Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter next week. In the meantime, we editorial lackeys thought we'd make this a true "blast from the past" and share with you a classic NR article on the rise of the hippie movement from the August 8, 1967, issue, excerpted below. Until next week, peace out! *** 
The hippie movement, if indeed it can be called a movement, confronts the curious observer as a strange paradox. On the one hand, it is generally held to be part of the New Left, itself a vague conglomerate of youthful and not so youthful malcontents, pronouncing the most frightful imprecations upon our society and culture, and threatening the most ferocious assaults upon things as they are. On the other hand, these hippies appear to be so harmless, so peaceful, so utterly absorbed in love and bongo. Where do they fit into the picture of the New Left? Who are the hippies, what are they? Most emphatically, they are not to be identified with the old-line beatniks, with whom they may have some tenuous historical connection. They do not have the truculence, the menacing air, the ideological ferocity of the old-line beatnik; they do not congregate in foul dens in the slums. They are the "gentle people," sun worshipers, love-mystics. No, they are not beatniks; but what are they? The Secessionists The sociology of the hippies is not yet well understood or sufficiently investigated. But what we do know suggests that they are largely young, though many approaching middle age may be found among them; mostly of good middle-class families, and with some education. They say they cannot stand the constraints, the conventionalities, and the hypocrisies of our society, and so they have determined to secede and establish their own "joy" society in the midst of ours, but inwardly dissociated from it. They are inner expatriates, going off to live their authentic lives, not to Paris or the South Seas, but to the sidewalks, parks, and beaches of our big cities, particularly on the West Coast, though we are not without our experience of them in Mayor Lindsay's Fun City as well. They seem to associate in tribes with odd names -- the best known of which is perhaps the Oracle Tribe -- and they flaunt their tribal banners when they settle down in a park or on a beach. And they have their tribal beads, which they rattle. Their dress is unconventional, but not uniform, as was, or is, the case with the beatniks; one can find them in bathing suits, togas, sarongs, blue jeans, miniskirts, even leather jackets (the old beatnik garb). Lately, some of the girls have taken to disfiguring their faces with scrawls and inscriptions, relating to their hippie slogans or their tribal membership. The few children among them -- they are still below school age -- are brought up in the hippie way as "flower children." In the wintertime, they are holed up in the "bohemian" quarters of the cities (the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco near Golden Gate Park is widely known as Hippieland); or else they pitch their tents just anywhere, hungry and homeless. It is the warm parts of the year they really look forward to: life is easier, and besides they can worship the sun. Scores of thousands of hippies gathered on the public beaches of Los Angeles and San Francisco toward the end of June to welcome the summer solstice with appropriate songs and ceremonies. And many have remained there since. How do these hippies manage to live? Some, of course, have private incomes, or allowances from their parents. Other hold odd jobs, mostly part-time; indeed, in San Francisco, they have their own employment agency, clothing cooperative, and housing agency (called the "British Embassy"). But mostly they live on handouts, or what they can scrounge; here, too, in San Francisco, they have an organization, the Diggers, who provide hundreds of hot meals a day, free, out of funds or supplies they solicit or beg. Obviously, the hippies are pretty well organized for a spontaneous "joy" group. How many hippies are there ? No one seems to know. Estimates in the San Francisco area place the number as high as 100,000 or more; much the same for the Los Angeles area. In New York, the number is said to be considerably smaller. But it must be remembered that the hippie population is a floating population; there are all-year-round hippies, and there are seasonal hippies, those who go in for it during the summer (school vacation) months. But even here we have no real information. So far our account has been largely external. What about the inner meaning of the hippie phenomenon? What is the hippie secret, the secret of hippie existence? . . . Read the whole piece here. |
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