How do we celebrate our national origins at one of the lowest points in American history? The cruel and rapacious ruling party betrays the Founders daily, while America’s worst impulses––racism, militarism, nativism, greed and know-nothingness––are not just tolerated by the White House. They are encouraged and inflamed. The shining city on a hill is mudsliding downward into a nightmarish abyss.

Thank God for the many resisters who incarnate the better angels of our nature in the continuing struggle for justice, equality and the common good. They are, in the words of an 1850 Fourth of July oration, “the only visible source of light and heat and repose to the dark and discordant and troubled world.”

Tomorrow I will refresh my own love of country by silencing the news to spend a morning with American writers like Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Muir, and Didion. And maybe it’s a good time to reread Nathaniel Hawthorne’s apocalyptic parable, “Earth’s Holocaust.” A vast crowd gathers on a broad western prairie to build a huge bonfire, into which they begin to throw all the “outworn trumpery” of the Old World. The heraldry of ancient aristocratic families feed the flames, followed by the robes and scepters of royalty. Scaffolds and other symbols of government oppression are tossed in as well. And finally, as the flames rise ever higher, the total body of European literature and philosophy is consumed. “Now,” said the chief celebrant, “we shall get rid of the dead weight of men’s thoughts.”

There are times when the idea of a radical makeover in politics and culture strikes a chord of repressed desire among the children of Adam and Eve––refugees as we are from a lost Eden. Such youthful optimism, such buoyant faith in the new, permeates the political rhetoric of our republic’s first century. “The American Revolution is the wonder and the blessing of the world,” said Daniel Webster. “Its inherent unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and flame up to heaven…In our day there has been as it were a new creation… The last hopes of mankind…rest with us.”

Fifty years ago, Hawthorne’s bonfire burned anew in the Summer of Love. In the largest mass migration of young people in American history, tens of thousands made their way to San Francisco in search of a new way of being. Some were just running away from home, some were just looking for a party. But many felt a deeper longing.

In a 2007 PBS documentary on the Summer of Love, Claudia King Yunker reflects on her reasons for joining the 1967 westward pilgrimage. As a 23-year-old civil rights worker in Chicago, she had been frustrated by the slow pace of social change. Rumors of a utopia happening now felt like a summons. “I was young,” she says. “I wanted heaven now.” So off she went to seek it in Haight-Ashbury.

Whatever was beautiful, true and good about the dreams of the “Love Generation” did not find an abiding home on this earth. It didn’t even last the summer. But as Yunker remembers fondly forty years later, things like racism, war, and greed “were not acceptable for a few minutes. [This lasted] for just a little short time. But it was really like something that shimmered.”[i]

During the months leading up to the Summer of Love, the mayor of San Francisco, the local police, and Governor Ronald Reagan did their best to put out the shimmer. In October of 1966, Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen, editors of the Oracle newspaper, organized a people’s response to official repression: not a confrontational protest against the powers-that-be, but a celebration manifesting an alternative social vision. The “Love-Pageant Rally,” they said, would “affirm our identity, community and innocence from influence of the fear addiction of the general public.”

Promotional leaflets for the rally featured a “Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence,” and on the eve of Independence Day, 2017, fifty years after the Summer of Love, it makes interesting reading:

When in the flow of human events it becomes necessary for the people to cease to recognize the obsolete social patterns which had isolated man from his consciousness and to create with the youthful energies of the world revolutionary communities to which the two-billion-year-old life process entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind should declare the causes which impel them to this creation.

We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness, and that to secure those rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting hate-carrying men and women of the world.[ii]

Related post: July 4th and the Pursuit of Happiness

[i] Summer of Love (PBS American Experience DVD: 2007), written, produced and directed by Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco.

[ii] In Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury (New York: Wenner Books, 2005), 92-3.