Hippie Homesteaders: Arts, Crafts, Music and Living on the Land in West Virginia

Pacifists, Protesters, and Draft Dodgers

24 3 Pacifists, Protesters, and Draft Dodgers The Times, They Were A-Changin’ F rom the perspective of distance,1968 can be seen as a seminal year in the United States. Much like other years in our country’s cultural DNA— 1941, 1945, 1963, and 2001—it evokes the question,“Where were you?” As in, “Where were you when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor? When FDR died? When they shot President Kennedy? On 9/11?” For those whose memories are indelibly stamped with the turmoil of 1968, often dubbed “The Year the Dream Died,” the questions become,“Where were you when they killed Dr. King?” or “Where were you when they shot Bobby?” While 1968 was only the climax in a decade of growing unrest,it marked the turning point for a generation of kids born during or post-World War II to parents who had lived through the Great Depression. They were raised during the affluent 1950s, and thus were teenagers when President John F. Kennedy told them not to ask what the country could do for them, but to ask what they could do for their country. Poised to go to college, many took it to heart, joined civil rights protests, and questioned whether their country was headed in the direction they had hoped Kennedy could take it. According to well-documented social histories by Judson Jerome, Timothy Miller, Irwin and Debi Unger, and Todd Gitlin, the youth of America lost heart following the tumultuous 1960s. Unable to sense that 25 Pacifists, Protesters, and Draft Dodgers their activist approach to civil rights had been effective, disheartened by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and shaken by the violent riots and urban fires that followed King’s death, young people across the country began to drop out. Disgusted by the brutal attacks of the Chicago Police Department during the Democratic National Convention, and horrified by the intensification of the Vietnam War and the bombing of Cambodia, they set off to create a new world for themselves. Despite mainstream stereotypes, it wasn’t necessary to take drugs to drop out; their way consisted of a new way of life, a philosophy, a rejection of the current state of affairs. It was, for them, a matter of survival . If they couldn’t change things, they could simply stop participating. To the dismay of their parents, many sons and daughters were drawn to urban centers like New York City or San Francisco—the bicoastal meccas for many a flower child—where some spent dissipated years in a purple haze of marijuana or harder drugs. Others chose a rural life for their self-made utopia. While this dream was hardly a new one in our history, the 1970s back-to-the-land movement was one of the largest.1 Nationally, the numbers of those who went back to the land are staggering , even if the counting methods were somewhat imprecise. Jeffrey Jacob, in New Pioneers, and Timothy Miller, in The Hippies and American Values, both reported that by the end of the 1970s the number of those living on the land, either in communes or as independent homesteaders, topped one million in rural North America.2 Enclaves of homesteaders dotted the U.S. map in rural areas of California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maine, among others.3 This migration contributed to a dramatic population shift in West Virginia as well. Census figures from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources’s website reveal that the only decade in the state’s last fifty years to see a significant increase in population was the 1970s, when it swelled by more than 200,000. Of those, 110,000 were added through the influx of newcomers. While one might assume an increased demand for coal production accounted for this population growth, the West Virginia Coal Association reports employment in coal production in West Virginia actually decreased from a high of 125,669 miners in 1948, to only 41,941 26 Chapter Three by 1969. During this period, coal production did climb steadily, no doubt because of more sophisticated mining equipment and the advent of strip mining. Yet, in the 1970s, less than 10,000 names were added to coal mine employment rosters, only 0.05 percent of those new arrivals.4 Although at least 10,000 of the other newcomers who came in...