>> do you deny that one of the reasons you are shredding documents that saturday was to avoid >> i do not deny that. >> i think this is a good time for a break. >> the hearing will stay in recess for 10 minutes. >> on c-span3, join the us onsation, like facebook. >> on lectures in history, university of washington professor william rorabaugh teaches a class on the counterculture in america. he compares the literature, clothing and beats and beatniks

of the 1950's and hippies of the 1960's. he also talked about the spread of lsd and the prevalence of drugs in hippie culture. this class is about 55 minutes. going to talk about the -- prof. rorabaugh: ok, so today we are going to talk about the counterculture, which in many ways people have associated with the 1960's as one of the major aspects of the 1960's. one could say of the decade of the 1960's, radical politics

clearly failed and faded away. and social change bumped up against limitations. race relations changed and official segregation disappeared and america became more tolerant, but race did not disappear as a fact. many liberals in the 1950's and 1960's hope it would be destroyed. gender relations also changed. women assumed new roles but women and men soon came to realize the differences have not been revealed by somebody declaring men and women are equal. men and women would not see things the same way. the greatest changes that took place clearly was cultural changes. a lot of the changes had to do with counterculture. the word counterculture was invented by a sociologist, and it means an opposite culture of mainstream. unlike the political and social challenges, the cultural challenges tended to stick. americans really did change cultural values and practices in the 1970's and 1980's and beyond. not so much in the 1960's. the counterculture of the 1960's is beginning. the counterculture of the 1960's begins with political change and that fails, and then social

change which also takes place in terms of race and gender but is -- doesn't entirely succeed. cultural change is really what is the legacy of the 1960's. counterculture had a lot to do with that. a sociologist defined and created the word counterculture to describe a culture that was opposite mainstream culture. not everyone adopted the same ideas, but enough people over time in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's came to adopt new ideas so the whole culture changed as a result. i will talk about the legacy. i want to start by going back to the beats and the beatniks. the first postwar critics of american society and culture and been the beats. they were criticizing america and the aftermath of world war ii. they wanted to create a revolution in expectation.

the beats, the original beat writers, believed american society was very repressive, especially sexually. in advocating hedonism, they were trying to make face for their own self-indulgence, especially homosexual self-indulgence. when they became celebrities in the late 1950's, traditional american culture was very unsure of itself. the traditional values were under attack and traditionalists were feeling uncomfortable. the original beats had been a very small number of writers. the followers of the beats in the late 1950's after they became very popular and sold millions of copies, the young followers of the beats were clearly a different generation. the beats experienced world war ii, veterans of the war or people who came of age right

after, the people who came of age in the late 1950's were clearly a different generation. having being born during or after the war. they became known as beatniks. the beatniks dressed in secondhand clothing, wore a lot of black clothing, expressed a depressed view of life. everything is hopeless. wild in despair. voluntary homelessness was an example and joblessness. jobs are a terrible idea. many lived in new york city or san francisco in north beach which became the beatnik hang outs in the u.s. tourists flocked to those districts in order to see real-life beatniks. they went to gawk at people. people are always looking at people one way or another.

some of the more amusing things, local suburbanites that would dress up like beatniks on the weekend and go into greenwich village or north beach and pretend to be a beatnik. you could always tell they were not dressed quite right. they didn't have quite the right hair. they could party in the beatnik bars in the village or north beach. they were sometimes referred to as weekend beatniks because of the way they did this. they of course had real jobs. you can sell a real beatnik man for my weekend beatnik easily because real beatnik men had long hair and beards. that was proof in the 1950's that you did not have a regular job because no employer would hire anyone with a beard or long hair, and you would be fired if you did. this is how writers and artists could separate themselves as they were self-employed. unless you were self-employed, you really cannot do this.

you didn't see many beards. real beatnik women wore their hair very long as well. beatniks wore sandals made out of old rubber tires from mexico. they were very cheap. about $.29 for a pair of sandals. they did not take many showers. they thought deodorant was a capitalist plot. beatniks were so exciting for some of the avant-garde in new york city that you can actually rent a beatnik. i am not making this up. advertisements appeared in newspapers. it was kind of the counterculture newspaper in new york and you can rent a beatnik and for your very upscale party on fifth avenue in your fancy apartment, co-op, or you could have a long-haired, bearded beatnik come to the party and be

the center of attention. very strange, i think. it was actually going on in the late 1950's. the beatniks, like the beats, liked jazz and read poetry aloud. the beatniks in san francisco more or less invented reading poetry out loud. they read a lot of odd books that were carried in beatnik bookstores, particularly the 8th street bookshop in greenwich village and in san francisco. you could buy radical political books or self printed poetry books or foreign language publications in the stores. many of the books that were sold in these stores were mostly in paperback, which was also a new idea. most books that were published in the u.s. were not published

in paperback in the late 1950's. that was very unusual and rare. bookstores did not like to sell them because it didn't make as much profit as the hardback. there was a new idea spreading, the paperback book, which is much easier and cheaper. so, that is one change going on. at the same time, just to show the beats were not the only source of what was counterculture, there was also the avant-garde. the avant-garde is a small group of people who challenge mainstream culture, but not for my beatnik point of view -- from a different angle of vision. one of the examples, one of the earliest ones in new york actually are julian and malvina

beck, who open a theater in new york in 1951. the becks were anarchists. the purpose of their theater was to jar the audience and step outside of their mainstream cultural values. at least challenge the cultural norms of the 1950's. they performed only radical new plays in small spaces. they were cheap to rent and very few props. no scenery ever. their theater company attempted to engage the audience. their theory in theater was quite radical. the separation between the audience and the performance was to be minimized, or nothing if at all possible. theater was performed by the actors for the audience, rather the actors pushing the audience past the limits that have been

set by traditional culture, which was obsessed, especially for public performances. one can see -- there was one other play they managed to film 1963 which is set inside a u.s. marine corps prison. although, i think the hidden subtext of the play is actually the german concentration camps. you can see the video. it is available if you want to watch it. if you can stand to watch it. is one thing to watch it on the television and actually see the live performance. it must have been excruciating to see it five feet away from you. with the audience identifying with the guard or the abused prisoners who spend the entire time of the performance of the

play being abused by the guards? or would the audience perhaps end up sympathizing a little bit with each? that very question would challenge the audience. where do you stand? are you standing with authority, the guard? or with the victim of authority, the prisoners? a good question to ask, especially if you are an anarchist. what would happen in another play, the becks challenge they would question challenges of nudity. what if an actor performed in the nude? it would be a shocking idea and also illegal. what would the police to? would they arrest the actors, the audience as well for being at a nude performance? it would be interesting. if you are a member of the audience, you might be a little bit nervous to be arrested and in the new york times the next day. during the 1950's, the living

theatre provoked its audiences, which were partly composed of other avant-garde artists, partly composed of beatniks, although they rarely had money for tickets. they often had to get tickets given to them by somebody else. and partly composed of respectable middle-class people who were bored with american culture and turned off by the sitcoms on tv. another change that went on at the time is performance art. the redefinition of art. art had traditionally been thought of as perhaps painting or sculpture, or photography, but it was something the artist did and presented to the audience as a finished product. in performance art, there is an

action that takes place, and the action is the art. the art takes place in front of the audience and involves the audience. you can see that was a relationship as we living theater and performance art. in the 1950's, the avant-garde poet and classical music composer ned rorum wrote a four-minute piece in which the performers did not play a single note. this was certainly taking music to the ultimate absurdity. the performers are on the stage and they sit there with their instruments and do absolutely nothing for four minutes. it was a very interesting score. the performers had to keep turning the pages. that is the only thing they do. they never make a sound. the audience at the first performance were not in on the joke, or after the first performance, people might know what is going on. as the musicians were sitting on the stage turning their pages, the audience was becoming increasingly restless and

uncomfortable and wondering what is going on. am i missing something? there were whispers and then wheezes and finally coughs. of course, that is the music. the music is the audience making all of these sounds and whispering. that is the music. that is the performance. the performance has been shifted from the stage to the actual audience. that is what he was trying to do. that was his purpose. you will notice that every time the musical piece is performed before a different audience, it will have a different result, right? so, no two performances will ever be exactly the same, and that is also part of what he was trying to achieve. the performers were only catalysts that were designed to bring the audience together as an audience, as a group in this

session where this was taking place. he went on to collaborate in other performance art pieces later on with the avant-garde where he actually did compose real music. robert might paint spontaneous paintings on the stage using rorum's background musical rift for motivation. you have the intersection of music and visual art going on by having a musical composer, having composed music that would stimulate or inspire the production of the artwork. rauschenberg would show that the feelings he had were being conveyed by the music. it can be even more interactive. what if the actors arrive nude, or given the fact they don't want to be arrested, semi-nude

and rolled on the floor in heaps of embracing bodies? what does this convey about people? what does this mean, or perhaps saying something about the oneness of humanity? or maybe it is people rolling around on the floor. what if the audience is invited to join on the rolling of the floor? what will that do? the audience members have to make a decision at that point. are they a separate audience watching what is going on or are they participants in the process and how much participation do they want to have? do they want to engage or not? this is shifting everything on the audience away from the performers. what if the floor was covered in butch paper and then covered in paint and then the rolling bodies are covered in paint? what if they are rolling around

even more and begin to randomly paint the paper by moving around in this way? the resultant paper might at the end of the performance be cut up into one foot squares and passed out to the members of the audience to take home. you thought you were going to performance and you end up with a painting to take home. very weird. so, this is the kind of stuff that is going on particularly in new york in greenwich village. one of the leading performance artists in greenwich village was yoko ono. she was better known later as marrying john lennon of the beatles. yoko ono staged an avant-garde performance in her loft in 1961. she was as creative as what she was before she married a creative avant-garde musician, john lennon.

she had the entire apartment fixed with a floor set at a 30 degree angle. that is really steep. that is about as steep as you can get and still able to walk on it. she that invited new york's leading avant-garde dancer to stage a dance on this sloped floor. they knew they were coming to her loft, but they didn't know about the floor. they only found out when they got there. the dancers never encountered such a floor before, and their attempt to reform at this angle revealed interesting things to them about their own bodies. their psychological state. they were afraid of falling, and it shows. the dancers would normally have a little fear of falling, but they are so practiced in the discipline to overcome that so the audience never sees that. in this situation, the audience , who also have to sit on the slope, would be seeing this as

well. it also revealed something about the will of the performer. people really were -- if they had a strong enough will, they could do it, but if they gave up, they would end up sliding down the floor towards the end of the room. as the performance continued, the audience could see and the performers came to realize that they had gradually adjusted their movements according to the sloped floor. the floor was causing people to behave differently. it was a physical fact, and it was interfering with the production and interfering with the assumptions of what people could do and couldn't do. human beings, in other words, had to adapt and that of course was yoko ono's whole point. that was the whole point of the evening, to get everyone who left to realize that human beings needed to adapt. they needed to change.

they needed to change the way they thought about things and change the way they behaved in the world. yoko ono had grown up in tokyo, and she had lived in this very traditional and repressed japanese culture, which was especially unfavorable to bright, talented young women like her. there was very little of a role she could imagine for herself in tokyo. she could marry some banker or something, but that was about it. she certainly could not be a performing artist of any time. so, she ended up in new york city because she found it much freer than tokyo. she still criticized the culture in the united states for being rigid and repressive as well, but she recognized it was not nearly as rigid and repressive as the culture in japan. she wanted everyone to

understand that cultural change was hard. she had to undergo the cultural change of being a japanese woman to being an american, and that was a big change for her. she was now trying to pass that information on with her performance art in new york city and open the eyes of the people so that they can see they too can make changes in their lives. all of this avant-garde art is about changing yourself ultimately. the performers are stimulating the audience to change themselves. one of the interesting examples comes from a dance company in 1963. it was founded in the basement of an avant-garde baptist church, if you can imagine that, but there was one in greenwich village. it was a church that was founded to help sailors that came into

the port of new york. it became an avant-garde church in the 1950's. the judsen dance company practiced and performed in the basement of the church and developed what really became modern dance. while background music may provide timing, the emphasis on the dance was a celebration of the human body. dancers wore tightfitting clothing to emphasize physicality and dance motions were tightly controlled and athletic. i sometimes think if you see "dancing with the stars" on television, you are seeing this is where it ended up with commercialization, but that is the kind of dance the dance company was doing in 1963. sometimes the dances seems more like gymnastics. still, there were many romantic and sexually suggestive aspects

to the dance company's performances and a celebrated sexuality as a part of the celebration of the body. this contradicted of middle-class american values which is sex should never be discussed and certainly not of audiences composed of men and women. sex was best left for the privacy of the bedroom, not for the mainstream culture of the 1950's. by the end of the 1960's, the celebration of the body would take on much more open form than having a dance company in the basement of a church building in greenwich village. had a long run and the entire cast this robe for an entire scene. local new yorkers kept bringing back out-of-town relatives to shock them. the play could not have been put on in st. louis, boston or other

conservative parts of the united states. by the late 1960's, the police did not arrest the cast in new york city. the other play that is more famous is "hair." "hair" was about a mindless long-haired hippie who was drafted and then sent to vietnam and killed. "hair" also had one brief nude scene that celebrated the body so it too participated in the new celebration of the body. it was part of the whole hippie consciousness. you will notice i did not

title the lecture hippie, because if these are not the entire counterculture. now we are on to hippies. the counterculture's most commonly identified with the word hippie. there is a certain truth in that but the counterculture is broader than that. it includes many people that would not and have not been identified as hippies. gary snyder put the matter about it succinctly when he wrote "hippies are living out the philosophy the beats were playing in." what was the relationship between beats and hippies? first, there was a major age difference. the beats were in their 20's during world war ii. the hippies were born around 1945, 1948. hippies were young enough to be the children of the beats if the beats had any children which are not very likely. the beats were the veterans of the great depression, world war ii, the holocaust.

the hippies were the optimistic children of the baby boom generation and the rising postwar consumer boom. that said a lot about the difference between the two groups. one had been raised amid the poverty and despair of the depression and the fear of world war ii and the others were raised in the postwar boom. there was also a matter of numbers. the numbers mattered a lot. the original beats had been a few dozen people. a tiny number. even when the more numerous beatniks joined the movement in the late 1950's, they probably were not more than 5000 people in the entire united states. now by the mid-1960's, the number of counterculture followers had suddenly exploded into hundreds of thousands and indeed by the 1970's, it might

be as many as three million or four million. really large numbers of people. the numbers matter. where the beats felt repressed and rejected by society, and the beatniks have shared that, the hippies were numerous enough that they were confident they can actually go out and create their own society, their own counterculture. why pay attention to the rest of society? just withdraw and go off on your own and create your own society. in most large american cities, there were entire hippie neighborhoods. in seattle, the big neighborhood was fremont. hippie neighborhoods and cheap rent always went together. unlike greenwich village or north beach, many of these districts got little attention from tourists. that is understandable. can you imagine tourists going to fremont? hippies did not care to play to tourists. the beats and the beatniks have been interested in showing

themselves off. rent a beatnik requires someone to rent a beatnik but also required someone to be willing to be rented. hippies instead wanted to develop their own community where different occupations could fit in. whereas the original beats had been writers, few hippies cared much about writing and very few actually wrote anything. there are not a lot of hippie writings. casey is like a guru to hippies. he is an older generation. the beats had been a literary movement that the hippies were more of a cultural movement that did not include literature. they were a social movement, too, perhaps. in some ways, the hippies depended on the beat writers, who they continued to honor. they do not need to create the philosophical or literary

underpinnings for their movement the way that the beats had felt a necessity to have a philosophical underpinning that was expressed through writing. the hippies did not need to do that. large numbers mattered. the hippies felt a certain confidence that they were right and that came from the fact that you look around and see lots of other people that look like themselves. the beats had to justify themselves even to themselves with their writings in part, because it left them so psychologically vulnerable, wondering about their own true significance. it was hard to believe in something when six other people believe it. numbers make a difference. the psychological difference between beats and hippies in his important. -- is important. if the beats were gloomy, the hippies were hopeful. the beats war old clothing.

secondhand clothes that they had gotten for free. hippies wore bright color close common often elaborately decorated. hippie clothing was often expensive. it wasn't always, but it certainly could be. hippies were always designed to be seen. they liked being noticed and wearing bright color closes one way to be seen. tightfitting jeans celebrated the body. perhaps tight jeans were important, because older people wouldn't wear tight clothing. finally, much hippie dress was unisex. this was a fact of the older generation. the unisex dress announce the coming of women's liberation, including the liberation from the skirt. this is where that comes in. like the beats, hippies wore long hair.

perhaps even longer than the hair that the beats had worn. this is true for both hippie women and both hippie men. if beats preferred to be left alone, hippies announce the presence to the whole society. hippies were in fact exhibitionist. hippies had different music. this is one of the important differences. interest in jazz declined in the late 1950's. there is a lot of speculation about why that happened. perhaps there were fewer talented jazz performers and the -- in the late 1950's. there were just not that much interest. in the 1960's, rock 'n roll ruled and hippies adopted and adapted new music and created their own particular version of rock 'n roll. the beats never did accept rock 'n roll. that was an important distinction. jack kerouac remained a lifelong jazz fan, denounced rock 'n roll and despised hippies and said so publicly.

he said, i am no hippie, i hate those people. he was very reactionary. the more accommodating alan ginsburg found rock 'n roll intriguing, but difficult to understand. ginsburg could not get into the spirit of rock 'n roll, even though he tried to. he did recognize the new music was important to the hippie. he thought that the rise of the new music itself indicated the importance of the hippies. it is certainly true. whenever there is a cultural change, there will be a new music. you could go back throughout history and find cultural change and music -- they changed music and changing culture always go together. there is a reason for that. many people speculated, why were they hippies wearing my close and listening to write music? maybe the reason was, lsd. beats and hippies had different drugs. although this was in part due to different circumstances.

the beats might have liked lsd, they just did not have any. it just wasn't available, we will put it that way. they would use alcohol. the beats had also experimented with many types of pills and many other types of drugs. the beats took up heroine. beats had regularly smoked marijuana, especially in new york city. they called it reefer or pot. hippies also were light users of alcohol and smoking even more pot. thou call continues but not with as much emphasis and marijuana becomes more important. hippies were not likely to use heroine, which was more likely understood to be deadly. there was a understanding of the

dangers of heroine in the 1960's than in the 1940's. hippies turned to the psychedelic drug, lsd. it had been invented accidentally in 1943 in switzerland by a chemist name albert hoffman who worked for a drug company. he got a drop on his wrist, then rode the bicycle home. the world's first lsd the trip, he practically fell off the bicycle. he said, aha, this drug is really potent, we need to research this further. during the 1950's, the manufacturer, the world's only manufacturer supplied free samples of lsd to researchers all over the world to try to figure out if lsd he had any use at all. if he could find a purpose for a

-- for it, they can make a lot of money for it. it was for a time in the 50's that they thought lsd might be useful to treat mental illness. that was not true. they also thought it would be a truth serum. the cia discovered this did not work either. by the early 1960's, the number of people in research that think lsd has a purpose is beginning to dwindle. that does not mean it does not have a purpose, it is just not a scientific or medical purpose. it is recreation. it is fun. many hippies, being a hippie was about using lsd and seeking to find spiritual truth through lsd trips. there was a sociologist who interviewed people in san francisco in 1967 and found that all but one of 70 hippies that

he interviewed had smoked marijuana within the last 24 hours. that tells you how much marijuana was being smoked. all but 2% or 3%, i think 97% had at least one lsd trip. lsd and hippies go together. you could call it better living through chemistry. lsd came about -- in addition to sandoz, through the influence of four people. i will go through each of them in a little bit. the first of these was aldus huxley who is best known as the author of "brave new world." huxley immigrated to the united states and became a script writer in hollywood. there was more money to be made

writing scripts than novels. he love los angeles because of the bright sunshine. his particular kind of blindness allowed him to see a little light. he could read if he had a magnifying glass and sat out right next to the swimming pool in the bright sun. he loved l.a. for that reason. in the 1950's, he experimented with mescaline, which was derived from peyote and lsd. he wrote the first serious book about lsd. the book is "doors of perception." in the book, he advocated psychedelics. he thought it was so powerful that it would cause all of the internal mental structures of everybody in the world to be radically altered, and peace would break out all over the world.

huxley believed that human society would be totally reorganized if the world elite took lsd. he continued to have the gate -- advocate lsd into the 1950's and into the early 1960's until he died of cancer in 1963. he so impressed jim morrison, that he named his rock group "the doors" in honor of huxley's book. huxley knew lsd posed a threat to the political order. he sees this as a radical drug with a lot of dust radical influence. he said people who had power were likely to resist it. throughout huxley's career, he advocated that a medical model be used for research and promoting the use of lsd. if medical elites -- in other words, eminent doctors could be persuaded to give lsd only two

elite patients. carey grant, the actor was one. there would be no crackdown by the government. if you had eminent people taking lsd in a medical setting under the advice, guidance and care of and eminent physician, the government would not outlaw lsd or arrest anyone. his idea was that if you could spread lsd to its elites, a to be recognized to the great changes that could bring about to the human psyche and you could change the world. huxley warned that if lsd became too available and was used by too many people, there would be a backlash and the politicians would ban it. that is exactly what happened. the second person who promoted this was allen ginsberg.

he never met a drug he did not like. ginsberg tried many times by the time he took lsd. he got his first lsd in a government run experiment sponsored by the veteran administration hospital at stanford university in the 1950's. late 1950's. ginsberg was astonished by lsd, compared to the other psychedelic drugs he tried such as peyote, mescaline, he found lsd revolutionary. he thought that if it was used wisely, it would cause the political, social and cultural system of the united states, and

the entire world would implode. that's with the beats wanted all along since the 1940's. ginsberg, like huxley worried that a premature -- to this drug would lead to a breakdown. the whole thing would cause a crisis and produce big backlash. in 1960, it was allen ginsberg who introduced lsd to timothy larry. it is not the other way around. leary was already -- he was a harvard psychology researcher at the time and he researched other drugs at the time, including magic mushrooms. it was not nearly as powerful as lsd. ginsberg told him he needed to try lsd. leary did not believe him, but ginsberg warned leary about the

political dangers of doing this. and leary, who had no experience with politics, media or the law, paid no attention. ginsberg was prosecutor for the publication of howell in the famous trial of the 1950's. ginsberg understood public relations and law, and the way you get into trouble easily. leary becomes the third figure in the spread of lsd. he started giving lsd to his friends and graduate students and harvard undergraduates. that was when harvard pulled the plug. in 1963, harvard fired leary for turning undergraduates onto it. he then moved to upstate new york to an estate to conduct what he called lsd experiments. millbrook was owned by one of his followers who had inherited it -- obviously an heir to a

wealthy new york city fortune. leary's experiments were rather cautious, although they were by no means serious. he was still trapped inside his own head in the world of the research scientist. he had been a research scientist since world war ii. he had all the jargon psychologist used. everything had to be set up as an experiment and you had to keep lab notes. although he spoke that jargon, his behavior became increasingly bizarre under the influence of daily lsd trips. he was taking acid every day. lsd seem to breakdown inhibitions, break up marriages -- it certainly broke up to his -- it certainly broke up his. leary liked this. he liked all the women that came to millbrook. he would give them lsd and and they would do whatever he wanted .

he became a guru for the hippie movement and proclaimed, most famously, turn on, tune in and drop out. tuning on meant taking lsd, tuning in meant tuning into yourself, and dropping outlet your could school, click quit yourhool, job and become a hippie. the massive publicity that ginsburg warned would be trouble that brought the authorities down hard on leary. when he and his family cross the border from mexico into the united states, he was arrested for a small amount of marijuana, which they should not have had, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. this caused him a lot of trouble. leary is interesting because he had a natural knack for soundbites, and he would call a press conference, making sure the new york times was there

every two weeks for about five years. there would always be one line that would become the headline of the new york times story. it would be the first paragraph, and it would be inevitably on page one. he was getting constant publicity. the fourth person in this movement for lsd was ken kesey. he can also be described as an organ author and a political libertarian with anarchist tendencies. he thought of himself as a rugged western pioneer. he thought of himself as a rugged western pioneer. he had been in the creative writing program at stanford university. he worked at the nearby va hospital and eventually he too was put into the lsd experiment there.

kesey in college was a champion wrestler and almost made the u.s. olympic team. he was an athlete. he was disciplined and self-willed. as a writer, he had a good vocabulary for description. unlike most users of lsd, he had a capacity of describing what was going on while he was stoned. he could, at times, even write while he was stoned, which no one else was able to do. the doctors at the va hospital were very fascinated with him as a test case. after his first book, "one flew over the cuckoo's nest," which was partly written under the influence of lsd, he bought a house and began to experiment on his own. this was in the early 1960's. kesey almost immediately grasped

that if you're going to have a drug as powerful as lsd, you need a music to go with it. he hires a musician, a young folksinger name jerry garcia who invented the music or it garcia tried classical music, did not work. jazz, did not work, full music, did not work. then he came up with rock. this is how jerry garcia ends up founding the grateful dead. it all comes out of these experiments with mixing lsd and music together up at his house. like huxley and ginsberg, kesey understood but rejected. he believed that a crackdown sd wasn't that -- was inevitable. he said you need to flood the country so fast with lsd that the authorities could not crack down on it. in 1965, he began to stages test -- to stage his acid test in san

francisco. at the acid test, who were lured there by the music, the participants were given a chance to take lsd at the concert. the jefferson airplane showed up, their name stood for free trip. in 1965 and 1960 six the san francisco ban, the grateful dead, janis joplin, the big brother rose to prominence while lsd was no longer distributed for free. many arrived already stoned. lsd became rampant in the bay area and 1966 until the state of california and the u.s. government banned it in october of 1966. it remained available but riskier after that. you never knew about the safety of it. all of this would lead to the summer of love in san francisco in 1967. 50 years ago.

about 75,000 young people, some of them high school students, some of them college students converged on the haight-ashbury district of san francisco during that summer. the new hippie hangout district. not the north beach area, because the north beach area the rent was too high. the hit singles got mckinsey his song, if you go to san francisco with flowers in your hair, that stimulated people to go there. there were free concerts by the leading bands in the golden gate park with a lot of marijuana and lsd to be scored. any young person with long hair walking down the sidewalk would be offered drugs at least once a block. being a hippie turned out to be about three things. rock music, drugs and sex. there was plenty of sex and the haight, or at least a lot of

talk about sex. maybe there was plenty of sex, because the rate of sexually transmitted diseases went way up in san francisco that year. a year later, most of the hippies were gone from san francisco, but haight was over run with heroin and crime. hippies fled to berkeley where they continued to live in the 1970's, but others moved out of town to quieter places, perhaps to mendocino county where you could grow your own marijuana. the biggest cash crop in mendocino county. rural communes became the new thing for the counterculture in the 1970's. by the 1970's, there were hundreds of thousands of people living in rural communes. the hippies left the cities and moved to the countries because of rising rent and partly because they wanted to escape

their neighbors were irritated with them, and so forth. they also try to grow food in these rural communes. meanwhile, the counterculture became commercialized in the 1970's. one fine co-optation going on, especially in the music industry. it was the first one where this happened. once you had big money, it was going to bring in people with money. at first, the music industry tried to create their own rock group that would be less drug oriented and easier to manage, but the major groups had more talent and the audience cared about the talent. in the end, the recording companies had to capitulate with huge sums of money. jerry garcia and the grateful dead was the first band to hold out under a record contract on which they decided with a -- who the recording engineer would be. they got total approval of the content of the album. it mattered a lot. it changed the way music was done.

the san francisco bands are among the first to obtain this artistic fame. their albums were mostly recorded in los angeles, not in new york because recording engineers in los angeles were cool. the ones in new york were stodgy and old-fashioned. as long as drugs were illegal, there was no way to commercialize the hippie drugs. hippies also had other new ideas. ideas about food. they were hostile to large-scale corporations, they just like process food, they were suspicious of supermarkets. many became vegetarians, many others declared themselves in favor of organic food and they grew organic food and natural foods. in vermont, ben and jerry cashed in on the demand for natural ice cream and made a lot of vermont dairy farmers happy with the process. the politics of vermont changed conservative republicans to liberal democrats because of ben and jerry. very interesting story. two jewish guys from brooklyn go up to vermont and reform the whole state around ice cream.

although ben and jerry was a capitalist business, it was small business. it was not a big business or a part of any conglomerate. the company donated to vermont charities. in boulder, colorado, celestial seasons made herbal tea in the mountain behind boulder coming -- eventually becoming one of colorado's largest companies. co-op grocery store spring up in hippie neighborhoods. the produce would come in from hippie owned farms that were outside of town. while most of these ultimately disappeared, some survived, including the pcc in seattle. the health industry can also be traced to the 1960's. business centers, exercise classes, disapproval of tobacco and alcohol, the rise of dance as a form of entertainment was all about body day worship. an idea that any hippie would recognize.

if these will be in a crisis where they reach the age where they need nursing home care. in the hippie view of the world, hippies never get old. i am proposing that there be a chain of cemeteries called woodstock. at woodstock cemetery, the music of woodstock will be played forever in the background. there is one other way in which the counterculture also figured. that is the invention of the personal computer. the personal computer was invented in california six blocks away from where jerry garcia lived when he was doing the grateful dead. it soon attracted the attention of a young teenage hippie by the name of steve jobs. apple computer actually emerges out of the counterculture. what is the connection? at the time, the only computers that anybody had were ibm or

other major corporations. they sold computers for millions of dollars. only large government agencies, or large corporations could afford to have a computer. the vision of the personal computer was that everyone in the world could have a personal computer. each person in the world could be empowered by a tremendous amount of computing power by having that. today's cell phones are more power than the giant computers did in the 1960's. steve jobs really did follow that vision. he was from the bay area and a part of the counterculture of the bay area. he went to college for one semester and dropped out. he lived in india for a month and became a buddhist. brought his buddhist guru back to san jose. you could see it up in san jose. the personal computer is the ultimate legacy of the counterculture.

i am going to stop with that. >> join us every saturday evening at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern as we join students in college classrooms to hear lectures on topics ranging from the american revolution to 9/11. lectures in history are also available as podcasts. visit our website, c-span.org/history or download itunes. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] sunday, james talks about the u.s. army special forces secretly operating in berlin for more than 30 years. here is a preview. i should go back and give you some information about the guys that were there, who were they? i said they came from special forces. they work.

-- they were. there was no special test to say, you are qualified to go to berlin. if you had become special forces, you have the qualifications. with one caveat, maybe two. you had to speak and eastern european language or german well or to to pass as a local confuse the east germans and russians for long enough for you to do your mission, and you had to accept the fact that you are going to wear civilian clothes. important, because wearing civilian clothes meant that come if you are captured by the east germans or russians, , within probably five to 10 minutes, shot of a spy. with those two caveats, the first 40 people were sent in 1956. of those 40, nobody had any problems with that. for the next years, a lot of

guys served their and never gave it a second thought of what bad odds they had. a lot of them were americans. 60% were first or second generation. they all spoke a language, either hungarian or russian in some cases. german was the predominately which. about 40% were recruits. theas passed early in 1950's to get eastern europeans, not germans, to join the american military just for this operation. in berlin.em served even in the 80's, a lot of people that came into the unit were immigrants.

something we should look at doing for iraq and afghanistan. quite an interesting group of people. you can watch the entire program sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv. only on c-span3.