Political, but not in the usual way
The Summer of Love is often described as a holiday from politics: flowers, music and drugs in place of meetings and marches. That is only partly right. The scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury drew on a political history, the Diggers ran a loud anarchist programme inside it, and city officials treated the arrival of thousands of young people as a problem of public order. What the scene mostly lacked was a shared programme or a wish to organise voters, which is why many antiwar organisers saw it as a distraction.
The Diggers
The most openly political group in the Haight were the Diggers. Their core came from the San Francisco Mime Troupe and its circle, and they took their name from the seventeenth-century English Diggers, who argued that land should be held in common. Names usually associated with the group include Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg, though accounts of who led what differ, and the Diggers themselves resisted the idea of leaders.
Their politics was direct action rather than argument. They held that money and property were the root of social problems, so they gave things away. The best-known example was the daily free meal, typically a stew served in the afternoon in the Panhandle, the strip of Golden Gate Park that runs toward the Haight. They also ran a “Free Store” where goods could be taken without payment. Much of the food was reportedly donated or scavenged.
This was street theatre as much as charity. The Diggers staged happenings and distributed leaflets and sought to make the point that a different way of living was possible now, without waiting for a revolution. That put them at odds with both the commercial boutiques opening on Haight Street and with the idea that the neighbourhood was a tourist attraction. They were also among the people who staged a mock funeral for the hippie as a media creation in October 1967, a gesture aimed at the press and at the label itself.
The Human Be-In and Berkeley
The scene’s link to organised politics is clearest at the Human Be-In, held on 14 January 1967 at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park and billed as a “gathering of the tribes”. It brought poets and bands from the Haight together with figures from the Berkeley side of the bay, where student activism had been strong since the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and where the Vietnam Day Committee had organised protests against the war in 1965.
Speakers and guests are usually reported to have included poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, the psychedelic advocate Timothy Leary and Berkeley activists such as Jerry Rubin. The event was a rare occasion when two scenes that often distrusted each other shared a field. Organisers presented it as a celebration rather than a protest, which both fitted the Haight’s mood and left some activists unconvinced.
City hall and the police
The official response combined worry about health and public order with a good deal of improvisation. LSD had been made illegal in California in October 1966, and police in the Haight made arrests for drug possession through 1967. City officials, local residents and some merchants worried about crowds, sanitation, runaway teenagers and the possibility that the neighbourhood would be overwhelmed by the summer’s arrivals. The city did not simply try to clear the district. Volunteers and community groups, including the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic that opened in June 1967, filled gaps the authorities did not.
Policing was uneven and, at times, heavy-handed. The Grateful Dead’s house on Ashbury Street was raided in October 1967, an episode that many in the neighbourhood read as a sign the tolerance of the early months was ending. For a broader view of how institutions responded, the pattern was similar elsewhere: there was official reaction to hippies that moved between curiosity, alarm and enforcement, depending on the place and the moment.
Why antiwar organisers kept their distance
The antiwar movement of 1967 was building toward large coordinated events such as the Spring Mobilization in April, which included a major rally in San Francisco, and the March on the Pentagon in October. Many of its organisers favoured disciplined, goal-driven campaigns: draft resistance, lobbying, mass marches.
From that viewpoint the Haight looked self-absorbed. Drug use and dropping out seemed to some activists a retreat from the fight rather than a challenge to it. The hippies, for their part, often distrusted meetings, leaders and slogans, and many saw the war as a symptom of a culture they were trying to leave, not a campaign to win. The groups were never fully separate, though. Many young people moved between both worlds, and by late 1967 some of the most imaginative antiwar tactics borrowed from the theatrical style of the Diggers and the Be-In. The Yippies, formed around the turn of 1968, are often seen as a deliberate merger of the two traditions.
What the summer shows
Seen from the end of 1967, the politics of the Summer of Love was a set of tensions rather than a single position. The Diggers demanded an economy without prices, the Be-In offered a common celebration with a political audience, city hall wanted order, and organisers wanted a movement they could count. None of these won outright. What the summer did leave was a style of protest built on spectacle, communal living and refusal to take the usual rules seriously, which turned up repeatedly in later movements.