The police riots at the march on Grand Central Station and the Chicago convention had shown the ugly and brutal side of the anti-war debate. By 1968 those qualities had become dominant; the movement was fractured, coming apart. Impatience had driven many activists away and adult hypocrisy had taken its toll.
Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had wound up with the Democratic nomination as a compromise candidate—by the time the convention rolled around none of the peace candidates who had stepped up against Lyndon Johnson were seen as credible. Eugene McCarthy was perceived as too closely associated with the anti-war movement to maintain any credibility; George McGovern had leaped in late and was seen not as a genuine anti-war advocate but as an opportunist.1 The only credible alternative candidate, Robert Kennedy, was in the grave, shot down by the assassin Sirhan Sirhan as Kennedy walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where he was holding a rally.2
Humphrey was the favorite of the old guard and they still had the clout to see to it that he won the nomination. After the complete mess the Yippies and the police had made of their convention in Chicago, the establishment Democrats had no more sympathy for the New Left. This attitude counted Hubert Humphrey among its adherents. At first, he’d been sympathetic to the youth movement, but Humphrey was a politician, capable of seeing which way the wind was blowing. He had become one of those leaders who discovered the direction in which the people were going, placed himself out in front of the line, and convinced himself they were all following him.
By the 1968 elections, the antics of the Yippies had turned off many of the New Left’s previous sympathizers. As the crowd turned against the anti-war movement, Humphrey did, too. He had once been a strong supporter of civil rights but now, as a presidential candidate, he presented himself as the conservative Democrat in the race in order to secure the support of the southern states.3 At the same time Humphrey had worked inside the hall to nail down the nomination at the convention, the city of Chicago had been exploding outside. The parks and streets of the city overflowed with protestors. In response, Mayor Daley brought 6,000 federal troops and 18,000 members of the Illinois National Guard to subdue them.4 Humphrey saw his future when he secured the nomination to almost no media coverage because all of the cameras and microphones were out in the streets. The news, both visual and print, was dominated by footage of the police riots going on outside the convention hall.
Life on the campaign trail was no better. When he was introduced at a solidarity march for civil rights, the crowd of 50,000 booed him.5 Ironically, Humphrey had long been a forceful advocate for civil rights and was the man responsible for adding the civil rights plank to the party platform. Now the very people whose rights he had fought for had turned against him.6 When he tried to pitch himself as a peace candidate, the booing crowds always reminded him that he was Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, tied to the war by his binds to Johnson, who objected whenever Humphrey tried to step out of his shadow. Johnson saw Humphrey’s role as a candidate as one of publicly validating Johnson’s approach to the war, and the media had a hard time separating the two members of the administration. Humphrey said, “The vice president of the United States is one of the president’s advisors, he is not president. And that’s the first thing he needs to learn.”7
The media constantly pointed out the irony of Humphrey’s situation; he was being booed by civil rights organizations when, back at the 1948 convention, he was booed by the Dixiecrats for pushing through a civil rights plank in the party platform. By 1968, though, he was being booed by the left because he had muscled in a plank supporting the Vietnam War. That move cost him the support of the anti-war forces, who showed up at his rallies to jeer him. He responded by accusing the young people of using the war issue as “escapism,” a move that did not endear him to them.8
That remark showed the real problem with Humphrey; since his ambition appeared to the voters to be larger than his convictions and he was losing to Nixon, who claimed to have a secret strategy for ending the war and had succeeded in developing a “southern strategy” that moved the Dixiecrats into the Republican party, Humphrey decided he would be whoever he needed to be to win. He turned solidly against the anti-war movement until his advisers convinced him that he needed their votes to take California and New York. Upon hearing that, he declared in a nationally televised speech that, if elected, he would immediately end the bombing of North Vietnam and arrange a cease-fire.9
Humphrey lost, Nixon took the presidency—and under Nixon the war went on for another six years.
Often spoken of as the year that changed everything, 1968 destroyed the dream. The year began with the Tet offensive in Vietnam, an event that was followed by the death of any hope of electing a progressive Democrat who would end the war. That dream was killed when Robert Kennedy was shot. The already split civil rights movement took another, bigger hit when Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot on a hotel room balcony in Memphis. Used to being the underdogs, the New Left suddenly found themselves declared the enemy by the Nixon administration. News that the newly elected president kept an ongoing and growing enemy’s list and the fact that many of the New Left as well as the people they respected were named on it caused kids who had already lost faith in their government to feel even further estranged from it.
The election had empowered the forces of what Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, called the Silent Majority; these were the ordinary middle-class working people the New Left had hoped to radicalize. Instead the Nixon administration radicalized them by successfully painting these leftist kids as the enemy of all things American.10 If it ever had been, Nixon’s majority was no longer silent and its members could not abide the kids who identified with and participated in the anti-war movement. Now, when they mounted a protest or a rally, the New Left did not just have to fear out-of-control policemen; they were just as likely to be attacked by ordinary citizens who did not agree with them. The very people they tried to win over were turning violently against them. The New Left felt that a darkness had fallen upon the land. The already-fractured movement began coming apart like the shell of a soft-boiled egg.
If the political scene was becoming dark and dangerous, so was the music. In 1966, at the University of California, Berkeley, where the Free Speech movement had begun, two San Francisco bands, Jefferson Airplane and Mystery Trend, performed at a benefit for the Vietnam Day Committee. The advertising poster shows a war scene, featuring black and white sketches of soldiers trying to escape the exploding bombs being rained down on them from airplanes above. The poster contains the word “Vietnam” at its top, while beneath that the word “peace” has been scrawled. The Airplane and Mystery Trend played psychedelic music in its first association with the movement.11
Psychedelic music had evolved from the drug culture. As LSD experimentation spread through the sixties, a music developed that attempted to replicate the visions, hallucinations, and other altered states that acid produced. Often played while accompanied by light shows that flashed almost random images on a screen behind the players, it was an assault on the senses. The guitars were amped up, producing a deliberate distortion and feedback, as screeching electric sounds became part of the musical palate. Eastern instruments, such as the Indian sitar and tabla, were frequently used and the song development relied on extended improvised solos. Structures were more complicated, with frequent modulations and lyrics drug-related. In their song “White Rabbit,” the Jefferson Airplane urged its audiences to feed their heads, reminding them that different pills had different effects—some made you grow, others shrank you, but the ones your mother made you take were ineffective.12 Studio technological effects were extensive.
In 1964 the progressive folk group Holy Modal Rounders probably became the first folkies to apply psychedelic techniques to their music when they recorded a psyched-up version of Charlie Poole’s “Hesitation Blues.”13 But it took the work of the Beatles to give the new sound impact in America. They used distortion and feedback in “I Feel Fine” and ladled drug references into their lyrics. The Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, especially the track “A Day in the Life,” remains a strong example of the form. Where the Beatles led, the Beach Boys followed, and their “Pet Sounds” tried to capture an acid experience on record. But psychedelic music hit a peak with a completely unknown band from Austin, Texas. In 1968 the Thirteenth Floor Elevator captured the zeitgeist with their record “You’re Gonna Miss Me.” They followed that one up with a string of songs that virtually defined the psychedelic sound. By 1968 anti-war music had become psychedelic. The Chambers Brothers contributed “Time Has Come Today,” which in live performance often ran more than nine minutes long, due to its improvised solos. Edwin Starr recorded “War: What Is It Good For?” There were also the Byrds’ aforementioned “Draft Morning,” which for its coda descends into a cacophony of war sounds and distorted instruments, and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar workout of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The psychedelic sound reached a dead end and faded out for two major reasons. One was that the music itself was too repetitive, dependent on electronic effects that soon grew overly familiar, so that it became formulaic and predictable. The second was that an already troubled mind could be blasted into a permanent state of schizophrenia by the use of LSD, which happened in too many cases. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Roky Erickson from the Thirteenth Floor Elevator, Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac and Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd were among the many who became acid casualties and found their lives shattered by the drug.14 Thousands of ordinary citizens had their minds dismantled by it also.
Despite the failure of psychedelic music, the very nature of the protest song changed. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band applied psychedelic influences to their weirdly odd “Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came,” which they described in a spoken introduction as an African tribal chant that they wrote. Over African drumbeats, a throbbing bass line, and drone-like electric guitars, they chanted the title continually through the song and wrapped it up with the sound of a crying baby. Creedence Clearwater contributed “Fortunate Son,” the lyrics of which spoke about the way the rich got draft deferments while the poor had to go off to fight the war. Joan Baez took a poem by Nina Dusheck and wrote music for it. The result was “Saigon Bride,” about a young soldier forced to say good-bye to his Saigon bride to go fight the enemy. Why? The narrator says the reasons won’t matter when they are dead. As she usually did, Baez discussed the war in terms of the people it affected rather than as an act of policy. Jazz singer Nina Simone also found inspiration in a poem. Taking Langston Hughes’ “Backlash Blues” as her model, she changed it from a civil rights poem into an anti–Vietnam War song. All of these songs were electric folk-rock, several of them exhibiting strains of psychedelic effects, which it turned out were perfect for replicating the sounds of war.
In 1964 Buffy Sainte-Marie had written “Universal Soldier,” a song about how each of us is responsible for war and how the old way of thinking about international issues leads to death and destruction. Released on her first album, the recording of the song became very well known among a small circle of folk singers and their followers but never generated a large following among the general public, remaining no more than a minor hit that failed to break though to mass acclaim. A year later, the British folk singer Donovan released a cover of the song as a single and this time the mass record-buying audience was more receptive. Donovan’s version became a major hit, reaching number fifty-three on the Billboard charts.
“Universal Soldier” is unique in that its lyrics claim that we are all responsible for war. Instead of being the innocent victims of out-of-control governments, we are actually coconspirators—we support the wars. Even if we oppose them, our silence and our refusal to act on our beliefs prove that we, when we get right down to it—and contrary to our words—actively support them. We fight the wars, and when we attempt to refuse to fight we run to another country instead of standing and fighting for our right to resist. And we refuse to accept the consequences of our attitudes and behaviors. Buffy Saint-Marie says that we can’t just sit back and blame our elders. Before we can change the situation, we have to recognize our part in it.15
By 1968, though, the New Left had lost the ability to make that distinction. Instead of taking responsibility, the various groups blamed each other. It appeared as if they had decided that if they could not win over the public at large and could not demand that the government stop the war, then they would fight each other. They had learned that, although they had freedom of speech, America at large had no responsibility and little desire to listen. The right to free speech also guaranteed the listener the right to ignore what was being said. The New Left did not know how to handle that knowledge and many of its members were too impatient to learn to live with it. Taking a cue from the Yippies, the New Left got the enemy plainly in its sights but then turned their guns on themselves. From then on, protestors who had lost their sense of direction would have to listen to music that had also lost its way.