Getting Back Together: Interview with Robert Houriet

When we interviewed Robert Houriet in 1987, he was a for-real fifty-year-old hippie, living on an organic farm in Hardwick, Vermont. Like thousands in the ’60s, the Movement kindled a spark of hope in Robert and he gave his whole being to make it happen. His ideals and vision led him to quit his job as an “upwardly- mobile city editor” of a newspaper in Philadelphia to go to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. From there he traveled around the country visiting various communes which he described in his book, Getting Back Together. Eventually he settled in Vermont and helped establish Frog Run Farm, a commune in East Charleston. Robert hopes that one day the ideals of the Movement will come into reality.

How did the Movement begin?

RH: About twenty-five years ago, the first communities started. Hippies started these open-ended communities. They were formed mostly in opposition to the local structure of Nixon, America, and the plastic nature of American culture. It wasn’t very clear in the beginning that there was an underlying spiritual hunger. The sense for community was also not clear. It was evident that people knew this [community] was what they wanted, but they saw they couldn’t get it in society. Community was spoken of first as tribal, extended families, and then later as community when the circle widened out to larger groups, and also broke down to smaller households in localities.

Why do you think that the Movement, as it is called now, had such a tremendous, powerful take-off? Why was there so much energy behind it? It just seemed like it exploded into something that affected a whole generation. Why is that?

RH: I think it got its explosive nature from its anti-authoritarianism. The war brought that out. The baby boom generation seemed to coalesce and play upon this “what we’re not” kind of feeling — we are not our parents; we are not university trustees; we are not American capitalists; we are not liberals — without really defining what we were. The clue is really in the name that still exists: the counter culture. It was not a positive culture to begin with; it was a counter culture. It was what we were against. When the war subsided, the dust cleared, and the anger subsided a bit, we looked around and found ourselves in places like Vermont, New Mexico, and Oregon. What was left after that anger abated? Was there anything positive to build a community on? What was the basis for a culture that holds families and communities together?

After May Day, 1973, the national leadership said, “Okay, we’re finished with the demonstrations. All you people go back home, work in your own communities, build your networks there. There’s nothing more to fight against; we can no longer hold what we have nationally; we’ve got to do it locally.” People came back and said, “Okay, what do we do in Vermont?” And they really couldn’t pull it off because they didn’t have their personal relationships together, didn’t have their groups together, and consequently didn’t have their politics together. The politics were defective because their relationships weren’t good. The relationships weren’t good because the basis of the culture wasn’t there.

Could you say that it was a counter culture in the sense of being against the culture of America, but that it really had no true basis as a nation itself, as far as having a government, a body politic?

RH: We spoke in terms of the Woodstock nation, but even though it existed in name, it wasn’t a nation in the centralist sense of the word nation. It was a very loose-knit concept of very decentralized anarchist groups.

Was the Woodstock nation more like a vision of what was in people’s hearts?

RH: Well, I think it was both in their heads and their hearts, and maybe the connection was lacking. I think there was a defect in the vision from the start because it was a vision based on opposition. We were defining ourselves by what we were not. We were not a centralized government, therefore we were a de-centralized, loosely-organized government. It was a vision in the LSD sense of the word, in that you could have a vision of something and yet be unable to attain it in reality. The vision may have had, for many people, a spiritual reality, but they were unable to connect it with day-to-day life. Somehow the distance between actuality and vision became wider and wider. The contradictions were so painful that it was impossible to maintain that tension without becoming schizophrenic.

Why do you think that happened, that the vision and the actual day-to-day practice never could come together? What was the flaw? Was it because there was not true spiritual authority?

RH: People found it difficult to submit themselves to the authority of a group or the consensus of a group because they were very much American individualists. And some of us were very cantankerous personalities! So the anarchists’ philosophy of “everyone do their own thing” was unworkable in terms of what will actually work in community.

Why was the baby boom generation so primed in every way to become a counter culture?

RH: Some people reduce it to child-rearing. They say permissive child-rearing promoted by Dr. Spock somehow cultivated unreal expectations of the world as if it were an unlimited breast, when in fact they found it wasn’t. Then they reacted with infantile rage against it. I don’t buy it. What stands out about that period of time is not so much the child-rearing practices, but the great wealth of this country. You’re talking about the height of the empire; you’re talking about the most money ever available — everyone was ripping with money in the ’60s. Before the oil crisis, foundations gave away money. The upper class as well as the middle had more money than they could deal with. There was a luxury for rebellion.

Was the catalyst a reaction against the American Dream?

RH: Yes, it was a reaction to the wealth itself which sponsored it, a reaction against our parents’ way of life. They had so much money, superfluous wealth, that they weren’t utilizing for a social purpose.

What do you feel was awakening that? What was causing that to happen?

RH: Well, it goes back to the Civil Rights period. It goes back to John F. Kennedy. The conscience was there. The Kennedy assassination was very important in that such great hopes were raised and then crushed. You were left with an awakened conscience and nowhere to go with it. Kennedy raised a lot of expectations; perhaps this country could save itself. Then he was snuffed out. I don’t know how much you believe in his politics, but he stood for something that aroused us. He was assassinated in 1963, Robert in 1968, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., and then right after that came the escalation of the Vietnam War. A cultural revolution in our music also awakened the conscience when the Beatles came to America in 1964.