Most people assume the pivot point of the 1960s counterculture was a protest. It wasn’t. It was a be-in. On January 14, 1967, between 20,000 and 30,000 people converged on Golden Gate Park’s Polo Fields. They were not there to march against something. The flyers called it a “Gathering of the Tribes,” a union of the Berkeley-based political radicals and the Haight-Ashbury-based spiritual hippies. The intent was not opposition, but presence.
The sensory details defined the day. The smell of incense and marijuana smoke mingling with the damp grass. The sound of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and poet Allen Ginsberg chanting mantras. Timothy Leary, in his signature white linen, advising the crowd to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” People wore face paint, beads, and feathers. They shared food. They flew kites. The Hells Angels, improbably, handled security. It was a deliberate performance of an alternative society, one based on experience, shared consciousness, and a gentle, if naïve, anarchism.
The event made no concrete demands. It passed no resolutions. Its power was entirely symbolic and catalytic. By demonstrating that such a large, peaceful, and joyous gathering was possible, it issued an implicit invitation. Come summer, tens of thousands of young people would accept it, flooding into Haight-Ashbury. The Human Be-In did not change policy; it changed the atmosphere. It argued that revolution could be a state of mind, and that the most radical act might simply be to be, together, in the open air.