1.1 The Culture that Produced the Counterculture

Research about the Counterculture

This study looks at the back-to-the-land counterculture movement in the cultural context of the 1970s. To understand the motivations of back-to-the-landers and other types of hippies, it is crucial to reflect on how the preceding few decades in America shaped the Seventies. Why did 16 million young Americans “drop out” of mainstream society during an economic boom that propelled the United States to the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known?

American children born between 1946 and 1964 are classified as ‘baby boomers.’ Their parents survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and then endured great sacrifice during World War II during the 1940s. In the jubilant post-war 1950s, young married couples were having larger families. More babies were born between 1948 and 1953 than during the thirty years before, combined. The baby boom was widely considered “a tribute to the national glory,” writes American sociologist Todd Gitlin. “Affluence was not just an economic fact, but a demographic one, and the demographic bulge matched the affluent state of mind.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, to be young was to experience a new phase of maturation in America. “As society has grown more affluent, it has created still another period of human life, one that intervenes between adolescence and adulthood.” Michael Harrington was a professor and theorist who saw the affluent radical young as a new cultural force. “Their bitterness with the existing order is partly the result of having been given the leisure and educational opportunity to take a disinterested and critical view.”

Unprecedented College Attendance

The growth of middle class wealth during this time frame enabled more youth to attend college. There was a social ladder through government programs such as the G.I. Bill, which helped military veterans pursue college degrees. In the United States there were 2.3 million students attending college in 1950. Ten years later, the number of students grew to five million. The university campus became a place where the young forged a new group identity. Across the nation, courses in social sciences were addressing contemporary issues.

Michael Harrington’s classic, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), was an immensely popular book. Political and social awareness was part of student discourse and among the young there was a nation-wide awakening to the excesses and contradictions about the world in which they had grown up.

American Poor Symbolize Social Hypocrisy 

In The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Harrington contends that post war affluence and the mass media generated the impression among citizens that the country’s poverty problem had been solved. “In this theory the nation’s problems were no longer a matter of basic human needs, of food, shelter, and clothing. Now they were seen as qualitative, a question of learning to live decently amid luxury.” 

Todd Gitlin was a student radical in the Sixties. In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), he writes:

“Private affluence was crowding out public goods, causing and obscuring the impoverishment of the public sector. If you looked at American schools, if you contrasted the condition of trains and subways with the condition of suburban houses and cars, you could see that public services were being starved, the public funds were going to fuel the boom in private spaces and private goods.” 

To a great many older Americans, the young coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s had everything. The generation gap was filled with bewilderment over the counterculture. This is clearly expressed by interview subjects in the documentary, Making Sense of the Sixties (1991), directed by David Hoffman. A retired professor says:

“I had a strong feeling that these children were rebels without a cause. They had everything—they could have had everything. And I found it very hard initially to see what they were rebelling against. When the Vietnam War came along, the peace demonstrations at least focused on something. But initially, when they started dropping out from society, I was baffled because I thought it was a pretty good society they were dropping out from.” 

Beyond college campuses, the Sixties was also a time when the injustice of poverty, racism, sexism, and the Vietnam War were becoming harder to ignore in the apparent calm afforded by affluence. Harrington’s study of poverty in America showed that twenty-five percent of American citizens, because of their economic status, were denied the minimal levels of healthcare, housing, food, and education. He found that people in both urban and rural communities were poor not because they were unwilling or incapable of finding work but because of ill-conceived government policies. 

For example, the federal government financed the relocation of the middle class from the cities by building the suburbs as part of the post-war promise to provide new housing for America. Funding for this “entitlement” ran out, and the inner city poor were consequently abandoned, left behind in the inner cities, which in time became slums. 

Todd Gitlin’s observation agrees. “Millions of Americans were acquiring whole new spaces to live in…while the upbeat language of ‘renewal’ concealed the injuries done to millions who were left behind.” People experiencing poverty were denied dignity and subsequently were blamed publicly for their lot in life and labeled as lazy. 

Another policy during the Sixties had impacts the rural populations. Family farms and agricultural working-poor were being displaced from agrarian life through federal policies that favored and funded what we know today as corporate agriculture. This changed America’s bucolic pastoral landscape and who lives there.

“Most of the people on welfare rolls are victims of government action and technological progress. They receive only a fraction of the compensation they deserve, not in charity, but in justice.” Harrington’s book laid bare the myth that “the poor” were being pampered by the government and that too much was being done for them. At this writing in 2012, this sounds curiously familiar.

Life, Death and Civil Rights

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We’re finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio.” 

Neil Young, Ohio. 1970

Many scholars credit Harrington’s The Other America (1969) with influencing President Johnson’s war on poverty, which the administration of the late President Kennedy had initiated. “The important thing was not just the President was going to commit money to the war on poverty,” he wrote, but that the White House was willing to focus “enormous moral and political power into this undertaking.” Harrington was invited to serve as a member of the federal task force against poverty and unemployment, headed by Sargent Shriver. Todd Gitlin, who headed Students for a Democratic Society alongside Tom Hayden, writes that Harrington’s study on poverty had a major impact on their nationwide student organization. “Harrington was pivotal, for he was the one person who might have mediated across the generational divide.”

The Sixties had other social victories—such as the Civil Rights Movement, lead by Dr. Martin Luther King, establishing the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. But national tragedies were the price. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the escalation of the war in Vietnam throughout the Sixties, and then the 1968 assassinations of Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy. As a grim culmination of the tension generated during the Sixties, in May of 1970 four Kent State students were shot to death by National Guard; ten days later two black students at Jackson State were shot to death by local police. The Sixties revolution created a legacy of disillusionment that Americans are still contemplating today. 

In his book The Hippies and American Values (1991), Timothy Miller writes:

“Since it was very difficult to live outside of the existing system, the function of the counterculture was defiance of the dominant mores. The counterculture was rebellion, a living protest vote, a declaration of choice—the Great Refusal to cooperate.”

For the young involved with the counterculture movement, the assassinations were devastating and exacerbated the generation gap. The 1968 democratic presidential election was a political “turn off.” The nation’s new president, Richard Nixon, established a Republican agenda of decentralizing government—which meant de-funding and eliminating social programs that “pamper the poor,” a phrase used then and today. It is in this context of hypocrisy from the federal government to the suburban neighborhoods and their own parents that young middle-class Americans found reason to protest, demonstrate, sit-in, and drop-out.

Resources for this section:

David Hoffman, 1991

Émile Durkheim, 1912

Hugh Gardner, 1978

Jeffrey Jacob, 1997

Maurice Isserman 1993

Michael Harrington, 1962

Robert Theobald, 1996

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Timothy Miller 1991

Todd Gitlin, 1987

Victor Turner, 1969

Up Next: 

1.2. Technology Plus Hegemony Equals Technocracy