In this wide-ranging essay, Howard invokes the symbolic location of Bunker Hill—site of the first major battle of the American Revolution, and nearly two centuries later the site of an antiwar protest led by Vietnam veterans—to discuss the emergence and evolution of social protest movements in the decades after World War II. Americans were generally slow to express dissent in the decade following the ghastly bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially during the anti-Communist purges of the McCarthy era. And yet, Howard writes, “something remarkable did begin to develop in those . . . postwar years, especially in the United States. A broad, heterogeneous movement started to take form. Disorganized, troubled, unsure of itself, vague about its vision of the good society, puzzled about the means of building that society, the movement, nevertheless, was alive and in motion as the seventies began.” The turning point, he argues, was the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which set in motion a relentless series of challenges to white racism and Jim Crow segregation that included economic boycotts, student sit-ins, Freedom Rides, Mississippi Freedom Summer, voting rights marches, and Black Power. Inspired by the black freedom struggle, other movements soon emerged alongside it, including the student movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the peace movement, which played a central role in ending the war in Vietnam. All of this amounted to a wholesale confrontation with American liberalism, “a tradition in which racial [or other forms of] equality was either promised in words or granted on paper, but without the needed radical changes in the society’s economic and political institutions, without the necessary changes in the value structure of the culture.” Near the end of the essay, Howard sketches the “rough outlines of some future world” beckoned by these protest movements—one where the nation-state would be obsolete; where resources would be taken away from both private corporations and centralized socialist states and used to promote the broad public good; where political democracy would extend beyond the two-party system; where the circulation of ideas would be completely free; where prisons would be abolished; and where authoritarianism and hierarchy in any form, public or private, would be eradicated. Of course, the realization of this world would be no easy task. As Howard concludes, it would involve a “long revolutionary process of struggle and example. The process would have to be long enough, intense enough, to change the thinking of people, to act out, as far as possible, the future society.” Nonetheless, the postwar era witnessed the spectacular beginnings of a “long revolutionary process” that continues today.
_________
SEVERAL HUNDRED VETERANS of the war, bedraggled, bearded, in remnants of their uniforms, were camping on Bunker Hill, in defiance of local regulations. These were not farmers, fresh from Concord and Lexington, resisting the tyranny of England across the ocean. These were veterans of another war, nearly two centuries later, anxious about the tyranny at home, angry about the brutal use of American power abroad.
They were veterans back from Vietnam who, on May 30, 1971 (Memorial Day weekend), were protesting the continuation of the war in Southeast Asia. But more than that, they were part of a great, loose, tangled movement in postwar America—of men and women, white and black, of all ages and backgrounds—that was trying, against overwhelming odds, to change the institutions, the human relations, the ways of thinking that had marked American society for so long.
The World War II armies of the capitalist and Communist worlds united to destroy the Nazi and Fascist military machines. But they did not destroy the values represented by fascism—racism, nationalism, militarism, bureaucracy, secret police, the violence of war abroad and the repression of freedoms at home, the supremacy of things over the individual. In the postwar years, the disparity between the promises and the reality of these societies, both capitalist and socialist, became distressingly clear. Their wealth and power had never been greater—their failure in human terms never more stark.
Yet something remarkable did begin to develop in those same post war years, especially in the United States. A broad, heterogeneous movement started to take form. Disorganized, troubled, unsure of itself, vague about its vision of the good society, puzzled about the means of building that society, the movement, nevertheless, was alive and in motion as the seventies began.
America has had reform movements and even radical movements in its past, but never anything quite like this one, where in one decade, protests against racism, against war, against domination by males, reverberated one against the other, to produce a widespread feeling that the traditional liberal solutions were not enough. Fundamental changes were needed, it came to be thought, not just in America’s political and economic institutions, but in its sexual and personal and work relationships, in the way in which Americans thought about themselves and about one another.
Beyond sheer political questions, more and more evidence began to appear of a fundamental unease deep within the culture of the nation. People began boldly to question the very assumptions they had grown up with and had been taught to believe—that America was a God-given place. Two women of different backgrounds expressed this questioning in their own ways. One was a professional writer, Joan Didion:
The center was not holding. . . .
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hope and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job.
The other was a young mother, whose job was tending a counter in a cheap department store. She felt her own life stunted; she had just experienced the death of an old woman close to her, who had spent her last days in one of those macabre city hospitals, those department stores of death, rotting away, uncared for until the end. One day in 1970, amidst counters piled with shoddy merchandise, in a sea of price tags, she scrawled her feelings on a piece of brown wrapping paper:
I feel so damn angry Lord, so angry! I hate the thought that fills my mind—that sight before me! It was cruel, the cruelest of all things I’ve seen—man is so awful cruel in his damn modern plastic ways. Look! Look! All around—too modern, too plastic!
In the ten years that followed World War II, America was relatively calm. Neither the Korean War, nor McCarthyism, nor the continued humiliation of blacks, nor the increasing diversion of the country’s wealth to the nuclear arms race aroused any widespread movement of opposition. Amidst the general complacency, based on middle-class prosperity, on lower-class fatalism, on agreement that communism was the great enemy, and on faith in the two-party system, only a few flurries of dissent were visible.[ . . . ]
The sixties was an angry decade. The most powerful protest movement of all was against the war in Vietnam, starting with a handful of Americans in 1964, and involving millions by 1971. The war exposed, as nothing else had in American history, the great gap between political rhetoric and national behavior. The war tested the elements of the liberal creed, and they were found wanting by large numbers of Americans. The implications of the war reached far beyond foreign policy, into the fundamental character of American political institutions, American culture, American values.
Antiwar movements had sprung up before in American history—indeed, in every war, but especially in the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. Yet never did an antiwar movement touch so many Americans, never did one take on such intensity, with so many demonstrations, as did the one against the Vietnam War. National polls—Gallup and Harris—showed a steady rise in the late sixties in the number of Americans who wanted the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, a number that by 1970 reached a majority. In cities where the issue of American intervention in Vietnam was put on the ballot, a clear change in opinion was registered from 1967, when, for instance, in Dearborn, Michigan, 41 percent of the voters called for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, to 1970, when in several cities on the West Coast and in Madison, Wisconsin, from half to two-thirds of the voters called for immediate total withdrawal or withdrawal within the year. At the same time, the polls also showed that most Americans did not believe what the government was telling them about the situation in Vietnam.
In part, the dimension of this antiwar movement was due to the special brutality of the Vietnam War—the use of napalm against women and children, the bombing of villages and hamlets, the forcible removal of millions of Vietnamese from their homes, the use of chemicals to ruin the forests and soil of Vietnam, the spoliation of an ancient culture by the intrusion of five hundred thousand American troops and one hundred fifty billion American dollars, in defiance of international and national laws and in support of a succession of strong-arm regimes in Saigon. In part, it was due to the astounding disparity between the two adversaries: the world’s most powerful nation raining shells and bombs on one of the least powerful, the kind of bullying that had shocked Americans when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and when Russia invaded Finland.
When, in early 1965, the United States began the sustained and systematic bombing of North Vietnam, on the pretext that the North Vietnamese had attacked two American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, groups of several hundred people gathered in protest here and there throughout the country. On Moratorium Day, four years later, two million Americans across the nation participated in antiwar demonstrations; the size of the outpouring was unprecedented in American history.
It was not surprising that blacks in the United States—fresh from their encounters with the government, disillusioned with the liberal performance as contrasted with the liberal promise—should look with distaste on the Vietnam War. In August 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin incidents were allegedly taking place, funeral services were being held in Philadelphia, Mississippi, for James Chaney, the black civil-rights worker who, with two young white men, had been murdered by a gang of whites, while the federal government claimed lack of protective jurisdiction. The contrast was stark. LBJ SAYS “SHOOT TO KILL” IN GULF OF TONKIN, read the headline in the Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper; while the United States was ready for aggressive military action ten thousand miles away, it was not ready to defend blacks at home against violence.
In mid-1965, black people in McComb, Mississippi, learning that a classmate had been killed in Vietnam, distributed a leaflet in McComb:
No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Viet Nam for the White man’s freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi.
Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go. . . .
No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Viet Nam, so that the White American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause.
In early 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee declared that “the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law,” and called for withdrawal from Vietnam. That summer, six members of SNCC were arrested for an aggressive invasion of an induction center in Atlanta, and were later convicted and given sentences of several years in jail. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went to Jackson, the issue between civil rights and Vietnam was clearly joined by his own words, as he praised Mississippi Senator John Stennis, one of the country’s archsegregationists, as “a man of very genuine greatness, . . . a man of courage and selflessness.” White and black students joined in picketing him, after a march downtown “In Memory of the Burned Children of Vietnam.”
The words of Eldridge Cleaver were strong, but the mood of the Black Panther leader was not foreign to that found in vast numbers of young blacks. He wrote “To My Black Brothers in Vietnam,” reminding them that police had murdered Fred Hampton, the Panther leader in Chicago, in his bed:
We appeal to you Brothers to come to the aid of your people. Either quit the army, now, or start destroying it from the inside. Anything else is a form of compromise and a form of treason against your own people. Stop killing the Vietnamese people. You need to start killing the racist pigs who are over there with you giving you orders. Kill General Abrams and his staff, all his officers. Sabotage supplies and equipment, or turn them over to the Vietnamese people. Talk to the other Brothers and wake them up.
How widespread and popular black antagonism was to the war, and how greatly the attitude of the black population had changed since World War II, was illustrated by the case of Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay). He was the hero-successor to Joe Louis, heavyweight champion at the time of World War II. Louis had urged blacks to fight for their country. Now Muhammad Ali set an example for other blacks by refusing to serve in a “white man’s war,” and took the risk of years in prison for doing so. Martin Luther King, by 1967, was speaking out powerfully against the war in Vietnam. That April, from a pulpit in New York, he declared:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. . . .
The black protest against the war separated blacks still further from the country and its behavior. They were not ashamed to shun patriotism. Alice Walker, a young black poet from Georgia, put it lightly but firmly in verse:
then there was
the
picture of
the
bleak-eyed
little black
girl
waving the
American
flag
holding it
gingerly
with
the very
tips
of her
fingers.
One of the most sustained and effective forms of antiwar protest was the draft-resistance movement. Most poor whites and blacks stayed out of this movement; they found their own quiet ways of avoiding the draft, or they went into the service, despite a lack of enthusiasm for the war, because it was expected of them, because for many it meant economic and training opportunities that were closed to them in civilian life. White middle-class students formed the core of draft resisters.
As early as May 1964, the slogan “We Won’t Go” was heard, and the following year young men who refused to be inducted were put on trial. For the next several years, the public burning of draft cards became a dramatic way of declaring refusal to fight in the war, and the prosecutions multiplied. In October 1967, there were organized draft-card “turn-ins” all over the country; in San Francisco alone, three hundred draft cards were returned. On the eve of the great demonstration of tens of thousands of people at the Pentagon that month, a sack of draft cards was presented to the Justice Department in a gesture of defiance—one of the acts that led to the indictment the following year of Dr. Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author; Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr.; author Mitchell Goodman; Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies; and Harvard graduate student Michael Ferber for interfering with the Selective Service system.
From mid-1964 to mid-1965, according to Justice Department figures, 380 prosecutions were begun against those who refused to be inducted; by mid-1968, the figure was 3,305. Mass protests were held outside induction centers with many of the demonstrators attacked by police and many arrested. The number of people trying in one way or other to avoid induction was much larger than the number prosecuted. In May 1969, the Oakland induction center, which had jurisdiction over draftees for all of northern California, reported that more than half the young men ordered to report for induction did not show up (2,400 out of 4,400), and that 11 percent of those who did show up refused to serve. A graduate student in history at Boston University wrote on May 1, 1968, to his draft board in Tucson, Arizona:
I am enclosing the order for me to report for my pre-induction physical exam for the armed forces. I have absolute no intention to report for that exam, or for induction, or to aid in any way the American war effort against the people of Vietnam.
I fully realize the consequences of my decision, there will be a trial, and then prison. I regret the suffering this will mean for my family and friends. But even more I realize what the war has meant for the Viet Namese people. It has meant six years of ceaseless and often senseless slaughter, largely of civilians. It has meant continual hunger, fear, unspeakable atrocities, and unimaginable suffering for a people, whose only dreams are for Land, Unification, and Independence. . . .
At the height of the Spanish Civil War, that country’s greatest philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, condemned the Fascist intervention [of Italy and Germany] (who were also trying to “save” that country from Communism) and declared: “Sometimes to be Silent is to Lie.” . . .
Hoping, praying, for a just and early Peace, I am,
Respectfully yours,
Philip D. Supina
Supina was sentenced to four years in prison.
As the war went on, draft resistance grew, and general support for it increased. By February 1968, a poll among Harvard graduate students showed that 40 percent of them would either go to jail or leave the United States if called for induction. A Harris poll among just-graduated seniors revealed a sharp reversal in attitude in just one year: whereas in 1969, 50 percent of those polled said they would not respect persons who refused to go into the armed forces, only 34 percent felt that way in 1970, and many more declared their respect for draft resisters.
By 1970, it was becoming more evident that this horror of a war was very much the product of the “liberal” leaders of national politics. What Carl Oglesby, an SDS leader, had told peace demonstrators in Washington on November 27, 1965, was, five years later, more widely recognized: that the war was not an aberration from normal American liberalism, but was its expression. Oglesby had pointed out:
The original commitment in Vietnam was President Truman’s—signer of the first civil-rights act. That commitment was seconded by the moderate liberal, President Eisenhower—who mobilized the National Guard to integrate Central High School in Little Rock—and intensified by President Kennedy, who gave us the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and the beginning of the anti-poverty program. Think of the men who now engineer that war—those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself.
They are not moral monsters.
They are all honorable men.
They are all liberals.
But so, I’m sure, are many of us who are here today. To understand the war, then, it seems necessary to take a closer look at this American liberalism. Maybe we are in for some surprises. Maybe we have here two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist, the other not so human at all. . . .
Not only did passive support of antiwar activity grow throughout the country, as shown in polls and city referendums, the activism of the handful in 1965 became adopted by all sorts of people to whom overt signs of protest were not familiar. In August of 1965, it was a few hundred protesters who joined David Dellinger, who had formed the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; historian Staughton Lynd; and SNCC leader Robert Moses in Washington to protest the war. Opponents splattered them with red paint as they marched down the Mall to the Capitol. By May 1971, twenty thousand people would come to Washington committed to acts of civil disobedience in trying to stop the war.
As the sixties came to a close, denunciations of the war emanated from all sides. Peace Corps volunteers by the hundreds protested against the war; in Chile, ninety-two volunteers were threatened by the Peace Corps director with punitive action if they did not dissociate themselves from a circular protesting the Vietnam War. Eight hundred former members of the Peace Corps also denounced the war. Poets and writers refused to attend White House functions. Robert Lowell was one, Arthur Miller was another. Miller’s telegram to the White House read: “When the guns boom, the arts die.” Singer Eartha Kitt scandalized Washington society by her criticism of the war during a White House affair. Teen-agers called to the White House to accept 4-H Club prizes expressed their displeasure with the war. In Hollywood, local artists erected a sixty-foot Tower of Protest on Sunset Boulevard to symbolize opposition to the war.
At the National Book Award ceremonies in New York, fifty authors and publishers walked out on a speech by Vice President Humphrey in a display of anger at his role in the war.
In London, two young Americans gate-crashed the American ambassador’s elegant Fourth of July reception, and, calling for attention, proposed a toast: “To all the dead and dying in Vietnam”; they were carried out by guards. In the Pacific, two young American seamen hijacked an American munitions ship to divert its load of bombs from Thailand to Cambodia in protest against the war. (At the time, Cambodia, headed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was in sympathy with the Communist cause.) For four days, they took command of the ship and its crew, eating amphetamines to stay awake, until the ship was in Cambodian waters.
Middle-class and professional people who had never engaged in overt protest before began to act. In May 1970, the New York Times reported 1000 “ESTABLISHMENT” LAWYERS JOIN WAR PROTEST. The lawyers were on their way to Washington to urge immediate withdrawal from Indochina. Only with the acceleration of public protests did Congress begin to react in any meaningful way against the war; resolutions were introduced in both houses to put a definite date limit for American withdrawal, though as late as June 1971, such resolutions still could not pass.
The crumbling of support for the government was exemplified also in the wave of “defections” by former government officials, who now, out of office, criticized the war they had supported or been silent on while in office: Humphrey, presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy, Professor Roger Hilsman, U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, Ambassador Edwin Reischauer. The war was unpopular now. There was at least one much more rare phenomenon: that of a person high up in the war bureaucracy who left his job and not only criticized the war, but became an active member of the antiwar movement, to the point of civil disobedience. This was Daniel Ellsberg, a former aide to Secretary of Defense McNamara, who had spent years with the Rand Corporation doing war research for the government, two years in Vietnam with the pacification program. Joining him in his rebellion against the war establishment was a former Rand colleague, Anthony Russo.
In June 1971, defying a possible penalty of many years in jail, Ellsberg turned over to the New York Times and other newspapers part of a ten-thousand-page study of the history of American involvement in Vietnam, a study he had worked on while at the Rand Corporation, ordered by the Pentagon, and labeled “Top Secret.” Its publication in the Times caused a national furor, with the government charging “security violation.” What was at stake was no one’s security, only the government’s embarrassment at having its plans and deceptions disclosed to the public: its planning for military action in mid-1964, while Johnson, campaigning for president, was talking peace; its control over the Saigon government; its opposition to peace negotiations; its use of bombing for psycho-political purposes; its violations of the Geneva Accords; its covert military operations against North Vietnam long before the 1965 escalation.
In the fall of 1967, a new constituency was added to the antiwar movement—Roman Catholic priests and nuns, and Catholic lay men and women. Again, here was evidence that the Vietnam War was causing tumultuous changes in all parts of American society. On October 27, Father Philip Berrigan, veteran of World War II and a Josephite priest, anguished over the killing in Vietnam, joined David Eberhardt, Thomas Lewis, and James Mengel in the invasion of a draft board office in Baltimore. They drenched the board records with blood, waited to be arrested, were tried, and sentenced to prison terms of two to six years.
The following May, Berrigan—out on bail on the Baltimore charges—was joined by his brother Daniel, a Jesuit priest, and seven other priests and lay men and women in the destruction of draft records at Catonsville, Maryland. They became famous as the Catonsville Nine, were tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Two of them, Mary Moylan, a former nun, and Daniel Berrigan, refused to surrender and became “fugitives from injustice.” After four months in a strange kind of underground, in which he spoke from a church pulpit, gave interviews to reporters, and met with groups of people to discuss the war and civil disobedience, Daniel Berrigan was captured by the FBI. Mary Moylan remained at large.
The war troubled the church. The priests and nuns who resisted shook a whole generation of Catholics, particularly the young, who began to rethink the heritage of Christ, the meaning of patriotism, the message of the Cross, the value of resistance. As Daniel Berrigan put it:
The madness goes on, it proliferates mightily. Behind a façade of sobriety and temperate action, the worst instincts of man are armed, rewarded, and set loose upon the world. An unthinkable Asian war, once a mere canker on the national body, a scratch on the tegument, undergone heedlessly and borne without a second thought—it has festered and flowered, a wasting fever, a plague, a nightmare rushing into full day and again into night, and on and on for months and years, until only Jeremiah and Kafka could encompass its irrational horror.
At his sentencing in Catonsvilte, Philip Berrigan tried to explain to the court why he and Lewis, while still on bail after Baltimore, had again broken the law:
As a Christian, I must love and respect all men—loving the good they love, hating the evil they hate. If I know what I am about, the brutalization, squalor and despair of other men, demeans me and threatens me if I do not act against its source. This is perhaps why Tom Lewis and I acted again with our friends. . . .
The Catholic Resistance (sometimes joined by Protestants and Jews) spread, in draft board raids across the country: the Boston Two, the Milwaukee Fourteen, the DC Nine, the Pasadena Three, the Silver Springs Three, the Chicago Fifteen, the Women Against Daddy War-bucks, the New York Eight, the Boston Eight, the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives, the Flower City Conspiracy. Some went to jail, some fled; what was called the “ultra-resistance” dramatized the change in a former stronghold of American conservatism—the Catholic Church and its constituents.
Anger against the war thus moved up and down through the layers of American society, across faiths, from class to class, race to race, well-to-do to poor. By 1969 and 1970, this anger also emanated from those involved in the war itself, from the GIs in the armed forces, from the soldiers and sailors in Vietnam, from the young men who had returned from the war as veterans. Whether or not their bodies were still whole, their sensibilities had been changed. Nothing like it had happened in American history: soldiers and veterans of a war turning against that war while it was still going on.
At first, there were individual and sporadic protests. As early as June 1965, Richard Steinke, a West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village where a Special Forces team was operating. “The Vietnamese war,” he said, “is not worth a single American life.” Steinke was court-martialed and dismissed from the service. The following year, three army privates, ordered to embark for Vietnam, denounced the war as “immoral, illegal, and unjust” and refused to go. They were court-martialed and sent to prison.
In early 1967, an army doctor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Captain Howard Levy, refused to teach Green Berets, members of the elite Special Forces; Levy argued that they were “murderers of women and children” and “killers of peasants.” He was court-martialed on the ground that he was trying to promote disaffection among enlisted men by his statements on the war. The colonel who presided at the trial ruled out truth as a defense for Levy. “The truth of the statements is not an issue in this case,” he said. Levy was convicted and sentenced to prison.
There were others: a black private in Oakland refused to broad a troop plane to Vietnam, although he faced eleven years at hard labor. A navy nurse, Lieutenant Susan Schnall, was court-martialed for marching in a peace demonstration while in uniform and for dropping antiwar leaflets on navy installations from a plane. In Norfolk a sailor opposed to the war refused to train fighter pilots because he believed the Vietnam War was immoral. An army lieutenant was arrested in early 1968 in Washington, D.C., for picketing the White House with a sign that said “120,000 American Casualties—Why?” Two black marines, George Daniels and William Harvey, were given long prison sentences (originally six and ten years each, later reduced) for talking to other black marines against the war.
Desertions from the armed forces mounted as the war went on. Thousands went to Western Europe, and estimates on how many GIs crossed over into Canada ranged from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand. A few deserters made a public demonstration of their act, by openly taking “sanctuary” in a church or other place, where, surrounded by antiwar friends and sympathizers, they waited for capture and court-martial. At Boston University, a thousand students kept a vigil for five days and nights in the chapel surrounding an eighteen-year-old, Ray Kroll, who, when hauled into court on a charge of drunkenness, had been inveigled into the army by the judge. On a Sunday morning, federal agents arrived at the chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he sent a poem to the friends he had made in the Marsh Chapel sanctuary:
My Dream
They told me I got to go off to war
Just to get rid of the big red sore
Well they got me all wrong
Me? I wanna live a happy song
I wanna live and love
and hold that peace dove
Oh you mean ole Turnkey
Why don’tcha just set me free
You keep me hanging on
You really don’t love me
I ain’t gonna kill
It’s against my will
When they gonna let me live in peace
and all wars come to a cease?
He wrote: “Marji gave me some books with some sayings in them. . . . ‘What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.’”
As the GI antiwar movement grew, it became more organized. Near Fort Jackson some enterprising young men and women set up the first GI coffeehouse, called The UFO, a place where GIs could have coffee and doughnuts and find literature about the war and current affairs. It was a low-key, deliberate attempt to encourage discussion among GIs about the war. The UFO was closed by local harassment and court action, with the coffeehouse declared “a public nuisance.” In the meantime, however, many GIs at Fort Jackson had come to know and like it, and the GI coffeehouse idea grew. A half-dozen coffeehouses were opened across the country, and at least two bookstores (to avoid the ruse of closing them for “health” reasons), one near Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and one at the Newport, Rhode Island, naval base.
Underground newspapers sprang up at army and navy bases across the country; by 1970, more than fifty were in operation. Among them: About Face in Los Angeles; Fed Up! at Tacoma; Short Times at Fort Jackson; Vietnam GI in Chicago; Graffiti in Heidelberg, Germany; Bragg Briefs in North Carolina; Last Harass at Fort Gordon, Georgia; Helping Hand at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho. They printed antiwar articles, revealed harassment of GIs, gave practical advice on the legal rights of men in the service, told how to resist military domination. In June 1970, twenty-eight commissioned officers of the army, air force, navy, and marine corps, including some veterans of Vietnam, saying they represented about 250 other officers, announced formation of the Concerned Officers Movement to protest the war.
Anger among those in the armed forces against the war was mixed with bitter resentment against the cruelty, the dehumanization of military life. And nowhere was this more true than in Army stockades. In 1968 at the Presidio stockade in California, after a guard had shot to death a disturbed prisoner for walking away from a work detail, twenty-seven prisoners decided to show their outrage by sitting down during a work detail, and singing “We Shall Overcome.” They were court-martialed, found guilty of mutiny, and sentenced to terms of up to fourteen years, later reduced after much public attention and protest.
The antiwar dissidence spread to the war front itself. When, on October 16, 1969, the great Moratorium demonstrations were taking place, some GIs in Vietnam wore black armbands to show their support. A news photographer reported that in a platoon on patrol near Da Nang, about half of the men were wearing black armbands. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970, that separate companies had been set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. “It is no big thing here anymore to refuse to go.” Earlier in 1970, the Saigon correspondent for Le Monde had written:
Indifference, rancor, disgust, hostility: the war less and less pleases the Americans who wage it. In four months, 109 soldiers of the First Cav, America’s first air cavalry division, have been charged with refusal to fight. At Saigon, as at Danang, the security services pursue deserters. In most units, more than half the soldiers smoke marijuana. A common sight is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his own. . . . Yet most of the troops fight well.
More and more, in military units in Vietnam, there were cases of “fragging”—incidents in which servicemen rolled fragmentation bombs under the tents of officers who were ordering them into combat, or against whom they had other grievances. The Pentagon reported 209 fraggings in Vietnam in 1970 alone.
By early 1970, many veterans back from Vietnam joined together in a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In December, 1970, hundreds of them went to Detroit for the “Winter Soldier” investigations; there they testified publicly about atrocities they had participated in or seen in Vietnam, committed by Americans against the Vietnamese. In April 1971, more than a thousand of them went to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against the war and discard the medals they had won in Vietnam; they passed before a wire fence around the Capitol, threw their medals over the fence, and made impassioned statements about the war. One of them, a former navy lieutenant in the Mekong Delta, John Kerry, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He told what GIs had seen in Vietnam: rapes; the random shooting of civilians, prisoners of war, and livestock; torture; the burning and sacking of villages; the forcible relocation of the civilian population. “It seems,” Kerry said, “that someone has to die every day so Richard Nixon doesn’t have to be the first President to lose a war. How do you ask a man to be the last soldier to die for a mistake?” When Memorial Day came around in 1971, the outburst of GI resentment against the war continued. A thousand American servicemen stationed in Britain announced their opposition to the war in petitions handed into the United States embassy. Circulating among them was an underground military newspaper called PEACE—People Emerging Against Corrupt Establishments.
It was on that Memorial Day weekend that several hundred veterans against the war camped out on the green at Lexington, Massachusetts, the cradle of the American revolution. They were joined by three hundred local citizens, and then all were arrested for refusing to leave the green. After getting out of jail, the veterans went to Bunker Hill, spent the night, and held an antiwar rally on the Boston Common the next day. This defection from violence, from war, this rebellion against authority, this suspicion of government, this independence of spirit, came twenty-five years after the passive acceptance by American soldiers in 1945 of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Something important was happening to the spirit and mind of many people in the United States.
Was a revolution—at least the first stirrings of one—taking place in postwar America? Many with a strong sense of history were dubious. Historians in the fifties, such as Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz, stressed the continuity in American politics and values, despite reforms in race and economics and politics and civil liberties. Would not the United States bounce back from the Vietnam War to its ordinary, if somewhat masked, injustices at home, and a quieter imperialism abroad?
And yet, there was something qualitatively different this time. Perhaps it was because Americans had now gone through the New Deal reforms, and knew these were inadequate in dealing with the gross waste and destruction of their resources. Perhaps it was because Americans had passed all those civil rights bills, and found they failed to touch the core of the race problem. Perhaps it was because Americans had defeated McCarthyism and made many procedural changes in the judicial process, and yet realized, particularly the many thousands who had experienced courts and jail, that the whole system was still essentially unjust.
In short, perhaps by the 1960s Americans had exhausted the deceptions of mild reforms at home, and, with Vietnam, had learned enough about foreign policy for many to be dissatisfied with the old excuses for war, for military and economic domination of other parts of the world. Perhaps the nation really had run out of all that time and space it had when other countries were the great imperial powers of the world. Now Americans were right up against a wall on all sides, and they had to tear it down, or climb over it into a new world, because they could no longer get along by meandering within its limits.
It was hard to be sure, in 1971, but there were signs of hopeful changes in America. They appeared first among the black people of the country, who so often in its history have been the key to understanding the level of American humanity or inhumanity. Blacks in the sixties got their civil rights bills and their token payments, but it was exactly as this was happening that they broke out in the greatest black rebellion in the nation’s history. They then embarked on a cultural revolution of sorts, to change the minds of blacks and whites on the race question, while trying to figure out a way to change the basic relations of wealth and power, beyond laws and tokens.
There were indications that this more fundamental approach to changing American society, early and tentative as it was, was spreading to other problems besides race. Perhaps it was the concentration of so many crucial issues in one decade—race, education, the war—but sharper questions were being asked, a revolt was under way against not just a specific policy, but against ways of thinking, ways of life.
The most personal, most intimate of human relationships began to be examined. It was an attempt to pierce the many layers of artifice piled up by “civilization” and rediscover the root needs of man and woman, to hear again that primeval cry for companionship and freedom. That cry had been stifled by modern technology, by unnecessary things, by false relationships, money, success, status, superiority; all these things had replaced genuine affection. At the pinnacle of American success—unprecedented wealth, power, resources—people suddenly felt a failure at the core. Some were unhappy and distraught, others vaguely, confusedly dissatisfied, but almost everywhere in the country, Americans were uneasy about what they were and where they were going.
Parents and children found themselves in a conflict. Some called it “the generation gap,” but there had always been a chronological difference; the conflict in the sixties was deeper. It both intensified hostility and speeded up changes in attitude, as crises and conflict tend to do. A woman named Marina Matteuzzi wrote to the Boston Globe one day in 1967 about how that conflict had changed her:
Last week my 20-year-old son left home. He put on some old clothes, beads, a pair of granny sunglasses. He took no bags, little money, told me goodby, he had to go to Frisco to see the beautiful people. He said, “Mama, don’t cry.” So I didn’t cry. I cried the day after. I cried for my dead dreams, to see my only son drop out (as he put it). I wanted him to be a doctor, teacher, something I never had the opportunity of being.
Then she told of a Negro friend, about to be sent to Vietnam, who looked for housing for his wife and two children, and was turned away again and again from one community after another.
I was angry and so was he. This country is like a South Africa underground. They are scared stiff of the Godless Communists, when they themselves are Christians without God.
So today I don’t cry for my son dropping out. Let him stay out. I will write to him to ask if among the 300,000 men like him there is room for a 43-year-old hippie woman—me!
Both the parents and the children spoke of “a sick society,” but it was the young who rebelled, probably because they had more space and freedom to do so. The young had not yet taken their proper places in the order of things, had less to lose, and were closer not only to their own childhood but to the yearnings of all people.
The dropouts—young people leaving the family, leaving their home towns, leaving their schools—became a mass phenomenon among the youth. They began to gather in urban centers around the country—San Francisco or Cambridge or Manhattan—and in rural enclaves in Vermont and New Mexico. The new folk music and rock music and country music of the postwar period connected them esthetically with one another and with something transcendental in a society they wanted desperately to escape.
Perhaps the degree to which the political disaffection of the thirties had become a much broader cultural phenomenon in the sixties is shown in the difference between the innocuous songs of sentimental love that dominate the popular culture of the thirties, and the more biting, vital, serious lyrics of folk-rock in the sixties. Bob Dylan became a hero because he expressed what so many felt:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,
Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
For the times they are a-changing.
Why were the young rebelling? It was hardly because of intellectual political analyses. No, it was more because of images and sounds that poured in on them in this intense period of history and stirred some inner recollection that life was supposed to be different, according to the precepts of the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, or the Communist Manifesto. On television they saw weeping Vietnamese women watching American soldiers burn down their huts and aim rifles at their children. As teen-agers, they had seen police hose down and club blacks in the streets of Birmingham.
The new mood of freedom, of defiance, caused the young to rethink everything about their lives. They remembered—because it was yesterday—their classrooms, which even an older, cooler observer, after three years of observation and study, found horrifying. Social critic Charles Silberman wrote:
It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of a joy in learning, of pleasure in creating, of sense of self. . . . what grim, joyless places most American schools are, how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for children as children.
The rebellion of the young was the most visible, the most troubling, but not the only, defection from culture. Older people, too, were moving out of their accustomed lines, and in parts of life so close to the heart of American culture that the move could not be dismissed as ephemeral or superficial. When Catholic nuns and priests moved out of line, when 4-H Club youngsters did the same, when young doctors and lawyers formed communes, then something important was happening. Even superstars of the football and baseball worlds began to challenge their coaches and their publics, the Cult of competition, dollars, success. A professional football linebacker, Dave Meggysey of the Saint Louis Cardinals, announced he was retiring from the game early in his career, explaining: “It’s no accident that the most repressive political regime in our history is ruled by a football freak, President Nixon.” Another linebacker, Chip Oliver of the Oakland Raiders, left football at one point to live in a California commune, saying:
Pro football is a silly game. It dehumanizes people. They’ve taken the players and turned them into slabs of beef that can charge around and hit each other. But where is their esthetic soul, the feeling they can accomplish higher things? . . .
I quit pro football because I felt I wasn’t doing anything positive toward making this world a better place to live. The world I was living in, the world of making money, was leading me nowhere. . . .
In the late sixties, a new force joined in the cultural upheaval, the revolt against authority, the search for human relationships. This was the Women’s Liberation Movement, which, in a few years and on a wide tactical front ranging from violent denunciations of male supremacy to more moderate insistence on equal rights, made millions of Americans conscious of the subordinate position of “the second sex.” (Simone de Beauvoir’s book of that title was a pioneering statement of the issue.)
Women’s Liberation pointed to the exploitation of women—crippling their education, consigning them to the household, denying them jobs in “men’s work,” paying them less than men for the same work, leaving them to deal alone with childbirth and children as their particular sphere, while men went off to work, or to play, or to other women. The new feminists also pointed to the way modern culture poisons the minds of men and women, from the time they are children, so that women are sex objects, weak, dependent, while men are leaders, heroic, strong. Evelyn Leo described the result of this socialization:
The course of her entire adult life, from beginning to end, is determined by her choice of a husband because she is culturally obligated to allow him to take the lead in career, geographic location, friends, entertainment, interests, and her so-called comforts in life.
Something is terribly wrong with this dependent status of women. They are bound up with another human being in a closely intertwined relationship, yet they are carried along in a parasitic manner, never reaching their full potential as human beings, never using their own free choice or functioning as an individual within the marriage relationship. Something must be done to change this unequal, unfair, and oppressive situation in marriage.
And so women organized. They were not centrally directed. The forms of organization, the ideology, the tactics, the emphases, differed enormously. There seemed to be special stress on avoiding authoritarian leadership and elitist direction, as if to illustrate in action what it meant to be free from man’s customary authority. To win reforms, to gain recognition, to make people think, women picketed Miss America contests, formed caucuses in professional organizations, published underground newspapers, held sit-ins and demonstrations.
A counterculture was developing in America, something more profoundly revolutionary than the political changes that followed the American Revolution and the Civil War. Along with the political struggles against racism, against war, against police brutality, there was an inchoate movement to declare for change by simply living in a different way. Some spokesmen for cultural change emphasized changing people’s minds as a more fundamental act than merely engaging in political actions that could easily be absorbed by a shrewdly reformist America. Historian Theodore Roszak argued in The Making of a Counter Culture that “the process of weaning men away from the technocracy can never be carried through by way of a grim, hard-bitten, and self-congratulatory militancy, which at best belongs to tasks of ad hoc resistance. Beyond the tactics of resistance, but shaping them at all times, there must be a stance of life which seeks not simply to muster power against the misdeeds of society, but to transform the very sense men have of reality.”
In those varied currents, although it was written in no one declaration, no one manifesto, the rough vision of some future world could be detected:
It would have to be an international society, for the nation-state—with its tight boundaries, its strangling flags, its cacophonous anthems, its armies, its hatred of others, its passports, its pledges of allegiance, its prisons, its addiction to violence—was obsolete. It was one planet; man would be embarrassed to get to Mars and explain to the green people there the Vietnam War, or the Israeli-Arab border dispute, or the Pakistani-India argument, or the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the president’s latest speech on television.
The resources of the world would have to be taken away from private corporations, which exploit them for profit, and from centralized socialist states, which exploit them for political or nationalist purposes. These resources would be managed for the public good, with priority given to the production of people’s most vital needs, striving for some union of social requirements and personal pleasure. Yes, socialism, some might say, but like no socialism yet seen on earth. It would retain the original socialist idea of rational use of resources for urgent needs, equitably distributed. But it would avoid national selfishness and centralized bureaucracy; it would try to give decision-making power to consumers, to those who work, with hands and brains, in the economy—to create the kind of economic democracy that has not yet existed anywhere.
Political democracy would have to go far beyond the rule of parties, whether in one-party or two-party systems, and far beyond representative government. Parliaments and congresses everywhere in the world have become a façade behind which men of power make decisions, while all other men delude themselves into thinking they control their own destiny because they go to the ballot boxes to make their puny choices, on prepared-in-advance ballots. People would have to be drawn into active, day-to-day participation in decision-making, instead of pulling a lever once in two years, or once in four or seven years, or once in a generation. People most affected by decisions would have the strongest voice in making them, and those with special knowledge would offer it to those with special interests. Administrators would be in perpetual communication with the people, and subject to immediate recall.
The circulation of ideas would have to be completely free, with no excuses of “security” to stand behind the creation of secret police, detention centers, political trials. And prisons would have to be abolished, not only because the “best” of them constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment”—unusual in the sense that the greatest perpetrators of fraud and violence, the men in charge of government and business, go unpunished—but because punishment itself is the greatest crime. No civilization worthy of respect can lock people in dungeons, deprive them of the most essential needs of human beings, and deserve to stand. It would take imagination, ingenuity, and risk to try to minimize individual acts of cruelty or violence, but that imagination and ingenuity could never come forth unless absolutely required by the elimination of imprisonment. The abolition of prisons would press Americans to speed up the transformation of the whole society—its distribution of wealth, its set of values, its human relations; it would be a good prod.
Authoritarianism in personal relations, involving blind obedience, hierarchy, arbitrary rule, control, humiliation, would have to fall away—in the family, between old and young, between man and woman, white and black, skilled and unskilled. Democracy on the personal level would be recognized as the crucial accompaniment of democracy on the social level. Americans would have to stop assigning marks of superiority to surgeons over sweepers, poets over carpenters. People would work at what most pleased them, and differences in biological or educational or cultural attributes would still leave all people equal in the most basic sense of retaining their self-respect. The ideas of cooperation, kindness, and equality would spread, by persuasion and example, firmly and vigorously.
Such, more or less, is the vision of a future society represented by the new currents of political and cultural change. How to achieve that vision, given the realities of present power and present consciousness, has been much more difficult to figure out. Many have come to believe, however, that it is not so much a matter of theorizing as of making a start. The tactics of such a change, even making a start toward change, have to be informed, both by a vision of the future and by an accurate assessment of the structure of the present. Understanding the present situation could give at least some clues to the necessary processes of change.
In postwar America it became increasingly apparent that the structure of its society differed from traditional societies—Tsarist Russia and Mandarin China, for example—not in the fact of oligarchical control, but in the mode of that control. In the traditional societies, revolution was staved off by a combination of force, tradition, and simple folk belief in obedience to authority. In the United States—as in other technologically developed societies of this century—the mode of control contained the same ingredients, but in different proportions, with different degrees of sophistication. Modern society was still held together by force—indeed, such force as could hardly be imagined in olden times—but by a much more complicated, much more effective structure of deception than in traditional societies. Control was now internalized in the masses of the citizenry by a set of beliefs inculcated from early age, by all the techniques of modern education and mass communication.
In the modern liberal scheme, there was more flexibility; partial defects could be acknowledged, so long as the whole system was considered legitimate and good. Each group that saw a tarnished side of the social structure was taught that all the other sides were clean. But most important, modern society strained the cruelties of the past through such an elaborate network of mystification as to keep the fairly educated, fairly resourceful, potentially dangerous population pacified.
Economic exploitation, for instance, has not been as obvious in liberal capitalist societies as in peasant cultures, where the lord simply took half the produce; it has been disguised by a labyrinth of contractual relationships and market interchanges that bewilder even the economists. Political tyranny has been masked by representative bodies, regular elections, and the ballyhoo of free choice. Freedom of expression, granted in theory, has been denied at crucial moments, and rationed according to wealth; the powerless have the legal right to shout into deaf ears, and the powerful have the right to pipe their message into every living room in America. Due process of law and the formalities of judicial procedure conceal inequality before the law between rich and poor, black and white, government and citizen.
All this deception is distributed through a system of compulsory education, and reinforced in home and church, so that school, church, and parents have become instruments of control. And just as the coin of the marketplace has had its value determined by powerful corporations and the government, the coin of communication, language itself, has been controlled in schools and in the mass media. Words like violence, patriotism, honor, national security, responsibility, democracy, freedom, have been assigned meanings difficult to alter.
For those seeking basic change, the main problem in liberal societies, with such a structure of control, would not be to organize military units for a violent revolution in the classical sense, but to pull apart the web of deception. What has been needed is a set of tactics aimed at exposing the gap between words and reality, a set of tactics proving that the liberal system failed to fulfill its own professed goals, that it violated its own asserted values, that it destroyed what it said it cherished, wasted what it said it revered.
The history of the postwar world demonstrated that such learning about reality did not take place in the home, the classroom, and the Sunday school, or from lecture and political platforms. Learning took place most forcefully, most dramatically, most promptly where people took direct action against an evil policy, for a desired goal. In the struggle with power that such action inevitably produced, deceptions were exposed, realities revealed, new strengths discovered. Out of such struggles, people might begin to develop new forms of working and living—the seeds of a future cooperative society. The civil rights movement, the student movement, the peace movement, the women’s liberation movement revealed how rapidly Americans could learn.
Not everyone was deceived in the wealthy liberal state. Many knew that it was a rich man’s society, that politics were corrupt, that justice was a farce. But they remained quiet, and played the game, because they also were very practical people; they knew they were powerless and saw the futility of rebellion. Yet for such people, organized action could give a sense of confidence, and occasional small victories could show that resistance is not always futile. Action could lay bare the potential power of the presumably powerless. It could show that money and guns are not the only ingredients of power. For whatever progress has taken place in the world, wherever revolutions or reforms have even temporarily succeeded, has it not been where some special, indefinable power was assembled out of the will and sacrifice of ordinary people?
The politics of protest in the sixties gave at least suggestions of this power. Minorities of organized blacks won gains here and there. Students drove the ROTC off fifty campuses, and changed many academic programs. Antiwar demonstrators made life impossible for Johnson and Nixon, determined the geography of their speeches, forced them to renege, if slowly, on their military policies in Asia. And there were many other examples, not always successful in attaining their immediate objectives, but showing the possibilities of action:
• In East Harlem, a group of young Puerto Rican activists, the Young Lords, seized a mobile chest X-ray unit and brought it to work in an area where the tuberculosis rate was high.
• In Boston, elderly residents organized and crowded into public hearings to get fare reductions for old people on the public transportation system.
• In Michigan, an elusive group of “billboard bandits” managed to remove 167 billboards along highways to restore the quiet beauty of central Michigan.
• In Upstate New York, a small group of volunteers guarded the home of an American Indian family being harassed by neighbors who wanted them to leave the area.
• Ten welfare mothers held a “shop-in” at Macy’s department store in New York, taking clothes openly, without paying, to publicize the fact that they had no money to buy the clothes.
• An antiwar group raided a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and distributed documents to the press to publicize the way in which the FBI was acting undemocratically to suppress civil liberties.
• Poor people showed up at lavishly financed national conferences on welfare to interrupt traditional speeches and demand action.
• Protesters appeared at stockholders’ meetings to ask that auto companies take measures to stop polluting the air, that banks remove investments from South Africa, that the Dow Chemical Company stop manufacturing napalm.
• Poor blacks in Greenville, Mississippi, occupied an empty air force base to demonstrate their lack of housing and their need for jobs and land.
• Doctors defied orders to close a hospital in the South Bronx, and set up voluntary clinics; residents later broke into the hospital and reopened it to let two doctors treat patients in the emergency room.
• Indians on the West Coast occupied Alcatraz Island to dramatize neglect of their problem; Indians in South Dakota stationed themselves on top of the Mount Rushmore memorial to pressure the government to honor an 1858 treaty giving land to the Sioux.
• In Berkeley, California, radicals succeeded in getting their candidates elected to half the seats of the city council.
• In Milwaukee, members of a tenants’ union invaded a housing authority meeting and succeeded in stopping evictions of two families.
The significance of these acts lay outside their immediate demands. They represented attempts to act out a fuller form of democracy, beyond the limitations of the ballot box and the political party, in which aggrieved people would make their statements directly to the public, and show directly what their needs were. Sometimes this meant bold confrontations, sometimes it meant hit-and-run tactics. One citizen, pondering the relationships of power, told a student: “No, you can’t fight city hall, but you can shit on the steps and run like hell.” His was one idiosyncratic approach. Significant change, however, required more permanent forms of action and organization, people moving in concert but without hierarchy. It was necessary to reach, to organize, to stir into action, large sections of the working population that had hitherto been absent from the movement of the sixties.
Some people found it necessary to act out new ways of living, to show the possibilities of cooperation. Thus, around 1970, communes became a widespread phenomenon in America, with tens of thousands of people across the country, in various living and working arrangements, trying to prove that people did not have to live competitively, that they did not have to live in small, segregated families, that a larger, warmer notion of “family” might be possible, in which children would grow up better, and adults would have a richer, freer life.
Some of these communes were based on cooperative living arrangements, with the members going off during the day to work at their regular jobs. Others were working communes, in which a group of lawyers or doctors, living where they chose, set up cooperative workforces with social need, not private profit, as the chief motivation.
In December 1970, there were at least two thousand communes across the country, but the New York Times, which had made the survey, acknowledged that this was a conservative estimate. Women’s liberation groups set up communes. So did radical political organizers, living together in the communities where they worked. The Times survey found living together: Cincinnati Health Department employees campaigning for a more efficient administration; former nuns and Appalachian whites working together with mining families in the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee; young men in Maine developing programs to save the state’s open lands and shores. A common type of commune in many cities consisted of the staff of the local underground newspaper. Near a number of military bases, antiwar organizers—civilian and GI—lived and worked together, operating a local coffeeshop or a bookstore. Rural communes sprang up in Vermont, in the Rocky Mountain states, on the West Coast.
In the tactics of social change in postwar America, one problem was constant: how to work for immediate, urgent reform, without succumbing to the American system’s customary way of avoiding drastic change by granting piecemeal reforms to pacify the population. No theoretical answer to this problem seemed to exist; it was a question of working hard, without losing a larger vision of change. Some were able to do this. In 1969, in Dorchester, a white working-class section of Boston, eight young people of different backgrounds—including a former student at Harvard, a local fellow just back from Vietnam, a girl who had left her high school after leading the antiwar movement—moved into a house together, opened up a storefront, and organized a food cooperative in which many local residents joined. They collected thousands of signatures on a petition to remove a particularly oppressive local judge, and they published a community newspaper. The paper was called tpf—the people first. It told about landlord-tenant disputes, discussed reasons why police should be hired and supervised by the community, gave special attention to the problems of women, offered practical advice to those on welfare, advertised the food co-op, explained the effects of the Vietnam War on the cost of living in Dorchester.
These eight people wanted revolutionary change in American society. They expected to get it, not by some massive military confrontation in Washington, but by groups like themselves, working all over the country to assemble the splintered power of people into forces so diverse, so widespread, so ingrained in their communities and their workplaces as to become irrepressible. The stability of the old order rested on widespread obedience. It required everyone to stay in place. Perhaps enough sensibilities could be affected, enough confidence built up, so that someday people, acting together, would refuse to obey, refuse to do their jobs on the assembly line of violence and waste, and build their own organizations, on the job and in the neighborhood. Then the government, with all its arms and money, would be impotent. Then, through free associations of people, engaged over a long period in difficult struggles with entrenched power, democracy would come into its own at last.
In postwar America, it was beginning to be recognized by a small but growing part of the population that the special qualities of control possessed by the modern liberal system demanded a long revolutionary process of struggle and example. The process would have to be long enough, intense enough, to change the thinking of people, to act out, as far as possible, the future society. To work for the great ends of the Declaration of Independence, for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, did not mean looking for some future day of fruition. It meant beginning immediately to make those ends real.