WEED is marijuana. We were living without money because we wanted our time and we wanted to be authentic and we didn't want to get jobs. There was a whole generation moving and this great sea of youth moving across the country. Reporter (archival): Why don't you like the hippies around here? US Marine Corps, NARA, Public Domain, Music Well, naturally they're going to play this sort of thing up. Selvin: The white middle-class establishment starts reacting to this movement with anger and vehemence. Joel Selvin: The music changed just immediately. Cause now it was squalid. Jay Thelin: Periodically, paddy wagons would drive down Haight Street, and the officers on the sidewalk would just go in and grab kids out of restaurants and, if you didn't have an I.D. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? And once the press offered a window into the world of Haight Ashbury, even more young people flooded in. Goldhaft: At that time, people didn't have garage sales. But we had work ethics, and, mostly blue collar workers and you learned from your mother and your father about, you know, going to work and being responsible and doing the right thing. "Ramblin Blues" We'd stop 'em and find out they were from the Midwest, from back east, they wanted to come out experience what was going on in the Haight-Ashbury. "We must never be parted," Tamsin intones to Mona but can Mona completely trust her? While Beatniks wanted the world to leave them alone, the New York Times said, "the new hippies want to change the world." Roz Payne Archives Lauren Prestileo, A Franco Dolgin Productions Film for American Experience in association with KQED, © 2007 In the summer of 1967, thousands of young people from across the country flocked to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to join in the hippie experience, only to discover that what they had come for was already disappearing. Narrator: In March, hundreds of kids on spring break flooded into the Haight. Narrator: It wasn't good enough for the so-called "beat generation." Let's just start getting people living the way they want to live. And Police Chief Thomas Cahill says the rule will be rigidly enforced. There was, you know, every day, you saw scores and scores of people, maybe hundreds of people showing up, just gaping that this was the great place. In late May, Look Magazine sent a young writer to live undercover as a hippie in the Haight. You want to live in a world where you don't have to work? Written by Went into Boston and a friend of mine walked up to me and said, "Hey! San Francisco Oracle, Reprinted by Regent Press They were straining the resources. Ed Pinkus The president many had found inspiring had been assassinated barely three years earlier. We could push our buggies and strollers down Haight Street. Guy Morrison, VideoVault Media Services Roszak: That combination of affluence and anxiety is a crazy-making combination to live with, to grow up with. After hitchhiking across the country, Sandi Stein was finally dropped off on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. In 1967, a sight-seeing company ran a bus down Haight Street, calling it the only foreign tour in the domestic United States. Gillian Boal Writing and tagged 1967, BBC DOCUMENTARY, Politics, video by AlwaysQuestionAuthority. Grateful Dead Member 1 (archival): What we're thinking about is a peaceful planet, we're not thinking of anything else. Bob Elfstrom, Noe Valley Sound Stage, Additional Interviews For many, the capitol of the counterculture no longer seemed a shimmering wonderland. And wore a tie, suit, that kind of thing. The sun was shining, people were wonderful. Before that, rock and roll songs were three minutes, period, paragraph, we're out of here. Sandra, runaway (archival): That's none of anybody's business. And, I can remember saying, I thought, "Oh, look! Narrator: By fall of 1967, crowds in Haight-Asbury had thinned dramatically. I mean, just the idea was liberating, a place where they gave you things where money was no longer the relevant issue. You have a sense of being brought in to God's workshop and that the veil is pulled away and for the first time you see how things really are. Gail Dolgin And Vicente Franco, Location Sound W. M. Hedgepeth, Writer: Before I had got the assignment, I had just paid peripheral attention to the hippie movement. Narrator: LSD, the revered sacrament of the original hippies, was becoming a source of grave concern as more and more people experienced frightening bad trips. Don't come here because it's over and done with. The next time I went back, man, those people waiting in line for that soup needed it. Jerilyn Brandelius Narrator: The clash of cultures reverberated throughout the city. I think everybody knows it. The utopian beginnings of peace and love prevailed, and ended in chaos. Complete opposites, each is wary of the other's differences when they first meet, but this coolness soon melts into mutual fascination, amusement and attraction. We came there twice a week. CorbisMotion Let's make the world that you imagine real by acting it out. Add the first question. Charles Moore, Black Star I thought we could change the world, and I thought we would make it a better place. By 1968 the celebration of free love and music had descended into a maelstrom of drug abuse, broken dreams, and violence. You can be what you are. And so, I think also, that those ideas of peace and love were wonderful. And they would go barefoot on the street and get infections and whatnot. But its underlying message left an indelible impression on those who witnessed it. Who's going to do this, who's going to do that? When you deconstruct your world, as many of us did with the stronger psychedelics, you have to build it back up again. 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