Basking under San Francisco’s summer sun, an immense kaleidoscope of youths thrummed with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet the Summer of Love was so much more than that three-pronged cliché. Flowers, fashion, posters, theater, panhandling, commercialism, revolution, anarchy, freedom—all these and more were overflowing among the young Americans packed into the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. They arrived to take part in a community that valued freedom, nature, and art over capitalistic mores. The hippie experiment ended in ruin, but it calls to mind the epitaph of Ovid’s Phaethon: “And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.” That summer ...(100 of 2613 words) Access the full article Help support true facts by becoming a member. Subscribe today!