Search Results

This essay reviews the book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion. First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Didion in which she mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s, including the one in Haight-Ashbury in the weeks and months leading up to the Summer of Love. The book takes its title from the poem “The Second Coming,” by W. B. Yeats. One of the essays is “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a story of murder involving the San Bernardino couple Gordon and Lucille Miller. Here Didion exposes the underside of the great Golden State myth: that it is a land of reinvention, in which we escape the past to find ourselves.

This chapter shows that while San Francisco’s cosmopolitan liberals organized around new conceptions of citizenship, they soon split over how to best organize the government to serve the citizenry. Growth advocates, who propounded deliberative democratic positions that oriented debate around City Hall, faced off against localists, who championed participatory democratic principles that regarded neighborhoods as the fount of democracy. Both sides insisted that their interactions with police served as model democratic arrangements. This intra-liberal competition fueled a police department civil war between liberal black officers and conservative white officers. A new generation of white, rank-and-file, “Blue Coat” organizers, however, came to recognize how they could defend their institutional interests by alternately supporting the growth proponents and the localists in their fights over democratic arrangements. The Blue Coats helped convince liberals to value inclusiveness and cooperation over regulation as the basis for democratic governance.

This chapter examines the 1967 establishment of the Living Room mission on Page Street in the Haight-Ashbury hippie district as a response to the influx of runaway youth during the Summer of Love. With the backing of a group of mostly Baptist pastors, an organization called Evangelical Concerns is formed that attempts to raise funding to help the mission and facilitate dialogue with a very hesitant, and often hostile, evangelical community. The chapter details stormy incidents involving evangelical establishment figures, as well as the group’s attempt at communal living at the House of Acts/Big House in suburban Novato. The original group pulls apart, but their existence inspires a Jesus People style and new evangelical work among the hippies in the Bay Area and elsewhere.