These early adapters were the real deal — as disaffected from society as, though less morose about it than, the Beats. Hip in a second-class (jollier) way — ergo, “hippies.” In the Haight, they established a true alternative economy — albeit a parasitic one — that scrounged the material world’s cast-off food and clothing, saw drug use as a mind-enriching occupation and force for change, and shared pretty much everything with everybody. An anonymously published flower-power “Declaration of Independence” championed among our inalienable rights “the freedom of body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness.” The Haight-Ashbury pioneers were loose, poetic, colorful, and a little spacy — hell, they were stoned — but they were also thoughtful ideological utopians, no crazier and no less practical than the philosopher communards at West Roxbury’s Brook Farm or Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands had been a century or more before.
The hippies got some press, their fame spread through student grapevines, and the Haight-Ashbury scene generated some fresh musical ideas that, even though the record companies didn’t really get it, married into the Brit Invasion pop renaissance and were leaked via AM radio into the far corners of America. In 1967, going to San Francisco became the thing to do for the high-school and college crowds. (The Boomer Generation did seem to share an as-yet-to-be-fully-explained collective consciousness, and it homed in on the West Coast scene.) Summer of Love’s one misstep, in fact, is to hold up Scott McKenzie’s too-precious pop hit “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” as the clarion call that drew America’s youth to Haight-Ashbury. (In truth, nobody over age 12 did anything but cringe in response to McKenzie’s commercial attempt to co-opt the hippie thing.)
But it’s at this point in the story that American Experience distinguishes itself. Thousands did migrate to the Haight and, temporarily, lived the dream. Then the sheer numbers of true believers and just-visiting gawkers caused the improvised community’s fragile infrastructure to collapse of its own weight. About this, Summer of Love pulls no punches. By the end of the summer of ’67, the hippies’ straight-world-renouncing flight of fancy had nose-dived. The Diggers (the Haight’s informal grassroots social-services agency) and other counterculture spokespeople urged the unwashed kids on the street to go forth and spread the message of the new society throughout America. In other words, go home.
This is in fact what happened, as people went back to school in the fall of ’67. Meanwhile, the original hippies moved onto communal farms to embark on a self-sustaining non-economic mind-altered society — a task for which, it turned out, few had the chops. The Haight was left in cultural and physical shambles, but as the film concludes, everyone who’d summered there (whatever attracted or befell them) had at least been exposed to the vision of trading in material values for human ones, and the seeds thus planted grew. That’s a very fair and thorough warts-and-all summary of events.
What this film doesn’t acknowledge is that the peace-and-love component of ’60 ethos was quickly overtaken and overwhelmed by events. The Summer of Love plays well 40 years later, but within a year it was reduced to so much American graffiti — a last fling before things became innocence-endingly heavy. By the summer of 1968, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead; Paris, Washington, and Prague were aflame with rioters and jack-booted thugs; and America’s youth was in the streets of Chicago being brutalized by cops as the floundering Democratic Party all but handed the country to Nixon.
