A group of 20-somethings is performing "Hair" in Arlington, Massachusetts. I was invited to talk to them about the 1960's, to help them understand their characters and the time. I told them a very personal story that I'd never told anyone before – it's below the fold with links to pictures. I tried to get the factual details as accurate as possible, given conflicting accounts. Your mileage may vary on the subjective stuff.
I'm going to send the cast a link to this diary, so I encourage you to post your own stories or thoughts as comments. I left out a lot of important stuff (including the political assassinations & the civil rights struggle), since I had only 15 minutes. Perhaps the most significant thing I left out was the sense of hope in 1968 (at least in my & my wife's memories) that despite all of the ugliness, love & peace would prevail. Eventually they did, sort of, for a while, but there was a lot more ugliness first.
Finally, I encourage those living near to consider attending this show. From the rehearsal that I saw, they've captured the craziness & passion of the time. If anyone wants to contact me directly on this topic, feel free to email Hair@aranfell.com .
TheMeansAreTheEnd (formerly posting as Aranfell)
The war with Vietnam officially began the day I was born: November 1, 1955. We'd had "advisers" there since 1950. In the early 60’s, Kennedy drafted a lot more “advisers.” I remember asking my Mom – I must have been in 1st grade – if I’d have to fight in the war when I grew up. She assured me the war wouldn’t still be going on, but I turned 18 a year and a half before the end of the war and just four months after the last draftee was inducted. If the draft had continued, I would have been taken, since I was 1-A and my birthday lottery number was 47.
Going to college wouldn't have helped me – they’d ended the student deferment in 1971. That kept my middle brother out of the war, but his lottery number was 29, so if he had dropped out or flunked out, he would have been taken immediately. My oldest brother was 21 in 1968 – that was before they used lottery numbers. Unlike his younger brothers, he was a Flower Child – and he was drafted.
Before telling that story, I want to talk about attitudes. My older son is 27 and when he was in elementary school, he'd sometimes come home and say “my teacher said that we’re the worst class she ever had!” I've heard that the messages to children are much more positive now, but when my brothers & I were young, adults said that we were “the future of the nation”. Is it any wonder that my generation thought we were hot stuff? And there were so many of us!
We grew up in a time of unparalleled middle class prosperity and consumer culture. Much of my generation rejected the materialistic values of the America we saw around us. We even told our parents so, and boy did that cause conflicts! We knew that the values that mattered were spiritual ones. And the most important spiritual value of all is love, in all its forms: peace, friendship, and feeling one with the entire world.
So of course the Flower Children rejected the sexual mores of the older generation. “Making love” was good by definition, as was enjoying life: “if it feels good, do it!" They also condemned the sexual double standards and hypocrisy of the older generations. There had always been pre-marital sex, but in earlier generations it was something that could not be admitted openly. A girl who was thought “fast” was shunned, and a girl who got pregnant generally had just three choices: instant marriage, a back-alley abortion, or bear the child in secret & give it up, whether she wanted to or not. The introduction of the pill in 1960 did a lot to even out sexual roles.
Another important goal was to be natural. Hair was a big part of this, of course. Older generation hair styles were rigidly controlled – every hair glued or permed in place. We thought that natural hair was beautiful. My wife still wears her hair below her waist – in high school she wore it nearly to her knees. We also thought that expressing your real feelings was natural and right: our saying was “let it all hang out”. That went along with “tell it like it is”: don’t use polite hypocrisy – say what you really mean.
Drugs were another area where the Flower Children condemned the hypocrisy of the older generation. Back then it was socially acceptable to come home from the office & drink martinis – you could get smashed before dinner. Women could get their doctors to prescribe tranquilizers, and everyone seemed to smoke cigarettes. So the Flower Children didn’t see anything wrong with drugs, and neither did adults – if it was their own drugs! Has that really changed?
In some ways it was a more innocent time. We didn’t know about drug gang warfare & organized crime. I don’t think it even went on the same way then. Nor did we know about the long term effects of some of the drugs. What the Flower Children did know was that drugs were fun, and that some could really expand your mind. Through the psycho-active drugs, they could experience that one-ness with the universe that was a key spiritual goal.
Clothing also expressed their goals. Of course the Flower Children wore lots of different kinds of things. For my generation, it was all about individuality, or as we said, “do your own thing”. I remember my brother wearing love beads and embroidered cotton shirts in ethnic patterns. Clothing could be a reference to spiritual experiences or to cultures that valued spiritual things. The Flower Children admired Eastern mysticism, astrology and the beliefs of native peoples. I made a beaded headband in 1969 as my interpretation of plains Indian culture (we still called them Indians).
By contrast, here’s what men's office dress looked like in the 50’s. They didn’t dress so similarly because they were boring. They did it because it was a uniform. Clothing defined who you were and how you fit in with those around you, and the older generation valued conformity.
Here’s what women’s underwear looked like in the 50’s. My wife assures me that the points on that bra are real, not an exaggeration, and look at that girdle! This was office and casual wear, not just fashion wear. Many women even wore bras to bed.The Flower Children rejected all that. Many women who could did without bras entirely. When they did wear bras, it was for comfort, not to contort their bodies into an artificial shape.
The Flower Children's attitude toward nudity was similar. They felt that the natural human body was beautiful. Nudity was an expression of that – and it was about freedom and sensuality, not sex. (I admit, I didn't completely believe that until I tried social nudity for myself, much later.) Here's a picture that to older people looked like hedonism and promiscuity. To me, it looks like a lot of unclothed people doing exactly what they'd be doing if they were fully dressed.
Nudity was also a rejection of the mores of the older generation, for whom the ultimate expression of an embarrassing situation was to be “caught with your pants down”. There’s even a case where two Flower Children who were being arrested stripped naked, as a non-violent protest to disturb and offend the establishment types.
Now back my brother. In 1968-69 we lived in Germany – our Dad was an engineer working for the Air Force. I was in Junior High. My brother was traveling around Europe with a woman, and I don't know how to explain how shocking that was at the time. Then his draft notice arrived. At first he thought that if it was never delivered to him, he wasn’t drafted, so he kept moving around. Then he learned that an international arrest warrant was being prepared for him.
My brother decided to turn himself in and accept induction – and I wonder now what role our Dad had in that decision. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went down a lot like the scene in Hair. Our Dad had fought in WW2, so he’s part of the generation that saved the world for democracy – really! In that time, it was expected that when your nation called, you served. And of course the older generation mostly saw Vietnam the same way – it was billed as a war to save the world from communism. If we let just one country fall to communism, all those around will fall like dominoes, including Australia. It's crazy, but people believed it, or at least didn't question it. Does that sound familiar?
I’ve seen WW2 training videos about how basic training had the goal of molding individuals into teams that would set aside their own interests to serve the needs of the group. From what my brother later told me, basic training for Vietnam was very different. He described how the recruits were set to fight each other in the evenings, with rows of ambulances waiting to haul away the losers.
My brother signed his letters “Peace, love, dove”. How could a guy like that survive in such a brutal environment? The answer is that he had a nervous breakdown during basic training. The army doctors who treated him told him that he would be posted to Germany – he’d be near his family. When he recovered, he learned that it was a lie – he was being posted to Vietnam.
So he ran. He got money from some friends and made it to Sweden, where he lived out the war in relative safety. Even there, there were plenty of people who, as he put it, could look at a drunken derelict who didn’t wipe when he used the toilet and say “cute”, but who would look at someone like him and say “dirty hippie”.
DON’T underestimate the hostility that the Flower Children faced, both verbal and physical. There’s a reason why they called the police “pigs” – as they saw it, the establishment used the police to repress undesirables, including the poor, minorities – and Flower Children. And that’s just for being who they were – some of the peace protests got very ugly. Have you heard of Kent State? But that was later.
Don’t think that the hostility was just from the older generation. I remember being amused in 6th grade by a cartoon that equated peace signs to chicken tracks. I had plenty of peers who called peace protestors cowards & traitors – does that sound familiar? I don’t know how I expressed all of this, but my Dad took me aside one day & said two things. First, he said "never forget that he’s your brother." The unsaid part was “I never forget that he’s my son.” It’s not that the parents sending their sons to war didn’t love them, it was just how the world was. The other thing my Dad said was that he used to think that Vietnam was like WW2, but now he knew it wasn’t.
Does anyone recognize the name “My Lai,” as in “the My Lai Massacre”? In March of 1968, a young Lt. Calley was ordered to clear the Viet Cong out of a region, as well as any collaborators. He found no VC, no weapons, and hardly anyone of military age. He found 500 women, children, old men, and babies, who welcomed the US troops. When commanded to quickly clear the village, Calley ordered his men to open fire, and he & 30 of them did. Some villagers they beat, some they gang raped, and some they tortured before they killed them. Does that sound familiar from Iraq? They threw most of the bodies in a ditch. Some they burned in their huts. Some they mutilated after they were dead.
The army investigated, called it a combat action and covered it up – that should sound familiar. But there were too many witnesses – in late 1969 it all came out and it shocked the world. It even shocked the United States – I said it was a more innocent time in some ways. Still, Calley had many defenders. He was tried & found guilty but didn’t serve much time. His superiors were let off, including those who covered it up – some things never change.
Well, after the war our Dad hired a lawyer who convinced the army to change my brother’s status from “deserter” to “general discharge”. That meant that he could return to the US, but he didn’t stay for very many years. He couldn’t stand the politics here, especially with the rise of Reagan. So he returned to Europe. To this day, he still wears a pony tail & smokes marijuana, he’s just as annoyingly certain of everything he says & does (like so many of my generation), and it is still the case that anyone who knows him, including his ex-wives, can go to him in trouble and he will drop everything to help them.
I want to leave you with two thoughts. First, the characters in "Hair" are not caricatures. They aren’t even exaggerations. Real people behaved in these ways, believed these things, and put their safety, freedom, and lives on the line for these causes. Peace, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, social justice, economic equality, an end to pollution and nuclear war... Movements for all of these and more arose out of the passions of the 60’s, fueled by the Flower Children and their like-minded peers.
Yes, we were sometimes foolish, and arrogant, and naive. But we knew that we were special, that we understood things the older generation did not, and that our thoughts & actions could change the world. The Flower Children did change the world, but these are not battles that you can fight just once and then it’s over. The ideals of the Flower Children have been under attack for a long time now, and the real-life Tribe members who were 18 in 1968 are now over 60 – if they survived.
That means that now it’s your turn. So choose your dreams, choose your goals, choose what you want the future to be. Choose your style – it doesn’t have to be the hyper-individualistic, inner-directed style of my generation. That doesn’t matter. What matters is this: you are special, you understand things the older generations do not...
And you can change the world.