A pathology of credulousness

In 1970, when Timothy Leary broke out of jail and he and his girlfriend arrived in Algiers, there was a brief moment of euphoria. They were guests of the Black Panthers and that seemed splendid at first. “Panthers are the hope of the world,” Leary wrote to Allen Ginsberg. “Socialism works here.... Eldridge is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned on too!”

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. “They intimidated us for money,” Leary reported in his autobiography,

spied on us, intercepted our mail, turned away friends and journalists who came to see us, quartered Eldridge’s sullen mistress in our apartment as a resident informer. When I protested, they kidnapped us at gunpoint, held us in “jail” in various apartments around town, issued press releases announcing our “arrest” for lack of discipline, and searched our apartment vainly for documents proving we were CIA operatives.

And then, in the cruelest cut of all, the Panthers even confiscated their drugs, “a small amount of LSD and hashish.”

If it is difficult to work up much sympathy for Leary, it is also worth noting that he was lucky to escape so easily from the Panthers’ clutches. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the Black Panthers, in direct repudiation of the moderate spirit of the civil-rights movement of the late Fifties, sought to achieve black liberation in America by means of revolutionary violence. David Horowitz, who was deeply involved with the Panthers in the days when he still considered himself a radical, wrote recently that “the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution, and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto.” There have been many books about the Panthers, critical as well as adulatory. But the liberal establishment that embraced the Panthers as an exciting new form of political theater has still never really faced up to their criminality. The radical sociologist Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, was right when he noted that “nothing made the idea of revolution more vivid to the white Left than the Black Panther Party. Image: Eldridge Cleaver writing in Ramparts how he fell for the Panthers when he saw Huey P. Newton hold a shotgun on a San Francisco cop in front of the Ramparts office, and face him down.”

In Radical Chic, his classic account of the society-gathering-cum-fund-raiser for the Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue duplex in 1968, Tom Wolfe caught the politically correct liberal temper exactly:

Shoot-outs, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Vietcong —somehow it all runs together in the head.... The black movement itself, of course, had taken on a much more electric and romantic cast. What a relief it was —socially—in New York—when the leaders seemed to shift from middle class to ... funky! From A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Martin Luther King, and James Farmer ... to Stokely, Rap, LeRoi, and Eldridge! This meant that the tricky business of the fashionable new politics could now be integrated with a tried and true social motif: nostalgie de la boue. The upshot was Radical Chic.

The continuing appeal of Radical Chic is doubtless one reason that the liberal establishment has never acknowledged the folly of its love affair with the Black Panthers and other criminally inclined elements of the counterculture. Another reason is the reluctance of the liberal establishment to admit that it was wrong about the radicalism it so freely embraced—wrong not just “tactically,” but wrong in its ideals, its aspirations, its vaunted ethos of “commitment.” As David Horowitz pointed out,

the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment, including the first lady and the deputy attorney general in charge of civil rights for the Clinton administration. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the university and stop the trial of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton certainly deserved the notoriety they elicited from their various clashes with the law, which included charges of murder for both. But it was Eldridge Cleaver—the histrionic author of Soul on Ice, one-time presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party, and Minister of Information for the Panthers from 1967 to 1971—who embodied the Panther ideology most vividly He also became a widely admired symbol for countercultural revolt. As Jerry Rubin put it in Do It! (1970)—the once-famous bible of loopy anarchism to which Cleaver contributed an introduction—“We are all Eldridge Cleaver.”

Cleaver was only sixty-two when he died in May 1998. Nearly all the obituaries—and they were plentiful and long—noted that Cleaver’s family refused to disclose the cause of death; his periodic addiction to crack cocaine leads one to suspect the worst. (In 1994, the Berkeley police found him staggering about with a severe head wound and crack in his pocket.) By the time he died, Cleaver had been almost totally forgotten. Like many other Sixties radicals (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin), Cleaver descended into a kind of buffoonery in the later years of his life. An obituary in The New York Times sardonically noted that, in the last decades of his life, Cleaver “metamorphosed into variously a born-again Christian, a follower of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Mormon, a crack cocaine addict, a designer of men’s trousers featuring a codpiece, and even, finally, a Republican.”

“Even, finally, a Republican”: well, Cleaver clearly came to a bad end, at least from the Times’s point of view. The Times, like the rest of the liberal establishment, saw something ludicrous in Cleaver’s having become a Republican. No one on the Left saw anything ludicrous in his being a poet of rape and an apologist for “picking up the gun.” In fact, Cleaver’s career is a good illustration of the important but easily forgotten truth that buffoonery is no enemy of violence or savagery. Mussolini was a buffoon; so was Idi Amin. Cleaver was not quite in their league, but our Paper of Record honored the former Black Panther with a long obituary because he had once been a nationally recognized hero of the counterculture, a figure who was as feared by the establishment as he was lionized by the radical Left. When Cleaver began teaching an experimental course at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1968, then-Governor Ronald Reagan was outraged: “If Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home one night and slit our throats.” The Times quotes Mr. Reagan’s warning almost in jest, as if to say, “You see how silly Reagan was, worrying about Eldridge Cleaver! Why, in 1982, he was booed by Yale’s Afro-American student society for supporting Reagan.”

Yes, but that was in 1982. Fifteen years earlier it was a different story.

Born in Arkansas in 1935, Cleaver grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles. His father was a dining-car waiter, his mother worked as a janitor. His childhood was marked by a string of petty crimes and convictions. He was first sent to prison in 1954, when he was eighteen, for possession of marijuana. Released in 1957, he was soon arrested again, this time for rape and attempted murder. It was while serving a two-to-fourteen-year sentence for these crimes that Cleaver immersed himself in the writings of various revolutionary authors (Marx, Tom Paine, Lenin, Bakunin, et al.), black American writing (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, W E. B. Du Bois), and the gritty beginnings of countercultural bombast (Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs). Starting to write himself, Cleaver, through his lawyer, came to the notice of various literary figures, including Norman Mailer, who petitioned the authorities to have Cleaver paroled.²⁰

Rape as an insurrectionary act

Cleaver was catapulted to fame in 1968 with the publication of his book Soul on Ice. Written almost entirely while he was in Folsom Prison, the book is a loosely knit series of letters and essays about race relations in America, prison life, one or two black literary figures, and, above all, Cleaver’s sexual obsessions, especially his obsession with white women. (“Desire for the white woman;” he wrote, “is like a cancer eating my heart out.”) Most of the book had first appeared in Ramparts magazine, the incendiary, radical-Left monthly on whose masthead Cleaver later appeared as an editor. The book is remarkable partly for its rage, partly for its embarrassing sentimentality. On the one hand, Cleaver concludes an essay on Malcolm X with the warning that “we shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.” On the other, his concluding piece, “To All Black Women, From All Black Men,” is full of hortatory appeals such as this: “let me drink from the river of your love at its source, let the lines of force of your love seize my soul by its core and heal the wound of my Castration, let my convex exile end its haunted Odyssey in your concave essence, ...” etc.

Soul on Ice is not a good book. Indeed, it is barely a book at all: more a collection of manifestos and imprecations. But in its day it had an enormous influence and reputation. It was widely assigned in schools and colleges (I first came across it in high school), and it is still in print, thirty years later, in a mass-market edition. The introduction, by the critic Maxwell Geismar, established the tenor of the book’s reception: “Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing.... He rakes our favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight back or laugh with him for the service he has done us.”

Here, from the book’s title essay, is a sample of what “one of the best cultural critics” then writing sounds like:

I’d like to leap the whole last mile and grow a beard and don whatever threads the local nationalism might require and comrade with Che Guevara, and share his fate, blazing a new pathfinder’s trail through the stymied upbeat brain of the New Left, or how I’d just love to be in Berkeley right now, to roll in that mud, frolic in that sty of funky revolution, to breathe in its heady fumes, and look with roving eyes for a new John Brown, Eugene Debs, a blacker-meaner-keener Malcolm X, a Robert Franklin Williams with less rabbit in his hot blood, an American Lenin, Fidel, a Mao-Mao, A MAO MAO, A MAO MAO, A MAO MAO, A MAO MAO, A MAO MAO, A MAO MAO.... All of which is true [ellipsis in original].

Actually, that’s only part of what Cleaver sounds like. Another critic noted that the book is also full of that “grand, old-fashioned Lawrentian and Maileresque myth-making” (this was meant as praise):

Each half of the human equation, the male and female hemispheres of the Primeval Sphere, must prepare themselves for the fusion by achieving a Unitary Sexual Image. ... The quest for the Apocalyptic Fusion will find optimal conditions only in a Classless Society, the absence of classes being the sine qua non for the existence of a Unitary Society in which the Unitary Sexual Image can be achieved.

If it seems difficult to understand why such babbling should earn widespread respect, remember that Norman Mailer had wowed critical opinion a decade earlier with equally profound observations, viz: “the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.”

By itself, Cleaver’s Mailerian rhetoric would have earned him kudos, but not adoration. For that, he needed the added spice of racially infused criminality. Here is the passage that, perhaps more than any other, won Cleaver his converts:

I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically—though looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild, and completely abandoned frame of mind.

Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women —and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

Had he been left at liberty, he notes, he undoubtedly would have “slit some white throat”

Of course, Cleaver includes a few words of contrition; he was, he admits, “wrong”; in the end, he “could not approve of rape.” But what made his reputation—as much among whites as among blacks—was the militancy: his infamous image of “rape as an insurrectionary act,” not his qualifying remarks; his slogan “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem,” not his later concessions. (Since he was “an extremist by nature,” Cleaver reasoned, “it is only right that I should be extremely sick.”)

There were a few dissenting notices. David Evanier writing in The New Leader was perhaps most accurate when he noted that “the style throughout ... is pop Leftism, a mixture of sex and revolution characteristic of the New Left.” But such demurrals were vastly overshadowed by the praise. “Original and disturbing” (The Saturday Review); full of “revolutionary zeal” (The New York Times Book Review); “a collection of essays straight out of Dante’s Inferno” (The Progressive); “beautifully written.... A brilliant book” (The Nation), etc. Writing for The New York Review of Books, Jack Richardson tells us that Soul on Ice “has a rare honesty, ... a dramatic temper that makes it a point gently to remind us of who is speaking and from where.” Gently? Well, for Richardson, “minds like Cleaver’s are sorely needed, minds that can fashion a literature which does not flaunt its culture but creates it.” So it was hardly any wonder that The New York Times declared Soul on Ice one of the ten best books of the year.

“White Standards and Negro Writing”

Perhaps the most egregious act of critical adulation came from the Yale professor Richard Gilman. In a long review called “White Standards and Negro Writing” in The New Republic, Gilman trotted out all the usual adjectives: Soul on Ice was “unsparing,” “tough,” “lyrical,” admittedly “foolish at times” but “extraordinarily convincing in the energy and hard morale of its thinking.”

What made Gilman’s essay notable, however, was not its praise but its effort to place Cleaver outside not only “white standards” of literary achievement but also “white standards” of legality. According to Gilman, writing by blacks like Cleaver “remains in some sense unassimilable for those of us who aren’t black” because “the Negro doesn’t feel the way whites do, nor does he think like whites.” In contemporary America, “moral and intellectual ‘truths’ have not the same reality for Negroes and whites.” (Note the scare quotes: does Gilman doubt there are such things as intellectual and moral truths?) Because “Negro suffering is not of the same kind as ours,”he does not, as a white critic, have the “right” to compare Cleaver’s thinking with “other ‘classic’ ways of grappling with sexual experience” or “to subject his findings to the scrutiny of the tradition.” In short, “white criteria” are out of place in judging works by black writers.

Had Gilman been a conservative, or had he ventured to offer any substantial criticism of Cleaver’s paean justifying black rage, his essay would have quickly been attacked for what it is: a piece of racist claptrap, justifying inferior work—and criminality—on the spurious grounds of racial difference. In the event, however, “White Standards and Negro Writing” was part of the radical propaganda of the day. When a respected critic and professor at Yale University tells his readers that “the Negro doesn’t feel the way whites do, nor does he think like whites,” is it any wonder that the Black Panthers should include in their “ten-point program” the demand that all black men be exempt from military service? Or the demand that all black prisoners be released from jail “because,” as Cleaver explained in an interview, “they haven’t had fair trials; they’ve been tried by all white juries, and that’s like being a Jew tried in Nazi Germany”? Asked whether the Panthers were serious about having all black prisoners released, Cleaver replied: “We don’t feel that there’s any black man or any white man in any prison in this country who could be compared in terms of criminality with Lyndon Johnson.”

Gilman was among those establishment critics who helped articulate a rationale for the blatant criminality of the Panthers. When Cleaver was involved in a gun battle with the Oakland police in 1968—an encounter that left a young Panther dead and Cleaver and a police officer wounded—his parole was revoked and he was returned to prison. Two months later, he was released when a judge ruled that he was being held as a political prisoner. A higher court overturned that ruling, however, and Cleaver was facing a long prison term on charges of assault and attempted murder. In New York, dependable radicals like Susan Sontag and the actor Gary Merrill demonstrated on his behalf; the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard urged his audiences to donate to the Cleaver defense fund. Cleaver himself managed to flee the country, stopping first in Cuba before setting up his American “government in exile” in Algiers. In his frequent travels, he was given a warm welcome in the Soviet Union (as it then was), Vietnam, and (the most peculiar radical resort of all) Kim Il Sung’s Korea.

Gradually, Cleaver grew disenchanted with his radical political beliefs; he broke with the Panthers in 1971 and moved to Paris, where he inaugurated his codpiece pants (called “Cleavers”). In the early 1970s, as he recounts in Soul on Fire (1979), he had a mystical vision in which the faces of Marx, Engels, Mao, Castro, and others appeared in the moon, followed by the face of Christ (“I fell to my knees”). Cutting a deal with the authorities, Cleaver returned to the United States in 1975; the attempted murder charge was dropped and he was sentenced to twelve hundred hours of community service.

Eldridge Cleaver was a serial extremist. The content of his beliefs was negotiable; only his fanaticism was constant. This ultimately made him something of a preposterous, indeed a pathetic, figure. But, again, preposterousness is by no means incompatible with malignity. And if Eldridge Cleaver became in his later years a kind of joke, this should not mislead us into thinking that his influence was not, after all, so bad. Like so much about the ethos of the counterculture, the influence of figures like Eldridge Cleaver has been as much in their afterlife as in their life. That is to say, the destructiveness of their ideas and example may be most severe not when they first appear and—whether they be championed or castigated—are regarded by one and all as outrageous. On the contrary, the really toxic effects of a cultural revolution begin to be felt only latterly, when the revolution is agreed to be “over.” By then, its characteristic attitudes have been so widely incorporated into the mainstream of life that they are taken for granted: unnoticed because ubiquitous. Only then do the precepts of the counterculture find their way into the realm of habit, taste, and feeling, becoming along the way not only ideas that are espoused but also a way of life.

The critic Myron Magnet touched on this point in The Dream and the Nightmare (1993), his astute study of how the misguided “idealism” of the counterculture contributed to the plight of America’s underclass:

Just as you didn’t have to frequent singles bars to be affected by the sexual revolution, you didn’t have to live in a commune and eat mushrooms to be affected by the counterculture’s quest for personal liberation. The new adversary stance toward conventional beliefs and ideals, breathlessly reported by the press and diffused almost instantly among the young, quickly put traditional values on the defensive, making them newly problematic even for those who continued to hold them.

And because the counterculture belonged to the young, its influence has persisted into the present, as the original Aquarians have matured into middle age and assumed positions of influence. That’s what accounts for the dreams of so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that they’ll drop out before long, or for the widespread use of cocaine in Hollywood and on Wall Street until recently. What you believe at twenty, as one historian has remarked, has a way of leaving its stamp on your world view for life.

Indeed, a good index of the success of a cultural revolution is the extent to which it has managed to render the ideas and values it set out to subvert not merely “problematic” but inert. A counterculture has really triumphed when it ceases to encounter significant resistance, when its values seem not merely victorious but inevitable.

The long march of America’s cultural revolution is partly the story of the social and moral malaise brought about by a pathology of credulousness. Euphoric hedonism exists on the smiling side of that pathology; on the dour side are clustered many other countercultural phenomena, not least the juvenile political activism and noisy readiness for violence that were such conspicuous features of the age. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hundreds of bombs were detonated as various radical groups carried out their campaign against “Amerika.” According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, “in California alone, 20 explosions a week rocked the state during the summer of 1970.” Fatalities from these insurrectionary acts were comparatively few. Nevertheless, as David Horowitz noted in his autobiography,

far from being peripheral, a criminal-intellectual outlook was central to the vision of Sixties radicalism, articulated in the writings of its most-read authors (Sartre, Debray, and Fanon), and in the speeches of Malcolm X. It was, in fact, a core tradition of the radicalism that went back through Sorel, Bakunin, and Lenin to the Jacobins, the “conspiracy of equals,” and Gracchus Babeuf—in short, to the very origins of the modern Left.

In America, no group better epitomized this militant radicalism than the Black Panthers, and among the Panthers Eldridge Cleaver was—as Susan Sontag might have put it—an exemplary figure. (What Sontag actually said was that Soul on Ice was “perhaps the most eloquent document,” proclaiming that “in a culture judged as inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian, it becomes a revolutionary gesture to be alive.”) Also exemplary was the liberal response to Cleaver, his book, and the cult of the Black Panthers. Sontag would scorn the name “liberal.” But her celebration of Cleaver’s paean to criminal violence was part of the liberal intelligentsia’s collapse into the arms of Radical Chic sentimentality. The extent of that collapse even—indeed, especially—among intellectuals whose entire training should have inoculated them against such mendacities is a critical part of the long march that transformed so much of American life in the 1960s and 1970s.