Why do we call it the Summer of Love?

In the hot months of 1967 there was a military coup in Greece; a war started in Biafra; there were race riots in Newark, Detroit and Boston; Muhummad Ali was stripped of his world title for refusing the draft; Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were jailed on drug charges; Arab attempts to destroy Israel triggered the Six Day War; Kenneth Halliwell murdered his lover, the playwright Joe Orton; the Beatles manager Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose; and the Swedish switched to driving on the right.

Doesn’t sound much like a Summer of Love to me.

So why the name? On April 5, 1967, in a converted firehouse on Waller Street, San Francisco, a press conference was held, called by assorted members of the hippy scene in the bohemian district of Haight-Ashbury. And they announced their intention to form a Council for a Summer of Love. The title stuck.

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The origin of the name is significant. For this summer we are celebrating, if that’s the right word, the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. And the tendency to see this term as the description of an era, rather than of a discreet series of events in a small district in one city, is strong. Does this mistake matter? Yes, because it is a symbol of something bigger – the way in which both Left and Right overestimate the Sixties counterculture. The 40th anniversary, while everybody is printing their cut-out-and-keep guide to the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, is as good a moment as any to challenge this.

Let’s start in Haight-Ashbury itself. The creation of the council was a defensive move, designed to reassure local residents. Even the bohemians of the district feared the influx of students once the college vacation began. So some form of rudimentary organisation was put in place – a free store, free food and free love in the parks. But it didn’t really work. Haight-Ashbury, which had been a delightful enclave, was left a shadow of itself, a refuge for drug addicts and other damaged people.

Sure, thousands of young people were involved. But this was still a tiny, tiny percentage even of America’s youth. At the height of the counterculture’s growth, only 10 per cent of young Americans described themselves as “radicals”.

Haight’s Summer of Love wasn’t even cool. Here’s the verdict of George Harrison, who visited in early August: “You know, I went to Haight-Ashbury expecting it to be this brilliant place, and it was just full of horrible, spotty, dropout kids on drugs.” Far from making him, in Timothy Leary’s phrase, want to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, Harrison vowed to stop using LSD.

In other words, the Summer of Love was a failure, a distinction it shared with other countercultural “happenings”, many of which ended in mayhem and even murder. Why, then, does it loom so large in our imagination so many decades later?

Because of the Sixties. It is even clearer now than it was at the time that this was a watershed decade. Forty years ago, it was thought that the generation gap between teenagers and their parents would be a permanent feature of modern life. Instead, there was just one generation gap, but the gulf yawns between those who grew up in the years before the Beatles and those who grew up after it.

The mistake is to regard this as the consequence of the counterculture. The real cause of the Sixties revolution was something much more powerful and much more widespread – capitalism.

In his fine new book The Age of Abundance Brink Lindsey argues persuasively that the most important cultural change of the postwar era was moving from scarcity to abundance. For millions of people, the struggle merely to survive lost its intensity. And this left room for other priorities – the search for identity, the desire to make something of oneself.

This new spirit swept all before it in the Sixties. It produced the demand for political rights by African-Americans, it allowed women to think of themselves as more than drudges and to begin to make their way outside the home, it enriched teenagers and made them a potent economic force. It also produced a consumer society. You want it? Yes, I want it and I want it now. Then you can have it. The mass market burst through class barriers, upturned traditions, made revered customs obsolete.

Lindsey quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” And Lindsey argues that this is as true of societies as of individuals. The Sixties were different from anything that came before.

Against this dominant, vibrant mass culture, the counterculture was simply a puny protest. Just chill out, man, they bleated, as they were pushed aside by the consumer in a hurry. It is a delicious irony that the biggest impact the hippies made was when they were coopted by the mainstream. Soon Booth’s House of Lords gin was being promoted as a way of “taking a stand against conformity” while Clairol took on the slogan “it lets me be me”.

And, of course there was the biggest and best mainstream co-option of all – the Beatles masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The bourgeois work ethic of Paul McCartney married to the avant-garde art of the counterculture produced an irresistible commercial product.

The story of the Sixties is a story of the triumph of economic freedom, of the power of free markets to change lives and produce a more open, exciting society. So why doesn’t the Right embrace it? Why be happy to let the Left colonise memories of that decade?

It is because the change was not all gain, by any means. There has been family breakdown, drug addiction, and a certain coarsening of public debate and deterioration in standards of civility and decency. And it is a dodge to argue that these all came from something quite separate – from an alien counterculture. They didn’t. They are in part the downside of the consumer revolution and can only be addressed by the Right if they are understood like that.

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