•A sociological word used to describe the values
and norms of behavior of a cultural group.
•Usually a subculture, that ran counter to
the social mainstream of the day.
Groups like: Beat generation or
Beatniks, Hippies, feminists and
gay/lesbian rights groups.
Factors in Question
•Civil Rights
•Vietnam War
•Opposition to the “Machine”
•Nuclear weaponry protests
•Women’s Rights
Who Joined the Counterculture?
•White middle class youth, for the first time
since the Great Depression of the 1930s, had
sufficient leisure time to raise concerns about
social issues.
Matthew
Shulman
Cleveland City
Club speech.
What is a
Hippie?
Began in the early 1960s and spread around the
world. They traveled in buses and spread the idea.
During this time period in Cleveland Ohio, speeches were
given at the City Club.
This forum was established to encourage new ideas and a free
exchange of thought, The City Club is the oldest continuous free
speech forum in the country, renowned for its tradition of debate
and discussion.
This speech given by Matthew Shulman at
the City Club explains the philosophy of
the Hippie movement.
Were referred to as the Beats, who lived in the
Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco.
Cleveland City Club
speech Matthew
Schulman. What does the
Hippie movement
Offer young people?
The Merry Pranksters are a
group of people who
originally formed around
American author Ken Kesey
in the early 1960s and
sometimes lived communally
at his homes in California
and Oregon. The group were
proponents of the use of
psychedelic drugs.
The Pranksters were known for using marijuana,
amphetamines, and LSD, and during their journey
they "turned on" many people to these drugs.
The Merry Pranksters escapades were chronicled by
Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Published in 1968 this novel puts into perspective
the story of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry
Pranksters as they drive across the country in a
DayGlo painted school bus dubbed "Furthur,"
reaching what they considered to be personal and
collective revelations through the use of LSD and
other psychedelic drugs.
Were a series of psychedelic parties held by Ken Kesey in the
San Francisco Bay Area during the early 1960's, centered
entirely around the use, experimentation, and advocacy of
LSD, also known as "acid."
Merry Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a
school bus nicknamed “Furthur”
Their goal was to create art out of everyday life.
Amongst other things?
American author, best known for his debut novel,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and as a countercultural figure who, some consider, was a link
between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the
hippies of the 1960s.
This novel was set at the Menlo
Park Veterans' Hospital on the
night shift. There, Kesey often
spent time talking to the
patients, sometimes under the
influence of the
hallucinogenic drugs with
which he had volunteered to
experiment. Kesey believed that
these patients were not insane,
but that society had pushed
them out because they did not
fit the conventional ideas of
how people were supposed to
act and behave. One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest was an
immediate success.
Wrote the
novel On the
Road,
autobiograph
y based on the
spontaneous
road trips of
Kerouac and
his friends
across midcentury
America.
In the novel he characterized Neal
Cassady as Dean Moriarty, who
became and icon of the psychedelic
movement of the 1960s.
Neal Cassady, he was and icon of the Beat
Generation and traveled with Ken Kesey and the
Merry Pranksters across America in 1964 to visit
the World’s Fair. In the process promoting the use
of LSD, marijuana and many other ideas of hippies.
Lysergic acid diethylamide
•first synthesized by the Swiss chemist
Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz (now
Novartis) laboratories in Basel,
Switzerland in 1938.
•Sandoz Laboratories marketed LSD as a
psychiatric cure-all and hailed it as a
remedy for everything from schizophrenia
to criminal behavior, sexual perversions,
and alcoholism.
•Harvard University
professor 1959 –
1963.
•Performed
experiments using
LSD (Lysergic acid
diethylamide).
•Became known as
the “Pope of Dope”.
Leary promoted students to:
Tune in, Turn on, drop out.
He Began a research program known as the
Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to
analyze the effects of psilocybin
(hallucinogenic mushrooms) on human subjects,
in this case, prisoners and later students, using
a synthesized version of the then-legal drug.
Interview with Timothy Leary on the use of LSD
January 14, 1967
San Francisco
The Human Be-In
Focused on the key ideas
of the 60s counterculture
•Personal empowerment
•Cultural and Political
decentraliaztion
•Communal living
•Ecological awareness
•Higher consciousness
(using psychedelic drugs)
•Liberal political
consciousness
San Francisco - California
The “Home” of the Counterculture movement
This event made the Haight-Ashbury district in
San Francisco a household name
Corner of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco
San Francisco and the Haight area gained a
reputation as the center of illegal drug culture
and rock and roll lifestyles by the mid 60's,
especially with the use of marijuana and LSD and
other hallucinogenic drugs.
By 1967, the
neighborhood's fame
chiefly rested on the
fact that it became the
haven for a number of
important psychedelic
rock performers and
groups of the time.
•Jefferson Airplane
•Grateful Dead
•Janis Joplin
These groups lived very close the Haight-Ashbury
intersection.
Formed in 1964, originally
called the Warlocks. They
changed their name because
a group was also recording
under that name.
Those who followed the
group from concert to
concert became known as
“Dead Heads”.
Jerry Garcia
The Airplane was part of the
psychedelic rock scene that
developed in San Francisco in
the mid-1960s.
Firsts for Psychedelic Rock
•First group to perform at a
dance concert
•Longshoremen’s Hall Oct.
1965
•First to sign a contract with a
major record label.
•First to appear on National TV.
•First to score hit records.
•First to tour the U.S. East
Coast.
Janis Lyn Joplin
(January 19, 1943–
October 4, 1970) was an
American singer,
songwriter, and music
arranger, from Port
Arthur, Texas. She rose
to prominence in the late
1960s as the lead singer
of Big Brother and the
Holding Company, and
later as a solo artist. In
2004.
Want to hear Janis?
1959 - 1975
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second
Indochina War, the Vietnam Conflict, and, in
Vietnam, the American War, occurred from
March 1959 to April 30, 1975. The war was
fought between the communist Democratic
Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and its
communist allies and the US-supported Republic
of Vietnam (South Vietnam).
Many felt it was unnecessary and
protested against it. Even
soldiers spoke out against the
government and its actions!
John Kerry
April 1969 the University demolished several
buildings on a 2.8 acre area near campus.
The area became and eyesore and many people
started to plant trees, shrubs, flowers and grass
to convert the land to a park.
A confrontation ensued on May 15,1969,
Governor Ronald Reagan ordered a two week
occupation of the city of Berkley
Flower power came into its own during this
occupation as hippies engaged in acts of civil
disobedience to plant flowers in empty lots all
over Berkeley.
Their slogan became:
In August 1969, the Woodstock
Music and Art Festival took place
in Bethel, New York, which for
many, exemplified the best of
hippie counterculture. Over
500,000 people arrived to hear the
most notable musicians and
bands of the era, among them
Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis
Joplin, The Grateful Dead,
Creedence Clearwater Revival,
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young,
Carlos Santana, The Who,
Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi
Hendrix. Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm
provided security and attended to
practical needs, and the hippie
ideals of love and human
fellowship seemed to have gained
real-world expression.
Became known as “Woodstock West”
The concert featured, in order of performance: Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The
Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, with the Stones
taking the stage as the final act.
Sympathy for the Devil stopped because of chaos
This concert became a huge disaster and fighting broke out
amongst the security (Hell’s Angels), and everyone, including the
performers.
The Altamont concert is often
contrasted with the Woodstock
festival that took place four
months earlier. While Woodstock
represented "peace and love",
Altamont came to be viewed as
the end of the hippie era and the
de facto conclusion of 1960s
American culture: "Altamont
became, whether fairly or not, a
symbol for the end of the
Woodstock Nation."
The Kent State shootings, also known as the May 4 massacre
or Kent State massacre, occurred at Kent State University in the
city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of students by
members of the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970.
Four students were killed and nine others were wounded, one of
whom suffered permanent paralysis.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
* “Four Dead in Ohio”