SAIGON: TET
Up until December 1967, American soldiers had difficulty finding their Vietnamese enemy. “It was a sheer physical impossibility to keep the enemy from slipping away whenever he wished it,” a general reflected. Then, suddenly, during the Lunar New Year called Tet, the enemy was everywhere, most worryingly in the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon. In an instant, the war changed completely.1
From the moment American combat troops had first been deployed, in 1965, the United States had followed a simple strategy of attrition: kill enough of the enemy, and eventually they’ll surrender. The body count became the main measure of progress. That strategy, however, worked against the complex task of achieving a politically viable South Vietnam. Americans were destroying Vietnam in order to save it. “At the end of the day the villagers would be turned loose,” William Erhart, a young Marine officer, recalled. “Their homes had been wrecked, their chickens killed, their rice confiscated—and if they weren’t pro-Vietcong before we got there, they sure as hell were by the time we left.”2
The war was stuck in stalemate, yet the only logical response was escalation. This, however, put enormous strain on the American economy, especially given Johnson’s commitment to the Great Society and NASA. His limited war was not sufficiendy limited. Americans had constraints—of time and money. Hanoi, however, had none. Ho Chi Minh understood that Americans would not tolerate a long war, so a long war was what he provided.
The American commander, William Westmoreland, remained stubbornly optimistic. “I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing,” he announced on November 21, 1967. He pledged that “within two years or less, it will be possible . . . to phase down our level of commitment and turn more of the burden . . . over to the Vietnamese armed forces.” The Johnson administration sang in harmony. On November 26, vice president Hubert Humphrey claimed “there has been progress on every front in Vietnam. . . . There is no military stalemate.”3
Optimism was a dish cooked for public consumption. Behind closed doors, anxiety festered. Defense secretary Robert McNamara was utterly disillusioned. “Ho Chi Minh is a tough old S.O.B.,” he confessed in private. “He won’t quit, no matter how much bombing we do.” The sense of futility drove him to tears. “He does it all the time now,” McNamara’s secretary revealed. Meanwhile, the other members of the administration tried desperately to maintain their composure. Nearly everyone could find evidence of progress when called upon to do so. That, however, was a far cry from believing in victory.4
Hanoi, ironically, was also worried. Losses were atrocious. The collapse of the Saigon regime seemed further away in late 1967 than it had three years earlier. According to the Maoist formula, the revolution was supposed to climax in khoi ngia—a popular uprising triggered by a general offensive. Politics and war would converge at a single point when the enemy was fatally weakened and the people were absolutely confident in the revolution. In 1967, this conjunction seemed more elusive than ever. The only consolation lay in the fact that Hanoi was better equipped than the United States to endure protracted war. The Communists were winning, but not in the way Mao had prescribed. Guerrilla action, by itself, was not supposed to bring victory. Yet through hundreds of small battles the Communists were gradually eroding American will, bleeding America to death.
The strength of the revolution had been its patience, yet in April 1967 patience wore thin. The Politburo decided to push for a “spontaneous uprising in order to win a decisive victory in the shortest possible time.” The decision was not unanimous. A group around Nguyen Chi Thanh argued that the time for khoi ngia was fast approaching, while those loyal to Giap steadfastly adhered to protracted war, with its emphasis upon political struggle. Ho Chi Minh was ultimately persuaded to push for quick victory. An official document proclaimed: “We need to inflict a decisive blow, to win a great victory, creating a great leap forward in the strategic situation.”5
The offensive would begin with an all-embracing attack, planned to coincide with the Tet holiday, traditionally a time of raucous celebration. Ubiquity of action was supposed to demonstrate the strength of the revolution and thus trigger a general uprising. Party officials carefully emphasized that the general offensive would still involve “extremely arduous and complicated military combats and protracted political struggles.” Complete victory was nevertheless expected by the end of 1968.6
Viet Cong troops were told that the offensive “will be the greatest battle ever fought throughout the history of our country.” With that rallying call ringing in their ears, 84,000 soldiers attacked at midnight on January 31, hitting thirty-six provincial capitals, sixty-four district capitals, and a number of military bases. The most conspicuous assault occurred when twenty insurgents penetrated the American Embassy compound and held off a counterattack for six hours, in full view of television cameras. That action was doomed from the outset, but the suffering of American soldiers made unpleasant viewing on the nightly news. Johnson’s friend Jack Valenti recalled a common reaction in Washington: “My God, if they can get that close to the embassy, the war is over!”7
After order was restored in Saigon, the photographer Eddie Adams was roaming the streets in search of a story. Ahead of him he saw an emaciated man—a Viet Cong guerrilla—being dragged along by Vietnamese marines, his hands tied behind his back. Adams had never found himself so close to the elusive enemy. He quickly aimed his camera. Suddenly, into the frame stepped the chief of the national police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who drew his revolver, put it to the man’s head, and fired. Adams captured the moment of execution perfectly, and in so doing produced the most famous image to emerge from the Vietnam War. The New York Times, recognizing its monumental nature, printed the photo prominently on the front page. (Large photos on the front page were unusual back then.) Readers saw an image of utter brutality, made worse by the fact that the perpetrator was an ally. What the photo did not show was that the victim had earlier murdered one of Loan’s aides, the aide’s wife, and all of his children. (A photo on the same page showed an RVN officer holding the body of his daughter, recently executed by the Viet Cong. That photo was quickly forgotten.)
In Hué, a place of huge symbolic importance, Communist units swept aside the Americans and held the city for a number of weeks. During this period, the revolution’s real cruelty was revealed. “Hué was the place where reactionary spirit had existed for over ten years,” a party report remarked with clinical detachment. “It took us only a short time to drain it to its root.” Translated, this meant that hundreds, perhaps thousands, were executed for the vague crime of being “reactionary.”8
Elsewhere, Tet was little more than a brief disturbance. It did, however, decimate the Viet Cong (or PLAF). Suddenly conspicuous, insurgents were rounded up and executed. A movement that had taken years to build was ripped to shreds in a moment. Meanwhile, peasants stubbornly refused to throw their weight behind the revolution. No general uprising occurred. The people remained confident that the Communists would eventually win, but until that happened they stayed firmly on the fence.
The offensive continued for the next eighteen months—the bloodiest period of the war. In some places, genuine success was achieved. But the revolution paid bitterly. By the end of 1970, victory was more remote than it had been on the eve of Tet. The Politburo concluded that “although Tet had been a great victory and a turning point in the war, further military successes might be delayed for years.” Only a fool could fail to notice the contradiction in that statement.9
Westmoreland boasted that Tet was a “colossal military defeat” for the enemy. The United States, he said, had “never been in a better position.” Eager to exploit this “great opportunity,” he asked for 206,000 additional men, which implied the mobilization of reserves. Many Americans, even those who still supported the war, wondered why, if Communist forces had been so decisively beaten, Westmoreland needed more troops.10
Johnson feigned tenacity. “I do not believe we will ever buckle,” he told reporters. “There will be blood, sweat, and tears shed. The weak will drop from the lines, their feet sore and their voices loud. Persevere in Vietnam we will and we must.” His brave face was, however, purely cosmetic. Johnson faced a classic dilemma: if he rejected Westmoreland’s request, he might lose the war; yet if he granted it, he might lose the election. Tet had destroyed the illusion of limited war: there was no “middle way” between escalation and withdrawal.11
Public support melted like ice cream in summer. Gallup found that one person in five shifted from hawk to dove between early February and mid- March. Before Tet, approval of Johnson’s handling of the war had stood at 39 percent; afterward it fell to 26 percent. On February 27 the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, reporting from Vietnam, vividly expressed American unease: “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. . . . For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate.” Listening to the broadcast, Johnson remarked: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war.”12
Johnson consulted Clark Clifford, who would shortly replace McNamara as secretary of defense. “We can no longer rely just on the field commander,” he warned. “He can want troops and want troops and want troops. We must look at the overall impact on us, including the situation here in the United States. We must look at our economic stability, our other problems in the world, our other problems at home; we must consider whether or not this thing is tying us down so that we cannot do some of the other things we should be doing.” “I was convinced that the military course we were pursuing was not only endless, but hopeless,” Clifford reflected. He recommended that Westmoreland’s request be denied and that the military burden should be shifted toward the ARVN. Accepting the thrust of Clifford’s recommendations, Johnson approved only a token troop increase of 22,000.13
“Tet . . . shook the enemy’s aggressive will to its foundation and put an end to the US dream of achieving Victory’ by escalating the war,” the North Vietnamese general Tran Van Tra boasted. “It awakened the United States to the fact that might, resources, and money have their limits.” That is a fair assessment. Tet was a psychological defeat for the Americans. Those inclined to praise Hanoi’s handling of the war assume that that must have been the plan all along. Giap encouraged this interpretation: “We wanted to project the war into the homes of America’s families, because we knew that most of them had nothing against us.” That, however, is tripe, all the more indigestible coming from a man who originally considered the offensive insane. Granted, the Communists were expert propagandists acutely aware of the war’s effect upon the American people. But no government is so stupid as to sacrifice 40,000 soldiers in the elusive hope of psychological victory. Tet was supposed to lead to a decisive military victory, not something that could be packaged as psychological triumph. The commander Tran Do was more honest: “We didn’t achieve our main objective, which was to spur uprisings throughout the South. . . . As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention—but it turned out to be a fortunate result.”14
Tet is often carelessly labeled a turning point. Occasionally, however, events turn in the wrong direction. The Communists had been winning the war before the offensive; they were shattered after it. As for the United States, it fought for two and a half years before Tet, and five years afterward. Nearly as many Americans died after the battle as before. Johnson was a demoralized commander-in-chief whose direction of the war was deeply flawed. His defense secretary, McNamara, was a broken man, while Clifford (McNamara’s replacement) could not muster enthusiasm for futility. Tet, however, opened the door for Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Melvin Laird, and a number of other hardliners who were determined to make North Vietnam pay dearly for every inch of gain. In other words, Tet hardly seems a clever psychological victory. It was in fact a colossal blunder which prolonged the war, causing unnecessary suffering on both sides. The true nature of the calamity can be gauged by Ho’s reaction. According to the historian Thai Van Kiem, Ho “silently regretted not having listened to Vo Nguyen Giap. . . . Following this burning debacle, Ho’s health declined day by day. He never got over this defeat. Unable even to sleep, he died the next year, in 1969.”15
ATLANTIC CITY: FROM MISS AMERICA TO MS. WORLD
Wherever lovely women gathered, Bert Parks was often nearby. In the Sixties, he was often master of ceremonies at beauty pageants. Few people knew why he was a celebrity; fewer still could recall him doing anything other than hosting beauty contests. Parks believed sincerely in his role. Judging the female form was only natural, he insisted, since a beautiful woman was like a sublime work of art. His opening monologue always celebrated the fact that the contest brought lovely women together in an arena free of politics. Afterward, the winner was sent on a goodwill tour to Vietnam.
Since pageants were highly ritualized, Parks had no reason to expect that the 1968 event in Atlantic City would be any different from previous ones. His jokes were canned, the contestants predictably pretty. But then came weird noises from the wings, puffs of smoke, loud bangs, and a clutch of women who did not remotely resemble Miss Nevada. Looking decidedly shaken, Parks was hustled from the scene by burly men in black suits. His face showed utter bewilderment: Why would anyone want to disrupt something so beautiful as a beauty pageant? After about twenty minutes of shouting, two dozen protesters from the New York Radical Women collective (NYRW) were hustled from the scene and unreality was restored.
Prior to the action, the protesters had picketed outside the venue, where they had crowned a sheep Miss America. They had also grabbed a rubbish bin, dubbed it the Freedom Trash Can, and proceeded to fill it with symbols of women’s enslavement—girdles, bras, makeup, curlers, mascara, high-heeled shoes. City authorities denied permission to ignite the contents, for fear the fire would spread to the wooden boardwalk. No one present recalls the bin being ignited, but that is how the event was subsequently reported. “It was a time of draft card burning,” Susan Brownmiller recalls, “and some smart headline writer decided to call it a ‘bra-burning’ because it sounded insulting to the. . .women’s movement. We only threw a bra symbolically in a trash can.” From that day forward, feminists were called “bra-burners” by those disinclined to understand. In truth, more bras were burned in off-color jokes told by men than ever were burned in protest by women.16
The women who took part in the Atlantic City action were almost all veterans of the civil rights movement or other New Left protests. They had been the support troops and camp followers, the good little girls who did precisely what their men asked. This, however, was their action. “We . . . all felt, well, grown up,” their leader Robin Morgan confessed. “We were doing this one for ourselves, not for our men.” Respecting themselves was, however, much easier than earning the respect of others. At the time, “feminist” was essentially synonymous with “spinster,” “lesbian,” or “witch.” In the Washington Post, Harriet Van Horne described the NYRW as an army of women who were “unstroked, uncaressed, and emotionally undernourished.”17
The scene was reenacted two years later at the Miss World pageant in London. This time the master of ceremonies was Bob Hope, a man who, like Parks, believed in the therapeutic properties of feminine beauty. Again, some loud bangs interrupted the proceedings, whereupon female invaders started shouting, “We’re not beautiful! We’re not ugly! We’re angry!” For perhaps the first time in history, the public saw the nasty side of Hope. On returning to the stage after order was restored, he sneered: “Anyone who wants to disrupt something as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope. The perpetrators will pay for this. Upstairs will see to that.”18
For Laura Mulvey, one of the demonstrators, the event was an epiphany—an attack upon sexism but also a personal liberation. “It was enormously exciting, the adrenalin, a feeling that it was a gesture that came out of political commitment but was very contrary to any kind of actions I might have expected of myself.” The protest was important because it was entirely free of male interference. Women had not submitted to male direction, nor had they been forced to subsume their gender-based goals into a wider social revolution, as had customarily been the case within the “movement.” They had used the tools of the revolution for themselves.19
Earlier in the decade, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) had exposed the discontent of women in a world of limited opportunities. Housewives trapped in suburbia were, Friedan argued, slowly driven to despair by drudgery. Friedan’s work provided a foundation for the later feminist movement, but not an entirely appropriate one. She wrote about white, middle-class, suburban women who lived the “good life” but still felt unfulfilled. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—’Is this all?’” Women of the Sixties generation, because they rejected that suburban ethos, assumed that they could also sidestep the discontent it implied. Radical baby boomers were certain that the world they would create would have limitless opportunities for both sexes and that enlightenment would render sexism obsolete.20
As it turned out, change did not spell liberation. “From a girl’s point of view, the important thing to remember about the 60s is that it was totally male-dominated,” Nicola Lane recalled. “You were not really encouraged to be a thinker. You were there really for fucks and domesticity. . . . It was a difficult time.” The alternative society, built on freedom, in truth meant the freedom to exploit women. “The treatment [women] got was so offhand and casual, verging on the contemptuous,” Charles Shaar Murray felt. “It was all ‘Yay! Freedom! Let everyone do what they want,’ but the little woman is still over in the corner. She may be wearing a flowered dress and a headband, but she’s still the one who rolls the joints . . . and generally does . . . ‘the chick work.’ A lot of the girls were trying to be good hippies, doing whatever good hippies did, which meant that a lot of them would literally fuck anybody, do all the washing up, and so on.” “What finally knackered the underground was its complete inability to deal with women’s liberation,” David Widgery wrote in Oz. “Men defined themselves as rebels against society in ways limited to their own sex, excluding women except as loyal companions or mother figures.” Morgan felt that the “Hip Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution . . . functioned towards women’s freedom as did the Reconstruction toward former slaves—reinstituted oppression by another name.”21
For many women, sex was their way into the movement, but also the method of their debasement. Since many joined as girlfriends of activist men, it was difficult to discard that sense of belonging to a man and be taken seriously as a comrade. Rather too typical was the advice Dieter Kunzelmann of the German radical group Kommune 1 gave to his male colleagues on the process of indoctrinating female members: “It’s like training a horse. One guy has to break her in; then she’s available for everyone.” A movement that placed such heavy emphasis upon sex, and particularly sex without emotional commitment, perhaps understandably ended up treating women like sex objects. The novelist Sheila MacLeod feels that the “revolution” allowed men to “indulge their preferences for irresponsibility and lack of emotional commitment.” Women who objected were invariably banished from the temple and told to take their “hangups” else-where.22
For all the talk of participatory democracy, the Sixties generation was rather keen on male heroes. Movement leaders enjoyed both political and sexual status. Robert Haber’s wife, Barbara, noted that “there were a few dozen men who stood out as incarnations of the Revolution, so that to sleep with them was the equivalent of taking political communion.” Like the dominant male in a pride of lions, they easily attracted women desperate to service them. Marjory Tabankin, an activist at the University of Wisconsin and the first female president of the National Student Association, recalls her eager anticipation of a visit by Tom Hayden. “The first thing he handed me was his dirty laundry and asked if I would do it for him. I said, ‘I’ll have it for you by tonight.’” Inevitably, women who had entered the movement with millennial visions of an equitable society grew disappointed at the stubborn survival of patriarchy. “The point about the underground was that this was not the way things were supposed to happen,” observes Rosie Boycott. “They were meant to be equally beneficial to everybody. But for a long time even the communes felt that it was right that Sue bakes bread and Bill brings in the cows.”23
Suzanne Goldberg, wife of Mario Savio, recalls the irony of struggling to express herself at Free Speech Movement meetings. “I was on the executive committee and the steering committee. . . . I would make a suggestion and no one would react. Thirty minutes later Mario or Jack Weinberg would make the same suggestion and everyone would react.” Subservience, being familiar, impeded enlightenment. Old patterns were hard to break. Sue Miles, a hugely intelligent and creative woman who helped found IT, recalled that “as the only woman there my job was to make the tea and the sandwiches, and whenever they were going to actually make decisions I was asked to go out of the room. And I did.” Cassandra Wedd, who worked for the British underground weekly INK, recalled: “I was treated badly but I didn’t realise it at that stage—I was used to being treated badly. I’d been a secretary and I didn’t expect to be treated any better.” Richard Neville admitted that he could never have produced Oz without a few women who managed to make sure that the important things got done while the “creative” males indulged in drugs and sex. But those women were never mentioned on the masthead. It did not occur to him to do things differently. “It was the culture of the time.”24
Male SDS activists saw nothing remotely wrong with a document arguing that “the system is like a woman—you’ve got to fuck it to make it change.” White Panthers went further, calling upon members to “fuck your woman so hard till she can’t stand up.” New Left women gradually came to realize that their male comrades’ behavior in bed was a good indication of the level of their enlightenment. In Germany, the Frankfurt Broads collective launched a particularly furious attack upon male activists:
We won’t open our mouth! If we open it, nothing comes out! If we leave it open, it gets stuffed for us: with petty-bourgeois dicks, socialist screw pressure, socialist children, love, socialist flotsam and jetsam, turgidity, socialist potent horniness, socialist intellectual pathos, . . . revolutionary fumbling about, sexual-revolutionary arguments . . . BLAH BLAH BLAH! . . . Let’s vomit it out: we have penis envy, we are frustrated, hysterical, uptight, asexual, lesbian, frigid, shortchanged, irrational. . . . We compensate, we overcompensate. . . . We have penis envy, penis envy, penis envy.
The attack came with a political cartoon showing a proud, naked woman holding an axe. On the wall are the mounted penises of prominent members of the German New Left. The message ended: “Liberate the socialist pricks from their bourgeois dicks!”25
Casey Hayden and Mary King, both members of SNCC, found that male colleagues reacted with derision when they tried to compare the plight of women to that of blacks. “If the question is raised, they respond: ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be. There are biological differences.’” Wini Breines felt that “the main reason that [we] relied so heavily on the comparisons between sexism and racism is that white male politicos recognized the race issue as morally legitimate, while dismissing feminism as ‘a bunch of chicks with personal problems.’” When Marilyn Webb tried to inject a feminist point of view into a political rally in 1969, men in the audience shouted: “Take her off the stage and fuck her!”26 Misogyny was deepest in militant movements with a heavy emphasis upon masculinity. Within the Black Panthers, for instance, the cherished image of a bad dude was enhanced through sadistic exploitation of women. Elaine Brown recalled “slave-like beatings and other sexist power plays.” Black power obviously did not extend to black women. “A woman,” says Brown, “was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. A woman attempting a role of leadership was, to my proud black Brothers, making an alliance with the counter-revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, feminist white bitches.”27
In contrast to the later feminist movement, which trumpeted the slogan “The personal is political,” female activists found that thinking personally was actively discouraged. Women were instead supposed to submerge their interests within those of the movement, always reassured (by men) that, since patriarchy was a product of capitalism, the revolution would bring sexual equality. Meanwhile, by doing the dishes, they would hasten the advent of the socialist millennium. For a very long time, women bought this radical cant. For instance, as late as 1969, an SDS women’s group placed a resolution before the annual convention to the effect that “as long as the material base for male chauvinism exists, it cannot be completely defeated. Therefore, the primary fight must be against this capitalist system of exploitation.” Those who complained about subservience were criticized for placing selfish concerns before those of society. Ellen Willis recalled: “It’s hard to convey to people who didn’t go through that experience how radical, how unpopular and difficult it was just to get up and say, ‘Men oppress women. Men have oppressed me. Men must take responsibility for their actions instead of blaming them on capitalism. And, yes, that means you.’ We were laughed at, patronized, called frigid, emotionally disturbed man-haters, and—worst insult of all on the left!—apolitical.”28
All these experiences were folded into a batter of consciousness. Female activists learned that individual liberation had to be pursued distinct from the broader social transformation which radical groups advocated. “As we analyze the position of women in capitalist society,” one SDS women’s group resolved in 1967, “we recognize ourselves as part of the Third World. Women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their own independence.” A male-dominated organization could not be trusted to deliver emancipation, since men were never likely to appreciate that they were the problem. That resolution heralded an eventual break from the movement, since the problems it outlined were irresolvable within the mechanism of a male-dominated group.29
The transformation often occurred as a result of practical experiences of protest. “We fought shoulder to shoulder [with the men] and we couldn’t see any difference between what were our roles and battles and what were theirs,” a Mexican female protester argued. “We were all androgynous. We were brave fighters, the same as any man.” Demonstrations were democratic in the distribution of pain. Police swung billy clubs with no consideration for gender. Tear gas floated everywhere. For women, most of whom were unfamiliar with violence, this was their first opportunity to show bravery. Direct action also provided a very effective way to sidestep traditional bureaucratic obstacles to women’s participation. Women got noticed at demonstrations, even if for the wrong reasons. All this meant that protests often brought epiphany. One female Harvard graduate commented that they “changed my life—in the way I questioned everything, in the sense of involvement in something greater than myself, and in the sense of my outrage.”30
The emergence of a new feminist movement came at the end of the decade because it took time for otherwise patient women to realize they were being short-changed. “If the fool persist in his folly he becomes wise,” Angela Carter reflected, alluding to William Blake. “I suppose that was how I came to feminism, in the end, because . . . all the time I thought things were going well I was in reality a second-class citizen.” Sheila MacLeod feels that feminism’s “time had come because the sixties were over, and eyes which had been clouded with ‘peace and love’ . . . were now wearily cold and clear.” Looking back, she recalls a transformation in her assessment of the Sixties. At first, the blatant sexism so appalled her that she found it difficult to discern anything of worth. “The sixties looked very much like a male invention based in power, promiscuity and self-abuse,” she once thought. But, as time passed, she began to see that hypocrisy and betrayal were necessary to the development of consciousness. “It is not mistakes as such which are reprehensible but the inability to learn from them,” she now feels. A German feminist expressed that coming-of-age more graphically, declaring that she no longer wanted to be “just a . . . shapely mass of flesh with a hole.”31
The endless talk about freedom eventually convinced some women to exercise it. “In the midst of sexist movements, women were having experiences that transformed their consciousness and changed their lives,” asserts Breines. “When women acquired the experience and skills that enabled them to feel strong enough to move out on their own, it was with political ideas that they had inherited from the sixties.” For those women who called themselves feminists by 1970, the decade had been a hard but necessary apprenticeship. Because of what they had learned, better days lay ahead. They’d come to realize that protest was more powerful if it had an identifiable goal, such as affordable childcare or the legalization of abortion, and not simply the wholesale transformation of society. “Certainly for me, it’s the seventies which signal change, growth and understanding of things,” Sue O’Sullivan concluded. “It was in the seventies that I became part of a movement which made sense of the world in a way which also gave me agency.”32
“There is a tendency to underplay, even devalue completely, the experience of the 1960s, especially for women,” Carter has observed. “But towards the end of the decade there was a brief period of public philosophical awareness that occurs only very occasionally in human history; when, truly, it felt like Year One, when all that was holy was in the process of being profaned, and we were attempting to grapple with the real relations between human beings.”33
GREENWICH VILLAGE: STONEWALL
The Stonewall Inn was a squalid dump of a bar in the West Village. For that reason, New York City’s gay community loved it. “It was a dive,” Eric Marcus admitted. “It was shabby and the glasses they served the watered-down drinks in weren’t particularly clean. . . . Patrons included every type of person: some transvestites, a lot of students, young people, older people, businessmen.” “The Stonewall . . . had become, in the late sixties, my own bar of choice,” Martin Duberman recalls. “I loved its cruisy, non-vanilla mix of people, its steamy dancing.” Its appeal derived in part from the fact that, at any moment, the police might raid the place.34
Raids were an accepted part of gay life in New York, and usually took a ritualized, benign form. Police would phone in a tip beforehand and arrive in the early part of the evening, so that business could return to normal in time for the after-midnight crowds. “The lights suddenly went on (announcing the arrival of somebody suspect),” Duberman remembers. “Dancing and touching of any kind instantly stopped, and the police stalked arrogantly through, glaring from side to side, demanding IDs, terrifying those not having them with threats of arrest.” After a brief flutter of excitement, the bar would return to normal.35
The night of June 27, 1969, was different. Eight officers from the First Precinct arrived at 1:20 A.M. The mere sight of men in uniforms sent shock-waves through the crowd, even before the lights went up. Doors were then locked and no one was allowed to leave. Fifteen minutes later, the police announced that patrons were to line up and proceed single-file out of the bar. At the door, IDs were checked and all staff, all transvestites, and any other “undesirables” were detained. They were herded into the coatroom—put into the closet.
Those allowed to leave congregated on the pavement, waiting to see what would happen. After a short while, prisoners were escorted to a paddy wagon. The crowd grew restless, shouting and gesticulating at the police. The exact sequence of events is confused, due to differing perspectives. Eric Marcus thought that the police deliberately turned their back on the prisoners, allowing them to escape. Others witnessed a scuffle as a prisoner was bundled into a patrol car. The first sign of trouble occurred when people started throwing pennies at the police. A light shower quickly turned into a downpour. Then someone threw a rock. Then another. The windows on the second floor were smashed, showering glass on the police. Feeling dangerously outnumbered, they retreated into the bar.
At one point the front door opened and someone from inside pointed a gun at the crowd, ordering people to stay back. A few retreated, but a solid angry core advanced. Someone uprooted a parking meter and proceeded to use it as a battering ram, breaking the bottom-floor windows. Someone else set fire to a trashcan and threw the burning material through the broken window. The police put out the fire from inside with a hose, and then trained it on the crowd. Instead of causing people to disperse, the water had the opposite effect. A full-scale riot broke out.
A fire engine arrived, followed closely by the serried ranks of the Tactical Police Force (TPF), a special unit trained to respond to violent demonstrations. Showing up in full riot gear, they seemed in no mood for dialogue. Meanwhile the storm of projectiles continued, occasionally punctuated by shouts of “Gay Power!” At first the police tried to herd the crowd away but, outnumbered, they had little success. They occasionally charged, grabbing one or two protesters to beat mercilessly. “Seventh Avenue . . . looked like a battlefield in Vietnam,” one witness recalled. “Young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even the eyes. Others were nursing bruised and often bleeding arms, legs, backs, and necks.”36
After about forty-five minutes of mayhem, the crowd dispersed, calm was restored, and the police left. “HOMO NEST RAIDED,” the Daily News shouted the next day. “Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad!” New York gays had experienced firsthand the cohesive power of violence. On the following night, an angry crowd returned to Stonewall, to drink again from solidarity fountain. Lucien Truscott was there:
Friday night’s crowd had returned and was being led in “gay power” cheers by a group of gay cheerleaders. “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We have no underwear / We show our pubic hairs!” . . . If Friday night had been pick-up night, Saturday was date night. Hand-holding, kissing, and posing accented each of the cheers with a homosexual liberation that had appeared only fleetingly on the street before. One-liners were as practiced as if they had been used for years. “I just want you to all know,” quipped a platinum blond with obvious glee, “that sometimes being a homosexual is a big pain in the ass.”
Irreverence was an expression of assertiveness. “Older boys had strained looks on their faces,” wrote Truscott, “and talked in concerned whispers as they watched the up-and-coming generation take being gay and flaunt . . . it before the masses.”37
The streets were quiet for the next two days, but then, on the fifth day, another riot broke out, again notable for its solidarity. In riot terms, what had happened was hardly remarkable. Inner-city disturbances were ten a penny in the late 1960s. What distinguished Stonewall was the constituency from which the rioters arose. To many people, a militant gay seemed an oxymoron, which explains why the protesters’ viciousness took police by surprise. Gays had previously responded to discrimination by turning the other cheek. They felt isolated, in part because they could not call upon a reliable phalanx of sympathetic supporters from the straight world. Straights might not have objected to homosexuality, but they were unlikely to campaign actively on gays’ behalf. “The result,” wrote Truscott, “was a kind of liberation, as the gay brigade emerged from the bars, back rooms, and bedrooms of the Village and became street people.”38
Up until 1965, police in American cities had felt free to harass gays, liberally interpreting indecency laws in order to make arrests on the flimsiest of grounds. The names of those present at gay hangouts were frequently published in the press even when no crime had been committed. In response to gentle protests by the Homophile Movement and the Mattachine Society, these practices had moderated somewhat by the latter half of the decade. Nevertheless, in New York, it remained possible for the Liquor Control Board to revoke the license of a bar if the staff knowingly served homosexuals. In 1966 Dick Leitch challenged this ruling by holding a “sip-in” with his gay friends. When they were refused a drink, they complained to the Human Rights Commission, causing the Liquor Control Board to relax its policy. Nevertheless, bars remained reluctant to serve gays, for fear of attracting police attention, or out of reluctance to become known as a homosexual hangout. As a result, most openly gay bars were owned by members of the Mafia, who sensed a financial opportunity and who already had a secure relationship with the police.
The Stonewall raid seems to have run counter to an increasing liberality on the part of police and city officials. The fact that New York was embroiled in a tight mayoral race might explain the show of force. The police and the city failed to realize, however, the extent to which feelings within the gay community had changed since the mid-Sixties. Tolerance of gays may have been increasing, but not as fast as gay anger. “We don’t give a damn whether people like us or not,” James Owles of the Gay Activists’ Alliance argued. “We want the rights we’re entitled to.” If gays at Stonewall had seemed to act with uncanny unanimity, it is because they had in common a deep sense of oppression. No one would have predicted an event of this magnitude on that particular night, but at the same time no one familiar with the gay community would have been surprised. For gays, throwing things at police or shouting slogans was empowering. As Marcus has written: “I watched. I wasn’t looking for a fight. I can’t claim credit for the small acts of violence that took place. I didn’t break any windows. I wasn’t the one who had a knife and cut the tires on the paddy wagon. I didn’t hit a cop and I didn’t get hit by a cop. But it was a very emotional turning point for me. It was the first time I had seen anything like that. . . . For me, this festering wound, the anger from oppression and discrimination, was coming out very fast at the point of Stonewall.” “Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel,” wrote Truscott. “The sudden specter of ‘gay power’ raised its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen.” For Allen Ginsberg, the effect was immediately apparent on the faces of gays in New York. “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”39
Instead of feeling alone and defeated, gays suddenly felt united and powerful. Stonewall was a turning point in the history of gay politics in America and the world. But however appropriate that description might be, it cannot be denied that the moment of epiphany had a long gestation. Gay solidarity was expressed with such intensity in 1969 for the simple reason that it was the product of a culture of protest that had been gathering strength since the beginning of the decade. Gay liberation was built on the intersection of New Left radicalism and countercultural revolt. Gays borrowed their tactics and dialectic from the politicos, but learned confidence in their own sexuality and a belief in sexual freedom from the hippies. The gay movement was also typical of late-Sixties separatist groups such as the radical feminists, black nationalists, and Chicanos. Like them, gays had lost faith in the potential for a comprehensive political revolution and had instead decided to fight for their own distinct cause, with violence if necessary.
The sense of liberation borrowed from the counterculture made gays more inclined to come out of the closet. This was more likely to occur in big cities, which provided anonymity and also allowed gays to hook up with similarly oppressed soul fellows. In San Francisco and New York, the gay communities reached critical mass, achieving a culture within a culture. As Carl Wittman explained: “San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals. We have fled here from every part of the nation, and, like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there. By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or ‘tolerated’ us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen.” Greater confidence led to greater openness. This made gays more visible, but at the same time more vulnerable. Most straights preferred homosexuality to remain out of sight. “Straights . . . prefer to think it doesn’t exist, but if it does, at least keep quiet about it,” one gay man complained. Once in the open, gays became easy targets for homophobic abuse. That explains why violence against homosexuals increased at the same time that tolerance rose. It also explains the Stonewall raid.40
Stonewall turned gays from an affinity group into a movement. The riots led directly to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the United States, with similar radical separatist groups forming across Europe in the early 1970s. The appropriation of the label “gay” was a deliberate affront to polite society and, as such, symbolic of newfound pride. Calling the movement a liberation front implied a parallel with the Viet Cong, another group fighting American oppression. The GLF was dedicated to eradicating the “dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy,” a somewhat strange mission, given that most gays were dyed-in-the-wool capitalists and the socialist countries were hardly notable for their tolerance of homosexuality. None of that seemed to matter, however, since the important thing was to feel part of a worldwide community of oppressed. Thus, radical gays often supported the black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Third World, and female-liberation struggles, and felt certain that their struggle was as valid as any other. “Negroes, Spanish Americans, hippies, [and] homosexuals . . . represent minority elements of society,” one gay man reasoned. “They are also the public. Who, then, will defend the public from the public defenders?” As Wittman argued: “There is no future in arguing about degrees of oppression. A lot of ‘movement’ types come on with a line of shit about homosexuals not being oppressed as much as blacks or Vietnamese or workers or women. We don’t happen to fit into their ideas of class or caste. Bull! When people feel oppressed, they act on that feeling. We feel oppressed. Talk about the priority of black liberation or ending imperialism over and above gay liberation is just anti-gay propaganda.” The obvious deserves mention: blacks, Chicanos, and women did not first have to come out of the closet before asserting their rights. For gays, the first step toward liberation was to invite even more oppression.41
The strength of the gay movement lay in the way a spectrum of sexual preferences was turned into something akin to ethnic identity. Sexual practices were less important than political freedom. As Duncan Fallowell explains, “Gay Lib started about ’69. The wonderful thing about it was that it had nothing whatsoever to do with sex. Politicized gay life is not a sexual thing. . . . Gay Lib was nothing to do with sex, it was to do with political banners. It’s even more true about the lesbian thing, which has nothing to do with the hunger of women to satisfy each other’s lusts with each other’s bodies—much more to do with trying to live a life in which they’re not going to be eaten up by men.” The strengthening of “gay” as a political label weakened it as a social label. In order to achieve solidarity and strength, a plethora of disparate groups—homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites, sadomasochists, and so on—marched under a single banner of gay pride. “Our first job is to free ourselves,” argued Wittman. “That means clearing our heads of the garbage that’s been poured into them.” The sense of pride was based on three incontrovertible assumptions: first, that there was nothing abnormal or distasteful about homosexuality; second, that gays could realize power only by coming out; and third, that nothing could be achieved without solidarity. Gay strength was based not on ideology (which can be compromised or discarded), but on identity, which in this case could not easily be denied. Gays lived politics in their everyday life, but especially after they decided to come out. “If we are liberated, we are open about our sexuality,” argued Wittman. “Closet queenery must end.” A gay person automatically became a radical simply by admitting to being gay.42
“Laws discriminating against homosexuals will almost surely be changed,” Merle Miller predicted in the New York Times Magazine in 1971. But, he argued, “private acceptance of homosexuals and homosexuality will take somewhat longer. Most of the psychiatric establishment will continue to insist that homosexuality is a disease, and homosexuals, unlike the blacks, will not benefit from any guilt feelings on the part of liberals. So far as I can make out, there simply aren’t any such feelings. . . . Most people of every political persuasion seem to be too uncertain of their own sexual identification to be anything but defensive. Fearful.” New pride nevertheless encouraged new assertiveness. Gays suddenly felt strong enough to adopt the tactics of earlier protest movements: they marched, they demonstrated, they occasionally fought. In time, they would demand rights and use their considerable purchasing power as a political weapon. Gay pride was a product of Sixties radicalism, but the political progress of the gay movement was a phenomenon of subsequent decades. The success of gays in integrating themselves into mainstream society speaks volumes for the long-term effects of the Sixties sexual revolution. That revolution has been widely criticized for being the root cause of many social problems, from the AIDS epidemic to the rise in divorce, the ubiquity of pornography, and the decline of the family. But the most impressive achievement of that revolution was the way sexual relations were accepted as the business of the individual, rather than of the state. While the speed of change varied from area to area, the state gradually came to the conclusion that it had no right to interfere in what occurred between consenting adults. Henceforth, the law was instead used to punish sexual behavior which the vast majority of people deemed unacceptable—rape, polygamy, pedophilia, and so on. Gays, emboldened by Stonewall, argued for “the right to make love with anyone, any way, anytime.” Most people still found that goal distasteful, but the vast majority no longer wanted to translate their displeasure into law. In time, the concept of sexual normality would cease to become a central preoccupation of the police and the courts. Both would eventually be called upon to protect the rights of those once considered abnormal.43
For hippies, San Francisco was the perfect place to build Jerusalem. The mild climate suited the pursuit of hipness, a predominantly public, and sometimes naked, pastime. The Bay Area also had a stable economy, the result, ironically, of the huge influx of Vietnam-era defense spending. Unemployment was low and rent still relatively cheap. Dropping out was easy in an age of affluence.
Hippies parked their wagons in the Haight-Ashbury district around the same time that the Beats were fading into obscurity. The city’s tolerance of nonconformity—the result, perhaps, of its multiculturalism—meant that hippies were at first accepted, if not exactly welcomed. Residents were not normally offended by bizarre behavior. In that sense, hippies were simply a new version of the old: a sybaritic group given to flamboyance, attracted to pleasures of the flesh, and dedicated to intoxication.
At first, they seemed harmless. The shenanigans of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters led seamlessly to the joyous hedonism of the Trips Festival and the Human Be-In, all of it played to the soundtrack of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Buffalo Springfield. The great thing about being a hippie was that it did not require much thought; hipness was a visceral pursuit enjoyed with the brain in neutral. Ideological commitment was not essential, other than the commitment to have fun. While the Beat life had required some intellectual effort, being a hippie was much more superficial—identity could be achieved with a kaftan, a psychedelic poster, a black light, a range of drugs, a few hip phrases, some incense, and a handful of lentils. Granted, there were those like Leary, Ginsberg, and the Diggers who tried to graft ideology onto escapism, but their preaching was largely ignored. In any case, the prevailing philosophy was to let everyone do their own thing. To impose rules was against the rules. It seemed genuinely possible to create the perfect world in California, as long as the acid was pure and the music loud. Gentle people found love everywhere. “Haight is love” went the mantra.
Back when brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened the first psychedelic shop in Haight-Ashbury on January 1, 1966, hippies were rare. Eighteen months later, they could have filled Candlestick Park. Tour buses took bewildered sightseers to “the largest hippie colony in the world.” It was, one company boasted, “the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States.” Publicity encouraged wannabe hippies to go west in search of flower power. A 1967 CBS documentary entitled “The Hippie Temptation,” though intended as a stern warning about the dangers of hip life, acted instead like advertisement. The somber advice of sociologists and psychologists was, for many viewers, completely negated by delightful background shots of hippies having fun. The Bay Area came to be seen as a hippie Lourdes. Time estimated 50,000, while Newsweek predicted that 100,000 would gather by the summer of 1967—the Summer of Love. “Kids thought, ‘Wow, I can just get stoned and all this wonderful stuff will come out,’” Travis Rivers, owner of the Print Mint, recalled. “So we ended up with all these mental cripples. . . . You had a lot of people talking to posts.”44
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” the Diggers said. Back then, the phrase, which has since been appropriated by manufacturers of cheesy greeting cards, actually meant something to those who wanted it to mean something. Going to San Francisco was supposed to be a spiritual migration, the start of a new life. When the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman interviewed residents of the Haight in 1967, he found that those who had arrived in 1965 and 1966 were mostly college-educated and upper middle class. For them, the hippie life implied both an intellectual commitment and a spiritual transformation. They went to San Francisco because the city harmonized with the way they wanted to live.
Not so the class of ’67. The second wave included a lot of tortured souls escaping abusive families, dead-end schools, or chronic depression. They were also younger—some as young as fourteen. The journalist Leonard Wolf observed in late 1967:
The new look of the Haight may be encapsulated in one word: tougher. The kids are tougher, the kicks are tougher, and the problems are tougher. . . . Young people come and go, but what now brings them to the Haight is not so much an intuition of a better world to come as, rather, a personal unwillingness or incapacity to deal with the world they have left. . . . LSD, which was the key to the hippie experience, is being replaced in popularity by Methedrine, thereby signaling a shift from a vision- to a kick-seeking community. . . . The hippie experience is becoming increasingly the experience of the very young who are impatient with visions and the rhetoric that was invented to go with them. For distressed teenagers, kicks, hard kicks, are their own justification, and Methedrine more than fulfills their expectations.
They were refugees in America, all escaping something, all looking for something, all hopelessly ill-equipped to care for themselves. “The people that I knew on the street,” recalled one disheartened hippie, “were running around with the Everything-Is-Perfect viewpoint. Real Candide nonsense about how living is groovy, and the fact that somebody was starving or a kid was freaking out on Methedrine was not a reflection of evilness or discomfort or something being wrong at all. It meant he wasn’t in tune with his karma.” She added, with deep regret: “It’s one thing to turn away from an institution, because maybe it’s no longer feasible to change something. . . . But you can’t turn away from human beings and abandon them, and that’s what a lot of these people are doing.”45
The hordes arrived for the Summer of Love, but, in truth, love was in short supply. Haight-Ashbury was a poor black neighborhood before the hippies invaded. Hippies talked of sharing and togetherness. They didn’t believe in property, but blacks did. When a middle-class white kid plays at being poor, it causes offense to those for whom poverty does not involve choice and is not fun. Resentment spilled over into violence. For the police, a turf war between blacks and freaks made life easy—there was no reason to show leniency to either side.
“All of a sudden, the game got real hard and real gritty and the city was overrun,” recalled Peter Coyote, a Digger who tried to pick up the pieces. The Haight was overrun not just with hippies, but with those keen to exploit them. A pack of nasty hyenas had followed the migrating herd, ready to pounce on the weak, the sick, and the vulnerable. Exploiting a newly arrived hippie was not terribly difficult, since their dependencies were great and their faith in humanity boundless. “It was ugly to watch the efficiency with which that scene was dismantled,” Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead remarked. “The Abyssinians came down like wolves upon the fold. There was no bone worth picking that wasn’t stripped clean and the marrow sucked.”46
Young girls who quickly ran through their meager horde of cash soon found the city short on charity. Aside from the pimps, no one seemed to care. Turning tricks was sometimes the only way to get food. Drug dealers had a peculiar talent for turning wide-eyed adventurers into hopeless junkies in a matter of weeks. There was not much money in pot or acid, which were often given away free. The real profits came from addictive drugs: speed, codeine, Quaaludes, heroin. Barbiturates—“downers”—were particularly suited to a dream gone bad. Getting a hippie hooked was a form of ownership; the junkie, enslaved by the drug, belonged to the dealer. Flower children often turned to petty theft in order to feed their dependency. Some discovered that the most lucrative profession open to them was to become a dealer. The murder rate consequently rose as pushers fought vicious turf wars.
Rape was popular in the Summer of Love. Rape was easy because there were so many naive young girls separated from parental protection. A group called the Communication Company drew attention to a common scenario:
Pretty little sixteen-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a seventeen-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes [micrograms of LSD, twelve times the standard dose] & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. . .
Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street. Kids are starving on The Street. Minds & bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam. . . . Are you aware that Haight Street is as bad as the squares say it is?
Often it was not even called rape—merely an expression of sexual freedom by a man or men unconcerned about issues of consent. Nor was assault essential for sex to be dangerous. Rampant promiscuity fired an epidemic of venereal disease.47
The sordidness was not exclusively Californian. In October 1967 came news of the double murder of Linda Fitzpatrick and James “Groovy” Hutchinson, two flower children who had sought tranquillity in Greenwich Village. They were killed while high on LSD. Fitzpatrick, two months pregnant, was also raped. The rock critic J. Marks felt the murders “irrefutably demonstrat[ed] the innocent stupidity of our belief that you could build a good life in society’s dead cities: the slums.” Desperate parents took out ads in underground newspapers calling their children home. Newsweek reported: “Almost overnight, the East Village seemed aswarm with parents searching for some of the 9,000 runaway children believed to be living the hippie life in New York.” Fitzpatrick’s parents confessed that while their daughter was busily learning to be hip, they thought she was studying art. For too many parents, that sounded eerily familiar. “I wonder if I’m really getting through to my daughter,” one mother confessed to Newsweek. “How can anyone be certain? For all I know, she could be leading a double life too. I die a little every day.”48
The Summer of Love was supposed to have been a celebration of hip-ness. In fact, it turned out to be a bizarre funeral—“Death of Hippie,” as the Diggers proclaimed. The original hippies had already begun abandoning ship when the streets of the Haight grew crowded with imitators, manipulators, impostors, and tour buses. Quite a few migrated north and set up communes, where they hoped to recreate the hip ethos in microcosm. Those who stayed behind fell mainly into two camps: the hardcore fantasists who refused to abandon the dream (some are still there), and the frightened souls desperate to escape their personal nightmare but unable to do so. What remained of the vision was what hippies called “shuck,” the transformation of dream into dollars. “Hip is saleable,” Leonard Wolf observed. “The market is flooded with hippie clothing, jewelry, school supplies, hardware. The Haight-Ashbury is well on its way to becoming one of the gewgaw centers of the world: posters, marijuana pipes, roach holders, buttons, and light-show equipment are items in the new marketplace. Street signs reading Haight/Ashbury are for sale at thirty dollars a pair.”49
“Linda and Groovy were sacrifices, the movement’s first real martyrs,” one demoralized hippie told Newsweek. “But they showed us something, man. They showed us you can’t find God and love in Sodom and Gomorrah. So it’s time to split.” Hippies had rebelled against their parents by going to San Francisco, and had rebelled against conformity by adopting the look—beads, sandals, tie-dyed shirts, flowers in their hair. That look had gained them entry to a community, but it had also earned them the disdain of the straight world. Nonconformity was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Public disapproval and police persecution merely confirmed that rebellion had been justified. But then it all went horribly wrong, and, to make matters worse, the nastiest evil came not from the Establishment, but from inside the hippie haven. “The world of the young, with all its fervent belief in man and myth, was . . . heading rapidly toward extinction,” J. Marks concluded. Parents’ warnings, once so easily ignored, took on a worrying ring of truth. There was, however, no clear direction home. To return was difficult because it constituted an admission of defeat—acceptance of the fact that hippies could not in fact make a better world.50