Anastasia Hayes: From the Beats to the Hippies

As the child of a historian, I have been raised to crave context. Aware of the Beats, the Beatniks, and the Hippies, I was not sure of how they figured in each other’s constellations. Skinner’s “The Beats and Sixties Counterculture” traces a fairly direct line from the Beats to the Beatniks and their Beat networks to the rise of the Sixties’ counterculture, the essence of which was captured (at least in the public imagination) by the Hippies. Knowing this now, Jack Kerouac’s revulsion to the Hippies seems all the more striking. There is something very telling in his decision to reference Tolstoy, whose conception of history precluded group action. The Russian saw it as a force which mass action was unable to impact in any meaningful way; the only revolution possible was personal.  While I will admit myself not totally persuaded by the Hippies’ platform (at least, as it has been disseminated through media) and their conception of popular protest, there is something noble in the willingness to try to reach out and awaken a collective consciousness. I understand Kerouac’s discomfort with communism’s platform but there is something to be said for moving beyond interiority and engaging society at large.