City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver in the Sixties (review)

The last few years have witnessed a substantial increase in scholarship on Canada in the 1960s. Most recently several local histories on the subject have seen print including Sean Mills’ The Empire Within (Montréal 2010) and Stuart Henderson’s Making the Scene (Toronto 2011). Lawrence Aronsen’s study of Vancouver is a welcome addition.

Aronsen, a former Vancouver sixties radical himself, is a professor of history at the University of Alberta where he teaches courses on US and world history, including a senior seminar titled “The Sixties Revolt.” He has published several books on US-Canada relations. His background is US history has likely contributed to what is most refreshing about City of Love and Revolution: the absence of maple leaves and beavers. Aronsen does not try to dress up Vancouver in the 1960s within the cloak of scholarly nationalism or Canadian exceptionalism. Aronsen repeatedly indicates that the cultural and political phenomena that occurred in Vancouver from 1963 to 1975 were by and large American imports.

City of Love and Revolution is composed of six short chapters, each addressing a particular topic. The first chapter chronicles the rise and fall of Vancouver’s hippy population from its emergence in Kitsilano in 1965. He credits the countercultural influence of San Francisco with the development of Vancouver’s hippy communities. Chapter two tells the story of the Vancouver Free University (vfu), an alternative institution grounded in the new left ideals of participatory democracy and opposition to hierarchy. Again, American influences leading to the establishment of vfu are clear. Founded in 1969, vfu traced its roots back to the establishment of free universities in Berkeley and New York in 1965. The influence of the United States, and again, San Francisco in particular, is also apparent in the chapter on the sexual revolution. Chapter Four links the appearance of new music with the proliferation of psychedelic drugs. Aronsen argues that the two were inseparable. And he attributes their appearance in Vancouver to influences south of the border: “In almost every case,” he asserts, “Vancouver’s rock’n’roll scene followed trends in the United States.” (88) The concurrent proliferation of drugs he argues was largely the result of two phenomena: Canadians travelling to San Francisco, getting ‘turned on’ there, and returning home with a generous amount of samples; and American draft dodgers who began arriving in the city mid-decade.

Chapter Five chronicles Yippie activism. The Yippies – radicalized hippies – are best remembered for their political theatrics and colourful leaders such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Emphasizing US influences, Aronsen tells us that the Yippies were important because “they highlight the cross-border transfer of American popular culture.” (108) They first rose to prominence in Vancouver with a visit by Ruben to the University of British Columbia in October 1968, where he led 1,200 students in an occupation of the faculty club. Yippies also distinguished themselves in May 1970 when they trashed the town of Blaine, Washington, in response to the US invasion of Cambodia and the deaths of four students at Kent State University. They figured prominently, as well, in the August 1971 Gastown Riot. The final chapter traces the transformation of the ban-the-bomb movement into the anti-Vietnam War movement.

There is much to like about this book, but there is also much to question. What is particularly good is that Aronsen places the old left, or at least part of it, within the narrative of the 1960s, an important facet that other scholars often leave out. In his chapter on hippies, he presents the Communist Party as one of the only two alternatives available to those challenging middle-class values in early 1960s Vancouver, the other being the Beats. But his depiction of the Communist Party, its motives, and its accomplishments projects an outmoded Cold War thinking, portraying Party members as merely carrying out the objectives of the Soviet Union, without any sense of agency or sincerity. Sometimes there are errors in fact as well...