The Flower Children

The following “special report” appeared in the Britannica Book of the Year published in 1968.

Sometimes you see them standing beside the highway, their long hair blowing in the wind, army surplus jackets hanging sloppily from their shoulders, rumpled sleeping bags at their feet, hitchhiking to New York, to San Francisco, to Chicago. Sometimes you glimpse them packed into an old bus, a Volkswagen camper, or even an ancient hearse painted with flowers, paisley designs, or other exotic markings—a long-haired driver and a sad-eyed, long-haired girl and generally a dog and a guitar. Sometimes you hear them first, walking along a path in a park somewhere. The sound of bells precedes them—light, soft, tinkling, elfin noises.

Sometimes you know they are there even when you can’t see or hear them. Driving along a city street at night you come on a brightly lit open window, shadeless, giving you a glimpse of a room with a huge blown-up picture of Lenny Bruce or Joan Baez or the multicoloured dance-hall posters from the Fillmore and Avalon Ballrooms in San Francisco. Or you ride down a country lane and there, miles from any town, is a mailbox on a fence post where the lane leaves the highway and disappears over the hill. A typical country scene, except that the mailbox is carefully covered with multicoloured flower designs.

These first generation American gypsies are called hippies. They call themselves by that name and, in turn, they are called that by “the straight world,” as they describe the nonhippie majority. “Hippie” is a curious word, deriving from the jazz term “hip” meaning aware, sharp, in-tune with all that’s going on. In the jazz world those who were hip were called hipsters and those who pretended to be hip, or who were so unbearably hip that their very hipness was unhip, were called “hippies.” In what one might consider a significant departure from the jazz-hipbeatnik generation of the late ’40s and ’50s, the new bohemians took the pejorative word and made it their badge of honour.

Who are these people?

The hippies, says Lou Gottlieb, the doctor of music who formerly led the folk-singing trio called the Limeliters, are “the first wave of an approaching ocean of technologically unemployable people created by snowballing cybernation in American industry.”

Peter Cohan, a hippie and a member of the Diggers, the unorganized group of hippies who run the Free Store (in which everything is free for the taking) and hand out free food every afternoon in the park adjacent to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, says that the hippies are “the fruit of the middle class and they are telling the middle class they don’t like what has been given them.”

Only in the conditions of affluence could the hippie rebellion occur, according to Bryan Wilson, an Oxford fellow doing research at Berkeley. “The hippies are escapists from the affluent society that produces and sustains them. They are opposed to the everyday middle aged values of affluent America—its commercialism, mechanism and bureaucracy; its car culture, hygiene and unquestioned acceptance of the work ethic and the quick buck.” Poet Allen Ginsberg, the most important literary figure to emerge from the Beat movement and one of the very few from that era whom the hippies accept as their own, says “I think of these people as young seekers.” Allen Cohen, poet and editor of a Haight-Ashbury newspaper called The Oracle, refers to them as “the prophetic community.”

“This is not a rebellion,” University of California sociologist Mark Messer quotes a hippie as saying. “We are not necessarily fashioning ourselves as a sort of anti-image to our parents. It’s just that we have grown up in an environment that was very, very different from the Depression, and we’re entirely different people.…”

The New Mendicants

Hippies are first of all young people. Generally they are young people in their teens or early 20s living out a rejection of material wealth and the Puritan ethic. The hippies believe hard work by itself is not a virtue, though they are willing to work long and strenuously (contrary to common belief) on anything they are interested in. A penny saved is not a penny earned to them; they live for now. Cleanliness is not next to godliness, for although they bathe (again contrary to popular myth), at no time do they manifest the maniacal drive to constant sanitary perfection that marks Americans off from the rest of the world.

In contrast to the Elders of the Tribe, the hippies regard fun and enjoyment as laudable, even as a goal. Dancing has returned with the hippie and dance halls, which all but vanished from the American scene after World War II, have reappeared. In San Francisco, where the hippie movement began and which is still the capital of hippiedom, hundreds and sometimes thousands of hippies dance each week at the various ballrooms or at outdoor functions.

Almost all hippies are white and this is significant. They are the children of the “haves” who are rejecting the values and rewards of the society—the same values and rewards that Negroes are struggling to obtain. In the course of their rejection, they have created a new way of looking at things and a new context in which to live. Dedication to the work ethic has produced the alienation that the hippies see all around them in the “nine-tofives.” They will work hard at a task for the delight and/or fulfillment it gives them. The only other full-time work they will accept, apparently, is with the U.S. Post Office, currently the largest employer of hippies. There, by conforming to the minimal requirements of dress and procedure, the hippie may work without scorn, without rejection, without criticism. In the San Francisco Bay area, it has become commonplace to have one’s mail delivered by a long-haired blonde—male or female—in blue jeans.

In the late spring of 1967, British historian Arnold Toynbee toured the hippie enclave in the Haight-Ashbury district and concluded that “the hippies repudiate the affluent way of life in which making money is the object of life and work. They reject their parents’ way of life as uncompromisingly as Saint Francis rejected the rich cloth merchants’ way of life of his father in Assisi…the question is whether the hippies are going to transfigure, like Saint Francis, a defiant voluntary poverty into something positive and redeeming.”

Beatle George Harrison, a fellow member of today’s British ruling classes, toured the Haight-Ashbury later in the summer and, while applauding the manifestations of love that characterize the hippie movement, adamantly refused to approve the panhandling. (Mr. Harrison believes in hard work.) Toynbee was reminded of Gautama, the king’s son, and Francis, the merchant’s son, holding out the begging bowl. Harrison was outraged. “There were people just sitting around the pavement begging, saying ‘give us some money for a blanket.’ These are hypocrites,” he said. “They’re making fun of tourists and…at the same time they are holding their hands out begging off them. That’s what I don’t like.”

Toynbee and Harrison were only two of the dozens of sociologists, anthropologists, journalists, TV film makers, and other students of mankind who jammed the Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1967 examining the natives. Few movements in this century have inspired the intense interest the hippie movement has created. This attests, at least in one way, to its importance. It would appear to strike deeply into something in the American character to have caused such a fuss.