The single most memorable bit from Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ a - mostly forgettable - book about building a revolution in the United States after the ‘Pan Asians’ conquer it?
The fact that the man leading the revolution, a non-professional military officer whose main business is PR and advertising tells his recruiters that he wants solid citizens and ‘no long haired men or short haired women.’
And this was written in 1941 and published in book form in 1949!
So what did Heinlein have against classical music?
I hear hippie were never good a punctuation, either. But think how long your hair would be if hadn’t cut it since 2009?
Zombie’s hair doesn’t grow.
Maybe he did too much LDS back in the 60s.
The Mormons were tough, but at least you can spread your precious seed among multiple wives. I’m sure the hippies appreciated that!
I think he was at Berkeley.
Good point. Asking how many hippies there were has the same problems as asking how many nerds there are, or how many rednecks, etc… You could do a poll to find out how many people in some area drive old pickup trucks, vote Republican, and chew tobacco, but then some people who would consider themselves to be rednecks or who would be widely considered such don’t do all of those things. These terms - hippie, nerd, redneck, etc., are vague and have fuzzy borders. You can find people who are solid, core examples of each stereotype, but then you’ll find lots of people in the borderlands. Is someone who dislikes SF but has a great love for medieval chivalric romances necessarily nerdy?
I thought that was “Fifth Column”?
Sixth Column, later retitled The Day After Tomorrow.
It was published under both “Sixth Column”, and “The Day After Tomorrow”. It was actually based on an outline of John Campbell’s, and Heinlein acknowledged that it was not his best work. Among other things, he said he had to work hard to remove Campbell’s racism – given that many readers (especially today) still find it racist, that gives you an idea of Campbell’s view of the times.
I came home from college for a weekend back in the draft-dodging days. Hair down to my belt. My family had gone to my younger sister’s track meet, so I headed over there. When my Dad saw me, he yelled, in front of the whole crowd, “SON! You’re back from Canada, I’m so thrilled!”
BTW, we called ourselves “freaks,” not hippies.
I’m curios as to how these threads get restarted.
Do people really do a search for “Were hippies in the 1960’s really discriminated against?”?
If we’re allowing scenes from fictional movies of the era, then there was also the diner scene from Alice’s Restaurant.
Long hair may have been unacceptable, but weren’t big greasy pompadours and duck tails A-OK back then? Or did that only work if you were in a NYC street gang?
Wasn’t that just the '50s?
People were as hysterical over those in the 1950s as they were over hippies in the 1960s. In fact, the hysteria over the hippies was probably made worse because of the gang associations of the 50s.
Outback Australia, 1970s:
A friend of mine was with a group of young guys out driving in the back country (I think shooting 'roos or wild boars or something). They weren’t hippies, just young. They drove late at night several hundred miles between towns, got to the next one in the morning, got petrol, and went to the main street to find somewhere open, because they were very hungry. Cop pulls up behind them…
COP: “Piss off.”
GUYS: “We’re just grabbing a burger.”
COP: “Not in my town. Piss off.”
Sure decent people would look askance at you if you looked like a biker, but it was because they were afraid you would beat them up, not that they wanted to beat you up.
Wasn’t there a bit in Starship Troopers about there being too much Delius and not enough Beethoven?
