| Forty years ago, under a sunny January sky, between 20,000 and 50,000 hippies descended upon the San Francisco Polo Fields. Pedestrians and illegally parked cars made traffic a nightmare for miles around, raising the ire of local commuters. Inside the park however, feelings of peace and love prevailed at the "Human Be-In," the first significant hippie gathering of the 1960s.
In October 1966, the U.S. government made possession of LSD a federal offence, and the residents of a small San Francisco community focused around the streets of Haight and Ashbury felt particularly persecuted. The new law threatened their burgeoning utopia, best represented in music and psychedelic magazines like The Oracle. Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen, the magazine’s editors, had attempted to protest the new law through a "celebration of innocence" dubbed the Love Pageant Rally, but it was undermined by low turnout. If the hippies, as they were beginning to be called, wanted to make their political presence felt, they would need to demonstrate that they were more than just several hundred long-haired San Franciscan youths.
Originally billed as a "pow-wow" and a "gathering of the tribes," a date was set for January 14, 1967. The two men commissioned local artist Mouse, who would soon become famous for his rock album covers, to design a poster inviting all youth to come to make the journey to San Francisco for a show of unity. They also reached out to the New Left political establishment at the University of Berkeley. Invitations were also quickly accepted by Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Alan Watts.
Originally scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. at the Polo Fields, Ginsberg and fellow poet Gary Snyder arrived early in the morning to perform a Hindu blessing ritual, granting the day’s activities a religious mystique. Other people started appearing shortly after 9:00 a.m., and by the official start time the number had reached the tens of thousands. The Grateful Dead were among the bands that performed, while speakers talked and handed out pamphlets on drugs and mysticism, but most participants simply wandered through the crowd, chatting, smoking, singing along or joining an impromptu game of Frisbee.
The success of the Be-In was double-edged. Its most dramatic impact was in launching the image of the naked, carefree, pot-smoking hippies into the national consciousness. There was soon talk of 1967 being the "Summer of Love" and police estimate that an astonishing 75,000 additional people spent time living in the Haight-Ashbury district between May and September. These hippies, having criss-crossed the United States expecting everyday to mirror the Be-In, discovered a neighbourhood on the verge of bursting. Throughout the rest of the year, and into the next, tensions escalated along Haight-Ashbury, especially once a shortage of marijuana and LSD caused many to turn to heroin. The Summer of Love depleted most of the resources and much of the goodwill built up by the hippies over the preceding five years. Older members of the hip community, unhappy with the newcomers, fled to the country, robbing the neighbourhood of potential leaders.
The idyllic day at the park of January 14, 1967 not only created the images of peace and love that would define a generation, but simultaneously led to its undoing. |
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