COUNTER CULTUREThe Values Revolution

Counter Culture Movement

Its adherents, mostly white, young, and middle class, adopted a lifestyle that embraced personal freedom while rejecting the ethics of capitalism, conformity, and repressive sexual mores.

Herbert Marcuse

Eros and Civilization [1955]

Like Freud, he believed civilization called for repression of basic human drives.

Marcuse called for liberation from repression by “eroticizing” Western society.

Counterculture

The term was applied by social critics attempting to characterize the widespread rebellion of many western youths against the values and behaviors espoused by their parents.

Absorbed by Middle Class

Many young people adopted certain counterculture trappings, such as those involving music, fashion, slang, or recreational drugs, without necessarily abandoning their middle-class mores.

What nurtured the Counter Culture?

the postwar growth of the American middle class (whose "materialism" the counterculture disdained)

wide availability of "the pill" for reliable contraception (thus reducing one risk of sexual experimentation)

the increasing popularity of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD (which encouraged introspection and alienation from "straight" culture)

the Vietnam War (which convinced many young people that America had lost its way)

Origins: Youth Rebellion

The 1960s youth rebellion largely originated on college campuses, emerging directly out of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Free Speech Movement

The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley was one early example, as a socially privileged group of students began to identify themselves as having interests as a class that were at odds with the interests and practices of the university and its corporate sponsors.

“Hippies”

Hippies were mostly middle-class whites but without the political drive.

Their hallmarks were a particular style of dress that included jeans, tie-dyed shirts, sandals, beards, long hair, and a lifestyle that embraced sexual promiscuity and recreational drugs, including marijuana and the hallucinogenic LSD.

Musical Icons

The sex and drug culture were reflected in the rock music of the time by such groups as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and performers like Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

Hippies: Urban Youth

Although some young people established communes in the countryside, hippies were primarily an urban phenomenon.

Hippie Communes

In the late 1960s, a significant number of young Americans became disillusioned with the establishment’s crass commercialism.

In answer to the society then in place, they developed and initiated a surge of unrestrained experimentation with lifestyle and living arrangements.

Many of them sought simpler lives, which they found by establishing alternative communities — communes.

“The Haight”

The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco and the East Village in New York were the focal points of the counterculture for a brief period from 1965 to 1967.

Summer of Love [1967]

The Summer of Love refers to the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people converged on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, creating a phenomenon of cultural and political rebellion.

1967: America Discovers Hippies

The Summer of Love became a defining moment of the 1960s, as the hippie counterculture movement came into public awareness.

Middle Class America Rejects the Hippies

Although initially treated as a harmless curiosity by the media, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, spoke for many Americans when he defined a hippie as someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah."

Hippies as a “caricature”