Moretta PoliticalHippies in Texas

Political Hippies and Hip Politicos
Author(s): John A. Moretta

Source: The Southwestern Historical Quarterly , January, 2020, Vol. 123, No. 3 (January,
2020), pp. 267-291
Published by: Texas State Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26876160
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University of Texas students affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) pro-
test the Vietnam War at the Texas State Capitol. Mariann Wizard Papers, di_06907, The Dolph
Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

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Political Hippies and Hip Politicos:
Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism
in 1960s Austin, Texas
By John A. Moretta*
I
n recent decades, residents of Texas’s capital city have been
enjoined to “Keep Austin Weird.” Although this slogan evades precise
definition, it does capture something important about the city’s collec-
tive identity.1 It has long been a haven for the offbeat, and its progressive
politics often put it at odds with much of the rest of Texas. While several
recent books have challenged the idea that Austin has lived up to its pro-
gressive self-image, especially in terms of racial equality, urban develop-
ment, and conservation, there is at least some truth that Austin is defined
by its “weirdness,” even as the city’s tech-oriented economy booms and its
population swells.2 It is the city Willie Nelson and others put firmly on the
* John Moretta received his Ph.D. in history from Rice University (1985) and has published several
books and articles on both Texas and United States history, ranging from biographies of Galvestonian
William Pitt Ballinger (Texas State Historical Association Press, 2000) and William Penn (Prentice Hall,
2006) to his most recent work on the 1960s counterculture, The Hippies: A 1960s History (McFarland
Publishers, 2017). Dr. Moretta has been a full-time history professor with Houston Community College
since 1982.
1
The many connotations the word “weird” means for Austinites—authenticity, anti-commercialism,
a plea to support local business, and more—is the subject of Joshua Long’s Weird City: Sense of Place and
Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
2
Among the works that explore the persistence of racial inequality in Austin despite the city’s tradi-
tion of progressive politics are Eliot M. Tretter, Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the
Knowledge Economy in Austin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016); Javier Auyero, Invisible in Austin:
Life and Labor in an American City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); and Andrew M. Busch, City in
a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Another body of scholarship explores the positive effects of
the cultivation of a “creative economy” in Austin and elsewhere. See Richard Florida, “Bohemia and
Economic Geography,” Journal of Economic Geography 2, no.1 (2002): 55–71. Also see Florida’s Cities and
the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005); The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins,
2005); and The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday
Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004) as well as Peter Hall, “Creative Cities and Economic Development,”
Urban Studies 37, no. 4 (2000): 639–649.
Vol. CXXIII, No. 3 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January, 2020

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268 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January
nation’s cultural map with the “outlaw country” music scene of the 1970s.
However, that scene did not come out of nowhere; it was built on a foun-
dation largely established in the 1960s.3 It was during that decade that the
blend of progressive politics and cultural experimentation that still makes
Austin “weird” was defined on the campus of the University of Texas
(UT), the result of the unlikely alliance of hippies and New Left politicos.
UT’s hip/radical coalition transcended the antagonisms between these
two groups evident in countercultural centers such as the San Francisco
Bay Area and New York City and forged an enduring identity for Texas’s
capital city.
To be sure, Austin was not the only college town in 1960s America
defined by the blending of radical politics and cultural libertinism. From
Madison, Wisconsin, to Norman, Oklahoma, and many other places in
the American Midwest and on the Southern Plains, the “prairie power”
student movement within the New Left proved to be a more open, less
uptight, spontaneous, and more action-oriented alternative to the more
doctrinaire New Left traditionalism of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts—
indeed, it also helped to give some of these “heartland” places a progres-
sive identity that still endures.4 But as Austin has grown to be a much
larger city than these other centers of “prairie power,” it might be argued
that its national—perhaps even international—influence and reputation
is that much greater. With apologies to Portland, Oregon, among other
places, Austin is the “weird city,” par excellence.
Austinites have fully embraced both their dissident past and current
political and cultural singularity, often viewing their city as “a progressive
island in a sea of intolerance” and a “liberal Mecca in a desert of conserva-
tism.” The roots of the city’s eccentricities were planted in the late 1960s
when a rebellious and contentious spirit emerged from the radical fusion
of the University of Texas’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and
their community’s hip counterparts. Together they transformed Austin
from a “sleepy, beautiful little town” to a city “vilified by the rest of Texas as
the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking, hell-raising Gomorrah of the West-
3
For more on the “outlaw country” scene in 1970s Austin, see Jason Mellard, Progressive Country: How
the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
4
For more, see Sarah Eppler Janda, Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Okla-
homa, 1962–1972 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018); Matthew Levin, Cold War University:
Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); the oral histories col-
lected in Robbie Lieberman, Prairie Power: Voices of 1960s Midwestern Student Protest (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2004); and Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 204, 279–280.
According to Carl Davidson, “The term prairie power came from [him]” when he and other SDSers such as
those from Texas who referred to themselves as “anarchists,” joined together “to get rid of the old guard.
I said ‘Well okay, we’ll form an alliance with the Texas anarchists, we’ll call it prairie power and we’ll use it
to displace the old guard in the national SDS.’ That’s where it came from.” Kirkpatrick Sale popularized
it in his book and it took on a life of its own.” See Davidson in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 49. Sale further
noted that the new prairie power contingent was overwhelmingly WASP, mostly from small towns or less
metropolitan cities, not steeped in intellectual theory or leftist rhetoric, from working class or farming
families, and with little activist experience and even less familiarity with radicalism.

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2020 Political Hippies and Hip Politicos 269
ern world.”5 Indeed, for many Austin natives, the sixties and early seven-
ties was the city’s Golden Age, a time “Old hippies . . . blather endlessly
about while picking dope seeds out of their dentures. . . . It was a good
time to be in Austin . . . [when] it was cooler to be a hippie than be in a
frat. It was really like what you read about. And it allowed for more weird
things to happen . . . and that gave you time to do something weird.”6
The alliance of UT student radicals and Austin’s hip community chal-
lenges most standard interpretations of the era that contend that SDS
affiliates, such as the one at UT, who welcomed the hippies as fellow reb-
els, contributed to both the New Left’s and SDS’s eventual demise by sul-
lying the ranks with individuals completely void of any sense of commit-
ment and political consciousness. In fact, quite the opposite took place in
Austin and on the UT campus. This unique engagement not only helped
to expand and strengthen UT’s SDS membership, but also led to lasting
and profound changes at the university and in the larger Austin commu-
nity in general.
Bitter factionalism often permeated the student movement at north-
ern universities but at more traditional schools such as UT, grassroots
activists believed creating a broader coalition was the best way to sustain
momentum. The customary assertion that hip and politico were distinct,
antithetical groups within the general counterculture and remained so
throughout the decade is at the very least inaccurate when assessing the
youth rebellion that took place in 1960s Austin, Texas. It is also not true
for the many other prairie power universities, many of whose student radi-
cals, inspired by their UT counterparts’ successful outreach to the hip
community, established similar alliances on their respective campuses in
order to both bolster SDS membership and to change political and cul-
tural consciousness.7
5
Kinky Friedman, “Keep Gomorrah Weird,” Texas Monthly, December 2004, <http://www.texas-
monthly.com/articles/keep-gomorrah weird/> [Accessed July 29, 2018].
6
Quoted in Long, Weird City, 20–21.
7
The questioning of the divisions between hip and politico are hardly new. Since the 1990s many
historians, including Alice Echols, Doug Rossinow, and Julie Stephens, have challenged the standard
interpretations that there were clear markers of distinction within 1960s radical culture that divided the
hippies from the radical politics reflected in New Left ideology and embodied in SDS. See Doug Rossi-
now, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998); Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Post-Modernism (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alice Echols, “Nothing Distant About It: Women’s Liberation
and Sixties Radicalism,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1994), 149–174. See also David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), and Richard Candida-Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Politics, and Poetry in California (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1995). Of all the studies listed here that challenged the “great divide”
between hip and politico, Rossinow’s study is by far the most extensive in its examination, which includes
UT and Austin as places where freaks and radicals found much common accord. Yet he concludes that in
the end, despite their coming together for a variety of purposes, in diverse forums, and even the sharing
of a fundamental ethos, “the notion of a united front between the new left and the counterculture was a
myth. . . . The distances separating them were clear. . . . The political radicals look[ed] askance at the hip-
pie rebellion even as they sympathized with it.” Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 259–260.

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The roots of the cultural permissiveness and progressive politics that

Austin’s hippies and politicos brought together in the 1960s reach back
at least a few decades. As early as the 1930s, Austin gained a reputation
throughout the South for both its liberal politics and advanced ideas
on many social issues. Simultaneously, the city nurtured an avant-garde
community of intellectuals, writers, musicians, and artists. By the close
of that decade, Austin and the surrounding Hill Country had become a
popular, welcoming safe haven for the region’s iconoclastic misfits and
social renegades.8
The University of Texas also played an essential role in fostering Aus-
tin’s notoriety as a sanctuary for social dissidents. During the 1930s,
the university became one of the South’s premier institutions of higher
education, one noted for its progressive academic environment and cul-
ture.9 UT was also home to individuals who occasionally ran afoul of the
state’s conservative “Establishment.” Most notably, UT president Homer
Rainey and folklore scholar J. Frank Dobie clashed with Governors W. Lee
“Pappy” O’Daniel and Coke Stevenson over issues of academic freedom.10
UT was also an early site of the post-World War II struggle for African
American civil rights. In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt challenged racial
segregation in higher education by applying for admission to UT’s law
school. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Fourteenth Amend-
ment’s equal protection clause required UT to grant Sweatt admission.11
Although compelled by federal authority, UT became an integrated insti-
tution—at least in a limited sense—at an early date. By the 1960s, thanks
in large measure to Cold War infusions of research dollars, UT rose in sta-
8
Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York:
Basic Books, 2003), 1–24. Despite Austin’s progressiveness, it has long been a town built to serve white
politicians and students, and a degree of social and residual segregation still evident reflects those origins.
Nevertheless, because Austin “created no wealth from agriculture” nor much from business, industry,
or oil, a “level of social equity” emerged among white “bureaucrats and academics” that “was unusual in
Texas.” See Stephen Moore, Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City (Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield,
2007), 35. Also see Anthony Orum, Power, Money, and the People: The Making of Modern Austin (Austin: Texas
Monthly Publications, 1987).
9
For more on UT during the late 1930s and the early 1940s, see John Moretta, “The Battle for the
Texas Mind: The Firing of Homer Price Rainey and the Fight for Academic Freedom and New Deal
Liberalism at the University of Texas, 1939–1945,” The Houston Review (Spring 2005): 40–44, 59–65.
See also Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: Form, Reform, and New Starts (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1974), 36–52.
10
George N. Green, “Rainey, Homer Price,” The Handbook of Texas Online, <https://tshaonline.org/
handbook/online/articles/fra54> [Accessed Apr. 22, 2019]; Francis E. Abernathy, “Dobie, James Frank,”
The Handbook of Texas Online, <https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdo02> [Accessed Apr.
22, 2019].
11
W. Page Keeton, “Sweatt V. Painter,” The Handbook of Texas Online, <https://tshaonline.org/hand-
book/online/articles/jrs01> [Accessed Apr. 23, 2019]. A comprehensive account of the struggle for civil
rights at UT can be found in Dwonna Goldstone, Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial
Equality at the University of Texas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

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tus and reputation from a regional to a nationally recognized institution

of research and learning.12
Another early factor in the creation of “weird” Austin was a robust form
of Christian liberalism that emerged in and around Austin and found a
home on the UT campus. The local YMCA and YWCA played integral
roles by providing safe spaces for UT’s student activists to meet. From the
late 1930s to the early 1960s, the University “Y” was “where it was happen-
ing” politically for students. The Y’s administrators—most notably Block
Smith, Frank Wright, Rosalie Oakes, and Anne Appenzellar—created a
refuge where student and faculty dissenters could openly discuss pressing
issues and controversies. As Frank Wright told the Dallas Morning News,
“We start with the issues of life—no holds barred—and work toward the
issues of faith.”13
The Christian liberal message emanating from the UT Y marked a path
toward achieving an authentic life through social justice activism. Perhaps
most importantly, the tenets of social gospelism encouraged interracial
cooperation and unity, providing an extraordinary degree of interaction
between black and white youth. As a result of this bonding and direct
participation, for many young white activists the civil rights movement
became their first real commitment to fulfilling the Christian liberal ideal.
Simultaneously, their involvement helped push many of them toward the
emerging New Left as they concluded that a more radical, intense insur-
gency was essential for genuine social change. As a Y student at Tufts Uni-
versity declared, “We are going to change society. . . . In the ’50s the beat
generation ran away from it. My generation knows we have to strike at the
system to make it respond.”14
The New Left is a catch-all term used to refer to a broad left-wing move-
ment that first emerged in the late 1950s and took its chief inspiration
from the civil rights movement. The most visible manifestation of the
New Left on American college campuses was the Students for a Demo-
cratic Society, founded in 1959. In 1962, SDS issued the Port Huron
Statement, a declaration of principles that sought no less to revolutionize
both the individual and society through “participatory democracy.” The
statement’s authors also decried racism, militarism, nuclear proliferation,
12
For a revealing discussion of how Cold War politics and many of the nation’s top universities became
tied to the military-industrial complex, see Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transfor-
mation of Stanford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
13
Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 85–114 (Wright quoted on page 86); Dugger, Our Invaded Univer-
sities, 64–66; Almetris Marsh Duren with Louise Iscoe, Overcoming: A History of Black Integration at the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Robert Pardun, Prairie Radical: A Journey
Through the Sixties (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Shire Press, 2001), 26–29; Beverly Burr, “A History of Student Activ-
ism at the University of Texas at Austin, 1960–1988” (Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1988), 7–17.
14
Tufts student David Smith quoted in Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties: Protest in
America From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41.

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technocracy, and, perhaps most significantly, how many of the nation’s

universities were helping to advance these anti-democratic, alienating,
and self-destructive developments. They sought a freer, more just, more
loving, and more authentic society.15
The belief in “student power” was perhaps the SDS’s most salient, origi-
nal assertion. The student authors of the Port Huron Statement believed
they offered a unique generational perspective, one that qualified them
to lead because they possessed the requisite humanity and the “real intel-
lectual and moral skills” necessary to effect change. Creating this sense
of exigency was the prospect of nuclear annihilation, which made them
possibly “the last generation in the experiment with living.” It was time to
act before it was too late for mankind in general. The university was the
ideal location, probably the only place where individuals—students—with
these prerequisites could be found and thus they would become the van-
guard of a new radicalism for change. Indeed, according to a mysterious
collective called the New Left Institute, “It is the historic responsibility
of students to begin to organize themselves into a movement which can
raise the fundamental issues confronting America and lead the way in the
creation of a New Left.”16
The students of the New Left saw much to criticize in the liberal ethos
that had informed the nation’s political and ideological landscape since
the New Deal. The civil rights movement in particular made clear lib-
eralism’s failure to truly deliver meaningful change to the nation’s dis-
franchised and marginalized. Many New Leftists believed that the major
political parties, the Democrats and Republicans, differed little from one
another and were controlled by wealthy corporate plutocrats who dictated
their foreign and domestic policies. They decried the power- and profit-
driven “corporate liberalism” that had emerged by the 1960s, best exem-
plified by the military-industrial complex that produced an imperialistic
U.S. foreign policy and sustained a perpetual Cold War hysteria at home.
By the mid-1960s the Vietnam War seemed to show this view to be true.
New Leftists were far more sympathetic to the worldwide struggle against
15
Madeleine Davis, “New Left,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-
Left> [Accessed Apr. 23, 2019]; Students for a Democratic Society, Encyclopaedia Britannica, <https://www.
britannica.com/topic/Students-for-a-Democratic-Society> [Accessed Apr 23, 2019]. The Port Huron
Statement can be online found at <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Pri-
mary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html> [Accessed Apr. 23, 2019].
16
“The Port Huron Statement” in “Takin’ It To the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and
Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61–74. See also C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the
New Left,” New Left Review 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1960): 75–81; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 1–20; Irwin
Unger, The Movement: A History of the New Left in America, 1959–1972 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company,
1974), 53–57; Anderson, The Movement and The Sixties, 62–66; Irwin and Debbi Unger, America in the 1960s
(St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 1988), 152–157; New Left Institute, “Beyond the Campus” (1968 type-
script), 1, Students for a Democratic Society Reports, 2J, Boxes 115–120, University of Texas SDS Papers
(Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; hereafter cited as DBCAH).

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western colonialism, of which the rebels in Vietnam were a part, than the
anticommunist “containment” policy of the United States.
Equally important was the New Left’s explicit disavowal of Old Left dog-
matism and shibboleths. According to New Leftists, the Old Left’s faith in
an insurgent working class had been tied to an age of scarcity that was
no more. Workers and trade unions no longer provided the source for a
radical renewal; they had either become co-opted by the liberal establish-
ment or had become conservative as they joined the ranks of the middle
class. As far as the New Left Institute was concerned, “the poor and the
unemployed are more responsive to liberal cooptation or to the right wing
than to a long-range radical perspective. The Old Left continues to talk as
though nothing has happened since the 1930s.”17
Instead, the New Left found ideological solace and inspiration from
existentialists like Albert Camus and social critics like C. Wright Mills and
Herbert Marcuse, who helped lead them down the path toward creating
a new political movement focused on “how late capitalist society creates
mechanisms of psychological and cultural domination over everyone.”
Mills, Marcuse, and other critical theorists questioned the working class’s
potential for revolutionary change in the age of abundance, contending
that that dynamic had shifted to a new type of worker: a white, college-
educated middle class “salariat” of the increasingly dominant, technology-
driven, bureaucratized, white-collar managed corporation tied to the mili-
tary-industrial complex. This was exactly the type of person the American
“multiversity” system of higher education was cranking out as graduates, a
“new working class of highly skilled personnel which are necessary to the
functioning of a technologically advanced industrial capitalism.” It was
this individual whom Marcuse and Mills believed would someday become
sick to death of being nothing more than an underpaid, overworked,
bored to death, emasculated, alienated, and soulless human being and
ultimately revolt against this new manifestation of psychological and emo-
tional exploitation by the corporate capitalist system. They would become
allies of the New Left student movement, and together they would bring
about the new consciousness necessary for change. In short, the new
radicalism was to be found among alienated university students and their
equally disaffected counterparts in the white collar workplace.18
17
Alan J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2009), 308–313; Edward P. Morgan, The ’60s Experience: Hard Lessons About Modern America
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 91–92, 94–97; New Left Institute, “Beyond the Campus,”
1; Bloom and Breines (eds.), “The Port Huron Statement,” 68–72.
18
New Left Institute, “Beyond the Campus,” 3–4; Andrew Kopkind, “Looking Backward: The Sixties
and the Movement,” Ramparts, February 1973, 32; Stanley Aronowitz, “When the New Left Was New,” in
“The ’60s Without Apology,” Social Text, no. 9/10 (Spring-Summer 1984): 11–43; Anderson, The Movement
and the Sixties, 64; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 34.

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What the New Left hoped to create in America was a new society based
on individual and collective authenticity. Only if individuals found their
way back to the “real” or “natural” and acted upon “raw” impulses, could
they overcome the despair, alienation, purposelessness, and anxiety of the
post-war era. Personal yearnings could be fulfilled by political activism.
According to the Port Huron Statement, “The goal of man and society
should be human independence . . . Politics has the function of bringing
people out of isolation and into community.”19 The New Left’s ultimate
goal was a participatory democracy that would alter the nation’s socio-
political structure, arrangements, and institutions to allow as many people
as possible to pursue that goal unfettered by any socio-cultural, economic,
or political restraints based on race, class, education, and eventually gen-
der. This call for radical change would inspire college students through-
out the country, including in Austin.
In the spring of 1963, a group of about twenty UT students, including
many Y activists and others involved in civil rights issues, decided it was
time to bring the various student groups together by organizing an official
UT chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These were
the “politicos” that would help define the 1960s in Austin. Although the
New Left emerged primarily on northern college campuses, there is little
doubt that the catalyst had been the southern civil rights struggle. Indeed,
the fight for civil rights was a magnet; it pulled activists together and gave
them a cause. While working together they discovered they had much in
common. Like the southern black student activists of the Student Non-
violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), many white students believed
it was time to address the inconsistencies between ideals and realities in
American life. UT’s Sandra “Casey” Cason believed “the whole country
was trapped in a lie. We were told about equality but we discovered it
didn’t exist.” The students who joined SDS at UT desired a political system
that was inclusive, not divided by Jim Crow segregation. “The concept of
participatory democracy spoke to my alienation, while offering a solution
through involvement,” Robert Pardun recalled later. Pardun believed SDS
was “an organization that would move people into action around issues
facing America. SDS’s ideology was basic—reach out to people around
issues that affect their lives and put them in contact with others who
shared their interests so that they could collectively have a voice in making
the decisions that affected their lives. This kind of grassroots democracy
would change America from the bottom up.”20
19
See under “Values,” Port Huron Statement, <http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/
Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html> [Accessed Oct. 30, 2019].
20
Casey Cason Hayden quoted in Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 57; Pardun quotation from
Prairie Radical, 35.

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Also appealing to UT SDSers was the fact that the Port Huron Statement
was firmly rooted in the American radical tradition. If the quest for the
real was a driving force for the New Left, then the movement’s every utter-
ance had to reinforce that ideal. According to Robert Pardun, the state-
ment’s authors wisely avoided using “Marxist words like ‘bourgeoisie,’ ‘rul-
ing class,’ ‘proletariat,’ and ‘internal contradictions’” because these were
terms that “weren’t part of most Americans’ vocabularies.” If SDS hoped
to attract more than students to their cause, particularly in Texas and on
the UT campus, New Left doctrine had to be free of all association with the
Old Left, “with Lenin, Trotsky, or Mao Zedong.” Pardun believed—prob-
ably correctly—that “the American people were not going to be moved by
foreign revolutionary heroes. The ideas of Marx and Engels were powerful
revolutionary tools, but Marxist rhetoric made nearly all Americans tune
out.” To Pardun this sense of authentic American leftist discourse was what
separated the Old Left from the new activists, as “SDS saw itself part of the
‘New Left’ unburdened by the old ideologies, sectarianism, and seemingly
endless splits over points of doctrine.” Jeff Shero Nightbyrd agreed with
his fellow UT SDSers: “Marxist rhetoric never really was part of the Ameri-
can psyche. It didn’t work, it wasn’t captivating.”21
Much like the emerging New Left at UT and other universities in the
early 1960s, the mostly white, middle class youth who came to be known
as “hip,” “hippies,” or “freaks” (as well as a host of other names) sought
greater authenticity in their lives and to create, like their New Left coun-
terparts, a freer, more inclusive, egalitarian society. They did so, however,
in ways that more explicitly flouted the respectable path taken by the stu-
dents of the New Left and deviated more openly from mainstream society
in their experiments with fashion, music, sexuality, and psychedelic drugs.
Nonetheless, the quest for authenticity motivated all of the decade’s radi-
cals, including the hip counterculture. At times the hippie idealization
of living authentically even surpassed that of the most passionate New
Leftist. It was the hip/politico quest for the real that became one of the
most important unifying forces between the two groups. With its long-
established reputation for welcoming dissidents and the offbeat, Austin
became a haven for hippies and other Texas participants in the 1960s
counterculture.
By the early 1960s, Austin’s hip counterculture began to emerge in
recognizable form on the UT campus and in the community at large. UT’s
Dick Reavis, who joined UT SDS in the fall of 1965, noted that already
the organization’s early rank and file “looked like the people, who six
months later the press would be calling ‘hippie.’” Nonetheless, Reavis
signed up and “from that day until I left campus, SDS was my university.
21
Pardun Prairie Radical, 35; Lieberman, Prairie Power, 86.

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. . . For a generation of thoughtful, talented, and rebellious young peo-

ple—some of whom had no interest in politics—SDS became a commu-
nity and school in the midst of a diploma mill.”22 The university’s and
the city’s “ragged fringe,” remnant beatkniks, integrationists, the campus
folk-singing club, renegade motorcyclists, spelunkers, and a whole host
of other bohemians, all found a common gathering place at UT’s Chuck
Wagon, the dining hall at the student union building. Binding this amal-
gam of Austin’s nascent underground was a common feeling of alienation
from, and disdain for, mainstream campus culture, then dominated by
Greek life, football, frat parties, panty raids, and segregation. As UT SDSer
Jeff Shero Nightbyrd noted in 1963, “we were so isolated. When you lay
out this insurgent group, and this is including everybody, we were about
200 in a sea of 20,000.”23 Although barely noticeable in 1963, these outli-
ers would grow in numbers, visibility, and most important, in purpose in
the next few years. They would soon join forces with their politico coun-
terparts to create a viable countercultural presence on the UT campus
and in the city of Austin. As the decade progressed, young people from
all across Texas flocked to Austin as the place to experience the profound
socio-cultural changes transforming American youth. Nowhere else in the
state but Austin could one live a bohemian, or proto-hippie life and par-
ticipate in the activities that defined the new consciousness—folk singing,
rock and roll, radical politics, and drug usage.
Of these early dissidents the “folk-singing group” was perhaps the most
important in shaping Austin’s hip counterculture. Indeed, many of Aus-
tin’s mid-to-late-1960s hippies emerged out of the Folksing, the first anti-
establishment student consortium on the UT campus. Folk music shed
light on the growing alienation of American youth from the nation’s insti-
tutions. The folk resurgence reflected a desire among young people for
an America more authentic than the version offered by contemporary
mass media. Folk music became a way of declaring distance from and dis-
dain for mainstream popular culture. Songs and ballads explored serious
social issues such as racial injustice, the excesses of modernity, poverty,
war, and nuclear annihilation.24
While “the Greeks” twisted to Chubby Checker records at parties near
campus, the folk singers sang traditional folk songs or commercial coun-
try favorites at Threadgill’s or at the 11th Door on the outskirts of town—
venues where these nonconformists could find both the authentic life
connections they were searching for among Austin’s “real folk”—white,
22
Dick Reavis, “SDS: From Students to Seniors,” in Daryl Janes (ed.), No Apologies: Texas Radicals Cel-
ebrate the ‘60s (Austin: Eakin Press, 1992), 102–103.
23
Nightbyrd quoted in Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover,
N.H.: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 44.
24
Ralph Gleason, “‘The Times They Are a Changin,’” Ramparts, April 1965, 47.

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UT SDSer Dick Reavis is pictured speaking at a microphone. UT Texas Student Publications

Photographs, e_uttsp_00042, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas
at Austin.
working class males—and where they could separate themselves from

their overwhelmingly white, conservative, middle class campus peers.
Thus, it was during the folk-singing craze of the early 1960s that musical
taste and expression emerged as one of the most important signifiers of
cultural difference among student dissidents and their counterparts on
the UT campus. As Alice Echols observed, “In more urban places like
Cambridge, Berkeley, and Greenwich Village, the search for authentic-
ity led folk music mavens to seek out obscure records and songbooks.
But in Austin, authenticity was considerably less hard to come by. Texas
was a region still alive with ‘real’ music, including country and western.”
On a university dominated by fraternities and sororities, the kind of peo-
ple who came to folk-singing events were the rebel group. Perhaps most
important, this early association of hippies and Austin’s “cowboy-redneck”
community both fulfilled the counterculture’s search for authenticity by

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“hanging-out” with Texas’s real folk and laid the foundation for the emer-
gence of Austin’s unique progressive country sound in the 1970s.25
Much as scholars have noted about present-day Austin, the 1960s
counterculture was marked by blind spots when it came to racial equality.
Threadgill’s maintained a whites-only policy that “folkies” did not chal-
lenge. The white participants turned a blind eye to the fact that their
music, which they believed represented local or regional authenticity and
anti-establishment values, and the people with whom they hoped to con-
nect as fellow renegades, were inextricably linked to racism and segrega-
tion. Although many UT folkies were strong supporters of the civil rights
movement and embraced Austin’s African American community, they
were unwilling to jeopardize the platform and message Kenneth Thread-
gill provided. Indeed, one of the folk singers members was Ed Guinn,
an African American, who was told by one of the group’s other white
members, John Clay, that his “presence” at Threadgill’s “would just be
too disruptive.” Guinn, taking the high road stated that he “had consid-
erable respect for John,” and thus felt “no need to blow up their bucolic
scene.”26 Despite their outward embrace of the civil rights movement and
their overtures toward integration, the overwhelmingly white participants
of the hip movement had some limitations when it came to racial equality.
Tensions and philosophical disagreements existed at times between
UT’s SDS and the campus’s hip community. But by the close of the decade,
the division between hip and activist on the UT campus had faded like
old tie-dye. In 1960s Austin, both hippies and radicals agreed that a cul-
tural transformation of American society was as important as the political
struggle; indeed, they became symbiotic in the hearts and minds of both
groups. More often than not, they supported each other’s causes, combin-
ing their efforts and philosophies when the need arose to either challenge
the status quo head on or to peacefully demonstrate their respective alter-
native lifestyles and beliefs. Through the use of spectacle—celebrations,
festivals, street theater, and spontaneous “happenings” in a variety of ven-
ues (including the Austin music scene)—Austin’s counterculture hoped
to raise the consciousness essential for cultural and political revolution.
It was this key dimension of New Left/hip thought that made the Austin
countercultural story unique. Direct hip participation in many UT SDS
events also helped to redefine Austin hippies as more than vapid, imma-
ture, apolitical druggies and dropouts, void of any socio-political aware-
ness and commitment to change. Indeed, 1960s Austin hippies were often
the vanguard for the cultural revolution, leading the charge by provid-
25
Shank, Dissonant Identities, 42, 44, 53; Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis
Joplin (New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 1999), 53; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 254. See also
Mellard, Progressive Country.
26
Shank, Dissonant Identities, 45.

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ing their SDS allies with a variety of creative ideas, tactics, and strategies,
which often produced political events and rallies that became legendary
for their inclusiveness, messaging, and outright fun.
Outside of Austin and other centers of prairie power, the hip coun-
terculture was suspicious and often hostile toward the New Left. For
example, reflecting the sentiments of the majority of hippies, Timothy
Leary told the San Francisco Oracle that “mass movements make no sense
to me, and I want no part of mass movements. I think it is the error that
the leftist activists are making. I see them as young men with menopausal
minds.”27 Mick Wheelock of the Los Angeles Free Press believed that the New
Left’s obsession with revolution had stripped the movement’s ideology of
its humanity. “When you pick up a gun and learn to kill,” declared Whee-
lock, “the part of you that loved flowers and simple things will die!” Many
hippies and even non-hippies—the so-called straight observers—believed
that by the late 1960s New Leftists had become so absorbed by politics and
revolution that they had lost all sense of fun. Bill Finn of the Berkeley Barb
opined that “the New Left writes so many position papers that they never
have time for sex. They just take a position.”28
If the hip communities outside of Austin were skeptical of the New Left,
the politicos were also not quite sure what to make of the “freaks.” On the
SDS’s mainstream campuses in the Northeast or on the West Coast, only
sporadically did hip and radical unite for a common cause or find affinity
for each other’s ethos. In those communities, most New Leftists believed
their countercultural counterparts to be irresponsible and naïve juve-
nile evaders of responsibility: “establishment finks in paisley.”29 When the
Berkeley Barb asked Trotskyist leader George Novack of the Socialist Work-
ers Party what he thought about the “psychedelic revolution,” he replied,
“It is a means of escaping the restlessness imposed by everyday life upon
everyone in this society. But it is sterile and infantile because it does not
fundamentally transform those restrictions which afflict and affect every
one of us. . . . The philosophy of the ‘hippies’ is a philosophy of politics
that says there should be love toward everyone. Love is a good thing, but
hatred of what is hateful is as necessary and important.”30 SDS member
Carl Ogelsby was a bit less disparaging but still skeptical, contending that
“the hippy scene may be fundamentally nothing but another form of a
weird American-style peasant uprising. We won’t really know what it was
27
“Changes” or “The Houseboat Summit,” San Francisco Oracle, February 1967, 10.
28
Wheelock and Finn quoted in Timothy Miller, The Hippies and American Values (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1991), 12–13.
29
Yuril Zhukov, “Pravda Views the Hippies,” trans. N. Vostochyni, Los Angeles Free Press, July 21–27,
1967, 9.
30
“Marxist Scholar Opines on Hips: An Interview with George Novack,” Berkeley Barb, May 19–25,
1967, 7.

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until the state’s repressive violence is turned against it full blast. Will the
hippies have the guts to strike back?” Ogelsby believed they would not
because “at the center of the hippies’ new love ethic” was “an intrinsic
capacity for surrender.” To Ogelsby, despite the hippies’ anti-bourgeois
blustering, the new cultural revolutionaries remained “suburbanites with
beads. Their activities have made themselves a circus for Caligula.”31
What bothered Ogelsby and many other New Left purists the most
about the hip counterculture was the centrality of drug usage, which
Ogelsby believed was not revolutionary but in fact harmful: “Drugs had
become kind of a metaphor of revolution and I felt that was really wrong,
that saying change your head, that wasn’t revolution.” UT activist Doro-
thy Burlage agreed, not only because she “was never into drugs” but also
because she feared that as hip and politico increasingly became one in the
same in the minds of straight Americans, they would come to see dope as
the defining feature of both groups and that would “contaminate a vision
of change in this country.” SDS compatriot Bob Ross also believed the hip
influence was detrimental to revolutionary change. “I saw the counter-
culture happening in front of me. I knew that it was becoming primary. I
didn’t like it. I thought it was destructive of a popular movement. It was
isolating; and elements of it, of course, were just purely reactionary.”32
The New Left in Austin in general, however, was also much less opposed
to drug use than its coastal counterparts. From the UT SDS’s founding,
its members engaged in the same countercultural activities as their hip-
pie counterparts: they all “turned on” to marijuana and some New Left-
ists even to acid. As UT SDS activist Marianne Wizard (formerly Vizard)
observed, “Basically everybody turned on; basically, everybody smoked;
very few people did not smoke dope.” In short, from the Austin counter-
culture’s inception its two most important affinity groups, the hippies and
the politicos, together, avidly participated in all three components of the
countercultural cliché of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” agreeing that rock
music, dope, and “free love” were the pathways to greater enlightenment.33
Several dynamics contributed to the partnership between UT’s SDS
and Austin’s other countercultural community, the hippies or “freaks.”
Although Austin had a flourishing counterculture, it was not large com-
pared to the San Francisco Bay Area or the East Village in New York City.
31
Carl Oglesby, “The Hippies: Suburbanites With Beads,” Activist, Fall 1967, 11–12.
32
Ogelsby, Burlage, and Ross all quoted in Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New
Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 136–137.
33
Wizard quoted in Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 257. Also see the Mariann Vizard (Wizard)
Papers, Boxes 3F 206 and 3G7, years 1963–1970 (DBCAH). Austin politicos not only indulged in mari-
juana, but also peyote, a local, easily obtainable psychedelic until it was outlawed in 1966. Until then, one
could buy buds on certain Austin street corners or in San Antonio at Hudson’s Wholesale Cactus, five
plants for a dollar. See Shank, Dissonant Identities, 49. Both Austin hippies and politicos were also known
to consume copious amounts of beer. See Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 257.

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Nonetheless, as Thorne Dreyer reflected, “Austin was a very funny scene.

There weren’t the real ideological-philosophical splits seen elsewhere at
the time between politicos and hippies. We probably had the most politi-
cal hippies and the most hip politicos around.” As Dreyer said in 1966,
“The Austin radical scene has the strongest sense of community of any I
have come in contact with; hippies and politicos merge.” Robert Pardun
echoed Dreyer’s assessment: “The community of people who identified
themselves as part of ‘the movement’ was growing everywhere [in Austin],
and a whole culture reflecting our values was taking form. In Austin this
community was a mixture of political people with counter-culture tenden-
cies and counter-culture people with political tendencies, and it was hard
to tell the two groups apart.” New Leftists such as Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
realized early on that if SDS had even the remotest chance of surviving in
Austin and on the UT campus, organizers had to welcome into their ranks
“every alienated person [we] could get of every kind, which was perfect
for SDS’s kind of politics. We had an alliance between the guys that rode
motorcycles, the kind of bohemian artist-writer types, the integrationists,
the early vegetarian peacenik types, even people who hated fraternities
and sororities, which ran the school. So it was an interesting coalition.”34
For SDSer Judy Smith, “The [hip] counterculture was a very important
part of what linked us. No one could do it alone, and the counterculture
[the hippies] provided a glimpse of what a movement might provide in
terms of new identities, new comradeship, and new ways of seeing.” Fellow
“new guard” SDSer Judy Baker agreed: “I really felt we were going to cre-
ate a culture that really worked. In 1966, 1967, and ’68, the countercul-
ture and the political movement were the same; if you asked people what
they belonged to, they belonged to everything. It was a very open time.”35
For UT politicos, the act of embracing the hip counterculture was
consistent with the cultural radicalism then being propagated by many
regional SDS chapters. In the opinion of one UT SDSer, the freaks rep-
resented the quintessential “victims of the process of demoralization; the
reduction of the individual to a machine producing entity.” However, the
hippies “have chosen to opt out of this process that dulls the conscious-
ness and have sought instead an alternative existence that rejects such
exploitation of mind and soul.”36 Robert Pardun believed that the young
34
Dreyer quoted in Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New
York: Citadel Press, 1991), 59; Dreyer to “Editors of the Underground Press Syndicate,” October 5, 1966,
announcing the Rag’s forthcoming publication, <http://www.nuevoanden.com/rag/ups_letter.html>
[Accessed Sept. 5, 2011]. Copy can also be found in Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground News-
paper, ed. Thorne Dreyer, Alice Embree, and Richard Croxdale (Austin: The New Journalism Project,
2016), 3; Nightbyrd quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 79.
35
Baker and Smith quoted in Klatch, A Generation Divided, 141.
36
Mariann Vizard, paper to be delivered at the National Conference for New Politics, in the Mariann
Vizard Papers for the year 1967, 3F: box 206 (DBCAH).

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people who were embracing the left were doing so for the same reason
they gravitated to the hip counterculture: they were sick to death of con-
sumer-driven, “plastic America” and its oppressive, soul-sucking acquisi-
tive obsessions; they wanted to become real individuals rather than con-
tinue to be the “game-players of society.” Pardun was certain that those
young people feeling such despair would find salvation from alienation in
a movement that represented the fusion of counterculture and New Left
“consciousness.” Such an alliance would provide young seekers with “the
options” for the “authentic” life they craved. To Pardun and other more
progressive New Leftists, the quest for a better way of life defined the era’s
youth rebellion, and by that standard, both Austin hippies and politicos
were on the same socio-cultural page.37
More than anything else, opposition to the Vietnam War forged the
alliance between student radicals and the hip counterculture. Indeed, the
youth revolt of the 1960s was inconceivable without the Vietnam War’s
destruction of young people’s belief in authority, faith in their govern-
ment, and confidence in their future. The war forced many citizens for
the first time to question the most fundamental assumptions about Ameri-
can culture, society, and government; about the nation’s moral purpose,
the American character; its historic mission in the world; and the legiti-
macy of its political system. The war came to define the decade as “the six-
ties,” consuming the nation’s attention and priorities while diverting the
human and material resources essential for continued reform at home.
As student activist Dave McReynolds observed in 1967, “Everything now
revolves around Vietnam. It is no longer a distant, bloodied, tedious spot
half way across the planet. Vietnam is here.”38
Perhaps more important than youth disaffection with the actual war was
the draft, which most young males, especially those in college, whether
hip, politico, or otherwise, most definitely opposed. The draft made being
a young male in the late sixties a very different experience from being one
in the early sixties. Because men could be drafted at age eighteen but they
could not vote until they were twenty-one, the draft seemed particularly
unjust. In the eyes of many young people, the draft seemed like an “Estab-
lishment” dragnet that at any time could abruptly end their carefree ways
and lives. The war itself, with its cruel and pointless violence was seen on
television almost every night through 1968. No matter how much young
people protested and reviled the slaughter, they could not stop it; the war
seemed to grind endlessly on. Because many in the counterculture had
abandoned school and mainstream institutions in general, they did not
qualify for deferments. Austin hippies found common cause with their
37
Pardun, Prairie Radical, 265.
38
McReynolds quoted in Anderson, The Sixties and the Movement, 131.

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politico brothers in protesting the war and defying the draft. Both freak
and radical concluded they would rather “have their brains bashed out by
a cop in front of an induction center for protesting against the draft, than
by a grenade in the jungle.”39
Opposition to the war in Vietnam not only served to unite Austin’s
freak and radical communities on their own terms, but it united them
in the eyes of those who looked askance at these challengers of the sta-
tus quo. To the police and the “Redneck terrorist groups” who harassed
both hippies and politicos, they were all uniformly dirty, lazy dopers and
hedonists, even “communist traitors.”40 “Frat rats” also menaced hippies
and leftists, according to a writer for The Rag, Anthony Howe: “They are
herd animals with herd mentalities: all the boys live together . . . they eat,
drink, drive, walk, and think (react) together and when they come upon
an unfortunate longhair, each tries to out-masculine the other by seeing
who can yell ‘queer’ the loudest with the greatest degree of Texas accent.”
Although Austin’s counterculture clashed with the fraternity scene and
“rednecks,” its worst nightmare was the Austin police. “Any time they feel
like it, the cops can pick you up, take you down to the station, beat the
holy shit out of you, and there is nothing you can do about it because the
cops are always right.”41 Harassment by such representatives of the establish-
ment helped to strengthen the bonds between Austin hippies and UT
radicals, for both realized that they confronted common enemies who saw
them in the same light.
As UT SDS founding member Jeff Shero Nightbyrd asserted, because
they operated in such a conservative, hostile environment, Austin coun-
terculturists “were by instinct much more radical, much more willing to
take risks. In Texas to join SDS meant breaking with your family, it meant
being cut off.” The reactionary animus southern New Leftists faced on a
daily basis helped to strengthen communal bonds. As Nightbyrd recalled,
“there’d be like twenty-five people who weren’t going home [at Christmas
or other holiday breaks]. It was like we’ll have our own Christmas here
[in Austin]. This is my new family. . . . You were much more bonded than
[old-guard SDSers] from the East Coast who were doing something that
was in the tradition of their families.”42
Because UT SDSers had always been outliers relative to the national
39
Quotation from nndated “Broadside” found in the Hippie Papers, San Francisco History Center
(San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California).
40
Pardun, Prairie Radical, 113; Anthony Howe, “I Would Suggest that the Situation of Texas Hippies
vis-à-vis Their Physical Well Being Could Rightly be Termed Dangerous or Paranoia,” The Rag, January 2,
1967, 10–11.
41
Howe, “I Would Suggest that the Situation of Texas Hippies vis-à-vis Their Physical Well Being Could
Rightly be Termed Dangerous or Paranoia,” 10–11. Also see Jim Simmons, “Straight Fun,” The Rag, March
4, 1968, 11.
42
Nightbyrd quoted in Sale, SDS, 20, and in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 88.

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organization, many local members found it difficult “to plug into the SDS
meetings” especially as they “descended into a haze of rhetoric,” which
caused many individuals to “avoid these meetings like the plague.” As Dick
Reavis saw it, by 1967–68, “The Austin chapter was especially anarchic. It
had no officers and rarely took a vote. . . . Decisions were ordinarily made
by tiny friendship cliques who consulted nobody. . . . We lost track of who
our members were . . . it was evident that SDS needed a new track. . . . SDS
was growing staid and hackneyed. We were all predictable noise, not new
music.”43
Not surprisingly, then, Robert Pardun and other UT SDSers increas-
ingly gravitated toward activities considered more hip than politico, where
they found solace from the rancor that characterized the SDS meetings,
and “where the old Austin SDS community spirit was alive and well.” As
these new hip-oriented service “affinity groups” emerged, Pardun and
other SDS expatriates believed these “cadres” best represented the direc-
tion the countercultural revolution should take. “There was a small group
trying to organize a chapter of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS)
to meet the needs of non-students. Another group of several dozen peo-
ple was starting Greenbriar School with a mission of helping children
learn cooperatively and at their own speed. They aimed to raise children
to be curious about many things. Judy Kendall, a ballet dancer, set up a
stage in a public park so that she could do ballet for the people. Small
businesses also sprang up. These ranged from our local head shop, Oat
Willie’s Campaign Headquarters, to food co-ops supplying whole grain
flour, natural peanut butter, and organic food. Several stores sold clothes,
jewelry, and other hand-made items, some of it produced in Austin.” For
Pardun and for many of his comrades, these various hippie-imbued ini-
tiatives and enterprises “formed a community, a counter-culture, where
people worked together, shared housing, occasionally made a little money
doing odd jobs, bought or traded for needed items, and just had fun. This
community was much more exciting than the SDS meetings and also a
lot more productive.”44 As far as Dennis Fitzgerald was concerned, there
needed to be even more “mingling of the tribes, more common festivals,
dialogue, the development of new rituals and institutions. . . . Let sds [sic]
organize toward a democratic society and the Conqueroo [Austin’s first,
most legendary, legitimate, multi-racial hippie band] blow their music.
But we need to make it clear to the Establishment and to one another,
43
Reavis, “SDS: From Students to Seniors,” 103.
44
Pardun, Prairie Radical, 265–266. For coverage of the emerging co-ops and other hip initiatives see
Paul Spenser, “Cooperative Store-y,” The Rag, September 16, 1968, 12; Spenser, “Insert,” The Rag, Janu-
ary 27, 1969, 2; “Insert,” The Rag, September 15, 1969, 3; “The Critical University,” The Rag, September
15, 1969, 10. By the early 1970s food co-ops in particular had flourished, with advertisements for such
initiatives in The Rag found on virtually every other page. See, for example, The Rag, February 21, 1972,
6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15.

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that whatever roads we are using, we are all going to the same place.” For
Robert Pardun, “the political movement and the counter-culture [the hip-
pies]” were “different ends of a spectrum of ideas about how to change
the world. In Austin . . . the political radicals and the cultural radicals were
overlapping in the same community. . . . We believed that politics should
be fun and that breaking down people’s social barriers was as much part
of politics as a demonstration or handing out leaflets.”45
In an intriguing hip/politico amalgamation, ex-lawyer-turned-radical
Martin Wiginton formed Mother’s Grits Austin Anarcho-Terrorist New
Left Beatnik Evangelical Traveling Troupe. Wiginton, along with “about
20 freaks of various leftist, shaggy tendencies,” combined virtually every
facet of the 1960s countercultural scene, perfecting the art of the spec-
tacle and festival with guerrilla theater performances, through which they
spread the gospel of Austin’s unique countercultural mélange of freak
and radical.46
According to an article in The Rag by Sandy Carmichael, Mother’s
Grits represented “that part of the movement’s ‘cultural revolution’ that
brings the hippies and the politicos together, which distinguishes the New
Left from the old.” Although Mother’s Grits “will tell you that their aims
are primarily political, that they are part of the Movement, and that they
are bringing the movement to small Texas towns,” they nonetheless real-
ized that their show had to reflect a counterculture and general youth
rebellion that was increasingly becoming more diverse, hip-oriented, and
attracted to the spectacle. Thus when Mother’s Grits hit the small col-
lege town circuit in the summer of 1968 in a bus outfitted à la Ken Kesey
and the Merry Pranksters, they not only bombarded their audiences with
political messaging but also engaged attendees with festival-like activities
of fun and games. For small-town college students in Commerce, Den-
ton, San Marcos, and even in “Wallace-country” Bryan-College Station,
Mother’s Grits’ arrival on campus was reminiscent of traveling carnivals or
circuses. Mother’s Grits purposely created that atmosphere with “their cir-
cus music, booths, rock band, political and religious speechmaking, and
guerrilla theater.” Indeed, the “main point” of Mother’s Grits’ band was
to help reinforce “the relationship between the hippy [sic] and political
movement. Most young people groove on that [hippie] music; they just
haven’t noticed that it is saying the same things the movement says.”47
By combining the most salient of the hip and radical ethos in their per-
formances, Mother’s Grits affirmed “what the new left has come to see”:
that the hippies’ “revolt against personal repression, against dominance
45
Dennis Fitzgerald, “Paranoid Community,” The Rag, June 5, 1967, 10; Pardun, Prairie Radical, 2.
46
“Texas Troup Trip,” The Rag, August 8, 1968, 8.
47
Sandy Carmichael, “Mother’s Grits,” The Rag, August, 22, 1968, 8, 9.

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“Texas Troupe Trip,” from the August 8, 1968, issue of The Rag (volume 2, issue 35) details
the travels of Mother’s Grits Austin Anarcho-Terrorist New Left Beatnik Evangelical Travel-
ing Troupe around Texas. The photo shows the group in San Marcos. Used by permission of
The Rag.

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and exploitation felt by individuals in their own lives; [their] affirmation

of a free life and [their] search for relationships with others rather than
things,” was “what ‘the revolution’ [was] all about.” Through their “dress,
the use of drugs, new forms of musical and other artistic expression; com-
munal living and shared wealth, and the rejection of rigid sexual and
other behavioral mores,” the hippies were “endeavoring to bring out the
beauty within all of us through freedom and love.” It was “for the sake of
the freedoms for which the hippies fight that the movement seeks to fos-
ter radical political-economic change,” and it was the message “of the poli-
tics of liberation and life affirmation” that Mother’s Grits hoped to propa-
gate “throughout the hinterlands of cowboy country.” As Jane Adams, an
SDSer from the University of Oklahoma, observed, the “Texas humor”
and messaging reflected in Mother’s Grits’ shows became part and parcel
of the prairie power ethos that SDS “easterners just didn’t appreciate. I
think people just didn’t have a clue about that kind of humor, which is
the style you know, it was a performative style. It was really wonderful and
could do outrageous kind of things.”48
Gentle Thursdays, “a gathering of the tribes,” activities designed to
unify the two communities and to break down the socio-cultural, polit-
ical, class, and racial barriers that existed on the UT campus, came to
define UT SDS’s collaborations with their hip counterparts in promot-
ing celebrations. This was precisely what Jeff Shero Nightbyrd envisioned
when he proposed “the happening” to his fellow SDSers. “I thought of
having this day where we for one day [would] act out the good society.”
Although breaking down barriers was important to Nightbyrd and others,
their main objective was the continued building and strengthening of a
leftist-freak alliance. As Robert Pardun declared, “On Gentle Thursday
people could step around the boundaries and get to know one another as
people.” The first Gentle Thursday, held in the fall of 1966, was a success;
even many “frat rats” and “sorority chicks” participated because “we were
having so much fun.” Indeed, in their announcement for the event, The
Rag suggested that “SDS chicks should hug fraternity guys and sorority
chicks should take emaciated Beatniks out to lunch.”49
Needless to say, university officials were none too pleased. Despite
constant administrative harassment, SDS persevered, sponsoring Gentle
Thursday annually in the spring for the next three years. It became the hip
event in Austin, as psychedelia and anti-war protest merged and increas-
ingly characterized the festivities. The Rag’s staff had to organize the 1969
celebration because by that year UT SDS was rife with dissension and was
thus unable to sponsor “a gathering of the tribes.” Nonetheless UT SDS-
48
Ibid.; Jane Adams quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 68.
49
Lieberman, Prairie Power, 91–92; “Announcement,” The Rag, October 31, 1966, 3; Pardun, Prairie
Radical, 162.

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ers realized that a hippie-influenced spectacle was far more appealing,

fun, and attractive to potential new recruits to the movement than politi-
cal speeches and protest marches would ever be. As Jeff Shero Nightbyrd
observed, “What was interesting about Gentle Thursday was it offered a
positive way of imagining society. Because if you just say ‘We’re against
the war and we’re against the imperialist lackey-dog military industrial
complex, we’re against racist, fascist pigs who run the university,’ that
rhetoric takes you only so far. Ultimately people want to live in a more
pleasing way.” For UT SDSer Susan Olan, Gentle Thursday was the
moment when “what came to be thought of as the Austin community was
born that day.”50
Gentle Thursdays, “Flipped Out Week,” and a host of other hip-imbued
activities and “celebrations,” reflected the attempt by UT’s SDS to create
a countercultural movement in Austin, Texas, that was unified, genuine,
and inclusive. It was an evolution that realized the importance of develop-
ing a radical ethos that was both political and cultural, and in that capac-
ity, Austin’s hip community played an influential role. Indeed, as one
participant in Flipped Out Week declared in a letter to The Rag, UT SDS
had “finally found the direction it had been looking for and complaining
about the lack of during the past year” and that was for SDS to finally aban-
don having “death marches and passing out literature talking about death
and photographically showing death.” However, thanks to SDS’s welcom-
ing of the hippies into the larger counterculture community, “Wow! We
are having peace parades, with flowers, balloons, streamers, children,
music, groovy spring days, and saying love is the only alternative.”51 Thanks
to the freaks’ philosophy of living a life that was liberated, organic, and
spontaneous, UT’s New Left embraced the belief that to be democratic
and authentic, one had to free oneself from the burdens of the material-
ism, conformity, and artificiality of the bureaucratic capitalism that drove
and defined peoples’ lives in post-war America.
UT SDS represented—and inspired—the emergence of a new “prai-
rie power” in American college towns between the coasts. They were less
“heavy” intellectually, less ideologically doctrinaire, less politically driven,
and much more action-oriented and open to accepting other counter-
50
Lieberman, Prairie Power, 92; Susan T. Olan, “Blood Debts,” in Janes (ed.), No Apologies, 1992, 20;
Glenn W. Jones, “Gentle Thursday: Revolutionary Pastoralism in Austin, Texas, 1966–1969” (master’s
thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1988), 69; Gary Thiher, “Gentle Thursday as Revolution,” The Rag,
April 24, 1967, 10–11; Thorne Dreyer, “Flipped Out Week,” The Rag, April 10, 1967, 1, 4. Also see Par-
dun, Prairie Radical, 162, 185–186; Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 261–263; Sale, SDS, 327; Glenn W.
Jones, “Gentle Thursday: An SDS Circus in Austin, Texas, 1966–1969,” in Sights of the Sixties, ed. Barbara
L. Tischler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 75–85; Susan Jankovsky, “A Challenge
for the New Left—‘Our Little Crusader at UT,’” The Texas Observer, March 17, 1967, 4; Dennis Fitzgerald,
“Gentle Thursday Banned at UT,” The Rag, April 10, 1967, 1, 4.
51
“Doran Williams to Funnel,” The Rag, April 24, 1967, 2.

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cultural affinity groups into their ranks. For Robert Pardun, UT SDS
and prairie power was simply “a mixture of direct action politics and cul-
tural rebellion.52 In Jeff Shero Nightbyrd’s view, what allowed UT SDS to
become one of “the biggest chapters in the country for two or three years,”
was “the blending of culture and politics which became larger and larger
as the sixties played out.” SDS Texans realized “the cultural flux going
on” and, in order to stay connected with the increasing appeal of the hip
counterculture they went to “be-ins, dropped acid, put out underground
papers [The Rag], wore love beads [as well as] SDS buttons.”53 Jane Adams
of the University of Oklahoma agreed that not only did the “prairie power
folks experiment with the cultural revolution right along with everybody
else,” but that it was primarily the UT SDSsers who were the first to bring
this new consciousness and a badly needed sense of humor to a national
SDS that was becoming by 1967 increasingly static, doctrinaire, and inter-
nally ideologically polarized. “I remember one instance when Dick Reavis
from Texas got quoted by the press [saying] ‘We’re going to overthrow
the country with forceful and violent laughter.’ There was that kind of
sensibility of, you know. Just thumb your nose at them. Laugh at them.
Different from the East Coast approach, which was very, very serious. Very
academic as opposed to this wide-open-throw-open-the-gates,” approach
which the SDS establishment labeled as “anarchists.”54
UT SDS and their hip comrades relished being described by the old
guard as “ruralistic in dress,” as “reflecting a different tradition, one more
aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individualistic,” and of being
“long-haired, dope smoking anarchists.” The image reflected an activist
dissent that retained much of its indigenous cultural heritage. A Texan
countercultural persona had emerged in Austin and on the UT campus,
which over time became an identity that many in the Texas countercul-
ture proudly embraced and exuberantly displayed, much to the annoy-
ance of their “Yankee” brethren. UT New Leftists in particular believed
that the best way to attract people to their movement was to cultivate and
maintain this Texan identity that compatriots could relate to. It was both
familiar and traditional, yet simultaneously alternative and oppositional.
52
Pardun, Prairie Radical, 2.
53
Lieberman, Prairie Power, 84–85. The successful alliance of hip and radical on the UT campus and
within Austin’s larger community would not have been nearly as strong had it not been for Thorne Drey-
er’s publication of The Rag, whose raison d’être was to do all it could to promote this unusual countercul-
tural coalition. In a 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Free Press, Dreyer proudly declared that The Rag
“has a definite non-ideological connection with the left-wing love, flowers, and freedom sect, anarchistic
division of SDS.” Dreyer also reminded his West Coast comrades that “Austin is often called Berkeley
Southwest because it’s the only place for miles around where anything is happening. The Rag has created
a real viable left-hip community” and the publication “has brought them all together in a funny sort of
way.” “Other Scenes: An Interview with the Austin Rag’s Thorne Dreyer,” Los Angeles Free Press, August
16–22, 1968, 6.
54
Jane Adams quoted in Lieberman, Prairie Power, 67–68.

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Texas leftists, and for that matter, even most Texas hippies, tended to view
themselves as Texans, not as southerners or westerners. In short, Texas
SDS gained a reputation for being a rough-hewn, wild bunch of provincial
beer-drinking, motorcycle riding libertarians, often labeled by their peers
as being stereotypically Texan: “egalitarian, individualistic, aggressive, vol-
atile, and conspiratorial.”55
According to Kirkpatrick Sale, this “new breed in SDS” brought with
them “a new style and a new heritage. For the first time at an SDS meeting
[the 1966 summer national convention held in Clear Lake, Iowa] peo-
ple smoked marijuana; Pancho Villa moustaches, those droopy Western-
movie addenda that eventually became a New Left cliché, made their first
appearance in quantity; blue work shirts, denim jackets, and boots were
worn by both men and women . . . their rustic dress reflected a different
tradition, one more aligned to the frontier, more violent, more individual-
istic, more bare-knuckled and callus-handed than the early SDSers.” They
had also grown impatient with the old guard’s “position papers” and con-
stant wrangling about petty protocol, agenda, and philosophical issues.
These “new guard” members pushed their more staid colleagues into
active resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. They agitated for chal-
lenging several aspects of the modern university: what they saw as repres-
sive, antiquated, and “inhumane” policies; an outdated, chauvinistic cur-
riculum; “fascist” administrators and their bureaucratic minions; as well as
corporation and military recruitment on campus.56
For national SDS vice-president Carl Davidson, the UT-led prairie
power radicals, with their affinity for the hip counterculture, anarcho-
syndicalist approach to local organization and action, and general free-
wheeling Texan attitudes, represented a faction within SDS he labeled
as “the shock troops,” whom, he concluded after his 1967 national tour
of hundreds of chapters, constituted “85–90%” of current SDS member-
ship. These new recruits were “rapidly moving into the Bob Dylan, hippy
[sic] syndrome. They are really into the [hip] counterculture.” Because of
their hippie sentiments, the shock troops were “staunchly anti-intellectual
as a result of compulsory miseducation, and rarely read anything unless
it comes from the underground press syndicate. They have never heard
of C. Wright Mills or Bob Moses.” Perhaps most importantly, they had “no
politics,” which meant they were not ideological captives of any form of
55
Sale, SDS, 204–205; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking
of the New Left (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 30–31; Gitlin, The Sixties,
192; Pardun, Prairie Radical, 2; Lieberman, Prairie Power, 83; D. W. Meinig, Imperial Texas: An Interpretive
Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 35, 89.
56
Pardun, Prairie Radical, 113–128; Doug Rossinow, “The Revolution is About Our Lives: The New
Left’s Counterculture,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, eds. Peter
Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (London: Routledge, 2002), 107–108; Sale, SDS, 204–205; 279–
280; 291–297; Unger, The Movement, 88–91, 97–100; The Rag, December 18, 1967, 1.

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New or Old Left brands of Marxist-Leninist or Maoist doctrine. If they

had any political philosophy it was reflective of “Populism and anarcho-
syndicalism.” They “loved to go to demonstrations,” yet hated attending
meetings and organizing; they were “just not into that kind of stuff” but
could consistently be counted on “for action.”57
In alliance with the hippie community, Austin’s New Leftists embarked
on a course of action determined to bring individuals back to their human-
ity, which they believed had been sucked out of people by the oppressive
weights of consumer capitalism. Because the hippies advocated spontane-
ity and ecstatic search for the “real life,” Austin’s student radicals believed
such an ethos should become part and parcel of a “new” New Left vision
and agenda for change. Thus the hippies must be welcomed and enfolded
into the new movement. They would provide the brashness and joie de
vivre sorely missing in an increasingly polarized, doctrinaire, and antago-
nistic SDS by 1968.
In the view of most UT SDSers, only through an alliance with the hip-
pies could the real cultural revolution take place. Although they main-
tained respect for each other’s differences on many issues and pursued
many activities separately, both hip and radical realized that on the topic
of fomenting cultural change they shared much of the same ideology.
They willingly came together for the common cause, giving greater voice
and recognition to the hip communities and campus activists not from
those areas of the country and institutions that have dominated the his-
torical conversation of the 1960s counterculture. In this regard, the 1960s
Austin countercultural community was unique and brought together the
progressive politics and cultural permissiveness that make Austin “weird.”
57
Carl Davidson, “National VP Report: Where We’re At and What We’re About,” New Left Notes, Febru-
ary 3, 1967, 4–5.

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Political Hippies and Hip Politicos

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Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26876160

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Vol. CXXIII, No. 3 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January, 2020

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The roots of the cultural permissiveness and progressive politics that

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tus and reputation from a regional to a nationally recognized institution

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technocracy, and, perhaps most significantly, how many of the nation’s

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. . . For a generation of thoughtful, talented, and rebellious young peo-

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UT SDSer Dick Reavis is pictured speaking at a microphone. UT Texas Student Publications

working class males—and where they could separate themselves from

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Nonetheless, as Thorne Dreyer reflected, “Austin was a very funny scene.

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and exploitation felt by individuals in their own lives; [their] affirmation

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ers realized that a hippie-influenced spectacle was far more appealing,

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New or Old Left brands of Marxist-Leninist or Maoist doctrine. If they

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