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THE FARM, Tennessee -- Albert Bates grows nostalgic remembering the freewheeling days when hundreds of hippies left San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in a caravan of psychedelic buses for a celebrated back-to-the-land pilgrimage. Bates was a law student when this electric circus rolled through New York in 1970, and he found it irresistible. Soon he followed, joining a young, affluent exodus to the American countryside that would be one of the most profound social experiments of its time.
His long hair and beard have grayed, but Bates still lives at The Farm, the storied American commune he helped build in backwoods Tennessee. Sipping Mystic Brew organic coffee at its eco-village, he chuckles at the memory of the trippy energy that once inspired some communards to boot up their "Marijuana Macintoshes" and design a Geiger counter they sold, for almost nothing, as a dashboard ornament for anti-nuke protesters.
"It was a novelty item, but it turned out to be very accurate," Bates says with a grin. "It was pretty funny."
The homegrown Nuke-Buster is no joke now. Today, the computerized, satellite-accessible nuclear detectors are used worldwide by police, military, firefighters and federal disaster officials. They are used to stem nuclear contraband at the borders that Belarus and Kazakhstan share with Russia. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sales have risen 30 percent, to $2.5 million last year. The Farm-based manufacturer has been commended by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Not bad for a place that spent years under FBI surveillance.
Thoroughly modern hippies
"Homeland Security's been good to us. We're high-tech hippies now," says Stephen Gaskin, the charismatic former San Francisco State lecturer who was once The Farm's guru, preaching a long-abandoned doctrine of multiple-partner marriage and marijuana spiritualism.
"We've had to find ways to survive," Bates echoed, "in the material world."
Hundreds of American utopian communities face the same challenge. A surprising number are thriving. But if American communes were once, in the eyes of Joan Didion, "slouching towards Bethlehem," many today lean closer to Merrill Lynch.
Tie-dye, wood-burning stoves and mandalas still abound. But so do multimillion-dollar industries and financial restructuring that residents earnestly liken to the transformation of the Communist world. They may have dropped out of mainstream society to live a utopian dream, but now they embrace capitalism as a tool of survival, on their own terms. Most, including The Farm, no longer define themselves as communes, describing themselves as collectives, cooperatives and egalitarian communities.
More than 600 such settlements in the United States are listed in the directory of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. The Fellowship's executive secretary, Laird Schaub, estimates that at least 10,000 Americans live in rural collectives.
Virginia's Twin Oaks produces hammocks for Pier One. The nut butters produced by a Missouri commune, East Wind, supply such mainstream chains as Whole Foods.
In a region where family farms have become an endangered species in a single generation, organic farms such as Sandhill are lauded by the Missouri Department of Agriculture Web page as possible models for survival.
The communities have slick Web sites, marketing directors, federations, group health plans, hotlines, magazines and conventions.
Far from retreating from society, many invite the world in. Last year, the Findhorn community in Scotland hosted a U.N.-affiliated environmental conference. The Farm started its own U.N.-recognized international relief agency, called Plenty.
What about the children?
Yet at many communities, the graying elders are soul-searching as they ponder who will carry on their legacy. People interested in living there permanently are often aging '60s veterans who are among the 74 million U.S. baby boomers making the transition to senior citizenhood.
Even at the venerable Farm, hundreds of commune-born children have grown up and moved to Nashville, New York or California.
"There are people who need to see their children come back here, as an affirmation that what they did has legs," said Cynthia Holzapfel, 56, the managing editor of the $1-million-a-year Farm-based Book Publishing Co., which has had several best-sellers: "Spiritual Midwifery," "Tofu Cookery" and "Defeating Diabetes."
"I'm a little more Buddhist about it. We've built it. If they're going to come, they're going to come," said Holzapfel, a warm, open-faced woman with Birkenstock sandals, thick yarn socks and a gray bob, leaning against a shelf of soy "meat" products in the warehouse of the mail-order health food business at The Farm.
Conflict in Paradise
Capitalism wasn't the only thing that happened to The Farm along the road to Utopia. The commune engaged in a collective divorce in 1982, firing their charismatic leader, Gaskin. Homes that once housed 60 people were given over to single families and residents were required to contribute $135 a month to the community foundation. The bitter exodus that ensued downsized The Farm from a 1,500-strong commune to a 200-member cooperative today.
That divisive rupture, like The Farm's ragtag infancy, is difficult to envision in the serene pastoral landscape beyond the pamphlet-filled visitors center. Rustic wood-frame homes nestle in the trees and sun-bleached grasses of gentle hills.
Roaming deer herds, swelled by three decades of vegetarianism, lend the 1,750-acre Farm the look of a game park. Grain silos are painted with flowers and butterflies, and rusting psychedelic buses from the 1970 exodus dot the landscape.
Near the entrance gates to this idyll lives Gaskin, who led the four-month bus caravan from Haight-Ashbury to the motherland at a time when the Vietnam War was raging, the Haight was fading and the Manson murders had cast a dark shadow on the California counterculture. Gaskin, a buoyant 69, with long gray hair and fringed Davy Crockett epaulets of beaded buckskin, is living out his days as something of an international hippie emeritus ("famous but not rich") in demand for such honors as judging the annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.
But for years this was the Stephen Gaskin Farm, and he made the rules. He led Sunday morning meditation services, presided over his followers' weddings and funerals and managed the commune's finances. (Though for most of 1974, he had to do this from the Nashville Penitentiary after he was convicted of marijuana cultivation.)
His wife, Ina May Gaskin, was one of the pioneers of the modern natural birth movement and author of the popular "Spiritual Midwifery." Their children were raised in one of The Farm's radical lifestyle experiments, a "group marriage" in which the Gaskins and two other couples cohabited, sleeping with each other's spouses and raising their children together -- something only 8 percent of The Farm adults practiced in the early 1970s, according to official Farm history.
In those days, 10,000 people visited The Farm a year. Most crashed for a few days, but about 1,500 stayed on to create a self-contained counterculture universe, complete with clinic, an ambulance service and a commune-wide phone system dubbed "Beatnik Bell." All money earned outside was handed over to The Farm.
By 1982, many of these norms were being challenged. People got tired of being poor and wanted to keep their wages.
"People said, 'Why should he have that much authority?' " said Phil Schweitzer, co-director of The Farm's Media Village, a video production business. "We were now in our 30s, and we didn't want a charismatic leader."
Gaskin was fired and the new trustees demanded cash dues. Hundreds left. Those who stayed after "the Changeover" began creating private businesses.
Yet the future still poses a question. Farm leadership wants to attract young families, but banks will not extend loans for single-family homes without individual property titles. The Farm is considering building rental housing; otherwise, "I can imagine The Farm becoming an old hippie retirement home," Schweitzer said. "I'd hate to see that happen."
The Farm may have relinquished the free-floating exuberance of youth, but perhaps it has acquired an equally valuable idealism of another vintage.
"Now The Farm has the wisdom of older people," said Douglas Stevenson, a 30-year Farm veteran. "That kind of experience helps guide you to success. It's one thing we didn't have in the old days."
Los Angeles Times
Anne-Marie O'Connor
July 06, 2004
©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co.,
Some communal farms harvest bushels of money
His long hair and beard have grayed, but Bates still lives at The Farm, the storied American commune he helped build in backwoods Tennessee. Sipping Mystic Brew organic coffee at its eco-village, he chuckles at the memory of the trippy energy that once inspired some communards to boot up their "Marijuana Macintoshes" and design a Geiger counter they sold, for almost nothing, as a dashboard ornament for anti-nuke protesters.
"It was a novelty item, but it turned out to be very accurate," Bates says with a grin. "It was pretty funny."
The homegrown Nuke-Buster is no joke now. Today, the computerized, satellite-accessible nuclear detectors are used worldwide by police, military, firefighters and federal disaster officials. They are used to stem nuclear contraband at the borders that Belarus and Kazakhstan share with Russia. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sales have risen 30 percent, to $2.5 million last year. The Farm-based manufacturer has been commended by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Not bad for a place that spent years under FBI surveillance.
Thoroughly modern hippies
"Homeland Security's been good to us. We're high-tech hippies now," says Stephen Gaskin, the charismatic former San Francisco State lecturer who was once The Farm's guru, preaching a long-abandoned doctrine of multiple-partner marriage and marijuana spiritualism.
"We've had to find ways to survive," Bates echoed, "in the material world."
Hundreds of American utopian communities face the same challenge. A surprising number are thriving. But if American communes were once, in the eyes of Joan Didion, "slouching towards Bethlehem," many today lean closer to Merrill Lynch.
Tie-dye, wood-burning stoves and mandalas still abound. But so do multimillion-dollar industries and financial restructuring that residents earnestly liken to the transformation of the Communist world. They may have dropped out of mainstream society to live a utopian dream, but now they embrace capitalism as a tool of survival, on their own terms. Most, including The Farm, no longer define themselves as communes, describing themselves as collectives, cooperatives and egalitarian communities.
More than 600 such settlements in the United States are listed in the directory of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. The Fellowship's executive secretary, Laird Schaub, estimates that at least 10,000 Americans live in rural collectives.
Virginia's Twin Oaks produces hammocks for Pier One. The nut butters produced by a Missouri commune, East Wind, supply such mainstream chains as Whole Foods.
In a region where family farms have become an endangered species in a single generation, organic farms such as Sandhill are lauded by the Missouri Department of Agriculture Web page as possible models for survival.
The communities have slick Web sites, marketing directors, federations, group health plans, hotlines, magazines and conventions.
Far from retreating from society, many invite the world in. Last year, the Findhorn community in Scotland hosted a U.N.-affiliated environmental conference. The Farm started its own U.N.-recognized international relief agency, called Plenty.
What about the children?
Yet at many communities, the graying elders are soul-searching as they ponder who will carry on their legacy. People interested in living there permanently are often aging '60s veterans who are among the 74 million U.S. baby boomers making the transition to senior citizenhood.
Even at the venerable Farm, hundreds of commune-born children have grown up and moved to Nashville, New York or California.
"There are people who need to see their children come back here, as an affirmation that what they did has legs," said Cynthia Holzapfel, 56, the managing editor of the $1-million-a-year Farm-based Book Publishing Co., which has had several best-sellers: "Spiritual Midwifery," "Tofu Cookery" and "Defeating Diabetes."
"I'm a little more Buddhist about it. We've built it. If they're going to come, they're going to come," said Holzapfel, a warm, open-faced woman with Birkenstock sandals, thick yarn socks and a gray bob, leaning against a shelf of soy "meat" products in the warehouse of the mail-order health food business at The Farm.
Conflict in Paradise
Capitalism wasn't the only thing that happened to The Farm along the road to Utopia. The commune engaged in a collective divorce in 1982, firing their charismatic leader, Gaskin. Homes that once housed 60 people were given over to single families and residents were required to contribute $135 a month to the community foundation. The bitter exodus that ensued downsized The Farm from a 1,500-strong commune to a 200-member cooperative today.
That divisive rupture, like The Farm's ragtag infancy, is difficult to envision in the serene pastoral landscape beyond the pamphlet-filled visitors center. Rustic wood-frame homes nestle in the trees and sun-bleached grasses of gentle hills.
Roaming deer herds, swelled by three decades of vegetarianism, lend the 1,750-acre Farm the look of a game park. Grain silos are painted with flowers and butterflies, and rusting psychedelic buses from the 1970 exodus dot the landscape.
Near the entrance gates to this idyll lives Gaskin, who led the four-month bus caravan from Haight-Ashbury to the motherland at a time when the Vietnam War was raging, the Haight was fading and the Manson murders had cast a dark shadow on the California counterculture. Gaskin, a buoyant 69, with long gray hair and fringed Davy Crockett epaulets of beaded buckskin, is living out his days as something of an international hippie emeritus ("famous but not rich") in demand for such honors as judging the annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.
But for years this was the Stephen Gaskin Farm, and he made the rules. He led Sunday morning meditation services, presided over his followers' weddings and funerals and managed the commune's finances. (Though for most of 1974, he had to do this from the Nashville Penitentiary after he was convicted of marijuana cultivation.)
His wife, Ina May Gaskin, was one of the pioneers of the modern natural birth movement and author of the popular "Spiritual Midwifery." Their children were raised in one of The Farm's radical lifestyle experiments, a "group marriage" in which the Gaskins and two other couples cohabited, sleeping with each other's spouses and raising their children together -- something only 8 percent of The Farm adults practiced in the early 1970s, according to official Farm history.
In those days, 10,000 people visited The Farm a year. Most crashed for a few days, but about 1,500 stayed on to create a self-contained counterculture universe, complete with clinic, an ambulance service and a commune-wide phone system dubbed "Beatnik Bell." All money earned outside was handed over to The Farm.
By 1982, many of these norms were being challenged. People got tired of being poor and wanted to keep their wages.
"People said, 'Why should he have that much authority?' " said Phil Schweitzer, co-director of The Farm's Media Village, a video production business. "We were now in our 30s, and we didn't want a charismatic leader."
Gaskin was fired and the new trustees demanded cash dues. Hundreds left. Those who stayed after "the Changeover" began creating private businesses.
Yet the future still poses a question. Farm leadership wants to attract young families, but banks will not extend loans for single-family homes without individual property titles. The Farm is considering building rental housing; otherwise, "I can imagine The Farm becoming an old hippie retirement home," Schweitzer said. "I'd hate to see that happen."
The Farm may have relinquished the free-floating exuberance of youth, but perhaps it has acquired an equally valuable idealism of another vintage.
"Now The Farm has the wisdom of older people," said Douglas Stevenson, a 30-year Farm veteran. "That kind of experience helps guide you to success. It's one thing we didn't have in the old days."
Los Angeles Times
Anne-Marie O'Connor
July 06, 2004
©1997-2004 PG Publishing Co.,
Some communal farms harvest bushels of money
