Hippies had German hiking ancestors called the Wandervogel
Long before Haight-Ashbury, young Germans of the 1890s rejected stuffy clubs and city life for folk songs, loose clothing and camping; they called themselves Wandervogel, wandering birds. Emigrants carried that back-to-nature ethos to America, opening early health food stores. Six decades later a San Francisco journalist gave its descendants a name: hippies.
The word descends from hip, meaning in the know, whose origin nobody has pinned down. It shows up in a 1902 cartoon and a 1904 novel; Harry Gibson coined hipster in 1944, and hip and hepcat were Harlem jazz slang in the 1940s. Norman Mailer used hippies in The Village Voice in 1961. On the West Coast, journalist Michael Fallon applied it in September 1965 to a new wave of beatniks gathering at the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse in Haight-Ashbury.
The movement drew mostly white Americans aged 15 to 25 and inherited dissent from the Beat Generation; Allen Ginsberg crossed straight over. Alongside the New Left and the civil rights movement, it formed one of the three strands of 1960s counterculture. Its style was communes, vegetarian food, long beards, psychedelic colour, Eastern philosophy, opposition to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, and a gentle creed of peace, love and personal freedom. Some used marijuana and LSD to explore consciousness; others went back to the land or trekked the hippie trail. Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, with Neal Cassady driving a bus named Furthur, carried the mood across the country in 1964.
Time magazine in July 1967 traced its roots far back, to India's world-renouncing sadhus and to Diogenes and the Cynics, and listed influences from the Buddha and Jesus to Thoreau, Gandhi and Tolkien. The ethos spread to Britain, Europe, Australia, Japan and Brazil, shaping the Beatles, who in turn shaped their American admirers.
Critics note that affluence made rebellion affordable. Most hippies came from upper-middle-class homes in rich countries during an unprecedented boom, so they could drop out and later rejoin the mainstream in the 1980s with few career costs. They favoured personal expression over organised politics, in effect turning left-wing ideas into a look and a lifestyle. Many became academics, musicians, spiritual teachers, politicians and entrepreneurs. Campus protest and student self-government owe something to them, while their aesthetic was commercialised as part of yuppie culture.
Source: Hippie
