My Sunday newspaper contained an obituary that awakened some long-dormant memories. Stephen Gaskin, the founder and guru of “The Farm,” one of the longest-lived and most successful communes to emerge from the hippie counterculture, has died at age 79.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I visited The Farm one day in the early summer of 1975. My girlfriend at the time was attracted by the idea of rural communal living, and when she heard about The Farm, decided that it was the place for her. So on our way from somewhere to somewhere else, we drove through central Tennessee to Summertown and spent the day visiting the farm, along with 50 or so other visitors, including a sociology professor and his class. My girlfriend’s plans to join were quickly shelved. The place wasn’t nearly as tidy and sanitary as she was expecting (“How can people live in this filth?” was one of her observations, as I recall).
I didn’t have any interest in staying on either, but for a different reason. The place seemed a bit too hierarchical for my liking. Stephen wasn’t in residence on the day of our visit, but his presence was felt in everything said by his lieutenants. Although they insisted that decision-making at The Farm was communal and that Stephen held no political power, it was also obvious that all of the decisions were made by Stephen and nothing could be decided in his absence.
There was a rash of interest in communal living from the mid-1960s, but by 1975, the bloom was definitely off that particular rose. More on this after the fold.
By 1975, many of the communes that started during the heady early days of the hippie counterculture had withered away. Some of them had broken down into squabbling over who really owned properties that, in some cases, were becoming quite valuable (especially in San Francisco). And hovering above the whole hippie/guru/commune idea was the anti-Christ of the whole hippie movement, Charles Manson.
The Manson trial has been big news just a few years before, and was widely interpreted as the death nail of the counterculture. I recently read Jeff Guinn's excellent biography of Manson. If you're looking for a compulsive page-turner of a read, go for it! As John Milton and others have discovered, the evil characters are always the most interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/...
Guinn describes how quickly things deteriorated in Haight-Ashbury between the famous "be-in" in January 1967 and the "Summer of Love" a few months later. By early summer, the neighborhood was teeming with druggies, thieves, and con artists all too willing to prey on the hordes of naive young idealists arriving daily. It was fertile ground for a charismatic sociopath like Manson. Charlie was released from prison in March 1967 and soon was a fixture in the Haight, where he began recruiting his stable of followers that eventually grew to around 40. The group supported itself by raiding supermarket dumpsters and, later, by freeloading on music industry types. Charlie hoped to eventually relocate his "family" to Death Valley - talk about getting away from it all! In any case, the end of the story was not pretty.
Stephen Gaskin was no Manson, of course. He seems a likeable and benign figure. However, it is interesting that, according to the WaPo article, the group eased him out of leadership in the 1980s, moving instead to a more conventional arrangement in which members earned money and contributed to the Farm's upkeep. Stephen seems to have accepted the change, observing "I liked it better when it was a circus...But I also like being solvent."
The Farm still exists and has around 200 members. More power to them, and R.I.P., Stephen!