[Rummyfan]

Townshend’s assessment was, if anything, more devastating: “All these hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day on. As a cynical English –ssh-le, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, trying to make them realize that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change. Not only that, what they thought was an alternative society was basically a field full of six-foot-deep mud laced with LSD. If that was the world they wanted to live in, then f— the lot of them.”

[dfwgator]

I suspect that sentiment was what fueled, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.

[DoodleBob]

Of course bad things can - and did - happen in a crowd of 300,000 people. But I believe the relative order probably has more to do with the kids' parents' values and the Golden Rule than they'd care to admit.

I also believe, in many ways, The Who at Woodstock says more about America (ironically) than the other performers. Think about it...most of the other performers were hippie-sympathetic. You'd expect that they'd have been heralded as the New Beatles. However, the hippie music generally sucked and didn't stand the test of time. Who wants to hear "Joe Hill" on acoustic guitar anymore? But what did The Who Do?

-they ran the photographers off the stage,
-Pete Townshed knocked a petulant Abbie Hoffman into the pit in front of the stage with his guitar (as you noted)
-they put on a pure rock show of power and volume; no peace and love during their set. In fact Townshend said "My 1460s (Doc Martens boots) released me from psychedelia and all the nonsense that went with it."
-God smiled on them with a sunrise at the end of their set.

The Who are playing to sellout stadiums this summer while other Woodstock vets...not so much. It seems a working class bunch of mods from Sheppard's Bush and their non-nonsense blistering (dare we say...anti-Establishment?) music style resonated better with American culture than acoustic folk songs.