In March, the city's Health Director, Dr. Ellis Sox, sent a task force of inspectors on a door-to-door sweep of the Haight-Ashbury. Reports of as many as 200 people living in one house or 50 in one apartment had stirred rumors of impending epidemics in the neighborhood. In a two-day blitz, eight teams of inspectors checked roughtly 1,400 buildings and issued a total of 65 deadline notices to repair sanitation faults. But only 16 of the 65 notices, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, were issued to occupants "whose bizarre dress and communal living habits could class them as hippies."
Dr. Sox had no choice but to back off. "The situation is not as bad as we thought," he said. "There has been a deterioration [of sanitation] in the Haight-Ashbury, but the hippies did not contribute much more to it than other members of the neighborhood." Dr. Sox went on to deny that his mass inspection was part of a general campaign against weirdos, but nobody seemed to believe him.
The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, a nonhippy group of permanent residents, denounced Dr. Sox for his "gratuitous criticism of our community." The council accused city officials of "creating an artificial problem" and harassing the hippies out of "personal and official" prejudice.
As recently as 1962, the Haight-Ashbury was a drab, working-class district, slowly filling with Negroes and so plagued by crime and violence that residents formed vigilante patrols. Housewives were mugged on the way to the grocery store, teenagers were slashed and stomped in gang rumbles, and every drunk on Haight Street was fair game for local jack-rollers.
Now, with the coming of the drug culture, even the squarest of the neighborhood old-timers say the streets are safer than they have been for years. Burglaries are still a problem but violence is increasingly rare. It is hard to find anyone outside the hippy community who will say that psychedelic drugs have made the neighborhood a better place to live. But it's even harder to find a person who wouldn't rather step over a giggling freak on the sidewalk than worry about hoodlums with switch-blades. The fact that the hippies and the squares have worked out such a peaceful coexistence seems to baffle the powers at City Hall.
A lot of cheap labels describe what is happening in the Hashbury, but none make much sense: the Love Generation, the Happening Generation, the Combine Generation and even the LSD Generation. The last is the best of the lot, but in the interest of accuracy it should probably be amended to the Head Generation.
A "head," in the language of hip, is a user of psychedelic drugs: LSD, marijuana ("grass"), mescaline, peyote, methedrine, benzedrine, and a half-dozen others that are classified in the trade as mind-stimulating, consciousness-expanding, or "head" drugs. At the other end of the spectrum are "body" drugs: opium, heroin, barbiturates and even alcohol. These are basically depressants, while head drugs are stimulants. But neither type comes with a manufacturer's guarantee, and the Hashbury is full of people whose minds have been jerked around savagely by drugs that were supposed to induce peaceful euphoria.
Another hazard is the widespread tendency to mix two or three drugs at one time. Acid and alcohol can be a lethal combination, causing fits of violence, suicidal depression and a general freak-out that ends in jail or a hospital.
There is widespread concern, at least in San Francisco, about the dangers of so many people using so much LSD. A doctor at San Francisco General Hospital says there are at least 10,000 hippies in the Haight-Ashbury, and that about four of them a day wind up in a psychiatric ward on bad trips. He estimates that acidheads make up only 1½ per cent of the city's population, but that the figure for the Haight-Ashbury is more like 100 per cent.
The estimate is absurd; if every hippy in the Hashbury took acid every day, the percentage of users in the neighborhood would still be less than 50 per cent. Many of the local squares try grass from time to time, but few have worked up an appetite for LSD; the difference in potency is roughly the same as the difference between beer and grain alcohol. Even among hippies, anything more than one dose of acid a week is considered excessive.
Most heads are relatively careful about their drug diets, but in recent months the area has attracted so many young, inexperienced hippies that public freak-outs are a fairly routine thing. Neighborhood cops complain that acidheads throw themselves in front of moving cars, strip naked in grocery stores and run through plate-glass windows. On weekdays, the action is about on a par with Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, but weekend hippies and nervous voyeurs from the suburbs make Saturdays and Sundays a nightmarish traffic jam. The sidewalks are so crowded that even a mild freak-out is likely to cause a riot.
Municipal buses no longer use Haight Street on weekends; they were rerouted after mobs of hippies staged sit-down strikes in the street, called mill-ins, which brought all traffic to a standstill. The only buses still running regularly along Haight Street are those from the Gray Line, which recently added "Hippieland" to its daytime sightseeing tour of San Francisco. It was billed as "the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States" and was an immediate hit with tourists who thought the Haight-Ashbury was a human zoo. The only sour note on the tour was struck by the occasional hippy who would run alongside the bus, holding up a mirror.
Last year in Berkeley, hard-core political radicals who had always viewed hippies as spiritual allies began to worry about the long-range implications of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Students who once were angry activists were content to live back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke -- or, worse, to dress like clowns or American Indians and stay zonked for days at a time on LSD.
Even in Berkeley, political rallies during 1966 had overtones of music, madness and absurdity. Instead of picket signs and revolutionary slogans, more and more demonstrators carried flowers, balloons and colorful posters featuring slogans from Dr. Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid. The drug culture was spreading faster than political activists realized. Unlike the dedicated radicals who emerged from the Free Speech Movement, the hippies were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in changing it. They were generally younger than the political types, and the press dismissed them as the "pot left," a frivolous gang of druggies and sex kooks who were only along for the ride.
Then Ronald Reagan was elected Governor by almost a million-vote plurality. Shortly afterward, Clark Kerr was fired as president of the University of California -- a direct result of Reagan's victory. In that same November, the G.O.P. gained 50 seats in Congress and served a clear warning on the Johnson Administration that despite all the headlines about Berkeley and the New Left, most of the electorate was a lot more hawkish, hard-nosed and conservative than the White House antennae had indicated.
The lesson was not lost on the hippies, many of whom still considered themselves at least part-time political activists. One of the most obvious casualities of the 1966 elections was the New Left's illusion of its own leverage. The radical-hippy alliance had been counting on the voters to repudiate the "right-wing, warmonger" elements in Congress, but instead it was the "liberal" Democrats who got stomped.
So it is no coincidence that the Haight-Ashbury scene developed very suddenly in the winter of 1966-1967 from the quiet, neo-Bohemian enclave that it had been for four or five years to the crowded, defiant dope fortress that it is today. The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election returns as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms.
There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move -- either figuratively or literally -- from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope, from the hangups of protest to the peaceful disengagement of love, nature and spontaneity.
The credo of the Haight-Ashbury was expressed, about as well as it can be, by Joyce Francisco, 23-year-old advertising manager of the new hippy newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. She was talking a few months ago to a columnist from the establishme
nt press, trying to explain what the hippy phenomenon meant: "I love the whole world," she said. "I am the divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything."
"How do you live?" the columnist asked.
"From meal to meal. I have no money, no possessions. Money is beautiful only when it's flowing; when it piles up it's a hang-up. We take care of each other. There's always something to buy beans and rice for the group, and someone always sees that I get grass or acid. I was in a mental hospital once because I tried to conform and play the game. But now I'm free and happy."
Next question: "Do you use drugs often?"
"Fairly. When I find myself becoming confused I drop out and take a dose of acid. It's a short cut to reality; it throws you right into it. Everyone should take it, even children. Why shouldn't they be enlightened early, instead of waiting till they're old? Human beings need total freedom. That's where God is at. We need to shed hypocrisy, dishonesty, phoniness and go back to the purity of our childhood values."
The columnist then asked if Miss Francisco ever prayed.
"Oh, yes," she said. "I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others. I never pray for anything; I don't need anything. Whatever turns me on is a sacrament: LSD, sex, my bells, my colors. . . that is the holy communion, you dig?"
The columnist wasn't sure if she did or not, but she passed on the interview for the benefit of those readers who might. Many did. Anyone who thinks all the hippies in the Bay Area are living in the Hashbury might just as well leave his head in the sand.
In normal circumstances, the mushrooming popularity of psychedelics would be a main factor in any article on hippies. But the vicious excesses of our drug laws make it impossible, or at least inhuman, to document the larger story. A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.
Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt; it is also a potential betrayal of people whose only "crime" is the smoking of a weed that grows wild all over the world but the possession of which, in California, carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison for a second offense and a minimum of five years for a third. So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads -- just as many journalists were hard drinkers during Prohibition -- it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.
If I were to write, for instance, that I recently spent 10 days in San Francisco and was stoned almost constantly. . . that in fact I was stoned for nine nights out of 10 and that nearly everyone I dealt with smoked marijuana as casually as they drank beer. . . and if I said many of the people I talked to were not freaks and dropouts, but competent professionals with bank accounts and spotless reputations. . . and that I was amazed to find psychedelic drugs in homes where I would never have mentioned them two years ago -- if all this were true, I could write an ominous screed to the effect that the hippy phenomenon in the Haight-Ashbury is little more than a freak show and a soft-sell advertisement for what is happening all around them. . . that drugs, orgies and freak-outs are almost as common to a much larger and more discreet cross section of the Bay Area's respectable, upward-mobile society as they are to the colorful drop-outs of San Francisco's new Bohemia.
There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable heads who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.
And these-- for the moment, at least-- are the young lotus-eaters, the barefoot mystics and hairy freaks of the Haight-Ashbury -- all those primitive Christians, peaceful nay-sayers and half-deluded "flower children" who refuse to participate in a society which looks to them like a mean, calculated and soul-destroying hoax.
As recently as two years ago, many of the best and brightest of them were passionately involved in the realities of political, social and economic life in America. But the scene has changed since then and political activism is going out of style. The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been -- perhaps should have been -- and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms.
The flourishing hippy scene is a matter of desperate concern to the political activists. They see a whole generation of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept almost anything as long as it comes with enough "soma."
Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a legion of young radicals who know they have lost their influence but have no clear idea how to get it back again. "This alliance between hippies and political radicals is bound to break up," he said in, a recent letter. "There's just too big a jump from the slogan of 'Flower Power' to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it."
Decanio spent three months in various Bay Area jails as a result of his civil rights activities and now he is lying low for a while, waiting for an opening. "I'm spending an amazing amount of time studying," he wrote. "It's mainly because I'm scared; three months on the bottom of humanity's trash heap got to me worse than it's healthy to admit. The country is going to hell, the left is going to pot, but not me. I still want to figure out a way to win."
Meanwhile, like most other disappointed radicals, he is grimly amused at the impact the hippies are having on the establishment. The panic among San Francisco officialdom at the prospect of 200,000 hippies flocking into the Hashbury this summer is one of the few things that ex-Berkeley radicals can still laugh at. Decanio's vision of the crisis was not written as prophecy, but considering the hidden reality of the situation, it may turn out that way: "I can see Mayor Shelley standing on the steps of the Civic Center and shouting into TV microphones, 'The people cry bread! Bread! Let them turn on!' "
The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967
When the Beatniks Were Social Lions
San Francisco.
What ever happened to the Beat Generation? The question wouldn't mean much in Detroit or Salt Lake City, perhaps, but here it brings back a lot of memories. As recently as 1960, San Francisco was the capital of the Beat Generation, and the corner of Grant and Columbus in the section known as North Beach was the crossroads of the "beat" world.
It was a good time to be in San Francisco. Anybody with half a talent could wander around North Beach and pass himself off as a "comer" in the new era. I know, because I was doing it, and so was a fellow we'll have to call Willard, the hulking, bearded son of a New Jersey minister. It was a time for breaking loose from the old codes, for digging new sounds and new ideas, and for doing everything possible to unnerve the Establishment.
Since then, things have died down. The "beatnik" is no longer a social lion in San Francisco, but a social leper; as a matter of fact, it looked for a while as if they had all left. But the city was recently startled by a "rent strike" in North Beach and as it turned out, lo and behold, the strikers were "beatniks." The local papers, which once played Beat Generation stories as if the foundations of The System were crumbling before their very eyes, seized on the rent strike with strange affection -- like a man encountering an old friend who owes him money, but whom he is glad to see anyway.
The rent strike lasted only about two days, but it got people talk
ing again about the Beat Generation and its sudden demise from the American scene -- or at least from the San Francisco scene, because it is still very extant in New York. But in New York it goes by a different name, and all the humor has gone out of it.
One of the most surprising things about the rent strike was the fact that so few people in San Francisco had any idea what the Beat Generation was. An interviewer from a radio station went into the streets seeking controversy on "the return of the beatniks," but drew a blank. People remembered the term, and not much more.
But the Beat Generation was very real in its day, and it has a definite place in our history. There is a mountain of material explaining the sociological aspects of the thing, but most of it is dated and irrelevant. What remains are the people who were involved; most of them are still around, looking back with humor and affection on the uproar they caused, and drifting by a variety of routes toward debt, parenthood, and middle age.
My involvement was tangential at best. But Willard was in there at the axis of things, and in retrospect he stands out as one of the great "beatniks" of his time. Certainly San Francisco has good cause to remember him; his one and only encounter with the forces of law and order provided one of the wildest Beat Generation stories of the era.
Before San Francisco he had been in Germany, teaching English and cultivating an oriental-type beard. On his way out to the coast he stopped in New York and picked up a mistress with a new Ford. It was de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. "Willard is a great man," said the letter. "He is an artist and a man of taste."