Haight-Ashbury
By Denis Mueller
The "hippies" of the 1960's did not come out of nowhere.
They were the descendants of the "beats" of the previous generation.
Proof in this can be seen in how easily people like the poet Allen
Ginsberg moved quite easily from the "beat generation" to the counterculture of the 1960's. The counter-culture is often confused with the
New Left but they held an uneasy alliance. In fact, it was SDS who
invaded the communes of the Liberation News Service and ransacked one
of the more cultural enclaves of the movement.
The hippies rejected the cultural norms of middle class society and
rebelled against it by turning convention on its head while using
guerrilla theater as a means of protest.
They were more interested in dropping out of the rat race than
reforming it but retained a anarchist streak that often promoted
spontaneous actions. It was a movement that sought a utopia, which puts
it within other utopian alternatives of living, and within the American
tradition.
The hippies wanted to live the revolution as if had been won rather
than join organized political campaigns. They were more into, a phrase
from the day, in creating an alternative world. Their politics were
more tied to groups like the "Diggers" who provided free food to the
residents of the Haight than the bomb-throwing tactics of the
Weathermen.
They became targets for the police shakedowns and while they saw the
man as an oppressor; they wanted the police to leave them alone and let
them live their lives.
The world of the hippies was also tied to drugs, mostly pot and LSD,
but not limited to those drugs. They saw LSD, and pot to a lesser
extent, as mind alternating drugs that could raise the conscious of
people. It is, in retrospect, quite interesting that LSD was first
developed as a mind-control program for the Army and CIA. But, back
then, it was thought that acid could free your mind from the
constraints of society.
Rock music played an important role in the development of this youth
culture. When the Beatles arrived in America the seed for a new postmodern culture was planted. They were force and soon rock groups began
to flourish across the country. The Beatles were followed by the
Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, the Who and Jimmy Hendrix, who
was from Seattle but became part of the English invasion. In America
groups like the Greatful Dead, The Jeffersom Airplane, the Doors, the
Lovin Spoonful and Bob Dylan who drew their support directly from these
alternative pockets of culture.
The flight to the suburbs in the 1950's left many areas, with spacious
housing, available to the young people. These cheap rents in the Haight
or on New York's lower east side allowed the hippies to live on very
little money. This, with the advancement of Real Estate values, make
living with no money virtually impossible.. It was a generation that
sought to remove themselves from the dominant culture and create their
own world. In the end, it failed and was overwhelmed by the drug
culture, but that occurs in the 1970's and is often confused with the
years of the 60's. It was an act of resistance that sought a way out of
the rat race and for better world. That, it wasn't successful, is not
the point but it should be remembered that there were people who tried
to resist the dominant consumer culture.
1968, Robert Daniels