SHARON: YOUNG AMERICANS FOR FREEDOM
Students for a Democratic Society began, rather appropriately, at a United Auto Workers retreat in the working-class state of Michigan. Its alter ego, the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom, began, equally appropriately, at William F. Buckley’s leafy estate in Sharon township, in the gentrified state of Connecticut. Because the staid YAF does not harmonize with the popular image of the 1960s, supposedly a decade of exuberant rebellion, it has often been ignored in studies of the period. Yet on many campuses conservative activism was more widespread and popular than the left-wing variety. YAF also had more identifiable long-term influence, given the direct line from its radicalism to the neoconservatism of today.
In 1961, Medford Stanton Evans, a disciple of Buckley, boasted that “the Conservative element on . . . campus is now on the offensive; it is articulate, resourceful, aggressive. It represents the group which, in fifteen or twenty years, will be assuming the seat of power in the United States. That is why, in my estimation, it authentically represents the future of the country.” This was not simply conservative hype; American news magazines confirmed that a tidal wave of conservativism was sweeping across college campuses, largely in reaction to Kennedy’s election. US News and World Report, Newsweek, and Time all reported a right-wing revolt, pointing out that campus conservatives were not merely echoing the political prejudices of their parents. For many, in fact, turning right was rebellion. “My parents thought Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest heroes who ever lived,” Robert Schuchman, chairman of YAF, remarked. “I’m rebelling from that concept.” A young conservative at the University of Wisconsin chimed: “You walk around with your Goldwater button, and you feel the thrill of treason.”1
Buckley wanted YAF to act as a counterweight to the supposedly left-wing bias of universities, which seemed to threaten the American way of life. While at Yale in the late 1940s, he discovered “an extraordinarily irresponsible education attitude that, under the protective label ‘academic freedom,’ has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.” By 1960, Buckley had gathered together a core of conservative purists to whom radical-right students could look for guidance. Students would provide the energy, but their mentors would provide direction. Aware of the dangers of youthful immaturity, Buckley had in mind a highly controlled organization able to impose a consistent political line, with power the predominant objective. Recognizing Buckley’s threat, the Nation warned in 1961 that while the left was concentrating on issues like civil rights, the right was busily building a movement.2
YAF’s charter—“The Sharon Statement”—was drafted in Buckley’s living room on September 11, 1960, by Evans. “In time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain moral truths,” the statement proclaimed. Foremost among these truths was free will. In the emphasis placed upon freedom, YAF and SDS had much in common, but while SDS also promoted equality, YAF never did. YAF maintained that “political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom.” The free market was endorsed as “the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom . . . and . . . the most productive supplier of human needs.”3
Big government threatened freedom. “When government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation,” the statement declared. “When it takes from one man to bestow upon another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both.” The biggest threat to freedom was, however, “the forces of international Communism.” The protection of liberty at home required the defeat of, “rather than coexistence with,” the Communist menace. Thus, foreign policy became an extension of domestic affairs. “American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?”4
“What is so striking in the students who met at Sharon is their appetite for power,” Buckley later confessed. For them, politics was not a game but an intensely serious crusade. They equated conservatism with maturity and therefore saw themselves as “older” than their fellow leftist students, whose cultural rebellion seemed trivial. The generation gap hardly bothered them; materialism and conformity seemed worthy ideals. As a result, YAF did not waste its time on parochial issues relating to university life. Dissent was expressed in exclusively national and international terms. Nor did they court publicity, since publicity invited attack. In stark contrast to Hoffman and Rubin, YAF organized in secret and zealously preserved anonymity. “We never got the publicity and we weren’t interested in that,” one activist maintained. While the left sought immediate solutions to distinct social problems, the right concentrated on a gradual assumption of power which would eventually allow them to exercise authority in all realms. Some activists formulated five-year plans; others, more realistically, thought in terms of a conservative millennium decades ahead.5
Buckley provided the iconic inspiration, but much more important was the practical guidance provided by National Review publisher William Rusher and the conservative fundraiser Marvin Liebman. Since age was no barrier to trust, YAF members venerated “old fogeys” like Arizona senator Barry Goldwater and the novelist John Dos Passos. Rather predictably, the Establishment loved YAF, generously providing financial and moral backing. Benefactors like Charles Edison and the manufacturer Herbert Kohler opened their wallets, so much so that Rusher was eventually driven to criticize the “rich-uncle” tendencies which seemed to encourage profligacy Friends in high places also ensured that YAF never had difficulty finding venues for rallies. While SDS struggled to get a parade permit in Ann Arbor, YAF was booking (and filling) Madison Square Garden.6
At its inception, YAF espoused an instinctual conservatism, untainted by pragmatism. For this reason, members revered Barry Goldwater. His proclamation at the Republican convention in 1964 that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” seemed written for YAF. Besotted with Goldwater’s purity, they assumed that the rest of the nation would be equally smitten. For that reason, his landslide defeat left them heartbroken. Lessons were nevertheless learned. Most members concluded that fundamentalist crusades do not harmonize well with electoral politics. They also learned that an ideology, no matter how perfect, still needs an attractive voice. Goldwater’s problem, they decided, was not so much his ideas but his personality.7
The lessons of 1964 explain the enthusiasm with which YAF embraced Ronald Reagan, first in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign and then, two years later, during the Republican presidential campaign. On the surface, Reagan was not a natural YAF standard bearer, since his populism contradicted the intellectual elitism of the movement. But while Reagan lacked ideological purity, he was indisputably a formidable candidate. YAF’s enthusiasm demonstrates that, in contrast to students on the left, the group understood the importance of winning elections and was not irresistibly attracted to the purity of lost causes.
That said, the right had its share of ideological purists. The belief in minimal government and the worship of liberty encouraged some YAF members to espouse a rarefied form of libertarianism, opposing not only welfare and the income tax, but also drug laws and the draft. The “Tranquil Statement,” produced by one such faction, might easily have been mistaken for an SDS document:
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, . . . it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government . . . . When a long train of abuses and usurpations (draft, drug laws, military industrial complex, police terror, taxation, imperialism, sex laws, and government), pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide New Guards to their future security.
YAF, like every other Sixties political movement, had its share of renegades. Holding a party line was the great challenge of the decade. At the 1969 YAF convention, banners like “Fuck the Draft,” “Kill the Commies,” “Fuck the State,” and “Sock it to the Left” reveal the leadership’s difficulty in maintaining conformity. In contrast to SDS, the strength of YAF lay in its ruthless willingness to oust those who jeopardized the quest for power. After that convention, libertarians were purged.8
College campuses provided fertile ground for right-wing politics. According to a poll conducted by Newsweek in 1967, the most popular student political group was the Young Republicans, which had four times as many members as SDS. During that year, 49 percent of college students surveyed considered themselves “hawks,” while only 35 percent were “doves.” At the 1968 election, Americans in their twenties preferred Nixon to Humphrey by a margin of 39 percent to 30 percent. Twenty-five percent supported George Wallace, the most enthusiastic response he received from any age group. All this suggests that YAF might easily have been even more successful than it was, if not for the fact that student apathy (the same demon encountered by the left) prevented political inclinations from being converted to activism.9
“The left battled for the campus; the right won politics,” one YAF member reflected on his years of student activism. Despite its conservatism, YAF was not a collection of squares. They demonstrated that one could not automatically guess a person’s beliefs by what he wore, the length of his hair, or the music and drugs he enjoyed. Many wore the uniform of the counterculture, tasted its pleasures, and shared its craving for freedom. What distinguished them was that they saw no need to indulge in left-wing politics in order to be part of the Sixties ethos and did not confuse the personal with the political. They accepted sex and drugs as simple pleasures, instead of investing them with profound political meaning. Ironically, they occupied a political position, as students, to which a good many of their campus adversaries would eventually gravitate, after their brief flirtation with socialism. As one activist who later served in the Reagan administration remarked: “My political views are no different than they [once were], but there has been a change [in] the mainstream—not that I went to the mainstream, but the mainstream came to where we were . . . . Before, I was on the outside; now I’m in the middle.” As Evans rather perceptively remarked in 1961, “Historians may well record the decade of the 1960s as the era in which conservatism, as a viable political force, finally came into its own.”10
LONDON: LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED
At some point in 1967, a gang of drugged-up anarchists from the London Street Commune, backed by some really frightening Hell’s Angels, raided the offices of IT (International Times), hallowed journal of the British counterculture, intent upon seizing control. Chanting “Property is theft!” they ran amok for most of an afternoon. The invasion plunged the IT staff into a deep moral dilemma. Many believed that property was indeed theft, and had argued as much in their paper. After frenetic debate, staff members decided that the principle did not apply to one’s own property. Unfortunately, they lacked the muscle to eject the invaders. An agonizing argument ensued over whether the police—hated agents of oppression—should be summoned. Eventually, principles gave way to pragmatism and the cops were called. Order was restored.
The dilemma encapsulates the nebulous nature of the British counterculture, a reactive movement based more on feeling than on logic. If the counterculture seems riddled with contradictions, that is because its “sacred” principles varied widely, according to time and circumstance. “The political character of the underground is . . . amorphous,” wrote Germaine Greer in 1969, “because it is principally a clamor for freedom to move, to test alternative forms of existence to find if they were practicable, and if they were more gratifying, more creative, more positive, than mere endurance under the system.” To call this amorphous body a movement suggests order, purpose, and organization. It was simply an alternative way of living.11
British hippies discussed “ideology,” and occasionally quoted Marx, Sartre, or Camus, but the talk was like clouds of smoke from a well-rolled spliff endlessly spiraling in the air. The one unanimous ideal was “a better quality of life,” which did not involve gainful employment. “I think it was probably the first time the children went to college without any idea of getting a job at the end of it,” said Sue Miles. “It had never occurred to me what I was going to do, never.” The fellow traveler Richard Trench remembers wanting the world “to be sort of left-wing socialist, but I didn’t want to work. . . . Everybody would work less, everybody would become middle-class like us, everybody would read poetry like us.”12
Indolence made for an uneasy relationship with genuine politicos who worked hard for revolution. The radical historian E. P. Thompson, for instance, derided the counterculture as “psychic self-mutilation, . . . self-absorbed, self-inflating and self-dramatising.” Hippies replied that true liberation could only come through forsaking politics. “Politics is pig-shit,” John Hopkins argued. “What we were doing was political, but it was not party politics. It was alternative politics.” The movement was defined by what it was not, Rosie Boycott felt. “There would be no taxes, there would be no Conservative party, there would be no forcing people into doing what they didn’t want to do, there would be no discrepancy between rich and poor.” Simply by doing whatever they wanted, hippies hoped to “prove that there was a different way of running the world.”13
Logic was oppression, seriousness a disease. Hippies sincerely believed that what was sordid or soul-destroying could be willed out of existence-ugliness could be made to disappear simply by wishing for a better world. Nicola Lane imagined “a sort of Tolkienesque landscape where industry and nuclear weapons and nasty politicians would somehow fade away under the powerful vibes of the good people.” A vague millenarian philosophy was constructed from romantic myth—an airy concoction which had as much historical foundation as a fairy castle. The vision started from the assumption that, in simpler times, people had been happier and work had not been oppressive. Jeff Nuttall envisaged “some kind of a Stone Age village. . . . People would build their own houses imaginatively and live there sophisticatedly and in a literate way and with a total permissiveness and . . . they would live with their hands and with their minds and they would not be dictated to by anybody selling them anything and they would not welcome anybody preaching to them.” A storybook world was built from the bricks of desire and the mortar of innocent imagination. “We are born into a world where work is considered ennobling, unlike the lucky ancient Greeks, for whom a life of leisure was essential for a man of wisdom,” wrote Richard Neville in his hippie manifesto Playpower. “It was during his full-time leisure that man could cultivate his mind and seek the truth. Work was considered degrading. It was something done by slaves. As the centuries rolled by, we all became slaves.” Neville never quite explained who would clean the toilets and remove the rubbish in his world free of work.14
Hippies espoused an alternative culture, but in reality created a parallel universe in which power, though differently distributed, was still crucially important. Labels changed but human nature did not. Middle-class values proved difficult to jettison. Thus, in common with the “straight” world, the counterculture had its own restaurants, bookshops, record stores, newspapers, art galleries, clothing stores, theaters, concert halls, cinemas, travel agencies, and people ripping each other off. Ambitious entrepreneurs did precisely what they might have done in the straight world, while convincing themselves they were rebelling. No surprise, then, that when the party ended, the elite had little difficulty rejoining reality.
Only the middle class could pretend to ignore money. “We weren’t really living in Edge City,” Jerome Burne thought. “We all had parents and backup systems, which the working-class people didn’t have.” Pretense was sometimes difficult, however, since pleasure carried a price. Hippies who eschewed government and politics happily lived off the welfare state, convincing themselves that accepting the dole was a bona fide act of rebellion against capitalism. When funds ran short, they resorted to shady practices to keep reality at bay. They stole, dealt drugs, and fleeced their fellow travelers.15
One of the most disappointing aspects of the underground, for those who sought a perfect world, was the way it mirrored British class divisions. “There were stars, there were walk-ons and there were cannon-fodder,” Peter Roberts recalled. Andrew Bailey found that those at the top of the hippie heap freely exploited their celebrity:
I was slightly in awe of the underground heavies like Richard Neville and Germaine Greer. You’d meet them, you’d be in the same room in parties, but they were stars. The underground had a star system exactly as did pop music and films and everything else. The stars knew what they were doing: they were as fundamentally insincere as everybody else. They knew what people wanted them to be, to look like, and to say and they dutifully went ahead and performed that task for the pleasure of television and the rest of the media.
“There were rich people and there were poor people and there were people in the middle,” Cheryll Park recalled. “Elitism took the whole movement over. . . . If you were an ordinary person who lived in some suburb, you had no chance at all.” Jonathan Park found the cynicism demoralizing. “The elitism meant that I was always an outsider, I had no starry nature, no wild wit or gift of the gab, lots of money or leather trousers.” Another camp follower recalled: “The prevailing memory I have of the 60s is the fear of being uncool.”16
While cynicism lurked beneath the surface, innocence was official policy. Hippies tried to ignore capitalism, even though they still had to buy goods and exchange money. Their naïveté rendered them easy prey. Crooks camped out on their perfect island, entrepreneurial sharks swam offshore and vultures circled overhead. “Movement people steal from each other more than from Harrods,” Neville reluctantly discovered. Craig Sams tried to run a macrobiotic cafeteria on an honesty system, but found that hardly anyone voluntarily paid. Miles tried to run an alternative bookshop, but was plagued by hippies who would run off with handfuls of books, shouting “Books should be free!”17
The underground eventually fell victim to its own success. The quest for more outrageous and magnificent happenings catapulted countercultural impresarios back into the real world. “You had to get record company support, you had to build stages, you had to pay for security, you had to pay for police,” Peter Jenner recalled. Principles gave way to profit. “That’s when they started doing things with Richard Branson, loathsome people like that who started living off the underground, pretending to be hip.” Clever entrepreneurs like Branson and Felix Dennis spotted opportunities and moved in for the kill. Sue Miles recalled Tony Elliott coming into the IT office one day and announcing that he wanted to do a listings magazine. The general reaction was (Hey, cool”—everyone instantly agreed that he could have what had previously been a neglected section of the magazine. What they failed to realize was that Elliott was a corporate raider dressed in a kaftan. He stripped a loss-making magazine of its one marketable product, renamed it Time Out, and made millions. “What was important was that we weren’t exclusively dedicated to the alternative society,” Elliott later confessed with admirable honesty.18
A movement founded on novelty discovered it could not keep pace with the constant need to renew itself. Before long, the alternative became orthodox. What started as a carefree adventure in cultural exploration deteriorated into mindless hedonism: mind-numbing drugs and meaningless sex. More fundamentally, hippies found that politics could not simply be ignored, especially not in the highly charged political year of 1968. Ignoring politics was not the same as abolishing it; changing the world was a bit more difficult than lighting a bong.
The idea that “all you need is love” heightened the appeal of the counterculture but also ensured its demise. It seemed so simple, beautiful, and true that the sordid, cruel world could be purified by an innocent outpouring of love. The light-show impresario Mark Boyle saw how flimsy faith doomed the movement: “I was angry with them for not defining what they meant by ‘peace’ and ‘love.’ I said, ‘Everyone through all time has been for peace and love—you’ve got to define what you mean.’ But of course they couldn’t define what they meant, because that would have split the whole thing apart. And the whole consensus among that group of people was entirely based on the fact that everyone was in favour of peace and love.” The counterculture was eventually crushed by its own contradictions. The world simply refused to conform to hippie naïveté. “Were society to be organised according to the rules that we were . . . mapping out, we might have been horrified,” the journalist John Lloyd reflected. “Only afterwards [did] you realise how exploitative it was, how far you were following your own games, your own pursuit of your own desires.”19
The greatest success (and most serious harm) of the underground was that it convinced so many young people that flowers and love could indeed change the world. “She’s leaving home,” the Beatles sang. Parents who had given their children everything watched helplessly as they left home in search of the holy hippie grail. “The people who suffered,” wrote David Widgery, “were . . . those who hung on to the myths and ended up in the squalid rat-infested squat shooting up. If people as a result of reading Oz decided to leave their parents, hitchhike to London and then ended up a mess, the underground, despite its occasional pretensions, couldn’t provide a welfare state. And if you’re going to have a new society based on new values, you need new social institutions.” A lot of people had a lot of fun and emerged in one piece at the end of their brief period of indulgence. For them, no harm was done. But some never returned home; others never returned to sanity.20
Some people lived the Sixties; others merely lived through the decade. In London, where the beautiful people congregated, it was easy to feel part of something. But the hip crowd was a small group from whom fantasy radiated outward and flattery inward. In 1969, a reader from the wilderness wrote an achingly accurate letter to Oz:
Reading your mag makes me feel very small. It’s all right for the Living Theatre to take off their clothes, but I’ve got a few nasty spots which I’m very embarrassed about. The fucking scene out here is nonexistent, we have to do it with our hands. . . . The smoking scene? One of the most efficient drug squads in the country. Then there was the time that I turned up at the Arts Lab to see the Dylan film [Don’t Look Back] and couldn’t afford it. Fifteen bob for a fucking film. I was thrown out by some irate trendy who kept muttering about royalties. I thought the idea of doing your own thing would be cheap and for everybody, not just cliques. I can’t play guitar, write poetry, act or sing, and my understanding of politics and economics is very limited. So what happens to me in the great cultural revolution? In my nineteen years I’ve had three women, a nervous breakdown and some bad education.
Can’t you people realise that twenty miles north of Oz, IT, Arts Labs, etc., NOTHING HAS CHANGED. What’s the fuss about? Do I hear smug laughter?
As a cultural revolution, the Sixties was predominantly white, middle-class, and urban. Miles from the epicenter, the great seismic shifts were felt as tiny tremors. An awareness of what was happening came only from reading newspapers and watching television, not from taking part. “Apparently all hell was breaking loose,” Terri Quaye, a member of Britain’s black community, recalled, “but it made little difference. . . . The release from society’s constraints only applied to the young whites, and as with most phenomena, those enjoying it would find it hard to believe that it was of little consequence to those only permitted to be onlookers.” In 1959, the novelist Beryl Bainbridge was a twenty-five-year-old mother of two living in Liverpool. Motherhood kept her from taking part in the cultural upheaval. “The music and the Purple Hearts passed me by, and it wasn’t until I came to London and Churchill had died and the Kennedys had both been butchered that I woke up to the years I was living through.”21
SAN FRANCISCO: IT’S FREE BECAUSE IT’ S YOURS!
In 1966, thousands of young people went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. The city could accommodate a small community of harmless nonconformists congregating around the intersection of Haight and Ash-bury. It could not, however, adjust to hordes of wannabe hippies—penniless runaways armed only with their fantasies. The “invasion” occurred because of the publicity given to the hippie phenomenon in songs and in the media. Old-timers joked about “bead-wearing Look reporters interviewing bead-wearing Life reporters.” “The media was publishing all these articles about the Haight,” Peter Coyote recalled, “seducing and attracting young people to come out there. . . . The city was capitalizing on it and taking no responsibility for it; telling all these kids . . . to get lost.”22
Coyote helped found the Diggers, self-appointed guardians of the hippie generation. “Our feeling was that they were our kids. . . . This was America . . . We started feeding them and sheltering them and setting up medical clinics, just because it needed to be done.” Charity was not the objective but the by-product; Diggers were trying to create a new society in which suffering would not occur. Like the Provos, they adhered to a philosophy centering on the concept of “free,” which had two intertwined meanings. “Free” meant free of charge, but also free of restraint. That which was free cost nothing but was also liberated and therefore liberating. The word provided description and it implied obligation. The aim was to place the adjective before almost any aspect of human existence and then attempt to bring that imaginary construct into being.
The Digger philosophy was deeply rooted in liberal individualism—the American dream amplified through the prism of LSD. Diggers maintained that individuals should be free to be whatever they wanted to be. Nothing should be predetermined. Freedom could be discovered only through action—by “doing it”—“it” being whatever inspired the individual. Everything the Diggers did, from their free stores to their anarchic street happenings, was designed to expose the tension between freedom and conformity.
The Diggers emerged from the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical group of actors devoted to “guerrilla theater.” The troupe’s aim, according to the founder, R. G. Davis, was to present “moral plays and to confront hypocrisy in society.” “This is our society,” he argued. “If we don’t like it, it’s our duty to change it; if we can’t change it, we must destroy it.” Action-orientated radicalism appealed to Coyote, who had become disenchanted with traditional protest. “It came home to me indelibly that I was never going to change anything in America by walking around carrying a sign. It was a great revelation. It saved me a lot of anxiety and a lot of wasted energy.”23
Through the SF Mime Troupe, Coyote met Peter Berg and Emmett Grogan, both of whom shared his radical politics and restless energy. He developed a “comprehensive world view’ which was essentially Marxist, though without the dogma. “Not necessarily doctrinaire, but analysis: class, cap ital, who owned what, who did what, who worked for what. . . . It was like speed for the imagination. You suddenly started looking at the world in this whole new way. . . . Suddenly, everything came together.” Eventually, working for a theater company, no matter how radical its politics, seemed hypocritical. Coyote, Berg, and Grogan decided that “theater was no longer an adequate vehicle for change, because the fact of paying at the door told you that it was a business.” Receiving reward for an action, putting a value on an achievement, destroyed autonomy. In that sense, fame, praise, and admiration were essentially money. “Free means not copping credit,” one Digger leaflet proclaimed. All action had therefore to be anonymous. “If you received recompense for what you were doing, [in the form of] fame, then it wasn’t Free. . . . You had to be doing it just for the fuck of it.”24
During a 1967 SDS conference, a Digger staged an unusual protest when he suddenly stripped off his clothes. Asked to explain, he replied: “Somebody has to be naked around here.” Ideologies, in other words, were protective clothing which prevented the individual from emerging. Political labels violated autonomy and were therefore “bullshit.” Communists were “creeps,” Grogan felt, while the New Left was “as full of puritanical shit as the country’s right wing was cowardly absurd.” “From our perspective,” Coyote wrote, “all ideological solutions, left and right, all undervalued the individual, and were quick to sacrifice them to the expediencies of their particular mental empires.” Instead of allowing individuality to flourish, radicals clothed themselves in political “truths,” while ritually attacking the intellectual garb of their opponents.25
Along with a distrust of ideologies went a deep suspicion of ideologues. Individuality as espoused by the Diggers was deeply threatening to those who used ideology as a method of control. “I . . . used to joke that Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman would be the people to shoot me,” Coyote reflected. “The Communist party would be the people to shoot me. Not the FBI. All those architects of the revolution, the Tom Haydens of the world, would have blown my brains out, because we stood for the sanctity of the individual.” The Diggers developed a profound suspicion of anyone who sought power. “You scratch a revolutionary,” Coyote said, “[and] I’ll show you a guy who thinks that he should be in charge.”26
Diggers also had no time for the counterculture’s heroes, those who pretended that hedonism had political meaning and escaped commitment in the getaway car of drugs. Timothy Leary was dismissed as naive and irresponsible, a dangerous and self-indulgent publicity seeker. Grogan derided “the absolute bullshit implicit in the psychedelic transcendentalism” promoted by the “tune-in, turn-on, drop-out, jerk-off ideology.” Diggers “were more social-oriented than revelatory,” Berg explained. “If someone took LSD to find out the inner truth and mystery of life, that kind of individual was disregarded or derided. . . . [We] . . . saw drugs in terms of individual personal fulfillment within a social context.”27
Diggers provided “alternatives to society’s skimpy menu of life choices.” They opened “stores” that offered free food and clothing, set up a free medical clinic, and ran a free bank. The bank consisted of a box full of cash from which an individual could take what he needed. He could take, but he must not steal. The oft-repeated slogan went: “It’s free because it’s yours.” Every day, they provided Digger Stew and Digger Bread, sometimes feeding a thousand people. Those who partook had first to pass through a huge wooden frame, brightly painted yellow, called the “Free Frame of Reference.” The frame was intended as a doorway between the actual and the possible. By stepping through it, individuals would change the way they viewed their world.28
Diggers believed fervently that changing the world started with changing oneself. The free stores, Coyote explained, were intended to show “customers” that one’s “life was one’s own, and if you could leap the hurdles of programmed expectations and self-imposed limits, the future promised boundless possibilities.” “One day, on my shift as ‘manager,’” he recalled,
I noticed an obviously poor black woman, furtively stuffing clothing into a large paper bag. When I approached her she turned away from the bag coolly, pretending that it wasn’t hers. In a conventional store, her ruse would have made sense because she knew she was stealing. Smiling pleasantly, I returned the bag to her. “You can’t steal here,” I said. She got indignant and said, “I wasn’t stealing!” “I know,” I said amiably, “But you thought you were stealing. You can’t steal here because it’s a Free Store. Read the sign, everything is free! You can have the whole fucking store if you feel like it.”
Berg was certain that once everything became free, “theories of economics [would] follow social facts. . . . Human wanting and giving, needing and taking, [would] become wide open to improvisation. . . . No owner, no manager, no employees and no cash register. . . . When materials are free, imagination becomes currency for spirit. . . . The question of a free store is simple: What would you have?”29
Rather like the Provos, Diggers engineered gigantic street happenings. One action, which started as a protest against traffic and pollution, had the public participate in a play called “Fool on the Street” by literally taking over the streets and blocking traffic. The police arrived and, in appropriately surreal fashion, began arguing with two huge puppets over the definition of “public” and “free.” Another demonstration, called “Death of Hippie,” was designed as an attack upon the media’s role in publicizing, sensationalizing, and inevitably cheapening the counterculture. A huge coffin was carried through the streets, into which bystanders ceremoniously tossed the paraphernalia of hippie culture, thus registering their disgust with media hype.
Money to fund this great adventure often came from drug dealers who had an interest in keeping the hippie community fed. The Haight Independent Proprietors (HIP) also contributed from profits made selling souvenirs to tourists. Donations proved problematic, however, because, if everything was free, there should technically be no charity. On occasion, when hip philanthropists tried to donate cash, a Digger would burn the money in front of the startled benefactor. When Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and other Beat writers organized a fundraiser at a North Beach bar, Diggers rejected the benevolence, explaining that charity was simply a salve to the conscience and an escape from commitment. In truth, however, moral standards were little more than self-righteous posturing. Diggers could not have survived without help from friends. In order to satisfy their own conscience, they convinced themselves that goods and cash donated had in fact been “liberated.” In some cases this was literally true, as stealing was not unknown. But since property was not acknowledged, neither was theft.30
The Diggers were products of affluence. The economic system they derided was in fact their lifeblood. Great Society welfare programs cushioned the blows of self-imposed poverty. Strictures against charity did not apply to welfare checks and food stamps. More fundamentally, a buoyant economy provided a surplus which could be redistributed as if it were free. “There’s already enough stuff for everybody,” Coyote maintained. “Money is a way of creating scarcity. There’s machinery that can create a television set for every man and woman and child on the planet. . . . The money is a valve that’s been put between you and the TV.”31
At the heart of this philosophy was a rather traditional faith in American technology as the Great Provider. Capitalist enterprise was usually seen as a monster, but sometimes as a savior, since it had the potential to provide for everyone, while at the same time setting the masses free. “Give up jobs so computers can do them,” a Digger leaflet instructed. The group sincerely believed that within ten years “machines and computers will do most of the work,” giving the people more time to pursue their dreams. Out of this belief grew the conviction that money would soon become obsolete. In one street pageant celebrating the “Death of Money,” a giant coffin was carried through the streets, into which spectators threw bills and coins.32
The attack upon conformity did not extend to a destruction of patriarchy. “Our men are tough,” a pamphlet proclaimed. “They have style, guile, balls, imagination, and autonomy. Our women are soft, skilled, fuck like angels; radiate children scent and colors like the crazy bells that mark our time.” Coyote admitted that “[women] were the real backbone of the whole deal,” because they could use their charm to liberate supplies from local merchants and wholesalers. A skimpy blouse worn with no bra could buy a lot of free food. Digger women also had to deal with pregnancies and childrearing in what was a frontier existence. Coyote recalled fierce arguments between women who needed money for their babies, and men “who wanted truck parts or . . . a bag of smack.” A strict hierarchy existed in which the men were “creating mythologies, dreaming, scoring dope. . . . The guys held down a lot of the visionary, metaphysical end of things. You know, like in an orthodox Hebrew community. The men are studying Talmud and they’re looking at heaven. The women are taking care of the household and paying the bills and cooking the food.” Men’s work was important because men did it, women’s work trivial because women did it. “The women were literally kept barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen making herb tea for the guys,” the singer Tracy Nelson recalled. “Either that, or they were this bizarre kind of whore . . . just the total earthy sexual persona.” Inequities could be excused by reference to the absolute certainty that everyone was free to do as he or she pleased. “Basically, in an autonomous system, you’re on your own,” Coyote insisted.33
Diggers had a pathological aversion to organization, structure, and leadership. “There must not be a Plan,” one leaflet proclaimed. “We have always been defeated by our Plan.” This aversion to management eventually spelled the end of the free food program. “Well, man, it took a lot of organization to get that done. We had to scuffle to get the food. Then the chicks or somebody had to prepare it. Then we got to serve it. A lot of people got to do a lot of things at the right time or it doesn’t come off. Well, it got so that people weren’t doing it. . . . Now you hate to get into a power bag and start telling people what to do, but without that, man, well.” “There was no leader,” one anonymous Digger complained in April 1967. “Whoever happened to come in and sit behind the desk assumed control until someone else happened in to sit. No one knew what anyone else was doing and no one would assume . . . responsibility.” The “O’Donnell Plan,” the brainchild of Tommy O’Donnell, called for the setting up of a six-man committee to direct the various Digger enterprises. Unfortunately, that idea contained too many words “plan,” “committee,” “direct,” etc.) abhorrent to the true Digger. The old guard reacted by running away.34
The Diggers were victims of their own success. Admirers took them more seriously than they themselves ever intended. Perhaps inevitably they spawned imitations. Digger groups started popping up around America, with “free” stores especially prevalent in the hippie community of New York City. This led to factionalism, envy, and conflict. Apparently the only thing that wasn’t free was the Digger identity, which the founders hoarded jealously. They were especially perturbed at their inability to prevent the corruption of the hippie ethic by the media. “Death of Hippie,” their last great demonstration, was more a pained acceptance of defeat than an act of defiance.
Most of the original Diggers escaped to the hills, taking with them those parts of the philosophy they found holy. Grogan decided to walk back to his New York home, in symbolic counterpoint to the traditional American tendency to equate western migration with renewal. Several years later, he was found dead on a New York subway, the victim of a heroin overdose. When Coyote recalls the short history of the Diggers, he remembers the enormous creativity and vitality, but also those who did not survive.
Coyote once described the Diggers as “social safe-crackers, sandpapering our nervous systems and searching for the right combinations that would spring the doors and let everyone out of the box.” That quest was ultimately unsuccessful, in some cases disastrously so. Diggers never quite appreciated the subtle interplay between individual fulfillment and social responsibility. Nor did they understand the sense of security that lies in structure and ownership: boxes feel safe. Their version of freedom might have been essentially American, but for most Americans it was completely alien. A beautifully symbolic act of rejection came during the Summer of Love, when the free store in San Francisco was burglarized.35
For Coyote, the lessons were personal and social. The personal lesson had to do with the limits of freedom, and probably saved his life:
There were real prices to pay—and sometimes the body, sometimes your life itself, was the coin. . . . My investigation of limits began when I was bedridden for fifteen weeks with my second case of serum hepatitis. And I was on a ranch, by myself, with no electricity, and I couldn’t walk. I lay in bed and I thought: How did I get here? And it started me rethinking about what was healthy. What was health? What did it mean? And once you accept anything as tacked down, then you begin to build a structure, to accept limits. Then you have to make a choice as to whether or not you’re going to accept that structure. If you do, you give up the notion of total freedom. Your freedom only becomes meaningful within that structure.
From that lesson came a realization that undiluted freedom was, ironically, tyrannical. “I sat in rooms and listened to people oppressing everyone . . . in the name of freedom,” he recalled. “It restricted you from participating in anything which the majority culture endorsed.” In his case, this meant that he was not allowed to pursue his passion for acting through conventional theater or films. “We adhered to a one-sided vision. We excluded people who didn’t see it our way. We created a dichotomous universe: us and them, good guys and bad guys. And to some degree, you define yourself, or one defines oneself, by what one’s not.”36
Structure, Coyote came to realize, was absolutely essential to human fulfillment: “Any structure is mutable, but once you’ve chosen it, then you have to accept it—if you’re ever going to get any depth. Because depth only comes in the struggle with limits. If there are no limits, you’re like a water strider skimming over the surface of the water. It’s only struggling against the geometry of a piano that you really find out what it can do. If you had a piano with unlimited keys . . . what’s it mean? . . . It means you write songs that nobody sings and nobody remembers.” “I no longer see anything as free,” he concluded. “Because ‘free’ to me means ‘without limits.’ And free means not interdependent.” “Autonomy,” that great Digger shibboleth, was ultimately recognized for the danger it posed and the harm it caused.
GREENWICH VILLAGE: YIPPIEI!
Yippie started out as an exclamation, uttered in a Greenwich Village flat on New Year’s Eve, 1967. Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, and Abbie Hoffman were gathered in semi-serious discussion. Out of the smoky haze emerged an idea, in a manner symptomatic of pot. Why not transform a lifestyle into an ideology? Or, better yet, a political party? The word “party” had delightful double meaning. “We realized that we couldn’t build things around just a youth festival,” Rubin explained. “We had to build it around a new person. Let’s create a new figure, we said, a long-haired, crazy revolutionary. I said it had to have youth in it because we definitely believed it was a generational thing. And it had to be international because we envisioned youth festivals in Russia, in Latin America.” Krassner shouted “Yippie!” and a movement was born. Exclamation eventually became acronym—“Yippie” would stand for Youth International Party. “What’s a Yippie?,” Hoffman was asked. “A hippie who has been hit over the head by a cop.”37
Rubin and Hoffman defined four specific objectives to guide their new movement:
| 1. | The blending of pot and politics into a political grass-leaves movement—a cross-fertilization of the hippie and New Left philosophy. |
| 2. | A connecting link that would tie as much of the underground together as was willing into some gigantic national get-together. |
| 3. | The development of a model for an alternative society. |
| 4. | The need to make some statement, especially in revolutionary action-theater terms, about LBJ, the Democratic party, electoral politics, and the state of the nation. |
For Rubin, the Yippie movement offered the chance to fuse the counterculture and political protest, which had previously been antagonistic. He was enchanted by the drug scene, but still attracted to politics. Hoffman provided the solution. “In Abbie Hoffman he found a man who had developed a style of action which would liberate the person . . . as well as changing society,” Rubin’s friend Stew Albert recalled. “If it was Hippie which gave Jerry a sense of his own liberation, it was Abbie and Yippie which gave him a way of carrying it out.” Or, as Timothy Leary recounted: “The dogmatic leftist activist chapter had been written, and here was Merry Jerry the Lysergic Lenin, the grass Guevara, the mescaline Marx.”38
Yippies originally saw themselves as a sort of East Coast branch of the Diggers, much to the Diggers’ dismay. While the Yippies mirrored Digger theatricality, they could not match their social conscience. That deficiency was important, since ethics gave Digger mayhem meaning. The Yippies, in contrast, were percussion without melody and lyrics. A telling distinction can be made between how the two groups looked upon the thousands of runaways who flocked to hippie havens. The Diggers saw tragedy and desperately tried to help them. The Yippies, in contrast, saw cannon fodder. “Runaways are the backbone of the youth revolution,” Hoffman claimed. “A fifteen-year-old kid who takes off from middle-class American life is an escaped slave crossing the Mason-Dixon line.” As one Yippie pamphlet boasted: “We tear through the streets. Kids love it. They understand it on an internal level. We are living TV ads, movies. Yippie!” Hoffman and Rubin envisaged a Children’s Crusade, ignoring the tragedy this implied.39
While Diggers cultivated anonymity, Yippies craved celebrity. They were pathologically self-obsessed; self-promotion became both method and objective. “Jerry was always a media junky,” Coyote reflected. “Abbie, who was a friend of mine, was always a media junky. We explained everything to those guys, and they violated everything we taught them.” Coyote was especially incensed by Hoffman’s decision to publish Steal This Book, a guide to the scams which would allow the would-be hippie to live on the street without having to get a job. According to Coyote, that book “blew the hustle of every poor person on the Lower East Side by describing every free scam then current in New York—which were then sucked dry by disaffected kids from Scarsdale.”40
Cleverly turning selfish gratification into ideology, Hoffman articulated a political and cultural vision based solely on the fulfillment of desire. “I don’t like the concept of a movement built on sacrifice, dedication, responsibility, anger, frustration, and guilt. All those down things. I would say, Look, you want to have more fun, you want to get laid more, you want to turn on with your friends, you want an outlet for your creativity, then get out of school, quit your job. Come on out and help build the society you want. Stop trying to organize everybody but yourself. Begin to live your vision.” In Hoffman’s view, it was entirely possible to smoke, dance, and fuck for the revolution. Marijuana, LSD, free love, long hair, and psychedelic music were chisels for chipping away at the Establishment. “I consider the yippies to be an acid movement,” Rubin once remarked, “in that the attempt is to wipe out a person’s total frame of reference, and to establish a new frame of reference. We are trying to put the country on an acid trip.”41
Simply being a hippie was not, however, enough; Yippies believed that the Establishment would crumble under the weight of nonconformity. They insisted upon action; “Just do it” was Rubin’s mantra. “Act first. Analyze later. Impulse—not theory—makes the great leaps forward.” Borrowing from the Diggers, they staged their own version of guerrilla theater, which Hoffman called “media-freaking.” Not much thought was given to the message, since action was the point. “Once you get the right image, the details aren’t that important,” Hoffman explained. “Over-analyzing reduced the myth. A big insight we learned during this period was that you didn’t have to explain why. That’s what advertising was all about. ‘Why’ was for critics.” Everything was geared to generating maximum publicity. “The trick to manipulating the media is to get them to promote an event before it happens,” Hoffman explained. “In other words, . . . get them to make an advertisement for . . . revolution—the same way you would advertise soap.”42
Politics became theater, an arena to act out fantasies. Taking drugs and wearing silly costumes were imagined to be profound political statements. Having fun was a way of thumbing one’s nose at the Establishment. On one occasion Yippies talked their way into the New York Stock Exchange and dropped dollar bills from the gallery to the trading floor below. The point was to watch the traders in imaginary money trample over each other in order to grab real money. The stunt worked, but it was just a stunt—the message was lost on all but the perpetrators.
“We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish,” another Yippie manifesto proclaimed. “This is not a program demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.” What precisely that meant was not clear, but, then, it wasn’t supposed to be. Words were chosen for the outrage they inspired rather than the meaning they conveyed. “Outrageous talk was cheap,” Todd Gitlin argued, with the Yippies in mind. Rubin dreamt of “the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik,” without really contemplating the implications. He saw himself as the model of the “dope-taking, freedom-loving, politically committed activist.” The Yippie recipe for revolution was effortless and simple: having fun, dressing up, and getting high would somehow create a better world. Oppression and conformity would be defeated by color and fantasy. Ideology in other words, wasn’t necessary as long as the spirit was powerful. “Ideology,” Rubin argued, “is a brain disease.” In reply to that statement, an angry Fred Halstead of the Socialist Workers party wrote: “I have to plead guilty. I read books and I try to learn from the past. . . . And in order to get the masses you have to achieve unity of diverse forces, and that takes some careful detailed work, some boring, yes, some boring things.”43
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was supposed to bring the great transformation from hippie to Yippie. The plan called for hippies to converge upon Chicago for a festival of youth, where they would be politicized by the experience of sharing center stage with the earnest members of the antiwar movement and the brutal forces of the Establishment. Chicago would be not just an act of protest against the war or the government, but the start of a concerted offensive against American culture. Rubin explained:
Our idea is to create a cultural, living alternative to the Convention. . . . We want all the rock bands, all the underground papers, all the free spirits, all the theater groups—all the energies that have contributed to the new youth culture—all the tribes—to come to Chicago, and for six days we will live together in the park, sharing, learning, free food, free music, a regeneration of spirit and energy. . . . The . . . Convention . . . gives us a stage, a platform, an opportunity to do our own thing, to go beyond protest into creative cultural alternative.
The purpose, said Rubin, was to “put people through tremendous, radicalizing changes.” He wanted to stimulate a “massive white revolutionary movement which, working in . . . cooperation with the rebellions in the black communities, could seriously disrupt this country, and thus be an internal catalyst for a breakdown of the American ability to fight guerrillas overseas.” Among the left, quite a few people were bothered at the way Yippies turned naive youths into cannon fodder. “When [Rubin] tells us he supports ‘everything which puts people into motion, which creates disruption and controversy, which creates chaos and rebirth,’ he might easily be one of the Fascist intellectuals explaining the merits of German National Socialism,” argued David McReynolds of the War Resistance League. Rolling Stone warned that the “media gamesmanship” risked “serious injury and possible Death.” “You radicals are all alike,” Phil Ochs told Rubin; “lashing out at the approaching armed tractor with Yo-Yos.”44
“In Chicago in August, every media [outlet] in the world is going to be here,” Rubin told the faithful. “We’re going to be the news, and everything we do is going to be sent out to living rooms from India to the Soviet Union to every small town in America. It is a real opportunity to make clear the two Americas. . . . At the same time we’re confronting them, we’re offering our alternative and it’s not just a narrow, political alternative—it’s an alternative way of life.” Copious quantities of drugs encouraged outrageous fantasies of infinite possibility. Yippies convinced themselves that they could attract hordes to Chicago and that those hordes could, in one dramatic act, bring a nation to its knees. In fact, protesters were vastly outnumbered by police. Not given to introspection, Yippies blamed everyone but themselves. “We looked around Lincoln Park and counted noses—maybe 2,000 to 3,000 freaks—and we organizers looked at each other sadly,” Rubin reflected. “We once dreamed 500,000 people would come to Czechago. We expected 50,000. But [Mayor] Daley huffed and puffed, and scared the people away.”45
Rubin nevertheless found reason for pride. “Although we were few, we were hard core,” he later wrote. “And we were motherfucking bad. We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed. We were a public display of filth and shabbiness, living in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards. We pissed and shit and fucked in public; we crossed streets on red lights; and we opened Coke bottles with our teeth. We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.” By every sane standard, Chicago was an abject failure. The crowd of protesters was tiny. No great countercultural conflagration started. The Establishment did not come tumbling down. But, like the spindoctor he would become, Rubin turned failure into success. “Everybody played out their karma,” he claimed. “It was all perfect. We wanted to show that America wasn’t a democracy, that the convention wasn’t politics. The message of the week was of an America ruled by force. That was a big victory.” Hoffman, however, wasn’t so sure. By the end of convention week, he’d had enough of Rubin. “Jerry’s a tough son of a bitch,” he later wrote. “He’s got a hell of a fuckin’ ego. . . . Jerry wants to show the clenched fist. I want to show the clenched fist and the smile.”46
“They were trapped in a media loop, dependent on media standards, media sufferance, and goodwill,” argued Gitlin. “These apostles of freedom couldn’t grasp that they were destined to become cliches.” Clichés, yes, but dangerous ones nonetheless. Yippies were dangerous not just for the way they manipulated confused kids, or for the violence they inspired, but also for the damage they caused to political protest in general. Because they came at the end of the decade of protest, critics saw them as a logical conclusion rather than as an aberration. It was easy to dismiss the entire political culture on the basis of this single, warped offspring. A movement without ideology is a balloon without a string. Action has to seem to have a point—otherwise, it appears self-indulgently nihilistic. While they tried to inspire outrage, in the end Yippies aroused mainly scorn.47
OAKLAND: THE BLACK PANTHERS
Huey Newton was a beautiful man, the perfect image of black pride. He could easily have passed for a running back for the San Francisco 49ers, or a model straight out of Ebony. In fact, he was minister of defense of the Black Panther party, a revolutionary who loved to quote Mao: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” In the late 1960s, one could often find, in the dorm rooms of white students, a poster of Huey, looking suitably bad, with a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other. Fantasists put that poster next to the one of Che.48
Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, in late 1966. They were socialists, though they did not have much truck with Marx. They disagreed with his contention that it was impossible to form a revolution out of the raw material of the peasant class, preferring instead the ideas of Franz Fanon and Che. Peasants, they believed, responded not to words, but to action. In 1968, Newton declared:
The large majority of black people are either illiterate or semi-literate. They don’t read. They need activity to follow. . . . The same thing happened in Cuba, where it was necessary for twelve men with a leadership of Che and Fidel to take to the hills and then attack the corrupt administration. . . . They could have leafleted the community and they could have written books, but the people would not respond. They had to act and the people could see and hear about it and therefore become educated on how to respond to oppression.
Panthers believed that a revolutionary mass could be formed from the human detritus of the ghetto, from the “brothers off the block—brothers who had been . . . robbing banks . . . pimping . . . peddling dope . . . brothers who had been fighting pigs—because . . . once you organize those brothers . . . you get niggers . . . you get revolutionaries who are too much.” In line with Fanon’s philosophy, violence was presented as an effective way to empower the oppressed: through fighting came liberation.49
The Panthers were part social workers, part ghetto army. They set up schools for black children, political education classes, free health clinics, and free breakfast clubs. Most of the demands outlined in their party platform were entirely reasonable, encompassing education, housing, full employment, human rights, and an end to police brutality. Others, however, betrayed the militant nature of their politics. They wanted blacks to be exempt from military service and those in prison to be freed immediately since they could not, by definition, have received a fair trial. Finally, they demanded “a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”50
The Panthers were an outgrowth of the intensifying black consciousness in the 1960s, expressed as Black Power. Neither the party itself, nor the name chosen, was entirely original. After the disappointments of the 1964 Democratic convention, Stokely Carmichael went back to Mississippi intent on forming a black political party in Lowndes County, which was 80 percent black. The state Democratic party, which excluded blacks, had a provocative white rooster as its official symbol. Carmichael chose as his symbol a black panther, which would make short work of a rooster.
Carmichael became the most outspoken advocate of Black Power. Martin Luther King found Carmichael’s enthusiasm for “Black Power” disruptive and the phrase itself too aggressive. He tried to persuade Carmichael to substitute “Black Equality,” but had no success. King’s misgivings merely underlined the fact that he could no longer claim authority over the militant wing of the civil rights movement. To militants, the threatening nature of the phrase “Black Power” defined its perfection. As Julius Lester wrote in Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mania!:
Everybody wanted to know what this Black Power meant. If SNCC had said Negro Power or Colored Power, white folks would have continued sleeping easy every night. But BLACK POWER! Black. That word. BLACK! And the visions came of alligator infested swamps arched by primordial trees and moss dripping from the limbs and out of the depths of the swamp, the mire oozing from his skin, came the black monster, and fathers told their daughters to be in by nine instead of nine-thirty. . . . BLACK POWER! My god, the niggers were gon’ start paying white folk back. . . . The nation was hysterical.
Black Power went hand in hand with the decision to extend agitation into the North. Northern whites would come under attack, and they would henceforth be unable to pretend that racism was a contagion quarantined in the South. The problem, Carmichael argued, was not Southerners but white people in general. For white liberals who had devoted themselves to the civil rights cause, this seemed a cruel rebuff.51
After Carmichael took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966, replacing the moderate John Lewis, he turned it into a movement synonymous with Black Power and violence, rendering its name a contradiction. Within months, a ruling was proposed to ban white people. It narrowly passed (19 to 18, with twenty-four abstentions). This left white liberals understandably confused as to where to devote their energy. They were not, however, the only ones ostracized as a result of the new fashion for separation. Since whites were defined as oppressors and blacks as victims, the black who succeeded in the white man’s world was clearly a traitor—an Uncle Tom.
That argument was put forward most vehemendy by Eldridge Cleaver, a highly talented writer who used his gift to peddle hatred. In his book Soul on Ice, which he wrote while imprisoned on a rape charge, Cleaver savaged those who had previously been role models, including James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Lena Home, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and of course Martin Luther King. King’s “award of a Nobel prize . . . and the inflation of his image to that of an international hero, bear witness to the historical fact that the only Negro Americans allowed to attain national or international fame have been the puppets and the lackeys of the power structure.” For militant blacks, it became fashionable to disparage King. After 1966, the angriest reaction King received was often from his own people, who shouted him down with chants of “Black Power!” King took to reminding his listeners that “whenever Pharaoh wanted to keep the slaves in slavery he kept them fighting among themselves.”52
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale disagreed with Carmichael on the matter of soliciting white help. Since they believed that the class struggle transcended race, they were willing to form alliances with anyone eager “to move against the power structure.” Rejecting black nationalism as too negative, they railed against the “racism” inspired by Malcolm X. In any case, whites had money, and Panthers liked to spend it. But while they did not reject white help, neither did they trim their sails to attract it. They were, in the nomenclature of the time, bad dudes who reveled in badness. Loving the Panthers became radical chic, an acquired taste rather like smoking filterless cigarettes and drinking Mezcal. At a fundraiser in New York hosted by Leonard Bernstein, rich whites and militant blacks shared champagne and canapés. One Panther promised a white woman “that she would not be killed even if she is a rich member of the middle class with a self-avowed capitalist for a husband.” For those hoping to induce mea culpa, the Panthers were a potent purgative. They were also fashionable among those who thought it cool to talk of killing. White middle-class kids who dreamed of “offing pigs” (killing policemen) derived vicarious pleasure from the fact that some Panthers were actually doing this.53
The “self-defense” part of the group’s official tide came from the fact that the members were dedicated to combating police brutality. They took to following police patrols through the Oakland ghetto, proudly brandishing their weapons. Black youths who had never seen anyone stand up to white authority so assertively were understandably impressed. Occasional gunfights enhanced the image of ghetto Robin Hoods. “Ninety percent of the reason we carried guns in the first place was educational,” Newton proclaimed. “To set an example,. . . to establish that we had the right.” When the California legislature responded by proposing a bill barring the carrying of firearms in public, thirty Panthers burst into the Sacramento statehouse on May 2, 1967, brandishing weapons and proclaiming that the legislation “aim[s] at keeping Black people disarmed and powerless while racist police agencies throughout the country intensify the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of Black people.” Newspapers reported a surreal scene: “grimfaced, silent young men armed with guns roaming the Capitol surrounded by reporters, television cameramen, and stunned policemen and watched by incredulous groups of visiting schoolchildren.” Five Panthers, including Seale, ended up in jail, but, as a gesture calculated to impress, their action was brilliant. Fully aware of the white community’s deep-seated fear of “niggers with guns,” the Panthers intentionally sowed panic.54
For black male youths rendered impotent by poverty and prejudice, there was something understandably appealing about these exemplars of indignant machismo. They offered the opportunity to belong to a group that was built on bravery and pride, and that, far from being cowed by white authority, could make whitey tremble. Panther pride was reinforced by their uniform: black trousers, light-blue shirts, and black leather jackets, complemented by black berets, dark sunglasses, and unconcealed weapons. For a brief period, their allure was contagious; by 1968, they had perhaps 5,000 members, with branches in at least thirty cities. Nor was the attraction confined to males. Regina Jennings was one of a significant number of women attracted to the machismo. “As a runaway since the age of fifteen, a witness to vulgar police brutality, and a victim of racism on my first job, I was ready to become a Panther. Their mystique—the black pants, leather jackets, berets, guns, and their talk—aggressive and direct-attracted me.”55
While Newton was serving time for shooting a police officer, a new generation of leaders emerged, Cleaver the most prominent among them. His obvious intelligence, not to mention the critical success of Soul on Ice, made him a cause célèbre among leftist intellectuals. Clever syntax was, apparently, sufficient compensation for moral failings. Underneath the artistic veneer lurked a racist, psychopathic, misogynist thug who labeled his raping of a white woman “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 woman.”56
While his discourse on politics was often sophisticated, Cleaver’s appeal to the black masses was cynically shallow:
There are enough people in Babylon to kick pig ass from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. We can kick pig ass for days, if we all start doing it. So why not? . . .
In times of revolution, just wars, and wars of liberation, I love the angels of destruction and disorder as opposed to the devils of conservation and law-and-order. Fuck all those who block the revolution with rhetoric—revolutionary rhetoric or counter-revolutionary rhetoric.
We are either pig-killers or pig-feeders. Let the pigs oink for themselves, till their last oink. When we finally pull all of the American people out of their pads, out into the streets, out into the night, into the jungles of our cities, then we will hear some farewell oinking.
Thanks to Cleaver, self-defense gave way to self-promotion. The Panthers’ genuine program of social reform became submerged beneath nihilistic destruction and egotistical attention-seeking. In 1968, cashing in on his enormous popularity among radical intellectuals, he negotiated an alliance with the New Left in California, forming the Peace and Freedom party, which selected him as its candidate for president. Efforts to make the alliance of hippies, Yippies, and ghetto blacks sound logical were thwarted by anarchic gags and puerile vulgarity. His running mate, Jerry Rubin, promised to put LSD in the drinking water, and Cleaver, at a rally dubbed “Pre-Erection Day,” mobilized what he called “pussy power.” He later challenged Ronald Reagan to a duel, offering the governor a choice of weapons: a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or a marshmallow.57
The Panthers were victims of their own hype. The violent image quickly overwhelmed the pastoral role. Writing from prison, Afeni Shakur remarked: “There is a great need for the sisters and brothers to know the true meaning of ‘Power to the People.’ Very few of our young brothers and sisters have ever read the ten-point program. They are unfamiliar with the party’s purpose. We are looked upon as an all-black gang dedicated to destruction. When the brothers in Oakland sat down and put the ten points together, that is not what they had in mind.” Panthers wanted white America to fear them, and white America did precisely that. J. Edgar Hoover called them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The fear they encouraged became justification for extermination. Few protested if a Panther was shot in the back, or, in the case of Fred Hampton, killed by police while sound asleep in his bed. Millions of dollars were spent on espionage and infiltration. Agents provocateurs exacerbated internal tensions and skillfully maneuvered Panthers into violent confrontations with the police.58
The Panthers were also very good at killing one another. Chapters competed in vicious turf wars, made more complicated by the extortion and drug dealing necessary for fundraising. The party was too small to accommodate so many huge egos. Violent arguments also erupted over political issues, in particular the reliance upon white support. Richard Moore, a New York Panther, accused the Oakland group of selling out. Newton and his sidekick David Hilliard were condemned for “destroying the desire in comrades to wage resolute struggle by confining the party to mass rallies and ‘fundraising benefits.’” They were, he argued, encouraging “dependency upon the very class enemies of our people.” Moore especially objected to the way Newton and Hilliard lined their pockets with money collected for the movement. “Outlaws cannot enjoy penthouses and imported furniture,” he argued. Newton and Hilliard had “betrayed . . . young black men and women who came out of the depths of despair that are the ghetto streets and who transformed themselves for an idea that gave meaning to their existence.” While that criticism was justified, in truth there was very little virtue within the Black Panther movement against which to measure its abundant vice.59
The Panthers proved much more adept at impressing middle-class whites than recruiting ghetto blacks. The blacks they did attract proved poor revolutionaries, their pride already polluted by alcohol, drugs, and poverty. Cleaver called them “jackanapes”—an undisciplined mob unable to focus on politics. The problem might, however, have arisen because the Panthers did not offer a sufficiently clear alternative to ghetto culture. The black lumpenproletariat failed to make an effective revolutionary mass, for the simple reason that they could not grasp the distinction between the crimes they were accustomed to committing (drug-dealing, theft, murder) and the political crimes their leaders committed (drug-dealing, theft, murder).
DELANO: BOYCOTT GRAPES
In the Sixties, white Californians were stubbornly disdainful of the Hispanic culture that surrounded them. They lived in houses designed to look like haciendas on streets with Spanish names, dined out at Mexican restaurants, and listened to pasteurized versions of mariachi, courtesy of groups like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. (No one in Alpert’s band was actually Hispanic. He used to joke that the band consisted of “three pastramis, two bagels, and an American cheese.”) The Chicanos themselves were ignored. They cleaned houses, mowed lawns, and picked fruit, but where they came from and where they went at night, no one seemed to care. They were not a problem, since, unlike blacks, they didn’t protest, even though unemployment among Chicanos was higher than in any other ethnic group. The McCone Commission investigating the Watts riot drew attention to the fact that the Hispanic community in Los Angeles was almost equal in size to the black community, and suffered more. “That the Mexican-American community did not riot is to its credit,” the commission concluded. “It should not be to its disadvantage.”60
Many of the Mexicans were braceros—farm workers from south of the border who, under the terms of a bilateral agreement, were recruited to work in US fields. The first such agreement lasted from 1917 to 1921 and was terminated when the Mexican government protested that the workers were little short of slaves, their pitifully low wages wiped out by their indebtedness to the company store. The system was revived in 1942 as a solution to wartime labor shortages. Technically, braceros could be used only if a farmer could demonstrate that no local workers were available and if the employment of braceros did not depress the domestic wage rate. In truth, however, these regulations were easily ignored.
Braceros were often outnumbered by “wetbacks”—Mexicans who crossed the border illegally. Occasionally, in order to tidy the records, wetbacks were rounded up, returned to Mexico, and then taken back across the border, where they were issued legal documents that made them braceros. A symbiosis existed: farms in the United States needed cheap labor in order to keep food prices low, and entire communities in Mexico depended on the income from the farm labor system. A circular migration existed in rhythm with the agricultural cycle. The arrangement artificially depressed wage rates on farms, mainly in California and Texas. The typical farm worker in the early 1960s made around $10 per day, and (since work was seasonal) around $1,200 annually. Domestic workers (a large percentage of whom were Hispanic) understood that they could be undercut by braceros, who in turn could be undercut by wetbacks. Both braceros and wetbacks were used as strikebreakers when domestic workers tried to protest their low wages and long hours.
In the years 1942 to 1964, some 4.6 million braceros crossed the border. The arrangement was brought to an end because of growing disquiet among the American people, fueled in part by the 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame. Embarrassment centered not on the braceros, but rather on the domestic farm workers who were kept in poverty because of cheap Mexican labor. Under pressure from President Kennedy the Department of Labor tightened the regulations, and in late 1963 Congress voted to end the system entirely, despite the vociferous opposition of farmers. Legislation did not affect the illegal traffic of wetbacks, though large farms grew wary of flouting the law.
The cessation of the bracero system was a boon to those who had struggled to unionize farm labor, since strikebreakers became less easy to recruit. It benefited in particular Cesar Chavez, a saintlike figure who came to symbolize not just the campaign for better conditions in the fields, but also the struggle for Hispanic civil rights.
Chavez had been born in 1927 on a small farm near Yuma, Arizona. His entire family became migrant workers ten years later, after losing their farm in the Depression. As a boy, Chavez attended more than thirty schools around the American West. He was forced to give up his education entirely after the eighth grade in order to help his family make ends meet. His experience as a migrant worker gave his subsequent struggle on behalf of farm laborers resounding moral force.
After a short spell in the Navy, Chavez settled in the poor San Jose barrio known to locals as Sal Si Puedes “Get Out If You Can”. There he met two people who would profoundly influence his development as a campaigner for social justice. The first was Father Donald McDonnell, who introduced Chavez to the writings of Saint Francis and Mahatma Gandhi, instilling in him an absolute faith in nonviolence. The teachings of McDonnell were given practical application through Chavez’s association with Fred Ross, of the Community Service Organization. For Chavez, the CSO provided the logical outlet for his crusading zeal. From 1953 onward he worked tirelessly in the San Jose area on voter registration, immigration, discrimination, and tax issues, thus helping poor Hispanic immigrants adjust to life in the United States.
Chavez could not, however, forget his past as a migrant farm worker, nor could he ignore the fact that the people most in need of help were those least able to draw attention to themselves. When, in 1962, the CSO refused permission to organize farm workers, he struck out on his own, forming the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). He hesitated to call it a union because of the tragic history of unionization in the fields. “The revolt . . . is more than a labor struggle,” one member insisted. It was instead “the desire of a New World race to reconcile the conflicts of its 500-year-old history.” The preamble to the NFWA constitution, drawn from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), demonstrated that the struggle was as much for social justice as for material benefit: “Rich men and masters should remember this—that to exercise pressure for the sake of gain upon the indigent and destitute, and to make one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by laws, human and divine. To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a crime which cries to the avenging anger of heaven.”61
The NFWA reflected Chavez’s personal philosophy. A humble man, he never developed the ego that usually went with leadership of a large campaign, despite the fact that reverence for him was deep and widespread. Drawing from the teachings of Gandhi and Saint Francis, he turned the humility and poverty of the farm worker into a powerful propaganda tool. In their struggle against farm owners, he urged followers to “resist with every ounce of human endurance and spirit. . . . Resist not with retaliation in kind but to overcome with love and compassion, with ingenuity and creativity, with hard work and longer hours, with stamina and patient tenacity, with truth and public appeal, with friends and allies, with mobility and discipline, with politics and law, and with prayer and fasting.” Eliseo Medina was an eighteen-year-old farm worker when he first came across Chavez at a rally. “I didn’t know what the hell he looked like,” he recalled. A friend introduced him. “He’s a little pipsqueak. That’s Cesar Chavez? He wasn’t a great speaker, but he started talking and made a lot of sense. We deserved to be paid a fair wage. Because we’re poor we shouldn’t be taken advantage of. We had rights too in this country. We deserve more. The strike wouldn’t be easy. The more he said how tough it would be, the more people wanted to do it. By the time the meeting ended, . . . that was it for me.” NFWA organizers were expected to live like the people they represented and were continually reminded of their duty to serve the powerless. The NFWA gave them room and board and just $5 a week pocket money in order to ensure that they were not attracted to the job for reasons of pay. Intense training ensured that organizers were “fit not only physically but spiritually.” Woven through every action was an uncompromising faith in nonviolence. “We do not need to destroy to win,” Chavez stressed. “We are a movement that builds and does not destroy.” In what could have served as a direct rejoinder to Malcolm X, Chavez proclaimed: “It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. . . . I am convinced that the truest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others.” “Participation and self-determination remain the best experience of freedom,” he argued. “Only the enslaved in despair have need of violent overthrow.”62
Chavez perceived a big opportunity in 1965, when the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a predominantly Filipino organization centered in Delano, California, went on strike after farm owners cut wages in the middle of the grape harvest. As a gesture of solidarity, the NFWA joined the action, and before long Chavez emerged as leader. A conventional strike was linked to a high-profile campaign to persuade consumers to boycott grapes. This involved acquainting them with the hardships behind the fruit on their table. “The consumer boycott,” Chavez explained, “is the only open door in the dark corridor of nothingness down which farm workers have had to walk for many years. It is a gate of hope through which they expect to find the sunlight of a better life for themselves and their families.” At the peak of the boycott, more than 13 million Americans refused to buy grapes.63
The NFWA was not simply a union, and the strike was not simply a strike. Chavez called his campaign “La Causa.” He wanted something permanent—a movement. This would come
when there are enough people with one idea so that their actions are together like the huge wave of water which nothing can stop. It is when a group of people begins to care enough so that they are willing to make sacrifices. The movement of the Negro began in the hot summer of Alabama ten years ago, when a Negro woman refused to be pushed to the back of the bus. . . . Sometime in the future, they will say that in the hot summer of California in 1965 the movement of the farm workers began. It began with a small series of strikes. It started so slowly that at first it was only one man, then five, then one hundred. This is how a movement begins.
While the wage cut was the trigger, Chavez was not interested exclusively in bread-and-butter issues. He wanted to give farm workers dignity. Their humility in the face of extreme poverty was used to inspire public sympathy; they did not stridently demand a raise but instead appealed to the American sense of justice. Because it was not a one-issue struggle, La Causa could not be broken by strikebreakers or by simple concessions on matters of pay.64
Organizing a group of itinerant workers who had litde education posed unique problems. The nature of their work—unskilled, low-pay, temporary, and grueling—rendered farm workers notoriously lacking in self-esteem and gave them a fatalistic attitude toward oppression. The conventional methods of mobilization—meetings, speeches, pamphlets, and so on—were ineffective. Organizing had to be personal, based upon a gradual establishment of trust between worker and representative. Art, music, and theater were used to communicate potent messages. Since modes of expression were rooted in Latino culture, they simultaneously helped to encourage the development of cultural pride. Plays by the touring company El Teatro Campesino were first performed in the mid-1960s on the back of a flatbed truck. Luis Valdez explained that humor proved the best weapon against oppression:
Humor is our major asset . . . not only from a satirical point of view, but from the fact that humor can stand up on its own and is a much more healthy child of the theater than, let’s say, tragedy or realism. You can’t do that on the flatbed of a truck. . . . We use comedy because it stems from a necessary situation—the necessity of lifting the morale of our strikers. . . . We try to make social points, not in spite of the comedy, but through it. This leads us into satire and slapstick, and sometimes very close to the underlying tragedy of it all—the fact that human beings have been wasted in farm labor for generations.
El Teatro Campesino has since become synonymous with Latino culture, performing in theaters around the world. Likewise, Latino artists such as Antonio Bernal, Malaquias Montoya, and Ester Hernández, whose work is now shown in galleries in New York, Paris, and London, started out making murals and posters for La Causa.65
Farmers responded by trying to besmirch the reputation of Chavez, portraying him as an untrustworthy foreign subversive who exploited the lowly farm worker to satisfy a craving for power. When E. L. Barr, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, accused Chavez of using terror tactics, the latter responded with his “Letter from Delano,” an intentional echo of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “We have,” he argued, “seized upon every tactic consistent with the morality of our cause to expose . . . injustice and thus to heighten the sensitivity of the American conscience.” He further insisted that “if to build our union required the deliberate taking of life, either the life of a grower or of his child, or the life of a farm worker or of his child, then I choose not to see the union built.”66
Chavez was never as articulate as King, but the dignity of his message made up for his lack of eloquence.
You must understand . . . that our membership . . . are, above all, human beings, no better and no worse than any other cross-section of human society; we are not saints because we are poor, but by the same measure neither are we immoral. We are men and women who have suffered and endured much, and not only because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor. . . . God knows that we are not beasts of burden, agricultural implements, or rented slaves; we are men. And mark this well, Mr. Barr, we are men locked in a death struggle against man’s inhumanity to man in the industry that you represent. And this struggle itself gives meaning to our life and ennobles our dying.
“Time,” argued Chavez, “accomplishes for the poor what money does for the rich.” Because he had absolute faith in the justice of his cause, he could be patient; because he was patient, he did not need violence. “We know that our cause is just, that history is a story of social revolution, and that the poor shall inherit the land.”67
Chavez demonstrated his own commitment with a twenty-five-day fast in 1968, during which he consumed only water. As he explained: “A fast is first and foremost personal. It is a fast for the purification of my own body mind, and soul. The fast is also a heartfelt prayer for purification and strengthening for all those who work beside me in the farm worker movement. The fast is also an act of penance for those in positions of moral authority and for all men and women activists who know what is right and just, who know that they could and should do more.” Those who might not have been sympathetic to La Causa could not help being impressed by Chavez. The fast inevitably raised his profile across the nation and, by implication, that of the farm worker. Politicians desperate to attract the Hispanic vote threw their weight behind La Causa. Robert Kennedy, during his 1968 presidential campaign, came to Delano to break bread with Chavez at the end of his fast. Chavez in turn promised to help mobilize the Latino vote in the California Democratic primary.68
If Chavez was the Latino Martin Luther King, Reies Tijerina was the Latino Malcolm X. Tijerina rejected assimilation, emphasizing instead ethnic nationalism, expressed through an attempt to reclaim ancestral land. Like Malcolm, he condemned Chicanos who had “sold out” to white America, calling them traitors—or “Tio Tomases” (Uncle Toms). He was not averse to violence. His militancy left him vulnerable to allegations that he was a Communist stooge or a dangerous demagogue; newspapers delighted in characterizing him as a monster. To Chicanos, his most profound effect came in the way he encouraged ethnic pride. For those who had already assimilated, however, his message rankled. “You know what that bastard . . . has done to me?” one Chicano complained. “He has questioned my whole life. All my life has been based on my denying I am a Mexican to myself. Now there are two sides of me and I have to decide which one I am. . . . I hate that bastard. Who appointed him my conscience?”69
Chavez had a similar effect, achieved more quietly. In 1969, he signed a historic agreement with California growers recognizing the UFW as the official union. In that year also, a march to the Mexican border poured scorn on the growers’ practice of using wetbacks as strikebreakers. While these demonstrations brought some improvements to the farm labor system, gains were eventually neutralized by increased mechanization and the easy availability of nonunion labor. By 1980, less than 10 percent of the Delano grape harvest was picked by UFW members. That, however, should not detract from Chavez’s success in raising Latino consciousness. The deep ethnic solidarity he helped to tap would eventually make Latinos a formidable force in the politics of the Southwest.70
Robert Kennedy felt that Chavez was one of the true American heroes of the 1960s. Luis Valdez, who founded El Teatro Campesino, agreed: “What amazed me was that he could completely absorb everything around him. He was brilliant, a genius. He didn’t just read about Gandhi; he became a living late-twentieth-century version of him transposed to the American Southwest. He didn’t just read about labor movements; he started one. He didn’t just read about the arts; he became them.” A grower who finally had to accept the power of La Causa put it more bluntly: “Our biggest mistake was to think that Chavez was just another ‘dumb Mex.’”71