How could the people in the movement have changed from idealistic civil rights workers to violent outlaws in less than a decade? How could the best and brightest of America’s young people possibly delude themselves into thinking that the middle- and working-class people of this country could be inspired by terrorist acts to rise up and violently overthrow their government? How could such an idea have possibly made sense to them?
Singer-songwriter Vince Martin believes that the Weather Underground was simply a small and statistically insignificant portion of the New Left and were anomalies not representative of the movement. According to Martin, the Weathermen did not actually become criminals: they already were, using the movement as a cover. “Every movement has dishonesty and deceit in it,” he says. “The New Left was no different. The dishonesty was in the ones who came into the movement for less than honorable reasons.” Martin is correct to a point, but the fact remains that the New Left’s reasoning was to a large degree a product of their education. Most of them became radicals in college, having studied political systems and ideas there. Movement people were accustomed to theorizing, having been trained to discuss ideas in the universities that spawned them. All action sprang from theory, they believed, and their theories were based on the prevailing Aristotelean logic that their classrooms made them experts in.
Alfred Korzibski, one of the creators of the field of general semantics, described the type of logic that characterized his field as non–Aristotelian. Aristotelian logic is based on a two-valued orientation, which can best be defined as the inability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time. A two-valued thinker divides all of reality into two opposing camps that generally boil down to things he approves of and things he does not. Statements such as “you’re either for us or against us” or “my friend or my enemy” or the slightly more complex “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” are two-valued. In fact, any either-or choice is an example of two-valued orientation.1
All sets of opposites are two-valued: Good or evil, heaven or hell, love or hate. All of these claim that there are only two possible positions that can be taken and these two are polar opposites. When the Johnson and Nixon administrations divided American citizens into two camps—those who agreed with their policies and the enemy—and used that division as an rationale for its law enforcement agencies to spy on groups and individuals they saw as being on the opposite side, adopting a “America: love it or leave it” or “my country, right or wrong” attitude, that was two-valued. Two-valued orientation is absolute; the in-between disappears. The comedian Mitch Hedburg satirized this position by joking that he was once in a band that people either loved or hated—unless they were indifferent to them. A true two-valued orientation removes the possibility of indifference, reducing the question to love or hate, which become the only possibilities.
This attitude is prevalent among many different groups. Some extreme and radical religious denominations believe an individual is either saved or damned, that one is either a Christian or a heathen and that Christians are going to heaven and all others are going to hell. To them, all things are judged according to whether they are Christian or not. Good and evil are absolutes, good being godly and evil covering the satanic bases.2 In two-valued orientation, all behavior falls into one of these two camps. In the political climate we currently inhabit, two-valued orientation dominates. Many Republicans think of Democrats as the enemy, while many Democrats believe all Republicans are heartless fanatics who want to take everyone’s money away from them and give it to their millionaire contributors. As a result, we have spent the past decade in a stalemate that has rendered Congress completely ineffective.
To this day, then, many people still live in a two-valued “us” and “them” world where other people either agree with them or become the enemy. Some Republicans proclaim that all “liberals” endanger “America,” and some Democrats consider all “conservatives” to be right-wing fanatics. Neither perspective leads to the compromise essential in passing effective legislation or creating a country that can live up to its stated values. Without respect or a willingness to look for a middle ground, debates among the citizenry devolve into hateful shouting matches.
It might be said that my analysis is unfair because it fails to tell both sides of the story. That very objection is two-valued. After all, those who offer that criticism say there are two sides to every story, which is the reason why formal debates and classroom essays are divided into pro and con structures, where the two identified sides can be examined. That is a classic structure that offers only one of two ways of looking at a subject: the so-called right way and the way that is declared wrong. The members of the New Left graduated from universities that taught Aristotelian logic. They were trained in the two-valued orientation these institutions taught. Being able to see only two sides was convenient for them because they could more easily perceive the evil forces that they were fighting. Their goal was to smash the opposite side.
When we are dealing with something like the white supremacist movement in Mississippi in the early sixties, it is easy to view it in a two-valued way. In fact, it is hard to see it any other way. However, ease of apprehension does not address the major problem of two-valued orientation: it oversimplifies. Few things are that simple. When people insist there are two sides to every story, they are looking at these stories in a two-valued way. In truth, there are as many sides to a story as there are people examining the story. In the case of the white supremacists, the hard-to-grasp truth is that many of the citizens of Mississippi were as appalled and repulsed by the behavior of the Klan and its racist sympathizers as the people who came to Freedom Summer were. Many Mississippians did not share the Klan’s hatred. When Phil Ochs had his song “Here’s to the State of Mississippi” in his repertoire, his friend, the blues singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt, suggested to him that the song—since it generalized its attack to include all of the citizens of the state—wasn’t fair. After all, Hurt said, “People like me live in Mississippi, too.”3 Ochs got Hurt’s message and stopped singing the song.
Two-valued orientation was most fully discussed by linguist and general semantics expert S.I. Hayakawa in his book, Language in Action (reissued in an expanded edition coauthored by Alan R. Hayakawa as Language on Thought and Action). Unfortunately, in his later years, when he was made acting chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, during the student strikes, Hayakawa fell victim to the very condition he had written about so cogently, coming to see the demonstrators as the enemy and the administration as the good guys.
In his book, however, in order to demonstrate that two-valued orientation was the product of a closed mind Hayakawa pointed to the Nazis, who under Hitler’s lead, divided everything into two categories: Aryan and not-Aryan. Things they approved of were Aryan; things they opposed were not-Aryan. All living things could be placed in one of those two categories. And they were. Chickens, for example, were either Aryan or not, depending on how many eggs they laid. Lions were Aryan, bunny rabbits were not. Polish people, Jews, and blacks were not-Aryan, while tall, lean, blonde people with good muscle tone, whether male or female, were Aryan. The Nazis, of course, embarked on a program of exterminating everything that was not-Aryan.4
The dangers of a two-valued orientation, then, become obvious. It is a mode of thinking that creates more problems than it solves. Before Hayakawa succumbed to it, though, he lined out the alternative to the two-valued paradigm: multi-valued orientation. Multi-valued orientation resolves many of the problems two-valued modes cause. It is important to note that multi-valued thinking is not simply a two-valued approach that recognizes how complicated things are. A common logical error is to adopt a mode of thinking that ultimately there are only two sides, one true and one untrue, but that one has to wade through a massive amount of complications to arrive at the true one. The shades of grey idea oversimplifies. No, multi-valued thinking recognizes that most things are relative, that each person’s idea of what is true is true for that person and that thinking does not lead to the truth but to a truth.
As an example, consider this statement from theologian Robert V. Thompson:
If I’m being asked about whether or not I believe in some supreme being with an extreme ego who insists that people conform to a rigid dogma, I say, “No, I don’t believe in that God.”
If I’m asked if I believe in a God whose abode is in a heaven, separated from the earthly domain, the answer is, “No, I don’t believe in that God.”
If the question is whether I believe in a God that uses coercive power to get his way, I reply, “No, not that one either.”5
Does this mean that Thompson is an atheist? No, it simply means he is operating from a multi-valued position. He recognizes the complexity and that more than one way of examining every problem exists. As he says, “Here’s to a God who giggles with delight, who tickles creation in order to waken it to the pleasures of life and the joys of living, who gets under your skin and who wants to get up close and personal.”6
This is not to say that multi-valued orientation is about religion. It isn’t necessarily; theology just serves as an excellent example. What multi-valued orientation is about is an approach to reality. We use a religious question as an example because it illustrates the subjective aspect to all questions concerning the world we occupy. We do not have to dive into the area of faith to see that a multi-valued approach to thinking, acting, and being pays dividends. It widens our picture of reality.
People who are committed to two-valued orientation think this more complex approach to cognition is evasive. Either-or believers take comfort in two-valued approaches because within those parameters they can feel certain. They can determine that they know the truth and sometimes come to believe that they have a duty to spread that truth. That feeling of certainty is denied multi-valued thinkers. The multi-valued are always aware of the fact that they are walking the edge of uncertainty, that they can never escape the possibility that they might be wrong.
Two-valued orientation is, in David Reisman’s words, other-directed. In a two-valued society, the most important value is conformity. As long as everyone thinks the same way, harmony can prevail. When people begin stepping out of line and dissenting, social and political unrest appears and the ruling classes far too often interpret this unrest to mean that order has broken down and must be restored by any means necessary. Innovation, creativity, and progress all suffer, as do the people caught in this system.
The late fifties, the time that spawned the New Left, was a two-valued time. The young radicals came out of two-valued homes with two-valued governments and went to two-valued schools where they were taught two-valued modes of reasoning. When they saw injustice, it offended their ideals and they felt they were faced with two opposing ways of responding: to ignore it or to take direct action. They chose the idealistic approach, taking action, and, as a result many enlarged their way of thinking, moving closer to a multi-valued approach, one that saw breaking the law in order to help the disenfranchised as merely one of many possible ways to achieve their goals. Others did not make that jump. The Weather Underground, with its us-versus-them mentality remained aggressively two-valued. To them, violent, revolutionary action was the only way.
Of course, certain situations are, at least on their surface, two-valued. White supremacists in Mississippi denying African Americans the right to vote that the Constitution gives them boils down to essentially a basic question of right and wrong, to which the proper answer is that it is wrong. The folk singers who went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer operated from a two-valued orientation. The white supremacists were evil and needed to be stopped; the artists were willing to put their lives on the line to stop them. It was an us-versus-them proposition. History has, of course, shown that the artists were correct.
Most topical songs written from a two-valued perspective, however, fail as art. Having been written to a specific situation, they have a very short shelf life. They serve a propaganda purpose and when the situation being sung about is no longer current, neither is the song. In 1964 Malvina Reynolds, the San Francisco folk singer, wrote “It Isn’t Nice,”: which sets up a duality: your way or my way. It then claims that the singer’s way is actually the only way because the alternative, the nice way advocated by the person being addressed in the song, never works but always fails. “It Isn’t Nice” had quite a run, being recorded by Reynolds herself, Judy Collins, Barbara Dane, Annie Patterson, Cyril Paul, Carolyn Hester, and Jackie Washington, among others. It was a powerful song, speaking directly to the civil rights movement and, for a while, appeared to be headed for a long life. But then the situation that inspired it changed and it all but disappeared. Its two-valued nature caused it to be applicable only to the times; as the times changed, it grew less appropriate and therefore less heard.
Phil Ochs faced the same situation with “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” When Dave Van Ronk told Ochs he was wrong to focus on Mississippi when just as much racial hatred could be found down the block in Greenwich Village, he was pointing out the two-valued nature of the song, which postulated that the people of the Village and the North were the home of the good guys, and the southern state of Mississippi was the home of every racial evil.7
Ochs couldn’t see the problem in dividing the problem into two opposing camps and placing all the blame on the southern camp until a few years after he’d written the song when Mississippi John Hurt objected it. On hearing Hurt, Ochs had a click moment and realized that both Van Ronk and Hurt were correct in their objections.8 He stopped singing the song and began turning his attention inward in his writing, exploring not just politics but everyone’s responsibility for the way things were in songs like “Outside a Small Circle of Friends” and “Pleasures of the Harbor.”
This recognition of the complexity of situations explains why the music got so much more complex and unfocused. Musicians were learning that the two-valued songs they’d been writing could neither capture the truth nor qualify as the truth, and most writers are not as interested in being applicable to a political situation as they are in creating a work of art. Take Ed McCurdy’s classic anti-war song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” Ed McCurdy was not typical of the Greenwich Village folkies. Born in rural Pennsylvania, he left the family farm at the age of eighteen to become a singer. What kind of singer, what genre he sang, didn’t make any difference to him. What counted was performing. He sang gospel in Oklahoma but then became a traveling singer of the Great American Songbook in clubs. The stripper Sally Rand hired him to sing romantic ballads to her as she peeled off her clothing. Working with her introduced him to the dying but still pulsing vaudeville circuit, and he toured the remaining vaudeville palaces as a straight man to comedians.9 Ever restless, in 1948 he moved to Canada, where he hosted his own network radio show. There he met and befriended the folk singers Pete Seeger, Josh White, and Oscar Brand, all of whom appeared as guests on his program. They introduced him to folk music, which he came to love, and he recorded his first album of folk songs in 1949.10
That album brought him back to America. He settled in Greenwich Village and gained prominence due to a string of albums released on Electra Records, many of which featured the bawdy songs first done by traveling minstrels in Elizabethan England. McCurdy also wrote and recorded original songs, including his most famous composition, “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” which has become an enduring classic. That song has been recorded in almost eighty different languages and by a variety of artists ranging from jazz singers to country stars to folkies.11 In addition to McCurdy, artists such as the Weavers, Pete Seeger, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Simon & Garfunkel, Donal Leace, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, Johnny Cash, Serena Ryder, Garth Brooks, and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd have covered it. As recently as 2016 Carolyn Hester released a version of the song.
When the Berlin wall came down, Tom Brokaw was there covering the event on live TV. He had his cameras pick up school kids on the East German side of the wall, singing the song as the wall was taken down. When it was recorded by Josh White, Jr., “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” became the official theme song of the Peace Corps.12
When hundreds of anti-war songs or, if one prefers, pro-peace songs, have been written, recorded and forgotten, why does this one endure? Why is it still sung when most of the others are now historical relics? At least a part of the answer is that “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” is a multi-valued song. It does not attack. It does not divide the world into good guys and bad guys, claiming that those who agree with us are good and those who oppose us are evil. Listening to the song or reading its lyrics, you cannot locate an enemy in its lyrics. Rather than an attack, the song is a celebration. It does not say anyone is at fault but instead takes pleasure in the fact that war has ended, thereby implying that all of us are responsible for the condition of war and for the necessity of ending it. It does this in a joyous and celebratory manner, substituting dancing and singing in the streets for shooting and killing. In short, because it is multi-valued, it is art in the service of a larger cause, rather than two-sided us-versus-them propaganda.
The New Left died out because it was two-valued, us against the war, and the war ended, leaving the forces of us with no opponent. The movement people tried to substitute the federal government for the war on the grounds that the government makes war and therefore is the enemy, but that approach was entirely two-valued. The public at large could see its flaws and were unable to buy into the fantasy of revolution.
The bombings and robberies of the Weather Underground instead of recruiting the young repelled them. The Weathermen had become deluded by their own two-valued thinking and came to believe that since they were morally right their actions were right. They had become incapable of seeing beyond their preconceived assumptions and were unable to see what would happen as a result. As Weather leader Bernadette Dorhn said, “We never expected to spend twenty-five years in prison.”13
Anyone who was capable of seeing more than one viewpoint would have known that prison was a very definite possibility. In fact, the novelist Norman Mailer, in his book about the 1966 march on Washington, The Armies of the Night, wrote eloquently of his realization that anti-war protestors might have to spend years in prison.14 As a novelist, accustomed to examining rather than judging, Mailer had the perspective of seeing more than two sides of the story, something too many movement people lacked. Two-valued orientation was a major reason for the collapse and disappearance of the New Left.
So what became of the folk singers most associated with trying to end the war when the war ended and the movement collapsed?
Phil Ochs was affected most dramatically. Eliot reports that his bipolar disorder got the best of him and he took on a second personality that he named John Trane. Trane was at best an unpleasant person, a snarling drunk who alienated everyone he came in contact with and continually claimed that Phil Ochs was dead. Ochs quit writing and was unable to perform. Occasionally he’d book a gig and take the stage, but it was more often John Trane who showed up and not Phil Ochs. The results were not pretty. After a long period of suffering, he moved into his sister’s home and hung himself, leaving a note that said the songs would not come anymore.15
Bob Dylan, as he always had, maintained his own direction, went his own inner-directed way. He mounted loose-knit collaborative tours, like the Rolling Thunder Revue—Joan Baez accompanied him on that one—and made underground movies like Reynaldo and Claire, as well as studio pictures. He had a prime supporting role in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He recorded what he wanted to record when he wanted to record it and after 1976’s “Hurricane” never cut another protest song. Continuing to fight his unwanted designation as the voice of a generation, he decided the best way he could escape that title was by building a new audience, so he embarked on his never-ending tour, which still goes on, and won himself a new set of fans.
Peter, Paul and Mary broke up and went their separate ways, but after almost a decade they reunited for a PBS special. Enjoying the reunion, they continued to work together and won their audience back through touring and appearances on public television. They continued as a group until Mary Travers died. As of this writing, Peter and Paul tour together, keeping the memories alive.
Carolyn Hester continues to record and tour, still playing clubs and concerts around the world. Now that her two daughters are grown, they have become her touring band.
In San Francisco, during the weeks leading up to Donald Trump’s inauguration, citizens held a rally on the steps of city hall to protest the Republican plans to repeal Obamacare.
Who better to be there than Joan Baez? She sang for them.