Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

by Benjamin Breen

The Mead and Bateson of the early postwar years were more overtly experimental than at any other time in their lives. In this, they were not alone. Around the world, as colonized peoples fought for independence, gender roles shifted, mind-altering drugs multiplied, the American civil rights movement and early gay liberation struggled into existence, and global population jagged upward at an unprecedented rate, the period from 1945 to 1960 was among the most radical eras of social experimentation in history. This fact has, in popular consciousness, been overshadowed by the attention lavished on the 1960s and 1970s. But looked at another way, these decades were an aftereffect, an echo. It was in the late 1940s and 1950s that the forces of change, stored up during the war like a coiled spring, most rapidly unwound themselves.