In Vietnam and in the Streets
Groups like SDS were, at first, reluctantly content to work within the existing system. That attitude ended when a tipping point was reached in 1964. In September of that year a group of Freedom Summer veterans set up tables outside Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, in order to pass out information on their activities. Their purpose was to raise money to continue civil rights activities, an action that was prohibited by the current rules in effect at the university, whose trustees on the governing board had initiated a policy that said only the Democratic and Republican student groups could fundraise on campus.1 As a reaction to the more radical students’ actions, the university passed a whole new set of regulations forbidding anyone from advocating for a particular candidate or cause, outside speakers, recruitment, or fundraising.
Groups like SDS and CORE, fresh from having their heads beaten in by white supremacists, were not going to meekly fold their tents and slip away in the night like a defeated army. A graduate student named Jack Weinberg decided to test the rules and set up shop at a CORE table. When the university brought in the police, Weinberg refused to cooperate; he would not shut down his operations. As a result, he was arrested. That’s when the situation exploded. A group of students spontaneously surrounded the squad car Weinberg was to be transported in. When the crowd swelled to nearly 3,000 people it became impossible to take Weinberg to jail. The police were forced to sit in one place, enveloped by protestors for thirty-two hours while the activists made speeches from the top of the car. After a day and a half of stalemate, the police surrendered, and the charges against Weinberg were dropped.2 Thus the Free Speech Movement was born. It lost little time in making itself a power. On December 2, four thousand students gathered in Sproul Hall to try once more to get the administration to lift the new restrictions. Joan Baez showed up to lead them in song, proving that “We Shall Overcome” was not simply a voting rights song but applied to all people who saw themselves as oppressed. Free Speech leader Mario Savio made a famous speech in which he said, “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your body on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you’ve got to make it stop.”3 The state police arrested 800 students, leading to a student strike that shut down the campus. It reopened after the faculty senate voted to support the Free Speech Movement, a move that caused the administration to change its mind and lift the restrictions.4
The Free Speech Movement is still remembered as the beginning of the campus turmoil in the sixties, which we’ll discuss later in this book. What is less well known, however, is the fact that the movement evolved into the Vietnam Day Committee. In May of 1965 an anti–Vietnam War demonstration took place at the Berkeley campus. It lasted 35 hours and drew more than 35,000 people. During that protest, New Left activists Jerry Rubin, Paul Montauk, Abbie Hoffman, and a few others formed the Vietnam Day Committee, which was designed to accomplish three major objectives: to coordinate anti-war action nationwide; to engage in militancy, including civil disobedience; and to take the movement beyond the campus. From the beginning the group explored the symbolism, sense of absurdity, and heavy use of symbolism Rubin and Hoffman would later become known for. One of their first actions was to lead a march of Berkeley students to the local draft board, where they presented the workers with a black coffin and then burned their draft cards.5 After that they organized the National Day of Protest, a series of coordinated protests taking place simultaneously in Boston, New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, and about a dozen other cities. In San Francisco the original group held a sit-in at San Francisco State College, with the folk rock group Country Joe and the Fish playing.6
Country Joe and the Fish were probably the perfect band for the National Day of Protest, as an association with activism was built into the band’s core. In 1965 two folk singers who had been working the California clubs and coffeehouses, Country Joe MacDonald and Barry Melton, teamed up to work as a duo. Both had leftist political backgrounds. Country Joe, in fact, published a radical underground magazine and was a veteran of the Free Speech Movement. To help the movement, he decided to put out a talking issue of his magazine and together with Melton rounded up a rhythm section to flesh out the band they called Country Joe and the Fish. That issue contained a recording of two of the band’s anti-war songs, songs that later became classics of the movement: “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” and “Superbird.”7 The issue was passed out to the crowd at an anti-war demonstration at Berkeley.
McDonald and Melton toured the Northwest playing SDS-sponsored events, which led to their National Day of Protest appearance. So for most of their career, and certainly for the most prominent and successful part, they were associated with the various protest movements. Country Joe and the Fish were to the Vietnam Day Committee what the laugh track is to a sit-com. As one would expect from a group formed by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Vietnam Day Committee thrived on publicity, absurdity, cheap symbolism, humor, and shock value—all elements that the band exhibited as well. In that sense, the band was a perfect fit for the committee’s actions. Their biggest song, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag,” for example, is black humor at its best, exhorting mothers to send their boys off to Vietnam so they can be the first people on the block to have their boys come home in a box. It urges Wall Street to support the war because it’s war au-go-go with plenty of money to be made producing weapons for the armed forces. The last line of the chorus celebrates the fact that the war is going to kill all of us. The song drips irony like blood from a cut.
“Superbird” is a satirical look at Lyndon Baines Johnson, characterizing the president as a comic book super villain and pledging to use the comic book superheroes the Fantastic Four and Doctor Strange to bring him down. The opening verse asks what’s that up in the sky and establishes that instead of Superman what we’re seeing is an insane man: President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The singer claims he’s going to bring Johnson down to earth, send him back to Texas, and make him work on his ranch. The song matches the operating philosophy of the Vietnam Day Committee by using heavily laden dollops of irony, twisted humor, unique symbolism, and a purpose that appears to be designed more to call attention to itself than to end the war.
Most people believe that the act of protesting the American presence in Vietnam was a product of the sixties. In truth, the first protest against our involvement in that land happened in 1945. Merchant Marine sailors rallied against the use of American merchant ships to transport French troops to that land.8 That demonstration, though, was an outlier, led by and participated in by people directly involved in the conflict. Opposition to the war by the general public was launched in 1963 by the War Resisters’ League, a pacifist organization that had originally been formed to try to end World War I. They organized a demonstration in New York City outside the United Nations headquarters, which was quickly followed by the picketing of Madame Ngô Nhu, the sister-in-law of South Vietnam’s president, Ngô ?ình Diệm. Since ?ình Diệm never married, Nhu was known as the first lady of South Vietnam. She was staying at the Waldorf Astoria hotel and the War Resister’s League picketed her there. In December of 1964 the group teamed up with other anti-war groups to organize a national protest against the Vietnam War.9
Although ending the war in Vietnam or at least preventing it from escalating were the goals, the major fear was greater than that. In an atomic age any war could lead to nuclear war. Already the Americans had engaged in actions that revealed a dubious set of ethics—the use of napalm to burn down entire villages, for example—and it was not inconceivable that they would continue to move into previously off-limits circles.
Since the possibility of nuclear war hung like a cloud over the nation—presidential candidate Barry Goldwater advocated the limited use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam as early as 196310—the folk music of the day reflected this fear. In England in 1963 the Ian Campbell folk group recorded “The Sun Is Burning,” an anti-nuclear war song quickly covered by Simon & Garfunkel. Satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer contributed “Who’s Next” and “So Long, Mom (a Song for World War III),” which, like most of his material, used black humor to make serious points.
Pete Seeger, the only man able to move freely back and forth between the Old Left and the New Left, had no use for humor when it came to nuclear war. Among the strongest of his anti-war songs is one that is generally not associated with him at all. In 1962 he adapted a poem by Zazim Hikmet, “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” into a song that he recorded in 1962. The Byrds released their much better known version in 1965. Like the poem before it, the song tells the story of a seven-year-old victim of the bombing of Hiroshima who knocks at the doors of the living but remains unseen because, when she died, as a result of the bombing the wind scattered the dust that had been her bones. The child’s silent prayer is that we fight for peace today so that no other children of the world suffer her fate.
The music had become political once more. Pete Seeger, who had long served as the lightning rod, was once again, even as he was still blacklisted from the better clubs, tours, and television, faced with complaints that his music was too political. Seeger would refer to something his old friend Woody Guthrie had said. In 1940 Guthrie explained to Alan Lomax that all of folk music was political. He wrote the following in a letter:
I think real folk stuff scares most of the boys around Washington. A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is, or who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is—that’s folk lore and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians could find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work. We don’t aim to hurt you or scare you when we get to feeling sorta folksy and make up some folk lore, we’re doing all we can to make it easy on you. I can sing all day and all night sixty days and sixty nights but of course I ain’t got enough wind to be in office.11
Certainly in his days as a Woody Guthrie clone Bob Dylan believed what his role model had written. As we have seen, he wrote dozens of protest songs, many of them attacking the war. In a period from 1962 to1964, at the height of the nuclear fears, he wrote, among others, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “With God on Our Side,” and “Talkin’ World War III Blues.” Yet even as he contributed to the anti-war mood that was growing, he was already having doubts. As stated earlier, the moment Dylan started to be defined as a spokesman, the voice of his generation, he backed off, rebelling against that identification. Comments he made at the time indicate he doubted that the writing and singing of songs would have any effect. At the 1963 March on Washington—where he sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In”—he wondered aloud, according to his biographer Anthony Scaduto, if anyone in the capital was listening and concluded they were not.12 By 1964 he had ended his association with protesters and overt protest materials and concentrated on internal ideas. At the time, he said, “All I can say is politics is not my thing at all. I can’t see myself on a platform talking about how to help people. Because I would get myself killed if I really tried to help anybody. I mean if somebody really had something to say to help somebody out, just bluntly say the truth, well obviously they’re gonna be done away with. They’re gonna be killed”13
Since most of the Greenwich Village folkies at the time followed Dylan’s lead, his withdrawal from protest caused a major case of disassociation. Some people saw it as the end of a direction, while a few forward-looking thinkers saw it as an opportunity to be heard. Phil Ochs was among the latter. Even though he had always been a hard-core Dylan follower, defending him when he was attacked for going electric, for example, Ochs was nevertheless his own man, determined to walk his own path to his own destination, which he saw as massive artistic and commercial success. After having been introduced to folk music in college by Jim Glover, Ochs got his head turned around by the music and, abandoning the journalistic career he had aimed for, began writing and performing songs.
If folk music changed Ochs, the Cuban revolution of 1959 turned him into a radical; as a journalism major he had begun writing political pieces, many for his own underground paper, The Word, in which he published exclusively radically tinged political stories.14 When his only college friend, Jim Glover, dropped out of school to go to New York to become a folk singer, Ochs stayed behind for the time being, working in folk clubs where he met his idol and mentor, Bob Gibson, who became his strongest influence as a songwriter.
In 1962 Ochs arrived in Greenwich Village, where he described himself politically as a Social Democrat and artistically as a singing journalist. After briefly being managed by Albert Grossman, who also handled Dylan, Bob Gibson, and Peter, Paul and Mary, Ochs became a client of Arthur Gorson, who was close to SNCC, SDS, and the Americans for Democratic Action. By 1963 Ochs had become important enough to warrant an invitation to the Valhalla of folk music, the Newport Folk Festival, where he performed songs that would become civil rights anthems: “Too Many Martyrs,” “Talkin’ Birmingham Jail,” and “The Power and the Glory.”
In the year that followed Freedom Summer, things fell apart. As we have seen, the civil rights movement imploded, and the anti-war movement was at that time still firmly in the hands of the old, traditional left, which implicitly endorsed the Cold War by opposing communism and was committed to working within the system. At first Phil Ochs and the rest of the New Left went along with that posture. They supported Lyndon Johnson in his campaign for a full elected term in office. But their optimism and faith in the government was quickly shattered. The promise of change that the Kennedy administration had brought to Washington died along with John F. Kennedy, which led to Lyndon Johnson, who was viewed as a hawk, trying to extricate the nation from Vietnam by escalating the war.
The attempts to work within the system failed when Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policy of trying to withdraw our troops from Vietnam. The new president’s act of sending more troops to that country led to new actions against the war. As Allen Guttman reports, the spring of 1964 ushered in an increasing number of protests against the war. In May the Progressive Labor Party and the Young Socialist Alliance organized a nationwide series of marches and demonstrations. In New York City several hundred students began a demonstration in Times Square that led to a march on the United Nations. Other marches were held simultaneously in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin. On May 12 a public burning of draft cards took place in Manhattan. Smaller, local demonstrations took place almost daily in almost every city in America. Slowly but unequivocably the nation’s academics, intellectuals, and artists turned against the war.15 Within a few years it would appear that the only member of the recognizable celebrity class who still supported U.S. efforts in Southeast Asia was Bob Hope.
Those events and attitudes informed the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. That year, Phil Ochs built on the reception he’d received the year before, introducing his famous songs “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.” At the same festival Joan Baez teamed up with Mary Travers for a couple of songs, including “Lonesome Valley,” and performed a traditional ballad that had gained new relevance, “The Unquiet Grave.” An anti-war aura hung over the entire festival. The year before, Bob Dylan had been an uninvited guest of Joan Baez, performing with her. In 1964 he received his own invitation and performed, among other songs, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “With God on Our Side” with Joan Baez, and “Chimes of Freedom,” all songs that nailed down his reputation as the spokesman for his generation, the very perception he spent so much of his energy trying to escape.
If Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez were able to light the fuses of their careers at Newport, a large part of the credit has to go to Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. When jazz impresario George Wein began the festival, he put together a board that consisted of Theodore Bikel, Bill Clifton, Clarence Cooper, Eric Darling, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, and Peter Yarrow, who insisted from the first meeting that the gathering not be limited just to the traditional singers of Child ballads (ballads of Scotland and England and American versions) and other public domain historical pieces. No, Yarrow, said, the young singer-songwriters were doing important work that had to be recognized and brought to a larger audience. He won out and younger artists who were doing protest material got a chance to be heard by 30,000 people at once, instead of the forty or fifty who could fit into a coffeehouse.16 Yarrow’s very notion of inclusion, however, in many people’s eyes weakened the impact of the festival. The unnamed author of a post on Wikileaks.com expresses the opinion that “the 1964 Festival ‘overreached’ itself: too many performers, too many different genres: in Theodore Bikel’s words, ‘giving both the individual performer and listener too little chance for expression or absorption.’”17 In addition, critic Paul Nelson wrote snarkily that it had left him “unmoved to the point of paralysis”:
Under the misguided conception that a couple of regiments of folk singers were preferable to a Hand-picked two or three squads, the Newport Committee enlisted what looked to be every folk singer, or reasonable facsimile, on the North American continent, and proceeded to attempt to have them all perform in the space of a single weekend. Even God himself needed six days. Further, Newport proved to be less of a folk festival than a spectacular three-ring morality play of cult worship. The scores of traditional artists remained virtually unnoticed in the back pew, while the hungry throng of worshippers craved a blood sacrifice to mount on a pedestal, another golden saint to add to their socio-religious trilogy of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.18
If this complaint is an accurate reflection on the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, it is also a reflection of two qualities that were prevalent in our culture at the time. The first was the SDS’s idea of participatory democracy, which created a climate where everyone’s ideas of who should appear at the festival were equally valid. The second was the chaos loose in our society at the time. Both ideas prevented a single vision from emerging and being acted upon. As we will see, both of those factors indicated that trouble blocked the road ahead like a fallen tree.