Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

2). They embraced a romantic notion of Native American culture in which individualscooperated and shared food and housing, while still honoring the search for self-identity.The hippies followed the Beats by grounding that search for self in Eastern religions.(“Om,” the sacred syllable of Hinduism, “Nirvana,” the Buddhist state of enlightenment,and “Hari Krishna,” a holy Hindu mantra, appear on the Yippies’ Chicago poster.) Soon amass movement that inspired thousands of young people to leave their homes, the hippiesrejected what they called the Establishment: the conventional expectations put on themby traditional family and religious values, and the capitalist individualism of Americanhistory.From the large urban centers of New York and San Francisco, the hippiephenomenon spread. The counterculture appeared all over the country in smaller urbancenters and university towns where hippies gathered. It developed quickly into a “way oflife, a community, an infrastructure, and even an economy” (David Farber, Age 169).Stores selling drug paraphernalia, beads, moccasins, and the accoutrements of the hippiestyle advertised in alternative newspapers like New York’s East Village Other andWestside News. Hippie style was so popular that Simplicity advertised sewing patternsfor “non-conformists” wanting to create their own hippie clothes (Heimann 724). Tens ofthousands participated in the hippie “Human Be-In” event at San Francisco’s GoldenGate Park in January, 1967. (Playing off the anti-war movement’s “teach-in,” a forum foropen discussion about the Vietnam War, the “Be-In” was simply a gathering of hippies in29