The 1967 Summer of Love, located in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, California, reflected a pivotal time in American history. It is considered to be the peak of hippie influence, bringing more attention to the anti mainstream culture than ever before. Though the months and years following the summer of 1967 strayed away from the original values, the pursuit of peace, love, and “expanded consciousness through drug use” during this time resulted in an optimism that spanned through the subsequent decades. The movement actually evolved from the Beatnik counterculture of the fifties, as both were outwardly against the mainstream. The term “hippie” was originally a derogatory term used by the beats for the “half-hip”, but became nationally recognized during 1967. Bands exhibiting the drastic shifts in popular music along with rapt attention from the media brought thousands of brightly dressed young people to the city in “the last golden days of a decade of hope”. Though drugs, overcrowding, and sickness were rampant during the 1967 Summer of Love, the wide influence and legacy of the movement outweigh these misdoings.
The most prominent cause for the hippies’ abandonment of American society was the widely unpopular Vietnam War. A fervid anti war movement, established by those upset with the government and the current state of affairs in the country, spread nationally. Many began to question the morality of the United State’s involvement in the Vietnam War, not simply the likelihood of success. William Seraile, a history professor at the City University of New York, was one of many who, after spending only seven months in the country, became disillusioned with U.S. involvement in the war after venturing to Vietnam as a volunteer through the International Voluntary Service. Shortly after arriving, the school at which he was supposed to be teaching English was converted into a refugee center, so instead, Seraile spent his time in either the local orphanage or the hospital. “There was no love for me to celebrate during the Summer of Love. I remember the amputations, the gangrened limbs, and the anguished cries of so-called stoic Vietnamese who gazed upon the lifeless eyes of children, dead before they had entered school,” he writes. His experiences, while nauseating, were not unique to him. Both veterans and volunteers returned to America lacking hope but possessing these brutal images and experiences, resulting in disillusionment from the capabilities and the motivations of the American government officials.
Younger Americans, especially those on college campuses, were at the forefront of these disillusioned groups, envisioning a world free of hatred and violence. This, combined with the general upset with the government, led to a series of mainly nonviolent protests. Students, religious figures, pacifists, and even Vietnam veterans led numerous parades and demonstrations, as well as a newly popular phenomenon called sit-ins in which a group of protesters would occupy a public place and refuse to leave. These demonstrations took place in hopes that the government would acknowledge the mass malcontentedness surrounding the war. The fight against communism did not seem a worthy enough cause to these peaceful Americans. By 1967, it became apparent that a majority of Americans thought intervention was at least a mistake. Antiwar demonstrations continued, especially challenging the draft policy. “They were just young kids—eighteen or nineteen years old. Going out to try to shoot somebody. And they weren’t even trained, they didn’t have time to train, they kept sending them over there,” eighty six year old Audrey Clark states in an interview. “World War II was very different. Everyone was patriotic and just united our country together because we were all on one team”. Many young men would attend school solely to escape the draft, or else flee to Canada. The country was, as it would be again just decades later in 2007, divided over war.
Young people were especially affected for they felt that their government had failed them, and were eager to change their seemingly bleak futures. In some areas, it became considered irresponsible to conform to the cultural mandates of the country. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 along with the violence of the civil rights movement resulted in further mistrust of the American system. Richard Nixon’s eventual ascent to the presidency brought more distress to the youth, feeling personally targeted by his legislations limiting drug use and restricting protest. “Government lies are as common and persistent as raindrops,” says Professor Seraile. Social advocacy and assertiveness were apparent attributes of the American youth, the largest youth generation to date, having been born during the postwar baby-boom. “Don’t vote,” a bumper sticker from the sixties read.”It only encourages them.” Though refraining from voting wouldn’t necessarily have an effect on the cookie cutter houses found in the suburbs or the model families portrayed on television central to life in the fifties, refusing to conform by creating a counterculture certainly would.
“Counterculture” is a sociological term for the attitudes and values of individuals straying from those of the majority. It is most commonly associated with the antiestablishment youth rebellion that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s, this usually meant advocating for women’s rights, the betterment of race relations, legalization of certain drugs, and peace in general. Members of the counterculture were often found wearing colorful, free-flowing outfits paired with long, unkempt hair. To further distinguish oneself from mainstream society, some would go as far to change their names. For example, one young woman took the name “Today” to reflect the importance of living in the moment. College campuses in America were the central points of origin for this movement, namely the University of California at Berkeley. For those not attending college, though, certain metropolitan areas became centers of the youth culture, namely the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco.
The Haight-Ashbury District, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, became a popular home for hippies. “San Francisco was a wellspring, the headquarters in some sense,” recalls Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at University of California at Berkeley. “People, at least in the Midwest, weren’t looking to New York for cultural cues. They looked to San Francisco”. Established during the Gold Rush in California, San Francisco had always been a home for hopeful dreamers from its humble beginnings. The Haight-Ashbury District, simply referred to as “the Haight” by residents, became a center for those rebelling against the values of their parents since the early sixties. In 1966 and 1967, it evolved into a hub for an underground culture, featuring new styles of art and music. Attention from the media increased both the popularity and influence of the Haight-Ashbury District. Every town in America had been informed of these new hippie lifestyles by the spring of 1967. Consequently, thousands more interested people flocked to San Francisco and other similar metropolitan areas. For those unable to or uninterested in migrating to San Francisco, communes, groups of people living and sharing together, became increasingly more popular across the United States. The residents often practiced the concept of free love, meaning even those in married couples were welcome to have relationships outside of their husband or wife. Any resulting children would be raised by everyone in the commune rather than just the parents. Though currently there are more high-end, trendy stores, certain aspects of the counterculture remain even today. For example, the city still has the highest percentages of single-person and single-parent households of any in the nation. It is also still considered to be an “alternative political capital of America,” more representative of the cultural views of the citizens. Because racism, sexism, and other forms of entitlement were deemed unhip, they did not exist in the Haight, ideally.
New forms of protest evolved within San Francisco, more peaceful than some of the demonstrations on college campuses, the most influential and expansive being the Human Be-In. Modeled after the sit-ins commonly held to protest segregation, the Human Be-In was the embodiment of hippie culture values. An estimated twenty to thirty thousand people participated in the event on January 14, 1967. Held at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, not far from the Haight-Ashbury District, mainly American youth gathered to hear free music, experiment with drugs (mainly LSD), and listen to the ideals of the hippie movement spoken by leaders such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, considered to be “links in the daisy chain of 1960s counterculture.” Leary is credited for popularizing the “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra of the sixties. The “turn on” refers to the wide use of drugs; the “tune in” refers to the abundance of free music; the “drop out” refers to the parting from materialistic conventions of society. The Human Be-In signified the extent of this cultural rebellion and is now considered a predecessor to the Summer of Love.
Between the winter and the summer months of 1967, thousands of young people began to travel to the Haight. Though the ideals and values of the movement, namely peace, love, and nonconformity, were established prior to it, the 1967 Summer of Love was a social phenomenon devoted to raising awareness for the central message of counterculture. Some of the roughly one hundred thousand people in attendance came as a temporary escape from mainstream life, while others were more devoted to the core values of the counterculture. James Brock, professor of management at Susquehanna University, was attending graduate school in San Francisco to avoid the draft, and took part in the many concerts in the area as well as modeled the typical sartorial styling of the hippies, including bell-bottomed pants and pierced ears. “There was optimism and genuine love for humanity in the air that summer, openness to new experiences, innocence and trust,” Brock recounts.
Because many of those in attendance had left their families and jobs behind, “counter-institutions” were created to ensure survival in the Haight-Ashbury District. These were groups of people who worked cooperatively, including, but not limited to: underground newspapers, rock bands, FM radio, free medical clinics, and drug distribution networks. The Diggers were one of the most important counter-institutions within the Haight. Because of the mass migration of hippies to the city in the summer, the Diggers extended support in food, supplies, and shelter for free. In attempt to consume minimal resources, “The Diggers salvaged food from restaurant and super-market overflow and prepared it in their communal kitchen,” which would then be served twice daily. Though it may seem impossible today, the Digger Free Store held donated clothes and furniture that could be taken with no exchange of money. Stores like this worked because of the anti materialistic views central to the hippies, “believing that a break from materialism was essential to achieving a spiritual awakening.” Also, most people only owned one outfit, so those who did take clothing were in dire need of it. Digger’s food service, overcrowding within housing, abundance of free drugs, music, and entertainment made it possible for many to live in the Haight with little to no money. However, because hippies had a habit of walking barefoot and poor hygiene, sickness was rampant. To improve this, the Diggers and a group of young doctors established the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic which treated dozens of young people each day.
Though a majority of the hippies were united when it came to opinions on war and drugs, there was not a universal religious view. Reverend León Harris, unlike most parishioners, saw the importance of making friends the hippies regardless of their practices. “The hippie manifestation is part of a major social revolution sweeping the world,” says Father Harris. “A huge number of young people are becoming unhappy, disturbed, and disillusioned with society. They find themselves in a society not of their making and which they don’t particularly like.” Hippies generally were against organized religion, but never collectively repudiated God. “The basic energy flowing out of Haight-Ashbury is religious in nature. It consists of a deep sensual appreciation, a renewal of the sensual and spiritual, similar to some eastern religions,” tells Father Harris. Though the hippies didn’t share Reverend León Harris’ views necessarily, he respected aspects of their lifestyle, including the work of the Digger counter-institution, which he considered to be “the executive branch of the hippie movement.” He went as far as to donate a room of his parish hall to the organization to be used as their front office. While the Diggers certainly appreciated Father Harris’ generosity, he eventually resigned due to disapproval from the church.
Rather than the fun “poppy” music about teenage love and heartbreak popular in the 1950s, the young people of the 1960s were more interested in songs that addressed the problems around them. The earlier folk artists of the decade simply did covers of older folk songs with new, more popular sounds to enhance them. These covers became widely heard on college campuses, inspiring more young people to try singing and playing music themselves as well as popularizing other artists with similar stylings such as Bob Dylan. These sounds and songs were at the heart of the Summer of Love, often accompanied by electric guitars rather than acoustic. This psychedelic music, so called because of the wide influence of drugs such as marijuana and LSD, was central for the many of musicians who played this new kind of rock and roll music from the Haight-Ashbury District. The psychedelic experience influenced not only music but art as well. Posters advertising for the Summer of Love and similar events would be designed in such a way to imitate one’s experience on drugs. This included the use of swirling, often clashing colors, repetitious patterns, and intricate almost hypnotic designs, and became known as Op art, or optical art. Many of these posters are designed to be seen under black light as many teenagers displayed them in their rooms. The Summer of Love harbored the shift from mass-produced poster for publicity to an informative art form centered on social and political change. These posters were initially intended for citizens of the Haight-Ashbury District, but were eventually mimicked across the United States.
There was inevitably some opposition to the Summer of Love. Many living outside of San Francisco, the “silent majority”, viewed the hippies as nihilists and criticized them for refusing to serve in the military, work a day job, or pay taxes. However, some of these critics themselves were “strapped into these 50- week-a-year jobs, unhappy and drinking beer in front of their TV sets,” Robertson, a Harvard student from the class of 1967, tells. In addition to the views raised by the Vietnam war, America’s fight in the Cold War sparked anti-Communist feelings throughout the nation, earning the hippies communes further condemnation. Daphne Patai, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was 23 years old during the Summer of Love, and periodically wrote letters featuring her political views at the time. Looking back, she states, “what is most interesting to me in those old letters is hearing myself voice the standard leftist politics of the time, the antiwar attitudes, the pro-Communism based on ignorance and idealism, the deep and irrational antagonism toward this country.” She denounces similar letters and articles published as she has accepted that America is not actually the worst place in the world as she did during the Summer of Love. Similarly, the President of Bard College, Leon Botstein, views the Summer of Love as “a turning point away from politics toward a mysticism, drug culture, and anti-intellectualism that ultimately made a mockery of disciplined thought and discouraged the appreciation of and engagement with science.” While this is a harsher analysis of the period than most, he does later admit that “the fundamental reshaping of the role of women in politics and the workplace and the slow but marked improvements in majority attitudes toward minorities” are the positive results of the Summer of Love and the decade as a whole.
Though the media often told tales of severe police resistance and brutality, Lt. John Curran of the San Francisco Police Department reveals that the hippies were more annoying than anything. However, one of the core values of the counterculture was actually against the law during the Summer of Love in 1967, as LSD became illegal during 1966. “The original hippies were all right— real writers and artists. Now we’re attracting the LSD crowd,” he told a reporter in an interview. The police generally treated the hippies no different than they did children celebrating Halloween. The biggest problem, at least according to Lt. Curran, was locating runaway teenagers, particularly girls.“Last month we had a father up from Los Angeles looking for his teenage daughter. He finally had to dress up as a hippie himself and of into the area to find her,” Lt. Curran says. Especially with the idea of free love common in the Haight-Ashbury District, these young girls were encouraged to have sex with older men, likely ignorant of the likelihood of getting a sexually-transmitted disease as a result.
As the months went on, the lack of proper housing became the paramount problem. “Their houses are way overloaded. You can’t have 50 or 60 persons using two toilets. Their sanitary conditions are poor. I’ve heard some get lice but are too tenderhearted to kill ‘em,” an officer says. Because hippies refused to pay taxes, garbage would collect on the streets and in the houses. This encouraged further diseases to spread, and though there were free clinics, some chose not to utilize these. Apart from refusing to disperse when too large of crowds occupied streets and parks, “all in all the hippies are peaceful. They’re just a little annoying at times because they want complete freedom.” The Police Department is mainly annoyed with the media, as the mass publicity of the area is expanding an already cramped population, the masses reaching “mob proportions” in the Haight-Ashbury, forcing police to close the streets to cars. Lt. Curran’s interview actually took place in April of 1967, so it can be speculated that these conditions only worsened as the population increased during the main months of the Summer of Love. Overall, because the police would then only go out by foot, relations with the hippies were civil and friendly even, and officers would frequently chat with locals to get to know them as well as take part in some of the art exhibitions or concerts.
Over time, the Summer of Love faltered. Even those in attendance knew that it couldn’t last forever, and many denounced it towards the end. The movement began drifting away from “flower power” and embracing a more sinister message as the illegalities increased in the fall of 1967. Though it was initially intended to be “the beginning of a new world order,” the increasing abundance of hard drugs and the consequences of overcrowding brought down the ethos of the hippie community and many lost respect for their overall message of community and peaceful living. “The ‘Summer of Love’ had become the ‘Autumn of Abuse’ and then the ‘Winter of Disrespect.’ ” says Philip DeAndrade in a New York Times interview. To symbolize the end of the movement, a gray coffin was labeled “Summer of Love” and burned in a funeral ceremony for the hippie movement on October 6, 1967. Representative of “the corruption that had infiltrated the once spectacular microcosm of the Haight,” thousands gathered to watch the funeral procession, listen to an outdoor concert by The Grateful Dead, referring to the ceremony as “the Death of Hip.”
Since then, there have been attempts of a revival of the hippie movement both in the Haight and elsewhere in the United States. The Summer of Love is largely romanticised in popular culture, for the young “seemed to be deserting their scripts”, writes Todd Gitlin in a book about the history of the decade. A 30th anniversary of the event was held in San Francisco on October 12, 1997, to celebrate the accomplishments of the activists of the ‘67 Summer of Love and encourage similar ambitions in America’s youth. The successes of the Summer of Love and the hippie movement in general are numerous, including the wide availability of organic produce in most stores, the passing of environmental conservation legislation, and the abolition of legal (though the committee of the 30th anniversary celebration notes that there is work to be done regarding racism). Anyone and everyone was encouraged to attend the event, free of charge. A decade later, the 40th anniversary was celebrated with similar intentions. That year’s celebration was all the more relevant due to comparison of the Iraq conflict to the Vietnam war. A crowd of about 50,000 spanning all generations gathered to hear the folk rock associated with the Summer of Love, though its significance fades after media scrutiny as the peace-and-love generation are entering senior citizenship. The 50th anniversary is currently being planned for the summer of 2017 in San Francisco.
The late Abbie Hoffman wrote, “The lesson of the sixties is that people who cared enough to do right could change history”. The optimism of the hippies during the 1967 Summer of Love is remembered with great respect and nostalgia even fifty years later. It was a period for dreamers, daring to not only oppose social systems and the government, but actually were brave and confident enough to establish an alternative. The Haight-Ashbury District symbolized everything about the counterculture, a model community in the hippie movement. Though the abuse of drugs and the countless health code violations were eventually enough to bring the Summer of Love to a close, the idealistic vision and social rebellion certainly remain today, fifty years later, and will remain for years to come.