Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Having It All

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2022.0023

1080-6628

Flannery Burke,

Music History and Culture

Having It All Flannery Burke (bio) Damon R. Bach, The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. vii + 336 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Sherry L. Smith, Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth Century America. Berkeley: Heyday, 2020. xi + 372 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. "Can you believe these new girls?" asks Sapphire in the 2000 film Almost Famous. "They don't even use birth control. And they eat all the steak." Sapphire's objects of derision are 1973 groupies of bands like Led Zeppelin, Yes, and the Allman Brothers in the catering line backstage. Some might call Sapphire herself a groupie, but she thinks differently. "They don't even know what it means to be a fan, you know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts." That the joke landed twenty-seven years after the waning days of the counterculture suggests that the questions she asks do not grow old. Where does love of art leave off and love of the artist begin? What does it mean to love freely? Who hurts? And who gets all the steak? Pairing Sherry Smith's Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth Century America and Damon Bach's The American Counterculture: A History of Hippies and Cultural Dissidents allows readers to ask those questions throughout twentieth-century American cultural history. Smith tells the story of the romance between Sara Bard Field, a suffragist and writer, and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, a lawyer and poet. Their story suggests a counterculture existed before it went by that name. Field and Wood, who first met in 1910, not only pursued free love in their personal lives, they also supported radical workers in California and Oregon, advanced anarchist political principles, broadcast sympathetic views of Indigenous people to white audiences, and found their most fulfilling self-expression in poetry. Bach defines hippies of the 1960s and 1970s in similar terms as those who "endeavored to create a better culture based on moral precepts—cooperation, truthfulness, love, empathy, and egalitarianism" (p. xv). That neither the bohemians of Smith's [End Page 208] book nor the hippies of Bach's consistently acted out their moral precepts is a contradiction that fascinates both authors. Smith tells how Field, thirty years Wood's junior, passed the baton (and perhaps the habit of contradiction) from her generation to that at the center of Bach's book. As Smith recounts, in 1955 Field invited the religious theorist Alan Watts to her estate in northern California, The Cats. There, she gave him her library of Vedantic thought. Vedantic Societies took root in the early twentieth century following a presentation at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 by Swami Vivekananda regarding the Ramakrishna movement. Field encountered Vedantic thought sometime around 1939, just five years before the death of her beloved Erskine. Field saw Vedanta philosophy as a clear expression of free love principles as well as her faith that an individual life well and fully lived served a greater good. She found a ready audience in Watts, himself a former Christian whose service on San Francisco's American Academy of Asian Studies, introduction of Zen Buddhism to U.S. audiences, and leadership in the 1960s counterculture brings Smith's story into conversation with Bach's. By 1973, one could find below many a Led Zeppelin college dorm room poster a hippie proclaiming Alan Watts's dictum: "Never pretend to a love you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command." Both Smith and Bach trace the crooked path of bohemian and hippie love from an origin on the West Coast. Field and Wood met in Portland, Oregon, at the introduction of lawyer Clarence Darrow, the lover of Field's sister, Mary. Mary and Sara Field later covered the 1911 trial of James and John McNamara, brothers and iron worker union members accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times building and defended by Darrow in court. After divorcing her husband, who maintained custody of their two children, Sara later settled in an apartment in San Francisco (which...