Hippie
Culture
Life in America has been molded
by many factors including those of the
hippie movement in the Sixties. With
the development of new technology, a war
against Communism, and an internal
war against racial injustice, a change in
America was sure to happen. As
the children of the baby boom became young
adults, they found far more
discontent with the world around them. This lead to
a subculture labeled as
hippies, that as time went one merged into a mass
society all its own. These
people were upset about a war in Vietnam, skeptical
of the present government
and its associated authority, and searching for a
place to free themselves
from society’s current norms, bringing the style they
are known for today.
"Eve of destruction; no satisfaction...and a third motif
went rippling
through the baby-boom culture: adhesive love" (Gitlin 200). The
freedom they
found came with the help of drugs. Marijuana evolved from its"black and
Hispanic, jazz-minded enclaves to the outlying zones of the white
middle
class young" (Gitlin 200). This new drug allowed a person to open their
mind
to new understandings and philosophies. But it wasn’t just marijuana
that
opened the minds of the youth; a new drug known as LSD came into
existence:
Depending on who was doing the talking, [LSD] is an
intellectual tool to explore
psychic ‘inner space,’ a new source of kicks for
thrill seekers, the
sacramental substance of a far-out mystical movement- or
the latest and most
frightening addiction to the list of mind drugs now
available in the pill
society being fashioned by pharmacology (Clark 59).
With politicians and law
enforcement officers looking on the drug as a danger
to society, many expert
chemists "set up underground laboratories and
fabricated potent and pure
LSD...kept their prices down, gave out plenty
of free samples, and fancied
themselves dispensers of miracles at the service
of a new age" (Gitlin 214).
It wasn’t just the youth in America who was
using these drugs. A statistic
from 1967 states that "more American troops in
Vietnam were arrested for
smoking marijuana than for any other major crime"
(Steinbeck 97). The amazing
statistic wasn’t the amount of soldiers smoking
marijuana; it was the amount
of soldiers America was sending over to fight a
war that nobody understood.
Between 1965 and 1967, troops "doubled and
redoubled and redoubled twice
more" (Gitlin 261). In a letter to President
Johnson sent by student leaders
from 100 American colleges and universities
and published in Time, this problem
was addressed: Significant and growing
numbers of our contemporaries are deeply
troubled about the posture of their
Government in Viet Nam. Even more are
torn-by reluctance to participate in a
war whose toll keeps escalating, but
about whose purpose and value to the
U.S. they remain unclear. With the fear of
being sent to Vietnam, many
potential draftees looked for a place to run. Some
went to Mexico, some went
to Europe, some went to Canada, and some just burnt
their draft-cards to
resist the draft. For those who went to Canada, they
received assistance from
the Committee to Aid American War Objectors. The
committee helped the young
immigrants with advice and aid on the Canadian
immigration laws. For those
who didn’t flee, life was full of harassment from
the Government. Popular
music and literature help display this message of
repression. Jimi Hendrix
released a song titled "If 6 was 9" that described
his oppression: "White
collared conservative flashing down the street/Pointing
their plastic finger
at me/They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die...Go
on Mr. business
man/You can’t dress like me." During Woodstock, the music
festival in ’69,
Country Joe and the Fish sang lyrics that were both comical
and intense:
"What are we fighting for?/Don’t ask me, I don’t give a
damn/Next stop is
Vietnam...Whoopee we’re all gonna die." Jerry Rubin
illustrated his anger in
the government, in the book he wrote while spending
time in jail. We Are
Everywhere describes Rubin’s hatred towards all authority
admitting, "heroin
is the governments’ most powerful counter-revolutionary
agent, a form of germ
warfare. Since they can’t get us back into their system,
they try to destroy
us through heroin" (118). This repression of the elder
generation sent the
youth to accepting communities, particularly out west. Most
of the people
leaving their homes came from working-class families whose parents
and
communities had driven them out for simply for supporting the civil
rights
movement. Being alienated from their towns and considered communists,
they found
it easy to side with the anti-war movement. It was also easy for
them to
discover drugs and the free-love idea that was already being spread.
The new
culture identified themselves with the Native Americans and their
unquestionable
oppression, sacramental drugs, and true ties to America. The
style that they
developed was true to this philosophy. Described by Gitlin:
Dope, hair, beads,
easy sex, all that might have started as symbols of
teenage difference or
deviance, were fast transformed into signs of cultural
dissidence...Boys with
long and unkempt hair, pony tails, beards, old-timey
mustaches and sideburns;
girls unpermed, without rollers, without curlers,
stringy-haired, underarms and
legs unshaven, free of makeup and bras...A
beard could be understood as an
attempt to leap into manhood...Clothes were a
riot of costumes...India’s
beads, Indians’ headbands , cowboy-style boots and
hides, granny glasses, long
dresses, working-class jeans and flannels; most
tantalizingly, army jackets.
(215) There was a tour bus that ran through the
Haight-Ashbury area in San
Francisco called the Gray Line. The tours
promotional brochure contained the
statement: "The only foreign tour within
the continental limits of the United
States" (qtd. in Sutton 36). The
significant people in the city didn’t like
the idea of a large hippie
community growing in their city. The city didn’t
contain any photographs on
file, nor did they "dig" the idea of journalists
doing reports on the
hippies. Ronald Reagan thought of the hippies as someone
who "dresses like
Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah" (qtd.
in Gitlin 217).
But with or without such outside influences, the hippies
continued to pursue
their "make love not war" and "free love" attitudes.
No movement in our
history defines a cultural change more accuratly than the
hippie movement in
the 60’s. They had their own laws, music, clothes, and
writtings. The view of
what a society should be was a common one to all hippies.
Their ideas
were big all throughout the late Sixties and early Seventies, and
there is
still a large hippie population in America
today.
Bibliography
Clark, M. "LSD and the Drugs of the
Mind."
Newsweek 9 May 1966: 59-64. Country Joe and the Fish. Woodstock.
Saugerties,
N.Y. June 1969. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties. New York: Bantam
Books, 1987.
Hendrix, Jimi. "If 6 Was 9." Axis: Bold As Love. MCA
Records. 1987. Rubin,
Jerry. We Are Everywhere. New York: Harper and Row,
1971. Steinbeck, John IV.
Marihuana Reconsidered. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1971. Sutton, H. "Summer Days
in Psychedelphia." Saturday Review 19 Aug.
1967: 36+. "Youth Question the
War." Time 6 Jan. 1967:22.