John Mill - The Survival of a Counterculture

Originally published in 1981 by University of California Press

Published 2004 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

New material this edition copyright 2004 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2003053341

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data

Berger, Bennett M.

The survival of a counterculture: ideological work and everyday life among rural communards / Bennett M. Berger.

p. cm.

Originally published : Berkeley : University of California Press, c1981.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7658-0805-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Communal livingCaliforniaCase studies. 2. SubcultureCaliforniaCase studies. 3. Social sciencesField work. 4. Ideology. 5. Knowlege, Sociology of. I. Title

HQ971.5.C2B47 2003

307.774dc21

2003053341

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0805-9

Whenever I reread some of the large number of words I have committed to print over the years, I often groan inwardly: I wish I hadnt said that; I should have put this differently; this point needs a qualifier; that point should have been pushed further. If I had this to do over I would have. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Write a lot, in short, make a lot of mistakes. But when Irving Louis Horowitz proposed that Transaction publish a new edition of The Survival of a Counterculture, I reread the old one and, surprise! I liked it. I said what I wanted to say, and said it as fully as I was then capable of. I dont know that I am any more capable now. A new edition of a book for a new generation of readers, though, deserves a new introduction and, invoking an idea explored in the original text, the introduction requires some ideological work to warrant that new edition.

When this volume was first published in 1981, the Hippie phenomenon (and its communal component) had largely waned and the Reagan era had begun. After considering several other titles for the book (e.g., Hippie Country), I called it The Survival of a Counterculture in part because, without fully realizing it, I wanted to call attention to the fact that countercultures, called by different names in each of the periods they erupt, have a long tradition, always a minor tradition but a long one nevertheless. J. Milton Yinger, one scholar of the words history, traces it back at least to the Ranters of seventeenth-century England. It is important to assert this tradition because many popular considerations of the Hippie eruption treated it as a fadone that began inauspiciously (if colorfully), gained some momentum and publicity, then faded as quickly as it appearedits evolution and decline attributed to the prolongation of adolescence, the vagaries of unanchored youth, their temporary concentration in age-ghetto s called schools and universities, the consequent ease of communication among them, and, eventually, the abuse of illegal drugs and the sobering consequences of leaving school and making a life.

It is also important to stress the traditional aspects of countercultures because, like all traditions major and minor, contemporaries pick up some features of the tradition, discard other features and usually add some new wrinkles for their own cultural descendents to pick up, discard, and add to. The Hippies learned a little from the Beats who learned a little from the Tost generation (which Gertrude Stein named and Malcolm Cowley wrote a book about), who learned a little from the early Bohemians, before and after the First World War, who inherited pieces of the tradition from the other Victorians and still other European Dionysiansfrom the once counterculture ghetto in the Schwabing district of Munich to the Left Bank cafs of Paris both before and after the French Revolution. The tradition is still plainly evident in the Latin Quarters of almost every cosmopolitan city in the Western worldand in rural enclaves like the one described in this book. Now waxing, now waning, always colorful, usually marginal, somertimes outcast, countercultures all.

Equally important to its status as a tradition is its status as a minoror minoritytradition. Until the prosperity of the post-World War II period in the United States rapidly expanded the middle classes and unleashed a large cohort of well-educated youth, countercultures usually involved relatively few people, mostly (but far from exclusively) the rebellious heirs of well-to-do, sometimes distinguished, even noble, families who might well be locally embarrassed by their disobedient or otherwise troublesome post-adolescent children, but who were willing to continue supporting them so long as they remained far from the familys home turf. And they were usually (not always) tolerated by governments, even by authoritarian regimes (for example Bismarcks) perhaps because their rebelliousness was less political than cultural, that is, more interested in pushing the limits in art, sex, drugs, dress, and what is today loosely called lifestyle than in basic changes in political power or wealthfrom the perspectives of established authorities, in short, mostly harmless. And in more liberal societies their deviance did not often involve serious legal infractions, so they were not easy to suppress as criminals.

But even when, after WW II, the pool of possible recruits was widely expanded the counterculture never succeeded in attracting more than a small percentage of its potential population, perhaps 8 to 10 percent at the height of its prominenceor notorietybetween 1964 and 1972. But on university campuses of twenty or thirty or forty thousand students even that small percent was able to turn out large numbers of demonstrators on the quad, and still larger numbers, reaching into the several thousands, at rallies and festivals (such as the iconic Woodstock) if one includes hangers-on, part-time and week-end Hippies, and curious sympathizers of one kind or another.

Still, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 by a large margin, and it is almost forgotten today that in 1968 and 1972 Richard Nixon got the bulk of the youth voteeven, especially, when George McGovern was his opponent. Conservative journalists sometimes comment with disdainful amusement on the transformation of the Hippies of the sixties into the Yuppies of the eightiesas if their Hippie days were merely a phase in post-adolescent development before they got their heads on straight. Arguments like these usually boil down to numbershow many?and no one I know of has reliable ones. It may be that some Hippies became Yuppies. But surely it seems more plausible to characterize the bulk of the 40-some-thing Yuppies of the 1980s and 1990s (the stereotype: J. Crew shirts, red suspenders, stock portfolios) not as ex-Hippies but as that majority of 1960s youth who were Nixon voters in their twenties. Another balloon of unearned irony punctured by the prick of probable facts.