It was one of the defining countercultural movements in the post-war period, with hundreds of thousands of young people rejecting mainstream society and opting for something different.
In this episode, we are going to look at some of the factors that led to the hippy movement, and how it developed and then largely disappeared.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about hippies and the hippy movement.
[00:00:27] It was one of the defining countercultural movements in the post-war period, with hundreds of thousands of young people rejecting mainstream society and opting for something different.
[00:00:39] And in today’s episode we are going to explore it in detail.
[00:00:44] We’ll look at some of the factors that led to the hippy movement, how it developed and then largely disappeared, and ask ourselves what lasting impact it left.
[00:00:54] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:00] The American Dream is a powerful force. It's something that has attracted hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions, pulled them into the United States.
[00:01:13] For people outside the US, it held the promise of a new start in the land of opportunity.
[00:01:21] And even for those in the US, the proposal of the American Dream was and still is an alluring one: work hard, do the right thing, and you’ll be able to live a good life.
[00:01:35] But starting in the 1960s, there was a growing section of American youth that rejected it, or at least rejected the traditional, mainstream, vision of the American dream.
[00:01:50] To these young people, the conventional view of the American Dream, a stable 9-5 job, a house in the suburbs, a car, a trip to the movies on a Saturday night, this did not represent their vision of “a life well lived”.
[00:02:07] Instead of houses in the suburbs, they lived in shared accommodation in cities or travelled around the country in buses.
[00:02:17] Instead of disposable razors and cheap deodorant, they grew their hair long and said no to the Old Spice.
[00:02:26] Instead of Sunday church, they practised Eastern spirituality.
[00:02:30] Instead of wearing tailored suits, they wore tie-dye t-shirts and bell-bottomed trousers.
[00:02:38] Instead of coffee on the commute to work, they took LSD and congregated in parks.
[00:02:45] These young people were, of course, what would come to be called hippies, and would form part of a movement that would define a generation and leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.
[00:02:59] Now, as to the question of where the hippy movement came from, the prevailing opinion is that it is exclusively American, but there is an alternative view that its roots can actually be traced back to something called Wandervogel, which was a German movement that started in the 1890s.
[00:03:21] Wandervogel translates as “wandering bird”, and this movement was all about rebelling against industrialization and instead going and immersing yourself in nature.
[00:03:35] The movement was outlawed in 1933 by the Nazis, but by this time it had been going for almost 40 years.
[00:03:46] Plenty of Germans who had participated in this movement had emigrated to the United States, settling there, making a life for themselves across the Atlantic, and sowing the seeds for the American countercultural movement that would emerge several decades later.
[00:04:04] Now, when trying to understand any countercultural movement, it’s important to start with a reminder of what mainstream culture was, to see what was being rejected.
[00:04:17] Post-war America, as you will know, was a time of great economic prosperity. TVs, dishwashers, fast food, disposable razors, cars, drive-in movie theatres, credit cards that would allow you to buy anything you wanted.
[00:04:35] All you needed to do was slot into the system, and your slice of the American dream was there for the taking.
[00:04:45] For men, there were jobs aplenty, and good paying jobs at that.
[00:04:51] For women, generally speaking, life meant staying at home, cooking, cleaning and raising your kids.
[00:04:59] Understandably, for a generation of people who had lived through the Second World War, and especially the slightly older generation who had lived through the Great Depression AND the Second World War, this must have sounded wonderful.
[00:05:14] Finally, a peaceful, “good” life, no war, no hunger, life seemed to be getting better with every year that passed.
[00:05:24] But for a certain segment of the younger generation, those who had never lived through this hardship and only known this increasing prosperity, they were left asking themselves: what was it all for?
[00:05:39] All the adverts on TV for new toothpaste or razor blades or tupperwares or deodorants…life seemed aimed at getting people to buy more and more material goods. Was this really what life was all about?
[00:05:54] And in fact, was it really so peaceful and prosperous?
[00:05:59] The Korean War, which started in 1950, had been a disaster. The Cold War was starting to rev up. Sputnik was launched into space in 1957, the Cuban Revolution came a couple of years later.
[00:06:14] American families might be able to have a house in the suburbs and afford a TV, but the world was undergoing rapid and confusing change.
[00:06:26] And starting even in the late 1940s, writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg had rejected the traditional American path, the get an office job, a car and a house in the suburbs route.
[00:06:40] Novels like On The Road and Howl talked about spiritual quests and about a rejection of conformity, and this kickstarted a literary movement that would come to be called The Beat Generation.
[00:06:55] The Beat Generation was all about rejecting the standard path, instead embracing things like swearing, drug use and more liberal views towards sexuality.
[00:07:09] This was a precursor to the movement we’re talking about today; it laid the groundwork for the countercultural “hippy” movement that would really come into full bloom a decade or so later.
[00:07:22] Now, the transition from the Beat Generation to the hippie movement wasn't a sharp divide but more like a natural evolution.
[00:07:32] The Beats explored Eastern spirituality and got involved in civil rights activism, but they were more introspective and literary; the hippies were more communal and action-oriented.
[00:07:46] And as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the political and social landscape became more turbulent, fueled by events like the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
[00:07:59] A new generation of young people emerged. This generation was inspired by the anti-authoritarian ethos of the Beats but was driven by their own unique set of socio-political circumstances, by what was going on in their world.
[00:08:16] And they began to come together to form communities that promoted peace, love, and an alternative lifestyle. In other words, to pursue their own interpretation of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
[00:08:32] In practical terms, young people flocked to areas where other young people were congregating, which tended to be in cities: New York, Oregon, and most famously, San Francisco.
[00:08:45] They lived communally, grew their hair long, wore loose fitting clothes, lived frugally and didn’t buy the latest consumer goods that were being advertised on billboards or on TV.
[00:08:59] Not only did most of these young people show absolutely no interest in getting a job and following a conventional path, they spent their days engaging in behaviour that was deeply disapproved of by much of the older generation, their parents and grandparents.
[00:09:17] Specifically, two fundamental behaviours of the hippy movement were free love and a change of consciousness.
[00:09:25] Or to translate this into language that their parents might have used, having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs.
[00:09:33] Now, I’m sure you knew this already, but there are a couple of technological inventions that helped enable this behavioural shift.
[00:09:43] Firstly, on the free love question, the first female contraceptive pill was invented in 1960.
[00:09:52] For the first time in history, the pill gave women control, and allowed young women to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant.
[00:10:03] And on the “change of consciousness” question, the drug LSD had been invented in 1938 and its hallucinogenic properties were discovered in 1943 when its creator accidentally took some and had a surreal experience.
[00:10:21] It spread quickly in 1960s America, especially with hippies, who used the drug to ascend to a higher state of consciousness.
[00:10:31] Importantly, LSD wasn’t made illegal until 1966, so people could take it without fear of criminal prosecution.
[00:10:42] Now, we’ll come back to touch on sex and drugs later, as they are clearly an important part of being a hippy, but first let’s talk about the kinds of people who were drawn to this hippy movement.
[00:10:56] It was primarily young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 or so, and people who came from middle class, so-called “good”, mainstream, families.
[00:11:09] These were young people who would otherwise have slotted right into the American system, but instead decided to reject it all.
[00:11:19] In fact, one of the criticisms of the hippy movement was because of how unrepresentative it was of young Americans.
[00:11:26] It was a predominantly white, middle class movement.
[00:11:30] Young people from poorer backgrounds firstly had never tasted the prosperity that the hippies were rejecting, and secondly they didn’t have the kind of economic safety net to fall back on if it was required.
[00:11:45] Middle class kids did.
[00:11:47] They might have some money to get them started in San Francisco, or their parents might send them some money every month to tide them over, so not having any kind of paid employment wasn’t an issue; the bank of mum and dad would sort it out.
[00:12:03] For people from a poorer background, they didn’t have this luxury, therefore they were less likely to become a hippy in the first place.
[00:12:12] So, moving on, what did these people believe?
[00:12:16] What were the fundamental tenets of being a hippy? What was the ideology behind the movement?
[00:12:24] Although there was a wide variety of beliefs, the overarching ideology was about peace, love, and freedom.
[00:12:34] Peace was about peace on a domestic and international level. It meant anti-war activism, especially towards the Vietnam War.
[00:12:44] Importantly, it meant non-violent resistance, a kind of resistance heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Hinduism.
[00:12:56] Love meant universal and unconditional love, that humans should love other humans regardless of who they were, where they came from, what they believed or what colour their skin was. This was manifested through communal living and shared experiences, and of course sexual activity that their parents might have considered immoral.
[00:13:21] And finally came Freedom. This freedom was ultimately about having the freedom to choose how you lived your life: what clothes you wore, what music you listened to, who you shared your bed with, what drugs you took, and ultimately, the freedom to live your life in whatever manner you so chose.
[00:13:42] Peace, love, and freedom - it’s not hard, if you ask me, to understand the attraction of these principles, and as more and more people heard about the hippy movement, more and more people gravitated towards the cities and towns where hippies congregated.
[00:14:01] On top of this, there were several large events that served as important catalysts, reasons for people to travel to a city like San Francisco, to taste communal living. And many never left, or at least didn’t leave for several years.
[00:14:19] The first official large gathering came in January of 1967. It was something called the "Human Be-In" which attracted somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand people to San Francisco
[00:14:34] Later on that year, the summer of 1967 would come to be known as The Summer of Love, and involved an estimated 100,000 people descending on the city of San Francisco.
[00:14:48] And a couple of years later, in 1969, there was the legendary Woodstock Festival, which was attended by 400,000 people, who were entertained by some of the most famous musicians of the era: Jimmy Hendrix, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Grateful Dead.
[00:15:08] By this time, hippie culture was, debatably, not quite so counterculture as it had once been.
[00:15:16] If literally hundreds of thousands of people were in the same place, behaving in the same way, wearing the same clothes, and all professing to be different, critics took the opportunity to point out that it wasn’t so alternative after all.
[00:15:35] And not so long after Woodstock Festival, the so-called “pinnacle” of the hippy movement, the hippie lifestyle was starting to become somewhat less viable.
[00:15:47] In the 1970s the US economy started to experience high inflation and high unemployment, meaning that the bohemian lifestyle that hippies had enjoyed during the boom years became somewhat harder.
[00:16:02] Everyday goods became more expensive, property prices and rents increased, and there was a decreasing tolerance from the general public towards people who were considered to be scroungers, people who were not contributing to mainstream society and were reliant on the generosity of others.
[00:16:22] When the going got tough, and the “alternative” to hippie society started to look more comfortable, many of these young people got jobs, settled down, and lived more conventional lives, slipping back into conventional American society just as they had slipped out several years before.
[00:16:43] But, and here’s another but, the counterpoint to those who suggest that the hippie movement fizzled out in the 1970s is just that it evolved and got stronger.
[00:16:56] The people who really bought into the hippie lifestyle were not the sort of people to be put off by a little hardship or to be attracted by the prospect of a 9-5 job and a house in the suburbs.
[00:17:09] There were new forms of communal living, new alternative communities and co-operatives that sprung up.
[00:17:15] The “fair weather” hippies, the hippies that were hippies when the times were good, were gone, and only the most dedicated, “true”, hippies remained.
[00:17:26] So, what was the hippy movement for, then, if it seemed to fizzle out?
[00:17:32] Was it a complete failure, did it really leave any lasting change?
[00:17:37] Ultimately, “mainstream” society today is not so radically different to how it was in the 1960s.
[00:17:44] I mean, Americans still tend to live in houses with their families and children, people go to work, they have jobs, they cut their hair, they don’t take drugs every day.
[00:17:55] Sure, on one level the hippy movement did not turn the entire country into hippies, it did not successfully end wars, it did not popularise communal living or free love or succeed in the legalisation of all drugs.
[00:18:10] But, there are plenty of important legacies that can be linked back to this period in time, legacies that can trace their roots back, albeit indirectly, to the hippy movement.
[00:18:22] There is, of course, the musical impact, but there’s also the anti-war activism, the environmentalism and veganism, and there’s the anti-consumerism.
[00:18:33] There’s also an increasingly liberal attitude towards recreational drugs, although of course you might disagree over whether this is a positive or a negative legacy of the hippy movement.
[00:18:45] So, to wrap things up, was the hippie movement just about sex, drugs, flowers, beards, long skirts and tie-dye t-shirts?
[00:18:56] To its critics, yes, it was an opportunity for spoiled middle class children to drop out of society and have some fun for a few years, only to come running back to the mainstream when the going got tough.
[00:19:10] But, to others, arguably, it laid the foundations for many important changes in society that we are still benefiting from today, developments that might not have happened had it not been for the trailblazing nature of the hippies of the 1960s.
[00:19:28] So, to quote a recent article from GQ Magazine, maybe The Hippies Were Right After All.
[00:19:37] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of hippies and hippy culture.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] Were you a hippy? Were your parents hippies? How was hippy culture different and unique in your country? And what legacy do you think hippy culture left on the modern world?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:05] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about hippies and the hippy movement.
[00:00:27] It was one of the defining countercultural movements in the post-war period, with hundreds of thousands of young people rejecting mainstream society and opting for something different.
[00:00:39] And in today’s episode we are going to explore it in detail.
[00:00:44] We’ll look at some of the factors that led to the hippy movement, how it developed and then largely disappeared, and ask ourselves what lasting impact it left.
[00:00:54] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:00] The American Dream is a powerful force. It's something that has attracted hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions, pulled them into the United States.
[00:01:13] For people outside the US, it held the promise of a new start in the land of opportunity.
[00:01:21] And even for those in the US, the proposal of the American Dream was and still is an alluring one: work hard, do the right thing, and you’ll be able to live a good life.
[00:01:35] But starting in the 1960s, there was a growing section of American youth that rejected it, or at least rejected the traditional, mainstream, vision of the American dream.
[00:01:50] To these young people, the conventional view of the American Dream, a stable 9-5 job, a house in the suburbs, a car, a trip to the movies on a Saturday night, this did not represent their vision of “a life well lived”.
[00:02:07] Instead of houses in the suburbs, they lived in shared accommodation in cities or travelled around the country in buses.
[00:02:17] Instead of disposable razors and cheap deodorant, they grew their hair long and said no to the Old Spice.
[00:02:26] Instead of Sunday church, they practised Eastern spirituality.
[00:02:30] Instead of wearing tailored suits, they wore tie-dye t-shirts and bell-bottomed trousers.
[00:02:38] Instead of coffee on the commute to work, they took LSD and congregated in parks.
[00:02:45] These young people were, of course, what would come to be called hippies, and would form part of a movement that would define a generation and leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.
[00:02:59] Now, as to the question of where the hippy movement came from, the prevailing opinion is that it is exclusively American, but there is an alternative view that its roots can actually be traced back to something called Wandervogel, which was a German movement that started in the 1890s.
[00:03:21] Wandervogel translates as “wandering bird”, and this movement was all about rebelling against industrialization and instead going and immersing yourself in nature.
[00:03:35] The movement was outlawed in 1933 by the Nazis, but by this time it had been going for almost 40 years.
[00:03:46] Plenty of Germans who had participated in this movement had emigrated to the United States, settling there, making a life for themselves across the Atlantic, and sowing the seeds for the American countercultural movement that would emerge several decades later.
[00:04:04] Now, when trying to understand any countercultural movement, it’s important to start with a reminder of what mainstream culture was, to see what was being rejected.
[00:04:17] Post-war America, as you will know, was a time of great economic prosperity. TVs, dishwashers, fast food, disposable razors, cars, drive-in movie theatres, credit cards that would allow you to buy anything you wanted.
[00:04:35] All you needed to do was slot into the system, and your slice of the American dream was there for the taking.
[00:04:45] For men, there were jobs aplenty, and good paying jobs at that.
[00:04:51] For women, generally speaking, life meant staying at home, cooking, cleaning and raising your kids.
[00:04:59] Understandably, for a generation of people who had lived through the Second World War, and especially the slightly older generation who had lived through the Great Depression AND the Second World War, this must have sounded wonderful.
[00:05:14] Finally, a peaceful, “good” life, no war, no hunger, life seemed to be getting better with every year that passed.
[00:05:24] But for a certain segment of the younger generation, those who had never lived through this hardship and only known this increasing prosperity, they were left asking themselves: what was it all for?
[00:05:39] All the adverts on TV for new toothpaste or razor blades or tupperwares or deodorants…life seemed aimed at getting people to buy more and more material goods. Was this really what life was all about?
[00:05:54] And in fact, was it really so peaceful and prosperous?
[00:05:59] The Korean War, which started in 1950, had been a disaster. The Cold War was starting to rev up. Sputnik was launched into space in 1957, the Cuban Revolution came a couple of years later.
[00:06:14] American families might be able to have a house in the suburbs and afford a TV, but the world was undergoing rapid and confusing change.
[00:06:26] And starting even in the late 1940s, writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg had rejected the traditional American path, the get an office job, a car and a house in the suburbs route.
[00:06:40] Novels like On The Road and Howl talked about spiritual quests and about a rejection of conformity, and this kickstarted a literary movement that would come to be called The Beat Generation.
[00:06:55] The Beat Generation was all about rejecting the standard path, instead embracing things like swearing, drug use and more liberal views towards sexuality.
[00:07:09] This was a precursor to the movement we’re talking about today; it laid the groundwork for the countercultural “hippy” movement that would really come into full bloom a decade or so later.
[00:07:22] Now, the transition from the Beat Generation to the hippie movement wasn't a sharp divide but more like a natural evolution.
[00:07:32] The Beats explored Eastern spirituality and got involved in civil rights activism, but they were more introspective and literary; the hippies were more communal and action-oriented.
[00:07:46] And as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the political and social landscape became more turbulent, fueled by events like the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
[00:07:59] A new generation of young people emerged. This generation was inspired by the anti-authoritarian ethos of the Beats but was driven by their own unique set of socio-political circumstances, by what was going on in their world.
[00:08:16] And they began to come together to form communities that promoted peace, love, and an alternative lifestyle. In other words, to pursue their own interpretation of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
[00:08:32] In practical terms, young people flocked to areas where other young people were congregating, which tended to be in cities: New York, Oregon, and most famously, San Francisco.
[00:08:45] They lived communally, grew their hair long, wore loose fitting clothes, lived frugally and didn’t buy the latest consumer goods that were being advertised on billboards or on TV.
[00:08:59] Not only did most of these young people show absolutely no interest in getting a job and following a conventional path, they spent their days engaging in behaviour that was deeply disapproved of by much of the older generation, their parents and grandparents.
[00:09:17] Specifically, two fundamental behaviours of the hippy movement were free love and a change of consciousness.
[00:09:25] Or to translate this into language that their parents might have used, having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs.
[00:09:33] Now, I’m sure you knew this already, but there are a couple of technological inventions that helped enable this behavioural shift.
[00:09:43] Firstly, on the free love question, the first female contraceptive pill was invented in 1960.
[00:09:52] For the first time in history, the pill gave women control, and allowed young women to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant.
[00:10:03] And on the “change of consciousness” question, the drug LSD had been invented in 1938 and its hallucinogenic properties were discovered in 1943 when its creator accidentally took some and had a surreal experience.
[00:10:21] It spread quickly in 1960s America, especially with hippies, who used the drug to ascend to a higher state of consciousness.
[00:10:31] Importantly, LSD wasn’t made illegal until 1966, so people could take it without fear of criminal prosecution.
[00:10:42] Now, we’ll come back to touch on sex and drugs later, as they are clearly an important part of being a hippy, but first let’s talk about the kinds of people who were drawn to this hippy movement.
[00:10:56] It was primarily young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 or so, and people who came from middle class, so-called “good”, mainstream, families.
[00:11:09] These were young people who would otherwise have slotted right into the American system, but instead decided to reject it all.
[00:11:19] In fact, one of the criticisms of the hippy movement was because of how unrepresentative it was of young Americans.
[00:11:26] It was a predominantly white, middle class movement.
[00:11:30] Young people from poorer backgrounds firstly had never tasted the prosperity that the hippies were rejecting, and secondly they didn’t have the kind of economic safety net to fall back on if it was required.
[00:11:45] Middle class kids did.
[00:11:47] They might have some money to get them started in San Francisco, or their parents might send them some money every month to tide them over, so not having any kind of paid employment wasn’t an issue; the bank of mum and dad would sort it out.
[00:12:03] For people from a poorer background, they didn’t have this luxury, therefore they were less likely to become a hippy in the first place.
[00:12:12] So, moving on, what did these people believe?
[00:12:16] What were the fundamental tenets of being a hippy? What was the ideology behind the movement?
[00:12:24] Although there was a wide variety of beliefs, the overarching ideology was about peace, love, and freedom.
[00:12:34] Peace was about peace on a domestic and international level. It meant anti-war activism, especially towards the Vietnam War.
[00:12:44] Importantly, it meant non-violent resistance, a kind of resistance heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Hinduism.
[00:12:56] Love meant universal and unconditional love, that humans should love other humans regardless of who they were, where they came from, what they believed or what colour their skin was. This was manifested through communal living and shared experiences, and of course sexual activity that their parents might have considered immoral.
[00:13:21] And finally came Freedom. This freedom was ultimately about having the freedom to choose how you lived your life: what clothes you wore, what music you listened to, who you shared your bed with, what drugs you took, and ultimately, the freedom to live your life in whatever manner you so chose.
[00:13:42] Peace, love, and freedom - it’s not hard, if you ask me, to understand the attraction of these principles, and as more and more people heard about the hippy movement, more and more people gravitated towards the cities and towns where hippies congregated.
[00:14:01] On top of this, there were several large events that served as important catalysts, reasons for people to travel to a city like San Francisco, to taste communal living. And many never left, or at least didn’t leave for several years.
[00:14:19] The first official large gathering came in January of 1967. It was something called the "Human Be-In" which attracted somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand people to San Francisco
[00:14:34] Later on that year, the summer of 1967 would come to be known as The Summer of Love, and involved an estimated 100,000 people descending on the city of San Francisco.
[00:14:48] And a couple of years later, in 1969, there was the legendary Woodstock Festival, which was attended by 400,000 people, who were entertained by some of the most famous musicians of the era: Jimmy Hendrix, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Grateful Dead.
[00:15:08] By this time, hippie culture was, debatably, not quite so counterculture as it had once been.
[00:15:16] If literally hundreds of thousands of people were in the same place, behaving in the same way, wearing the same clothes, and all professing to be different, critics took the opportunity to point out that it wasn’t so alternative after all.
[00:15:35] And not so long after Woodstock Festival, the so-called “pinnacle” of the hippy movement, the hippie lifestyle was starting to become somewhat less viable.
[00:15:47] In the 1970s the US economy started to experience high inflation and high unemployment, meaning that the bohemian lifestyle that hippies had enjoyed during the boom years became somewhat harder.
[00:16:02] Everyday goods became more expensive, property prices and rents increased, and there was a decreasing tolerance from the general public towards people who were considered to be scroungers, people who were not contributing to mainstream society and were reliant on the generosity of others.
[00:16:22] When the going got tough, and the “alternative” to hippie society started to look more comfortable, many of these young people got jobs, settled down, and lived more conventional lives, slipping back into conventional American society just as they had slipped out several years before.
[00:16:43] But, and here’s another but, the counterpoint to those who suggest that the hippie movement fizzled out in the 1970s is just that it evolved and got stronger.
[00:16:56] The people who really bought into the hippie lifestyle were not the sort of people to be put off by a little hardship or to be attracted by the prospect of a 9-5 job and a house in the suburbs.
[00:17:09] There were new forms of communal living, new alternative communities and co-operatives that sprung up.
[00:17:15] The “fair weather” hippies, the hippies that were hippies when the times were good, were gone, and only the most dedicated, “true”, hippies remained.
[00:17:26] So, what was the hippy movement for, then, if it seemed to fizzle out?
[00:17:32] Was it a complete failure, did it really leave any lasting change?
[00:17:37] Ultimately, “mainstream” society today is not so radically different to how it was in the 1960s.
[00:17:44] I mean, Americans still tend to live in houses with their families and children, people go to work, they have jobs, they cut their hair, they don’t take drugs every day.
[00:17:55] Sure, on one level the hippy movement did not turn the entire country into hippies, it did not successfully end wars, it did not popularise communal living or free love or succeed in the legalisation of all drugs.
[00:18:10] But, there are plenty of important legacies that can be linked back to this period in time, legacies that can trace their roots back, albeit indirectly, to the hippy movement.
[00:18:22] There is, of course, the musical impact, but there’s also the anti-war activism, the environmentalism and veganism, and there’s the anti-consumerism.
[00:18:33] There’s also an increasingly liberal attitude towards recreational drugs, although of course you might disagree over whether this is a positive or a negative legacy of the hippy movement.
[00:18:45] So, to wrap things up, was the hippie movement just about sex, drugs, flowers, beards, long skirts and tie-dye t-shirts?
[00:18:56] To its critics, yes, it was an opportunity for spoiled middle class children to drop out of society and have some fun for a few years, only to come running back to the mainstream when the going got tough.
[00:19:10] But, to others, arguably, it laid the foundations for many important changes in society that we are still benefiting from today, developments that might not have happened had it not been for the trailblazing nature of the hippies of the 1960s.
[00:19:28] So, to quote a recent article from GQ Magazine, maybe The Hippies Were Right After All.
[00:19:37] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of hippies and hippy culture.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] Were you a hippy? Were your parents hippies? How was hippy culture different and unique in your country? And what legacy do you think hippy culture left on the modern world?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:05] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about hippies and the hippy movement.
[00:00:27] It was one of the defining countercultural movements in the post-war period, with hundreds of thousands of young people rejecting mainstream society and opting for something different.
[00:00:39] And in today’s episode we are going to explore it in detail.
[00:00:44] We’ll look at some of the factors that led to the hippy movement, how it developed and then largely disappeared, and ask ourselves what lasting impact it left.
[00:00:54] So, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:00] The American Dream is a powerful force. It's something that has attracted hundreds of millions of people, perhaps even billions, pulled them into the United States.
[00:01:13] For people outside the US, it held the promise of a new start in the land of opportunity.
[00:01:21] And even for those in the US, the proposal of the American Dream was and still is an alluring one: work hard, do the right thing, and you’ll be able to live a good life.
[00:01:35] But starting in the 1960s, there was a growing section of American youth that rejected it, or at least rejected the traditional, mainstream, vision of the American dream.
[00:01:50] To these young people, the conventional view of the American Dream, a stable 9-5 job, a house in the suburbs, a car, a trip to the movies on a Saturday night, this did not represent their vision of “a life well lived”.
[00:02:07] Instead of houses in the suburbs, they lived in shared accommodation in cities or travelled around the country in buses.
[00:02:17] Instead of disposable razors and cheap deodorant, they grew their hair long and said no to the Old Spice.
[00:02:26] Instead of Sunday church, they practised Eastern spirituality.
[00:02:30] Instead of wearing tailored suits, they wore tie-dye t-shirts and bell-bottomed trousers.
[00:02:38] Instead of coffee on the commute to work, they took LSD and congregated in parks.
[00:02:45] These young people were, of course, what would come to be called hippies, and would form part of a movement that would define a generation and leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.
[00:02:59] Now, as to the question of where the hippy movement came from, the prevailing opinion is that it is exclusively American, but there is an alternative view that its roots can actually be traced back to something called Wandervogel, which was a German movement that started in the 1890s.
[00:03:21] Wandervogel translates as “wandering bird”, and this movement was all about rebelling against industrialization and instead going and immersing yourself in nature.
[00:03:35] The movement was outlawed in 1933 by the Nazis, but by this time it had been going for almost 40 years.
[00:03:46] Plenty of Germans who had participated in this movement had emigrated to the United States, settling there, making a life for themselves across the Atlantic, and sowing the seeds for the American countercultural movement that would emerge several decades later.
[00:04:04] Now, when trying to understand any countercultural movement, it’s important to start with a reminder of what mainstream culture was, to see what was being rejected.
[00:04:17] Post-war America, as you will know, was a time of great economic prosperity. TVs, dishwashers, fast food, disposable razors, cars, drive-in movie theatres, credit cards that would allow you to buy anything you wanted.
[00:04:35] All you needed to do was slot into the system, and your slice of the American dream was there for the taking.
[00:04:45] For men, there were jobs aplenty, and good paying jobs at that.
[00:04:51] For women, generally speaking, life meant staying at home, cooking, cleaning and raising your kids.
[00:04:59] Understandably, for a generation of people who had lived through the Second World War, and especially the slightly older generation who had lived through the Great Depression AND the Second World War, this must have sounded wonderful.
[00:05:14] Finally, a peaceful, “good” life, no war, no hunger, life seemed to be getting better with every year that passed.
[00:05:24] But for a certain segment of the younger generation, those who had never lived through this hardship and only known this increasing prosperity, they were left asking themselves: what was it all for?
[00:05:39] All the adverts on TV for new toothpaste or razor blades or tupperwares or deodorants…life seemed aimed at getting people to buy more and more material goods. Was this really what life was all about?
[00:05:54] And in fact, was it really so peaceful and prosperous?
[00:05:59] The Korean War, which started in 1950, had been a disaster. The Cold War was starting to rev up. Sputnik was launched into space in 1957, the Cuban Revolution came a couple of years later.
[00:06:14] American families might be able to have a house in the suburbs and afford a TV, but the world was undergoing rapid and confusing change.
[00:06:26] And starting even in the late 1940s, writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg had rejected the traditional American path, the get an office job, a car and a house in the suburbs route.
[00:06:40] Novels like On The Road and Howl talked about spiritual quests and about a rejection of conformity, and this kickstarted a literary movement that would come to be called The Beat Generation.
[00:06:55] The Beat Generation was all about rejecting the standard path, instead embracing things like swearing, drug use and more liberal views towards sexuality.
[00:07:09] This was a precursor to the movement we’re talking about today; it laid the groundwork for the countercultural “hippy” movement that would really come into full bloom a decade or so later.
[00:07:22] Now, the transition from the Beat Generation to the hippie movement wasn't a sharp divide but more like a natural evolution.
[00:07:32] The Beats explored Eastern spirituality and got involved in civil rights activism, but they were more introspective and literary; the hippies were more communal and action-oriented.
[00:07:46] And as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the political and social landscape became more turbulent, fueled by events like the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
[00:07:59] A new generation of young people emerged. This generation was inspired by the anti-authoritarian ethos of the Beats but was driven by their own unique set of socio-political circumstances, by what was going on in their world.
[00:08:16] And they began to come together to form communities that promoted peace, love, and an alternative lifestyle. In other words, to pursue their own interpretation of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
[00:08:32] In practical terms, young people flocked to areas where other young people were congregating, which tended to be in cities: New York, Oregon, and most famously, San Francisco.
[00:08:45] They lived communally, grew their hair long, wore loose fitting clothes, lived frugally and didn’t buy the latest consumer goods that were being advertised on billboards or on TV.
[00:08:59] Not only did most of these young people show absolutely no interest in getting a job and following a conventional path, they spent their days engaging in behaviour that was deeply disapproved of by much of the older generation, their parents and grandparents.
[00:09:17] Specifically, two fundamental behaviours of the hippy movement were free love and a change of consciousness.
[00:09:25] Or to translate this into language that their parents might have used, having lots of sex and taking lots of drugs.
[00:09:33] Now, I’m sure you knew this already, but there are a couple of technological inventions that helped enable this behavioural shift.
[00:09:43] Firstly, on the free love question, the first female contraceptive pill was invented in 1960.
[00:09:52] For the first time in history, the pill gave women control, and allowed young women to have sex without the fear of getting pregnant.
[00:10:03] And on the “change of consciousness” question, the drug LSD had been invented in 1938 and its hallucinogenic properties were discovered in 1943 when its creator accidentally took some and had a surreal experience.
[00:10:21] It spread quickly in 1960s America, especially with hippies, who used the drug to ascend to a higher state of consciousness.
[00:10:31] Importantly, LSD wasn’t made illegal until 1966, so people could take it without fear of criminal prosecution.
[00:10:42] Now, we’ll come back to touch on sex and drugs later, as they are clearly an important part of being a hippy, but first let’s talk about the kinds of people who were drawn to this hippy movement.
[00:10:56] It was primarily young Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 or so, and people who came from middle class, so-called “good”, mainstream, families.
[00:11:09] These were young people who would otherwise have slotted right into the American system, but instead decided to reject it all.
[00:11:19] In fact, one of the criticisms of the hippy movement was because of how unrepresentative it was of young Americans.
[00:11:26] It was a predominantly white, middle class movement.
[00:11:30] Young people from poorer backgrounds firstly had never tasted the prosperity that the hippies were rejecting, and secondly they didn’t have the kind of economic safety net to fall back on if it was required.
[00:11:45] Middle class kids did.
[00:11:47] They might have some money to get them started in San Francisco, or their parents might send them some money every month to tide them over, so not having any kind of paid employment wasn’t an issue; the bank of mum and dad would sort it out.
[00:12:03] For people from a poorer background, they didn’t have this luxury, therefore they were less likely to become a hippy in the first place.
[00:12:12] So, moving on, what did these people believe?
[00:12:16] What were the fundamental tenets of being a hippy? What was the ideology behind the movement?
[00:12:24] Although there was a wide variety of beliefs, the overarching ideology was about peace, love, and freedom.
[00:12:34] Peace was about peace on a domestic and international level. It meant anti-war activism, especially towards the Vietnam War.
[00:12:44] Importantly, it meant non-violent resistance, a kind of resistance heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Hinduism.
[00:12:56] Love meant universal and unconditional love, that humans should love other humans regardless of who they were, where they came from, what they believed or what colour their skin was. This was manifested through communal living and shared experiences, and of course sexual activity that their parents might have considered immoral.
[00:13:21] And finally came Freedom. This freedom was ultimately about having the freedom to choose how you lived your life: what clothes you wore, what music you listened to, who you shared your bed with, what drugs you took, and ultimately, the freedom to live your life in whatever manner you so chose.
[00:13:42] Peace, love, and freedom - it’s not hard, if you ask me, to understand the attraction of these principles, and as more and more people heard about the hippy movement, more and more people gravitated towards the cities and towns where hippies congregated.
[00:14:01] On top of this, there were several large events that served as important catalysts, reasons for people to travel to a city like San Francisco, to taste communal living. And many never left, or at least didn’t leave for several years.
[00:14:19] The first official large gathering came in January of 1967. It was something called the "Human Be-In" which attracted somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand people to San Francisco
[00:14:34] Later on that year, the summer of 1967 would come to be known as The Summer of Love, and involved an estimated 100,000 people descending on the city of San Francisco.
[00:14:48] And a couple of years later, in 1969, there was the legendary Woodstock Festival, which was attended by 400,000 people, who were entertained by some of the most famous musicians of the era: Jimmy Hendrix, Santana, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Grateful Dead.
[00:15:08] By this time, hippie culture was, debatably, not quite so counterculture as it had once been.
[00:15:16] If literally hundreds of thousands of people were in the same place, behaving in the same way, wearing the same clothes, and all professing to be different, critics took the opportunity to point out that it wasn’t so alternative after all.
[00:15:35] And not so long after Woodstock Festival, the so-called “pinnacle” of the hippy movement, the hippie lifestyle was starting to become somewhat less viable.
[00:15:47] In the 1970s the US economy started to experience high inflation and high unemployment, meaning that the bohemian lifestyle that hippies had enjoyed during the boom years became somewhat harder.
[00:16:02] Everyday goods became more expensive, property prices and rents increased, and there was a decreasing tolerance from the general public towards people who were considered to be scroungers, people who were not contributing to mainstream society and were reliant on the generosity of others.
[00:16:22] When the going got tough, and the “alternative” to hippie society started to look more comfortable, many of these young people got jobs, settled down, and lived more conventional lives, slipping back into conventional American society just as they had slipped out several years before.
[00:16:43] But, and here’s another but, the counterpoint to those who suggest that the hippie movement fizzled out in the 1970s is just that it evolved and got stronger.
[00:16:56] The people who really bought into the hippie lifestyle were not the sort of people to be put off by a little hardship or to be attracted by the prospect of a 9-5 job and a house in the suburbs.
[00:17:09] There were new forms of communal living, new alternative communities and co-operatives that sprung up.
[00:17:15] The “fair weather” hippies, the hippies that were hippies when the times were good, were gone, and only the most dedicated, “true”, hippies remained.
[00:17:26] So, what was the hippy movement for, then, if it seemed to fizzle out?
[00:17:32] Was it a complete failure, did it really leave any lasting change?
[00:17:37] Ultimately, “mainstream” society today is not so radically different to how it was in the 1960s.
[00:17:44] I mean, Americans still tend to live in houses with their families and children, people go to work, they have jobs, they cut their hair, they don’t take drugs every day.
[00:17:55] Sure, on one level the hippy movement did not turn the entire country into hippies, it did not successfully end wars, it did not popularise communal living or free love or succeed in the legalisation of all drugs.
[00:18:10] But, there are plenty of important legacies that can be linked back to this period in time, legacies that can trace their roots back, albeit indirectly, to the hippy movement.
[00:18:22] There is, of course, the musical impact, but there’s also the anti-war activism, the environmentalism and veganism, and there’s the anti-consumerism.
[00:18:33] There’s also an increasingly liberal attitude towards recreational drugs, although of course you might disagree over whether this is a positive or a negative legacy of the hippy movement.
[00:18:45] So, to wrap things up, was the hippie movement just about sex, drugs, flowers, beards, long skirts and tie-dye t-shirts?
[00:18:56] To its critics, yes, it was an opportunity for spoiled middle class children to drop out of society and have some fun for a few years, only to come running back to the mainstream when the going got tough.
[00:19:10] But, to others, arguably, it laid the foundations for many important changes in society that we are still benefiting from today, developments that might not have happened had it not been for the trailblazing nature of the hippies of the 1960s.
[00:19:28] So, to quote a recent article from GQ Magazine, maybe The Hippies Were Right After All.
[00:19:37] OK then, that is it for today's little exploration of hippies and hippy culture.
[00:19:43] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:47] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:50] Were you a hippy? Were your parents hippies? How was hippy culture different and unique in your country? And what legacy do you think hippy culture left on the modern world?
[00:20:01] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:05] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:14] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:19] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
