The 6Os Communes Messianic Communities) Bus at Bellows Falls) Vermont
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The 6os Communes Messianic Communities) bus at Bellows Falls) Vermont. Photograph by Timothy Miller. TIMOTHY MILLER The 60s Communes Hippies and Beyond Syracuse UniversityPress Copyright © 1999 by Syracuse UniversityPress, Syracuse, New York 13244-5160 AllRights Reserved First Edition 1999 02 03 04 05 06 6 5 4 3 2 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard forInformation Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANS I z39.48-1984.@ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG ING -IN-PUBLICATI ON DATA Miller, Timothy, 1944- The 6os communes : hippies and beyond/ Timothy Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8156-2811-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8156-0601-x (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Communal living-United States. 2. United States-Social conditions- 1960-1980. I. Title. II. Title: Sixties communes. III. Title: Hippies and beyond. HQ97I.M55 1999 307.77'4'0973-dc21 99-37768 Manufactured in the United States of America For Michael) Gretchen) andJeffre y TIMOTHY MILLER is professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas. Among his previous publica tions is The Quest forUt opia in Twentieth-CenturyAm erica: 1900-1960) the first of three volumes on communal life to be published by Syracuse UniversityPress. Contents Acknowledgments IX Introduction xm I. Set and Setting: The Roots of the 196os-Era Communes I 2. The New Communes Emerge: 1960-1965 17 3. Communes Begin to Spread: 1965-1967 41 4. Out of the Haight and Back to the Land: Countercultural Communes after the Summer of Love 67 5. Searching for a Common Center: Religious and Spiritual Communes 92 6. Secular Visionaries: Communes for Social Reform and the Good Life 128 7. Ends and Means: Communal Ideologies, Economics, and Organization 149 8. The People of the Communes 170 9. Doing It: Daily Life in the Communes 192 10. Moving On 225 Afterword: Communal Life after1975 243 Appendix: American Communes Active 1960-1975 Notes Selected Bibliography 317 Index 321 BLANK PAGE Acknowledgments No social phenomenon as vast, open-'ended, and geographically, cultural ly, and ideologically diverse as the 196os-era communal tide can be ade quately represented in any single volume. This book simply seeks to provide an overview of the great siege of commune-building within a loosely chronological and typological framework. If nothing else, the book in its notes and bibliography will point toward useful resources for those who would like to know more about the topic. Only the practical realities of the world of writing and publishing kept this volume from be ing a thousand pages long. The efforts of hundreds of individuals supported the 6os Communes Project and the writing of this book, and I thank all of them most sincere ly for their generous assistance. Heading the list are the former (some times ongoing) communitarians themselves, who provided time and hospitality-and sometimes food and lodging as well-for interviews about their communal experiences. Ramon Sender, the first resident at Morning Star Ranch, deserves special credit among the interviewees for helping me locate dozens of communal veterans (mainly in California) as well as for extensive and generous hospitality. Those who conducted the interviews did a heroic job; in particular, Deborah Altus, in her year of travel for interviewing, did far more work than the job required and pro duced an enormous pile of tape recordings and documents with great good energy. Other interviewers included several of my students at the University of Kansas: Shirley Andrews, Amy Beecher Mirecki, Angela Dilling, Lisa Doffing, Bill Jensen, Blake Jones, Aaron Ketchell, Marilyn Klaus, Kenn Peters, Courtney Shanks, Lesley Speer, Rosalie Vaught, and Teresa Young. Two students at Dartmouth College, Carlyn Lettan and Erin Gaffney, also provided good field support through class projects there. Eva Garcia and Paula Lopez-Cano contributed helpful assistance before the project formally got under way. Benjamin Zablocki and Allen Butcher provided helpful reflections and information during the process as well. lX x ACK NOWLEDGMENTS Kristen Thorsen and Jack Omch both provided useful backfiles of Communities magazine, the most important single periodical for primary materials in r96os-era communal studies. Daryl Ann Dutton helped me with contacts and materials in southern California, andLy man To wer Sar gent provided a steady stream of literary references that proved most use ful. Geoph Kozeny's communal database provided timely information repeatedly. J. Gordon Melton first pointed me down this line of inquiry and provided essential resources at several critical junctures. Robert Thur man helped me track down scarce material about Millbrook. The transcription of over five hundred tapes is still in process, and many persons, most of them students at the University of Kansas, have put a good deal of welcome effort into that phase of the project. Gina Walker of the Center for Communal Studies Archives at the University of Southern Indiana has long assisted me in the quest for information, and also helped via her student staff in transcribing interviews. The 6os Communes Project was the research backbone for this book, and I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for its generous support of the project. I also thank Janet Crow, William Andrews, Eliza beth Granberg, Susan Pauls, and the many others at the University of Kansas (especially at the Hall Center for the Humanities, which provided a fe llowship that gave me writing time and other resources) who helped initiate and operate the grant project for more than two years. Funding from the General Research Fund at the University and a sabbatical leave supported the writing of the book and are gratefullyacknowledged. A very different version of parts of chapter one (and a small bit of chapter two) were published as an article in the fa ll 1992 issue ofAm erican Studies_, and part of the short item in chapter six on the Gesundheit Insti tute was published in the J(a w Valley Independent (Lawrence, Kansas) in late 1998. In winter 1992 Syzygy: Jo urna l of Alternative Religion and Culture published an excerpt from what I had intended to be a book-length histo ry of Drop City, and although the account that appears here is a different one, I am grateful to Syzygy fo r publishing my first work on the subject and helping to clarifymy thinking for the account that appears here. I also thank Community Publications Cooperative and Community Service, Inc., fo r permission to use passages from Elaine Sundancer's Celery Wine_, Gordon Yaswen fo r permission to quote extensively from his excellent memoir "Sunrise Hill Community: Post Mortem;'1 and HarperCollins for permission to use Allen Ginsberg's poem about the Merry Pranksters at La Honda. ACK NOWLEDGMENTS X1 Gene and Jo Ann Bern ofsky provided me with repeated recollections and with access to their files of Drop City art. The Bernofskys' commit ment to living their values has been an ongoing inspiration. I also thank Walt Odets, who provided the use of a photograph fromhis extensive col lection. My colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies of the Universi ty of Kansas provided essential time and resources for my work, and my many congenial colleagues in the Communal Studies Association were helpful and enthusiastic throughout. The University of Kansas librarians provided, as usual, vitally usefulhelp. Other libraries, including that at Big Sur, California, provided good assistance. Katherine Short, a local histori an at Big Sur, helped me sort out a few obscure details. Ta mara, Jesse, and Abraham have tolerated much more commune-visiting and interviewing than they ever would have chosen, and I greatly appreciate their support and patience. The 6os Communes Project will be collecting materials of all kinds for its archives for the foreseeable future. Please feel free to contact me at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045; [email protected]. BLANK PAGE Introduction Communal societies have long been an American cultural fixture, with anywhere from dozens to hundreds of them operating at any given mo ment since the pioneers of Plockhoy's Commonwealth and the Labadists of Bohemia Manor took to the common life in the seventeenth century.1 Nothing in the American communal past, however, would have led any judicious observer to predict the incredible communal explosion that be gan during the 1960s. In a period of just a few years communal fever gripped the alienated youth of the United States-indeed, of the devel oped world-and thousands upon thousands of new communities were established throughout the land. The size and diversity of the new com munitarianism made accurate counting of communes and of their mem bers impossible, but the overall significance of the 1960s era (here defined as 1960 to 1975, inclusive) as a watershed in American communal history is undeniable. Those who have seen volume one of this history will find the present tome distinctly different in approach and in content from its predecessor. American communes active between 1900 and 1960 were few enough in number to be enumerated individually, and most of those that had been very visible are discussed (at least in brief) in that previous volume. With the 1960s era, however, the subject mushrooms. We are no longer dealing with communes numbering in the low hundreds but rather with thou sands-probably tens of thousands-of them, and an incredibly diverse lot at that. The best known (and certainly the subjects of the most media coverage) were the hippie communes, the countercultural encampments that thumbed their collective noses at conventional American society and were regarded both with fascination and with loathing by members of the very Establishment that they rejected.