The Beats and their beatnik imitators represented bohemian tendencies that recurred throughout history -- in the Transcendentalists of the 1840s and 1850s, in the Greenwich Village radicals of the 1910s and the expatriate Lost Generation of the 1920s. What made things different in the mid-twentieth century movements is that the country was richer and could afford such rebellions -- or thought it could afford them.
There was a spiritual movement that, as it spread outward from the originators to those who thought the originators were cool, got cheapened and commercialized. The play and then the movie Hair did convey part of the charm but were seen by many who took a stereotyped caricature back home with them.
Coming from a northeastern college to a Sausalito houseboat, I was amazed by the hippies in California, who didn’t care where you were from or what you wore. I realized that was the essence of hippiedom, not black stockings and long straight hair and guitars.
Love the literature too. Remember that Jack Kerouac said in On the Road that we could have peace overnight. I always thought Salinger was influenced by the Beats too, although he is classified with the postwar Jewish writers: all those Zen stories in his later work and he surely had a grasp of the core of it and how it was congruent with Christianity.
I knew Ginsberg briefly in the eighties. He was a sweetheart but took no guff from the small-minded: You can come to my party but don’t bring books for me to sign so they will double in value. Most of what we know about the Beats is through a glass darkly at this point, but there was something real and true and world-changing at the core of both hippiedom and the Beat spirit.