Salem Press

The Sixties in America
Flower Children

A term associated with the early phase of the hippie counterculture. It connotes chiefly white youths, typically festooned with flowers, who had "dropped out" of bourgeois society to pursue a lifestyle devoted to sensuality, personal freedom, and social change.

The identification of hippies as "flower children" may have originated with Allen Ginsberg. In fall, 1965, he encouraged organizers of Berkeley's Vietnam Day protest to deploy "masses of flowers" during their peace march as a way of pacifying hostile counter-demonstrators and the police. The idea reappeared one year later at what was perhaps the first outdoor "be-in"--San Francisco's Love Pageant Rally--which was held in the botanical splendor of Golden Gate Park. A flyer announcing the event encouraged those planning to attend to bring "flowers, feathers, beads, flags, incense, costumes." This list can be considered an inventory of the hippie accouterments for the Summer of Love in 1967.

Impact
Timothy Leary, former Harvard professor and advocate of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), popularized the hip-floral style when he was filmed at the January, 1967, Human Be-in with yellow flowers ringing his temples. Accompanied by his infamous slogan "tune in, turn on, and drop out," the image was much circulated by the news media and no doubt served as a kind of fashion plate for the nascent counterculture. A few months later, Scott McKenzie's hit song "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" lured droves of would-be hippies and hangers-on to the Haight-Ashbury scene.

Additional Information
For a closer look at the flower children and their culture, see Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury: A History (1984).

Michael Wm. Doyle

See Also
Be-ins and Love-ins; Counterculture; Haight-Ashbury; Hippies; Leary, Timothy; Pentagon, Levitating of the; San Francisco as a Cultural Mecca; Summer of Love.