What triggered the hippie movement?

[Blind Didymus]

[Steven]

The basic view that money was not the source of happiness.

[Duke]

The introduction to rock n roll, the Vietnam War, rejection of traditional values, and marijuana.

[SmartAZ]

It was religious. The country was possessed by a spirit of stupid.

[R]

The draft and the invention of LSD

[Gerald]

we had the cold war and general conflicts in the world and youth started to develop protests in song and music gatherings at large festivals with many top artists to promote peace in the world these developed into a cult where love and peace was the message and the power was the peaceful flower Hippies is a general name drugs and promiscuity was involved but not by all

[tuffy]

The Cold War, Vietnam War protests, O'Leary (LSD), Woodstock, 1968 presidential election (U.S.) with the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1967 race riot in Detroit, assassinations of MLK, JFK, RBK, Meadgar Evers, murder of Emmit Till, Rosa Parks arrest, Brown vs Board of Education (SCOTUS) decision 1954.

[wayfaroutthere]

"We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are."

Sure, that was from a Styx song from the '70s and not from the origins of the hippie movement, but I think it is exactly what the hippies were trying to avoid. People would say "to be successful (and therefore happy) you must ______", where the blank for males involved getting a career, earning enough money for a somewhat posh lifestyle, a wife and a couple kids, and for the women it was to marry a man who would ensure the couple would have those same things.

The hippies were trying to say that you can find happiness without becoming a cog in the economic machine, working to earn someone else a lot of money while you earn a little--which you promptly spend to give yourself the illusion of that posh lifestyle. And then it grew.

Now when movements grow, often the 'new' members don't have the values or core beliefs that the original members did. (Sorry, I know "hippies" isn't a club, but I can't come up with a better noun than members at the moment.) So while it started as a counter-culture movement to show people that there is more than one path to happiness, the movement soon had people jumping on the bandwagon who cared about nothing other than sex and drugs. While these were two areas in which the hippies felt the mainstream were being silly and uptight so they chose to ignore the rules of society, sex and drugs isn't why they started it--but it is why a lot of people joined in later. I would guess that it started with a bunch of 20 year olds trying to figure out their lives who see a bunch of successful suits with miserable looks on their faces, so the young students made a decision to never become those guys--even if it meant having no money.

[Kevin7]

I think the Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam

[Gerry]

The "Beatnik" era of the 1950's led or rather evolved into the "Hippie Movement" of the next decade.

"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac inspired a whole young generation of Americans that were born during the Second World War that were young adults by the mid to late 1950s. Add of course as others have mentioned to the Civil strife and an unpopular war being led by the Americans in Vietnam and then you have a "cause de jour" as well.