Hippy History

I want active participation in this project.  Hippies made an extraordinary contribution to American life that is sadly unappreciated.  I believe part of the bi-coastal malaise and bitterness is the surviving sense of hippies and others from that era that their 25 year endeavor to create a new world failed.  It was not a failure.  The hippy successes are part of the American mainstream and have made life more colorful and pleasurable.  The great hippie experiment needs to be appreciated. 
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Is it fair to suggest that the hippy experiment was the greatest voluntary human experiment in history?

The hippy experiment began in 1964....

The hippy experiment began in 1964 and continued for 25 years, nearly a generation.  It included roughly a quarter of a million fully-immersed participants and 4-8 million partial participants. 

The two other voluntary human experiments competing for “greatest” were the Israeli kibbutz movement, which covered a longer period of time but involved a significantly smaller proportion of the population, and the nation building experiment that followed the American war of independence.  The American experiment involved many people, but the breadth of experimentation did not extend to every nook and cranny of daily life as the hippy experiment did. 

There have been numerous involuntary experiments from Nazi Germany to the Soviet, Cuban and Chinese Communist revolutions; most of these deservedly failed.

Hippies really wouldn’t have cared if their experiment was the greatest.  The excitement and exuberance of creating a new world were sufficient reward. 

The hippies experimented with sex, drugs, clothing, housing, every aspect of food, health, morals, education, transportation, business, religion, communication and play.

The hippy experiment was so vast, deep and exhaustive that we seem to have been unwilling and unable to examine it.  It is hard to remember the elevated optimism of the times… Stewart Brand used the phrase, “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.” It is hard to remember that Charles Reich’s 1970 Greening of America, a paean to the greatness of hippyhood, was considered accurate prophecy and an inevitable reality by those of us immersed in it.

I will try to change that picture because I believe the hippy contribution is of great and enduring importance both for the positive changes and the negative lessons.  The positive changes have made America a greater and more viable nation.

I write this with two documents in front of me: the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog from 1994 and the membership list of the Briarpatch Network 1981.(The Briarpatch was a network of over 1,000 small San Francisco Bay Area businesses that believed in open books and helped each other. Also see for more on the Briarpatch.)

What flat out didn’t work? 

Water beds.  Very few people still sleep on waterbeds.

Hitchhiking. Hippies hitchhiked on a vast scale for more than a dozen years.  It worked as long as the identity of hippies was readily recognizable to fellow hippies.  It was too dangerous to operate effectively in the broader, more dangerous society.  Still, ride sharing continues on a large scale for drivers between the East Bay and San Francisco during commute hours in the form of  “casual carpools.”

Open marriage.  Hippie married couples tried to be married and have open multiple sexual relations.  Marriage didn’t work for long in these circumstances. No lesson here.  The two words “open” and “marriage” don’t fit together.

Communal living.  Hippies learned that twenty people in the city can live on the earnings of one person, or twenty people working one day in an urban environment can live on their earnings for a month.  The hippies tried to do the same in rural areas and found that it didn’t work at all because the dream of self sufficiency was an impossible fantasy.  The communal idea also failed because middleclass Americans can’t live together for long.  The first thing they squabble about is the refrigerator, too neat for some… too messy for others.  The second thing to squabble about is the noise level, particularly with children involved. 

Without a formal hierarchy, pre-established rules or an ideological cohesion, Americans can’t live together in groups.

Domes, teepees and yurts. Turns out that Americans are most comfortable living in rooms that have 90 degree angles.

Recreational drugs. While many recreational drugs are still in regular use by young people who experiment with their mind-altering effects, only a small number of older hippies continue to use recreational drugs extensively.  Marijuana seems to be the main recreational drug that has developed a long-term following in the modern mainstream.  The debilitating effects of recreational drugs in the work environment precluded them from widespread daily usage.

One of the recreational drugs popular in a subset of the hippy world was cocaine.  Cocaine use resulted in high output of energy and general optimism.  Cocaine became a popular drug in the Silicon Valley computer culture.  It is possible to argue, with only a little evidence to support the thesis, that the high output of energy from cocaine became the norm for high tech and 80-hour-a-week workers, resulting in the national espresso craze that swept the country in the late 1980s and has lasted until today.

Unusual pets.  Hippies tried a wide range of species as pets, ranging from pigs to bats.  Only cats and dogs remain as common pets in the contemporary world.

Armageddon.  While hippies were inveterate optimists, nevertheless the idea of Armageddon always hung over their heads. They feared global population explosion and attendant starvation and resource exhaustion, nuclear winter and the millennium computer meltdown; none of which happened.

While the current Armageddon scenario of global warming is popular and widely supported on the political and science landscape, the global warming Armageddon cannot be attributed solely to hippy influence.

Co-ops and democratic management. Before the hippy era there were wholesale and retail co-ops in the food industry in the U.S. and many parts of the world.  The hippies tried the co-op organizational structure with auto repair, pharmaceuticals, small farms with urban subscribers, every imaginable small business…from retail ice cream to tool exchanges and bicycle repair. At the end of the hippy era there were a few remaining co-ops, and those were, as before the hippies, largely in the food industry because the food industry has a more stable customer weekly expenditure than any other industry. Marginally competent management is all that is necessary for survival in the food industry.

Democratic management was tried in every possible form of business, from farming and playground design to high tech computer assembly; it never worked. Democratic management was a fantasy; management is hierarchical. Management can be more or less hierarchical, but it is always hierarchical.  Nothing new was learned, but many people learned about the failure of democratic management from painful experience.

Self-sufficiency.  Tens of thousands of hippies moved to rural areas and tried to create self-sufficient environments in food and energy. It wasn’t possible.  Only rugged, solo, jacks-of-all-trades survive in self-sufficient rural hideaways.

Barter.  Hippies tried to live entirely in a barter environment. Even in highly structured barter systems, such as was tried among the younger members of the U.S. Congressional staff for babysitting, it didn’t work.  Barter continues in contemporary life on a very modest scale.  It also continues in the traditional form of gifting. Money and pricing are too effective for carrying out trade for barter to be meaningful.

Local currency.  Hippies in many areas fantasized about having a local currency. It never reached the level of a viable test.  The idea remains an anti-commercial fantasy.

Composting toilets.  They never caught on.

The many hippy experiments that did work have become fully absorbed in mainstream American life.  We each need to appreciate these wonderful contributions.  Acceptance by mainstream America is the ultimate goal…we can buy organic food at almost any grocery store and get acupuncture treatment covered by our medical insurance policies.

I’ll take the list of positive contributions in the form I used above: sex, drugs, clothing, housing, every aspect of food, health, morals, education, transportation, business, religion, communication and play.

Sex.  Hippies carried out the most extensive experiment in sex in history.  The National Sex and Drug Forum in San Francisco made sex education films that trained an entire generations of doctors and ministers, everywhere in the country.  We owe the ready availability of sexual toys to hippies and particularly Betty Dodson.  Hippies created the open clean-well-lighted sexual toy business with the first store: Good Vibrations in San Francisco.

It would be nice to give hippies full credit for the explosion of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities, but hippy sexuality was only an important contributing element.  Hippies wanted prostitution legalized and supported Margo St. James’ hookers’ union, Coyote.  This appears to have resulted in the opposite… a rise in Puritan punishments for men arrested using hookers. Hippies made many porn movies including “Deep Throat.” Porn movie quality made steady improvements in quality from 1970 on.

Today’s sexually promiscuous environment, including a multi-billion dollar porn industry, owes a great deal to the sexual experimentation and sensual orgies of the hippies. Hippies put on the first porn film festival (Rasberry.)

The gay community existed before hippies, but hippy sexual freedom brought the gay community out of the closet. Harvey Milk, the first publicly-elected gay was an active member of the hippy business network: Briarpatch.  The founder of the first bisexual organization was a hippy (Maggie Rubenstein.)  The first sex information phone hotline (SFSI) was founded and run by hippies.

A comparison of the sexual practices of 1960 in America to those of today is one of night compared to day.  In 1960, condoms were only available at pharmacies by asking, gays were regularly arrested and banned from teaching jobs, porn was illegal, nearly impossible to find and very poor quality; oral sex was limited to the upper class, sex information was secretive and only explicit in Playboy magazine. On the horror side, masturbation was publicly condemned and denigrated regularly and no person in America explicitly advocated sexual pleasure.  The changes in sexuality in America are worth celebrating and giving thanks to the great hippy liberation. 

Drugs.  Recreational drugs moved from an obscure jazz underground to an open and flourishing feature of daily hippie life.  They have never gone away. A large proportion of young people assume that experimentation with recreational and psychedelic drugs is a step on the road to adulthood. 

While many users of recreational drugs may bemoan their continued illegality, the ready availability of the drugs, high quality, creative introduction of products and decrease in judicial penalties for personal use are the gift of the hippies.

Clothing. The major residual impacts of hippy experimentation with clothing are the two mainstays of informality: widespread wearing by adults of blue jeans, and t-shirts printed with social and political commentaries (the specific hippies who were formerly surfers created this entire message t-shirt market). Americans are still recognizable around the world in the lobbies of great hotels: the ones in casual clothes.  Casual clothes mean “egalitarian” and “American.”  Hippies also brought us a great appreciation for natural fabrics as well as high tech fabrics.  The original designers for Sierra Design and North Face were hippies. (Linda Underhill was a key designer.)

The greatest designer of art clothing was a hippy: Kaisek Wong. Kaisek was part of a resurgence of wearable art that will probably be appreciated for centuries to come. In the meantime it continues to shape high couture, especially the Japanese leading style.

The hippies also brought us the whole world of middleclass recycled used clothing; still a dominant force in daily clothing style. Goodwill and Salvation Army became style centers thanks to hippy values.

Hippy love of exotics brought many fabrics into everyday life, from Indian designs to batik, shiburi and many more.

Housing. San Francisco Victorian homes were painted white until the hippies came along.  The first to paint an entire house in bold colors was Jefferson F. Poland. The style spread rapidly and widely. Contemporary San Francisco and many classic homes in America owe their color vibrancy to the explosion of color that came from the hippies. Hot tubs and Jacuzzis are extensive in American life … thanks to hippies, so is an appreciation of flowers in the home.  The hippies left the shades of their front windows open and used potted and cut flowers as ornamentation.

Hippy taste also expanded the market for Persian carpets, craftsman design, Japanese gardens and natural wood. 

Food.  No single element of modern America owes more to the great hippy experiment than our relation to food.  Hippies created the entire realm of organic foods, the extensive consumption of fresh vegetables and the entire food marketing, and retail style found in Whole Foods as well as its extensive use in conventional markets.  Hippies gave us urban fresh markets, the world of mushrooms and soy products, put a hundred new spices into our food and added hundreds of species to the American palate, brought us the vast array of good tasting bread and, most importantly, a vibrant and creative commercial world of new restaurant cuisine. 

Hippies were the first group of middleclass Americans to drink wine at every meal (maybe not the best wine). They helped make it a staple in ordinary American homes and de rigeur at restaurants.

The first restaurant to serve flavorful bread and imaginative fresh tastes (later called nouvelle cuisine) was Buttercup on College Avenue at Alcatraz in Berkeley.  The new cuisine exploded over the next two decades.  If you can’t see or appreciate the pervasive extent of hippy influence on food, visit a small coffee shop in an Oklahoma town in January to taste 1960 food.

Health. The second most significant hippy influence is in health. Hippies were young and more concerned with good health than illness. They sought vigor and vitality.  The sterile “health food” stores of the 1950s sold only pills.  The hippies sought and used every imaginable traditional herbal remedy, Chinese herbs and potions from exotic teas to herbal drinks… most are still with us.  The old “health food” store with three hundred different supplements is the new “nutritional supplement” store with three thousand combinations.

For medical treatment, hippies experimented with native American practices and Indian Ayurveda, but ended up bringing us acupuncture and a variety of massage practices.  For good health, they brought us a wide range of new movements including Yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gung and a range of martial arts from Aikido to Judo.  All of these a have become part of the American landscape and many medical practices are covered by health insurance. At Kaiser Permanente, MDs have been trained in a variation of acupuncture. Massage has become a national industry, greatly encouraged by hippy users and practitioners.

Hippies put a great deal of effort into issues of birth.  Midwives that hippies favored have become legal in most parts of the country and have been supplemented by doulas. The prevalence of pre-birth training including specialized exercises are a by-product of hippy focus on birth practices.

Morals. Because hippies openly rejected the moral values of the general society and were outlaws on the issue of marijuana, they considered their morals to be self made. Promiscuity and loyalty to other hippies were the obvious moral values.  During the hippy era a high level of hang loose, almost anything goes, whatever the individual chooses morality developed.  Interpersonal honesty became a moral value, possibly the lasting one. 

Hippy politics was Panglossian based on the assumption that bringing people face to face could resolve all problems. Hippies also tried the adage: “speak no evil.” The behavior known as Political Correctness which stresses public and private expression of pro-feminist, anti-racist, anti-corporate, anti-tobacco and anti-military values may be attributable to residual hippie political views.

It would appear that an anti-hippy reaction beginning in the early 1980s has led to a period of strong moral renewal in America, with elements that are anti-promiscuity, pro-marital monogamy and reliant on religious conservatism.

Education. The hippy hostility to the conventional world around them promoted an aggressive self-schooling movement.  The handbook of self-schooling, Rasberry Exercises, remains a mainstay of the home schooling movement.  This movement has steadily grown, often because of religious antagonism to public schooling, but it has grown nevertheless.

The Whole Earth Catalog was also a handbook of self schooling for adults.  The Whole Earth Catalog was published continually up to the time that the Internet, with broader access to information and open sources of educational information, replaced it.  Public reservoirs of information on the Internet, such as Wikipedia, are the direct offspring of the hippies.

Transportation. The hippy revolution was so complete in transportation and so innocuous that we hardly noticed it.  Bicycles have been used in many societies.  The Japanese use bicycles because they fit perfectly into their highly developed rapid train and dense subway system.  The Chinese and many other developing countries use bicycles until they can afford motor vehicles. 

Our middle class hippies have brought the wealthiest country in the world back to bicycles for sheer pleasure and health.  The revolution came from hippies riding modified bikes down the side of Mt. Tamalpais.  They modified their bikes until the technology worked on the rugged mountain fire trails.  Voila, the mountain bike was born and urban riders loved the new light, strong SUV of urban terrain.  Bicycle sales have been growing every year since the Briarpatch consulted with the first mountain bike builders in San Anselmo in 1976.

Hippies also designed and pioneered wind surfing and hang gliding technology. Countless outdoor and specialty travel businesses owe their creation and survival to the hippy love of the outdoors and hippy wanderlust.

Business. Hippies created over 4,000 small businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area by 1984 and probably 20,000 more around the country. Many businesses were completely innovative and became well known, from the Body Shop to Chez Panisse to Whole Foods.

I can only recount a few of the pioneering hippy businesses. Urban recycling on a large scale began with Urban Ore in Berkeley. The ad format invented by Common Ground quarterly free listing of services in San Francisco is copied directly in the current format of Google. The Pickle Family Circus was an non-animal circus pioneer that influenced Cirque du Soleil.  Fort Mason was the first federal park used for urban business and the arts; it has since been replicated in many parts of the country in abandoned military bases. Greens Restaurant became the pre-eminent high-end vegetarian restaurant, with many top selling cook books and imitators. Nolo Press spawned the do-it-yourself legal field and the world of paralegals. Planetree, a medical resource library, has been imitated in most American cities, as have dozens of hippy-founded services such as Meals on Wheels for shut-ins and a vast array of hospice services.

Hippies and hippy businesses created and promoted the entire world of open books business, which helped spur the rapid and successful expansion of hippy-founded businesses as well as a number of high tech manufacturers.

In my opinion, one of the greatest hippy contributions in the non-profit world was the Center for Independent Living, founded by Ed Roberts in Berkeley. It awakened the disabled community and created the unexpectedly high level of accessibility and participation by the disabled community that we now have.

Religion.  Hippies brought a solid new wave of Buddhism to America… from Zen Buddhism to Tibetan Buddhism, which seems fairly strong and vibrant today.  Hippies also brought New Age spirituality which doesn’t appear to have had much effect.  Hippies formed the backbone of the Jesus revival which was part of the explosion of Baptist and Fundamentalist churches.   

Communication. John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, makes it clear that the Home Brew Computer Center (Menlo Park) was only a small part of the hippy contribution to the creation of the personal computer.  The entire milieu of the hippy world shaped the engineering of the PC and the later development of the Internet.  Hippies built the first ISPs and created the value system we call open source systems that now run nearly forty percent of all commercial servers and more than forty percent of all Internet browsers.

Play. Hippies deserve full credit for the idea that having fun in business and loving business have a place in commercial and corporate life.  Nearly every high tech firm has a commitment to fun, whether it is regular volleyball at the office, work-out rooms on the premises or permission to have ridiculous paraphernalia in the office. While fun is a small part of business life, what we have comes from the hippy world.

Environment.  I have little to say in this realm.  The hippies embraced environmentalism whole heartedly and it is hard to know what they specifically contributed versus the extent and expanse of the entire environmental movement which took on a life of its own.

Summary.  The movement, labeled by outsiders “the hippy movement” may have been one of the most successful experiments in history.  Hippies radically shaped America of today and made everyday life more colorful, internationally diverse, interesting and provided one of the greatest sources of American renewal in America’s 200 year history.

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Later blogs on the disability movement and politicos.

Comments

[Briana]

Absolutely amazing. All this information helped me put together a wonderful cause and effect essay for my class. Thank you so much!!! My mom is one of the few major business women these days to proudly represent the hippie movement still to this day. It's so great to hear that the spirit is still all around us. Thanks again...

PEACE

[BridgetAnjellla]

Feliz ano nuevo

[Sarah]

Thank you so much for this wonderful information on hippies. It provided perfect facts, funny, educational, and interesting. I'm writing a speech about hippies, and this blog was so, so helpful. Thanks again! :]

[Carson Dugal]

I hope you may see as I do a new movement underway that may help restore a little justice in the world. Well, put a stop to some of the lawlessness anyway.

"It will either be them that join us in obeying the law or us the join in the lawlessness. How else will we be able to compete."

This is a post of mine from the Save Our State message boards.

http://saveourstate.org/vforums/showthread.php?p=221823#post221823

They never left. They are all around us. Maybe even a little, in us!

It was the same thing during the Viet Nam war era. The media kept telling us everyone believed what they wanted us to believe, we believed, I believe.

Well something like that.

People went around for a while thinking they were alone.

People slowly started waking up to find we all didn't think alike like they said.

For me it started with the Beatles and I happened to be about that age when that sort of independence happens anyway, I suppose. For a moment after they came to America we had two camps. People either liked them or didn't. A trivial thing but the division was taken fairly seriously at the time. Some let their freak flag fly by growing their hair. People were expressing themselves about other things also. Some not so trivial. One was the war.

Like I said earlier many of us felt alone at the time. Not anymore! We had new allies on many topics. One that seemed pretty important was whether going to Viet Nam was really high on your list. The war never did draw enough people that really wanted to volunteer to go that I remember. Many did not feel comfortable volunteering others to go.

Any way to make a long story short we started getting together and sharing with each other how we felt on many things. The media no longer controlled our minds.

We had a whole new world full of friends and started having more fun with each other. We also grew a new respect for each other that has never died.

Arlo Guthrie and his song and movie Alice’s Restaurant brought many of us together to help us face some of the reality we had to face at the time.

Some say the happenings of the sixties were a mistake. As we look back some of it may appear wrong but it felt right at the time and life can be like that. Everything that happened may have not been important in itself but it was part of the whole. Hopefully we learn from the past but it did take all of it and everyone doing their thing to get us where we are today! Many of us still haven't lost our faith we found in each other.

People are again coming together. It's not all going to be easy.

It sure can be a beautiful thing to behold.

Carson

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/01/hippy_history.html

[Odilon Ross]

A lack of context, and a great deal of vanity, go into any valuation of "how I contributed to history". The article suffers from such, but overcomes the error in seeking to locate threads of connections, sorta like a hippy James Burke, of 'Connections' and 'The Day the Universe Changed' fame. After everyone from that generation are dead, meaning, there will be no more advocates with their identities at stake, the products and behavior wrapped in hippie clothing maybe selling for quite a lot of money on ebay, or other auction sites, but it will look altogether like many, many other movements in history. I hesitate to say it, but Ronald Reagan's culture, that successfully ended the cold war, will loom larger.
The hippie culture, mostly a visual/media archive now, can be taken as a somewhat aggresive promotion of alternative lifestyles, but a little knowledge of history goes a along way in putting in with other alternative lifestyle cultures. Rich people can afford to have an alternative lifestyle, and just because a lot of Americans (their families)got rich and were enriched in the fifties doesn't mean they are responsible for making more real the values of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in contrast to any other generation.
Again, I make it sound like vanity, but it is more than vanity. But Peaceful Gatherings are central value in all, all, all religous communities. One hears the common arguement that "those guys (meaning the religous folks)are responsible for more violence...." etc., but in fact, a great deal of violence is associated with the hippies as well. Imagine if the hippies became mainstream, and everyone tuned in, dropped out, and turned on? Civil War.
Drugs are fun, for awhile, but tuning out, dropping in, and turning off gets co-opted by business folks inevitably.
If you want to expand your mind and think you belong to something special in History, become a scholar, not a drug user. I'll take James Burke, the stuffy high brow from Oxford, over Whatever it is the hippies are now trying to sell.

[M. Phillips]

I use whatever typeface that Typepad.com is providing. It looks like Arial to me. I have a short bibliography on http://phillips.blogs.com/commerce/

[Mary]

This is a great blog! Never though I would find something like this :)

But I have to know just one thing:
Have you used any fonts? Any bibliography? If yes, could you please let me know which one?

Thank you very much

i luv ur site!!! the pics r awesome and the info is great!!

[Stacey.]

This has really helped me for my corsework. It covers everything i needed to know for my 'hippy' research.
Thanks Stacey.

[Warwick Rowell]

I scanned your head article and would comment on three matters:

Stewart Brand admitted in “How Building Learn” that Geodesic domes did not work.

Dry composting toilets do work. We have been using one type for ten years, and it is going very well. The secret is minimal air inlet anywhere else but the seat, and maximum air outlet. The Rotaloo technology is simple, and achieves the best trade-off of volume for heat mass to ensure composting versus small containers for ease of handling. To empty and clean ours after three years of collection took three hours..

We have seven other varieties of commercially available DCTs on Rosneath Farm, and one home made job, using wheelybins.

I agree that that era made a huge contribution to the present, and frequently see the stages of cultural advance proposed by Fred Emery many years ago: the dominant system ignores, ridicules, indulges, subverts, opposes, then coopts the emerging system. And then in turn on to the next “cultural icon”. A key thing is for those who have made the paradigm shift (see Appendix four of The Production of Houses, Chris Alexander et al) to support those acting in the areas you are not acting in.

Warwick Rowell
Rosneath Farm Ecovillage
www.rosneath.com.au

[eskimo bob]

great website...i learned a lot of great material to help on my quest of complete and total hippiness...thank you for the assisstance of my journey

-with great admiration
Eskimo Bob

[Ishmael]

A couple of random thoughts from my bystander perspective:

(1) wasn't a great part of it "San Francisco values"--or at least Bay Area? In music and poetry (the beats, at least, as precursors--and people like Snyder and McClure), in Herb Caen inventing the name, in the Sexual Freedom League, in free music in the parks and free clothing boxes, in toplessness (love that photo!), in the availability of easy and shared drugs, etc. etc. It slopped over into the country's other cities, and down the Peninsula it morphed into the Bus and Stewart's nomadics, etc., and finally it penetrated the nation's suburbs and little enclaves in the countryside, but it seems to me that the initial inspiration or freeing-up impulse was something about San Francisco: the end of the line for so many aspects of traditional America. . . .

(2) Open marriage is still evolving, into polyfidelity or group marriage. (AIDS is of course important in everything sexual after about 1981)

(3) Employee ownership was not always o-management="democratic management". Bookpeople had an elected board that chose managers, who managed, and it survived longer than many businesses set up on "normal" lines. Oakland's Center for Employee Ownership is still active, I think, and a certain number of private firms go into employee ownership when the founders (sometimes once hippies) get ready to retire, e.g. Thomson-Shore printing co.

(4) Domes etc. People still like cob and other non-rectangular spaces, but they are hard to build, weatherproof, and maintain.

(5) Communal living is still with us (my Japanese piece ran in COMMUNITIES magazine, and there are probably more intentional communities in the US now than there ever were communies), but part of it has evolved into co-housing, where people share many things but have altogether private spaces too. (Interestingly enough, the ones that survive as co-housing rather than dissolving are the ones in which people eat together several times a week, perhaps because it makes a consensus process viable.)

(6) Food: I think maybe extensive travel to Europe by a lot of non-hippies (e.g. teachers, the original market segment for Trader Joe) was also important; we learned that way about good bread, decent coffee, and fresh seasonal food. Hippies were more into organic, vegetarian, and sometimes really dangerous things like macrobiotic diets.

(7) Home schooling is now mainly Christian. God, is Rasberry responsible????

[phillip]

love

[Alice Stagg]

Michael - You really outdid yourself on this one! It's a blog-gallery tribute.

And thank you for the conversations with Charlie!

--Alice

[raines]

I think we've learned from early experiments... under Communal Living and Housing, see: cohousing and intentional communities.

[M. Phillips]

My designation of “hippy,” in all cases comes from personal experience.

Joe and Gary, the fathers of mountain biking, joined the Briarpatch Network for consulting. The Briarpatch was a hippy business network that believed in open books, sharing resources with other businesses and doing a business that you love. So did Joe and Gary.

Hippies were a cross section of the middleclass, maybe with a higher than usual proportion of skilled, athletic and entrepreneurial members than the general population.

Food coops in America have a long history and flourished in the Grange period of the 1880’s. The explosion of food coops in the hippy era was unique in its depth and extent. It included dairies, bakeries, warehouses, distribution systems, manufacturing and the most extensive array of organic farms imaginable.

Clothing. I cited Linda Underhill, the woman who designed all of the innovative, light, watershedding-outdoor specialty wear for North Face and Sierra Designs as early as 1975.

Rachel Carson was not a hippy by any stretch of the imagination. I excluded the environmental movement in my essay, though hippies were the bulk of the early membership in that movement.

[Sylvia Paull]

I wouldn't call the inventors of mountain bikes, Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher, hippies in any sense of the word. They were athletes, skilled craftspersons, and businessmen.

Food coops were around long before the advent of hippies.

Rachel Carson, a seminal environmentalist, was not a hippie.

This article attributes many trends that preceded the hippies to the hippies and it misattributes a maverick lifestyle, such as those characterized by rock climbers Yvon Chounard and Royal Robbins, to hippydom when in fact they were athletes and again, later businesspeople.

Maybe the writer thinks Walt Whitman was also a hippie?

[Old friend Charlie]

I am impressed with Alice Stagg's comments -- some real insights there.

ALICE STAGG: "the power of this social movement to intoxicate groups into collective fantasies that in some cases generated real new things and in other cases didn’t hold up"

CHARLIE: Yep!

ALICE STAGG: "Look at how much we as a culture hate leaders and don’t support them, and how hard it is for executives to lead decisively. This is also part of an attack in our society against “patriarchy,” which could also be understood as the social function of masculine authority to protect, to guide, to have rules, to set boundaries, to make decisions, and to maintain hierarchy, etc. I really see fundamental self-doubt about the role of masculine authority beginning in the hippy era."

CHARLIE: I am not so sure about the "how hard it is for executives to lead decisively" -- I think that there is no leadership other than decisive leadership. Of course, it may be that the decisiveness is hidden, with the executive not wanting to appear as the key person. However, the rest of Alice's remarks feel very accurate to me.

ALICE STAGG: "I think the superhuman productivity ideal (fueled by caffeine) may have come from hippy optimism about self and collective actualization and innovation that business culture has been infused with, even in the more conservative industries. I also wonder about the connection to the “you can have it all” generation of women whose parents were hippies."

CHARLIE: Being of the male persuasion, I have always wondered what young women were talking about when they would explain (?) to me their desire, even their need, to "have it all"? Maybe now, thanks to Alice, I finally get it.

ALICE STAGG: "My parent’s community created a home school for all the kids from kindergarten through middle school, and this was one of the strongest examples of how they promoted and instilled their community values and expressed their disdain for mainstream education."

CHARLIE: Yes, that kind of thing was in some ways maybe the most astounding of all the "hippie" phenomena - although it was mostly almost invisible to the mainstream culture. And now look at it -- home schooling is a commonplace!

[Alice Stagg]

"Without a formal hierarchy, pre-established rules or an ideological cohesion, Americans can't live together in groups."

I think it might be worth saying more here about the power of this social movement to intoxicate groups into collective fantasies that in some cases generated real new things and in other cases didn’t hold up without greater mental distortions of reality that could be produced by ideological brainwashing or dictatorship, etc. It seems that hippy communities were prone to going fundamentalist and rigid about authority, and this is interesting considering how seeming counter to egalitarian hippy values that was. I think this was the underbelly of hippy communities, which is that many people were rebelling against rigid authority systems in a counter-dependent way. So, by not wanting to have clear authority structures and hierarchy, they were in some cases more dependent on bad examples of authority and power, and didn’t generate new more viable forms of authority. This is still impacting the world of business and politics today. Look at how much we as a culture hate leaders and don’t support them, and how hard it is for executives to lead decisively. This is also part of an attack in our society against “patriarchy,” which could also be understood as the social function of masculine authority to protect, to guide, to have rules, to set boundaries, to make decisions, and to maintain hierarchy, etc. I really see fundamental self-doubt about the role of masculine authority beginning in the hippy era.

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"It is possible to argue, with only a little evidence to support the thesis, that the high output of energy from cocaine became the norm for high tech and 80-hour-a-week workers, resulting in the national espresso craze that swept the country in the late 1980s and has lasted until today."

I think the superhuman productivity ideal (fueled by caffeine) may have come from hippy optimism about self and collective actualization and innovation that business culture has been infused with, even in the more conservative industries. I also wonder about the connection to the “you can have it all” generation of women whose parents were hippies.

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"...the home schooling movement... has steadily grown, often because of religious antagonism to public schooling, but it has grown nevertheless."

My parent’s community created a home school for all the kids from kindergarten through middle school, and this was one of the strongest examples of how they promoted and instilled their community values and expressed their disdain for mainstream education. I grew up Jewish, but went to Catholic high school because my parents’ community believed that Catholic high school had better community values. I don’t know if this meant a lack of diversity or less trouble for us to get into or a better education, but I’m not sure any of those were true.

[Old friend Charlie]

Michael,

This is more than a blog, it's a super-blog! Wonderful! Delightful!

And the foto-commentary is, like, scrumpchuss! (Hippie contribution to English spelling.) Especially the lead foto!

Thank you.

[Scott]

Dude, Yah that's all-right, but like did you for get the hippy contribution to, you know, grammer? Hello...skateboarding!!! And rock climbing was reinvented by hippies living in Yosemite valley. Before hippies climbing was done in itchy wool nickerbockers with a hammer and monster boots.