Margery Tabankin, who had helped lead the University of Wisconsin protests and who became the first female president of the National Students Association, explained the complicated psychology: “Part of being a woman was this psychology of proving I was such a good radical, ‘better than the men.’ We felt we were motivated by something higher because we didn’t have to go to war ourselves. Most guys didn’t take women seriously, however. They were things to fuck.”
Heather Booth had grown up in the New York area and became an activist in her teens, inspired by the American Friends Service Committee’s work against the death penalty. She later participated in SNCC’s actions against segregation at Woolworth’s in 1960. In 1964, by then nineteen years old, she was part of SNCC’s “Mississippi Summer” that focused on voting rights. Booth laughingly recalls the SDS discussions: “A woman would say, I’m not listened to, and a man would answer, Yes you are. Someone else complained that women were only people asked to make coffee or take notes, and a guy would say, That’s not the only thing you do.”
In June 1967, a resolution for “liberation of women” was brought to the SDS convention in Ann Arbor. It protested women’s “colonial relation to men,” and called for communal childcare centers, distribution of birth control information and devices, legalized abortion, defense against rape and domestic violence, gay rights, women’s health care, and equal pay for equal work, all no-brainers in retrospect, but apparently too edgy for SDS at the time.
The leftist paper the National Guardian reported that some men objected to the phrase “help relieve our brothers of the burden of male chauvinism.” A watered-down resolution to “study the problem” passed and was published in SDS’s New Left Notes, but it appeared alongside a cartoon of a woman wearing earrings, a polka-dot minidress, and matching visible panties, holding a sign that said, We want our rights and we want them now. For many women on the left, this was the final straw. Booth recalls that at the SDS convention, “Jimmy Garrett, who was with SNCC, walked out and said to a group of us, You’re not going to get your act together unless you decide to meet by yourselves. At first I thought he was wrong and that we should all stay together, but after an hour I realized he was right, and afterward, several of us talked among ourselves.”
Booth also notes, “In the women’s movement, women’s liberation was the vehicle for students.” By 1967, she was attending the University of Chicago, and was helping women get safe abortions (still illegal in 1967; the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized it nationally would not come until 1973). She was also a cofounder of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union in 1969.
The Democratic Party was not completely oblivious to the women’s movement. President Johnson signed an executive order that broadened affirmative action to include discrimination based on gender, which resulted in federal agencies and contractors taking proactive measures to increase the number of women employed on federal projects.
Although I supported the policy goals, I was never a part of the women’s movement. Speaking to women who were involved in the sixties, it is clear that one of the movement’s many virtues was providing a euphoric sense of community, similar to the feeling many of us had about hippie culture. I got a flash of this when I spoke to Booth in 2016 while she was immersed in get-out-the-vote work to help Hillary Clinton in Florida, a few weeks before the US presidential election. The sixties were fresh in her mind half a century later and she conflated an explosion in the arts, dancing, rock and roll, and poetry, along with consciousness movements, with the hard-core activism she embraced.
Many histories of the period cite Stokely Carmichael’s statement, “The position of women in the movement is prone,” as the prime example of leftist male chauvinism. Booth emotionally defends him: “We all knew he meant it as a joke, as a sarcastic depiction about the way some of the less enlightened males in the movement felt. Stokely was personally always respectful of women.”
When I ask if she had bitterness about the way SDS had acted, Booth responds, “In a way, there was a continuum and SDS was not all bad. It allowed us to find our voice. It allowed us to convene a meeting on the women’s question.” She continues, “There always have been people working in particular areas like women’s rights, gay rights, the environment, the peace movement, and civil rights, but in my heart, I always felt like it was one movement and I still do.”
In hippie circles there were also those who felt a metaphysical unity among the many subcultures that emerged in the sixties, though it was becoming increasingly obvious that after 1967 this unity would have to occur without relying on most of the symbols that had served to connect the tribes.
CHAPTER 9
death of hippie
The Summer of Love Curdles
Most of the symbols of hippie life—long hair, bright colors, psychedelic posters, hip language (far out, crib, bummer, uptight, groovy, balling)—would all be drained of meaning over the next couple of years.
On the summer solstice, June 21, there was a free concert on Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park with the Big Brother, Quicksilver, the Charlatans, and the Grateful Dead (using the sound equipment “borrowed” from the Monterey Festival). The idea was to welcome the Summer of Love, but to many in the community it was an elegy.
“The Haight-Ashbury was a gigantic media magnet, and now we would drown in the media flood. It would never be the same,” lamented Allen Cohen. It could take an hour for a car to go the six blocks on Haight Street between Masonic and Stanyan. Rock Scully complained of rising prices: “We’ve been driven out of our community. Starting in July, it became all drug dealers. Coffee shops charging fifty cents for a cup of coffee!”
It was not only the sheer quantity of wide-eyed teenagers that strained the infrastructure of the neighborhood, it was also the juxtaposition of the most naive and vulnerable kids with the lowest types of predators.
The open sexuality in hippie culture was exploited by a predictable number of macho jerks. Some guys crudely expected hippie chicks to immediately have sex with them. Other guys creepily deployed cosmic language as a tool of seduction.
A widely quoted mimeographed circular handed out by the Diggers’ Communications Company described a darker trend:
Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about and gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before last. The politics of ethics and ecstasy. Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.
George and Pattie Harrison flew to San Francisco in August 1967 to check out Haight-Ashbury. He was dressed in psychedelic pants and moccasins, and wore heart-shaped sunglasses. The neighborhood had changed enormously in the few months since McCartney had visited. Garbage littered the streets. Harrison was depressed by “horrible spotty dropout kids on drugs.” A couple of longhairs came up to him in his car and said, “You’re our leader.” Harrison was appalled: “No, you’re wrong.” He held up a picture of Paramahansa Yogananada as he drove off. Paul McCartney came to the same conclusion on his second visit to Haight-Ashbury, quipping, “I can’t see this lasting because the media are going to get here and pretty soon [Haight Street] will turn into Rip-Off Street.”
On August 3, John Kent “Shob” Carter, a twenty-five-year-old flute player and dope dealer, was found after having been stabbed to death by a twenty-three-year-old client named Eric Frank Dahlstrom, described by a Communications Company flyer as a “longhaired Marin Country daredevil bike freak with symptoms of what an untrained man might call a psychopathic personality.” In his confession, Dahlstrom said it was because Shob had sold him inferior-quality acid.
On August 15, the Recreation and Park Commission banned amplified music from San Francisco parks, which ended one of the primary ways in which the community had gathered over the last few years.
As m
ost of the early idealistic hippies left the neighborhood, the ultimate villain arrived. Charles Manson’s mother was in and out of jail for robbery when he was a child. He was sent to foster homes, and was frequently arrested, eventually serving several years in McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary for forging checks. In jail, Manson read a handbook on Scientology and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. He was released at the age thirty-two, in March 1967.
Manson gravitated to Haight-Ashbury, saw the Dead at the Avalon Ballroom, and took LSD. He established himself as a self-styled guru, mixing a hodgepodge of occult doctrines with his own apocalyptic notions. He soon attracted a handful of followers, most of them female, who called themselves the Manson Family. The next year they would move to Southern California, and in October 1969, Manson and several followers were arrested and later convicted for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others.
Near the end of September, an “invitation” was given out in Haight-Ashbury:
FUNERAL NOTICE
HIPPIE
In the Haight-Ashbury District of this city, Hippie, devoted
son of Mass Media
Friends are invited to attend services beginning at sunrise,
October 6, 1967 at Buena Vista Park
A Communications Company handout elaborated:
Once upon a time, a man put on beads and became a
hippie—Today the hippie takes off his beads and becomes
a man—a freeman! Leaving behind the final remains
of “Hippie”—the devoted son of mass media and the
boundaries are down.
San Francisco is free! Now free
The truth is OUT, OUT, OUT!
The date of the ceremony was October 6, 1967, exactly one year after LSD had been made illegal in California. Organized by the Diggers, a couple hundred people marched through San Francisco with a mock coffin filled with beads, incense, and flowers. At the end it was burned while the “mourners” did “Indian” dances. The Psychedelic Store stayed open all night, giving everything away while Sgt. Pepper’s played over and over again in the background.
Another Digger communiqué read:
Media created the hippie with your hungry consent. Be somebody. Careers are to be had for the enterprising hippie. The media cast nets, create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in. Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am. Narcissism, plebian vanity . . . Exorcize Haight-Ashbury . . . You are free, we are free. Believe only your own incarnate spirit . . . Do not be bought by a picture, a phrase. Do not be captured in words.
Some of the marchers explained that the idea was to bury the “term” hippie and suggested that those imbued with the vibe would now call themselves “free men,” a suggestion that quickly disappeared without a trace. However, they were right about the word “hippie.” It was toast. If we had to call ourselves something, it was “freaks,” which was a lot harder for Madison Avenue to co-opt.
On October 2, eleven people were busted for smoking pot at the Dead’s house at 710 Ashbury, including Pigpen, Bob Weir, Scully, and Danny Rifkin. They pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and paid fines, but after that the members of the band soon left the city for Marin County. Soon the Psychedelic Shop closed and put a sign in its window saying, Nebraska Needs You More.
The Oracle printed a letter suggesting that the original Haight dwellers move to Louisville: “The scene there began to grow . . . but we need more turned-on real people.” The missive added that Louisville had Victorian houses with low rents.
On December 21, Owsley was arrested for conspiracy to illegally manufacture controlled drugs. Although he was released on bail, he was out of business. The Oracle published its last issue in February 1968.
New York and London
The Lower East Side also struggled under the burdens of a greater population of inexperienced kids, an influx of criminals, and an increase in police hostility. In the summer there was a “Community Breast” concert at the Village Theatre featuring Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Tiny Tim, Paul Krassner, and Hugh Romney, intended to raise money to gather content for a Digger-style free store. It soon opened at 264 East 10th Street, and in a brief burst of optimism, Paul Goodman volunteered to stack clothes.
The concept failed almost immediately. Local hippie stores that did charge money plundered free stuff and then sold it. Meth heads started hanging out and there were numerous fights and muggings. When it first opened, the free store had a sign out front that said, Love. By the fall, it had been replaced by one that said, Hate.
Meanwhile, Ed Sanders had asked a charismatic neighborhood hippie named Groovy to live in the back of the Peace Eye Bookstore. Groovy gave advice to young newcomers to the Lower East Side in need of help, and he offered karate lessons in the garden behind the store. At some point over the summer, they halted the lessons when the landlord, alarmed by weird-looking visitors learning martial arts, threatened to call the cops. Groovy and his girlfriend Linda moved out and found a pad a few blocks away. On October 7, both were murdered—someone had smashed their heads with a brick. A neighbor named Donald Ramsey, a self-described Yoruba priest, was arrested.
In his memoir Fug You, Sanders mourned, “In a better world, Groovy Hutchinson, spreader of goodwill, warder off of burns and bad acid, and finder of sleeping space for the partisans of love, might have gotten a Great Society job to help locate housing or temporary communes in the tenements.”
The degradation of hippie symbols happened in Europe at the same time. Music producer Joe Boyd wrote, “The agape spirit of ’67 evaporated in the heat of ugly drugs, violence, commercialism, and police pressure. In Amsterdam, people began stealing and repainting the white bicycles.”
Rationalist Backlash
The decline of Haight-Ashbury and respect for hippies could not come quickly enough for those who had been appalled by the whole thing. It was no surprise to many of us that political and cultural conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham demonized the hippie idea, but many liberal grown-ups were similarly contemptuous. They were not in the same moral sinkhole as the Blue Meanies, who cynically pursued the war in Vietnam, and for the most part were people of goodwill. Some were brilliant. Some were genuine altruists. They just didn’t get it.
One was Nicholas von Hoffman, a political progressive who wrote for the Washington Post and had worked for radical organizer Saul Alinsky. Von Hoffman visited Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and published the book We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, which seethed with indignation and contempt for the counterculture as he saw it. In the book, von Hoffman quoted a hippie girl: “I’ve decided that from now on I’m not going to sleep with any boy unless I know his name.” And he referenced a “guy at a commune with a religious smile on his face all the time, but he would never do the dishes.”
Von Hoffman did not merely cherry-pick hippie airheads—he was repelled by the whole idea:
At a time when Negroes are fighting to get off dope and forcing their way out of the ghetto to get the good things that hips dismiss as so much plastic, it’s hard for them to empathize with white kids who have all that Negroes want. It’s incomprehensible that these whites should build a new ghetto and lock themselves up in it to take dope. They are an affronting put-down to the blacks, making a virtue of every sin the black man has been accused of—dirt, shiftlessness, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, and irresponsibility.
Putting aside the intellectual dishonesty of conflating marijuana and heroin, von Hoffman (who is white) seemed to be suggesting that a critique of materialism was invalid if it came from people born into relative privilege. A determination to escape from poverty and prejudice did not necessarily translate into a value system that prized superficial material success above all else. Von Hoffman also implied that focus on an inner life somehow precluded liberal reform. It did not seem to occur to him that while the liberal policies that he (and many hippies) believed i
n might be necessary to help transform the darkest aspects of America, they were not sufficient.
Contempt for the Haight scene also permeated “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” an essay by Joan Didion, who was thirty-two years old in 1967 when it was first published in the Saturday Evening Post. (The piece was later included as the title chapter in an anthology of Didion’s brilliant short nonfiction.)
Like von Hoffman, Didion spent some time in Haight-Ashbury and interviewed anguished parents of runaways. “We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” She reported on some grotesque extremes, such as young mothers who gave their five-year-olds LSD. There were a few young women who were indeed that irresponsible. My former classmate Susan Solomon says she witnessed such behavior in some of the people who hung around with the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish, whose drummer she married. Sara Davidson, author of the sixties novel Loose Change, saw it at the Wheeler’s Ranch Commune. And yet there is no reason to believe that such irresponsibility was either typical or widely sanctioned in the counterculture. It is not fair to judge any community by a few of its most disgraceful members.
Didion concluded that the hippie movement was “quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis . . . [which] lends itself to authoritarianism.” This proved to be as inaccurate a prediction as Timothy Leary’s suggestion that Times Square would be covered over by grass in fifty years.
One of the reasons that a number of older intellectuals were so put off by the hippie idea was that the secular religion for many in the 1950s was old-school Freudian psychoanalysis, the very worldview that Leary, Alpert, Janiger, and Kesey had all rebelled against.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 24