Bigger India
Yoga’s Popularity in the US Long Predates Hippies and Bead-wearing Hipsters
By early 20th century yoga was a crowded field in the US. There were so many yoga teachers around the country that they began stealing students from each other.
With the exception of notable figures such as Swami Vivekananda, most assume that yoga arrived in the United States in earnest during the late 1960s, when the opening up of immigration laws to allow Asians into the country coincided with the flowering of a hippie counterculture that looked to India as a source of mystic wisdom. There was, however, a vibrant world of American yoga during the early 20th century, and it flourished because earlier immigration policy succeeded not in keeping Indian immigrants out of the United States as much as keeping them in.