Historical Development of the Stereotype
This stereotype is a caricature
of a series of art and political movements (plural) that started with the Beats, partly fueled and fused by LSD. Acid evangelists included Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. There were also the Diggers, the Anonymous of the 1960s, who sought a realistic path to a totally free economy,note the Artists Liberation Front, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe street theater. Much more here about how these groups interacted and formed a new society. Word got out, attracting youthful runaways and seekers who flocked in the thousands to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and to New York's Lower East Side during the "Summer of Love" in 1967. These seeking young people were the ones most people think of as "hippies" today, although the term is much older than that.By the time the CBS News crews arrived to film The Hippie Temptation, the documentary that gave most Americans their first glimpse of The Grateful Dead, the Haight had been overrun with thousands of bewildered kids, most of the men rightfully apprehensive of the draft and being sent off to die in The Vietnam War, and looking for a better world than the artificial Stepford Suburbia.note
The Diggers became actively involved in the peace movement when they noticed soldiers in uniform escaping a Vietnam death sentence by obtaining civilian clothing in the Digger free stores, and began providing high quality fake IDs for them. However, The Diggers had repeatedly warned that the increased publicity of the Be-In and the "Summer of Love" was going to attract way too many people and crash the existing Haight Street economy, let alone the Diggers. Only a few of the newcomers caught onto what was really happening and pulled themselves into a good understanding. Most had come assuming the subculture was an already-existing Free-Love Future Utopianote instead of a work in progress. The key word being "work." note
Naturally, this growing mainstream attention, especially by hangers-on who came for the Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, led to a different, more negative hippie stereotype emerging by The '70s, especially as incidents like the Altamont disaster and the Manson Family murders showed Americans a dark side to the hippie movement. These hippies, instead of free-love idealists who expanded their minds through psychoactive drugs, meditation, travel, and art, were portrayed as burnouts under the sway of drug pushers, gangsters, and cult leaders who wished to exploit them both financially and sexually. Oftentimes, they were seen as susceptible to extreme leftist political ideologies as well. While there was some Truth in Television to this, many "New Left" activists of that era actually shared the disdain that the "squares" held for the hippie movement, albeit for very different reasons: they saw the hippies not as dangerous radicals shredding public morals and the fabric of society, but as politically and socially apathetic and unwilling to actually face the problems in the world as opposed to withdrawing from it into their own communes and societies. Gil Scott-Heron, in his 1970 poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", famously castigated the hippies as drones engaging in a hollow rebellion who would likely try to sit on the sidelines when the real revolution came, similar to the mainstream society they rejected, and reworked the famous slogan used to define the hippie culture into "plug in, turn on, and cop out". Either way, the excesses of the hippie movement made them a foil for conservative politicians and activists like Richard Nixon and the Moral Majority to play off against.
By The '80s, the hippie movement was mostly dead to conservative mainstream society, though it would persist in the counterculture for some time and enjoy periodic revivals, especially in The '90s when that decade's '60s nostalgia brought everything from jam bands to tie-dye shirts to Austin Powers. Most notably, key elements of hippiedom went on to become integral parts of modern society, including what you're reading this on. The ideals of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture heavily impacted the technology industry that arose in nearby Stanford and Silicon Valley, and with it the related hacker and computer cultures of the late 20th century, bringing to them a broadly anti-authoritarian culture, a belief in changing the world through technology, and the ideal that Information Wants to Be Free. Timothy Leary, the LSD guru who coined the hippie slogan "turn on, tune in, and drop out", even celebrated the personal computer as the new LSD late in his life, and came up with a new, Cyberpunk variation on his old saying: "turn on, boot up, jack in". Ironically, many of the original hippies scorned computers as tools of centralized control,note but the hackers saw them quite differently.
