Some say it was the civil rights movement, war, nuclear fallout, women’s rights, Feminism, human sexuality, civil rights movement…
But nothing really explaining what really caused it and the social issues going on back in that time line.
The baby boom and post-war prosperity. Lots of kids, lots of money.
Alesan nailed it in 6 words.
But if ya wanna read more, here’s a copy of a post I once made in a similar thread :
The hippies (and most baby boomers) love to claim credit for changing the world.But they are wrong.
The world did change—but not because of the hippies. It changed because of the enormous improvements in standard of living.
By the 60’s, most urbans kid had lived their entire lives at the highest standard of living in histroy. With no financial difficulties, always secure, and always with plenty of food in the refrigerator.
Lets compare earlier generations, for contrast:
–in the 40’s nobody had refrigerators, and so most people routinely went to bed a little bit hungry at night; Not because they were poor, but because there was no junk food. The last slices of bread had gone stale (no plastic wrapping, and no preservatives.)You had to wait till tomorrow to buy more. RESULT: You lived with patience, and there was no reason to fight the system. No hippies…
–During the 50’s, life improved. Families began to buy their first refrigerators, their first car, etc…Now, bread stayed fresh longer, food was plentiful, you could drive Dad’s car to the school dance.
RESULT: a few kids lost their patience and tested the system, using their new freedoms (greasers in black leather jackets, drag racing, etc). Other slightly older kids became beatniks—the seeds of hippies
–By the 60’s, life had improved even more. Almost all urban teenagers could afford their own car, their own record collection, and,–for the first time in human history—their own apartment, with a refrigerator full of fresh bread and junk food.
RESULT: Widespread social change. Not just a few hippies, but a wide slice of society, mostly young, lost their patience and wanted to test the system. Using their new freedoms, and with no supervision,they naturally wanted to try forbidden things, which they wouldnt dare to do back in their parent’s house.
So people experimented, and found out that life could be fun.
The earliest experimenters (say, 1964-1966) were labelled as hippies. But they didnt cause the revolution in lifestyles.They were just early adopters of the economic boom which everybody was participating in.
It was suddenly easy to live a lifestyle that had been impossible only a few years before–when your dad held the keys to the only car in the family, and your mother had to work hard to prepare the food in the ‘ice box’.
The hippies and baby boomers love to claim credit for creating today’s free lifestyle. But they didnt create it–it created itself.They just happened to be alive at the time when the economy allowed a new type of freedom that had never existed before.
For proof–compare different countries. Some countries experienced the full-blown revolution of “The Sixties”. But some countries had poor economies and were completely uninfluenced by it.Yet they later became just as “liberated” as the USA.
Compare the “summer of love” --1967-- in various countries:
Students in America, France and Germany were holding demonstrations, discovering sex and taking birth control pills.
But Ireland was a Catholic theocracy where students were quiet,(and nobody was allowed to enjoy sex 
). Spain was a dictatorship, where nobody dared to demonstrate or try to express any freedom. Israel was at war fighting for its life, its campuses closed because ALL students were called up to their military units, and spent the “summer of love” holding rifles in foxholes.
Yet all 3 of these countries, a decade or two later, developed economically to the level of America and France. And, guess what happened?–with no hippie “revolution”, they just casually adopted the same lifestyle as America had. Because when people have enough money to live well, they choose to live as free as they can.
And if they all have private bedrooms at age 18, they’re gonna have sex. You don’t have to thank the hippies for inventing that concept.
First: Refrigerators not only existed in the 1920s, they became popular in the 1920s, and ice boxes existed before that. Also, sliced bread was first introduced in 1928, and was banned for less than two months in 1943 precisely because sliced bread required thicker wrapping than unsliced to prevent staling.
Second: If you think there was no reason to fight the system in the 1940s, I have to question your knowledge of history. Especially since…
… the Beatniks were explicitly (as in, it is explicit in the name of the movement) a follow-on to, a younger group aping, the Beats, who were active in the 1940s. The Beats were a number of people, including gays, Jews, and gay Jews, who had every reason to be against the system in the 1940s, but who were too alienated from society to make much of a difference. They wrote wonderful poetry and took lots of amphetamines and morphine and the ones who survived either became Kerouac or the older generation which shepherded the hippies into their Eastern religion mind-expansion phase.
Prior to that, you had the Jazz Age, which has a number of parallels with the Sixties, including an unprecedented economic upturn*, which gave more people access to disposable wealth (helped by the popularization of buying “on time”, or what we’d call an installment plan), a new Terrible Youth Music scandalizing the older generation by mixing Blacks with Whites (not to mention the flowering of Black culture that was the Harlem Renaissance, paralleled by the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s), a social panic about drugs and loose women, and, of course, the economic explanation: The country was industrializing in the 1920s, moving people out of the farms and into the cities, which tends to break down social strictures. This has parallels with the 1960s in that more of the youth were going to college at that time, either due to newfound affluence or, later, veterans going to school on the GI Bill, and that also tends to make people more broad-minded.
*(Gee, if a massive economic upturn is unprecedented in the 1920s, the 1950s, and the 1990s, when does it become precedented? 
)
So I really have to question your narrative about the 1960s having the first really rebellious youth.
That is a wonderful description of the teenagers of the 1920s. It applies to the teenagers of the 1960s, but the 1920s got there first.
Gee, they must have been the ones what invented sex!
This I agree with you about. The hippies, as such, didn’t achieve a lot of lasting social change on their own, and mainly hitched their wagon to a massive economic upturn which allowed a lot of social progress to happen.
Actually, while Spain had a relatively small amount of locally-grown hippies (quite a few from abroad though, specially in the mediterranean coast and in a still-virginal Eivissa), it was experiencing its own boundary-pushing as a consequence of its own economic improvement.
For more than 20 years we’d been poor. Dirt poor. First we’d been at civil war; then the neighbors had been at war; then the neighbors didn’t talk to us because the gang who won our was was different from the one who’d won their war. Giving NATO permission to use Spain as a staging area brought a much-needed influx of money, as well as foreigners who weren’t just singers and movie stars visiting Europe’s quaint, bullfighting corner. Our boundary-pushing was very heavily political; forms of music and “folk stuff” that had been preserved by The Regime were now being coopted and defrosted by leftist, young folk with long hair. The general pattern of “people who are hungry are too busy chasing food to chase democracy, equality, or any of that; feed them and they’ll be able to start getting both creative and demanding” is the same as you describe, though.
Derleth ,The OP asked about the hippies of the 60’s. I contrasted it with the previous 2 decades.
You are right that in the 1920’s there was also a mini-hippy movement, for many of the same reasons.
I don’t disagree with you.
I didnt know that. My father tells me that his family (in an immigrant neighborhood of Boston, solidly working class, but low income) didn’t get a fridge till 1940, and they were the only family on the street who had one.
I didn’t know that either.(Thanks!) . But , sliced or not, it still went stale in 24 or 36 hours, and you had to wait till the next morning to buy more at the corner grocer. My point is that people suffered a bit; they lived with a level of patience, and even mild hunger pangs, that we today cannot put up with. They lived with limitations in their daily life, and learned not to complain about it. The hippies never experienced those limitations, so they complained, and demanded more freedom.
Yes, this is similar to the 1920’s–but on a much larger scale.
of course they did. But the ice was supplied daily by an iceman–who used a horse-drawn cart, and delivered a block of ice to you that had a few bits of straw and horse shit on it. Not exactly the easy life that the hippies of the 60’s grew up with.
The Beats were so few in number that they had zero effect on American society.
The hippies were everywhere.
(The summer of love was 1969, not 1967, by the way.)
It was 1967, at least in San Francisco. I was there, and was part of it in a very small way.
Although it didn’t suddenly stop a year later. It might be more correct to call it a “half-decade of love.”
What, no blaming it all on Dr. Spock?
I’d blame a lot of it on Dr. Pincus.
Oh, come on man. That’s such a downer. We were all about Peace and Love. Creating a new world, man! Free your mind for the crushing conventions of society, man! We don’t need money, man. Hey, can I crash at your place tonight, because, well you know… I’m a little short on bread right now, man.
I’d also suggest a bit of a backlash on the military organization and discipline of the previous generation. 14 million people were in the US Armed Forces for WWII just 20 years earlier. Most of them didn’t fight, but that was still nearly 10% of the US population. Then they came home and we had our top WWII general as President for 8 years.
And then we had the Vietnam War going on with the draft and more militarization.
Isn’t really too much of a shock that a chunk of that generation goes “Screw that shit! PEACE AND LOVE!!!”
Pretty much. When you get into the various levels/denominations of “hippy” you can get into different roots - what caused someone to turn say SDS as opposed to Hog Farm for example. But in a general sense the long-haired general rebellion was just a matter of numbers and because it was affordable as an option at the time.
Every age has had a counter-culture movement. Before the Hippies there were the Beatniks, and after them there were the Punks and the Goths and so on. The different movements all manifested in different ways, but that’s inevitable, because you can’t rebel against your parents by doing the same things they did to rebel against your grandparents.
No, Sergeant Pepper came out during the summer of love. 1967.
I’m a baby boomer. My mother rebelled against the scrupulous frugality and endless toil of her midwestern dairy farm upbringing by moving to Californian suburbia, filling a house with Eames chairs and abstract art, and feeding us with boil-in-a-bag vegetables and hamburger helper. Frankly, as a rebellion it lacked pizzazz.
What we rebelled against was the incredible stultifying boredom and conformity of the fifties and early sixties. Oh, and the draft. Remember the draft? Pre-hippie movement, the generation which had lived through the Great Depression and WWII wanted nothing more than safety and comfort. Born into that environment, we wanted nothing but out of there. There was never a better moment to rebel, because just about anything you did besides march in lock step wearing a skirt that came to the exact middle of your knee was an act of rebellion.
I was the kind of hippie who embraced Zen Buddhism and the Whole Earth Catalog. If you weren’t around then, you just can’t conceive of how exciting it was, like falling through the veil from a black and white world into a world of color. And IDEAS. Stuff no one seemed to have ever heard of before, sprouting up everywhere like wheat.
It was a confluence of prosperity, an enormous number of people coming of age all at the same time, and many other things.
What happened in the *60s is still not understood very well by most people.
To comprehend it, you need to fully understand that all social structure consists of ideas that are in people’s heads. Not elsewhere. In people’s heads. What makes social structure feel as real and concrete is the fact that the same ideas are in everyone’s heads, more or less — that they are socially shared, that they are shared and expected to be shared in common, every individual expects all the other individuals they interact with to embrace the same concepts.
If you don’t fully comprehend that, it can sound like the most ludicrous of hippie-dippie bullshit woo woo to say that “if enough people visualize things differently, they become different, reality is in our minds”. It actually is hippie-dippie bullshit if you’re talking about visualizing Mt. McKinley or the iron bars of your own jail cell, because those things exist outside of our minds, but social structure doesn’t.
- by the 60s, I refer to a timeframe not neatly bookended by 1960 and 1960 respectively, but offset a bit later and lasting a bit longer than 10 years by the way…
In that timeframe, an entirely different worldview, composed of several new axioms and discarding several of the old axioms, began to be shared in common by a critical mass of people. This critical mass of people were mostly of a similar age and the critical mass phenomenon was greatly assisted by the demographic fact that the generation in question consisted of a lot more people than usual. Yeah, baby boom. But the different worldview didn’t transpire directly because it was a baby boom, that just fueled the ability of a set of ideas to become shared by a critical mass.
The content of the new worldview drew from several different sources but a great many of them had axioms in common, shared attitudes and assumptions, things that caused acceptance and embrace of one set of ideas to be a good predictor of acceptance of others that also prevailed in this worldview. There was a whole lot less interest in tradition, less attitude of adapting to the world as it is, far less belief in the sanctity of rules and the importance of following them. There was an optimistic idealism and a belief that rationality and good intentions could make everything good for everybody, and that an adversarial situation was not necessary. Peace wasnt just about VietNam but was also about setting aside race conflict and rejecting an international worldview that painted a huge chunk of the globe as ‘enemy’ and questioning the correctness of coercive law enforcement, coercive handling of students, anything coercive really.
It may or may not be true that young people from most eras tend to think more in that fashion. I suspect it probably is true. But there were also era-specific things going on, a rebound in attitude from the conservative rule-following Russians-fearing 1950s. But none of that would have mattered without the critical mass. Without critical mass it is only of theoretical interest that social reality exists only in people’s minds, because most people’s minds would still be full of the conventional social reality.
Critical mass meant that a meaningful large percent of the people that anyone interacted with shared the new viewpoints and priorities and perspectives, and acted accordingly, and therefore if expected to act accordingly would be found, as with the old social structure, to confirm the “expected to be shared” element of social structure. People living by the new rules were being validated. And as they experienced that, they realized they were experiencing that, and became very excited about the fact that (not notion, FACT) that they were changing the world. And that therefore it was all up for grabs. They ceased to perceive themselves merely as wanting to change the world or as resisting the status quo and began to experience themselves as the driving force.
sound track courtesy of Neil
A moment of thought would have prevented you from typing this, while refrigeration was uncommon, ice boxes were common. Even so lots of junk food does not require refrigeration. As for stale bread, if one is hungry it is consumable. So it looks liek you statement seems a bit slanted.
You far underestimate the people of the past if you believe this.
Yes but the hippies where mad at the system.
May be it was not one thing that started it!! But number of thing that was among young people mid like war, nuclear fallout, women’s rights, human sexuality rights, civil rights movement.
Rebellion and revolution always comes from hardship. Look at dictators, war and revolution always over hardship.
When the economy and way of life is good you don’t have war, rebellion and revolution.
Some hippies did drop out and rejected materialism and city life. Moved to the country built shack, no electricity, no water, no TV, no electronics. And did not work and buy any thing.
Others where just in it for ride ( some thing to do and have good time) and than there where political hippies.
Some say if it was not for the music and media there would been no hippie movement.