Sex became an issue in strange places. After searching his conscience for five years on contraception, Pope Paul rejected it in a 7,500-word encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) on July 29, 1969. Millions of American Catholics were furious. A study by the Urban Life Institute of the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school, disclosed that 70 percent of them approved of birth control. The vast majority of young priests agreed (though over 90 percent of the older priests did not). In Washington several rebellious priests staged a sit-in, and a hundred and forty-two others sent a letter of protest to the head of their archdiocese, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle. When the cardinal began a sermon on obedience in St. Matthew’s Cathedral, two hundred members of the congregation rose from their pews and stalked out. Seven Buffalo priests were dismissed from a seminary for mutinous remarks. Still the revolt spread. The following year the former auxiliary bishop of the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese married a New York divorcee. Soon stories about priests marrying—often to nuns who had leaped over the wall—lost their novelty.
A lot of carnal knowledge was being acquired in laboratories, observed by scientists in white coats holding stopwatches and other things. The most famous of them were Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, who eventually married one another. Their findings at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis were invaluable, but fastidious critics were appalled by the measuring and photographing of copulation; it smacked to them of charcoal filters and flip-top boxes. The most remarkable piece of Masters-Johnson equipment was an electrically powered plastic penis with a tiny camera inside and cold light illumination to allow observation and recording of what was happening inside the vagina. The size of this artificial phallus could be adjusted, and the woman using it could regulate the depth and speed of the thrust. Inevitably it inspired several novels. The best of them was Robert Kyle’s Venus Examined (1968). At the end of it a disillusioned heroine returns to the sex laboratory, demolishes the plastic phallus, and is electrocuted.
All this was a great strain for the young. Previous generations had been protected from early sexual entanglements by social custom, the fear of disgrace, and the possibility of venereal disease or pregnancy—a catastrophe for the girl. Now mores had changed spectacularly; society took a tolerant view of premarital affairs. Venereal infection had vanished. (Late in the decade it would reappear as a nationwide epidemic, a consequence of the new promiscuity.) “If it feels good, I’ll do it,” read a pin popular among college students. Intercourse felt good, and they did it a lot, protected by the Pill, or diaphragms, and various intrauterine devices, loops and coils.
Late in the decade, when abortions became easier to obtain, girls felt even safer. But improved contraceptives were not responsible for the increase in pushovers. It preceded them. Illegitimate births doubled between 1940 and 1960, and 40 percent of the mothers were in their teens. The Hechingers found that in some sophisticated communities a girl was expected to begin sexual intercourse with her steady boyfriend on her sixteenth birthday; if she refrained, she lost status. Pregnancy was so common in an Oakland high school that girls were allowed to attend classes until their confinement. A New York hospital on the privileged East Side reported that the number of unwed mothers jumped 271 percent in six years, and the New York Times quoted Dr. Margaret L. McCormack as saying that pregnancy, “once a college problem, is now a high school and junior high school problem.” One New York junior high, she said, had 240 pregnancies in one year. The Pill came into widespread use during the winter of 1961–62, and by 1967 the illegitimacy rate among schoolgirls was on the decline. But no one suggested that coitus had lost its popularity.
The sex-drenched state of American culture was undoubtedly responsible for much of the increase in premarital and extramarital intercourse. Sexiness was everywhere—on paperback book racks, television, in ads, magazines, popular songs, plays, musicals, and everyday conversation. Betty Friedan cited a psychological study which found that references to sex in mass media increased by over 250 percent in the 1960s. The New York Times Book Review noted the popularity of books about “love” affairs between animals and human beings. Complaints to the U.S. Post Office about smut doubled within six years, to 130,000 in 1965.
“Be Prepared!” proclaimed a poster showing an enormously pregnant girl, smiling broadly, in a Girl Scout uniform. The Scouts asked for damages; the court threw out the case. “Use Contraceptives: Take the Worry Out of Being Close,” said a Planned Parenthood ad. The New York Hilton, Manhattan’s largest hotel, was renting rooms by the hour. Frustrated persons (or couples) took out ads in the personal column of the Saturday Review, or in underground newspapers, soliciting new partners. Everybody knew about key parties for swapping couples; the men threw their house keys on a table and the wives picked them up at random, each then going to bed with the owner of whatever key she had.
Nicholas von Hoffman described a game, manufactured by the Diplomat Sales Company of Los Angeles, which provided “a safe, nicely structured way for two or three couples to end an evening naked, drunk, out of their minds, and lascivious as hell.” Called Bumps and Grinds, it was played by the light of one candle (which was included). Players moved around a board like the one used in Monopoly, drawing “Tomcat” and “Pussycat” cards. These advised them to “Take one drink,” or “Strip one article of clothing,” and so on. The game was rigged for the girls to wind up nude and drunk first. Subsequent moves decided who was going to stagger to the bedroom with whom.
If wife swapping was permissible for the middle-aged, youths argued, what was wrong with wife testing for them? Some communities, troubled by the question and aware of the temptations which prompted it, tried to ward off the great landslide of sex with local regulations. For a while wearers of bikinis on some public beaches were required to have two inches of cloth on each hip. Then President Kennedy’s widow was photographed in a three-ring bikini, and the regulations collapsed. Thus clad, or unclad, the young could caress 95 percent of each other’s bodies with suntan lotion in public. And as they thus excited one another, transistor radios alongside broadcast suggestive lyrics:
If somebody loves you, it’s no good unless she loves you
All the way
Or:
I’d like to teach you all,
And get your love in return
“There is,” said a University of Michigan coed, “nobody saying ‘No.’” So many were saying yes that it was a wonder one-third of female college undergraduates remained virgins. In some instances, parents actually regarded the absence of coital experience as troubling. All things being equal, they would have preferred that their daughters remained maidens. But in this generation everything else was unequal. A teen-age girl who lacked a normal interest in sex could be in the toils of another new snare for the young. She was possibly—and in some communities probably—a user of heavy drugs.
***
Early developments in mid-century chemotherapy were benign. The sulfa drugs had arrived in the late 1930s. Then came penicillin (1943), streptomycin (1945), cortisone (1946), ACTH (1949), terramycin and aureomycin (1950), the Salk vaccine (1955), the Sabin vaccine (1960), and the tranquilizers, led by Miltown and Librium, which cut the length of the average mental hospital stay in half. All these were called “miracle drugs” when they first appeared. Because of them, diseases which had afflicted men since the dawn of history were tamed and, in some cases, eliminated. In 1959 over 579 tons of tranquilizers were prescribed, which gives some idea of the need they met. As recently as the early 1950s polio terrorized parents during the summer months; 57,000 cases were reported in 1952. Now that was merely a memory.
The first inkling that the drug revolution had a dark side came in 1962, when eight thousand European women who had been taking a new tranquilizer called Thalidomide gave birth to limbless babies. Thanks to Dr. Frances O. Kelsey of the Food and Drug Administration, Thalidomide had not been licensed for general use in the United States. Nevertheless, a fe
w Thalidomide-deformed babies had been born to expectant mothers who had been taking the blue tablets on an investigative basis. If a drug could do that, anything was possible. And the amount of medication in American medicine cabinets was unprecedented. Doctors were now writing nearly two billion dollars’ worth of prescriptions each year for pills which included new barbiturates and amphetamines, hypnotics, and antidepressants. In addition, an enormous black market was flourishing. Of the eight billion amphetamines, or pep pills, manufactured each year, about four billion were being sold illegally. Laymen might call the pep pills and barbiturates “soft” drugs and heroin, morphine, and cocaine “hard,” but pharmacologists knew it should be the other way around; the older drugs calmed addicts, but the new ones created dangerous, unpredictable moods. Some became part of the culture, familiar enough to have popular nicknames. Among them were “bluejays” (sodium amytal), “redbirds” (seconal), “yellow jackets” (nembutal), and “goofballs” (barbiturates laced with benzedrine).
The most widely discussed of the new compounds was d-lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD. First isolated in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz Research Laboratories in Basle, Switzerland, it lay around his lab for five years, unappreciated, its properties awaiting discovery. That occurred on April 16, 1943. Absorbing some LSD through the skin of his fingers, Hofmann began hallucinating. His scientific curiosity aroused, he then deliberately took 250 micrograms of it—an amount about the size of a grain of salt. In his diary he explained the effect: “With closed eyes, multi-hued, metamorphizing, fantastic images overwhelmed me…. Sounds were transposed into visual sensations so that from each tone or noise a comparable colored picture was evoked, changing in form and color kaleidoscopically.” In short, he had taken a trip.
Dr. Humphrey Osmond of the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute neologized a new name for LSD. He called it a psychedelic and said it meant mind-expanding. At the start of the 1960s, the colorless, odorless, tasteless drug was still unknown to the public. Then two Harvard psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, began experimenting with colleagues, writers, artists, clergymen, and volunteer prisoners. Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in 1963, but by then LSD had achieved its reputation. Taking a trip, or turning on, had come to convey status on campuses. Alarmed, the FDA warned college presidents that taking it was an “insidious and dangerous activity.” Sandoz Laboratories stopped making it. Laws barring it in any form were passed in Michigan, New Jersey, Nevada, and California. None of that made any difference; the use of it continued to spread.
LSD became a household word in 1966. Even recluses knew what was meant by tripping, freaking out, and blowing one’s mind. Priests and pastors held a conference on the religious aspects of LSD. In discotheques—and also in art galleries and museums—films, slides, and flashing colored lights suggested the impact of an LSD experience. Chilling stories, some of them apocryphal, were told to scare those who were tempted to take a trip. A youth high on LSD was said to have taken a swan dive into the front of a truck moving at 70 mph. Teen-agers under its influence reportedly lay in a field staring at the sun until they were permanently blinded. That was exposed as a lie, but the Associated Press verified the case of a young man who turned himself in to police saying he had been flying on LSD for three days and asking “Did I kill my wife? Did I rape anyone?” and was then charged with the murder of his mother-in-law.
Users described feeling depressed, even homicidal, and told how they had turned themselves into ravens, or Jesus Christ, or tiny people six inches tall. Distraught parents told what had happened to their children: “My boy is on drugs. He went to St. Louis because it’s the astrological center of the universe. He has met Hitler and Lincoln.” And “Our son came home for Christmas. He looked awful. He rode his little sister’s bicycle barefoot through the snow. The neighbors took their children in. People are afraid of him.”
But the users of LSD—they called it acid—described their trips as ecstatic. “Who needs jazz, or even beer,” wrote a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, “when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.”
The Beatles sang “Yellow Submarine,” which was a euphemism for a freakout, and another song freighted with LSD meaning, “Strawberry Field.” Elementary school children dismayed their mothers by coming home chanting, to the tune of “Frère Jacques”:
Marijuana, marijuana,
LSD, LSD,
College kids are making it, high school kids are taking it,
Why can’t we? Why can’t we?
At times it seemed that an entire generation was turning on to drugs. In fact, the hippy movement, or counterculture, which sprang from the self-medication and narcotics, was at first smaller than it appeared to be. It was really an extension of the beat generation of the 1950s. In the early 1960s the beatniks moved into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. A musical combo called the Jefferson Airplane was then playing the first acid rock in an obscure night spot called the Matrix. Their group and the Grateful Dead were being entertained by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters at La Honda, Kesey’s forest home fifty miles south of San Francisco. It was at La Honda that Kesey and the Pranksters served their guests Kool-Aid spiked with LSD, and there that he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964).
Listening to the driving, drowning acid rock, the Pranksters experimented with light and color, wore spectacular clothes, and evolved a life-style which would later become familiar in virtually every American community and in many abroad. It wasn’t popular then. The dances at which the Airplane and the Dead played were thinly attended. Most customers still preferred the Charlie Parker brand of jazz. The new musicians painted posters depicting the visual impact of an LSD trip. Few admired them. At first they gave away these early examples of psychedelic art, then they sold them for a dollar each. A Ramparts editor said the printing was “36-point illegible,” but by 1967 some of the originals would be selling in the best San Francisco art galleries for $2,000.
By then a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle had christened the new bohemians “hippies,” and the movement had become first a national and then an international phenomenon. Hippy communes were flourishing in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, and hippy enclaves had been established in Mexico, Canada, London, Rome, Tokyo—even in Laos. By then many charter members of the movement had quit, disgusted by the exhibitionists who were giving colorful interviews to newspapermen and television commentators. “The best year to be a hippy was 1965,” said Hunter S. Thompson, the Ernie Pyle of the movement, “but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche.”
Fortunes were made in the 1967 “Summer of Love” from the sale of DMT, mescaline, methedrine, LSD, and the even more popular—and safer—marijuana to the disillusioned children of the middle and upper middle class who flocked to hippy communes, leaving what they regarded as a stifling straight life to Do Their Thing. Pot, boo, maryjane, grass, or Mary Warner—the various names under which marijuana was known to them—sold in Mexico for $35 a kilogram (2.2 pounds). Smuggled into the United States, a kilo brought $150 to $200. Meted out in 34-ounce bags, it went for as much as $25 an ounce, or $850 the kilo. Joints—marijuana cigarettes—sold on the street for a dollar each. The heroin racket was even more lucrative. Undercover chemists made $700 for every kilo of morphine converted to heroin in Marseilles. Manhattan entrepreneurs paid $10,000 for it and sold it on the street in plastic bags, each containing just 5 percent heroin cut with sugar or quinine powder. In that form the original 2.2 pounds earned $20,000. And the market was expanding
rapidly. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimated that 68,000 Americans became addicted in a single year.
In literally scores of cities there were share-ins, be-ins, and love-ins. As in the case of the beatniks ten years earlier, San Francisco was the focal point of the movement. The San Francisco Oracle, the leading underground newspaper, was published there, and there the original band of Diggers—named for a seventeenth-century English brotherhood that raised food for the poor on land which had been uncultivated—became beggars in order to feed indigent hippies. The distribution was in what was called Panhandle Park; it was known as the Politics of Free.
The issue of how many youths participated in the counterculture depends entirely on definitions. If smokers of marijuana are counted, the number is enormous. Dr. Henry Brill, chairman of the American Medical Association’s committee on drug dependence, estimated that the number of Americans who tried pot went from a few hundred thousand in the early 1960s to eight million at the end of the decade, most of them in their teens. That was by far the most conservative of the estimates; the U.S. Public Health Service put the figure at 20 million. A Playboy survey reported that 47 percent of the nation’s college students admitted smoking marijuana, though only 13 percent said they used it frequently. Members of families with high incomes smoked it most often. Just 2 percent acknowledged injecting methedrine, or speed—liquid amphetamines—directly into their veins, and a mere 1 percent were addicted to other narcotics.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 167
