Attendees of the Human Be-In Festival resting in a field in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1967.
n 1967, an ocean away from the escalating Vietnam War, the Summer of Love bloomed with psychedelic colors in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood. Most of us remember the two events as distinct phenomena: One was a story of firebases, napalm, jungles and the draft; the other of communes, L.S.D., flowers and rock music. In fact, the two were inextricably linked.
San Francisco Bay was often the last place a servicemember would see before heading off to war. By 1967, the United States commitment in Vietnam had escalated dramatically, to 500,000 in 1967 from 23,000 men in 1965, with more than 200,000 shipping out from the Oakland Army Base, an enormous facility located just below the eastern end of the Bay Bridge. It sent more than just men: The Oakland port also sent 37 million tons of matériel to Vietnam during the first eight years of the war.
Young soldiers passing through the Oakland facility often made time to travel across the bay to catch a glimpse of the emerging scene in the Haight, especially once the neighborhood began attracting national attention. Among the hippies and gawking tourists, you might see packs of soldiers and sailors, in town for a few hours on leave. The war infiltrated the Haight in other ways, too — one participant in the scene, Reg E. Williams, wrote in his journal that during an LSD trip, he thought he glimpsed an armada, bound for Southeast Asia, passing through the fog under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Others saw a similarity between the military mobilization on one side of the bay and the cultural mobilization on the other. Paul Williams, a young rock critic who visited San Francisco in 1967 and would soon move to Northern California, imagined the Fillmore Auditorium and other psychedelic rock concert halls as “induction centers” just like the one in Oakland that antiwar protesters targeted, except in these venues, “the teeny-boppers, the college students, the curious adults come down to the Fillmore to see what’s going on, and they do see, and pretty soon they’re part of it.”
While there were differences between antiwar activists and the less-overtly political “freaks” of Haight Ashbury, the freaks also opposed the war. Hippies in the Haight passed out flowers to protesters marching through their neighborhood, when they didn’t join the marches themselves. Psychedelic concert posters from the era show that many of the earliest rock shows — including the one Ronald Reagan infamously condemned on stump speeches when he ran for and won the California governorship in 1966 — were benefits for antiwar efforts. After a long day on the barricades, it seems that even the political activists yearned to get inducted into the Summer of Love.
By 1967, the political and countercultural scenes of the Bay Area, always closely connected, were merging in new ways. The organizers of the January 1967 Human Be-In/Gathering of the Tribes clearly had Vietnam on their mind. “The reason we can no longer identify with the kinds of activities that the older generation are engaged in,” Jay Thelin, a co-owner of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street as well as a member of the Council for a Summer of Love, remarked to reporters, “is because those activities are for us meaningless. They have led to a monstrous war in Vietnam, for example. And that’s why it’s all related, the psychedelics and the war and the protesting and the gap in the generations.”
Thelin’s brother Ron concurred. “Ultimately,” he wrote of the Human Be-In and similar efforts, “the energy generated in gatherings like this could shift the balances enough to end the war in Vietnam and revitalize many dead hearts.”
When life in the Haight worsened over the course of 1967, as hundreds of thousands of young people made pilgrimages to San Francisco and as harder drugs and hustlers entered the picture, the specter of Vietnam appeared even more intensely. To Chester Anderson, who published the Communications Company broadsheet, the Haight had become “a scale model of Vietnam,” a place where “minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch.”
