From the “Beat Movement” to Student Radicalism 779A young man perches in a tree with a guitar at Woodstock, a drug- and water-logged music festival that attracted 500,000 to rural New York in 1968.
But if the “beats” were a fringe group of poets and
musicians, their successors in the 1960s—generally
known as hippies—could be found in large groups in
every big city in the United States and Europe. They
were so “turned off” by the modern world that they
retreated from it, finding refuge in communes, drugs,
and mystical religions. They were disgusted by the dis-
honesty and sordid antics of so many of the politicians,
horrified by the brutality of Vietnam, appalled by
racism, and contemptuous of the smugness they
encountered in colleges and universities. But they
rejected activism. Theirs was a world of folk songs and
blaring acid rock music, of “be-ins,” “love-ins,” casual
sex, and drugs. Their slogan, “Make love, not war,”
was more a general pacifist pronouncement than a spe-
cific criticism of events in Vietnam. At rock concerts
they listened where earlier generations had danced.
Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychologist who became
known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” advised
them to “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”
But the 1960s also witnessed the emergence of a
new activism. Many students were frustrated by persis-
tent racism and bigotry, but they regarded these as
symptoms of a right-wing “power elite” of corporate
executives and military and political leaders—a con-
cept outlined in a book of that title by Columbia soci-
ologist C. Wright Mills. In 1962 a small group of
students in theStudents for a Democratic Society
(SDS)put together a manifesto for action at a meeting
at Port Huron, Michigan: “We are the people of this
generation... looking uncomfortably to the world we
inherit,” the Port Huron Statement began. Their mainTimothy Leary, “The Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” asserted that
psychedelic drugs and sexual rapture—“ecstasy”—could
promote political freedom, as the cover for his book on the
subject suggested.