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Chapter summaries
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Online Chapter: Peace Symbols: Posters in Movements against the Wars in Vietnam and Iraq“What’s So Funny ’bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?”: Hippies “Hippies” have now become for many only a kind of cultural joke, a retro style for fashion designers or for kids to wear on Halloween. But in their context, the hippie counterculture played a significant role in the peace movement and the wider process of social change in the 1960s and 1970s. The hippie counterculture contributed especially to the left-pacifist dimensions of the movement. If we examine “hippies” closely as a social text, we can see that their styles, slogans, and ways of being formed a coherent, if not often fully worked out, critique of U.S. politics and culture.4 Hippies acted out a critique of the middle-class, consumption-driven, “organization man” culture of the 1950s that had also been a target of SDS in “The Port Huron Statement.” The counterculture’s critique included a strong rejection of the war system and accounts for the ubiquitous flashing of the peace sign (Figure 17).
Figure 17. Origin unknown, circa 1969. Courtesy of Picture History. Where the New Left concentrated primarily on analytic critique of the political and economic structures underlying the war system, the hippies attacked it head on as a way of life, or “lifestyle”—a term just emerging at this point that in its very name suggested the superficiality of living as just a style. In a sense, the hippies sought to live out the alternative culture the New Left theorized more than it practiced. Even for those who did not become hippies, the hippie examples of alternative ways to live helped distance young people from their elders who were prosecuting the war. What became known as a “generation gap” got its visual markers (long hair for both genders, colorful clothing, and so on) and its cultural experimentalism (psychodelic drugs, Eastern religions, antimaterialism) from the hippie counterculture. Many young Americans did remained conservative during this era, but millions felt a strong generational tie driven by a combination of countercultural and progressive politics. Over the years both tensions between and syntheses of the New Left and the hippies emerged, but both represent a response to deep-seated discontent with the rampant materialism and the empty conformism of mainstream U.S. society. Hippie style entered the antiwar movement and its posters in a variety of ways. Most directly, the psychedelic forms developed to advertise rock concerts were adapted for movement purposes, first through benefit concerts and later through a more general stylistic preference (compare Figure 1 to Figure 18).
Figure 18. Fillmore Auditorium concert poster. Courtesy of Peace Rock. And psychedelic rock became the sound track of the movement for young people, hippie or not. Where the goal of mainstream America was to make as much money as possible, the goal of hippies was to live on as little as possible and model alternative economics that were not based on endless expansion of consumerism. An embrace of voluntary poverty by middle-class kids, however protected some were by possibilities of going home again, was a powerful living statement about the emptiness of a life of materialism. Hippies drew much of their vocabulary and their costuming from marginalized, oppressed elements of U.S. society, particularly African Americans and Native Americans. Black slang provided most of the base for hippie terminology, mediated in part through the beatnik phenomena of the late 1950s that fed into the hippie scene, particularly in places like San Francisco where the first and strongest wave of the counterculture emerged near the North Beach beat scene. But if black lingo was important to the mostly white hippie culture, other forms of identification with blacks were difficult in the years of countercultural ascendancy (roughly 1965 to 1969). Blacks (and other people of color) were in search of identities fully separate from white racist America. That search was at the heart of the black power movement then raging (see chapter 2). Given this limitation, hippies identified instead with an even more marginal and much less visible culture, American Indians. Hippie clothing drew heavily on what was imagined to be Indian modes. Beaded headbands, deerskin garments, moccasins, and feathers were the most obvious signs of this connection. Hippies actively chose downward class mobility and were often resented by both those in the class above them whom they left behind and those in the lower classes with whom they sought solidarity. Flaunting poverty was more effective as a critique of their middle-class forbears than in aligning with working-class and poor folks, most of whom strove to hide their poverty as they sought to leave it behind. Their embrace of a postmaterialist cultural possibility was more convincing to those who had passed through the materialist moment, who had been satiated with consumer products, than to those who struggled with material deprivation. (A similar credibility gap faced young New Leftists who lived among the poor as they sought to stimulate a participatory democratic revolt of the underprivileged.) Failure to build cross-class alliance was and remains a major obstacle for most U.S.-based progressive movements. These cultural forms helped give the peace movement a more distinctive style as the look and feel of the counterculture wove its way into the movement culture, at least for most of the young members. “Peace” as a key word enters the lexicon of hippies from a number of different directions. Most obviously, and most importantly for this chapter, it meant peace as opposed to the war in Vietnam. But in the wider counterculture, as in the wider New Left, it meant peace as opposed to the massive war machine that was U.S. militarism, and militarism was seen as tied to U.S. materialism. Peace also meant peace of mind, as opposed to the mad rush of the nine-to-five, success-obsessed mainstream rat race. As counterculture icon Bob Dylan cryptically put it, “there is no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.” It is no accident that the freak counterculture emerged between 1965 and 1967, the key years for the emergence of the antiwar movement. The hideous war seemed to expose the twisted logic behind straight society at its most destructive. The counterculture was a peace movement, involving several million young (mostly white) Americans who saw the roots of war in social conformism, economic materialism, lonely individualism, spiritual deprivation, sexual repression, and deep-seated psychosocial dissatisfaction. Hence it is not surprising that it is the hippie counterculture that gave the peace movement one of its most famous slogans, the one that adorns the poster at the head of this chapter: “Make Love, Not War.” The implication, derived directly or indirectly from psychosocial theorists like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, was that beneath all the justifications for militarism, misdirected sexual impulses led to deep frustrations vented as hatred, political repression, and war. The counterculture increasingly found points of contact with the movement culture of the antiwar and student movements. The New Left, drawing from the intensely personal experiments of groups like SNCC, had spoken of the “beloved community” and of “prefiguring” the new society within the movement to change it.5 The image of that community had been rather vague, and for some the picture seemed to be developing among hippies. Particularly in places with intense counterculture scenes, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Madison, Wisconsin, and the East Village in New York City, the New Left and counterculture blended significantly. But even there it was sometimes a tense fusion;, as from the point of view of many politicos, the hippies were self-indulgent and unorganized, while the “freaks” of the New Left looked too much like a just another bureaucracy of folks postponing life till after the revolution (whatever that was). But whether blended or marching and dancing in separate groups, the New Left and counterculture formed a very strong base for the youth component of the antiwar movement, and it was youth who drove the movement. The retro spirit of parody found in hippie clothing, for example, worked its way into antiwar posters and demonstrations. Hippies had a penchant for what would now be called vintage clothing and what might be called anachronistic clothing—Civil War uniforms, nineteenth-century cowboy outfits, and so on—that seem to be a comment on the emptiness of progress defined only in material, not human, terms. One of the most dramatic efforts to make hippies more directly political came in the form of the Yippies, founded by longtime activist Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman and fellow Yippie, Jerry Rubin, sought to direct the countercultural spirit of play and parody right at the heart of the political system. Hoffman and Rubin, for example, mocked their felony indictments for their protest activities at the 1968 Democratic convention by showing up in court in uniforms from the revolutionary war of 1776. They were at once reminding folks that those first American revolutionaries were also labeled extremists as well, and at the same time using the inspired comic spirit of the counterculture to point up the drabness of the mainstream system that sought to jail them for committing free speech. A similar spirit was found in efforts during the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, where counterculture activists sought to “exorcise” the demons within the Defense Department complex, and then later tried to levitate the building.6 While some more serious peace activists decried such actions, for many among the young the point was clear: trying to levitate the Pentagon is no crazier than the war in Vietnam, and a lot less bloody.7 4. Throughout this section I draw heavily on Stuart Hall, “The Hippies: An American Moment,” in Student Power, ed. Julian Nagel (London: Merlin Press, 1969), a piece that remains one of the finest analyses ever offered of the political import of hippies. 5. Throughout this section I draw heavily on Stuart Hall, “The Hippies: An American Moment,” in Student Power, ed. Julian Nagel (London: Merlin Press, 1969), a piece that remains one of the finest analyses ever offered of the political import of hippies. 6. The best analysis of this dimension of New Left theory and practice can be found in Wini Breines, Community and Organizing in the New Left, 1962–1970: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 7. The classic account of this march is Norman Mailer’s nonfiction novel Armies of the Night (New York: Signet, 1968). While the merging of hippies and the New Left was not always smooth, at least one observing entity, the FBI, saw their linkage as a serious threat. As part of their viciously repressive counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO for short) against all forces of dissent, the FBI sought to manipulate “mystical symbols” that they seemed to take more seriously than most protesters: “The emergence of the New Left on the American Scene has produced a new phenomenon—a yen for magic. Some leaders of the New Left, its followers, the Hippies and the Yippies, wear beads and amulets. New Left youth involved in anti-Vietnam activity have adopted the Greek letter ‘Omega’ as their symbol. Self-proclaimed yogis have established a following in the New Left movement. Their incantations are a reminder of the chant of the witch doctor. Publicity has been given to the yogis and their mutterings. The news media has referred to it as a ‘mystical renaissance’ and has attributed its growth to the increasing use of LSD and similar drugs. Philadelphia believes the above-described conditions offer an opportunity for use in the counterintelligence field. Specifically, it is suggested that a few select top-echelon leaders of the New Left be subjected to harassment by a series of anonymous messages with a mystical connotation. . . . It is believed that the periodic receipt of anonymous messages, as described above, could cause concern and mental anguish on the part of a ‘hand-picked’ recipient or recipients. Suspicion, distrust, and disruption could follow”. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that this particular form of mystical psychological warfare had much impact on the movement, though other aspects of COINTELPRO actions did great damage to the New Left, black power, and other radical and liberal groups. On the other hand, the FBI was quite right to sense a connection between the counterculture and the culture of the peace movement. The counterculture provided the sound track—psychedelic rock—as well as much of the costuming and set design for the dramatic confrontations that occurred between pro- and antiwar forces as the sixties wore on. |
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