The Waves and the Ocean: What is the legacy of the counterculture movement?
Throughout the semester as a student in L&S 25, a Thinking Through Art and Design course that focused on the California Counterculture movement of the late 1960’s, I have been wrestling with a question I believed was central to this course. One Wednesday afternoon, a man named Peter Coyote provided my question with an answer.
Peter Coyote was invited three Wednesdays ago as a guest speaker at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. When I initially saw his name on the agenda as an invited guest, I was slightly taken aback. I was familiar with Peter Coyote, but certainly not for a reputation as a prominent counterculture activist with any anti-establishment background. Coyote has starred in big-budget Hollywood films and even narrated the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. I was intrigued by what he might have to share, but also skeptical; why would a counterculturist go to the mainstream?
Coyote eased my skepticism as he narrated his experience and struggles with living in California communes, a community lifestyle that is completely radical to the “nuclear family” of the modern day. As Coyote ended the biographical aspect of his talk and began sharing his insights into the legacy of the counterculture movement, . In totality, Coyote’s talk was, for me, the most compelling of the year as a student, because in my view it captured the central question of this course.
As a student at UC Berkeley, I study economics, a social science that is analytical and data-driven by nature. I worked in student government and a large student-newspaper for the majority of my four years at Cal. I have worked in large financial service companies, and I am a straight Asian man at a majority Asian student. In many respects, I do not consider myself an anti-institutionalist, and in a larger sense, I think I have spent more time fitting into spaces than countering them. I’ve always been a skeptic of the counterculture movement because when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a “counterculturalist”.
In this sense, the struggle I have had with this course is answering the question: what really is the legacy of the counterculture movement?
Let me lay my question out a little more specifically by providing an anecdote.
As a reporter at The Daily Californian, I got the opportunity to report on the history and legacy of People’s Park. As part of a wave of anti-establishment fervor in and around Berkeley, community members built People’s Park in 1969 at the intersection of Haste and Bowditch streets, without the approval of university administration. For community members, the park would stand as a symbol of free speech and liberalism. University members disagreed, and built a fence around the park, so on May 15, 1969, protesters stormed People’s Park in protest. The Governor of California at the time Ronald Reagan, who had already publicly expressed his contempt for liberal activism on university campuses, eventually declared a state of emergency, and sent in 2,700 National Guard troops to chase off protesters from the park. Today, while ownership of the park has continually been a source of occasionally deadly conflict, since 1996, the UC Board of Regents has had sole ownership of People’s Par, and the park is maintained by the facilities services department in the UC Berkeley Real Estate division.
I provide this anecdote because it is indicative to me of the struggles of the counterculture movement, a movement that seemed to be limited in its impact because it was born outside “the establishment” and ultimately struck down swiftly by the establishment. The issues we discussed that were central to the counterculture movement seemed to be issues we still struggle with today: racism, sexism, LGBT rights, etc. The public guests who attended our lecture were largely older people, from an earlier generation than my own.
I not only what was the legacy of the counterculture movement, but whether it had one at all.
Coyote’s address, though not directed at me personally, challenged my assumption. During his talk, Coyote laid out what I consider was a basic thesis of the legacy of the 1960’s counterculture movement. In reference to the impact of the counterculture movement, Coyote first laid out the an image of the landscape of society by describing it as an ocean. He called the politics, and the slow moving institutions of our society the “frothy, white water” of the ocean: to him, it was largely superficial to treat the political and institutional changes in our country as the entire nature of the country as a whole. On the other hand, Coyote called the social nature of our country the “depths of the ocean”, things that were harder to see from the surface but deeper and fundamental to the country’s nature.
In this sense, Coyote claimed that despite losing its political battles, the counterculture’s movement was lasting cultural impact. Though the counterculture movement lost every political agenda it had aimed to achieve, these were surface-level concerns; Coyote believed ultimately the counterculture movement won the larger cultural agendas it aimed to achieve, and it can be observable by looking at the depths of our country’s ocean.
I want to evaluate this argument to some extent, both in its premise and its conclusion on political and cultural impact, and see what was the lasting impact of the 1960’s counterculture movement, if there is one.
As suggested in the history of People’s Park, the political victories of People’s Park were few and far in between, with limited impact. Ultimately. the political blowback from the counterculture movement dramatically tempered the potential entrenchment of the counterculture movement. As previously noted, the major political victories that counterculture activists were able to achieve varied in their impact.
As Coyote suggested, many Americans, especially those not directly exposed to counterculture activists, perceived the counterculture movement as rebellious, branding counterculture activists as fringe, radical outsiders. A backlash of political conservatism ensued. The Reagan Administration and ideologically-countered Conservative Movement of the 1970’s rallied around the spirit of traditional values, passed a series of tax reforms, defense spending, welfare cuts, and pushed social agendas in direct opposition to counterculture liberalism. IN 1971, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell felt compelled to assert, in a memo now known as the Powell Memorandum, that the “American economic system is under broad attack” and that businesses had to mobilize for political combat, entrenching financial institutions as a financial power in American government. Conservatism channeled ideology into action through identity activation in opposition to “hippie” culture, and it transformed the structure of politics for decades to follow.
That is not to say that there were not political victories for the counterculture movement. As the 1960s progressed, widespread social tension developed concerning a variety of anti-establishment sentiment for a variety of issues, including human sexuality, women’s rights, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. The counterculture movement of the 1960’s was born out of a confluence of this sentiment, and the issues raised during this time are still being voiced to this day. Social rights advocacy of gender rights and environmental activism became louder, more organized, and more sustained in politics. Two political movements central to the counterculture era. the Civil Rights Movement and protests of the Vietnam War, ultimately ended in political victories to varying degrees, with the Johnson Administration’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the U.S. government’s withdrawal of armed forces from Vietnam. Professor Leigh Raiford acknowledged the success of photographers of the counterculture movement as integral to the success of these victories as well by documenting protests and political activist.
But even so, the political victories that the counterculture movement was able to achieve seem to be somewhat limited in their scope. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation passed under the Johnson Administration that hoped to address racial inequity, hardly ended the issues born out of the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow Era — racial segregation under state governments did not end immediately, and the impact of racial discrimination still exists today. In this respect, the most lasting political change of the counterculture movement may just be polarizing culture politics, instead of addressing the concerns raised in the counterculture movement through political action.
The second prong of Coyote’s thesis is that the counterculture movement achieved lasting impact in terms of successfully achieving its cultural agendas. In this sense, Coyote’s argument seems to hold some weight.
The counterculture movement is certainly entrenched in art. For example, drug use was a major subculture of the 1960s — the use of LSD was extolled as a symbol for mysticism and religious enlightenment, and advocates complimented it as a method of raising the consciousness of its users. Psychedelics became an identity central to many public personalities and were effectively historicized by the most prominent musicians of the 60s, including Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Music of the 1960s moved towards an electric, psychedelic version of rock, and legacy of this shift can still be heard even in modern-day electronic dance music or rap.
The sexual revolution was another social movement that was born out of the counterculture movement. It challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world, including increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships, use of contraception and legalized abortion, and advocacy for homosexual rights. In many senses, this effort has been largely successful, as modern generations and governments move towards greater tolerance for LGBT rights. Counterculture “hippies” were also likely to embrace Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, or other spiritual identities, and the increasing religious diversity of this country in the modern day is a product that that divergence
Overall, even as counterculture activists grew out of the 1960’s and moderated their lives and their views, the counterculture was still largely absorbed by the mainstream, leaving a lasting impact on philosophy, music, art, fashion, and even lifestyles.
Overall, Coyote’s thesis compelled me and largely convinced me; I do think the counterculture movement, while losing its political agendas, had lasting social impact. However, I disagree with him on one part.
I disagree that this was an achievement. To me, true social change goes hand in hand with institutional change. For Coyote, the counterculture achieved impact because of social change. For me, the counterculture movement achieved impact despite no political change.
