Not one movement
The word “hippie” covers a loose set of people and attitudes rather than an organisation with members and a programme. It was applied by journalists, adopted partly by those it described, and stretched to cover everything from serious communal farmers to weekend visitors in beads. The term is reported to have grown out of “hipster”, which had been used for the Beat generation in the 1950s, and writers in San Francisco were using “hippie” for the younger version by the mid-1960s.
Understanding the movement therefore means looking at several overlapping streams that merged in the middle of the decade.
Roots
The Beats. The writers and poets of the 1950s, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, criticised postwar conformity and consumerism, celebrated spontaneity and travel, and drew on jazz and on Buddhism. Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956) and Kerouac’s novel “On the Road” (1957) gave younger readers a model of rejecting a conventional career. North Beach in San Francisco was their centre, and many hippies saw themselves as their heirs. The Beats were generally older, more literary and often more pessimistic than the hippies who followed.
Folk music and the civil rights movement. Folk revival audiences on college campuses, along with the civil rights movement, introduced many young white Americans to protest and to the idea that ordinary people could challenge institutions. Songwriters such as Bob Dylan gave the wider American counterculture a vocabulary of dissent. Student activism such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 added to the mood.
Psychedelic drugs. LSD, then legal and researched in some settings, was promoted by figures such as Timothy Leary and, in a more informal way, by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Many in the movement regarded these experiences as spiritual or educational. The topic is contested, and the drugs also caused real harm.
Eastern religion. Interest in Zen, Hindu and Buddhist teachings, meditation and yoga grew through the decade, and the Beatles’ visit to India in early 1968 boosted public awareness.
Values
The values most often attached to the movement were:
- a distrust of materialism and corporate careers
- an emphasis on personal freedom and authenticity, summed up in the phrase “do your own thing”
- communal sharing instead of private property
- non-violence and, for many, opposition to the Vietnam War and the Selective Service draft
- an interest in nature, simple food and what would later be called environmentalism
These themes overlapped with the New Left politics of the same years, but the two groups differed. Political activists tended to focus on organising and changing institutions, while many hippies emphasised personal change and creating alternative ways of living. There were disagreements between them, and plenty of people belonged to both.
Communes and communal living
The movement’s most distinctive social experiment was the commune. One early example was Drop City in Colorado, founded in 1965 by artists, known for its geodesic domes built from scrap material. In California, Morning Star Ranch and groups such as the Hog Farm, associated with Wavy Gravy, were among the better-known examples. Later, in 1971, Stephen Gaskin and followers founded The Farm in Tennessee, which lasted far longer than most.
Estimates of how many communes existed at the peak of the trend in the early 1970s vary widely, and no reliable single count exists. What the sources agree on is that most were short-lived. Common problems included:
- inexperience with farming and building
- shortage of money and conflict over who contributed what
- disputes over rules, leadership and sexual relationships
- legal and zoning difficulties with neighbours and local authorities
- division of work along traditional gender lines, despite the egalitarian ideals
Even so, the communal experience shaped later practice in cooperatives, organic farming and intentional communities. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, served as a practical guide for people trying to build such lives.
Before and after 1967
The Summer of Love was one high point in a longer story. The Haight scene began in 1965 and 1966, and the movement continued to grow in smaller towns and the countryside after the Haight declined. The Woodstock festival of August 1969 became its best-known gathering. At the same time, the end of the 1960s darkened the picture: violence at the Altamont concert in December 1969, and the Manson Family murders of August 1969, which the press loosely tied to the counterculture, damaged its image, though the Manson group was not representative of hippies in general.
Through the 1970s, many former hippies returned to more conventional work, and mainstream society absorbed pieces of their style, from natural foods to informal dress. Historians still debate how much the movement changed America lastingly. Its social experiments were often unstable, but its criticisms of consumerism, its interest in ecology and its argument for tolerance had an effect well beyond its size.