Long hair, tie dye shirts, and peace, all describe the group of people who fueled the musical movement that we know today as Woodstock. It was 1969 when it happened, over 500,000 people showed up to a farm just 50 miles outside of Woodstock New York to take part in what may be the biggest musical movement to help shape the political economy. Woodstock was a music and art festival that displayed some of the most recognizable artists of the 1960's such as, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, and Jimmy Hendrix, as well as many more. But what was Woodstock about? Was it a peaceful demonstration that many people there say it to be, or was the media at the time right, saying that it was all about hippies, long hair, and drugs.
During the first few days of Woodstock, the media coverage on the festival was displaying only the negative aspects. It is true, Woodstock was very poorly organized, the organizers sold roughly 180,000 tickets before hand, and were expecting an approximate 200,000 to show up to the festival, but that estimate was blown out of the water, peaking at just over 500,000 people. New York governor at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, told Woodstock's organizer, John Roberts, that he was going to order 10,000 New York state troops to the grounds if he did not get it under control, Roberts was able to get him to call this off. The media displayed Woodstock as a "Hippiefest," they distilled the true meaning of what the festival was about, which was a place for these music loving hippies to show their love for music and peacefully protest against some of the big problems facing America at this time. However, the media described it as "a glorification of drugs, a loosening of sexual morality and a socially corrosive disrespect for authority."
The festival was quoted as "three days of peace and love," and this was to go against the war that was happening across the world in Vietnam. The festival organizers were quoted as saying "anyone buying a ticket was contributing to a united front against the Vietnam War." Act's made speeches against the Vietnam war and Country Joe McDonald, at the beginning of his act told the crowd "if you want to stop this fucking war, you'll have to sing louder than that." If the true meaning of the Hippie movement was to change the world for the better by peaceful musical protest, then why was the media not depicting this? It was because the media and America could not see this as a political movement, they were to busy focusing on the negative fallacies of the Hippie movement to see the positive reality. Bernard Collier a writer for the New York Times, who was writing the major article on the festival said that he had been told by his editors that he should write a "misleadingly negative article about the event."
The media displayed the festival as a hippie drug filled festival of nudity and not a musical festival about peace. America saw this festival as a failure because it lost revenue, they didn't take into account the movement that formed and ideas that spread into peoples minds, all they took into consideration was the fact that there was a revenue loss, it is clear the media and political economy only cared about money. The truth behind Woodstock will never be uncovered as over the years it has gotten more and more foggier from the media, but everyone has their beliefs on what truly happened on that great day in musical history. The tie dye shirts, long hair, and Woodstock may just be a part of history now, but the Hippie movement is still in our society today, you just have to dig deep to find it.
Peace, Love, and Unity.
Kyle Ketchum
Sources:
http://historyrat.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/woodstock-did-the-1960s-change-the-world/
http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtiswoodstock.html
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript119.html
Woodstock (Film)
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