The United States of Hippies

Abstract

The United States of Hippies Roger Chapman (bio) AMERICAN HIPPIES. By W. J. Rorabaugh. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2015. AMBIGUOUS BORDERLANDS: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture. By Erik Mortenson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2016. Hey Jack, now for the tricky part, when you were the brightest star who were the shadows? —Natalie Merchant, "Hey Jack Kerouac" (1987) Every picture has its shadows And it has some source of light —Joni Mitchell, "Shadows and Light" (1975) The hippies were seemingly everywhere in the 1960s and 1970s, but in actuality their sense of presence in American society was greater than their number. The term "hippie" can be honorable, pejorative, or flippant, all depending on context and speaker. Everyone knows what is meant when "hippie" is uttered, [End Page 19] but the truth is no one precisely knows. According to W. J. Rorabaugh, in his very readable American Hippies, the hippie counterculture movement not only made a lasting impression on American culture, but it largely remains a work in progress. What the author hopes to convey is the hippie aspect of hippies; in other words, their diversity and complexity. Of course, it would be less than hippie for hippies to be uniform and standard. Rorabaugh approaches the topic with just the right flow, avoiding bogs of minutia, and he is to be congratulated for doing so while making use of archival material (including a finely selected array of photographs of the period). Appropriately for the "blast to the past," there are footnotes as opposed to endnotes. The organizational structure of American Hippies divides hippie culture into two broad categories: hedonism/spiritualism (covering drugs and music) and politics (covering the antiwar movement, the politically engaged/politically disengaged, and libertarianism). American Hippies is comprised of five chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, and index. In chapter one, the origins of the hippie movement is explained; and reasons are offered for why the counterculture movement is important history to study: first, it was a major contributor to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, including concern for social justice, civil rights, black power, feminism, environmentalism, and socially liberal politics. Second, for a period of time it held hundreds of thousands of young people in its sway. Third, its past is not past. Drugs, music, and spirituality are the topic of chapter two, and the keywords are "individualism" and "authenticity." The third chapter is devoted to the sexual revolution, emphasizing the advent of the birth control pill, the love of the naturalness of the naked human body, the natural "male wildness" (97) of beards and long hair, and also the imbalance of free love that led some female hippies, (the future feminists), "to reconsider whether the counterculture was nothing more than the creation of a male fantasy world at the expense of women" (130). Chapter four explores the political aspects of the counterculture movement, while communes are the topic of chapter five. Readers of wry humor will be amused by how communes were often places of refuge for hippies escaping the burdens of hedonism, but having all things in common did not extend to record albums. Communes allowed hippies space for exercising one of their important values: community. Hippies such as the freaks were apolitical; others, like the diggers, were socialistic. There was a tension between hippies and the New Left—Todd Gitlin, for instance, faulted hippies for their "frivolity" (133)—but in actuality the yippies, though claiming "no ideology" while promoting a "cultural revolution" (153), were in accord with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its opposition to the Vietnam War. Overall, Bruce Schulman is correct in his observation: "political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand."1 Hippies, it is self-evident, were too loose and free to subscribe to the dogmatic Marxism that typically animated lefties; indeed, the hippie embrace of anarchism and its skepticism of government anticipated the libertarian movement. In his conclusion, though conceding that the hippie legacy in American culture is ambiguous, Rorabaugh points to the counterculture's lasting impact with respect [End Page 20] to sexual practices, recreational drugs, music, fashion, individualism, and multiculturalism. Rorabaugh suggests that the values of the hippie movement are "still...