“The Movement” reached critical mass when the cool kids started appreciating it.  A dramatic example of this occurred when I was at the University of Virginia.

I had a roommate who decided, along with a friend of his, to run for student government.  They did it in a way, though, that was decidedly different from the prevailing campus culture at the time.

Having been not only founded, but also designed in architectural detail by Thomas Jefferson, the college had a lot of hallowed traditions.  Among them:  students wore coats and ties every day to classes, even though there was no official policy stopping us from showing up in our bathrobes, if we were so inclined.

Also, our instructors didn’t refer to us by our first names.  If your name was John Smith, they called you Mister Smith.  We did the same with them.  No one was Professor or Doctor Jones—only Mister Jones.  This practice applied even to the president of the university.

Being treated as men rather than just boys—and beyond that, gentlemen, who were addressed with the exact same terms of deference as the faculty and administration—was pretty heady stuff for us.  It helped shape us in some very positive ways.

Other traditions, though, were just stodgy and dull.

These included the way people ran for election to the student government—a distinction which, for most of them, appeared to be mainly a way of burnishing their applications to law school.   Their “campaigns,” such as they were, involved little more than putting up a few posters featuring a photograph of themselves in their best three-piece suit, plus a bland slogan or two.

My roommate and his friend took a tack that was…uh…a little different.

They were members of a Southern affiliate of the obstreperous leftist group SDS—a major force behind campus protests around the country—and together, they formed and officially ran on the ticket of something they called the Anarchist Party.  Its central message:  “What has order gotten you?”

I shot the official poster portraits of them on my very own dime-store Polaroid camera.

In these, my roommate appeared sitting behind a desk in one of those dark-colored, short-billed Greek fisherman’s caps that were popular in coffeehouses at the time, plus a black turtleneck adorned with a clumsily scissored-out white cardboard letter “A” for Anarchist.

He held up an object to the camera, giving a million-watt cheesy smile in the manner of an early TV talk show host plugging a sponsor’s bottle of Geritol, but with a slight variation:  the thing he held up was a disarmed (I hope) hand grenade.

His running mate was attired in a manner more befitting the young Southern gentleman he was, with a name consisting entirely of surnames followed by a set of Roman numerals. But he also wore a set of plastic vampire fangs, and his eyes had a distinctly crazed expression as he drew back his hand in readiness to hurl a round, black, bomb straight out of the cartoons—complete with oversized fuse.

The two of them staged unconventional campaign events, like a torchlight rally from the rusting bed of an old pickup truck, and had very little trouble getting noticed.

But was it positive or negative?

They began to sense they were onto something when the ultra-gentlemanly president of the normally conservative Inter-Fraternity Council approached them and quietly indicated his support for them—adding “But don’t tell anybody.”

As it turned out, they got elected, and with the largest majority in the history of the university.

Similar (if less dramatic) scenes played out around the country.  People who were among the most popular in their schools started wearing bell bottoms and letting their hair grow long, and sometimes even talking about peace and love.

What drew them in such numbers? 

Much has been written about the magnetic pull of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.  Without question, all were more widely available in the enclaves of The Movement than in so-called “straight” society.  But these down-and-dirty pleasures also had a distinct component of rebellion in them—an attitude that was much admired.

On top of this were strong idealistic yearnings to somehow make the world a better place.  If its only pull had been sensual, the Counterculture could never have drawn in all the nice, high-minded young people who initially flocked to it, and fueled the fire that would later engulf much of the developed world.

But what had alienated young people whose lives were far more comfortable, with prospects many times brighter, than their Depression-battered parents could ever had imagined?