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Except, as I pointed out earlier, the tea party movement contains many ex-hippies and bears characteristics of the loonier side of the political counterculture that many of its members went through when they were young. There was an essay I read in my college 20th century US history classes talking about the counterculture (the essay was written in the mid-70s, technically immediately after the countercultural era) in which the author predicted that the hippie generation would either swing far to the left or far to the right but would NEVER follow the general political centrism and pragmatism of the WW2 generation.
Besides older people whom I've talked to, it's not hard to put two and two together. Dean was idolized by a LARGE percentage of young boys and there were many hippies born in 1941 and 1942. Read interviews with many of the '60s rock musicians and you'd find that they'd idolized Dean. Any history of the counterculture would state that Dean was a big influence on the counterculture to come. There were '60s and early '70s rock songs about Dean.
I've found this out from talking to ex-hippies, but if you want written, documented evidence, and not just anecdotal evidence, this comes from "The American Counterculture" by Christopher Gair:
"These movies also established a new group of Hollywood stars, most notably James Dean and Marlon Brando, whose rebellious images appealed to the young. A decade later this generation and their younger siblings would constitute the audience at Woodstock and other large, musical gatherings...."
Also refer to Domenic Priore's "Riot On Sunset Strip" (about the counterculture in 1960s Los Angeles, which makes a very good case for the seeds of the counterculture having first been planted in the '50s), and, for a source actually from the hippie era, John Sinclair's "Guitar Army".
Phil Ochs said that his idols as a teenager were Dean (typical of an American teen of that age) and Fidel Castro (nowhere near as typical, but before Castro came to power and when he first came to power he was widely admired in the USA as a "real life action hero" and there was even a Castro comic book put out in the US directed towards the young teenage boys who were the comic book audience at the time. This was before he became a dictator.)
Dennis Hopper was Dean's closest buddy and would be an icon of the counterculture. Russ Tamblyn, who was friends with Hopper and Dean, became a hippie.
Granted,Mike Davis is a Marxist and thus more likely to see "patterns of revolution" before the fact, but men I've talked to of that generation who don't share his politics, including the artist Robert Williams, can verify that. That's part of the background the counterculture came out of. Whether said participants in the counterculture were "hippies" is another issue. I've talked to former SDS members and many didn't define themselves as "hippies" because they thought hippies were into sex, drugs, and rock and roll while they were more into revolution and radical politics.
The movies/movie stars you mention are certainly part of the background of the counter culture, but they were not the singular, or even the most significant input.
FWIW, I AM an 'older person' and am married to a man who was born in 1941. I don't have to talk to any one or read a book to know what happened in the 60s - I lived it.
Except, as I pointed out earlier, the tea party movement contains many ex-hippies and bears characteristics of the loonier side of the political counterculture that many of its members went through when they were young. There was an essay I read in my college 20th century US history classes talking about the counterculture (the essay was written in the mid-70s, technically immediately after the countercultural era) in which the author predicted that the hippie generation would either swing far to the left or far to the right but would NEVER follow the general political centrism and pragmatism of the WW2 generation.
The author might have been referring to HIDO's, Hippies In Dress Only.
Except, as I pointed out earlier, the tea party movement contains many ex-hippies and bears characteristics of the loonier side of the political counterculture that many of its members went through when they were young. There was an essay I read in my college 20th century US history classes talking about the counterculture (the essay was written in the mid-70s, technically immediately after the countercultural era) in which the author predicted that the hippie generation would either swing far to the left or far to the right but would NEVER follow the general political centrism and pragmatism of the WW2 generation.
There are sociologists who say that the vast majority of people become more conservative as they get older, regardless of their former views. It has to do with family and what not.
The movies/movie stars you mention are certainly part of the background of the counter culture, but they were not the singular, or even the most significant input.
FWIW, I AM an 'older person' and am married to a man who was born in 1941. I don't have to talk to any one or read a book to know what happened in the 60s - I lived it.
So why'd you ask for sources or references?
Don't mean to be rude but I just wondered.
I was in elementary school in the late '60s so obviously I wouldn't have the first hand experience you would, but you'd probably know that the counterculture was a great deal more varied and diverse than the stereotypes that people have of it now.
Unlike Dean, the hippies were not a mindless rebellion against authority, rather, they were a mindful rebellion OF authority.
That is what scared the bejesus out of the right.
On LSD, a person might see that a sphere has a zillion sides.
The right wing would have you believe, and obey the belief, that a sphere has no sides.
The right believes in KISS, Keep It Simply Stupid.
More to the point, the spread of higher education to the middle and working classes of America (and Britain) and the increased educational level of young people was seen as a culprit for the spread of the counterculture by the US right. They claimed that the kids had been corrupted by "Marxist professors", (i.e. NYC socialist intellectuals or German emigres who'd fled Nazism and the Holocaust), who'd stirred them into "revolution". Hence the subsequent cutbacks in education by Reagan (as governor and president) and Prop 13 in California which destroyed that state's school system (previously excellent, subsequently pretty bad, although the effects took time to kick in). Not to mention that these policies were emulated on a federal level and on state levels by subsequent Republicans, to the point that we now have a "dumbed down right". The events of 1968 scared enough people in power that they realized that the public had to be kept dumber in order to be more easily manipulated.
However there certainly was a "mindless rebellion against authority" that was part of the hippie movement. Ultimately like most historical events the counterculture was too complex and varied to be easily pinned down by stereotypes.
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