As Americans, we have a pretty distinct cultural memory of the Vietnam War era: antiwar protests and marches, the Kent State shooting, Summer of Love, hippie communes and geodesic domes, parties drowning in LSD, bra burners, Black Panthers, etc. It seems like hippie culture had a lot of influence on the American cultural imagination.
And yet I've heard it said that the hippies numbered no more than a couple hundred thousand during this period. Is that true? Were there really just a handful of pockets of hippies, and our cultural imagination has just blown them up into this culture-dominating force? Because with the way people talk about and portray them, it's like they were actually the mainstream culture for nearly a decade.
Thanks in advance for your insights.
In this post, /u/quintus_aurelianus argues that it was probably somewhere 200,000-400,000 people told.
Using a different, much broader metric, I'd say it was possibly higher. By 1973, probably about 15-20% of young people had participated in an anti-war protest, and probably about 35-50% thought that marijuana should be legal. See here. The total population 15-24 in 1973 was 38,919,000. Let's just imaginationarily transpose that to 18-27. If 15% of that group had gone to an anti-War protest, that's still almost than 6 million people. So you get a huge range of numbers depending on how loosely you define "hippy", and what period you're talking about. However, it seems like no matter what period you're discussing, you're discussing a minority, and even a minority among young people.