While protesters fomented revolution in the streets, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco was the birthplace of a more peaceful—and longer-lasting—social revolution. When LSD research spilled out of topsecret government laboratories and onto city streets around 1965, it unleashed a wave of psychedelic madness that transformed America almost overnight. Led by rock bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and acid gurus such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey, the socially conservative atmosphere of the early sixties was suddenly fractured by an unprecedented drug-induced revolution against traditional American values.

As tens of thousands of mostly white middle-class teenagers followed Leary's advice, "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out" and became hippies, they began to ridicule their parents' world for what they saw as its materialism, blind patriotism, and devotion to hard work.

Men grew long hair and...