A Commune, a Series of 1969 Murders, and the Myth That Followed

The Manson Family was a communal group that gathered in California in the late 1960s around Charles Manson, and it is commonly described in the journalistic and scholarly literature as a case of a group organized around the near-total psychological dominance of its leader. Drawing on a mixture of countercultural, apocalyptic, and idiosyncratic beliefs, including Manson's notion of a coming race war he called "Helter Skelter", the group lived communally at the margins of the Los Angeles music and hippie scenes. Its place in history rests on the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 1969, in which members, at Manson's direction, killed seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. These are matters of criminal record: Manson and several followers were tried, convicted of murder and conspiracy, and imprisoned; Manson remained in prison until his death in 2017.

The case had an outsized cultural impact, often taken to mark the end of the 1960s counterculture's optimism, and it played a major role in shaping the popular, and frequently sensationalized, image of the "cult." Scholars caution that this outsized mythology can distort understanding, and study the group more soberly as an instance of coercive control, isolation, and a leader's ability to direct followers to violence.