Political Hippies and Hip Politicos: Counterculture Alliance and Cultural Radicalism in 1960s Austin, Texas

University of Texas students affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protest the Vietnam War at the Texas State Capitol. Mariann Wizard Papers, di_06907, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.

In recent decades, residents of Texas's capital city have been enjoined to "Keep Austin Weird." Although this slogan evades precise definition, it does capture something important about the city's collective identity.¹ It has long been a haven for the offbeat, and its progressive politics often put it at odds with much of the rest of Texas. While several recent books have challenged the idea that Austin has lived up to its progressive self-image, especially in terms of racial equality, urban development, and conservation, there is at least some truth that Austin is defined by its "weirdness," even as the city's tech-oriented economy booms and its population swells.² It is the city Willie Nelson and others put firmly on the nation's cultural map with the "outlaw country" music scene of the 1970s. However, that scene did not come out of nowhere; it was built on a foundation largely established in the 1960s.³ It was during that decade that the blend of progressive politics and cultural experimentation that still makes Austin "weird" was defined on the campus of the University of Texas (UT), the result of the unlikely alliance of hippies and New Left politicos. UT's hip/radical coalition transcended the antagonisms between these two groups evident in countercultural centers such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City and forged an enduring identity for Texas's capital city.

To be sure, Austin was not the only college town in 1960s America defined by the blending of radical politics and cultural libertinism. From Madison, Wisconsin, to Norman, Oklahoma, and many other places in the American Midwest and on the Southern Plains, the "prairie power" student movement within the New Left proved to be a more open, less uptight, spontaneous, and more action-oriented alternative to the more doctrinaire New Left traditionalism of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts—indeed, it also helped to give some of these "heartland" places a progressive identity that still endures.⁴ But as Austin has grown to be a much larger city than these other centers of "prairie power," it might be argued that its national—perhaps even international—influence and reputation is that much greater. With apologies to Portland, Oregon, among other places, Austin is the "weird city," par excellence.

Austinites have fully embraced both their dissident past and current political and cultural singularity, often viewing their city as "a progressive island in a sea of intolerance" and a "liberal Mecca in a desert of conservatism." The roots of the city's eccentricities were planted in the late 1960s when a rebellious and contentious spirit emerged from the radical fusion of the University of Texas's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their community's hip counterparts. Together they transformed Austin from a "sleepy, beautiful little town" to a city "vilified by the rest of Texas as the long-haired, hippie, pot-smoking, hell-raising Gomorrah of the Western world."⁵ Indeed, for many Austin natives, the sixties and early seventies was the city's Golden Age, a time "Old hippies … blather endlessly about while picking dope seeds out of their dentures. … It was a good time to be in Austin … [when] it was cooler to be a hippie than be in a frat. It was really like what you read about. And it allowed for more weird things to happen … and that gave you time to do something weird."⁶

The alliance of UT student radicals and Austin's hip community challenges most standard interpretations of the era that contend that SDS affiliates, such as the one at UT, who welcomed the hippies as fellow rebels, contributed to both the New Left's and SDS's eventual demise by...