I should be clear that i'm specifically talking about the American hippie culture. Across the threads discussing his death, a common thought that's expressed everywhere is that his actions somehow contributed to the end of the Hippie movement and the culture that goes with it.
Is it true that it was really a contributing factor and if so, how could it impact a whole cultural movement on such a level? Isn't it a bit much to credit this event over other, more directly impactful factors?
Amongst the counterculture in the 1960s, there was deep dissatisfaction with American capitalism/democracy and the way its imperialist instincts played out in the Vietnam War in particular. But by the 1960s, amongst the same people, Communism - and specifically the Stalinist and post-Stalinist versions of that - were widely seen as also fatally flawed. The hippie movement, in some respects was a response within the counterculture to dissatisfaction with both of these alternatives.
Instead, the hippies wished to withdraw from mainstream society and its economics, and instead live in communities that were more aimed at human flourishing, without the restrictions of conservative American society or the restrictions of communism. The solutions that the hippies arrived at was a movement to live in small groups that could potentially be self-sufficient - hippie communes. This was also an era of 'humanistic psychology', where psychologists like Abraham Maslow made arguments about what humans needed to have in order to 'self-actualise' (in Maslow's terminology); to self-actualise was to become the potential person you were capable of becoming, to reach your full potential. For the young people attracted to the hippie movement, self-actualisation involved 'free love', the expansion of the mind with psychedelic drugs, and returning to nature, and perhaps all of that was best done in the kind of hippie commune where you could ignore the outside world.
One example of this logic was the way that The Beatles responded to the trauma of the death of their manager Brian Epstein by going to live for a month or two, from February 1968, in India on an ashram with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. One song written by John Lennon during the retreat to India was called 'Child Of Nature' which has lyrics like "yes, the dream I had was true/ I'm just a child of nature"; Lennon later thought better of the sentiment of the song and reworked that melody to become 'Jealous Guy' in 1971. And because the Beatles had become, in a way, the patron saints of the hippies, with utopian songs about how 'All You Need Is Love', the idea of going to live on a commune with your like-minded friends was in vogue.
The actions of Charles Manson and his Family, however, showed very vividly how easily the theory behind the hippie movement could be subverted, and how easily a charismatic psychopath could take the rejection of society implicit in the hippies in dangerous directions. To explain him in the context of hippie culture, let's talk about The Beach Boys. Circa 1964, the Beach Boys were personification of bright young American youth, and the best reply the USA had to the Beatles. But by 1966, they were becoming influenced by the counterculture, and by 1968, they had turned into what Richard Nixon definitely would have called a bunch of dirty drugged-out no-good hippies. Even their usual lead singer, Mike Love, had become a hippie. Love, by all accounts had resisted the Beach Boys move into hippiedom very strongly indeed (he hated drugs, he was the one saying 'don't fuck with the [surf, cars and girls] formula', and he was the one who spent years making fun of the experimentation on the Beach Boys album Smile (even if he denies it now, pretending that recordings of him doing so don't exist). Love's whole personality was the antithesis of the ideal hippie (read: he comes across even in his autobiography as a gigantic arsehole whose vibe was harsh, man, and the New York Times and most other outlets ripped into him in reviews). Nonetheless, Love had attended the Maharishi's ashram with the Beatles in February 1968 (and unlike the Beatles, become a lifelong devotee of the Maharishi). And Mike Love was the least receptive of the Beach Boys to hippie ideals; the most receptive was Dennis Wilson, the Wilson Bros. middle child, whose 1978 solo album Pacific Ocean Blue's themes revolve around ecology and love.
When Dennis Wilson picked up two cute hitchhikers and brought them back to his house in the spring of 1968 for what he hoped would be a threesome, it turned out that Dennis had bitten off more than he could chew. He did apparently have the threesome, and then they left, but then they returned later that day with a further bunch of female hippies, along with a dark-eyed guru they called Charlie Manson. Manson impressed Wilson very deeply by being able to get a roomful of women to take off their clothes on command. For Dennis Wilson this was an amazing Satyricon that had just turned up in his house unprompted, and so he was happy for Manson and his Family to move into his sprawling mansion.
Wilson became enamoured of Manson, quoting him in what are now deeply disturbing interviews of the time: "fear is nothing but awareness, man" - and he even recorded some songs by Manson, including 'Never Learn Not To Love' (which was released on the Beach Boys 20/20 album that led with their comeback single 'Do It Again'), along with introducing him to many of his hippie LA friends like producer Terry Melcher (the son of Doris Day, who had produced The Byrds' 'Mr Tambourine Man'). However, as Manson insinuated himself into Wilson's life, it became harder and harder to ignore his darker ideas about trying to provoke race wars and the like. Eventually Wilson grew tired of having Manson around his mansion, and kicked him and his Family out.
Manson did not take this well, and began to make threats on Wilson's life, and that of his stepson. Eventually, Manson turned up at the house Melcher had recently moved out of, and his Family murdered one of the new occupants, Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the movie director Roman Polanski, scrawling Beatles lyrics on the walls. The next day, he turned up at Wilson's door, demanding money; Wilson gave him some out of fear, and after he went away to Canada on tour and came back, he found that Manson had left a bullet on his doorstep.
Anyway, you can read the gory details in plenty of sensationalist accounts of the murders, but the point is that Charles Manson was an incredibly prominent, living, breathing argument against the idea that the hippie lifestyle would help people self-actualise into better versions of themselves - he had all the free love he ever wanted, he knew the Beatles' music, and hung out with the hippiest Beach Boy. And despite it all, he was a charismatic, murderous psychopath. It very clearly showed how impossibly utopian the hippie dream was - even basically good-hearted people have negative emotions, let alone the likes of Manson. Conflict and evil cannot be so easily done away with by simply thinking nice hippie thoughts. After all, Manson had aped the tone of the hippies very well indeed - he co-wrote a song called 'Never Learn Not To Love' and found inspiration in Beatles lyrics...but that didn't stop the whole murderous psychopath bit.
The Manson murders not only made hippies feel sad about their ideals; it also changed the way that mainstream America viewed the hippies. Previously, hippies had been something of a curiosity, in the same way that millennials and their ability to kill a variety of industries by not spending their money on things are now something of a mainstream curiosity. But the Manson murders became a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of the hippies; Los Angeles Magazine, for example, published an article with the title 'Could Your Daughter Kill?'
President Richard Nixon responded to Manson's arrest, argued Richard Perlstein, with the theory that it was the turning point that would make the 'Silent Majority' of Americans decide that enough was enough, and that they needed to put a stop to all these lefties and hippies (additionally after Manson had been arrested and imprisoned but before the murders had gone to trial, Nixon made deeply prejudicial comments about the case). And so, in between the arrest and the trial, pushback against the counterculture became much more visible. Most prominently, the Kent State shootings occurred in May 1970, where the Ohio National Guard shot at students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four. So beyond the way that Manson's existence soured the hippie dream, it also made being a hippie something more of a dicey proposition politically; being a hippie now attracted bad vibes. It harshed the mellow. As a result of all of these factors, the energy of the counterculture moved on from the kind of communal ideals and 'peace and love' vibes of the hippie lifestyle, with the 1970s famously styled as the 'me decade'.
Counterintuitively, the tropes of hippie culture also became increasingly mainstreamed in the 1970s; the hippie bands of the 1960s who survived the era became the bands that really raked in the cash (e.g., Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young who released the song 'Almost Cut My Hair' in 1970, and whose stadium tours of the 1970s played a big role in the modern touring circuit for big rock stars). Even the conservative country music scene had a star in a longhaired hippie pot smoker called Willie Nelson. But nonetheless, the tropes of hippie culture that survived into the 1970s were more like familiar tropes rather than the stuff of serious counterculture, which is why you get Lester Bangs in 1971 writing articles titled 'James Taylor Marked For Death' bemoaning how safe the hippie stuff has become, and why you get the punk movement of the late 1970s positioning itself as the antithesis of all "that hippie shit" (to quote Sex Pistols lead singer John Lydon's autobiography, Rotten).
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Followup question. I just read this comment in another thread. Is there any truth to this?
From what I read, Atkins and Watson didn't even blame Manson until the police put that idea in their heads. Similarly the young women didn't blame Manson or say he brainwashed them until the cops inferred that he did. I see it this way: young white girls from middle class families committed these heinous crimes. This wasn't something that society was willing to accept as possible. Thus came the myth that Manson - a life long criminal from the lowest social class - must have brainwashed and controlled the women. I think that Manson will be somewhat exonerated by history. In so many ways he was the scapegoat for the actual murderers and since those were mostly young women who had an "acceptable" upbringing, everyone was all too relieved to put the blame on him. Because of Manson, white middle class America didn't have to experience a moral panic.