San Francisco’s Summer of Love: Marking the Demise of the Hippie Movement

Introduction

The “Summer of Love” was a massive gathering of hippies in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. Inspired by the success of the Human Be-In in January of 1967 and intended to be a prolonged gathering of hippies from around the country, the Summer of Love is often pointed to as the mark of the end of the hippie movement. The hippie movement wasn't quite new but had gained nationwide traction in the late sixties due to large public events, especially in San Francisco, that reflected their core values: peace, love, drugs, and community, which the people of America so desperately wanted. The more the movement gained traction, the more people, especially college students and young adults, fled to San Francisco to experience and indulge in the hippie lifestyle of communal living, LSD, parties, and peace. Haight Ashbury was home to most of the hippie culture of the time, and by the time the Summer of Love came to be, over 100,000 people were planning to come and celebrate.

San Francisco as a “Hippie Haven”

San Francisco emerged in the mid-1960s as a haven for hippie culture, and “fueled by drugs and electric music, the Haight-Ashbury district turned into a street carnival, teeming with young rebels and poets, flower children, and free spirits.”1 San Francisco, with its long history of liberal acceptance towards marginalized groups including immigrants, African Americans, and Beat generation members proved to be a welcoming place for the hippies to settle. In addition, the lower rent prices, availability, and good weather lured many hippies to move to the Haight Ashbury, where they could be assured that they would be welcomed by the people already living there. The Haight’s declining status as a middle-class district made it an ideal nurturing ground for a bohemian subculture. Prior to the 1960s, the Haight was a solid working or middle-class district with a progressive, liberal reputation as many residents were associated with the labor movement. The flight to the suburbs after WWII and subsequent plans for commercial rezoning of large residential areas and for the construction of a nearby highway contributed to a middle-class flight from the district. Consequently, housing values declined and the rents were lowered. At the same time, in 1962 and 1963, rents in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco were steadily rising, threatening the beatniks and other counterculture members who were residents. 

San Francisco Beatniks 

The Beat Generation (or “beatniks,” a name coined by Herb Caen in the S.F. Examiner as a parody of Sputnik) was one of America’s first counterculture movements. The beatniks were primarily poets and writers who embraced drug use, liberal sexuality, and rejection of traditional values in their writings and works. Authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs were some of the most famous Beat writers of the time, and they often found themselves at the center of American controversy over literary censorship and obscenity. Many writers from the Beat Generation originally met at Columbia University in New York City but ended up resettling in the West Coast in places like the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Although the Beat Generation was primarily a literary movement, it has been long studied as a movement that heavily influenced the musically charged hippie movement.2 Like the hippies who followed them, the beatniks rejected traditional societal norms like materialism, consumerism, and capitalism. The Beat movement’s influence extended beyond literature and manifested in alternative living as well with coffeehouses and bookstores emerging as intellectual havens for debates and conversation. 

While their ideologies were closely aligned, there were clear stylistic differences between the beatniks and the hippies. The beatniks wore dark colors and black sunglasses while the hippies wore colorful psychedelic clothes and had long hair. Yet what both groups yearned for went deeper than surface-level fashion choices; the beatniks and the hippies craved a sense of fulfillment that could not be gained through materialism, but rather, through experiences. During the 1960s, aspects of the beat subculture began to meld with the growing hippie movement. In fact, despite the hype surrounding the youth rebellion, the leading figures in the Haight Ashbury hippie scene in the early days were not young. As one hippie put it, “the people who have been big forces in this movement are people who have been around, who are older”.3 One of these people was the playwright and founding member of the Diggers, Peter Berg, who once remarked upon the hippie lineage: “I don’t think it happened in ’65...When I read “Howl,” I knew I didn’t have anything to lose. That’s what did it. That’s what sent people out in search of experience.”4

As rent increased in North Beach and other popular living destinations in San Francisco in the early 1960s, beatniks were pushed out and flocked to the more affordable Haight Ashbury neighborhood, where the hippie movement was already growing. Many of those associated with the Beat movement subsequently joined the hippies. Ed Sanders observed the change immediately after the 1967 Human Be-In event: "And right after the Be-In all of a sudden you were no longer a beatnik, you were a hippie."5

Formation of Haight Ashbury Hippie Community

The opening of the Psychedelic Shop on January 3, 1966, was a momentous event in marking the formation of the Haight Ashbury hippie community. By June of 1966, over 15,000 hippies had moved to San Francisco, “hippies were a San Franciscan event. [...] Hundreds and then thousands of ‘flower children’ had flocked to San Francisco in search of love, peace, community, and self. They sought refuge from an American dream that was crumbling quickly in suburban wastelands and urban hothouses, as well as the jungles of Vietnam. The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was the focus.”6 The hippie community in San Francisco was founded on two main commodities: drugs (specifically, LSD) and music. Philosophies of love, peace, and community were rooted in drug experimentation and rock music. Taking LSD was seen as a way to break down the barriers and boundaries to deeper perception and enlightenment, while other counterculture movements including the Beats had used drugs like marijuana or peyote, the hippie movement was unique in the fact that it was the first counterculture movement to be defined by the fundamental symbol of the use of one specific drug, in this case, LSD. “The Haight-Ashbury represents a cultural renaissance and creative surge that is changing the bruted face of America. The booming neighborhood was only one active manifestation of a worldwide youth revolution that has been infused with a revelation of the spiritual unity of all men and women of all races here and everywhere on all planets in all solar systems of all galaxies in the universe.”7 While the Haight Ashbury neighborhood is often viewed as the epicenter of the hippie movement, in fact, hippies were growing in influence all around the nation as dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War and consumerism and suburban malaise grew. 

Many people began to flock to the Haight Ashbury, rejecting societal norms and expectations and searching for another alternative lifestyle. In 1966, the residents of the Haight Ashbury community summed up the vision they had for a new way of life in their A Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence, parodying the Founding Fathers’ words with their statement, “We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and expansion of consciousness . . . . To secure these rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion.”8

“The Diggers”

The hippie movement and Summer of Love in San Francisco were heavily influenced by a group named The Diggers, a name borrowed from a 17th-century British anarchist collective. The Diggers, a subculture to the hippies, were an “anarchic collective of street activists” who wanted “free—free of money, and of all the ways needing and getting money limit one’s personal mobility and spontaneity.” The Diggers envisioned a world in which the community would take care of one another, and they worked towards achieving this goal through numerous community outreach efforts including distributing hot meals in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The Diggers also established a “free store” and assisted newcomers with finding shelter and paying rent. By taking it upon themselves to feed people and provide for their health needs and safety, the Diggers believed that they were meeting a community need. However, some also believe that by providing these services, the Diggers “were also actively stoking the myth of San Francisco as an urban utopia into which one could arrive penniless and alone and be welcomed with food, shelter and love.”9 The Diggers were often indistinguishable from the Haight Ashbury hippies, and many of the Digger ideologies were later adopted by the hippie movement, such as the concept of free love, “We decided that since the media picked up on ‘love,’ we would just put ‘free’ in front of it. In fact, we put free in front of everything. You give me the noun, and we’d put free in front of it and see what happens. So: Free food.”10 Rather than indulge in LSD and marijuana, the Diggers tended to stray towards heroin and amphetamines.

And while the Diggers were one of the only groups of San Francisco residents that understood the seriousness of how many hippies were planning to travel to the city during the Summer of Love, even they began to fall apart. The Diggers officially had no leaders, and after months of dishing out free food, free housing, and free love, the Diggers were overwhelmed and exhausted. The Diggers envisioned a free world and a fantasy—a world of no fear and mobility. The Diggers yearned for a life of no work, all play, and communities that were somehow completely self-sustaining. The massive numbers of hippies who came to San Francisco during the Summer of Love can partly be traced to the Diggers, who helped cultivate an idealized image of life in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, and yet, were unable to maintain these ideals once the massive influx of people came to the Haight Ashbury. Soon the Diggers found the Haight Ashbury to be unlivable, and they reorganized themselves as a loosely affiliated group living in rural communes and caravans up and down the California coast. Towards the middle of the Summer of Love, the Diggers changed their name to the “Free City Collective” and soon disappeared from the Haight entirely.

Organizing the Summer of Love

The words “Summer of Love” had not been uttered until the “Council for the Summer of Love” put out a press release stating the plan to accommodate thousands of new visitors expected to arrive in San Francisco throughout the summer of 1967. This group of predominantly young individuals had met prior to the release of this article at a conference established to help plan the logistics surrounding the arrival of the hippies and capture the optimism and confident idealism that initially characterized the movement, “This summer, the youth of the world are making a Holy pilgrimage to our city, to affirm and celebrate a new spiritual dawn...This city is not a wasteland; our children will not discover drought and famine here. This city is alive, human and divine…”11 This council was led by different groups and companies including “The Family Dog”, a hippie commune and music promoter, The Straight Theatre, a staple of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, The San Francisco Oracle, a hometown newspaper and supporter of the hippie movement, and many of the people involved in the Diggers guerilla street theater group.12 The council took the jobs and work that the city could not provide for the community, creating shelters, distributing food, and providing health and safety to those who could not afford it, which was much of the community living in the Haight Ashbury at this time. It was also the responsibility of the council to put on events for the music and arts as well as coordinate with local churches and social groups to provide different types of social events throughout the Summer of love. 

Summer of Love: Newfound Media Scrutiny

The “Council for the Summer of Love” tried its best to express to the mass media that the hippie community was not what had been portrayed for so long, but a “new” hippie lifestyle that accepted all participants, yet the mass media of America did not agree. It was clear to those invested in the community that the hippie movement was defined by the light in which the mass media had placed them in, leading many to show disdain for and distrust what they considered to be media.13 Prior to the huge influx of people and popularity in San Francisco, the city had not been a popular tourist or vacation destination, but the quick growth in media coverage surrounding San Francisco and the hippie culture brought many new crowds to visit. While the majority of tourists were young individuals attempting to find peace and enlightenment through the growing hippie scene, the not so silent minority of visitors were those trying to catch a glimpse of what was really going on in the streets of San Francisco. The media, especially advertising, magazines, and music, also served to push the culture, lifestyle, and fashion across America, which was met with anger and resistance from true hippies who felt their culture being commercialized, “The marketing and “repackaging” of the festival experience brought an influx of “plastic hippies,” and the corporatization of the music destroyed another important aspect of the hippie culture.”14 While the mass media served to begin what we know as the Summer of Love, it also became the movement's biggest threat, and ultimately its downfall.

Sexual Freedom and Feminism

It may be said that the hippies freed American society from the prevailing old-fashioned sexual prejudices through the practice of free love and their rejection of exaggerated morality. The hippie movement is generally associated with the concept of free love and liberal sexual activity outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. While the concept of “free love” traces back to the 18th century, the hippie movement popularized it. The hippie movement gained more traction during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, in which traditional attitudes towards sex were being challenged and women were gaining more control over their bodies, with sex being viewed beyond just a means of reproduction within the confines of marriage. The development of free love was additionally perpetuated by the invention and newfound popularity of oral contraceptives commonly referred to as “the Pill.” On June 23, 1960, the FDA approved the sale of Enovid for use as an oral contraceptive.15 The pill was different from the more commonly used contraceptives like condoms since it was designed for use by women, thereby granting women more agency and control over their bodies and lives. The popularity of the pill exploded in the 1960s, “By 1965, one out of every four married women in America under 45 had used the pill. By 1967, nearly 13 million women in the world were using it. And by 1984 that number would reach 50–80 million.”16

The female hippies during the Summer of Love were emboldened by the new, permissive attitude towards sex and even public nudity. In 1965, members of the Haight Ashbury community created the Sexual Freedom League as a way “to confront traditional standards and repudiate and reject previous sexual taboos.”17 Initially, many young women at the time of the Summer of Love believed that embracing free love was a way to fire back at a world that continually insisted on consigning a second-class status to women. However, as time went on, women in the hippie movement began to recognize that the prevailing attitudes towards women, even within the hippie movement, had not changed all that much. In fact, the new liberal attitudes towards sex were often used as a way to exploit female hippies. “According to first-hand accounts from the period, women were often used as an inducement to get new male members into a commune or crash-pad.”18 And while sex emerged from the shadows and became more visible, it also “replaced currency in drug deals and other transactions.”19 In fact, many women in the Summer of Love realized that many men within the hippie movement interpreted “free love” to mean love without any responsibility whatsoever, with women still expected to take on all the traditional roles of cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. 

The Role of Music in the Hippie Movement

Acid Rock, or Psychedelic Rock, is a genre of music associated with the hippie movement. It is similar to other psychedelic music genres but has defining undertones of Blues, Folk, and Hard Rock. Many of the most famous Rock musicians to date apply to this category including Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. When the popularization of LSD took off in the mid ’60s, “...the blues ran up against psychedelics, [and] rock'n'roll really took off.”20 No longer were the melancholy Blues and Jazz suitable for the psychedelic trips and effects of LSD, but rather a genre directly inspired and influenced by the drug. Acid Rock gave LSD users a mirrored sound to their visual out of body experience, with lyrics reflecting these LSD trips:

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small

And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

“White Rabbit” Jefferson Airplane21

Acid Rock quickly became a staple of the hippie culture and a necessity if you had considered yourself a hippie. Many artists who created Acid Rock “jams” were inspired by the many themes and ideals hippies most relied on, besides the commonly referred to LSD and marijuana. As the genre became more widespread across the United States and the world, artists used the words in their songs to talk about the Vietnam war and anti-war protests, the civil rights movement, and sexual liberation. It was different from what the American citizens had been listening to in the 1940s and ’50s, it was a “pop song [that] could be both a means of social commentary (protest) and a form of self-expression (poetry).”22 This new wave of music led to a change in the music industry that continues to last today in which songs transcended self-expression and became a means of communicating political ideas and cultural issues.

“Acid Tests”

In 1964, Ken Kesey, a writer, and his friends, The Merry Pranksters, took it upon themselves to experiment with drugs and draw in crowds to their ranch in La Honda, Kesey ranch, and in order to gain recognition, they painted a school bus rainbow and drove it around the country to conduct what they called “acid tests”.23 Despite Kesey’s efforts to defy and subvert the expectations of America, it was San Francisco that received these ideas of peace and drugs most enthusiastically. “The city’s bohemian subculture of writers, poets, and theatre troupes and jazz, blues, folk, and country musicians was a perfect melting pot.”24 The so-called “acid test” music and drug festivals slowly became a staple of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was during one of the “acid tests” that infamous acid dealer Augustus Stanley gave The Grateful Dead instruments, who, after taking a “tab” of acid, used them to combine rock, folk, and jazz in long songs or “jams” and create what is now known as Acid Rock. The Grateful Dead quickly became a widely known group especially around San Francisco, becoming what was essentially the center of the San Francisco social and music scene. “What became known as ‘The San Francisco Sound’ was present at the birth of hippie style and the bands associated with that sound were acutely conscious of that historic role.”25 Many artists including the Grateful Dead wrote songs expressing the unique style and culture San Francisco had to offer. In May 1967, Scott MacKenzie released “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which came to be the unofficial anthem of the Summer of Love, with lyrics summarizing San Francisco’s central role in the hippie movement:

If you're going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

If you're going to San Francisco

You're gonna meet some gentle people there

For those who come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there26

As the San Francisco social and musical scenes continued to grow in popularity with residents and tourists alike, Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters were able to expand their audience and host the Trips Festival by January of 1966, which drew in many new crowds of youth and young adults to San Francisco to experience and revel in the growing hippie scene. The “wide-open three-day party” supplied acid and marijuana and most importantly music, securing over 20,000 visitors. Drug use was rampant and brought disparate groups together, “Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey had thrown aside the false candor of the ‘American Dream’ for the allure of LSD’s alternative universe; stoned prophets watching as their virgin test subjects reached a collective enlightenment all while swaying to the never-ending groove of the Grateful Dead. From beatniks to disgruntled teenagers to Hell’s Angels, acid provided an outlet for ambitious minds to collectively envision America’s future as a clean slate.”27

The Human Be-In

The Human Be-In (Gathering of Tribes) of 1967 brought together large and diverse groups in the Bay Area to celebrate and socialize with music and drugs, and it served as an inspiration for the later Summer of Love. This event came to define many aspects of the hippie culture including “communal living, ecological awareness, and psychological growth through the use of psychedelic drugs”.28 Psychologist Timothy Leary spoke the words “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” on stage at the festival, referring to the usage of drugs leading to a euphoric experience. The phrase itself holds significance in defining the goals of the hippie movement. The phrases “turn on and tune in” imply that there are different wavelengths of perception within society and that the trouble with mainstream society is that it is “tuned in” to the wrong channel. The second part of the slogan, “turn on” invites the hippies to open their minds and consciousness with the use of mind-bending psychedelic drugs like LSD. The final phrase “drop out” implies the hippies should reject the traditional structures of middle-class American life, which is viewed as a way of life in which consumption, status, power, conformity, and work are held up as primary values—values which are antithetical to the hippie counterculture movement. The Human Be-In brought even more new faces to San Francisco, just months before the start of the Summer of Love.

Community Tensions Rise

By the Summer of Love, the hippies’ relationship with their surrounding community in San Francisco had severely deteriorated. Angered by the hippies’ disrespect for keeping the streets clean, blatant drug use, aggressive panhandling, and harassment of locals, local San Franciscans began to turn on the hippie movement in Haight Ashbury. Many of the hippies who flocked to San Francisco in the Summer of Love were actually underage runaways, who were often vulnerable and exploited and faced dangers like rape, starvation, drug overdose, and illness while living on the streets of San Francisco. These runaways complicated the relationship between the hippies and the police, who were often forced to intervene and reunite these children with their parents, creating more tension between the hippies and law enforcement. Many began to view the hippie movement as supporting the corruption of youths, “Hippies behaved so much like visitors to the community that their neighbors, who intended to live in the district forever, questioned whether proclamations of community did not require acts of community. Hippies had theories of love, which might have meant, at the simplest level, muting music for the benefit of neighbors who must rise in the morning for work.”29

The Hippie Movement and Political Activism

The hippie movement began to take shape at the same time that Americans became involved in the Vietnam War. Hippies viewed mainstream authority as the origin of all society’s ills, which included the war. Hippies joined with political radicals in their support for the civil rights movement and their opposition to the Vietnam War, yet hippies were also criticized for their lack of meaningful political involvement. “Hippies would agree with that, but they would not protest. That was the difference—hippies were not protesters.”30 While espousing the need for peace and love, the hippies did little to actually bring about these ideals. The hippies mainly held anti-war protests, marches, and signs. The slogan “Make love, not war,” became a rallying cry for the pacifist hippies who were against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. At an anti-war protest in Berkeley in 1965, Ken Kesey summed up the flippant view towards activism that the hippies had, “You’re not going to stop this war with this rally, by marching. . . . They’ve been having wars for 10,000 years, and you’re not going to stop it this way.”31 In addition, the majority of the hippies’ activism was mainly symbolic acts with little effect, “To further promote their pacifist cause, some in the hippie movement placed flowers in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns while others made daisy chains.”32

And yet, while the hippies may be criticized for their lack of direct involvement in grassroots political activism, their views did impact the American political scene.“The utopian thinking of the counterculture was vitally important as a way of imagining another, better life, or a different way of living. Not the existing everyday life, but rather a newly imagined life... liberated from things such as technocratic social repression, racial and sexual oppression, conventional capitalist notions of ownership and individual property.”33

Exposing Widespread Drug Abuse

The Summer of Love exposed the reality of drug abuse within the hippie counterculture. While the hippies projected an image of freedom and joy, the reality of the subculture was decidedly darker. In July of 1967, fifteen children ranging in age from six months to five years old were treated at the Free Clinic for bad LSD trips. They had been given the drug by their parents.34 Drugs weren’t the only thing causing problems. “In this small, tightly-knit neighborhood, with its emphasis on sharing and contempt for the laws of hygiene, communicable illnesses spread rapidly. Close to a thousand new cases of hepatitis were reported in San Francisco in 1967, most of them in or around the Haight.”35 The community struggled to show the differences between their beliefs and the reality, and “in reality, the Haight was based on dope, not love.”36 Many doctors and health professionals felt that these close-knit communities were not safe, and in March 1967 in an “interview with the [San Francisco] Chronicle, the city’s health director, Dr. Ellis Sox, did not mince words, comparing the influx of hippies to an apocalypse: “These people are creating the slums they live in,” he said. “Most poor people forced to live in poor housing at least try to keep clean, but here we have young people of good education and background who are creating a slum. When water is shut off from failure to pay the bill, toilets are not being used. Garbage is thrown around, and this attracts flies and rats. Bubonic plague is carried by rats on fleas, and it is not impossible there might be an outbreak of epidemic meningitis.”37

Clashes with Law Enforcement

As the hippie movement became more closely associated with drug use, the California state government grew fearful for their communities and cities being overrun by drug use and homelessness. Prior to the ban on LSD, it was commonly shown across the media that LSD was unsafe, unhealthy, and “the greatest threat facing the country” at the time. American citizens were quick to label hippies as “acid heads” and “a cult influenced by hallucinogenic drugs”, a far cry from the ideals of peace and love the hippie movement was pushing. It became clear that many citizens disliked, even hated, the hippies. Across America “signs read ‘hippies not served here’ or ‘Keep America Clean: Get a Haircut’” and the beatdown on hippies did not end there. The government and police forces only continued to clash against the hippie movement by conducting police sweeps and attacks on peaceful gatherings including the “Yip-In” of 1968 in Grand Central Station. Much of the violence and crime committed within San Francisco seemed to be at the fault of the hippies, who on many occasions were caught buying or selling drugs, destructing of property, minor usage of drugs and alcohol, and even assault and rape. Despite usually having eyewitnesses or evidence against the defendant, it was hard to convict those who constantly used and were on mind-altering drugs. With increasing public fears and negative media portrayals of LSD, the federal government decided to take action. The federal government’s plans didn’t align with that of the hippies, and lawmakers grew increasingly annoyed with the movement. In order to shut the movement down and clean up their city streets, the government classified LSD as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, a drug with no medical potential, and therefore a high probability of abuse, a classification that remains to this day.38 In October of 1966, the California state government banned the use of LSD legally. This attempt to eliminate the hippies from the streets of America effectively backfired, and instead pushed counterculture movements together. Together these movements created bigger communities and more influential events, including the Human Be-In of 1967. This did not stop the local government and police force to continue to push back against the growing movement, and with the help of the media finally succeeded in fracturing the community by the end of that summer.

The Summer of Love’s Legacy

The Summer of Love, which was meant to strengthen the hippie movement, ironically marked the disintegration of the hippies. Rifts grew between hippies in the community who viewed some members as less authentic in their beliefs.“They slowly became, in the word that seemed to cover it, polarized, distinct in division among themselves between, on one hand, weekend or summertime hippies, and on the other, hippies for whom the visual scene was an insubstantial substitute for genuine community.”39 The hippies who had dreamed of establishing a utopian community of free love found the media’s scrutiny of the movement unsustainable, “The most perceptive or advanced among the hippies then began to undertake the labor of community which could be accomplished only behind the scene, out of the eye of the camera, beyond the will of the quick reporter.”40 “By October of 1967, tens of thousands of hippies who’d migrated to San Francisco for the summer had left. Many returned to college to finish their degrees, others were drafted into the Vietnam War. A “funeral” marking the death of the hippie movement was held to signify the official end of the summer. “We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, to stay where you are, bring the revolution to where you live and don’t come here, because it’s over and done with,” organizer Mary Kasper said in a public statement after the funeral took place.”41 The definitive moment that marked the death of the hippie movement occurred right after the Summer of Love in 1967 and was a televised funeral held in Golden Gate Park. “In a glorious spectacle of flowers, furs, beads, and orange peels, the 15-foot coffin for the ‘Summer of Love’ was set aflame, met by cries proclaiming, “Hippies are dead: now the Free Men will come through!’ The procession included a “hirsute ‘corpse’” with a zinnia upon its chest, a “symbol of the death of the flower children.” Literally and figuratively, the televised funeral for the “Summer of Love” marked the death of the hippie and the hippie ideology: a counter-culture that fought to escape consumerism and mass media.”42

Conclusion

The Summer of Love is often pointed to as the mark of the end of the hippie movement. Part of its downfall can be traced to the massive population explosion as hippies from around the country flocked to San Francisco, placing too great a strain on the small city, while others point to the pressure of media attention and the subsequent commercialization of the hippie movement as a factor contributing to the despair that characterized the Summer of Love, “The hippie image was successfully used in advertisements, and much like the music industry, repackaged and sold to the masses. Hippiedom no longer represented a “shift in consciousness” but had become “merely a change in superficial values,” “more a matter of fashion than a statement of any revolutionary attitudes.”43 Today hippies are few, but “the lessons of that summer—from the cautionary (you can’t build a social movement on drugs) to the positive (love and liberation should be core principles of life)—are still with us.”