Letters From the Archives: <em>Atlantic </em>Readers Had Mixed Feelings About Hippies
In the fall of 1967, readers responded to an article about the hippies of Haight-Ashbury.
Letters from the Archives is a series in which we highlight past Atlantic stories and reactions from readers at the time.
The hippie movement was “easier to see than understand,” wrote Mark Harris in his September 1967 “The Flowering of the Hippies.” In Haight-Ashbury that summer, people came from all over to see the men who “by design or by accident resembled Jesus Christ” and the women who “gave flowers to strangers.” (In total, there were about 75,000-100,000 of these “flower children.”) Harris, a San Francisco native, described a scene “characterized by
