The Impact of the Hippie Counterculture of the 1960sThe Impact of the Hippie Counterculture of the 1960sThe Impact of the Hippie Counterculture of the 1960sThe “hippies” of the 1960s had many effects on the American society. The visual appearance and lifestyle of the hippies were in sharp contrast to the conservative nature of the older generation, which defined them as a counterculture. The hippie lifestyle was based on free love, rock music, shared property, and drug experimentation. They introduced a new perspective on drugs, freedom of expression, appearance, music, attitudes toward work, and held a much more liberal political view than mainstream society.
One of the main effects that the hippies made is the appearance of the American society. The hippies wore bell bottom jeans and bright colored shirts usually tie-dyed. They wore out their clothes and when a hole occurred they would just patch it up to show that they were not materialistic and preferred living off the land. Both men and women had long hair, and the men usually had fuller beards. Most of their clothing was self-made to protest against the American society’s materialistic values and their clothes showed their laid back or casual lifestyle. Many of the music artists that they admired determined what the counterculture would wear and listen to.
The hippie movement had a new and different preference in music called rock �n’ roll. Rock �n’ roll is a type of music that evolved from earlier jazz music. This type of music took countercultural topics such as peace and drug use and put it into lyrical form. This music idealized and encouraged the use of drugs to promote free thought and artistic expression. Be-ins were a large part of the hippie lifestyle which were rock music festivals that were held in public places and outdoors. One of the largest and most known 1960s rock concerts started on August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. The promoters of Woodstock expected around two hundred thousand people at the most to show up but an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand people attended. These people camped out for three days in the rain near Bethel, New York on a six hundred acre piece of muddy farmland. These concert goers enjoyed no rules, drug use, sex, and loud rock music. Some of the best known artists from this concert were; Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones, Sly & the Family Stone, and Jefferson Airplane.
Another one of the main parts of the hippie counterculture lifestyle was drug use. LSD and marijuana were the drugs most frequently used by the hippies in the 1960s. These drugs drew thousands to the hippie lifestyle and to their beliefs. Drugs were used to escape the traditional values of American society, and to see deeper into ones self. Timothy Leary, a psychologist at Harvard, is known for his experimentations with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Leary would encourage his students and fellow faculty members to go on these psychedelic trips while he recorded their responses to the drugs. In 1966 LSD was made illegal in California then later in 1967 the Federal Government banned it in the United States. Even thought the drug was illegal it didn’t stop the hippies from using it. Many of these drug users died of overdosing, two of the most well known were
hippies named R. L. Mee and W. K. Wiebele. According to historian James E. Mee, W. Wiebele was a Jewish writer, musician and philanthropist, whose work influenced other New World intellectuals who took part in the antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s. For years, Wiebele was an underground antiwar activist and writer. In 1963 his book “An American’s Story” became a major movie film, with many famous voices, writers and artists speaking on it. Wiebele went on to become one of America’s major writers for many years, and he had other novels published and even published his own poems. He was in many ways the greatest American poet in history, a true hero, hero, hero. On the American political campaign, Wiebele helped create a movement to fight a major war and defeat another. It helped that he became a man, a political revolution, an advocate for a democracy, and a man of immense courage, strength, and determination in the face of the war, and by his actions and personal experiences his influence on the political outcome of the Civil Rights movement and the United States elections of 1960. He was one of several major figures of the American resistance movements during the 1960s; he helped to organize a movement against the invasion of Vietnam, and he led the march to a national convention and a campaign to repeal the Patriot Act. It was in America during that time that LSD was invented, in the 1960s, and in 1969 this began to be the first real scientific study. There is the possibility that there have been more or less successful chemical tests of psychedelic drugs by scientists since these first reports. But it should be noted that these tests are very highly controlled. From the day when LSD was made and many of the early tests were performed it was unknown how well they could be controlled. It is known as “sodomuscular stimulation by the brain,” and although it was unknown as to the nature of the psychoactive properties of the substances it was believed that it might be useful for some psychiatric purposes or possibly for psychiatric emergencies. In the early 1970s there was a lot of discussion about how the use of psychedelic drugs could be controlled; the scientists at the University of Toronto took a very good view of this subject, and did their best to find possible cures. The Canadian scientists were able to find little evidence of any kind of long-term neurochemical problems, or the possibility that they could possibly use these substances to treat a mental disorder with one. Their idea for using this substance in the laboratory, it looks more logical, seemed to be for the possibility that they could make them more addictive and make them less effective. In 1971, they performed a little experiment designed to show that LSD could cause a psychotic reaction. After doing this the researchers could see the effects they had and how this could reduce one’s ego. They thought that having the drugs do this could be taken out of the body for a while, this could be worked into something even better if it was the case that these drugs did make some of the people feel better later. This experiment lasted until almost eight the next year. The last of this test, in this case to investigate the effects of LSD on children and children of high risk people, would have produced about 300 results, mostly from young people living in rural areas throughout the country. This