Leon Botstein, president, Bard College: The Summer of Love passed me by. Having been a premature adult, I was not a candidate to be a hippie. As an immigrant, I was not inclined to drop out. With an internship as an urban fellow in New York City Mayor John Lindsay's administration, I thought I could substitute a contribution to resolving the urban crisis for involvement in Vietnam, a war I, like so many others, opposed. What those turbulent years did is to lead me first into public service before I embarked on my career in music.
We asked college faculty members and administrators to share their memories and reflections about where they were 40 years ago during the Summer of Love, 1967. Some were flying their freak flags; others were flying missions over Vietnam. Some said they felt part of a pivotal historical moment; others were just trying to survive lousy summer jobs. Deeply felt politics mingled with casually observed spectacle. It was light-years ago. And it was just yesterday. ...
Theodore Roszak, emeritus professor of history, California State University-East Bay: Maybe it was an advantage that I was 5,000 miles away when the Summer of Love happened. I had taken a leave from my teaching job and was living in London, editing a small pacifist journal and working on a series of articles for The Nation dealing with campus protest. The articles would eventually become a book titled The Making of a Counter Culture. That title emerged in large measure from the reports that were arriving in England from the streets of San Francisco, a bemused journalistic chronicle of young Americans experimenting with a zany lifestyle that might not outlast the summer, but which certainly made a blazing statement of dissent. From that distance, I had little to work from except sardonic commentary in the British press and sensational images of blissed-out youth cavorting in Golden Gate Park.
The coverage that came my way typified the European fascination with wild and wacky California. But by then I was convinced there was more to these matters than sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Not that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll didn't matter. They were the most forceful expression of the statement. But could that statement be given a more accessible philosophical translation? That was the task I set myself, giving my attention mainly to a group of influential thinkers (among them Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, Norman Brown, Paul Goodman, and Alan Watts) who were raising significant questions about the dominant reality principle of the modern world.
Remember, this was the era when, on both sides of the cold war, science and technology had signed on with the military-industrial complex, leaving the world to wonder how soon the missiles would fly and the sky catch fire; "mad rationality," as Lewis Mumford so aptly put it.
What I sensed beneath the surface of youthful dissent was the spontaneous emergence of a subterranean tradition that reached back to the early days of industrial revolution, a "cry of the heart" first voiced by romantic poets and artists against the "dark, Satanic mills" that were desiccating the human spirit and the natural world. A counter culture. That's what I saw in the ebullience of Haight-Ashbury for that one brief interval in 1967. It didn't last long, but it didn't have to. The lines had been drawn and the issue joined. ...
Michael Kazin, professor of history, Georgetown University: Having completed my first year in college, I imagined I was living in the springtime of the revolution. So naturally I spent the summer of 67 trying to nurture its buds. I attended my first convention of Students for a Democratic Society, in Ann Arbor, where network TV filmed our debates about how to stop the draft — and the national leaders all dropped LSD. Then I took a job in the SDS regional office in New York City, soaking up what passed for wisdom from people like Mark Rudd and Dave Gilbert, who, two years later, would be founders of Weatherman. We sponsored a talk by the SNCC firebrand H. Rap Brown and a conference of student radicals from Europe. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution?, which proclaimed guerilla war as the salvation of the third world.
But politics didn't take up all that many evenings. I went to smoke-ins in Tompkins Square Park, heard the Fugs play at a tiny theater nearby where my girlfriend sold tickets. Sometime in August, she and I spent a long, tense day at Jones Beach, quarreled that evening, and broke up the next morning. But I was just 19, healthy, and headed back to Harvard. Everything mattered, which was fine by me....
David Horowitz, writer and conservative activist: I missed the Summer of Love. I was living in a two-room basement flat near Hampstead Heath in normally dank and dreary London. I don't remember anyone holding a Summer of Love in London — it was probably too cold. I probably wouldn't have participated if they did. I had three kids in a nuclear family and had never been high. I was a fairly humorless Marxist and would not hear a live electric guitar until the following year, when I moved back to Berkeley (I still remember the band's name, Purple Earthquake — I loved it). I worked for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and facilitated a meeting between Lord Russell and Joan Baez, which was somewhat problematic since neither of them had the foggiest idea who the other was. I organized and wrote manifestos for the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a little "vanguard" opposing the Vietnam War. Of course, as with every other leftist antiwar vanguard, our "solidarity" was with the Communists, not the Vietnamese, and we were not against war, just America's wars. When I wasn't plotting revolution, I was finishing a book called Empire and Revolution (seriously) and trying to figure out how I was going to get back home.
James Wright, president, Dartmouth College: It is hard to remember 1967 as the "Summer of Love." Although a student, I was a long way from San Francisco or Monterey. Married with three children, the youngest of whom was three years old, I was pursuing my doctorate in American history from the University of Wisconsin, working with the great Western historian Allan Bogue. I was just beginning my dissertation research on populism, and that summer, I piled the whole family into our old Chevy station wagon — which was not air-conditioned, of course — and drove from Madison to Boulder, taking the slow route through the Dakotas. The AM car radio played Otis Redding, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, as well as, given where we were, Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline. And we followed updates on the Six Day War.
In Boulder we spent the summer in a house on 13th Street across from Beach Park, a gathering place for University of Colorado students and the counterculture. We could catch the whiff of marijuana and listen to the music. I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. I worked in the libraries all day, but in the evenings we watched on television with horror the race riots in Detroit, Newark, Washington, and elsewhere. Public opinion on the Vietnam War had begun to turn extremely negative, and I joined in that opposition. Just a few years earlier I had served in the Marines myself, and so I sympathized with the young troops in Vietnam who had been given an impossible assignment. It was not really a summer of love....
The Summer of Love was a turning point away from politics toward a mysticism, drug culture, and anti-intellectualism that ultimately made a mockery of disciplined thought and discouraged the appreciation of and engagement with science. After 1970, when I became president of Franconia College, at the age of 23, a spirit of wild-eyed utopianism flourished in the context of a rage among young people toward the war, inequality, and injustice that increasingly was turned outward at older adults and inward with more than an edge of personal pain.
One ought to remember that era without nostalgia and with the recollection that as the energy and organization of the 60s descended into violence and escapism, a reaction was brewing that turned the anti-intellectualism of the left into the equally anti-intellectual moral absolutism of today's neoconservatism. Radical as that era seems in retrospect, it has been more than matched by the disasters wreaked by the extreme right.
If the revival of religion in public life and the intolerance of reasoned critical debate are legacies of reactionary conservatism, then the fundamental reshaping of the role of women in politics and the workplace and the slow but marked improvements in majority attitudes toward minorities are the positive residues of the 60s. The hammer blow of reaction against the perception of moral collapse, however, has done more damage than the late 60s and early 70s ever did. No matter one's political beliefs, one familiar quip from from that time is worth remembering. If one were forced to choose between simplistic extremes, I'd rather live with fellow citizens who, in a free society, would choose love over war.
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