HIPPIES

Hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s, swiftly spreading to other countries around the world. The hippie subculture still exists across the United States and remains relevant today. The term ‘hippie’ is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York City’s Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s, and similar urban areas. Both the words “hip” and “hep” came from black American culture and means awareness. Thus the word “hippie” means “one who is aware,” and expanded awareness was a goal of the movement. The early hippie ideology included the counter cultural values of the Beat Generation. Some created their own social groups and communities, listened to psychedelic rock, opposed the Vietnam War, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as marijuana, LSD and “magic” mushrooms to explore alternative states of consciousness.

 In January 1967, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast. In the United Kingdom, mobile “peace convoys” of New age travellers made summer 

pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge. In Australia hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival and the annual Cannabis Law Reform Rally orMardiGrass. “Piedra Roja Festival”, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie fashions and values had a major effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature, and the arts. Since the widespread movement in the 1960s, many aspects of hippie culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The sense of style and costume that began at the Red Dog Saloon flourished when San Francisco’s Fox Theater went out of business and hippies bought up its costume stock, reveling in the freedom to dress up for weekly musical performances at their favorite ballrooms. As 

San Francisco Chronicle music columnist Ralph J. Gleason put it, “They danced all night long, orgiastic, spontaneous and completely free form.” Young Americans around the country began moving to San Francisco, and by June 1966, around 15,000 hippies had moved into the Haight. Activity centered on the Diggers, a guerrilla street theatre group that combined spontaneous street theatre, anarchistic action, and art happenings in their agenda to create a “free city”. By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organized free music concerts, and performed works of political art. On October 6, 1966, the state of California declared LSD a controlled substance, which made the drug illegal. In response to the criminalization of psychedelics, San Francisco hippies staged a gathering in the Golden Gate Park panhandle, called the Love Pageant Rally, attracting an estimated 700–800 people. As explained by Allan Cohen, co-founder of the San Francisco Oracle, the purpose of the rally was twofold: to draw attention to the fact that LSD had just been made illegal — and to demonstrate that people who used LSD were not criminals, nor were they mentally ill. The Monterey Pop Festival from June 16 to June 18 introduced the rock music of the counterculture to a wide

 audience and marked the start of the “Summer of Love”. Scott McKenzie’s rendition of John Phillips’ song, “San Francisco”, became a hit in the United States and Europe. The lyrics, “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”, inspired thousands of young people from all over the world to travel to San Francisco, sometimes wearing flowers in their hair and distributing flowers to passersby, earning them the name, “Flower Children”. Time magazine featured a cover story entitled, “The Hippies: The Philosophy of a Subculture.” The article described the guidelines of the hippie code: “Do your own thing, wherever you have to do it and whenever you want. Drop out. Leave society as you have known it. Leave it utterly. Blow the mind of every straight person you can reach. Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun. Haight-Ashbury could not accommodate the influx of crowds (mostly naive youngsters) with no place to live. Many took to living on the street, panhandling and drug-dealing. There were problems with malnourishment, disease, and drug addiction. Crime and violence skyrocketed. None of these trends reflected what the hippies had envisioned. Some of the more idealistic hippies preferred to be called freaks; to distinguish themselves from those for whom being a hippie meant sex and drugs, not revolution and transcendence. Misgivings about the hippie culture, particularly with regard to drug abuse and lenient morality, fueled the moral panics of the late 1960s.