The Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Movement

Abstract

The countercultural back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the third wave of an antimodern tradition that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. This study places the hippie back-to-the-land movement within this larger context and follows the intergenerational exchange between the counterculture and second generation back-to-the-landers such as Ralph Borsodi, Mildred Loomis, and the School of Living organization in the mid-1960s. The resulting narrative offers a complex picture of exchange as an older generation introduced hippies in Berkeley to decentralism, eugenics, and a form of anti-statist environmentalism. The counterculture, however, was the product of the Cold War prosperity and the shifting politics of the New Left. The overwhelmingly white, middle-class counterculture did not adopt eugenics. Instead, it formulated a novel back-to-the-land ideology that combined decentralism and pastoralism with an emerging white identity politics that appropriated from non-white traditions, especially those of Native American groups, that were viewed as premodern models for a post-modern future. This study follows three case studies – Twin Oaks in Virginia, Alpha Farm in Oregon, and Heathcote in Maryland – to track the movement as the 1960s counterculture transformed into the New Age movement of the 1970s and 1980s. By drawing on newsletters and other archival materials, this study explores how back-to-the-landers sought to fashion alternative political cultures that avoided the practice of voting, novel economic systems that empowered women, and intercommunal organizations that offered labor-sharing services and New Age social gatherings. Like other antimodern movements such as the Arts and Crafts movement, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s primarily served the racial and class interests of participants and ended up reinforcing dominant cultural trends such as the rise of post-World War Two consumerism, the shift towards a politics of the personal, the rightward turn of American politics in the 1970s, and the settler-colonial appropriation of Native culture. Though the countercultural back-to-the-land movement offered individual personal transformation and influenced the Organic movement, the environmental movement, and the personal computing movement, it failed to attract a more diverse coalition and could not offer a radical alternative to Cold War society and culture.