hippie movement essay

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Hippie lifestyle

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• Academia - Influence of 1960's Hippie Counterculture in Contemporary Fashion
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hippie , member, during the 1960s and 1970s, of a countercultural movement that rejected the mores of mainstream American life. The movement originated on college campuses in the United States , although it spread to other countries, including Canada and Britain . The name derived from “hip,” a term applied to the Beats of the 1950s, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac , who were generally considered to be the precursors of hippies. Although the movement arose in part as opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1955–75), hippies were often not directly engaged in politics, as opposed to their activist counterparts known as “Yippies” (Youth International Party).

Hippies were largely a white, middle-class group of teenagers and twentysomethings who belonged to what demographers call the baby-boom generation. They felt alienated from middle-class society, which they saw as dominated by materialism and repression. Hippies developed their own distinctive lifestyle, whereby they constructed a sense of marginality. They experimented with communal or cooperative living arrangements, and they often adopted vegetarian diets based on unprocessed foods and practiced holistic medicine . Hippies were also known for their unique style, favouring long hair and casual, often unconventional, dress, sometimes in “psychedelic” colours. Many males grew beards, and both men and women wore sandals and beads. Long flowing so-called granny dresses were popular with women, and rimless granny glasses with both men and women. For many The Whole Earth Catalog , which first appeared in 1968, became a source for the necessities of life. It was crucial for former urban dwellers who practiced semi-subsistence farming in rural areas (in what came to be called the back-to-the-land movement). Hippies tended to be dropouts from society, forgoing regular jobs and careers, although some developed small businesses that catered to other hippies. Many critics noted that hippies had the luxury of being able to “check out” of society and remarked on the incongruity of hippies’ participation in the civil rights movement , wherein Black Americans were fighting for the right to fully participate in society.

Hippies advocated nonviolence and love, a popular phrase being “Make love, not war,” for which they were sometimes called “flower children.” They promoted openness and tolerance as alternatives to the restrictions and regimentation they saw in middle-class society. Hippies often practiced open sexual relationships and lived in various types of family groups. They commonly sought spiritual guidance from sources outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly Buddhism , Hinduism , and other Eastern religions , and sometimes in various combinations. Astrology was also popular, and the period was often referred to as the Age of Aquarius. Hippies promoted the recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs , particularly marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), in so-called head trips, justifying the practice as a way of expanding consciousness . Indeed, drugs were one of the reasons given for traversing the “hippie trail.” Between 1957 and 1978 some 100,000 young people from the United States and western Europe traveled overland through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or Greece to Turkey , India , Morocco, Iran , Afghanistan , or Nepal . In addition to drugs, they sought enlightenment, adventure, or something “exotic.”

Both folk and rock music were an integral part of hippie culture . Singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and groups such as the Beatles , Grateful Dead , Jefferson Airplane , and Rolling Stones were among those most closely identified with the movement. The musical Hair , a celebration of the hippie lifestyle, opened on Broadway in 1968, and the film Easy Rider , which reflected hippie values and aesthetics , appeared in 1969. The novelist Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ) was one of the best-known literary spokesmen for the movement, but he became equally famous for the bus tours he made with a group called the Merry Pranksters.

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• The History Of The Hippie...

The History Of The Hippie Cultural Movement

The hippie cultural movement was an influential cultural movement that originated in the early 1960s and became a major international collective as it grew in popularity and size. Today, the term ‘ hippie ‘ is often used as a derogatory term and continues to be a complicated term that is often used to isolate various left-leaning parties or groups. In this brief article, we will explain how the hippie movement started and explain some of the major events and people that helped define the incredibly important international movement.

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The Times They Are A-Changin’

To many, the American hippie is often seen as a direct result of the various national and international struggles that defined the 1950s. The mammoth disaster that was the Korean War (1950-1953) kicked off the ‘idyllic’ era of the 1950s and continued with the groundbreaking and terrifying hydrogen bomb test in 1954. The African-American Civil Rights Movement also started in the middle of the 1950s and culminated in events such as Brown V. Board (1954) and the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Along with these developments, technology was rapidly advancing as the Soviets sent the satellite Sputnik I into space in 1957 and started the billion-dollar space race between the two rival superpowers. Along with this, the 1950s were also defined by major events like the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the failed Hungarian Revolt of 1956. Although many have the preconception that the 1950s were a perfect post-war paradise, they were actually as rocky as the 1960s and single-handedly helped spawn the hippie movement that we know today.

On The Road: The Beat Generation

Often seen as the precursor to the hippie movement of the 1960s, the Beat Generation was primarily a group of young writers who explored the strange cultural shifts in post-World War II America. The Beat Generation was one of America’s first counter-culture movements and embraced drug use, liberal sexuality and obscenity in their writings and works. Authors such as Ginsberg , Burroughs and Kerouac were some of the most famous Beat writers and were often the center of American controversy over literary censorship and obscenity. Many writers from the Beat Generation met at Columbia University but mostly ended up on the West Coast in places like San Francisco and Big Sur . Although the Beat Generation was mostly a literary movement, it has been long studied as a movement that heavily influenced the musically charged hippie movement.

Acid Tests: Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters

One of the groups that have been labeled as the ‘first’ major hippie group was Ken Kesey (of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest fame) and The Merry Pranksters. Kesey has often been seen as the major link between the late Beat Movement and the early hippies of the 1960s. Kesey and The Merry Pranksters were a large community of like-minded people in California and Oregon who took epic road trips and traveled in a brightly colored school bus while ingesting large amounts of LSD, which was legal until 1965. The group traveled the nation, housed famous parties, gave out large quantities of LSD and helped define the long hair and bizarre fashion that came to symbolize the American hippie. One of the major events that established the Merry Pranksters in American society was the so-called ‘Acid Tests’ where large groups would drink Kool-Aid laced with LSD and attempt to experience a community-oriented trip. The group was also famous for its experiences with the Hells Angel Motorcycle Gang and The Grateful Dead .

Get The Hell Out Of Vietnam

The Vietnam War was a near 20-year conflict of massive proportions which helped propel the hippie movement into mainstream American consciousness. In the mid-1960s, the United States Government started a huge military surge wherein large qualities of American troops were sent to Vietnam to destabilize and destroy the communist North Vietnamese government, which was supported by the Soviet Union and China . Originally, the war was somewhat popular, but the seemingly never-ending conflict strained the American populace who were getting more and more frustrated with the tremendous loss of life and crazed politics of the war. After some time, large protests of students, veterans and hippies started to erupt everywhere (including internationally) and slowly twisted the average American’s view of the Vietnam conflict. The American hippie became famous for their influence in the widespread Vietnam protests and helped to define their role in the tumultuous 1960s.

Flower Children

The summer of 1967, or the ‘ Summer of Love ,’ has often been referred to as one of the most important widespread social and political gatherings in recent American history. During the famous summer, over 100,000 people convened and relocated to the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. Although many people mostly remember the ‘Summer of Love’ taking place in San Francisco, hippies actually convened in most major cities in America, Canada and Europe . The San Francisco summer is often remembered best because it was the cultural center of the hippie movement where free love, drug use and communal living became the norm. This period of time also helped spawn the ubiquitous ‘flower children’ that became a major American symbol in the 1960s. Many historians have reclassified the ‘Summer of Love’ as a major social experiment wherein people from all over congregated to question the social spheres and practices in which they grew up.

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An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music

For many hippies and children of the 1960s, the original Woodstock Festival in 1969 was the culmination of years of experimentation and changing social practices. Originally billed as ‘An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music,’ the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a four-day festival comprised of 400,000 people on a dairy farm in rural New York State . The festival, which was originally planned as being three days long, drew people from all over the world and was a major point of controversy as the festival was almost shut down. A multitude of famous artists performed at the concert and included Santana, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin , Sly and The Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix . Jimi Hendrix’s famous psychedelic performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became one of the most famous moments of the entire festival and helped to cement the hippie movement as a deeply political group that strived to rethink general society and its constraints on the average person.

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History of Hippie’s Culture Research Paper

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Introduction

Historical development of hippies and communes, communal census, the first communes in east and west coast, works cited.

Hippies emerged from the mainstream culture of the 1950s and 1960s, following in the footsteps of an earlier counter culture group, the rebellious youth movement known as the Beat Generation (Issitt 1). According to Miller (xiii) communal societies have long been an American cultural fixture, with anywhere from dozens to hundreds of them operating at any given moment.

However, nothing in the American communal past would have led any judicious observer to predict the incredible communal explosion that began during the 1960s. The years that followed saw the number of communes and hippies increase in different parts of the world.

The size and diversity of the new communitarianism made accurate counting of communes and of their members impossible. Nevertheless, the overall significance of the 1960s era as a watershed in American communal history communal history is undeniable.

Despite the fact that there have been challenges trying to the population of communes, the exact number of communes has continued to increase. Today, we are no longer dealing with communes numbering in the low hundreds but rather with thousands and, probably tens of thousands of them.

Numerically, however, the hippies probably constituted a minority presence on the 1960s communal scene, as thousands of other communes sprang up as well. In addition, there were new communes founded by spiritual seekers of all sorts.

According to Miller (5), more than a generation has elapsed since the communes of the 1960s era burst onto the American scene. At the same time, those who were involved in the great American 1960s era communal experiment, whether still living communally or not, are more accessible than they used to be in the past.

Apparently, the majority of the 1960s era communes were short lived, but their impact on American life has been really solid. According to some scholars, communes have for a very long time had social influence beyond their own memberships and typically, brief lifespans.

Many of the 1960s communards were well educated, and they produced a variety of creative works that help us to understand the period from which they emerged.

Practically, it is impossible to establish the number of communes who existed during the 1960s era. The plain fact is that no one has a better idea than that of just how widespread communal living was in those days. Of the many observers who visited and tried to track the communal America, dozens made estimates of the size of the communal outpouring, but in all but a few cases, those estimates were simply wide guesses, utterly without foundation, or quotations of the wild guesses of others.

The most recent guesses as to the number of communes were in the low thousands. An article in the New York Times in the late 1970 gave the figure of nearly 2,000 communes in America. Although the article makes an attempt to explain how the 2,000 was arrived at, it appears to be simply a guess and nothing more.

Benjamin Zablocki, writing about the same time, offered another widely cited of about 1,000 rural communes (Miller 15). Other scholars provided estimates of local communal populations much higher than the figures already given. William Speers, a newspaper reporter writing in 1971, calculated that 100 to 200 communes existed in his city of Philadelphia alone.

In the same year, another observer reported that members of the Christian World Liberation Front, a leading Jesus movement organization, counted over 200 Jesus communes in California alone, a number supported by pins stuck in a wall map (Miller 25). Also, in 1971, Mark Perlgut surveyed his immediate neighborhood in Brooklyn and noted several communes close by, with at least four on one specific street, leading him to conclude that New York alone probably had as many as 1,000 communal houses.

A scholar writing in the mid 1970s found estimates of 200 to 800 communes in Berkeley and 200 in Vermont in 1972. In spite of the fact that some of these numbers are not solidly founded, they generally would point toward a count of American communes well up in the thousands.

According to Oved (64) the first communes begun to appear in California in 1965. The background to their creation was the same as that of the original appearance of the hippies. It resulted from protests against the changes in the American society, and aversion of materialism, as well as the experiences of young members of the New Left in the struggle against the Vietnam War.

The disillusion from politicians that became stronger after the events of the Democratic conference in Chicago also led to a major turning point. Although political groups became more violent, there were also many who sought a new way of life. The romance of a return to values that had been abandoned by the prevalent culture which included the return to the community, to social obligation, to relationships with each other, and to nature and the land, also played its part (Smith 25).

The communal movement of the sixties began in the eastern and western regions of the United States, and spread from there to the center of the continent. Beginning in California it reached Oregon, and, later northern New Mexico and Colorado, and on the East coast, from Vermont southward to Virginia.

This wave was at its height from 1967 to the early seventies. After its initial stage in the mid sixties, the trickle became a flood and young people established communes in hundreds of localities in and outside the big cities. Many scholars and journalists have tried to estimate their numbers. Newsweek claimed that in 1969 there were some five hundred communes, with ten thousand members.

Benjamin Zablocki distinguished between rural and urban communes, and estimated that in 1971, there were about one thousand rural and about two hundred urban communes. The urban communes were small, with no defined doctrine. They were pluralist and poor, practiced partial cooperation with no independent productive branch, and generally lived in rented accommodation. Considering that the communes were not included in the urban census reports, it became quite hard to estimate their exact number.

In Boston, attempts to determine their numbers in the autumn of 1972 concluded that there were approximately 200 in the city, 350 in San Francisco, another 200 in Berkeley, and about a thousand in New York (Oved 64). In addition, there were similar communes in most of the big towns, particularly those with a number of universities. Despite their impressive numbers, the urban communes are not a representative sample of communalism, since they encompass many temporary phenomena connected the students’ way of life.

According to the New York Times, there were some two thousand communes in thirty four states in the year 1970. In his book, Families of Eden, Jerome Judson claimed that at the beginning of the seventies, the communes numbered 5,000, and that rural communes had a membership of about 250,000.

Richard Fairfield’s estimate, in the preface of his book, Modern Utopia, is similar. He maintains that the average membership of the rural communes is between twenty and forty and that most of the members were in their twenties (Oved 66). Apparently, the rapid expansion of the communes was connected with the development of the media such as television, radio, and the press.

There is no doubt that publicity in Time, Newsweek, and Life encouraged the growth of the communes. Through the media, local events made a resounding impression and influenced parallel processes on the national level. Interest in communes reached its peak between 1968 and 1971, when the media displayed considerable interest on the phenomenon. They saw in it and outstanding expression of the counter culture and the realization of its deals (Smith 35).

Although the hippies’ individualism and anarchism would seem to conflict with their tendency to foster communal life, whether in small groups traveling together over highways in America, or in urban communes or more stable rural communes. For most of the young people who adopted this life style, the commune was not a permanent way of life. It was simply a temporary refuge that gave them a place of retreat in which they could reassess the individual’s disappointment with the society.

Clearly, the escapist tendencies of most of the hippies who joined communes led them to form a picture in their minds of the society from which they were fleeing, rather than an imaged of an ideal society.

Issitt, Micah. Hippies: A Guide to an American Subculture, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Print.

Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Print.

Oved, Yaacov. Globalization of Communes: 1950-2010, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2012. Print.

Smith, Sherry. Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

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Hippies and Pioneers (August 1967 essay with March 10, 2016 preface)

2016, Academia.edu

The 1960s were a turbulent time in American history. I wrote this essay, "Hippies and Pioneers," at one of the pivotal moments of that decade. A March 10, 2016 preface explains the historical context.

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The Hippie Movement essay

The Hippie Movement was a complex, multi-dimensional sociocultural phenomenon that produced a lasting impact on different spheres of American life. This essay will focus specifically on the influence this movement had on the United States economy. Strangely enough, from the economic perspective, the most dramatic change associated with the Hippie Movement was sexual revolution. It caused the redefinition of gender roles, and women ceased to limit themselves to homemaking:

‘The ‘traditional family’ where women stayed home and took care of the kids was clashing up against the reality of more women entering the workforce and going to college’ (Li, 1999, para. 8). Women wanted to be perceived as fully-fledged members of society and joined the workforce actively. Before the sexual revolution, women, who were breadwinners, had been few and far between. Yet the situation changed quickly in the 1960s and subsequent decades.

While feminism was also on the rise, many women started to view career as one of their life priorities, thus challenging the traditional gender norms: ‘Appearing just as the women’s movement took off, the hippie counterculture also challenged conventional ideas of appropriate gender roles’ (Rosen, 2001, p. 124). Women massive joining workforce contributed to economic growth and development. Another typical feature of the Hippie Movement is that it lured teenagers and youth into running away from home and living an independent life:

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‘[Young Hippies]…left their families and did it for many different reasons. Some rejected their parents’ ideas, some just wanted to get away, and others simply were outcasts, who could only fit in with the Hippie population’ (Huber, Lemieux & Hollis, n/d. , para. 1). While many younger Hippies were reluctant to enter paid employment, they eventually had to get some job. Therefore, many younger citizens have joined the workforce. Additionally, this development had more far-reaching implications.

The Hippie Movement established a new tradition for early teenage aspiration for independence, financial independence from parents included. Middle class youth started to join workforce much early as compared to the generations who lived in the first decades of the previous century. While these two features influenced the U. S. economy in a positive way, Hippie values and Hippie lifestyle were contrary to the notions of gainful employment and productivity. Many Hippies were unemployed or occupied low-paid positions; some of them preferred vagabond life.

Hippie culture was anti-establishment in its essence, while hard work and industriousness were perceived as conformist values, from which Hippies wanted to be liberated. Hippies often lived bohemian life getting money occasionally and from different sources. A good example of Hippie lifestyle is the story of Merry Pranksters. In 1964 Ken Kesey had an interesting idea how to promote his new book, Sometimes a Great Notion. He and his friends, later labeled as the Merry Pranksters, drove from San Francisco to New York in a psychedelic painted bus.

It was named Furthur – a combination of the word “further” and “future. ” For several generations after Kesey living in a bus became a symbol of freedom, and this road trip was further describes in the landmark novels of the Hippie epoch – Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and On the Road. It is quite obvious that Hippie lifestyle has no connection to the promotion of economic efficiency. Another typical characteristic of Hippie culture was the use and abuse of drugs, predominantly marijuana and hallucinogens.

Drug use reached ‘sufficient magnitude to justify the designation of the 1960s as ‘a new chemical age. ’ Recently compounded psychotropic agents were enthusiastically introduced and effectively promoted, with the consequence of exposing the national consciousness to an impressive catalog of chemical temptations – sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, antidepressants, analgesics, and hallucinogens – which could offer fresh inspiration, as well as simple and immediate relief from fear, anxiety, tension, frustration, and boredom’ (Inciardi, 1990, p.

11). It is quite obvious that the abuse of drugs did not contribute to workplace productivity. In addition, marijuana is a drug that diminishes motivation and gives rise to passiveness and apathy. Consequently, few Hippies worked, and those who did were unproductive and often changed jobs. Drug abuse in the 1960s produced a serious impact on the economy in the longer perspective. The psychedelic epoch considerably impaired national health. Several generations following the Hippies could feel the devastating consequences of rampant drug use.

This phenomenon puts an additional pressure on healthcare even nowadays. Another way to analyze the influence of the Hippie Movement on the economy is through the prism of Hippie’s political views. They were mostly left in their opinions, and political left is associated with high social spending and universal welfare. Hippies pressured the government to provide better social protection, which sometimes resulted in an excessive burden on the government. Anti-capitalist views expressed by Hippies might have undermined American competitiveness.

Hippies attempted to ‘buffer the majority of people against the abuse of power in a capitalist economy. They detested monopoly and liked public services’ (Gitlin, 1993, p. 60). Since the U. S. economy was faring well in the post-war era, the effects of this development were not keenly felt. Yet there was another way how Hippies undermined capitalist economy. They believed that a man does not need many material things in order to survive. They also believed that people should value spiritual revelation and personal freedom more than wealth and property. Essentially, Hippie culture was anti-consumerist.

From purely economic point of view, any decline in domestic consumer spending is very dangerous for the economy. The term ‘Gandhian economics’ can be used to define the life of many Hippie communes. Gandhian economics implies that a commune is a self-sufficient entity where members are able to produce their own food, clothing and means of living. Under the principle of Gandhian economics, less luxury goods should be produced, since people have to satisfy their basic needs and cease to derive pleasure from possession but engage in spiritual development.

Such approach might have led to a considerable economic decline. Basic products as contrasted with luxury goods have little added value, therefore they do not fuel economic growth. Furthermore, Hippies were reluctant to use cosmetics, buy new clothes, and use manufactured medicines. They believed in natural beauty and holistic medicine. It caused a minor slowdown in research and production of textiles, drugs, and some FMCGs. Another feature of Hippie culture was environmentalists.

While there is a broad consensus that economic growth and environmental protection are contradictory in the short run, Hippie’s pressure on the government and companies caused the first to increase spending on environmentally-friendly activities and the later to engage in environmentally-benign practices, even if they were not economically feasible. However, there was another political peculiarity of the Hippie Movement that is closely tied with economy. Hippies were pacifists and started a potent anti-war movement:

‘Thus in the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the hippie counterculture movement were so heavily cross-identified that their participants in the late 1960s used to just refer to ‘the Movement’’ (Calhoun, 2001, p. 38). Many believe that anti-war movement and domestic opposition resulted in the withdrawal of forces from Vietnam, and the war there cost millions in lives and billions in dollars. Therefore, the Hippie Movement produced a controversial impact on the American economy. From one hand, many women and younger citizens joined the workforce, and the U. S.

withdrawn from Vietnam. From another hand, Hippie lifestyle did not endorse traditional values of industriousness and gainful employment. Anti-consumerism and drug abuse were two other negative factors. Yet in general, Hippie movement laid the foundation for the emergence of subsequent Yuppie generation, which most definitely contributed to the economic growth.

Calhoun, Craig. ‘Putting Emotions in Their Place. ’ In Goodwin, Jeff, Jasper, James M. , & Francesca Polletta (Eds). Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2001. Gitlin, Todd.The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Revised ed. New York: Bantam, 1993. Inciardi, James A. Handbook of Drug Control in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Penguin, 2001. Huber, Adam, Lemieux, Chris, & Marlon Hollis. ‘The Hippie Generation: A Brief Look Into the Hippie Culture. ’ N/d. May 23, 2007. <http://users. rowan. edu/~lindman/hippieintro. html> Onesto, Li. ‘The Sexual Revolution and Dreams of a New World. ’ January 24, 1999. May 23, 2007. <http://rwor. org/a/v20/990-99/991/60swom. htm>

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Hippies Movement: The Summer Of 1967

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