“And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply

So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why

He said you look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do

So I took off my hat I said imagine that, huh, me working for you”

-Five Man Electrical Band, 1970

In the early 1960’s, a new and alarming scene began to surface across America. Young men and women with long, unkempt hair and unusual styles of clothing, new and different kinds of music, and strange political ideas that were foreign to many people in the country, began to congregate. These young people spoke out against discrimination toward women, African-Americans, and homosexuals; they also protested the Vietnam War in huge numbers. Where did these young people get their new and sometimes frightening ideas of equality, free love, and experimentation with drugs?

The poet Allen Ginsberg, a literary spokesman for the beatnik generation of the 1950’s, wrote a highly controversial poem called “Howl” which some say sparked the evolution from the beatniks of the 50’s to the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s (Hippie History). The first passage of that infamous poem is as follows:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of

night…” (Literary Kicks: Howl).

Notice the word “hipsters” in the fifth line. This is the word that was sometimes used instead of “beatnik” for the rebelling youth in Ginsberg’s generation, and it is easy to see how that word evolved into the word “hippies” over the course of that decade as the hippies began to emerge.

The reason that I decided to write about hippies for my paper is my own experience as what some people might call a “modern hippie” today. For as long as I can remember I have accompanied my mother to various rallies and protests and as I got older, I began going to protests on my own. I have been to protests against the Gulf War, the bombings in Sarajevo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the use of pesticides in public areas when I lived in Southern California. I was raised to always work passionately towards a cause that I believed in. My father was fairly conservative and usually preferred to keep to his own, and as we were growing up my younger sisters also usually preferred the more private life my father chose. However occasionally the entire family, including my father, did go out to a protest or a rally, and the earliest protest memory that I have is of my entire family protesting the Gulf War in 1990 when I was just seven years old. That was an enormous rally with thousands of people in attendance from the greater San Diego area. While I remember at the time that it was somewhat of an overwhelming experience for someone so young, I did manage to catch my mother’s passion for fighting for what she believed in. As I grew up my mother and I attended some rallies together as special mother-daughter time. I fell in love with the feeling I got from being with a group of other people who all believed in the same cause of freedom and equality.

While we lived in Southern California, my parents were best friends with a woman named Marge and her husband Mike, who now that I look back on it were straight out of the flower-child era, although when we knew them I was too young to have any concept of old hippies. Marge was a youth group advisor for the fourth grade at the local Unitarian-Universalist fellowship, and she convinced my parents to enroll my sisters and me in the religious education program there. We started going to the fellowship every Sunday, and continued that tradition when we moved to New Jersey. We found a very welcoming UU fellowship, which we started attending when I was a freshman in high school, and we attended there right up until my high school graduation. It was there that my mother became acquainted with Lauren Dunn, another parent with two children in the religious education program. When I was 15 years old, Lauren mentioned to my mother that she was trying to organize a UU youth convention to the 1999 World Peace Conference in The Hague. My mother mentioned their conversation to me, and Lauren and I began working together. A year later after much hard work when we traveled to the conference, we had brought together about 80 youths and their adult advisors from UU fellowships all over the USA and Canada, and we formed a delegation called UU Teens for Peace and traveled to the conference together. It was extremely inspiring to attend that conference with thousands upon thousands of people from all over the world. It was working for and attending that conference, I believe, that firmly planted the seed of political activism in me.

The hippies in the 1960’s were not unlike the youth I met at that conference in 1999. Moreover, like many of the politically minded youth of today who protest bombings and stage rallies, the hippies were subject to some intense discrimination. To this day, misconceptions about the flower children of the 60’s exist and dominate public opinion. This is apparent even in some aspects of our every day speech now, when we see a longhaired man with sandals and hand-stitched pants whom we immediately label a “dirty hippie”. While researching for this paper I found an online encyclopedia entry for “hippie” which included the following paragraph as part of the definition.

“Often, the term ‘hippie’ is used with the pejorative connotation that the subject participates in recreational drug use . . . and does not think or care much about work, responsibility, or personal hygiene” (Hippie – Wikipedia).

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the emergence of the hippies was that in enormous numbers these young people challenged the age-old, traditional way of life in this country. These huge numbers of American youth protested the Vietnam War, racial segregation, discrimination toward women, capitalism, censorship, and more (1960’s Counterculture).

Important themes in the hippie movement were free speech, free love and sexual freedom, world peace, racial and gender equality, environmentalism, communal living, and spiritual alternatives to the traditional Christian religions. These ideas were the young people’s response to the traditional ways of life that included oppression toward women and minority groups, extreme censorship, and “rigid social taboos” (Asheroff, 2000). Imagine the traditional idea of a typical 1950’s family and lifestyle in the way of Leave It to Beaver or The Dick Van Dyke show, and you will see what the hippies were taking a stand against.

Another aspect of this movement that alarmed the majority population was the emergence of women as a political influence, which was a drastic change from the old-school idea of a woman’s place in society. Again, imagine television’s image of the traditional 1950’s family in which mother would stay home during the day and keep house, while father went to work and the children went to school. Mother would leave the house to grocery shop (unless the family could afford a housemaid to do the shopping) or to play cards with the other women. A woman’s place in society was to care for the men and children, while men would work outside the home and were the majority in politics. The hippies, with their message of equal rights, helped the daughters of the early 1950’s to come into political circles and the job market, which was no doubt a terrifying change for the male majority of yesteryear. In some instances, women were even singled out as being the underlying cause of the hippie movement, which only fueled discrimination toward women.

“The young ladies were experimenting in drugs, in sexual license, living in communal quarters furnished with mattresses. . . . Girls who might have been in fashion were panhandling. . . . Hippie girls gave flowers to strangers, and they encouraged their dirty young men to avoid the war in Vietnam” (Harris, 1967).

Another extremely alarming aspect of this movement was the fact that these young people represented the White, Protestant majority of society. This meant that rather than simply be able to attribute society’s unrest to some minority population, members of the White majority were forced to examine their own culture and way of life.

“…this was the thing most maddening, that these where not Negroes disaffected by color or immigrants by strangeness but boys and girls from the right side of the economy in all-American cities and towns. . .” (Harris, 1967).

Hippie youth very commonly would travel the country to various rallies, protests, and festivals, going from job to job, often hitchhiking and panhandling along the way. This was often viewed as a direct violation of the Protestant work ethic, which marked our society and stated that hard work, individualism, self-reliance, discipline, and delay of gratification were virtues.

The hippie generation brought about vast social and political change, yet eventually after 1970, it began to dwindle. Some speculate that the dwindling of the hippies was due to setbacks during the Reagan administration, that rights that were gained during the hippie era were lost during the Reagan era.

“We started losing the individual rights we gained. It turned from the we generation to the me generation” (Hippie History).

During a class discussion about this year’s bombing of Iraq, one University of Maine at Machias professor said that antiwar demonstrations today are largely made up of older people, often out of the flower child generation, and that a frequently asked question is “Where are the young people?” I feel that while the atmosphere in our society has traditionally been one of various discriminations and oppressions, until this last decade there has been a tradition of having a counterculture of sorts, which was marked by the enormous hippie culture in the Vietnam War era. However just by looking at the majority of American youth today, it is easy to speculate that the general attitude among young people is one of apathy and lack of motivation. There are still a great deal of societal strides to be made as far as I am concerned, and I think that young people are the key to making these strides as we are the new world leaders. I believe that the key to transforming youth into political figures is education. In my high school American History book, the only credit given to protestors against the Vietnam War was one tiny photograph of a group of hippies with a caption describing that some percentage of the population opposed the war in Vietnam. If our educational system is going to squelch and silence the efforts made by past generations of activists, then it should be no surprise that this new generation of young people are so politically apathetic. That is a perfect example of our ongoing pattern of discrimination against the hippies, because what better example of discrimination against a minority group is there than constantly covering up evidence that the group even existed?

I believe that it is very important to educate our youth about people who have brought about change by protest and by setting a new example, even when that new example so drastically went against the traditional American way of life like the hippies did. I also believe that we need to devote much more media attention to what young people are doing around the world. For instance, when I took part in the peace conference in The Hague, the first activity we did was to converge on the Court House to request media coverage of the conference, since very little international news coverage was planned and we felt it was very important for the world to see what we were doing.

When I was researching for this paper, the most important thing that I learned was how extensive and on how many levels the discrimination against hippies was, and still is. During an internet search I came across an editorial by David Horowitz called “An Open Letter to the ‘Anti-War’ Demonstrators: Think Twice Before You Bring The War Home” which he wrote in response to people protesting the most recent attacks on Iraq. In that column Horowitz said, “blood…is on the hands of the anti-war activists who…gave the victory to the Communists” (Sacks, 2003) referring to people who protested the Vietnam war. I am sure that American youth’s desire to avoid being the subject of such intense discriminatory comments is another reason for such widespread apathy among the young generation.

I also had a difficult time finding any photographs of the hippies, and I wonder whether that has anything to do with our society’s unwillingness to look in the faces of those young people who were subject to such hatred and discrimination so recently in our county’s history.

1960’s Counterculture – The Movement and Photos (2000) 1960’s Counterculture. Retrieved May 14, 2003, from http://www.artsandmusicpa.com/popculture/60’scountercult.htm

Asheroff, Sara (2000). Lehigh University, Class of 2003. Retrieved May 14, 2003, from http://www.lehigh.edu/~ineng/jac/jac-sara4.htm

Harris, Mark (1967). The Flowering of the Hippies. The Atlantic Monthly Online. Retrieved May 14, 2003, from http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/67sep/harris.htm

Hippie History (2001) Hippie History. Retrieved May 13, 2003, from http://oldhippie.jimgreenlee.com/hiphistory.html

Hippie – Wikipedia (2003) Hippie. Retrieved May 14, 2003, from http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Hippie”

Literary Kicks: Howl (2002) Howl. Retrieved May 14, 2003, from http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/Poems/Howl.html

Sacks, Glenn (2003) Horowitz’s ‘Letter to Anti-War Demonstrators’ Is Poor History Lesson. Retrieved May 12, 2003, from http://www.glennsacks.com/horowitzs_letter_to_pf.htm