Narrator: January 14, 1967. Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Never before had America witnessed such an unusual gathering. There was no line-up of big stars swelling the crowd, no tickets were sold, no political candidates spoke. It was simply a coming together. They called it a Gathering of the Tribes; a Human Be-In.
Mary Kasper: There were like 20,000 people, and it was this gloriously beautiful day, as you can only have in certain times in San Francisco. The sun was shining, people were wonderful. You know, it was like, my god, look at how many there are of us.
Narrator: To most of country, the Be-In must have seemed like a world turned upside down. A Harvard professor exhorted the crowd to reject the traditional path to success.
Timothy Leary (archival): Turn on, tune in, drop out. I mean drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school...
Narrator: Hindu chanting melded with motorcycles and rock music.
Coyote: It was such an exciting, heady time to find out that under the official reality there was this seething turmoil of young people, learning new music, new thoughts, new ideas, new literature, new poetry, new ways of being.
Narrator: This "turmoil of young people" was, in part, due to sheer numbers. Never before had so many Americans been under 25. There were over 90 million of them, nearly half the population. And many were disillusioned with the world around them. The president many had found inspiring had been assassinated barely three years earlier. War in Vietnam was killing a hundred American soldiers every week. Month after month dozens of young men were being drafted into the army. And the struggle for civil rights at home had grown increasingly militant. Those gathered in the park that sunny January day sought a different world.
Theodore Roszak, Writer: It would be a world where people live gently on the planet without the sense that they have to exploit nature or make war upon nature in order to find basic security. A simpler way of life, less urban, less consumption-oriented, much more concerned about spiritual values, about companionship, friendship, community, sharing ideas, values, insights. A world in which that was considered more important than the gross domestic product.
Narrator: The first hippies were children of the 1950s, the baby boom generation. Their parents had endured years of economic depression and a brutal World War. Now the future looked bright. Millions of Americans started families, encouraged by the unprecedented prosperity of the post-war economic boom.
Coyote: We came out of World War II as the richest, most powerful country on the planet and our families built the suburbs and the fathers went off to work and the mothers stayed home, and the kids were basically left to run around.
Narrator: The new standard of living in 1950s America offered an abundance of affordable homes, sleek new automobiles, miracle drugs. Science and technology seemed to have an answer for everything. But beneath the surface lurked a deep anxiety. Peacetime had devolved into a bitter Cold War between superpowers. Americans linked to communist groups were hounded and persecuted. An atomic arms race fueled fears of annihilation.
Roszak: That combination of affluence and anxiety is a crazy-making combination to live with, to grow up with. So, you had a generation of kids who arrived at high school and then in college, trying to make sense of a world which they've been told is just grand and wonderful, and there's nothing to complain about anymore. And on the other hand, you look a little deeper into it, and it's just awful and scary.
There was a deep issue here. Whether material affluence is what life is all about. Because that is what an industrial society, a market economy, can give you. But what if that's not good enough?
Narrator: It wasn't good enough for the so-called "beat generation." Who, starting in the late 1940s, congregated in the North Beach district of San Francisco, a city long known as a sanctuary for those outside the mainstream. The Beatniks, or Hipsters, rejected the conformity and materialism of 1950s America and embraced poetry and jazz, mysticism and marijuana.
Kasper: Even in my early years, I knew I wanted something different than the world I saw around me. I used to get on the bus and ride to North Beach and sit in the coffee houses and listen to people read poetry and listen to folk music and that was the first time I'd seen women who didn't have their hair done every week and who didn't wear girdles routinely.
Narrator: By the mid-1960s, as North Beach became commercialized, baby boomers drawn to a Bohemian lifestyle began moving into a low-rent neighborhood across town, the Haight-Ashbury district. They shared the Beatniks' disdain for corporate America and the politics of inequality and war. But they preferred the sunshine of nearby Golden Gate Park to the darkness of coffeehouses, the passion of rock-and-roll to the cool of modern jazz, wild, expressive colors to beatnik black.
They were derided by some as junior grade hipsters, "hippies" for short. Many began experimenting with communal living in the large Victorian houses of the Haight, and visions of a utopian society began taking shape, enhanced by a mind-altering new drug called LSD, or acid.