From love to blood: How the summer of ’69 did — and didn’t — mark a zeitgeist shift

On a warm day in May 1969, USC students held a love-in at Alumni Park on the university’s campus. Singing “Age of Aquarius” and “Revolution,” attendees danced and rolled about on the lawn, one student baptizing foreheads with water dribbled from an empty jug of Red Mountain cabernet. Another blissfully declared: “SC is finally turned on.”

Less than eight months later, some of those students were likely headed to war. The first military lottery in the United States since WWII, instituted on Dec. 1, called close to 850,000 men into service in the protracted conflict in Vietnam that killed nearly 60,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese.

In the months between the USC love-in and the lottery, a spree of violence shocked Los Angeles. Guided by the charismatic Charles Mason, a predatory drifter with aspirations to fame, a group of his young followers calling themselves “the Manson family” murdered nine people. Their victims included the actress Sharon Tate, her unborn son, and famed celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring. “RITUALISTIC SLAYINGS: Sharon Tate, Four Others Murdered” declared a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Aug. 10.  

To some, a dark slide, signaling the end of the ebullient ’60s and the start of an era marked by increased cultural and economic anxiety, had begun.

Or had it? To USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences faculty members, Manson was more of a tabloid footnote than a change catalyst. They’d argue that earlier events contributed more significantly to the evolution in countercultural tenor from joyous bohemianism to anti-establishment anarchism.

Everybody get together

John Rowe, professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature, who was living in L.A. that summer, said the Manson family had little connection to authentic counterculture.

“They presented as hippies, but they were totally baffling to those of us in the actual counterculture,” he said. “Their values were completely opposite: violent, racist, nationalist, and anti-feminist, even if the women did dress as flower children.” In other words, they were “posers.”

To Rowe, years of escalating clashes between citizens and authorities in L.A. led to the changeover from the ’60s into the ’70s. The Watts Riots of 1965 contributed to a redirection of the civil rights movement in the coming decade from nonviolence aimed at system reform to more militant tactics focused on black liberation.

Similarly, the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots a year later prefigured the rise of youth dissent when more than 1,000 people rallied on the strip to protest a 10 p.m. curfew the city enacted in response to growing crowds and drug use in rock and roll clubs.

In 1967, youth protests would escalate dramatically and take a more politicized turn when 10,000 anti-Vietnam War marchers demonstrated at a Century City Democratic party fundraiser for President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Rising social and political discontent was pronounced in the summer of ’69, as public support for the war plummeted from 50% to 35%.

Ground control to Major Tom

This discontent even began to darken a previously joyous race into space. On July 20, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, Southern California aerospace industry employees who worked on the Apollo command and service modules as well as the Saturn V rocket celebrated. But while they watched humans take the first steps across the lunar surface, “they were also looking around at their coworkers to see who would lose their job next,” says aerospace historian Peter Westwick, adjunct professor (research) of history at USC Dornsife. West is also director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

The end of the Apollo program and the concurrent shift from blue-collar assembly workers to white-collar engineers meant nearly a third of the region’s aerospace workers would lose their jobs by 1972, he said.

The moon landing might have sparked national pride in the moment, but for many who had contributed to its success, it signaled the start of a new decade of significant economic anxiety.

Trouble in paradise

At the beach, a sea change was apparent, as well. The Southern California surfing community, itself inspired by the laidback Polynesian lifestyle where the sport originated, allied early with the hippie movement.

“Throughout the 1960s, the sport shifted from a wholesome, athletic enterprise to one aligned with hedonist dropout culture,” says Westwick, who also coauthored The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing (Crown Publishers, 2013).

To Westwick, this is best embodied by the Laguna Beach surfer commune, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which formed in the mid-1960s. Their psychedelic storefront, Mystic Arts World, became a gathering space for those looking to “expand consciousness.” Intent on turning on the world (and gathering funds to purchase land for their growing commune), they became one of the biggest suppliers of LSD and hashish in the country, returning from surf trips to South America and Southeast Asia with drugs stashed in hollowed-out surfboards.

But the arrest in 1968 of brotherhood co-conspirator Timothy Leary, a one-time Harvard University clinical psychologist turned advocate of LSD use, signaled the beginning of the end. The group shifted to cocaine smuggling, which increased paranoia and dysfunction among commune members. Even their personal acid brand, “Orange Sunshine,” was producing less than desirable results by 1969: This was the acid Manson and his followers dropped, as did attendees at the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Festival — a counter-culture rock concert in Northern California that erupted in violence — later that year.

West of Eden

If the Manson family’s reputation as a fatal blow to a peaceable counterculture movement is largely unwarranted, as Rowe suggests, what exactly was their impact on the region? To Thomas Gustafson, associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity, Manson reinforced long-standing L.A. myths about its citizens.

“Manson is another episode in the narrative we love to tell about L.A.: the transition from sunshine to noir, a loss of innocence, a fall from the garden with Manson another snake,” Gustafson said.

Like many Angelenos, Manson was also a transplant, originally from Ohio. He arrived in the city hoping to achieve fame and acceptance through his music but only met with frustration and failure.

Gustafson says: “Manson also fits the ‘end of the road’ story for dreamers who come to Los Angeles as a last resort, to escape from somewhere, to fulfill a dream that turns violent when it ends.” In short, Manson was one answer to the question, “What happens to a loner’s dreams when deferred, when bankrupted?”