All language subtitles for American Experience - S19E12 - Summer of Love (April 23, 2007)

(Transcrito por TurboScribe.ai. Actualizar a Ilimitado para eliminar este mensaje.) It was the largest migration of young people

in the history of America.

From every direction they came, from the biggest

cities and from the smallest towns, all bound

for San Francisco in the summer of 1967.

A hundred thousand is the minimum estimate of

what's happening.

I think it will be a major historical

event for this country.

We're trying to do what no one else

has ever done before in this culture, and

that is to find a new way for

humanity.

Mines are up for grabs.

It's up for grabs.

Civilization's up for grabs.

I think everybody knows that.

Drawn by the city's new hippie counterculture, with

its vision of changing the world through peace

and love, they arrived in numbers great enough

to create a crisis in San Francisco and

threaten the utopian dream itself.

There were people who were coming who were

just coming for the drugs, who weren't coming

for, say, a spiritual awakening.

Kids were coming from all over the country.

They were straining the infrastructure of the city.

They were straining the resources.

What could there be but trouble?

It got ugly, and the original people that

really went out there for peace and love

left.

Yet thousands would be swept up by a

revolutionary movement that would shape American life far

beyond that turbulent summer.

January 14, 1967, Golden Gate Park in San

Francisco.

Never before had America witnessed such an unusual

gathering.

There was no lineup 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 being.

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.

To most of the 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.

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

I mean drop out of high school, drop

out of college, drop out of graduate school.

Hindu chanting melded with motorcycles and rock music.

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.

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.

It would be a world where people lived

gently on the planet without the sense that

they have to exploit nature or make war

upon nature and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Cats die, caught in my head, all over

the kitchen.

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.

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.

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.

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 coffee houses,

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.

A new drug called LSD, or acid.

The LSD use was a fundamental building block

in a new way of thinking in a

new community.

Why do we have war?

What is the power of love?

Who is God and why is he here

and what has he done for me lately

anyway?

I mean, these were questions that were being

debated by young people who were just growing

into their bodies and their minds and their

selves.

We really thought that drugs were going to

change the world.

We really did.

We thought if you turned on, if you

took acid, you would really change because we

had changed from those experiences.

Experiences of cosmic oneness, where I truly felt

I was no different than you, I was

no different than my black friends, I was

no different than anyone who lived in any

other part of the world, nor was I

that different than my dog.

God lived inside all of us is a

cliched way of putting it.

You were going through a door and you

wanted to be in the rooms on the

other side of that door.

You wanted to know what was there and

you wanted to take that knowledge back with

you.

There's a sense of being in communion with

powers greater than yourself and intelligence which far

outstrips the human mind and energies which are

very ancient.

You have a sense of being brought into

God's workshop or that the veil is pulled

away and for the first time you see

how things really are.

Hey, you know, we're trying to learn to

live better and to think better and to

be better human beings and to be a

better race and to be a better civilization

and to make this whole thing work.

What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet.

We're not thinking about anything else.

We're not thinking about any kind of power.

We're not thinking about any of those kind

of struggles.

We're not thinking about revolution or war or

any of that.

We would all like to be able to

live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a

good life, you know, and like think about

moving the whole human race ahead a step.

And one of the ways of achieving that

being is through drugs.

I think personally that the more people turn

on, the better the world is going to

be.

The music changed just immediately.

I cannot explain to you what it's like

to be in a crowd of 5,000

people on LSD with a Grateful Dead also

on LSD leading the crowd through a series

of improvisations.

And before that, rock and roll songs for

three minutes.

Period paragraph, we're out of here.

One of the peculiar things about LSD was

that for a very long time it was

legal.

It seemed illegal.

I mean, it was so wild, you figured

that if anybody hears about this, they're definitely

going to make it illegal.

Well, I'm terribly frightened by the problem of

LSD.

I think there's been a great deal of

misinformation by those who seem to see no

harm in it.

But I think our only hope lies in

a concerted effort of education so that young

people will be aware that there is nothing

smart, there is nothing grown up or sophisticated

in taking an LSD trip at all.

They're just being complete fools.

California did make LSD illegal on October 6,

1966.

The hippies openly flaunted the new law with

a love pageant rally in the hate and

their own declaration of independence.

The creation endows us with certain inalienable rights,

it read, that among these are the freedom

of body, the pursuit of joy, and the

expansion of consciousness.

On the heels of the love pageant, a

group of anarchist street performers called the Diggers

began distributing free food.

We're trying to start a pilot program here.

It's called a Digger Feed-In.

You go home, you cook whatever you can

cook in your kitchen, and you bring it

out and you serve it to hungry people

on the street, you know?

And if everybody does it, we'll all have

a bowl, you know?

The street theater that we had been doing

was now going to be acted out as

an alternative society where food, shelter, entertainment was

going to be free without ideology.

The Diggers salvaged food from restaurant and supermarket

overflow, prepared it in their communal kitchen, and

brought it twice a day to the park.

I used to go to the wholesale produce

markets and get produce for the free food

that we did.

Unbelievable amounts of food were thrown away.

I remember once there were crates and crates

and crates of cantaloupes that came in.

They didn't quite meet the standards for sweetness.

They couldn't be sold.

They stood in back of the produce market.

We came there twice a week.

We picked up ten cases every time we

came.

For the Diggers, the free feed-ins also

served to push people to examine their own

values.

We were looking for the people driving by,

going to work, who would see people gathered

in the park eating food free, and that

this would provoke them, provoke their idea of

what they were doing by going to work.

We thought culture is much more important than

politics.

Let's just start getting people living the way

they want to live.

You want to live in a world where

you don't have to work?

Let's make it.

You want to live in a world where

you can get food for free?

Let's make it.

You want to live in a house with,

you know, lots of women and men and

live the way you want?

Let's do it.

Let's make the world that you imagine real

by acting it out.

And if you can act it out, it's

real.

In December, the Diggers dramatized another hippie belief,

that the pursuit of money interfered with a

fulfilling life.

They staged a happening.

They called it the death of money.

People dressed in animal heads took huge pieces

of money, stage money, and put them in

and out of an enormous coffin in a

march down Haight Street, singing, get out my

life, why don't you babe, to Chopin's Death

March.

And it went, get out my life, why

don't you babe.

We certainly on some level thought money was

the root of all evil, and thought having

a lot of money was not a good

thing for your soul.

We were not living without money because we

had lots of it, and it made it

easy.

We were living without money because we wanted

our time, and we wanted to be authentic,

and we didn't want to get jobs.

The Be-In in January 1967 put San

Francisco's hippies in the national spotlight for the

first time.

While Beatniks wanted the world to leave them

alone, the New York Times said, the new

hippies want to change the world.

Newsweek wrote of their regimen of all embracing

love, nonviolent, mystical, and bizarre.

These stories of hippies resonated with young people

across the country.

The Boston Globe had pictures of Haight Street,

pictures of people dancing.

And I can remember saying, I thought, oh,

look, everybody looks so happy.

And I'm thinking, oh, I'd really like to

go there.

Sandy Stein was only 13, questioning and impressionable.

She anguished over the grief that permeated her

Boston neighborhood because of the Vietnam War.

When somebody was killed in Vietnam, they would

put a flag in the window, and there

was not a block that you could walk

in that working-class, middle-class neighborhood.

But you didn't see flags in the windows.

And my home was full of fighting, arguing,

and so I think also that those ideas

of peace and love were wonderful.

You know, that looked good.

San Francisco looked good, too, to Claudia King.

At 23, she was frustrated with the slow

pace of civil rights gains she'd been working

on since high school in Chicago.

Every time an idea came up, it would

be, okay, how are you going to fund

this?

Who's going to do this?

Who's going to do that?

You know, I was young.

I wanted heaven now.

You know, and I really believed that it

should just change, and we should all smarten

up and do better.

I was really ready to go to the

Haight-Ashbury.

So was Phil Morningstar, a restless teenager living

in a conservative town east of Los Angeles.

It was a semi-rural area, kind of

Southern California Bible Belt.

And I was reading Berkley Barb, the S

.F. Oracle, and I was looking at all

that stuff, and they're talking about, you know,

crash pads, free food.

And my father was very intolerant of any

views that disagreed with him.

And so at 14, I took a walk

down to Greyhound Bus Station and bought a

bus ticket.

Next stop, San Francisco.

In March, hundreds of kids on spring break

flooded into the Haight.

They heard by word of mouth.

I mean, if you went to one of

the great public events like the rock dances,

you would meet people.

And they would say, hey, man, you got

to come to the Haight.

Man, it's really beautiful there.

Kids were looking at pictures of kids like

them, sitting on the stoops, cupping a joint,

looking around for the cops, and saying, holy

cow, people are living free in San Francisco.

And they came out here to invent whatever

that meant to them.

Everybody had a different entrance point.

Some people came in because of the sexual

liberation prospects.

Some people came in because of the appeal

to music.

Some people came in because they were angry

and scared about the draft and the war.

But once you were in that vortex, once

you were in that swirling miasma of social

and personal change, all the doors were open.

For many longtime residents of Haight-Ashbury, the

growing hippie community was unwelcome.

We had an influx of all people from

all over the country.

I mean, they were from all over the

country.

I mean, we'd stop them, we'd find out

they were from Midwest, from back east, and

they wanted to come out and experience what

was going on in the Haight-Ashbury.

Art Gerens was born in the Haight and

joined the San Francisco Police Department at age

22, assigned to Park Station.

It was kind of a quiet station until

the hippies came.

The old timers that lived out there didn't

like it.

They were used to having a nice, quiet

neighborhood.

Our neighborhood here was just really lovely.

We could push our buggies and strollers down

Haight Street.

There were three or four bakeries.

There was a candy shop.

There was a Woolworth's.

I was annoyed with them for changing my

neighborhood.

By late March, Haight Street was already bursting

with hippies and hippie wannabes.

Many feared that when schools let out for

the summer, San Francisco would erupt into chaos.

There were these headlines, hippies warn San Francisco.

Big print, hippies warn San Francisco about all

these kids coming.

And then a couple days later, the mayor

warns hippies.

The hippies seem to be a new way

of life, that's their right.

But they have no right to inflict their

way of life on everybody else to the

detriment and the exclusion of people continuing their

way.

And when they block the streets, then it

is interference with the normal, routine life of

a community.

It will be stopped.

Hippie leaders were incredulous.

The mayor is, this is really very insidious

what he's up to.

He wants to stop human growth.

He's trying to throw the seeds of this

growth out of the sandbox.

Which is a presumption that it's his sandbox,

and it isn't because it's a very cosmic

sandbox.

It just happens to be occurring here.

I took a trip in December, you know,

and talked to a lot of kids in

some other cities about whether or not they

were coming out here.

And a lot of kids would say, well,

we read the magazines and we've heard a

lot of talk, but I don't know.

We got a scene here, we're happy.

But as soon as the mayor comes out

and puts a taboo on this, I tell

them that they're not welcome.

He should have thought about it first.

What I think he doesn't know is that

we don't want him to come yet.

This neighborhood is by no means prepared to

handle that many people.

Haight-Ashbury cannot handle 100,000 because there

isn't room.

The city of San Francisco can, the state

of California can, everyone can.

And if they open up their hearts, they

can.

And I say that, welcome them.

The city of San Francisco has been warned

of a hippie invasion come summer in numbers

almost too staggering to comprehend.

The Park and Recreation Department has ruled that

no longer will the hippies be allowed to

sleep in Golden Gate Park.

And Police Chief Thomas Cahill says the rule

will be rigidly enforced.

If they come in and you have them

in the park where there are no facilities

for them, then you are going to have

a health problem.

Chief, are you threatening to kick them out

of San Francisco?

I never said a word about that, but

I will take whatever police action is necessary

and I'm not going to cross bridges until

I come to them.

And certainly nobody should let their young children

come into San Francisco unsupervised to become a

part of a group such as that.

The powers to be in the city wanted

to erect a way in which no newcomers

would be welcome to the Haight-Ashbury.

There was an assumption that this was an

absolute drug out culture, this was a place

where all of the so-called family values

were challenged.

I was just absolutely blown away by how

distant what the Supes and the mayor were

attempting to do was, from my understanding of

democracy.

The white middle class establishment starts reacting to

this movement with anger and vehemence and they

move to repress this thing and shut it

down, acting just like we thought they would.

The clash of cultures reverberated throughout the city.

Now certainly these shaggies and hippies with their

talk about peace and brotherhood and understanding and

international amity, all this ridiculous nonsense, naturally the

newspapers are going to play up the things

they say, especially when these people bang tambourines

and like Allen Ginsberg, go into these absurd

chants, these Hindu chants.

Well naturally they're going to play this sort

of thing up.

It would be absurd to expect that they're

not going to do this.

I grew up in my neighborhood, mostly Irish

and Italian kids and we'd go to church

together.

But we had work ethics and mostly blue

collar workers and you learn from your mother

and your father about going to work and

being responsible and doing the right thing.

And with these kids here, they didn't want

to work.

They wanted to fall out, they didn't want

to work, they didn't want responsibility, they didn't

want nobody telling them what to do.

They wanted to have sex, they wanted to

have dope and just sightsee and go in

the park, get stoned and they were sort

of wasting their life.

They weren't going nowhere.

Why don't you like the hippies around here?

I don't like their morals.

I don't like the example they're setting for

younger people.

I don't like being pushed off of the

streets, walking in their filth on the streets.

I don't like to look at them.

I don't like their sound of their voices

and the filthy words they use.

I don't like their filthy posters.

I just don't like them.

A sightseeing company began running a bus down

Haight Street, calling it the only foreign tour

in the domestic United States.

The hippies take many trips.

The trip of the hippies is generally an

unusual one.

A world about themselves and of themselves.

And marijuana, of course, with LSD, is being

used.

Tourists were even provided with definitions of hippie

slang.

A teeny bopper is a hippie in early

teens.

Speed, a combination of heroin and methadone.

Stoned, high as on LSD.

Straight, square, conventional.

Trip is an LSD experience.

Turn on is to commence a far out

experience as to turn on with LSD.

Weed is marijuana.

We've seen the better or the worst of

the Haight-Ashbury district.

And now back into Golden Gate Park and

our next stop will be the Japanese Tea

Garden.

In April, the hippies sought to ease growing

tensions in the city, presenting an optimistic vision

of the coming summer to the local media.

The Haight-Ashbury community has created the Council

for a Summer of Love in San Francisco.

Within the Haight-Ashbury population, there are many

strata of imaginative and creative energies whose spirit

extends throughout San Francisco and the world.

Our purpose is to provide an atmosphere which

is more healthy than the kind of atmosphere

that the city government and the newspapers have

tended to put out about the influx of

young people to the city.

We don't believe that the young people who

are coming here are the sort of thing

that has been associated with vagrants.

In fact, we believe in them.