Transcripts For CSPAN3 Counterculture And San Francisco In 1967 20170218

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michael: what i would like to do in this talk is introduce you to some of the literature on the counterculture. i should go back for just a moment. this presentation takes much longer to do thoroughly. i'm going to hit some of the high points that i want to call attention to the fact that i have the url where the full presentation may be accessed. the final slide will happen again also. that way you could dwell longer on some of the slides, so i will be going over that lightly. the book came out in the last two years. it's called days of rage. in the dust jacket blurb, it reads he "gives the story of the american underground revolutionaries and what it has long desperately needed. conflagration of the counterculture." that is what i want to begin with, because this term "counterculture" has, in recent years, come to subsume everything that happened in the 1960's, particularly associated with activities on the left, whether they be of political or cultural origin and intent. and you find this term "counterculture" being used in many different ways over the course of the historiography. sometimes as a compound, two words, and sometimes as a single. it has become, as i say, kind of an umbrella term for the 1960's, perhaps synonymous with that. there is an attempt to establish definitional clarity. -- yinger isger the source for anyone who wants to look at the origins of the term. it was originally "contra culture" and was devised as a way to differentiate culture from subculture and from this other sociological category that was neither. this is something popularized in the book "the making of a counter space culture," which originated in a series of articles he did during the summer of love, and the publisher asked if he would expand it into a book, which he did. and that helped popularize the term. i should mention that his book has never gone out of print. yinger's attempt to make sense of this sociologically is to break off 1960's counterculture. "thee who says counterculture," with the article, they tend to be referring to the 1960's formation. but it is a term that has been used and can be applied historically to other sociological phenomenon like this. so it is important to differentiate between the version that comes along in the 1960's and other variations on counterculture. he makes the point that a counterculture breaks out of a mainstream culture, creates an objective space in which it can critique the mainstream culture, and then engages in a low intensity warfare with the aspiration to delete transform -- to utterly transform, root and branch the dominant culture. , if it succeeds, it becomes the culture and maybe dialectically spins off its own countercultures. you could make the argument that christianity, in its roman catacomb phase, was an example of a counterculture with great aspirations and was ridiculed at the time and ended up sweeping its world in transforming norms and values of its own era. i attempted tod use this set of theories and invite authors to contribute to the first book that historians did on the 1960's counterculture. "imagination," published by routledge, and is still in print. here, we made the attempt to first attempt to collectively analyze the phenomenon as it pertains to the 1960's and 1970's, not always with agreement as to what this thing is. i think you will hear echoes of that discussion in our response to your comments to one another today. some of the issues historians need to contend with is what is the relationship between the hippies of the era and this thing we are calling the counterculture. what difference does it make you have a cradle or incubator of the counterculture? typically people associated with the haight-ashbury. hence, the name of our session. but there were multiple centers for innovation that fed into the screen that becomes identified by this term. historians from the 1980's through the 2005 book are attempting to establish the connection between hippies and counterculture. are the beats part of the 1960's counterculture? were they distinctly different? there is an argument that can be made that they were more in a subculture without a vision of utter transformation. the hippies came along with this expansive, utopian scheme. that would be one of the way to mark off the difference between them. it's easier to say when this thing exists, because you see references in the primary sources, but some people, myself among them, make the argument that the 1960's counterculture persists into the present. it is not always easy to recognize because of the ways it has been accommodated by the mainstream culture and itself has been transformed in the process. theorizing the counterculture, there are many ways to do this. these are six books that have come out in the last 15 years or so to attempt to come up with a scheme --n yinger's yinger's theme on the counterculture and assessing whether it was something that had lasting impact or not. i have attempted to group, in the succeeding slides, the categories of literatures. there's over 100 monographs, and i've tried to cluster them according to categories. one notable category is to look at the literature of conservative or neoconservative critiques of the counterculture. i did an article on this topic for a book david and beth put together for the columbia guide to the 1960's, which investigated with the ultimate impact of the counterculture was from where it was first noticed in the 1960's and differentiated from the beats and bringing it to the present. one of the things that struck me was writers on the left regarded the counterculture as a gigantic failure in many respects, but it was the people on the right that regarded the counterculture's impact as catastrophically effective. so you would not think you would go there, but it raises interesting questions about who's paying attention to whether culture trumps politics, something that we might want to take up in the questions and comments. the rest of the presentation is on a seven-second slide loop. you will see a slide up for seven seconds under the various categories under which i have placed this literature. what i wanted you to know is the literature of the counterculture is burgeoning. it treats a whole set of issues, including some i'm sure my colleagues will be addressing, having to do with race, class, ethnicity, matters of how the american diet has been transformed utterly by what has been called the counter-cuisine launched by the counterculture , especially by the food co-op movement and persisting into the present. counterculture humor. virtually everyone who writes a 1960's piece talks about how "mad magazine" presented a frame of reference to people who could be irreverent toward authority , and something of that humor became transformative not only within the counterculture, everythingat including itself but humor and , comedy was transformed as well. the media, we talk about alternative media and the ways that allow access to people who did not own their own presses. there is a literature that roots the current developments with alternative media to the underground newspapers of the era. i've talked to colleagues at the school of architecture at my university. they say they don't really teach the architectural developments of the 1960's much. recent books are beginning to take these more seriously. museum exhibits as well. environmentalism, countercultural origins of the earth day and other events that were an attempt to bring people together with a vision of transformation. largely by sidestepping politics initially has been , getting its authors as well. communalism persists. there are fewer communal groups noted today than there were in the 1960's. today, the countercultural communes and intentional communities are a way to show there is persistence and you might say sociological reproductions of the communal living effort. to conclude, the impact this thing called the 1960's counterculture has had on american culture is vast. i've tried to make some sense of it categorically with the literature that is out. going to the powerpoint presentation online will give you more of the specifics on that. but one of the things i want to make as my final point before a -- i yield is that by trying to erase the boundary between art and life, between the public and private by challenging traditional , authority structures, we may seen an unintended consequence by creating the kind of social space currently being filled by trumpism. so with that, this is where the link where you will be able to find the complete presentation. and with that, now i would like to yield to my colleague, david. >> thank you so much, michael. and good to be here. a lot of what i want to say is yes, good point, but i differ quite a bit in what i want to say. one of the ways to think about what we are doing is making some money off the 50th anniversary of something. that seems to be one of the things we historians get to do. the summer of love is a great opportunity. i'm going to san francisco and santa fe. it is like the stations of the hip cultural cross. so hooray for anniversaries. the summer of love is one of the ways in which we think about counterculture and the 60's that is against how we as scholars should think about the phenomenon. the summer of love was a marvelous event. it drew together some 100,000 people from across the country come to san francisco -- it was a monumental spectacle and a fascinating one. it was produced however to an end by a particular group of people. and the people who produced the counterculture, the council of the summer of love, are more the kind of people we should be interested in as scholars. what i want to talk about is not so much the counterculture as spectacle or as a series of iconic events or six or eight celebrity figures, but as a project, as a way in which a group of people tried to do something in real time. from 1965 to 1968, the glory years of the counterculture in journalistic terms is probably a misleading way to think about the project of the counterculture as it was crafted by people invested in doing something. i'm much more interested in thinking about the counterculture as a series of productions, not as a spectacle or sociological phenomenon stuck in time that had no diatribe development, but a historical event and an event i don't think we know much about. some of the books are the ones that michael showed. but some of these are the very best. a couple that aren't on their, very best. what we are seeing is that we are starting to create and history atrophy of the counterculture, other than the journalistic -- a history all caps the -- a historiography of the counterculture rather than a journalistic response or one more descriptive set of pictures of what that should be. these are some of the books i am invested in. when i want you to think about and what these books think about is was it people who thought they were crafting some sort of counterculture interested in a project of cultural rebellion that had institutional and personal forms. what is it they thought they were about? they were not something to be butribed from without, something people did themselves. and to find that archive, to find the sources that reveal the personal projects that lend themselves to the creation of an alternative institution of practices, head spaces, that is a difficult task. the reason the historiography of the counterculture has been weak is because we are dependent on representations. we use underground newspapers or iconic photos or a series of memoirs from 10 or 12 really well-known people. the hard work has just begun. one of the awesome ways to do it is to move outside of san francisco but stay within the bay. the grateful dead archive is an incredible source. stanford has a whole series of papers about the tech visionaries who came out of the counterculture. there are places to go to do the real historical work 50 years later that is yet to be done. while doing that kind of paper trail search, the archival work, we cannot forget there were lenses through which the counterculture is best perceived. i'm not saying that we historians have to imbibe the -- the same substances, but it is useful to understand that at the core, i would argue in some of the books i referenced is that at the core of what we are talking about is this cultural production process was acid. that was often the key hole through which you had it to enter to create that new project. and how we think about that sensibility, that technical tool. that is what acid was a technical tool that opened the door. while we have written about it, we have not explored again outside of a few iconic figures. the tech community has been an incredible window as it is shocking how many scientists of all kinds used acid to change the paradigms through which they had been trained as graduate students. and it is something we could reproduce in disciplinary act after disciplinary act. it is in those disciplinary eruptions i think the legacy of the counterculture is best perceived and is better understood than thinking about the panhandling dope head sitting on the corner of haight-ashbury. drugs matter, but who takes those drugs and why the drugs have the effect they did in the 60's and early 70's is something we are still wrestling with as scholars to understand. the technology of drugs is imperative as an understanding not just of the 60's but the production of history. what drugs we use at a given time and place have an ability to change the direction of a given society. one of the things people in the 60's talked about before the summer of love was the ways people had to take their drug experiences, their sense of alienation, their sense that something was in disruption and figure out what to do about it. gary schneider was probably the wisest guy to speak to the counterculture, those who were trying to find rebellion with meaning. said this, and i think it was a marvelous insight. there is the turn toward simplicity, the drive to go back to the earth in some fundamental sense. snyder also says learn new techniques. tomorrows that are different. that's what we are still trying to figure out about the counterculture. not that they went back to archaic times and decked themselves out in costumes, but how they try to find new technology and knowledge, new disciplinary forms, new ways of disseminating information in nonhierarchical forms. those new ways of being in the world that lent themselves to institutional change, disciplinary eruptions and real practices that had a difference in everyday lives those are the things we are trying to write about all those decades later. and which the history profession has chosen mostly not to write about, but but are being written about from the outside. and that is something we are really in need of doing. whether it will happen or not, i don't know. i talked to some of the mainstream publishers, and they are not caught by the counterculture. they dismiss it as a subject of great importance. we have to convince them differently. i think our friends and historians, environmental historians have led the way in , reframing the counterculture. the history of capitalism, information technology, the history of consciousness, all those are fields are ripe for a countercultural re-visitation. that is enough. thanks. last slide, but don't forget that. [applause] >> my name is gretchen and i am the author of "daughters of aquarius." which, i wrote in part hoping to generate further scholarship and research. that has not, unfortunately, been the case. what i would like to do today is talk about the connection between cultural feminism and hippie women's post-60's legacy. when women of the counterculture became fitted this -- became feminists i argue they , disproportionately adopted an offshoot of radical feminism that essential items gendered difference and we labeled cultural feminism by second-waivers, it made sense in a broader context of the counterculture. allen ginsberg was not alone in observing that kindness, cooperation, recep real city, interdependence, egalitarian is in intuitive ways of knowing, , and emotional and physical expressiveness, what he termed the affectionate feminine were at the heart of the utopian experience. given this convergence of countercultural values and gender constructs that women presumably possess the very qualities the counterculture lauded-- counterculture it should come as no surprise hippie women seized upon the difference to claim power in their own movement. while radical feminists characterized hippie women as politically naive, sexually exploited dredges, hippie women saw themselves as launching an assault on prevailing class and gender norms. including the suburban domesticity of their mothers. for example, their labor, while often domestic in character, was performed in communal, rural or rustic environments, rendering it more creative, varied, challenging, and undeniably crucial to the well-being of their families and communities. in the end, it was not their roles that they found oppressive failure to value their labor and efforts in contrast -- and efforts. in contrast, their efforts in more transitory situations ended up sustaining many of the more grand social experiments. third, the affirmation of a different feminist vision was living and working in community with other women, especially in rural, back to the lan settings. women developed and sustained mutual support networks that reinforced female bonding and identity. out of this environment came a growing realization that their hippie sisters provided greater support and affirmation than the men folk and that they, the women, were the true keepers of aquarian values. as one woman noted -- the values that have been labeled feminine , love, compassion, cooperation, and patients, are badly needed in giving birth to and nurturing a new era of greater peace and justice in human history. cultural feminism growing organically out of the women's lived experience became the feminism of choice. it was not, however, universally accepted or accepted without question. competing feminisms also made their way into the counterculture. this was particularly the case as the new left and the counterculture began to blur with each assuming aspects of the other until they were virtually indistinguishable. hippie women's narratives often conclude with a feminist awakening that not only involves female bonding experiences, but also reading the first issue of men's firestone dialectic affects or sexual politics. this richness and complexity of this interplay of competing feminism's within the counterculture really begs for further investigation. while the limitations of cultural feminism have been amply documented, we can't dismiss it as an unfortunate diversion from true feminism. or as having little or no historical impact. nor were countercultural women alone in reviving it. lesbians feminists who launched their own back to land movement and counter institutions also gravitated toward its precepts. what then was the legacy of hippie women's cultural feminism? in the short-term, it led many to demand authority and respect in their own personal relationships and extended communal families. in the longer scheme and in keeping with the long 60's narratives and the theme of this panel, hippie women claiming to be aligned with natural, vital , and cosmic forces and divine feminine energy, went on to craft new h spiritual alternatives that ran the gamut from neopaganism, meditation and channeling to tibetan buddhism and the appropriation of native american spiritual traditions. packaged and marketed in various combinations, they provided americans with a irritable smorgasbord of spiritual options and fostered a greater degree of tolerance for religious pluralism. by the early 1980's, counterculture women dominated the holistic healing movement, outnumbering male practitioners in every field from yoga, massage, aromatherapy, to biofeedback, non-western "wisdom" traditions and creative visualization. these soon became lifestyle options for mainstream americans. their influence was even more pronounced in the home birth and natural mothering movements where countercultural women , established practices as midwives and childbirth coaches, and created networks, advocacy and support groups, websites and retail establishments. as a consequence, childbirth and rearing practices, once limited to the counterculture, are as mainstream as yoga and meditation. peace and environmental activism were two other arenas where cultural feminism and countercultural values converged to heighten women's authority and power. by the mid-1970's, hippie women were asserting they naturally possessed the temperament and values necessary to counter the destructive masculine energies of the piscean age. a few years later when activists initiated protests against nuclear power and weapons, this philosophy permeated their organization and shaped their strategy and tactics. kathleen duffy, an organizer of the 1983 international day of nuclear disarmament, asserted " it's not the women of this planet who are responsible for this mess. we have been brought to the precipice by a way of thinking that is only scientific and sterile. women could never conceive of an idea like the pentagon." similarly, cultural feminism crept into the radical environmentalism of the 70's and 80's where women claimed leadership roles by virtue of their supposedly deeper connections to nature. as one activist noted, " women have always thought to elude the paradigm for of logical thinking there is nothing like the , experience of one's belly growing into a mountain to teach you this." in both movements, cultural feminism came up against anti-essentialist critiques of militarism and environmental degradation. the resulting battle over what should be the dominant feminist paradigm or analysis is also waiting to be fully explored and documented by historians. the organic food sustainable farming movement is the final arena, but not the last by which 'suntercultural women influence expanded beyond the 60's. the women found responsibility for food production, the cure meant, and preparation and viewed that with significance cultural transformation. as such, they revived sustainable agricultural practices, launched food cooperatives, authored cookbooks that emphasized the health and environmental benefits, organic locally sourced non-meat-based diet, and restaurants, bakeries, and natural food companies. example of the growing influence, the moosewood cookbook became one of the top-selling cookbooks in history. dresser veryl indicates countercultural food preferences have gone mainstream . despite gender, a category that other feminists were not keen on deconstructing, cultural impetus tove the push value and practices into the mainstream. of theirour estimation legacy and the feminism that informed it, it redefined how americans worship, find personal fulfillment, heal and nourish their bodies, relate to the environment, raise children, and conceptualize family and community. that leads to other areas ripe for further investigation. [applause] >> i am sharon smith. my field is native american history and the native american west. i am an outlier, but my interest led me to the counterculture. june of 1967, the summer of love was in full swing. and we interviewed buffy sainte marie. she is a canadian folksinger and one of the most prominent people in countercultural circles in the day in 1967. the reporter asked her what she and theirout hippies fascination with indians. she was slightly bemused, but mostly dismissive and critical. indians, sheer be said. the white people never seem to realize they cannot suck the soul out of a race. the sweetest intentions are the worst soul suckers. comparing their sympathetic interest and inclination to mimic what they thought of as indian-ness, including longhair, feathers, eating peyote, and living communally in try -- in tribes, comparing that interest impulse.d vampire-like she placed those hippies in a tradition of people trying to tradition of those who they conquered. she said they should accept their whiteness, be the best kind of white people they can be and understand there are things , that white people will never have or become. they should face of their own history. they should accept what they or their nation or ancestors have done and they should do , something honorable as white people to address is the consequence of conquest. this critique of countercultural interest in indian-ness was pointed, powerful, and ever since it has been the dominant interpretation of how this phenomenon has been understood by the general public as well as by scholars. hippies' attentiveness to native americans is seen as little more than mindless cultural appropriation, a continuation of the colonial process doing more harm than good to indians, representing only a passing fashion among the white appropriators. i will to go on record as saying there is without doubt a good deal of truth to this interpretation, and also i completely understand the ness of cultural appropriation. however, it is my contention that to leave it at that is insufficient. there was more going on and more we need to think about as historians about the consequences of this. it ignores the political consequences of the phenomenon , and it ignores the smart, savvy way that native american political activists at the time understood this cultural turn toward indians and consciously used it or their own purposes. to ignore the political implications of hippies interest in indians is to erase the political shrewdness with which indian people played on those sympathies to rally widespread support and effective support for real political gains. it is not actually just a story about white people playing indian. it is about indian people understanding the value to be tapped in those inclinations for their own purposes. in fact, what eventually happened i argue in my book was mariey what buffy sainte was encouraging. for many of those people originally drawn to indianess, they did get deeper and face of their nation's history of conquest, and tried to do something honorable to address the consequences. only throughout a couple of ideas to support this contention i made. i want to talk very briefly about why the interest in indians among the counterculture and where did this superficial , interest turn into something more consequential. san francisco in starting with 1967, the be-in and the summer of love was ground zero for the hippie cultural turn to indianess. if alternative seekers did not come to california with indians on their mind, they could not avoid them once as they picked up the haight-ashbury newspaper called "the oracle" or looked at rollrs announcing rock 'n concerts illustrated with historical photos of indian people, or saw the poster in depictingthe be- indians on horseback. it bills itself as a powwow, a gathering of the tribes. and believe me they did not have in mind federally recognized tribes. why indians? they were attractive because they presumably offered a living base for an alternative american living., a new way of symbols of the models for ways and practices that were counter to what young people were rejecting about white, middle-class, american life. they were presumably more spiritual compared to the materialism of their backgrounds. they were presumably tribal and communal rather than individualistic. they were holdouts against american conformity. they were the original american longer hairs. -- long hairs. people who embraced drugs, as we have already heard, they were supposedly people who embraced drugs because of the peyote cult. for those already politically engaged, when the world was witnessing global decolonization movements, the u.s. involvement in vietnam elicited for an and domestic concern about imperialism abroad, americans were a reminder of imperialism at home and in opportunity to speak to that. this represented the often romanticized perspective of what being indian in america meant, and that is why buffy sante marie was so disdainful. in their efforts to know more, some of these 60 seekers were some of the non-indians of the first postwar generation to seek out contact with the native americans, and to do so because they wanted to emulate them. i think this is unheard of in the entire scope of american history. certainly on this scale. there are always people going indian back in the colonial days but this is a mass and social , and cultural movement we have not seen before in american history. you have to remember the political context of this which , was quite antithetical of celebrating indians. the culture of the 1960's was designed to extinguish reservations, liquidate reservations, to destroy tribal councils, to eliminate treaty rights. it was to extinguish indian-ness from the united states altogether. the counterculture was it to -- what the counterculture was to do was not to extinguish, but to replicate them. in the process of seeking out actual indian people, whether to the native american church and peyote context or visits to the hopi pueblo in the hopes of creating a hopi-hippie be-in in relation to the summer solstice. in the process, they begin to interact with real indian people, learn about their grievances, complexities of reservation life, and political problems. they began to learn, write about them, and eventually some joined in their fight providing substantive material support. on the other side, many indian people did not welcome hippies to their communities. they were deeply skeptical of their intent. they were clear eyed about the limitations of these starry eyed youths and they were to about the impact of drugs and sexual practices -- they worried about the impacts on their own impressionable children. not to mention the antiwar, anti-military sentiment of many hippies which violated native american's common respect for military service. the young people could be useful. whiteness, money, privilege, bodies could be mobilized on behalf of indian interest. without significant non-indian support, tribal calls for retention of treaty rights, self-determination and sovereignty would go nowhere. where indians represent a tiny minority without real power demanded non-indian allies. not necessarily the most attractive choice, would not have been the first choice, but they were the most available and often the first willing to help. it happened in a lot of different places. the pacific northwest, hank one example, inthe pacific northwest, hank adams who was sioux and semioi, he attracted a marlon brando to come to the northwest and engage in talks of protest to bring attention to the problems they were having, but he also attracted a cluster of hippies and college-aged students to support a petition on the nisqually river. civil asked of disobedience to challenge state laws violating century-old treaty-waste fishing rights that were northwest corollaries to the south. only indian people would engage in the fishing. the white kids would provide material support, transportation, guard the nests, participate in protests. importantly, they were attracting the attention of the media to the story because of their whiteness. in the long-term, more media attention and significant political attention, ultimate resolution of this issue in favor of the northwest tribes' fishing rights at the supreme court level. a remarkable success story. securelys share rests on indian shoulders, but the support of non-indians was an absolutely essential element to the outcome of what happened. examples,ve you other alcatraz and wounded knee, but i'm running out of time. let me return very briefly to the summer of love in san francisco and the convergence there. the counterculture attraction to indianess began in ignorance and was superficial and fleeting in many cases, but because of the widespread interest in native americans and the enormous media attention, the summer of love and the counterculture and because of the shrewd political calculations and strategies of some native activists, that interest was important to the broader cultural shifts that include in the 1960's and 1970's regarding indian affairs. what began as fashion, in enough cases turned to serious interest and concern. pat had political potency and became accepted in mainstream america. 2 nights ago i attended a forum in jackson hole, wyoming about standing rock. 20 something white, privileged but who are not hippies, they are the ski bum version without work to do between the summer and winter tourist season , they organized an event to talk about their pilgrimages to the camp in north dakota which they had done over several months. they put together caravans collecting winter gear selected in wyoming where people understand how to dress for the cold, firewood, and food. they stayed for a couple of days or weeks, then they wanted to talk about it. they expressed amazement at the community and harmony they experienced. listen to their testimony. that they have almost no understanding of the issues and no information about the deeper history. like the hippies in washington state, they wanted to help the indians. so they did. they showed up with material and political support. they came because of this -- because the standing rock sioux .ribe asked for people to come that was part of the political strategy. the media followed. i kept wondering why no one was covering the story, when does the serious reporting begin? people, other indians and non-indians show up. when they flock to the camp attention is ratcheted up, that ratchets political pressure and at least until the inauguration of our new president, the pipeline has been stopped. i find in standing rock the same patterns i find in the 60's and 70's. they are being repeated with the deep problematic element of cultural appropriation not part of the situation in 2017. as far as i can tell. these kids were not going to be indian, but were going to help them. they are the living examples of the cultural and political turn i took in my book. [applause] >> thank you. i am from the university of washington and i wrote a book , called "american hippies." and all four panels and their work, publications, and their thinking really helped shape my project, which was to do a short volume and kind of convincing the whole topic something that would be easily readable by an undergraduate. i think that every time i approach the topic of the counterculture, and i would work on one side and would find something popping up on the other side. ultimately, it seems to be a very amorphous topic. it runs in so many different directions. i think that sherry smith, in her comment, used the phrase "seekers." that is one thing young seekers of the 60's, , certainly some people were out to have a good time and some were out for political change. it was not clear that these were in conflict with each other. one could have a good time while searching for political change, maybe even in north dakota today that is true. .he said something else one of the radical students that was there was richard white and richard white took away from this the question of why are things the way they are and he went to the university of washington and had a long conversation who suggested he should be a graduate student. that is how richard's graduate career was launched after living among the nisqually indians for a while. i don't know, where does one begin with all of this? the summer of love, as david points out, there is a lot of hype involved in the summer of love. i am sure mike pointed this out, too, the parts i missed. the summer of love this focus -- did focus attention on a particular time and place. in one sense, the media noticed it, but in another sense the media also hyped it, and that attracted more people to go there. what created this was the california postwar generation boom. so many veterans of world war ii settled in california. some because they were discharged there, others because their wives had moved to the coast to work in industries. shouldcided the family stay there. they had children, then they had more children, then they had the vast suburbs. california's population went up more than 50% between 1940 and 1950. it continued to expand rapidly. the baby boomer children in california were different. richard white has commented about this, because he was from the new york area and his parents moved to california in the early 1950's when they were tensionscreasing between his mother's relatives and father's relatives. one way to get away from this was to move to california, 3000 miles away from the relatives. he describes how california simply seemed to be a much freer place. partly because of the sheer numbers of children, and not having grandparents, aunts and uncles, not having ethnic neighborhoods. it was a middle-class society with a higher per capita income, lower housing costs then the rest of the country. people were doing well in california in the 1950's. what happens by 1967, the kids grow up, but the economy is slowing down at the time the children are reaching working age. middle-class families who had children that went to the university of california, that is one thing. for the vast majority of children out of high school, there was not much. haight-ashbury sounded exciting. i thought part of this was surplus labor in the most painful kind of way. making the most of one's poverty i posting about it was one way to get through the period. and there was the alternative known as the vietnam war. whether this was an alternative he wanted to be a part of was another matter. it is safe to say that people who went to haight-ashbury made a decision they do not want to be part of the war. it is the case that the tails off just as soon as the war tales off. by the 70's, the war is in the past, the counterculture is also sort of in the past. you can see the influence of jobs, high-tech, and the , the rise ofists natural food, natural childbirth, and other cultural changes that take place. it was any or a where we had an enormous amount of cold rule change and we are indeed living with the consequences of it to this a day. should i and with that? i think so. it is time for people to ask questions. because we are recording, come up to the mic. no one wants to come up to the mic? please? [laughter] >> i had a brief question. you talked about the 60's a lot in terms of the counterculture , but in my experience it seems the early 70's was when this expanded into mass culture. just interested in your thoughts on that. >> counterculture fits within the long 60's narrative for that reason. their legacy continued to the 70's and even into the 80's. blake's work documents of that -- documents that as well. i suspect my colleagues would be in agreement with me on this one. >> it depends on what you think the counterculture was. > if you take a bill's perspective and you write a book called "hippies" and who he is one way of thinking about the counterculture. it goes from 1965 to 1971. most of the history moved in a different direction. if you think the counterculture is more about disrupting this fun area norms, trying to find new forms of expression and being in the world, the periodization changes. you see an efflorescence in the early 1970's. one way that i phrase this based on a great set of photographs by irving klein, you get a bunch of young people moving from innocence to experience. they have disruptions, they looked towards indians, dropped acid, and thought "now what do i do? " the "nowrested in what" part of counterculture, which goes from 1967 at least into the late 1970's when i think things change again. josh clark davis has another new book coming out called "from headshops to whole foods." that is a great way of thinking about that process. that it is not divide between the counterculture and the mainstream, that is a false economy that calls a lot of -- that causes a lot of consternation that is unnecessary. instead, we think about disruption, and what happens when a society disrupts itself, and how does it reformulate itself in terms of those new distortionary knowledges. he had a different periodization. it is not about hippies. >> no one liked the word hippies except time magazine. you.d do -- and >> >> it was the hype word of the late-60's but when he say this is does not reflect the generation, i think the generational aspect is certainly true in the 60's, there is a generational tension there. you have to call it something. i don't mind people using counterculture instead of hippies. it includes more aspects that extend. >> often you see a term like hippies, which meant junior and from thes, process of doing that converging into something bereft of the power should insult. term in thisg the way, ironically. , he cleans it up so that people who would never have began themselves hippies to do that to take the power away from the insult. >> and book publishers like to use it in their titles. actually i'm not sure it has , stopped. brand, one ofwart the people you are thinking about, he may not call himself a hippie, but he is the same person he was in the 1960's in terms of trying to change the way one thinks about things and solves a problems. >> i am a big believer that this yippie to yuppie is totally fallacious about thinking about a generational change. the people that were deeply the political radicalization and coulter or a billion, or both, most people continued to hold those truths. now they are very great and -- very grey and starting to -- starting to write their memoirs. the tremendous successes of those people, not of the counterculture, but of the cultural producers and disruptors, the world changed. if you start thinking instead about how did we get from with theotors corporate hierarchy and gray uits, to apple computer with its flattened hierarchy and its different way of disseminating knowledge. apple is one of the most accessible corporations in the world. it is not counterculture versus mainstream. everything changed. >> nor was it really the invention of the personal computer per se. it is jobs and others deciding there needs to be a personal computer so ibm does not have corporate control. >> i will just add in terms of stewart brand, he is very critical of the 60's counterculture. yet, if you look at the work he continues to do and his values, he embodies it. that is why it is so difficult to figure out who is in or was in and who is not. the people that i study and do oral history with our critical -- history with our critical with what they call the hippie phase because they saw it as superficial and sensationalistic. they were in for the long march through the institutions but , these were alternative in to -- alternative institutions. they did not think you could topple the edifice that the institution has built and was reinforcing with powers it could only control. there has to be a way to find a new set of structures and the disruption. why is it all of the evidence to the contrary that the counterculture was invested and a significant cultural change, wanting to build or create utopian alternatives to what existed, why does this historical profession continue to ignore it significance, or trivialize it? i'm not speaking about what i consider to be a small number of historians who have and braced it. i remember when i began "daughters of aquarius" and told my colleagues what i was doing. there were snickers right and left. why would you want to do that? is it because historians all came out of it and left? >> i have a pretty easy answer to that. ly we haveaphic been invested in two generations now in the history of struggle, a noteworthy project. the counterculture was mainly white people, it was overwhelmingly overeducated -- overwhelmingly well educated people, it was male-dominated, and it was not invested in overthrowing the structures of inequality. so, it's project was so different that it takes a historiography to recognize the difference. how do we tell the story of the history of capitalism? supposed to care about the history of technology? do we care about institutional structures? the territory where the counterculture has a significance. as we recast the major fulcrum point of what it is we do for business, that is an interesting question. an uphill struggle, because we are not writing about the overthrow of inequities. >> i do not completely agree that they were not interested in any quality. the late 1960's, people i talked interested in the civil rights movement, they felt pushed out by the turn to black nationalism. in the case of native americans, they needed them, right? they welcomed them. they were people willing to go. nevertheless, you have a larger point that there are other kinds of questions that matter to us now where we can turn to this phenomenon, whatever you want to call it, and assigned new things to ask about it. i want to say one more thing. i think that your question, i want to piggyback on it. it as a failure, and the conservative right sees the counterculture as catastrophically affected. why do they say it was catastrophically effective? do they have evidence? was it because they were so filled full that they made it into a bigger thing than it was? i'm trying to debate whether to engage on the counterculture dealing with structures of any quality. -- of inequality. one of the counterculture norms is his military and is on. egalitarianism, what is that -- isegalitarianism, what is that besides taking on inequality? it is the methodologies that perplex us. it is one thing to organize a demonstration, it is another to organize a co-op collectively owned by the people that consume and produce the food distributed. to come intocome that structure. you don't need very much money to do that. in terms of the question, let me look at the new left projects of trying to transform american politics, and up through the 1970's and the -- movement,meet the expansion of civil rights, if you look at who is in power in the state houses and nationally, it does not look like it was the left's legacy, it was the right's. the right got there by going against the cultural revolution, which was so sweeping that they used that to gain political many of the people associated with the counterculture walked away from. they were not interested in being elected to office. how do you imagine that, and to go from imagining that to doing it? >> thank you for a wonderful panel. i always have contempt for people who would begin by offering their credentials of having experience, in the things that historians were talking about. i went to santa cruz, i was from the east coast, and i was in san francisco in 1967. without having this as my actual research field, i think that hippies is a term that if i were a historian i which highway from. it was, in my experience, embraced by many people. to counter,e song merle haggard "proud to be an okie from the skokie." proud to be a hippie from the lima. one of the many examples that occurs to me. narrative of the uppie is wrong, i do not think that most of the -- who wouldre have considered themselves -sympathizersppy did maintain. everyone from my cohort had some friend that may have been the last hippy. the person who either took drugs the longest, did not have a real job the longest, and maintained , 1960'sd of alternate alternate, lifestyle. i offer those as my random comments. hippy, not the last counterculture. [laughter] i am from heritage university. this is close to my research area. i want to go back to the definition as the counterculture separating to create something new that may replace aspects of the dominant culture. then talking about the counterculture as building something. the type of projects the counterculture was engaged in, the most meaningful ones, required time, leisure, and resources. what we have not talked about is the fact that the counterculture was emerging in a post-scarcity prosperitytremendous . that tends to echo with how the onnterculture was critiqued the left as escape arrest, as a group of -- as escapist, as people engage in a process of consumption and consumption within a capitalist economic system. you can see this in the summer of love by looking at the diggers. the diggers were politically radical. they have radical ideas, but i think you can fairly critique them and say their idea of thing s being free was contentious on overconsumption. you have to consume free things, they have to be produced somewhere. i am wondering whether you inc. -- you think the critique of the counterculture as being dependent on capitalist overconsumption is a fair one? whether that undermines any of the projects you are looking at that they were engaged in, and how dependent was the counterculture on that context? i think this also relates to the decline of the counterculture in the 1970's. someone mentioned the "decline" of the counterculture coincides with the ending of the vietnam war. i would suggest is has more to do with the changing economic circumstances in the united states in the 1970's. to be specific, my question is how contingent was the counterculture on a post-scarcity economy, and does that matter in critiquing your thinking about the counterculture? >> you are on the money in a lot of ways. the use of drugs and the kind of cultural project that emerges, not to save the drugs are themselves except as but they disrupt a specific time and place. so if you drop acid in the 1960's in the land of over material abundance, that would jump out [indiscernible] says, it is incredible, so beautiful, and you see the cadillac rolled by and he is like, whoa, look at that machine and that is what a lot of young people saw. who needs all this metal and plastic? it is ridiculous. you are right. you may not have felt that 1933, even if you dropped acid or 1983 or 1993. the world is different that you look at. i think you are right. overconsumption, that material splendor and someone said it, remember, 1960's was the second longest period of growth in the united states, a time of abundance. and like your point to think about in 1973 and 1974 when economic shit hits the fan, what does that do to people's concept of material abundance?does it change the project? i know the grateful dead, to get a specific example, look at their papers. there ought, man, it costs more money to tour than it used to, we don't get the same ticket revenues, what are we going to do? it is real, material. they started charging more money. >> what came to mind as you were speaking was despite their naivety and lack of real skills in thinking about this, they represented i think kind of a middle ground, the success or failure of their projects, i think, did depend upon overabundance, but at the same time, i believe that many were genuinely and thoughtfully striving for self-sufficiency and were consciously rejecting the superabundant mentality. what comes to mind is voluntary simplicity movement, the simple living movement, which grew out of the 60's -- the 1960's counterculture. >> there is no question in my 1966 to 1968, they are largely accessing surplus in the bay area and redistributing it. they're well-positioned because there are many people shipping out of the open bay terminal tour not expecting to come home, except in the body bag and their giving their car away because why would they need that? it is interesting to think, rather than think about how would we do this in a typical goodwill passion, why don't we can see where we can go at the? let's turn it into a noun, adjective, let's envision what that could lead to an there is a direct line from the diggers project a free to stewart brand in the catalog that says information wants to be free to the dilemma that we are today, where information wants to be free, but we have to get it behind a firewall but then it gets hacked, so free is out of there. it has come out of pandora's box and it is not going back in. >> just to introduce no mental race. it isn't in taos, new mexico, theirin that community white people coming in, some with money, some without, and they become the target of anger about the fact that they're able to do this, to go and collect when these local people, particularly hispanic people, really did not have hardly anything, so my point is that actually, they understood it, the counterculture understood it and it began to think very deeply about this and write about it and be self-critical of it. i just want to say that none of this criticism is near. circulating at the time and some of them are open and really thinking deeply about what they were a part of, so you might want to think about that. go ahead. >> i am going to throw something else out there. their search for meaningful work, i thinking of the whole am handcrafting movement so that you are creating things of beauty as opposed to mass-produced consumer gimmicks and gadgets that saturate the mainstream. so that, too, i think, countered the superabundance bestows of the time. >> i am glad you mentioned voluntary simplicity movement. there is recently in new book that came out that is explicitly critical of white radicals in the counterculture. they used locations of social change in the bay area as a failed experiment, and that i seem being the five today is this notion that by doing good you can also do well. if you are outside of moneygrubbing, you want to make a living, but you don't want to exploit people, how do you do that? this was a clearing house with information on how to move into those sorts of occupations. >> right livelihood. >> right livelihood coming from buddhism. >> right, i mean how do you live in the capitalist society without being part of capitalism on some level? there isn't any answer unless you withdraw, but of course, the people who were doing this were not thinking of themselves as capitalists. that is the important thing. they were consumers, perhaps, but they were not capitalists and they were interested in alternative co-ops and livelihoods and they were interested in ultimately changing the system at some level. although, exactly what that new system would look like they were not prepared to say. the 1960's. maybe in the 1970's, too. >> i just want to jump in again. i think that is another one of those half-truths. i think a great many people involved in the counterculture were not anti-capital. >> no, that is true. >> they were anti-materialist, anti-moneygrubbing, anti-greed. what michael said is correct. livelihoods,ached gretchen said, so i think that is quite different than being anti-capitalist. it is reimagining market relations within the market. they were not communists. they were cooperatives, but most of them are entrepreneurial in many ways, so it depends on the ability to have social and cultural capital, albeit not necessarily money capital. >> andy kirk's book is great about this, and one of my neighbors [indiscernible] [laughter] i mean, he is totally a dirt bag, ultimate, but he turned his interest in getting better tools to climb yosemite into a multimillion dollar still family-owned -- >> i have an article on this. >> do you? nevermind then. my "let my people go" surfing for his statements about this. >> hi, i am david. i wanted to strongly second the idea that who gets the coulter -- culture, is not necessarily who gets these eight house who -- the statehouse. what strikes me is that there is this tremendous volume of not only writing but also documentary filmmaking about the 1960's. that did not get touched on. who owns the 1960's? who owns the counterculture? what does a historography of the 1960's and the counterculture look like and who gets to write it? >> david, name the two best books that are synthetic stories of the counterculture. you cannot. there are not many. [laughter] imagination is an old collection. there is not a synthetic history of the counterculture yet. isn't that amazing? there are a lot of good 1960's books. >> i'm glad you mentioned documentaries and are there any films in particular you think are good, maybe not completely synthetic and cannot cover anything, but i thought in particularly berkeley in the 1960's because it was a pretty good film. >> one question i wanted to ask and it relates to berkeley in the 1960's is, again, it is sort of the standard narrative now. counter character -- counterculture in the initially, andon then they at some point blurred, with each taking on characteristics of the other. this is something that comes out quite forcefully in the film "reclaim the 1960's." i have always been a little bit suspicious of that narrative. i wonder what the rest of you, . -- i wondered what the rest of view -- >> why are you suspicious? i am just much are in happen that way. i think that there were distinctions between the two, but i also think -- for example, in my talk i mentioned how women of the counterculture overwhelmingly adopted cultural feminism but not necessarily to the exclusion of other feminism's. i suggested they were reading firestone, and other prodigal feminist works. i think if we as countercultural historians began to probe more deeply, we will find fewer distinctions and more of fuzzy gray areas. >> ok, so berkeley in the 1960's does a pretty good job. what would you place a film like easy rider in your individual narrative of that moment? >> irish tim hodgin was here -- i wish tim hodgson was here who wrote manhood in the age of aquarius. i think that film conforms to one of the many countercultural masculinity's. >> a british film company will have about been around may of this year and documentary called "the counterculture in hollywood," penned "easy rider" features in it. it should be pretty cold. >> that is great. >> i think the berkeley film is an excellent film. the reason the filmmaker structures it the way he does is because berkeley radicals get back to the 1930's and late 1950's and early 1960's. berkeley radicals were of various -- a very serious and sober bunch, who did not think much of the beat generation much less the counterculture of the 1960's. on the -- the counterculture is on the other side of the bay in san francisco anyway. at a certain level, in berkeley in the mid-to late-60's, there was a lot of antagonism on the part of berkeley radicals toward counter culture. these are people that critique of the society we critique and should be with us but they have dropped out instead and are not part of our protest and that really irritates us. counterculture on the other side said we think your protest are stupid and ineffective. [laughter] we don't want much to do demand we would rather live our own -- much to do with them and we would rather live our own lives in our own way and to do things in a totally different way and demonstrate to the public at large, particularly members of our own generation that there are alternative ways of thinking about things. i think he is right that by the early 1970's or late 1960's, there is increasing contact between the two groups and if nothing else, the music, maybe the drugs, too, cost over and people started addressing countercultural and the police could not the difference between one or the other. >> at the same time, i think we need to be cautious about using berkeley and san francisco as case studies. if you went to a place like lawrence, kansas, that you might find much more of an initial wedding of the two. rather than -- >> when the psychedelic shop closed at the end of the summer of love, someone wrote on the front door, kansas needs you more. [laughter] >> i teach at kent state and aside from pockets of countercultural manifestations throughout the united states, primarily, stories are about california in the 20th century. can the counterculture he -- be described as the ion of the united states, given the movie industry, had these images are and sounds are transmitted throughout the united states? >> there is a strong california orientation in san francisco with the summer of love and publicity about that, but i see strong connections between the beat generation and beatnik culture of the late 1950's and early 1960's, which prevailed not only in san francisco but also in new york city. i think one has to talk about the counterculture in york city. we have not done that, but there is a strong and important component. of course, there is a big media in new york and "time" magazine may have been just as involved with what was going on in the east villages as what was going on in haight-ashbury. in terms of their interest in the topic. >> i think it was because i felt compelled to talk about the summer of love since it was in the title that emphasized california, but in my own work, i talk about how this is from the northwest the california, all the way to washington, d.c. it was a national phenomenon i was looking at. i'm sure the others would say the same of their work. >> i'm thinking of this moment where people are getting old 1940's school buses and going to caravans. we talked about gaskin, so forth, and the diggers do this and they decide to try this califo rnication, if you want to call it that, going across the country and seeking out that back when groups and community groups. i ran across evidence of than em having been in liberty, maine, and the point of view that the diggers thought they were doing their and what the back to the landers thought they were doing there, there was a conflict of hellenists got much more meaningful to the people who are trying to ekk out a living out in that barren soil in maine and they were much more interested in forming alliances with local people who had been scraping by forever. if someone's house burned down, everybody, hippies and non-hippies, turned out and you helped one another. those values were part of what the counterculture was trying to revive in other places. they did not think they needed free. they did not have surplus in that way. to move intotries kansas and other places, it really runs the ground. >> chris. there is an explosion of policing histories focusing on in 1960'st these right now, and the hippies are often playing an important role in the story. they're the last chapter vagrancy law and it did play a role in my book in establishing community policing. these are all from scholars who are taking the perspective of the state or liberals, and i was wondering from your perspective, what can they counterculture -- looking from within the counterculture movement, what can we understand about policing and the rise of the karsta lowe change of crime -- the karsta lowe change of crime in the 1970's that outsiders are not being or what could you reinforce? >> real quick response, it has to do it. it laws and racial liberation loss. laws start tosons get hard in the late 1970's because of drug offenders, it is ckt aimed toward black cra dealers, but towards white marijuana dealers. you see in the 1970's a certain effort by the dea to take down the networks that are bringing hash, marijuana and lsd. which is mostly internally manufactured, and it is a massive movement. you start to see white kids getting 10, 20 or 30 year jail sentences. if you look at the war on drugs, we didn't always do it right. which is to say drug laws and institutional power of the state starts to increase at those white dealers and distribution before it becomes racialized area i think that is something we have always dropped out of the story. >> i think we have run out of time. that will be the last word. >> thank you very much. [applause] [indiscernible chattering] >> join us sunday at 6:00 p.m. eastern for live coverage from the smithsonian national museum of african american history and culture. we recently talked with members of congress about its significance. >> congressman makes, can you tell us -- meeks, can you tell us of the significance of a new african-american mall means to the country? congressman meeks: it is significant. all i can think of is waking up and saying, my, oh my, and going to school and not knowing

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