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First let me say that I'm young and this is before my time. But what exactly set it off? Was it the assassination of JFK? The Vietnam War? I noticed this was a time of self-indulgence, feelings, pleasure, etc. Is all this accurate? Anyone live during this era? What were your experiences? What do you remember most? What's the biggest pro and con of this movement?
First let me say that I'm young and this is before my time. But what exactly set it off? Was it the assassination of JFK? The Vietnam War? I noticed this was a time of self-indulgence, feelings, pleasure, etc. Is all this accurate? Anyone live during this era? What were your experiences? What do you remember most? What's the biggest pro and con of this movement?
I'm not sure. It did start soon after the assassination. That took our hopes and dreams away because JFK believed in the youth of America. He made us feel important and he said to not ask what our country could do for US, but what WE could do for our country. Maybe what he said was a catalyst for us to take a stand and not just sit back and do nothing when we saw things we didn't agree with.
Couple that with the Viet Nam War that was taking our guys away to be maimed and killed for nothing. We got angry then. That's when we protested. "Hell no, we won't go."
Yes, most of us had good lives, having been brought up in the '50s when times were simple. We may not have had a lot but life wasn't complicated like it is today. We knew what was expected of us, we didn't have violence on tv but we had family style shows instead. We still had to behave in school and at home. We played outside and felt safe.
I just remember hearing about an anti Viet Nam group forming on campus. My boyfriend and I joined it. It was for peace and some of the members were Quakers, pacifists. As we began to feel more free, we tried new things like marijuana. Then came the clothes! That was probably the best part for me--love beads, handmade sandals, unusual outfits.
We started to feel really free and we were spoiled, I will admit. We were in college, we had never really suffered or sacrificed. And we didn't want it wrecked by Viet Nam. Anyway, some of us actually thought things over and decided that wars were stupid and cruel. So we joined protests. I went to a big one on the New Haven Green. It was totally peaceful and pretty quiet. We felt proud to have made our beliefs public.
Last protest I attended was in NYC and it was for peace and to see Martin Luther King.
The pro was that together we were strong. We never knew that. (There are more pros but I'm not here to write a dissertation.) The cons were that the protests were hijacked by violent people and also that the protests turned from Viet Nam and peace into occupying university offices, hating the police and calling them pigs. That's when I left. I thought it had become too disrespectful, gone too far.
The Beatnik era, late '50's - early '60's, was an anti-establishment movement. It ran concurrent and was outlasted by the Civil Rights movement which was concerned with social justice. What followed was a fusion of those two dynamics, excessively irreverent people calling for social justice. It was the righteousness of thinking oneself on the correct side of all issues that permitted the outlandish behavior.
And the Baby Boomer dynamics meant that young people were a greater percentage of the population than ever before or since. Consequently they had greater influence on society as a whole than is usual.
It might do to keep in mind that the counter culture practitioners were still a minority even among the young. While 400,000 gathered at Woodstock on an August weekend, that same weekend saw millions going to ball games, or movies, or drag strips or shopping malls etc.
And we should not confuse counter culture and "Mod" which was more or less the commercial exploitation of counter culture wannabees. Things like "Laugh In", "The Mod Squad", the word "groovy", Sammy Davis Jr. in a Nehru jacket...that was all "mod" and was a meaningless sideshow fad.
There were many threads that came together - and often pulled apart - to create the counterculture. Any attempt to explain it will leave a lot out that belongs in. This is just what I recall. The Folk Music revival that started earlier but blossomed in the early-mid 1960s coupled with the Civil Rights movement unleashed a heightened awareness and a hyper American-centric perspective. The Kennedy years -- a young President with new ideas -- gave the impression that things could be better. I recall listening to Joan Baez and Buffy St. Marie in high school English class. That teacher ran off with the Biology teacher to San Francisco in 1966...advance party for the "Summer of Love" in '67.
The war in Vietnam was getting hot and opposition was growing even in Congress. The draft was unpopular. The Hippy label was applied to almost everything so it is nearly meaningless. Music was a continuing thread that went through it all. The folk singers began writing anti-war songs and some with very self-aware themes. 'Blowing in the Wind' was my senior class song. Simon and Garfunkel were writing poetic self-awareness songs. The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and others took it to a different level.
The notion of movement was important with many young people taking to the road on their own or in a communal group. San Francisco was the usual destination. Timothy Leary and LSD were one facet of the drug scene but mostly it was marijuana or maybe hash (these were initial baby steps into the drug culture that grew into what we saw later). By the time I finally got to Haight-Ashbury it was dead or dying and just bug infested drug dives. I kept going. The music was still good.
There was also a growth in Eastern meditation and religions. Transcendental Meditation was big. There were also Jesus Freaks. The 'Child of God' reference in the song Woodstock is a nod to the Jesus Freaks. The Hari Krishna street performer groups were common in cities. The Woodstock Festival was in 1969 and by then music was very electric and more drug focused. For me that was the high water mark in the cultural aspects. The protest aspect kept growing.
The war began to consume everything. I was a Eugene McCarthy supporter and we were buoyed up when LBJ withdrew from the election. The 1968 Democratic convention was a free-for-all and an ultimate disappointment. I was in college in a small town by then and that scene was very polarized. The rising war opposition ran headlong into Vets recently returned from Vietnam and there were some very tense and ugly exchanges.
I graduated about a week or two after the Kent State shootings and the unrest of the Cambodian invasion. Rumors were flying in town that student radicals were coming from some unnamed larger university and were camped right outside town and getting ready to riot and set the town ablaze. That was pure insanity. Some self-appointed vigilantes patrolled the streets. A few students got beat up for walking home at night. Nobody ever caught sight of the bus loads of radicals.
Meanwhile, the music continued and there was a lot to choose from. The first Earth Day took place -- we had a parade up the main street. I was home that summer and my best friend was killed in Vietnam. He had been there a week. The focus was now beginning to move to opposing Nixon. Although he kept an enemies list he ended up being his own worst enemy.
My opinion, it was when young Baby Boomers started getting drafted to go to Vietnam.. it caused a catastrophic schism between them and the older generations (who expected them to stoically comply ?). Everything else/subsequent.. the rampant drug use, free love, repudiation of traditional patriotism, unprecedented divorce rates etc all stemmed from the trauma of a generation being conscripted in to an unpopular war. But it was before my time, so I'm just conjecturing from my study of American history.. (and personal experiences with some twisted Baby Boomers).
The previous posts are all certainly true. It's complex, so no simple answer will account for the convergence in time & space of so many factors that led to The Hippy Movement, and it's not like it was suddenly born full blown at one time, but evolved.
But if I could give a simple answer, it's this: The Boomer generation was the progeny of The Greatest Generation, who grew up in the restrictions of The Great Depression, then came of age regimented either in the Armed Services or with the restrictions of rationing on the home front.....They carried that regimentation into the late 40s & 50s as they raised their kids....Everybody wore short hair, no facial hair, clothes were practically uniforms with very little deviation from the norm.
The Hippy Movement was then maybe not so much a rebellion against regimentation, but a realization that regimentation wasn't necessary, and that individual expression could be the goal (although, of course, that quickly dissipated into a situation where to be "in," you had to show "the look" that everybody else was showing - long hair, bell bottoms, etc etc. It became its own "uniform."
There was a convergence of several social movements: the loosening of Victorian morals (James Bond movies were a primary mover of that, coincidental with the new availability of The Pill)--changes in the music world- always very influential among young people (The Beatles were a major motivating force- long hair, then drug use & oriental religion, The Magical Mystery Tour, etc)- and politics-- Viet Nam was the war that didn't need to be fought (no strategic or security purpose, merely political) so rebellion against that was logical and a uniting factor for the Boomer generation.
Was long hair, paisley shirt & bell bottoms really any different than a small straw hat, raccoon coat & ukulele in the 1920s? ...or sitting all day texting and not talking to anybody in the 2020s?
Agree that all of the things mentioned here are contributors but psychedelic drugs were really the fuel for the movement after 1965 or so.
Not heroin or meth or cocaine or alcohol, which as others pointed out eventually led to the death of many artists and became a scourge, but drugs like LSD and mescaline.
In many ways, these drugs were (and are) far more dangerous to a traditional American society than drugs like alcohol or heroin - because they opened people to the fact that they were being gamed. This led to the questioning of religion and politics and really the whole basis of the Corporate state.
More than anything else, this was why the "counterculture" movement was crushed and why psychedelics like LSD and peyote were demonized as Schedule 1 drugs.
... But what exactly set it off? Was it the assassination of JFK? The Vietnam War? I noticed this was a time of self-indulgence, feelings, pleasure, etc. Is all this accurate? Anyone live during this era? What were your experiences? What do you remember most? What's the biggest pro and con of this movement?
First off there was a previous counterculture from late '40s- 50s: beatniks. They were literary, intellectual, listened to jazz, eschewed some expected middle-class decorum (beards! adult women with long hair! living together without marriage!), smoked pot & questioned the post-war herding towards conformity & consumerism during the Eisenhower years. They were also opposed to Joe McCarthy's "Americanism" & passionate about civil rights when both of those issues weren't popular in white, middle-class America. Countercultures are largely a white, middle-class phenomenon.
The beatniks got older, became parents & more career focused & the 60's arrived with a new generation becoming aware of civil rights & Vietnam, first through "protest" folk music. Then Nov 1963 the youthful JFK was assassinated & 3 months later The Beatles appeared on TV. I can't overemphasize the effect this few months had on music, fashion, & questioning status quo. Most teenaged boys probably started rebelling over their hair length & a few years later realized they were being groomed to forcibly go into the Army to someplace called Vietnam & possibly die for... something? Or have to go to a federal prison.
The Pill came along around 1965, kids started "experimenting" with pot & sex & questioning the War & the lack of civil rights for non-white Americans & this begat a questioning of American society's norms in general. As mentioned above most folks are go-along, get-along, don't-question much types & are happy to just go with the crowd. Hippies were the counter to this.
The hippies were much less intellectual than the beatniks & more interested in experiences like music, dancing, psychedelic drugs, communal living & potential spiritual paths. Alternative lifestyles. My guess this had to do with the hard deadline of The Draft & Vietnam at age 18-19yo that the Beatniks didn't have to be concerned with.
The pros: the environmental movement, women's movement, gay liberation, broadening of the civl rights movement, the freedom to explore/reject new spiritual paths rather than stick with the "tribe" one is born in, fighting the laws against pot, forcing Nixon to end the Vietnam war - hence questioning authority (most "authority" is self-appointed).
The cons: drug use that shifted from psychedelics to addictive hard drugs; being self-centered; STDs; bell-bottom pants.
I think you had to have been there. Even then, understanding what was going on was impossible.
Think of up to an eighth of teens in the U.S. all on rumschpringe at the same time. Many of them were incredibly naive, some were dumb as rocks or so stoned all the time that they gave a great imitation, some were trying to extend activism beyond civil rights, a few were undercover "minders," and some were agitators with larger agendas. Inevitably, there were various cults and loose groups.
Causes? There were too many to list them all, and the movement, unlike as described by a confused media, was far more fractured and diverse than reported. Reported "causes" often have been just a reflection of personal bias. (I personally find the Satan in the minds of the kids due to the Beatles particularly amusing.) One thing that added to the unrest and "wild" lifestyles was the draft. Young guys who had no idea whether they were going to be called up to die for the whims of politicians had a choice: live and wait quietly, or try to grab a lifetime in a few months while still alive. The draft lottery did a lot to dampen the flames of that angst among every young male.
The era saw a lot of destruction of rigid society that needed to be dismantled. Saying much more would get into current events, inappropriate for this forum.
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