1. Dropping out?
The search for a new beginning
Daniel Brockett Jr.
11/30/2008
The hippie commune movement was well within the bounds of what has historically been
considered American, but the hippie movement also redefined what it meant to be American, as
had each successive reform movement before it. The hippies, like so many groups before them,
were willing to experiment with new ways of living and working “on their own dime” in an effort
to remake what they saw as a stagnant society. They were willing to wager the best years of their
lives in an attempt to save their country, their society from itself. The American Dream is an idea
and, therefore, is a fluid, ever changing thing. From person to person, from moment to moment,
and from place to place it is always different. The hippies seem to have understood that and they
understood that this country is one ruled by ideas. The commune movement was one of many
tools the hippies used to try to remake or reform American society based on new ideas.

2. The hippie commune movement had much in common with previous American reform
efforts. Like the transcendentalist Movement and the Puritans before them, the Hippies sought to
reinvent the dominant economic system of their society.1
They were pitiless critics of capitalism
and the social values associated with it.2
They were opposed to urbanization and large
landholdings, seeking to realize the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of small farms – though not in the
manner Jefferson would have envisioned.3
Like Jefferson, they saw a clear relationship between the
freedom they felt was their birthright and economic independence, which they felt had been taken
from them.4
Like the puritans, they also felt religious life had been compromised and sought to
rediscover their spirituality – again, in a way the puritans might not have approved of, but
spirituality was a key element in the new culture they envisioned.5
Finally, like the
transcendentalists, they hoped to usher in complete equality and there were elements within the
movement that sought gender equality as well – though as a whole the movement would be best
described as neutral on the subject.6
The hippie commune movement rejected most of the assumptions of mainstream society
and started fresh, learning as they progressed which were worth keeping and which needed to be
discarded.7
The process was chaotic.8
Many of the brightest members of their generation destroyed
themselves in the process. Nonetheless, what emerged was a society ready to grow. It was a society
in some ways tarnished. New problems – drugs, teenage pregnancy, single-parent homes and
others – emerged out of the freedom of the 60’s that would plague the country to this day. The
society had also been strengthened in some ways. This was not the first generation to make waves,
but the hippie generation was certainly among the more notable revitalization movements in
American history as well as the genesis of many new ideas. Organic foods, alternative energies, new
frameworks of social interaction, sexual liberation, and a more analytical approach to learning and

3. teaching all were examined in the 1960’s to the benefit of society today.9
Environmentalism,
brotherhood, and individualism, meanwhile, were among a long list of traditional American ideals
to be rescued from the wreckage of the Post War era.10
The hippie movement sought to make a
brand-new society from invented and borrowed parts.11
They failed. They did, however, re-
evaluate and remake the American Dream. As they discovered the weaknesses in their own
movement, they found themselves returning to many of the ideas they had left behind.12
I cannot
hope, within the confines of a twelve page paper, to detail all the successes and failures of the
hippie movement, nor fully delineate the similarities and differences between this and previous
movements. What I hope to do, however, is accurately portray their struggle.
Five books formed the basis of this paper. As a secondary source, I read The 60’s
Communes: Hippies and Beyond by Timothy Miller. Arthur Kopecky published two books, New
Buffalo and Leaving New Buffalo, about his stay at the New Buffalo commune in Taos, New
Mexico from 1971 to 1979. Kopecky was a graduate school dropout with a degree in history from
City College of New York who kept a regular journal with the intention of recording the daily life
of the commune movement for historical purposes.13
Peter Coyote, currently a Hollywood actor
who was a central figure in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and later the Diggers in the 1960’s
and 70’s, wrote his memoir Sleeping Where I Fall after the fact, but included several journal
entries written at the time of his involvement in Free Family communes. His perspective is
somewhat different in that he was an artist, not a historian and his memoir begins several years
earlier in San Francisco in the 1960’s.14
Margaret Hollenbach’s memoir, My Life in a Group
Marriage Commune, is written by an anthropologist, but is written as a personal memoir and is
more introspective than analytical. Hollenbach dropped out of graduate school to live in a group
marriage commune before returning to receive her Master’s Degree in Anthropology.15
Her

4. communal experience represents the wide range of ideas that made up what we collectively refer to
as the hippie movement.
The hippies were not the transcendentalists, the puritans, the beatniks or the founding
fathers. One difference between the hippie movement and many of their predecessors is that they
did not seek a return to some mythical past they envisioned as innocent or pure, but rather
envisioned a new beginning to civilization. The Diggers, a group that largely defined the ideals of
the hippie movement, sought to remake society without its flaws. Part of this process was an
examination of the ideas of the founding fathers, previous reform movements, Native Americans,
and even Eastern cultures and belief systems, but the idea was to incorporate elements they saw as
useful into a new, more perfect society. Further distancing them from most past movements was
their rejection on principle of any type of leadership or attempt at establishing a consensus. To say,
in fact, that the Diggers, let alone the hippies, sought to do anything is a bit of a misrepresentation
of reality. Rather, individuals each sought to create a society perfect for themselves.16
This proved
to be one of the strengths and weaknesses of the Diggers. They were able to avoid infiltration and
subversion, but were prone to selfishness and factionalism – much like the Puritans and
Transcendentalists.17
Far from seeking to advance an ideology, the Diggers sought to transcend the very idea of
ideology. They reasoned that ideology delayed necessary action and encouraged the sacrifice of
individuals, something they sought to avoid.18
They were fiercely individualistic, but most of their
individual visions included in some way the idea of brotherhood, of helping one another rather
than competing with one another.19
Again, hippie communalism could be chaotic. The idea was to
live together as extended families.20
The underlying assumption, however, was that each person
should do exactly what he or she wanted to do, should make their own perfect society.21
There was

5. no leadership and no common ideology. Ultimately, there were no legitimate grounds on which to
confront a member who would not contribute and no way of encouraging group cohesiveness or
checking self-indulgent tendencies.22
As the commune movement sought to progress, hippies
addressed these problems, ultimately concluding that some authority was a necessity. The
distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority became key.23
Still, some saw movement in
the direction of productivity, order and authority as a betrayal of hippie values.24
Yet another difference between the hippie movement and previous communal endeavors
was the sheer size and scope of the former. Estimates for participation in the commune movement
of the 60’s and 70’s range from hundreds of thousands of people on thousands of communes to
one million or more people on tens of thousands of communes.25
The wide range of estimates is
due largely to the dearth of information left by many communes, but also to disagreement as to
what exactly constitutes a commune. Small communes, communes in which some degree of
private property was allowed, mobile communes or communes in which the individual was
stressed over the group are all tough to classify as they do not fit well into previous definitions of
commune.26
For the purposes of this paper, however, if a group satisfies most of the definition,
sees itself as a commune, and is seen as a commune by the outside world, it is commune enough.
It fits the common definition of a commune, has an impact on how people think of communes
and is obviously inspired by previous ideas of commune. It belongs in a discussion of communes
as an idea, a discussion of how hippie communes impacted and reflected the idea of the American
Dream.
The definition of hippie communes is even more difficult. Hippie is even tougher to define
than commune and there were often several important elements present in a given commune.
Timothy Miller, author of “The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond,” has placed communes of

6. the 60’s era into three admittedly rough categories: counter-cultural communes, religious and
spiritual communes, and communes aiming for social reform.27
Even this simple classification,
however, is misleading. The fact that a commune sought social change or was religious does not
make it any less a hippie commune. For the purposes of this paper, if a commune was inspired by
the hippie movement or its members saw themselves as hippies, or the outside world saw them as
hippies, it belongs in a discussion of hippie communes. It seems likely that most of the new
communes of the 1960’s and 1970’s fit at least some of these criteria, but there is no way to back
that up. There are, however, ample grounds to reject Miller’s assertion that hippie communes
represented the smallest group, as he has so obviously minimized his estimation of their numbers
by excluding communes that are otherwise in line with the hippie culture because they happened
to be lesbian, Christian, or environmentalist.
Hippie communes were extremely diverse. They varied in size from a couple to a couple
hundred, in occupation from goat farming to communes of mechanics or writers, and in facilities
from a shack or collection of shacks to one in which a huge dome was designed and constructed
specifically as a commune and another which took over a mansion.28
There was also a variety of
lifestyles. Free land communes would allow anyone to settle for whatever amount of time and treat
them more or less as equals, regardless of their contribution to the commune.29
Other houses had
well-defined procedures for admitting new members, some even requiring unanimous consent.30
Free love and free drugs were the norm at many communes, while monogamy and sobriety were
enforced at others.31
Some even featured group marriage or forbid coupling.32
Finally, the level of
commitment varied from commune to commune and from person to person, as the story of the
New Buffalo and Olema communes will illustrate later in this paper.33

7. In the midst of all this diversity, there was one constant. While there were members at
most every commune who pursued the communal life for their own self-interest, every commune
examined in this paper was organized with the intention of remaking or reforming society.34
If one
insisted on criticizing society so mercilessly, one should have an alternative in mind. This key goal
of the hippie movement was ultimately responsible for the explosion of communes in the period
from 1960 to 1975. Of course, even this common ground admitted a fair amount of diversity. For
instance, different communes focused on different critiques. The focus of the Olema commune
and the other digger communes or free family communes seems to have been a criticism of
capitalism and an attempt to re-examine social relationships.35
Art Kopecky of the New Buffalo
commune, however, was focused on peace and brotherhood, a return to the land and an emphasis
on community.36
That is not to say that Kopecky was not critical of capitalism or that Coyote didn’t
want peace, but rather it is a matter of degrees.
The means of effecting change were also controversial. There were communes that were
committed to the overthrow – even the violent overthrow—of society, the idea being to replace it
with the new society they were forging.37
There were others that simply sought to create an
attractive alternative which might eventually draw enough people in to make a difference. Others,
realizing how big a task creating a new society was, eventually acknowledged that the real goal was
to change the mainstream culture by opening a dialog.38
Likewise, there was almost constant debate
within individual communes as to what was the best way to correct what they mostly agreed were
serious flaws in the status quo. In fact, since most groups were without leadership, there was debate
about almost everything. All this debating, the lack of leadership make even individual communes
impossible to nail down ideologically as individual members each had different ideas and agendas
and both the members and the consensus within the communes changed over time. The trend was

8. generally to become more exclusive as the few members that stuck around got increasingly tired of
chaos, of footing the bill for freeloaders, and of constant infighting.39
The Digger groups, a key element in the Haight-Ashbury community, were among the
early back to the land groups.40
Peter Coyote was among the leaders of two Digger communal
efforts: the commune at Olema early on and a commune at his late father’s Turkey Ridge farm.
Despite taking over an established farm at Turkey Ridge, neither achieved real production.
Coyote’s group was unconcerned with, and unsuccessful at, becoming productive.41
Coyote and
the Diggers represented an early stage in development of hippie ideas. They sought to remake
society by simply disengaging from it completely. Of course, he failed. His group was too
disorganized and uncommitted to be productive agriculturally, so they had to buy, steal or scavenge
food and clothing from straight society.42
They drove cars fueled with gasoline and were, therefore,
tied to the money society, the capitalist market. A society living parasitically off the mainstream
cannot claim to be truly separate from it and a society devoted to perfect freedom and
individuality, which refused to recognize leadership and had no unifying ideology, was doomed to
non-production – ultimately to dependence on the larger culture.
The consciousness had not yet evolved to the point that they realized a new society would
have to be productive independently of the mainstream if it was to offer an alternative. The
Diggers were simply too anarchistic to make it work in most cases. Nevertheless, the early
communards learned a lot of things that mainstream society already knew, setting up the next wave
of communards to be slightly less hapless.
Arthur Kopecky arrived at New Buffalo in the Arroyo Hondo valley of Taos, New Mexico
in 1971.43
The commune scene here was dominated by parties and crashers at the time, the land

9. was barren and, though the house was devoid of the firewood they depended on for heating and
cooking. There was, however, a sub-group of people working to make this a productive farm. For
the first couple years Kopecky was there, the commune fought to overcome the chaos of anarchy,
nightly parties, last minute guests, and lazy communards. The commune was also broke and owed
back taxes. With little income, they relied on random charity and odd jobs to break even. Slowly,
they dug their way out of this mess.44
After six years, they took in their first ‘real’ harvest in 1973,
paid off their taxes, and progressed towards using more solar heating and less wood. Finally, in
1975, New Buffalo took in its’ first full harvest of wheat, though production continued to expand in
other areas over the course of Kopecky’s stay.45
The focus then shifted to bringing the dairy on
line, which they almost did. Until a former communard Kopecky called Rebel moved to some
property near New Buffalo and began taking shots at Kopecky with a rifle.46
Kopecky was finally
run off in 1979 by a group of communards, led by Rebel and a man named Pepe who had been
among Kopecky’s closest friends, felt that Kopecky had taken on too important a role in the
commune. Soon after, New Buffalo received a large grant – which Kopecky had written the
application for – to build a modern dairy barn. Nonetheless, New Buffalo apparently began a
decline after Kopecky’s departure. By 1985 the farm was finished, chaotic, with cows and
equipment gone.47
At New Buffalo, restrictions were slowly tightened, moving away from the complete
freedom that was a hippie ideal, to a more practical middle ground between mainstream capitalism
and society and the hippie free-for-all.48
Ideologically, Kopecky initially sought to remake society
with a greater emphasis on peace and brotherhood.49
His ideas were still evolving. Later, he came
to realize that, to offer an alternative, a new society would have to be productive independently of
the mainstream.50
As this became less likely, he saw ‘dropping out’ as impractical and began to

10. work within society. There were simply too many contradictions between production and order
and hippie ideals and too few dedicated, hard-working people willing to work to bring them
together.51
The Family, a group marriage commune in Taos, New Mexico, was organized around
Gestalt therapy. Any problem drew all members present in the house into a circle for therapy
based on direct confrontation. The entire focus of life in this commune was to be truly in touch
with one’s real emotions.52
According to Hollenbach, however, it amounted to little more than a
form of brainwashing in which people were told their feelings were incorrect until they matched
the group – or pretended to match the group.53
The group meetings had a coercive role in practice
and the group, in which total equality was an organizing principle, was ruled by a man named
Byron who claimed to be the messiah.54
The author, however, is not entirely trustworthy. Hers was
an introspective book and she comes off as silly, immature and petty. She holds a grudge against
her mother, for example, for allowing a doctor to treat her when she was sick as a child because
the treatment hurt.55
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that she tells the story as she remembers it.
Byron probably was a messianic figure and the group probably felt coercive to some people.
The Family is a good illustration of the necessity of differentiating between communes
dominated by hippie ideals and communes made up of hippies, but with an ulterior motive. An
attempt to apply generalities drawn from The Family to the hippie movement as a whole would be
extremely misleading. On the other hand, it also shows that even communes entirely dominated by
a single idea, or person, were still hippie communes. The members were hippies. The ideology of
the group had to be adapted to match the context of the movement and the group did share a
critique of bourgeois American society and a commitment to reform.56
Overall, it demonstrates the
wide range of ideas and realities embraced by the hippie commune movement.

11. The stereotype of the stoned, bumbling, impractical hippie is not without justification.
Especially in the early days of the commune movement, the hippies were like full-grown children.
In discarding the dominant society, they had to relearn what most of society had known for
thousands of years.57
But using this stereotype to dismiss the hippies is a huge mistake. As silly as
they were at times, they did something revolutionary, brilliant. Their deviance not only taught them
about themselves, it also made “straight” society look itself in the mirror. In responding to the
criticisms of the hippie movement, mainstream society rediscovered the best and worst about
themselves. Though they fell comically short of their goals at the outset, the hippies still
accomplished as much as any generation before or since. They changed the way the most powerful
country in the world thought and acted and identified problems like global warming decades
before it became an accepted fact. They reminded the world that we are at our happiest when we
are free not only in theory, but in our actions, our minds and our hearts.
Works Cited
Coyote, Peter. Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle. New York: Counterpoint, 1999.
Hollenbach, Margaret. Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune (CounterCulture series).
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.
Kopecky, Arthur. Leaving New Buffalo Commune (Counterculture Series). Albuquerque, NM: University of New
Mexico Press, 2006.
Kopecky, Arthur. New Buffalo: Journals from a Taos Commune (Counterculture). Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, 2004.
Miller, Timothy. The 60's Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution).
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

12. 1 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo Commune (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 52.
2 Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall (New York: Counterpoint, 1999), 139.
3 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo: Journals From a Taos Commune (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press,
2004) 190-1, 266.
4 Peter Coyote, 69. Society and economy go hand in hand.
5 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 172
6 Peter Coyote, 142, 247
7 Peter Coyote, 64, 65, 71, 137, 140, 141
8 Peter Coyote, 52, 306, 317
9 Peter Coyote, xiv, 349
10 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo xix, 12, 34
11 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo 128, 145; Leaving New Buffalo 47, 57
12 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 226; Leaving New Buffalo 36
13 Arthur Kopecky New Buffalo, xiii, 11,
14 Peter Coyote, 5
15 Margaret Hollenbach, Lost and Found: my life in a group marriage commune (Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, 2004), viii
16 Peter Coyote, 64-71, 197-8, 291, 300, 306
17 Peter Coyote, 309-310
18 Peter Coyote, 70
19 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo 34, 56
20 Peter Coyote, Chapter 19
21 Peter Coyote, 64-71, 197-8, 291, 300, 306
22 Peter Coyote, 140, 291, 300
23 Peter Coyote, 137, 140, 300
24 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo, 79, 198
25 Timothy Miller, The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), xviii
26 Timothy Miller, xxii-xxiv
27 Timothy Miller, xxiv-xxvi, 69
28 Timothy Miller, xxii, 70-2, 83, 86
29 Peter Coyote, 132-150, 219, 300
30 Timothy Miller, 81-3
31 Hollenbach, 10
32 Peter Coyote, 150-2
33 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 52, 141, 214
34 Hollenbach 8
35 Peter Coyote, 64-71. This section discusses Digger ideas in depth.
36 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo, xxii, xxiii, 12, 34, 156
37 Timothy Miller, 72-4
38 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo 190-1; Leaving New Buffalo, 186
39 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 24, 184, 214; Leaving New Buffalo, 55, 79, 150
40 Timothy Miller, 3
41 Peter Coyote, (roughly) Olema: 170-80’s & 207-220’s. Turkey Ridge: 280 to 300.
42 Peter Coyote, 132
43 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 11
44 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 26, 34, 39, 54, 140, 159; Leaving New Buffalo, 91, 127, 139
45 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 140, 254
46 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo, 170, 171, 180
47 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo, 198-205
48 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 45, 143; Leaving New Buffalo, 79, 150
49 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 99, 108, 184, 226
50 Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo, 190-1, 266, 273-4; Leaving New Buffalo, 52
51 Arthur Kopecky, Leaving New Buffalo, 132
52 Hollenbach, 8, 13
53 Hollenbach, 68-9
54 Hollenbach, 144
55 Hollenbach, 75-6
56 Hollenbach, 22
57 Peter Coyote, 150-2, 179. I believe there is some funny advice here he had to give involving poison ivy.