Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin: Summer of love beats cynicism of today
[Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, history professors at Hamilton College and Georgetown University respectively, are authors of "America Divided: The Civil Wars of the 1960s."]
In the current wave of media-generated nostalgia over the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it's fitting that one of that summer's most recognizable songs is "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Procol Harum's lyrics had nothing to do with race - die-hard fans still debate what "One of sixteen vestal virgins/Who were leaving for the coast" means - but for historians the title is suggestive. For the images usually recalled from that summer are tinted in all too pale a shade, as if the only ones involved were the sons and daughters of White America.
Black America gets segregated in a different corner of our historical memory of the 1960s. But it was examples set by the black freedom struggle in the years leading up to the summer of '67 that made possible all those well-remembered long-haired waifs dancing in San Francisco with flowers in their hair.
In popular culture, summer had long been associated with youth (school's out) and escape from adult responsibilities (surf's up). The idea of devoting a summer for something, of young people traveling to a particular place in pursuit of an idealistic goal, was of more recent vintage, specifically the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, when 1,000 college-age black and white volunteers braved death threats to aid the Mississippi freedom movement's voter registration drive.
Underscoring the seriousness of their commitment was the death of three young volunteers at the hands of local Klansmen.
Then there is that word "love" - which came to mean something more than summer romance. Thanks to the freedom movement, "love" came to be linked with the hope for a redemptive transformation of American society.
In his 1963 "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. challenged those who regarded civil rights activists as extremists. "Was not Jesus an extremist for love?" he asked. Civil rights activists routinely spoke of their movement as a "beloved community." A shared commitment to human equality would, they hoped, prefigure a just and caring society.
Much of the media coverage that Haight-Ashbury generated during the summer of 1967 focused on the music, fashions and illegal pharmaceuticals associated with the hippie lifestyle - what became the stereotype of the long-haired, bell-bottomed, flower child. But the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll version of the summer fails to capture a more wrenching historical moment. This was also a summer of conflict, with great and tragic issues fought over by Americans. It was the deadliest year yet in the Vietnam War. The 11,000 Americans who died that year nearly doubled the casualty rate of the previous year. And scores of black people died in inner-city riots in Newark and Detroit.
What did any of that have to do with hippies? While they never had anything like a unified hippie ideology, within the emerging counterculture of 1967 were some common themes. Most salient was the belief that America was on the verge of a cultural and moral reformation, in which communities (or "tribes") of believers would shelter and nurture more humane and harmonious ways of living and self-expression. It was a vision that owed much to the civil rights movement's "beloved community."
The trouble with anniversary observances as they roll around every decade or so is that they divide the past into a series of unrelated vignettes, usually linked to a few powerful but fragmentary images - Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial, hippies in Golden Gate Park and so on, with nothing seemingly connecting them.
But young white Americans did not simply wake up one morning in the summer of 1967 and decide to become hippies because they had swallowed a little pill the night before. They were living in a historic moment that had just witnessed a stirring upheaval by a long-oppressed people, who defied violence and hatred to overturn centuries-old institutions and injustices.
That the old nonviolent civil rights movement was being pushed aside in the headlines by militant black power advocates that summer did not mean that the movement's influence was not still being felt by many, black and white. To young people in particular, the world seemed open to change in 1967 - in ways that today are difficult to remember or imagine.
Looking back at the Summer of Love, 40 years on, the hopefulness of the moment may seem extravagant. It seems to deserve ironic condescension as much as it does media-driven nostalgia. But given a choice between the values of that long-ago summer and those of our own Summer of Cynical Resignation, who would choose the latter?
Read entire article at Newsday
In the current wave of media-generated nostalgia over the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it's fitting that one of that summer's most recognizable songs is "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Procol Harum's lyrics had nothing to do with race - die-hard fans still debate what "One of sixteen vestal virgins/Who were leaving for the coast" means - but for historians the title is suggestive. For the images usually recalled from that summer are tinted in all too pale a shade, as if the only ones involved were the sons and daughters of White America.
Black America gets segregated in a different corner of our historical memory of the 1960s. But it was examples set by the black freedom struggle in the years leading up to the summer of '67 that made possible all those well-remembered long-haired waifs dancing in San Francisco with flowers in their hair.
In popular culture, summer had long been associated with youth (school's out) and escape from adult responsibilities (surf's up). The idea of devoting a summer for something, of young people traveling to a particular place in pursuit of an idealistic goal, was of more recent vintage, specifically the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, when 1,000 college-age black and white volunteers braved death threats to aid the Mississippi freedom movement's voter registration drive.
Underscoring the seriousness of their commitment was the death of three young volunteers at the hands of local Klansmen.
Then there is that word "love" - which came to mean something more than summer romance. Thanks to the freedom movement, "love" came to be linked with the hope for a redemptive transformation of American society.
In his 1963 "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. challenged those who regarded civil rights activists as extremists. "Was not Jesus an extremist for love?" he asked. Civil rights activists routinely spoke of their movement as a "beloved community." A shared commitment to human equality would, they hoped, prefigure a just and caring society.
Much of the media coverage that Haight-Ashbury generated during the summer of 1967 focused on the music, fashions and illegal pharmaceuticals associated with the hippie lifestyle - what became the stereotype of the long-haired, bell-bottomed, flower child. But the sex-drugs-rock-and-roll version of the summer fails to capture a more wrenching historical moment. This was also a summer of conflict, with great and tragic issues fought over by Americans. It was the deadliest year yet in the Vietnam War. The 11,000 Americans who died that year nearly doubled the casualty rate of the previous year. And scores of black people died in inner-city riots in Newark and Detroit.
What did any of that have to do with hippies? While they never had anything like a unified hippie ideology, within the emerging counterculture of 1967 were some common themes. Most salient was the belief that America was on the verge of a cultural and moral reformation, in which communities (or "tribes") of believers would shelter and nurture more humane and harmonious ways of living and self-expression. It was a vision that owed much to the civil rights movement's "beloved community."
The trouble with anniversary observances as they roll around every decade or so is that they divide the past into a series of unrelated vignettes, usually linked to a few powerful but fragmentary images - Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial, hippies in Golden Gate Park and so on, with nothing seemingly connecting them.
But young white Americans did not simply wake up one morning in the summer of 1967 and decide to become hippies because they had swallowed a little pill the night before. They were living in a historic moment that had just witnessed a stirring upheaval by a long-oppressed people, who defied violence and hatred to overturn centuries-old institutions and injustices.
That the old nonviolent civil rights movement was being pushed aside in the headlines by militant black power advocates that summer did not mean that the movement's influence was not still being felt by many, black and white. To young people in particular, the world seemed open to change in 1967 - in ways that today are difficult to remember or imagine.
Looking back at the Summer of Love, 40 years on, the hopefulness of the moment may seem extravagant. It seems to deserve ironic condescension as much as it does media-driven nostalgia. But given a choice between the values of that long-ago summer and those of our own Summer of Cynical Resignation, who would choose the latter?