BERLIN: RUDI THE RED
On December 11, 1967, Der Spiegel carried on its cover a photo of an angry, unkempt young man, his mouth wide open in a shout, his piercing eyes evoking menace. The accompanying article began: “The revolution wears a sweater, coarsely knitted, with a violent pattern. Colored stripes over chest and biceps signal the contrariness of the rebel. The sleeves are pushed up in a let’s do it’ manner. The upper body moves back and forth, in time with his speech. His fist, with thumb held up, lies clenched on the table; his forearms seem to grasp space, a gesture fit for accompanying a workers’ song.” The magazine intentionally identified the student revolution with a single, dangerous individual, thus providing a focus for fear. The Germans, for good reason, are suspicious of demagogues.1
Hider aspired to demagoguery. Rudi Dutschke—the radical in striped sweater—did not. He was made into a hero by those who worshiped him and those who despised him. Prominence, however, was an indication of failure, since he was never supposed to become “Red Rudi”—the icon of a movement that was not meant to have leaders.
West German baby boomers dressed in jeans, listened to rock music, and revolted against parental mores. They worshiped Dylan, Che, Lenin, and Lennon, rather indiscriminately. In other words, they were not unlike young people in Britain, France, and the United States. Peculiarities did, however, exist. German students who attended university in the 1960s were the first generation raised in the post-Hitler era; for them, democracy carried special resonance, particularly in contrast to the Fascist past and to their Communist neighbors. The “liberal democracy” they experienced, however, had been seriously distorted by Cold War expediency. The United States, leader of the supposedly “free” world, was an occupying power—the overseer of West Germany’s postwar reeducation. America’s support for nasty dictators, and her oppressive behavior in Cuba and Vietnam, caused young Germans to question the liberal dream. West Germany, argued Dutschke, was a “colony of the United States” and therefore, like Vietnam, obliged to support the worldwide struggle against imperialism. “Comrades, anti-authoritarians, human beings!” he shouted. “We do not have much more time. We, too, are being destroyed daily in Vietnam . . . . We have a historical opportunity. It is our will that shall largely determine how this period of history ends. If the Viet Cong is not joined by an American, European, and Asiatic Cong, the Vietnam revolution will fail, like all others before it.”2
The political system seemed to offer little opportunity for change, due to the decision by the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) in 1959 to abandon Marxism in favor of a social market economy. This “de-ideologization” meant that there was little difference between the SPD and the Christian Democrats, a fact confirmed by the Große Koalition established between the two parties in 1966 in order to combat recession. As in the United States, students grew suspicious of the “corporate liberalism” identified by Marcuse.
Young people in Germany were also forced to come to terms with their country’s Nazi past. “You can’t talk to people who created Auschwitz,” the future Red Army Faction terrorist Gudrun Ensslin complained. Reflecting on her radical days, the feminist Barbara Köster recalled
a horrible moral conformism, against which we naturally rebelled. We wanted to flee from the white Sunday gloves, to run away from the way one had to hide the fingernails behind the back if they weren’t above reproach . . . . For a long time I had severe altercations with my parents and fought against the fascist heritage they forced on me. At first I rejected their authoritarian and puritanical conception of childrearing, but soon we came into conflict over a more serious topic: the persecution of Jews. I identified with the Jews, because I felt myself to be persecuted by my family.
Because the young valued freedom and democracy, truth and justice, they found the presence of former Nazis in positions of power (including the federal president Heinrich Lübke and Grand Coalition chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger) especially galling. Hypocrisy, that favorite Sixties demon, seemed rife.3
West Berlin had an unusually large student population, due in part to the fact that young residents were exempt from military service. Until the mid-1960s, students mirrored the virulent anti-Communism of the city but a new generation, born after the war, were more inclined to think independently. The contrast between the democracy they read about in books and that which they experienced in daily life led to a feeling of alienation which they eagerly expressed in public. Prior to 1968, students in West Berlin were more rebellious than any others in Europe.
Dutschke experienced in microcosm all the political turmoil of his generation. Raised in Luckenfelde in West Germany, he witnessed firsthand the shortcomings of Moscow-inspired socialism. He saw workers exploited in a system that was supposed to be a workers’ paradise. Disturbed by these contradictions, he moved to West Berlin shortly before the Wall blocked escape. He soon found, however, that the supposedly free West was, like the East, addicted to authoritarianism and riddled with contradictions.
Studying sociology at the Free University, he immersed himself in socialist theory, convinced that Utopia could be built on the ruins of capitalism. He became expert in the rhetoric of revolution—words like “oppression,” “confrontation,” “class,” and “struggle” peppered his everyday speech. The state, he decided, could be brought down, crushed under the weight of its own contradictions. A free people could then create a truly democratic system that would enhance their lives. Like many Sixties revolutionaries, Dutschke had enormous faith in the people. But he believed that, weighed down by toil, they were incapable or unwilling to recognize oppression and lacked the confidence to revolt. Like Tom Hayden, he decided it was the duty of students, the gifted of their generation, to lead the masses to the promised land.
In January 1965, Dutschke and a few like-minded friends joined the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), which, before its expulsion in 1961, had been the official youth wing of the Social Democratic Party. SDS adhered to the Marxist faith in the working class as agents of change. Dutschke, who disagreed with that fundamental point, was determined to steer SDS toward the idea of a student-led revolution. Students, he believed, would be radicalized through demonstrations designed to provoke a violent, authoritarian response. Borrowing from Che, he envisaged a system of “action centers” that would be located at universities and that would resemble the revolutionary cells established in peasant villages. They would spread the word but also provide safe havens for urban guerrillas who would take on the government, exposing its cruelty and further politicizing the masses.
Dutschke admired Marcuse, who, along with other members of the Frankfurt School, highlighted the ideological suasion of the “administered society.” Marcuse argued that the modern industrial state was a sophisticated system of control devised by technocratic elites who found popular will inconvenient and had therefore constructed a comprehensive apparatus for neutralizing democratic power. Institutions of the establishment—the government, the military, the media, big business, and so on—colluded to enfeeble ordinary people. The Establishment not only stifled political expression; it also controlled the dissemination of information, so that most people were kept blissfully ignorant of their oppression.
Dutschke read widely but did not tie himself to any ideological mast. “No abstract theory holds us together,” he insisted. “Instead, it is the existential disgust with a society which chatters about freedom while subtly and brutally oppressing the immediate interests and needs of individuals and the people fighting for their socioeconomic emancipation.” His Utopia was big on dreams but short on structure. He spent little time thinking about practical economics and the machinery of government, preferring instead to dream of an Elysian paradise in which people would have the time and inclination to be beautiful. It would be a classless society because he said so. It would be based on participatory democracy because he assumed that people wanted to participate. Their apparent apathy was really just the effect of a suffocating government and a manipulative media. Once freed, the people would rediscover their creativity and take control of their lives. Work would become more fulfilling because people would do what they wanted to do. After their spiritual rebirth, these people would set about establishing the practical institutions to buttress their perfect world.4
Being students, German activists had profound belief in the power of learning. Left-wing bookstores and publishing houses sprouted like crocuses in spring. Marxist study groups and debating circles provided the illusion of action. Copying the American example, Dutschke and his colleagues organized teach-ins, where arcane argument was translated to theater. As in America, issues ranged from personal concerns (overcrowded universities, inattentive teachers, vague alienation) to external matters like the Vietnam War. Demonstrations were highly ritualized, lacking the creative energy evident in Paris or Berkeley. Dutschke, who cherished discipline, found that some students were attracted more to juvenile mayhem than to genuine reform. The sybaritic attractions of the counterculture worried him. He could not, for instance, prevent the clowns of Kommune 1 from marching with signs that read, “What do I care about Vietnam? I’m having problems achieving an orgasm.” Referring to their blatant sexism and puerile shenanigans, Dutschke complained: “This is not what I imagine a commune should be. The exchange of women . . . is nothing but the application of the bourgeois principle of exchange under the sign of pseudo-revolutionism.” As Hayden had already discovered, commitment was often paper-thin. Most students simply wanted a bit of anarchic fun before embracing conformity.5
The Establishment reacted predictably, given the deep apprehension of anything remotely Marxist. The university took disciplinary action against Dutschke, exactly the aggressive response he wanted. While this action suggested that Dutschke was a leader, in theory leadership was inimical to an anti-authoritarian movement wedded to participatory democracy. Dutschke preferred instead to see himself as “chief ideologist.” His prominent role nevertheless encouraged friends and foes alike to call him leader. The contradiction was partly his fault. Though he believed in mass participation, he knew precisely which direction the mass should go, and did not hesitate to point the way. He wrote articles and gave interviews designed to inspire the people, but these merely confirmed his status as the one in charge—the spokesman ready to offer opinions. Dutschke struggled with this contradiction but never resolved it. Nor did he work out the dilemma of needing the media, but also despising it.
On June 2,1967, during a demonstration in West Berlin against a visit by the shah of Iran, a student activist named Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead by police. The authorities immediately claimed it was an accident, with mayor Heinrich Albertz blaming the students. He was supported by the right-wing publishing house Springer Verlag, which had been conducting a virulent campaign against the student movement. Ohnesorg’s death galvanized the movement, with protests spreading to otherwise conservative universities. Nor was outrage confined to students. “Everybody knows that it was not a single mishap, but a deliberate campaign of terror against dissenters,” the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher argued. “It has to do with the rights of critical opposition and free speech, which are important for the success or failure of our . . . German democracy.”6
Albertz used the emergency to push through stringent laws banning demonstrations. For many Germans, this was a painful echo of the Emergency Laws passed by Paul von Hindenburg during the Weimar period. Dutschke was delighted, since overt demonstrations of authoritarian power helped to politicize the masses. Taking the initiative, he, along with a few hundred other students, challenged the government by turning Ohnesorg’s funeral into a political demonstration. They gave speeches accusing the government of sanctioning political murder. Dutschke also signaled a new phase in the struggle, one in which violence would play a part. “The established rules of the game in this irrational democracy are not our rules,” he proclaimed. “The starting point for the politicization of the students must be our conscious breaking of these established rules.” The demonstrations showed that Dutschke had a remarkable talent for focusing people’s outrage and transforming it into a willingness to take to the streets. But, like hundreds of would-be revolutionaries, he made the mistake of confusing a mass march with a mass movement. He was absolutely right about the power of provocative acts to arouse emotion, but did not understand the feelings he inspired. He failed to appreciate that demonstrations are fun; people like to march. The difficulty lay in converting a momentary fondness for protest into a commitment to protracted struggle.7
Dutschke’s actions after the death of Ohnesorg attracted the unwelcome attention of the prominent sociologist Jürgen Habermas. Though sympathetic to the need for reform, Habermas accused Dutschke of encouraging mob violence and called him a “left-wing fascist,” a remark which left the public queasy. The criticism was all the more damaging because it came from an independent thinker on the left, not the nodding donkeys of Springer Verlag. Dutschke countered that, after the formation of the Große Koalition (a move fully supported by the unions), there was no longer any opportunity for leftists to voice their views within the existing political system. In the absence of pressure, the authoritarian state would simply become more authoritarian. It had to be confronted, he argued, and the streets were the only appropriate arena.8
Dutschke felt that since violence was intrinsic to authoritarian rule, the revolution had no choice but to respond with “counterviolence.” Thanks in part to Dutschke, violence was discussed all too casually by rebellious youths; it became as fashionable as long hair and jeans. “A gun in your right hand—a joint in your left,” went the popular slogan. When students rioted in November 1968, one underground newspaper remarked: “One hundred and thirty cops now have a hole in their head. Few can complain about that.” Helmut Gollwitzer, a professor of theology, called Dutschke’s flirtation with violence “the most lunatic piece of advice possible at this moment.” Rebels, in turn, dismissed Gollwitzer as a “liberal shit.”9
The refusal to condemn violence rendered Dutschke Public Enemy Number One, or, as Springer Verlag dubbed him, Roter Rädelsführer Rudi (Red Rabble-Rouser Rudi). For all the talk of taking on the right-wing press, Dutschke was actually its best friend. Monsters, real or imagined, sold newspapers. Springer had more success mobilizing the masses than Dutschke. In February 1968, 50,000 Berliners marched in opposition to a student antiwar demonstration. Police had to intervene when the crowd attacked an unfortunate student who looked like Dutschke.
Aware that he was being manipulated, Dutschke tried desperately to improve his image. His efforts included granting a television interview to the journalist Günter Gaus on December 3,1967. Gaus, fancying a bit of provocation, introduced Dutschke as the leader of a minuscule band of “young revolutionaries at a time when one cannot believe in revolutions anymore.” Dutschke rejected this idea, and countered with a distillation of the Marcuse line that capitalism kept the people in a state of permanent somnolence. “We aren’t hopeless idiots of history, unable to take our fate into our own hands,” he calmly explained. “We can create a world such as has never been seen before. This world would not know war or hunger anymore, anywhere on this planet . . . . For this we will fight, and have begun to fight.” Viewers undoubtedly found it unsettling to witness the demon Rudi speaking with serene eloquence about revolution. The image was certainly far removed from that constructed by Springer Verlag, even though the message was rather disturbing to those sleeping comfortably in the status quo. Gaus, in perfect evocation of the gap between the young and the old, replied: “The difference between your generation and the generation of the today’s forty- to fifty-year-olds seems to be that you, the younger people, do not possess the understanding gained during recent de-cades—namely, that ideologies are used up. You are capable of believing in ideologies [ideologiefähig].”10
The public was understandably confused about the real Rudi. His gentlemanly appearance on television contrasted sharply with his behavior at an SDS conference in February 1968, itself a harbinger of the terrorist violence that would plague Europe in the 1970s. Dutschke drew from Che’s “Mensaje a la Tricontinental” calling for a protracted struggle against the “imperialist” United States. Urban guerrillas, he explained, would bring war onto the streets of the United States and its allies. The demands of fighting the internal war would make it impossible to wage external war in places like Vietnam. A short film on how to assemble Molotov cocktails was shown. While Dutschke argued that he was merely providing the means for the masses to be politicized, the emphasis upon violent provocation seemed to confirm Springer’s warnings. Dutschke may have complained that the media had made him into a demon, but every once in a while he behaved like one.
Dutschke became the leader he supposedly did not want to be. His protestations that no one was indispensable sounded increasingly hollow. Aware of this contradiction, he told the television journalist Wolfgang Venohr that the “system” was to blame. He understood that the media had to personalize the struggle, but protested that in this case it was misguided. He warned that attention paid to him would attract authoritarians keen to strut on Springer’s stage. Aware that he had become the greatest obstacle to his own ideals, he announced that he would withdraw from the limelight. He hoped that by removing himself from power he could encourage a free discussion of the movement’s future, or what Marxists called self-criticism. He wanted to demonstrate—to his followers and to the Establishment—that the movement could survive without Rudi.
Whether one takes seriously Dutschke’s announcement depends to a large extent on one’s fondness for the man. Granted, he had long complained about the media’s excessive emphasis upon leadership, and might genuinely have felt that his identification as a leader was causing harm. He had also recently become a father, in the process discovering pursuits more important than violent revolution. For nearly a year, he had been constantly in the spotlight, demonized by the press and adored by followers. This sort of thing appealed to Hitler, but not to Dutschke. Threats upon his life came regularly. Then again, he might have been plotting a restructuring of internal SDS administration in a way that would allow him to have his Kuchen and eat it too. He may have fancied a quiet spell away from the internecine struggles of SDS administration, while still enjoying the status of an elder statesman to whom the media could turn for revolutionary wisdom. Whatever the motivation, it is clear that the manner in which he announced his retirement merely confirmed his prominence.
On April 11, 1968, Joseph Bachman, an unemployed house painter from Munich, walked up to Dutschke on a Berlin street and fired three bullets. One hit him in the face, another in the chest, and the third lodged in his brain. While Dutschke lay bleeding on the pavement, the gathering crowd was more inclined to heckle than to help. Judging by letters written to Der Spiegel, many Germans celebrated the assassination. “It was the most beautiful Easter gift imaginable to hear that Dutschke had been put out of action,” one correspondent wrote. News of his miraculous survival brought disappointment: “When will this Communist pig Dutschke finally croak?”11
After being apprehended by police, the assassin explained: “I heard of the death of Martin Luther King, and since I hate Communists I felt I must kill Dutschke.” It later transpired that Bachman worshiped Hider (a fellow Munich painter) and was an avid reader of Bild Zeitung, a sensationalist tabloid owned by Springer Verlag. German radicals responded by labeling Springer an accomplice to murder. Five days of riots followed. By the end, two people lay dead, hundreds were injured, and hundreds more had been arrested. Since street violence and political assassinations evoked painful memories, German fears rose exponentially. Ordinary people reacted by blaming the students. One poll found that 92 percent of Germans were opposed to student violence. Even more significantly, 78 percent of working-class Germans under the age of thirty expressed disapproval. While the shooting of Dutschke might have fired the anger of radical students, it also unified opposition to them.12
Dutschke survived the attempt on his life, though he never fully recovered and his death ten years later was attributable to the long-term effects of the shooting. Since assassins do not usually shoot nonentities, the attack confirmed what was known all along: Dutschke was the leader of the German student movement. The attack also made moot his plan to retire, since retirement was now inevitable. The decline of his movement soon after his departure seemed to confirm just how important he was, though student organizations were admittedly in decline everywhere.
The assassination attempt bequeathed the worldwide student movement a convenient martyr. Fallen heroes encourage speculation as to what might have been. The martyr is assigned an importance and nobility he never earned in life. So it went with Dutschke. The impracticalities of his utopian dream, and the violence it implied, were quickly forgotten. The myth subsumed the man. Dutschke became a symbol of the Sixties, a time when heroes had the guts to dream and were shot for doing so. Though the student movement had clearly failed, he escaped blame. Fallen heroes like Dutschke continue to block the path to understanding the decade.
“Our life is more than money,” Dutschke announced in 1971. “Our life is thinking and living. It’s about us, and what we could do in this world . . . . My question in life is always how we can destroy things that are against the human being, and how we can find a way of life in which the human being is independent of a world of trouble, a world of anxiety, a world of destruction.” Spoken by any other student radical, such a shallow statement would have received the harsh critique it deserved. Spoken by a martyr, however, it sounded like the Sermon on the Mount. The Sixties is a basket of brilliant myths, and Dutschke one of the shiniest.13
NEW YORK: UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER!
Grayson Kirk was a typical Ivy League president, a well-mannered patrician of liberal temperament who saw himself as a guardian of the best traditions of American higher education. To manage Columbia University well, to allow it to grow and to prosper, was his vocation. In any other era, Kirk might not have been noticed outside the academic community. Unfortunately, he served as Columbia’s president at a time of rampant student unrest and had to confront a group of militants who considered his liberal philosophy complacent and the university itself a bastion of authoritarian power.
Kirk was bewildered by the anger he encountered. In a speech at the University of Virginia, he remarked: “Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority from whatever source derived, and they have taken refuge in the turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.” The gap was not simply one of generations; it was also one of understanding. Rebel students would not have considered their behavior nihilistic or inchoate. Kirk clearly did not understand them—a fatal fault for a university president in 1968. But they, in turn, did not understand Kirk.14
Trouble started when Columbia scheduled a memorial service for Martin Luther King. For politically aware students, the plan smacked of hypocrisy. At that very moment, the university, located on the edge of Harlem, was demolishing slum housing it owned in order to build a fancy new gymnasium. At the same time, the university was blocking the unionization of ancillary staff, the vast majority of whom were black or Puerto Rican. Alleged links with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a military think tank, caused further disquiet. Kirk apparently failed to see a contradiction between these issues and the ceremony in honor of King. His students did. When they protested that the gymnasium plan smacked of American racist imperialism, the university compromised by suggesting that local residents might occasionally be allowed access through a rear door—an astonishingly insensitive response which students labeled “Gym Crow.” It seemed that the university was actively trying to emulate the US government.
During the memorial service, a student named Mark Rudd jumped onstage and seized the podium, pushing aside the university vice president, David Truman, who was eulogizing King. Rudd shouted: “Dr. Truman and President Kirk are committing a moral outrage against the memory of Dr. King!” The microphone was cut off, causing Rudd to shout louder, railing against the university for stealing land from the people of Harlem.15
An angry and impatient young man, Rudd had long been looking for a cause to which to devote his brains and fists. Having just returned from a pilgrimage to Cuba organized by Students for a Democratic Society, he was utterly convinced of the necessity for violence in order to carry out a Cuban-style revolution in the United States. In that sense, he was at least as hypocritical as Kirk, since he had clearly rejected the nonviolent teachings of King. “Rudd continually accused people of cowardice,” one rebel recalled. “That was a big word back then . . . . [He] said . . . you had to get a gun, and stop being afraid, and be a man, and all that.” In common with the civil rights movement, a split was developing in SDS between those who wanted to march and those who preferred throwing stones. Rudd, disenchanted with the excessive intellectualizing of SDS, had begun to hang out with the East Village Motherfuckers, who took their name from a line in a LeRoi Jones poem: “Up against the wall, motherfuckers, this is a stick-up.” The Motherfuckers proudly asserted their intention to “defy law and order with . . .bricks, bottles, garbage, long hair, filth, obscenity, drugs, games, guns, bikes, fire, fun, and fucking.” Their tendency to mix politics with mayhem was rather too provocative for most SDS members, who took to calling Rudd’s group the “Action Faction,” a name the group rather liked. For the Action Faction, loyalty would be measured by one’s willingness to mix Molotov cocktails.16
The university responded exactly the way Rudd hoped it would. “Authoritarian” power behaved in authoritarian fashion, banning certain types of demonstrations. When Rudd subsequently led 150 students on a march protesting the university’s participation in defense research, the administration reacted, again predictably, by disciplining him and six other students. On April 23, he sent Kirk an open letter which referred specifically to the president’s complaints about the generation gap. The gap was “a real conflict between those who run things now—you, Grayson Kirk—and those who feel oppressed by and disgusted with the society you rule—we the young people . . . . We can point, in short, to our meaningless studies, our identity crisis, and our repulsion with being cogs in your corporate machines . . . . We will take control of your world, your corporation, your university, and attempt to mold a world in which we and other people can live as human beings.” The first part of the letter was reasonably logical and sane, if rather melodramatic. Rudd’s childish fantasies, however, surfaced in the last paragraph. “There is only one thing left to say,” he concluded. “It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’”17
On that same day, Rudd launched another demonstration, whose purpose was unclear. “I had only the vaguest idea about what we were doing,” he later confessed. That did not appear to matter, since action was all-important. Rudd’s mob resembled a worm on a pavement, squirming without purpose or direction. Its first target, the Low Library, was locked. They then turned in the direction of the gymnasium site, but were stopped by a sturdy fence, a cordon of police, and a counterdemonstration of 150 right-wingers. Rudd’s group grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of a building to occupy. He was losing control. Someone then suggested seizing nearby Hamilton Hall. The dean, Henry Coleman, blocked their way. In the heat of the moment, it seemed logical to take him hostage.18
To say that events quickly spiraled out of control would be inaccurate, since control had never existed. Those who crave action frequently forget to plan. Rudd and his followers held meetings about what to do next, but these quickly descended into arcane discussions about the proletariat, Marx, Lenin, and dialectical materialism. Meanwhile, a group of blacks from Harlem joined the occupation. Since they were even more action-oriented than the students, they eschewed intellectual debate and instead simply seized the building. The students wanted it to remain open for classes; the blacks didn’t. Since the latter had guns, they won the argument. They then suggested that perhaps the students should find another building to occupy.
Rudd’s group moved to the library, which they managed to force open. Since it was the site of Kirk’s office, it at least had symbolic importance. Students took the opportunity to look through the president’s secret files and smoke his cigars. Tom Hayden, who was working on an SDS-sponsored inner-city project in nearby Newark, was impressed when he paid a visit:
I had never seen anything quite like this. Students, at last, had taken power in their own hands, but they were still very much students. Polite, neatly attired, holding their notebooks and texts, gathering in intense knots of discussion, here and there doubting their morality; then recommitting themselves to remain, wondering if their academic and personal careers might be ruined, ashamed of the thought of holding an administrator in his office but wanting a productive dialogue with him, they expressed in every way the torment of their campus generation.
As time passed, the sit-in grew more popular, with the result that more buildings were occupied—a total of five by the end of the week. There was still, however, no plan or purpose. Each occupied building was like a free republic, pursuing its own agenda and producing its own propaganda. On Friday, April 26, the administration finally admitted that it had lost control and closed down the university. On the following Monday, Truman attempted to hold negotiations with Rudd and other student leaders, but these went nowhere. It proved impossible to negotiate with a group that had no idea what it wanted.19
Early Tuesday morning, the New York police provided the students with a lesson in violence, efficiency, and organization. At 2:30 A.M., the university was sealed off and 1,000 heavily armed officers descended on seven targets, sweeping aside some well-meaning students desperately appealing for calm. Police violence was indiscriminate; no attempt was made to distinguish between perpetrators and bystanders. The university resembled a war zone and, in the aftermath, 120 charges of brutality were brought against the force. The Columbia revolt had nevertheless been crushed and order restored—at least for the moment. Rudd, still believing in his cause, decided to replay the sorry episode by again occupying Hamilton Hall, with the same disastrous effect.
No one emerged with honor. Rudd and his friends convinced themselves that, despite their defeat, they had demonstrated “that the administration was more willing to have students arrested and beat up . . . than to stop its policies of exploitation, racism, and support for imperialism.” They called this “maximizing the contradictions.” In the process, however, they had also shown that they were hardly capable of organizing a bun-fight in a cafeteria. That said, the administration had provided useful lessons in how not to handle militant students. An official inquiry later criticized the university for allowing a rather simple crisis to escalate out of control. Kirk, singled out for blame, wisely retired. No longer inclined to preach eloquently on the dilemma of the generation gap, he now simply blamed his troubles on “the permissive doctrines of Dr. Spock.” The behavior of the police was roundly condemned, even by those usually inclined toward knee-jerk opposition to student radicalism. But most of all, the revolution was revealed as hollow and superficial. What had started as legitimate grievance deteriorated into childish tantrum. A year after the revolt, Rudd admitted: “We manufactured the issues. The Institute for Defense Analysis is nothing at Columbia. And the gym issue is bull. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. I had never been to the gym site before the demonstration began. I didn’t even know how to get there.” Since the politics of the demonstration were always difficult to discern, it is probably safe to conclude that most of the protesters were drawn by the lure of mayhem. “The issue is not the issue,” Rudd shouted at one point during the action. At the time, quite a few people praised his profundity. In retrospect, that inane sentence seems a suitable explanation for the descent into anarchy.20
Hayden, intoxicated by drama, afterward called for “two, three, many Columbias.” “A crisis is foreseeable that would be too massive for police to handle,” he argued. “It can happen; whether or not it will . . .is a question which only time will answer. What is certain is that we are moving toward power—the power to stop the machine if it cannot be made to serve humane ends.” He later added: “I think the problem in the movement is not so much the tendency toward adventurism, to running out in the streets, as it is the tendency in the opposite direction—to look for ways to achieve social change without pain, without loss of life, without prison sentences. America, I think, is no different from any other country in this respect—someone will have to pay dues in order to make the system move.” Rudd agreed. “At a time when the radical movement was the most disheartened and dispirited,” he later claimed, “the Columbia student rebellion broke through the gloom as an example of the power a radical movement could attain.” For him, that meant a divorce from SDS—a group too obsessed with theory. He grew enamored with a French idea called “exemplary action.” This was simply a posh way of arguing that a small demonstration could inspire a big revolution. In June 1969, Rudd helped to found a new organization devoted to exemplary action. Paying homage to a line from Bob Dylan, he and his friends called themselves Weathermen.21
PARIS: ABSURDISTS REVOLT
Paris in the spring of 1968 was not quite what Cole Porter had in mind. “The streets . . . looked dismal,” Anne McDermid, a British student drawn to the “events,” recalled. “Smouldering hulks of cars still left in the middle of the road, other cars which had not been destroyed, but whose owners had been too nervous to come back to reclaim them, . . . many street signs torn down to add to the barricades, most of the trees along the Champs Elysees cut down for similar reasons; piles of garbage bags torn by cats and dogs during the night, with their contents rotting.” Despite the ugliness, Paris of 1968 still evokes romance. Sentimental interpretations dominate recollection. Screen out the rosy glow of burning barricades, however, and the picture that emerges is one of anarchy, egotism, and emptiness. The revolutionaries achieved nothing but a very big mess. Instead of a blossoming, May inspired spring-cleaning.22
France in the early 1960s was an anachronism, a country where national pride impeded modernization. Pride was chiefly expressed in the person of General Charles de Gaulle, president of the Fifth Republic, a man whose vocation was to uphold France’s status as a great power. Since the Second World War, two futile imperial wars had been fought in order to maintain that illusion. France had also become a nuclear power, because the Bomb, the government maintained, was essential if “France is to remain a great modern country.”23
While desperately clinging to past glory, France underwent rapid economic modernization. Real wages rose by 3.6 percent in the years 1963 to 1969, an improvement manifested in a consumer boom focused on automobiles and electrical goods. The benefits were not, however, shared equally. Manual workers justifiably argued that modernization was achieved at their expense, since their wages remained low. Official statistics revealed that, at the beginning of 1968, 40 percent of workers earned less than $1,800 per year. Only one household in four could boast a refrigerator, a washing machine, and a television, while only one in five laid claim to all those and a car. Rural laborers had migrated to the cities in search of more stable and better-paid employment, not always finding their holy grail. This put enormous pressure upon urban areas, resulting in appalling slums. De Gaulle remained popular among nationalist elements in the hinterlands, but in the cities he seemed an old-fashioned autocrat.24
Baby boomers who entered university in the mid-Sixties found conditions worse in France than in any other Western country. The student population had trebled in a decade, yet facilities had not kept pace. There were not enough student rooms for everyone, and residence halls were often indistinguishable from slum housing. Students accustomed to a more permissive society than that of their parents wanted a university responsive to their needs, but encountered instead a very traditional authoritarian culture which demanded reverence for teachers. France had twice as many university students as Britain, but granted only half as many degrees, a statistic that convinced de Gaulle that students were lazy and therefore incapable of sustained political action.
Disgruntled students sampled new ideologies with great enthusiasm—there were more factions than cheeses in the market. Radicals easily claimed to be victims of “oppression,” in the process manufacturing commonality with other genuinely subjugated peoples around the world. Jacques Sauvageot of the National Union of French Students (Union Nationale des Etudiants Français, or UNEF) argued that “we can think of the present movement as a consequence of the anti-imperialist struggle. Our solidarity with struggles in the Third World cannot be overemphasized.”25
The Chinese Cultural Revolution seemed like a beacon of hope. Maoism was embraced without concrete knowledge of Mao. Fantasies of Che also proliferated. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam provided a convenient focus for anger. American efforts were interpreted as merely a continuation of what French imperialists had failed to achieve. In France, the market for American flags rose as fast as the demand for matches. “The stars and stripes have been lit up all over Europe and we may not see them go out again in our lifetime,” Richard Neville remarked rather cleverly.26
At the beginning of 1968, unrest broke out at Nanterre, a new university built in the bleak working-class suburbs of Paris. During a visit on January 8, the minister of youth and sports, François Misoffe, was challenged by a student named Daniel Cohn-Bendit over the government’s refusal to allow men to visit women in their residence halls—a regulation that was causing “sexual misery.” “I read your white paper on youth,” Cohn-Bendit interjected. “In three hundred pages, there is not one word on the sexual issues of youth.” Misoffe insisted that he was there to promote sports and suggested that if Cohn-Bendit was having problems with sex he should perhaps get more exercise. The latter retorted: “Now, there’s an answer worthy of Hitler’s youth minister.” The exchange left Misoffe flummoxed and made Cohn-Bendit a star. Thereafter, he was known as Dany le Rouge. His willingness to take on Misoffe greatly enhanced his revolutionary credibility. Likewise, the minister’s facile response reinforced the impression that the government had ears of cloth.27
French students were a class apart and behaved as such. While they professed an interest in wider social revolution, they concentrated upon improvement of their own lives. They demanded a restructuring of the ivory tower, mainly by removing aspects they found unpleasant. The criteria by which degrees would be awarded should, they insisted, be changed, with tests replaced by nondiscriminatory group discussions, and self-assessment. Their version of Student Power in practice meant the right to veto rules they hated. “A thoroughgoing analysis never truly evolved,” McDermid says. “In fact it seems ironic now how humble were the aspirations, how unambitious the demands . . . . The expressed demands were always for reforms perfectly consistent with capitalism.”28
Feeling emboldened, activists occupied the “Tower,” one of the main Nanterre buildings. As in Germany and the United States, the government overreacted, immediately suspending classes. “If the government had not thought they had to crush the movement,” Cohn-Bendit later reflected, “we never would have reached this point of a fight for liberation. There would have been a few demonstrations and that would have been it.” Sympathy strikes followed at universities around the city. Before long, it seemed that everyone aspired to revolution. The Parti Communiste Français at first wanted nothing to do with the students, but then decided that the government’s difficulties presented an opportunity. The same could be said of labor organizations—on May 1, workers marched from the Place de la République to the Bastille. Events were spiraling out of control. On the 3rd, police broke up a meeting of activists at the Sorbonne, again providing evidence of authoritarian power. A week later, demonstrators occupied the Latin Quarter, in response to the government’s refusal to allow the broadcast of a television program on the student movement. On the 13th, students and workers for the first time marched together, to the great dismay of de Gaulle.29
Lacking a coherent strategy, the movement resorted to violence as the simplest expression of Marcusian refusal. “Violent revolt is in the French culture,” Cohn-Bendit claimed with too much fatalism. Dreaming of the Revolution of 1848, students quickly learned to build barricades and improvise weapons. With battles raging on the streets of Paris, the government mobilized the Compagnies Republicaines de Sécurité (CRS), who resembled a fiendish army of Daleks. “It’s a moment I shall never forget,” recalled one protester. “Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades were being thrown up in the streets. People were piling up cobblestones because they wanted—many of them for the first time—to throw themselves into a collective spontaneous activity. People were releasing all their repressed feelings, expressing them in a new festive spirit. Thousands felt the need to communicate with one another, to love one another.” McDermid was surprised at how easily violence erased a culture of restraint. “I threw my pave with all the force I could muster, and the shriek of triumph in my ears was probably my own. I had broken a fundamental taboo against civil disobedience which lies very deep.” Violence validated participation. The government’s heavy-handed response convinced the students that they deserved to be taken seriously as a revolutionary force. “The possibility of being shot,” McDermid reflected, “not hit over the head, dragged by the hair, kicked in the stomach, not suspended from classes or ostracised by relatives—but wounded by an actual bullet fired from a real gun—made those snide comments about middle-class revolutionaries somehow lacking in point.”30
In truth, there were few real bullets fired from real guns. The riots had a distinctly avant-garde, symbolist nature, as if the whole affair had been scripted by André Gide and filmed by Jean-Luc Godard. The barricades were constructed not for strategic purpose but for symbolic value. Their strength lay in their existence, not in the fact that they prevented the passage of Authority. Demonstrators hurled more gestures than Molotov cocktails. The same could be said of the authorities: the CRS achieved a great deal more by suggesting oppression than through actual oppressive force. Even the actual violence seemed choreographed and symbolic. A police spokesman admitted that “violence was the price we paid for the refusal, on both sides, to kill.”31
“I was completely surprised by 1968,” François Cerruti, who ran a radical bookstore, confessed. “I had an idea of the revolutionary process, and it was nothing like this. I saw students building barricades, but these were people who knew nothing of revolution. They were high school kids. They were not even political. There was no organization, no planning.” Nadja Tesich later decided that 1968 was a “bourgeois revolution”—an uprising of wealthy children bent on wrecking their parents’ cars.32
Having previously been reluctant to join the fray, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s largest trade union, eventually found it irresistible. In conjunction with the French Communist Party, the CGT fomented demonstrations around the country. Strikes spread like a plague, with factories shut down and public services paralyzed. By May 18, perhaps six million workers had downed tools, the biggest strike in French history.
Students and workers made strange bedfellows. While the situation suggested an organized uprising, in fact it was nothing of the sort. Dissident groups acted opportunistically, in pursuit of their own aims. There were no attempts at coordination, no long-term goals. Visiting the Sorbonne in the midst of the crisis, Ian Dengler found that the students there “really don’t understand what they are after.” A proclamation pinned to the entrance of the Sorbonne stated: “The revolution which is beginning will call in question not only capitalist society but industrial society. The consumer society must die a violent death. The society of alienation must disappear from history.” When it came to describing what would replace the old, however, the proclamation was studiously vague: “We are inventing a new and original world. Imagination is seizing power.” The students fantasized about revolution, while the workers simply sought better pay and shorter hours. A poll taken in 1967 found that only 19 percent of workers were dissatisfied with their circumstances, while 81 percent were “generally” or “frankly” satisfied.33
French Maoists insisted that mass participation was the only way to achieve liberation. They camouflaged their insignificance by shouting loudly. Traditional forms of political expression were derided as boring or—shades of Marcuse—part of an elaborate plot to silence dissent by providing an illusion of consent. While the students were supposed to be fomenting a revolution, in truth micro-communities emerged which were remarkably similar to the society the students supposedly sought to overturn. There were leaders, social classes, in-groups, out-groups, and virulent prejudice toward those accused of deviation. Anti-authoritarians reveled in the exercise of authority. For all the talk of democracy and free speech, anyone deemed “moderate” or “bourgeois” was automatically purged. One anarchist periodical claimed that the only thing forbidden was to be on the right. Occupiers of the Odéon Theater refused admission to anyone deemed bourgeois.
In theory, the students idolized the working class and demanded workers’ control. Some insisted that the percentage of working-class students at the universities be increased. Others openly advocated the demystification of “proper” speech and defiantly adopted the idiom of the workers. In practice, however, students were rudely contemptuous of their “comrades.” The two groups were determined to exploit each other. Workers considered students elitist snobs, and students considered workers stupid sheep. Mutual incomprehension fueled disdain. Because the students had never had to worry about their daily bread, they could indulge in esoteric politics. Because bread (both the paper kind and that made from wheat) mattered deeply to the workers, they had no time for fancy ideologies.
According to Ian Dengler, only those workers who had already proven their credentials by being members of approved political groups were accepted. “The worker who just drifts in for a look is treated with all the intellectual disdain and scientific detachment a technician would have for his children: surprised to find that they have anything to say to him, after he has arranged things so well for them.” When Dengler found the toilets at the Sorbonne blocked and the whole place a stinking mess, he wondered to himself who would take care of the plumbing after the revolution.34
Actually, there was no such thing as a French student movement. There were instead myriad movements espousing contradictory aims. In the absence of leadership, factions flourished. As the narrator reflects in Jean-François Vilar’s novel Nous cheminons entourés de fantômes aux fronts troués (We Walk On Surrounded by Ghosts with Faces Full of Holes; 1993), Paris was a three-ring circus: “We like one another, we detest one another with that inexpiable hatred that links those who are not building the same identical embryo of the future and necessary revolutionary party. The ‘Italians,’ the Trots [Trotskyites], the Maoists, the anarchists, the spontaneists, the Bordighists, the archeo-situationists, the Posadists, the ones who are against all tendencies, and a few others besides.” Every attention-seeking rebel laid claim to the revolution by making himself a poster and shouting from a soapbox. Most people joined for the excitement, sampling ideologies like tarts from a bakery. The entire affair was a gigantic exercise in political masturbation, as thousands of activists feverishly sought individual fulfillment. “In this revolution we are trying to reinvent the concept of life, of language, and of political expression,” Jean-Jacques Lebel claimed. In attempting to explain the ideology of the movement, he managed only to convey its self-indulgence. “We are for the total destruction of categories. We want everyone to use the university for whatever they want. Not only for education, but to eat, sleep, fuck, and get high . . . . We want to demolish the structure of the consumer society—and that includes culture.”35
McDermid initially thought French students much more intensely politicized than those in America or Britain. She was impressed by the fact that “our debates contained Marxists, Trotskyites, libertarian anarchists, Maoists, but no American-style hippies with their emphasis upon life-style instead of theory.” She gradually realized, however, that “it was . . . lifestyle that the students were really interested in, but their manner and their language was so formal and stylised I was quite misled.” Most French revolutionaries were nothing more than hippies able to quote from Mao’s Little Red Book. Posters on the walls of the Sorbonne proclaimed: “The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” “Imagination has seized power” was another favorite. One anarchist at the Sorbonne demanded the “right to urinate where I like,” a demand which would have delighted Jerry Rubin. Like the kids they were, the group occupying the Odéon Theater broke into the costume closets and then went out to face the police dressed as centurions, princesses, jesters, and pirates. “I never believed, from Day One, that they would take power—because they were too chaotic and disorganized,” Nadja Tesich reflected. As Baudelaire wrote of 1848: “The revolution was charming only because of the very excess of its ridiculousness.”36
The leaders in the self-indulgence stakes were the Strasbourg-based Situationists, who turned the pursuit of sensual gratification into a political creed. “We do not want a world in which the guarantee of no longer dying of hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom,” they argued. It was their aim “to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammeled desire.” They took their name from the belief in the need to create “situations” which would provoke authority to demonstrate its repressiveness—something Provo did better and with a lot less pretense. The revolution, they argued, had to be fun, or it was no use having it at all. Cut through the verbiage and one found a basically antidemocratic, elitist movement dominated by the desire for orgasms on demand. To post-pubescent men still in the process of discovering the joys of sex (though yet to learn the beauty of loving), the Situationists had enormous appeal. The puerile had suddenly become political.37
Conditions in Paris were approaching a crisis, with work stoppages causing food shortages and general chaos. The government seemed clueless; its helplessness exacerbated public panic and made the demonstrators more daring. Then, on May 27, prime minister Georges Pompidou struck a deal with the CGT by granting higher wages and shorter hours. Hopes of a breakthrough, however, were dashed when workers at Renault unilaterally refused to ratify the deal. Meanwhile, the head of the French Socialist Party, François Mitterrand, announced that he would be prepared to form a new government of the left, with himself as president and Pierre Mendès-France as prime minister.
De Gaulle responded by leaving the country, to the considerable alarm of his people. No one quite knew the reason for his departure, or indeed if he remained in control. He turned up in Baden-Baden, where he held discussions with General Jacques Massu, commander of French military forces in that sector. Having apparently secured the reassurance he sought from Massu, he returned to Paris reinvigorated. On May 30, he announced that elections would take place the following month. The tide had turned. On that same day, a pro-government demonstration marched along the Champs-Elysées. An estimated one million people took part, some of them chanting slogans like “Send Cohn-Bendit to Dachau”—a demand all the more frightening given that he was half-Jewish. Since students had depended on the support of the workers, when that support evaporated their threat disintegrated. Elections on June 23 and 30 gave a landslide victory to the Gaullists. De Gaulle, who had seemed so old-fashioned at the start of the crisis, was suddenly in vogue again. He played a part he knew well—that of France’s hero in its hour of need. Never mind that the crisis was largely his creation.38
In that remarkable French way, humiliation was transformed into triomphe. “Last May we took to speaking up,” the cultural theorist Michel de Certeau argued, “just as in 1789 we took the Bastille.” Certeau unwittingly summarized the attitude of a new generation of revolutionaries whose ambitions could be satisfied with mere display. According to Cohn-Bendit, what mattered was that the students had launched a spontaneous experiment designed to make a complete break with society. The fact that the experiment failed was unimportant, since the revolutionaries had done “enough to prove that something could exist.” Competing with Cohn-Bendit in vague justifications, Jacques Rémy claimed that 1968 had “no goals, no plans—only sensations and good feelings and a desire to see to a conclusion what had been begun.” Those with romantic recollections of the episode are hard-pressed to prove that it was anything more than a rollicking good time—a month of juvenile mayhem free of parental supervision. Alain Peyrefitte, the French minister of education, dismissed the uprising by claiming that “certain French students, having found out that students in other countries have shaken up and smashed everything, want to do the same.” In retrospect, that sounds about right.39
The uprising is best known for the clever slogans painted on walls throughout the city. The wittiest of the lot was probably “I have something to say, but I’m not sure what,” a simple sentence which perfectly encapsulates those directionless days. Meaningless futility does not, however, sit well with the French. Many insist that their society was more open and democratic after May 1968, and credit students for this change. There seems to be, within France, a conspiracy to paint the past in bright colors. The official version holds that youthful rebellion, though at times ferocious, smoothed France’s transition to modernity. Commenting upon this convenient myth, a disgusted Régis Debray has written: “The France of stone and rye, of the apéritif and the institute, of oui papa, oui patron, oui chérie, was ordered out of the way so that the France of software and supermarkets, of news and planning, of knowhow and brainstorming, could show off its viability to the full, home at last. This spring-cleaning felt like a liberation and, in effect, it was one.”40
“Our generation was generous, the bearers of very strong moral values that were perverted by politics,” wrote Jean-Paul Ribes. Positivists desperately connect the May events to everything good that happened after 1968. They lay claim to the emergence of feminist and green movements in the 1970s, even though there was little feminist or environmental consciousness evident on the barricades. Educational reforms after 1968 seem no more impressive than the normal pace of change would have produced. In truth, the May events seem to be the manifestation of a freer, more permissive society, rather than the progenitor of such a society. Though the uprising grew from a youthful sense of exuberance, it left the French public frightened and suspicious. Playful students encouraged authoritarian backlash, as evidenced by the success of the Gaullists at the June election. The dream of social change wilted around the same time as the narcissi.41
“In 1968, the planet embraced itself,” wrote Cohn-Bendit in 1986. “In Paris, as in Berlin, Rome, or Turin, the paving stone became a symbol of a generation in revolt.” One of de Gaulle’s first acts after the crisis was to order the paving of the Latin Quarter with asphalt. For nearly 800 years, cobblestones had provided a ready source of ammunition for disgruntled citizens. Never again.42
LONDON: A VERY BRITISH REVOLUTION
In 1968, outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, the British momentarily dispensed with civility. If the antinuclear Aldermaston marches of the previous decade seemed scripted by the Ealing Studios, Grosvenor Square was a film by Kubrick. “[We] were really having a go,” Nina Fishman recalled. “That took everyone by surprise, because it wasn’t good manners.” Though she had witnessed violence firsthand in the American South during Freedom Summer, she had never seen that sort of thing in civilized Britain. The past, it seemed, had been left behind.43
The British may have been the stars in the Sixties cultural revolution, but in the political upheaval they were bit players. For most of the decade, the pursuit of happiness kept British youths too occupied to get excited about serious issues of life and liberty. British police kept reserves of tear gas, but never used it. Students, for the most part, went to classes and took exams.
History books seldom pay attention to the mundane—to the dogs that refuse to bark. Riots and demonstrations make interesting reading, but the tendency to concentrate on them encourages the assumption that the Sixties was a decade of incessant turbulence. In fact, even in America, where student protest was supposedly rife, mass demonstrations occurred at only 10 percent of campuses and, on those campuses, only 10 percent of students took part. In other words, protesters were a tiny minority of an otherwise apathetic student body. Apathy was even more the norm in Britain, where politics seemed too much like hard work. One Leicester University student complained that “virtually all intelligent and worthwhile debate . . . still takes place among relatively small groups in an atmosphere of comparative privacy. The subject of greatest concern has been the apathy that most of us display”44
British students lived in a stable society in which protest of any kind was rare. The welfare state provided a safety net and encouraged the impression of a caring society. The government was not involved in costly wars abroad; it had refused Lyndon Johnson’s invitation to fight in Vietnam. Of all the developed countries, Britain was least bothered by the generation gap. One poll of adults across Europe found that a whopping 59 percent of Britons had a generally positive opinion of the younger generation. All this meant that it was rather difficult to foment unrest. “It was pretty quiet,” one frustrated activist admitted. “It was very hard to struggle against the nanny state . . . . London was a huge party and everyone was having a good time.”45
Craving seriousness, some students occasionally laid claim to the problems of the world. The Radical Student Alliance argued:
The path from the examination-room to the paddy-fields of Vietnam may appear to be a rather long and devious trek; this is because of our neat habit of separating issues into their “well-defined” compartments . . . . But the path of Student Power rejects this segmentation of our thought-processes . . . . There is a social pattern to these events which can be traced back to the social and economic organisation of societies—in other words, examinations and support for the American policy in Vietnam—both emanate from a certain type of society, from the same social set-up known as monopoly capitalism.46
That was, of course, a load of tripe, but the British are fond of tripe. This sort of reasoning allowed some students to convince themselves that seemingly trivial campus issues were deeply important, because they symbolized the oppressive power of the state. Presto, the ivory tower became part of the real world.
At most British universities, however, protests were infrequent, small, and invariably peaceful. The one exception was the London School of Economics (LSE), where students were much more agitated about issues, and much more inclined to protest. This fervor had historical precedent. The LSE had been founded in 1898 by Fabian socialists and had retained its radical reputation. It was also an institution that was dedicated to the social sciences and that tended to attract politically aware middle-class students. In addition, the university had a rather strange tradition of hiring reactionary administrators who reveled in righteous authority.
The LSE was the unofficial headquarters of the British New Left, a group less new and more left than its American counterpart. At least in theory, the British were much more willing to embrace the communal at the expense of the individual. Theory was, however, usually as far as it went. The British New Left consisted of political junkies who could spend days arguing the finer points of Marxist dialectic without ever descending to practicalities. Though they dreamed of taking revolution out into the streets, they hardly ever managed to get up from their desks. “I knew the New Left Review people but always felt distanced from their politics,” Michael Horovitz recalled. “They seemed such literal-minded disciples of Sartre and purveyors of long words. Talking a lot but not getting that much done, beyond all their publishing.” The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm dismissed them as “negligible,” since they produced “neither new parties of the left . . . nor lasting new organizations of significance . . . nor even individual national leaders.”47
Alan Marcuson agreed in retrospect that so much of what he witnessed at the LSE was just political playacting. The very fact that the revolutionaries were still going to classes and still interested in getting degrees seemed to confirm that politics was just a hobby.
All those revolutionary arseholes, when it really came down to it, had to finish their courses and get their jobs and secure their careers. And that’s the reason, I believe, that the LSE failed—the revolutionaries wouldn’t give up their goddamn careers.
It was very interesting and exciting but it was a complete fuck-around. Just a load of talk, endless, endless meetings and arguments and bad feeling and factions of the Left.
The battles were fierce, but the weapons just words. “People would come to my flat and have discussions about, ‘Could Bukharin be resurrected? Could Bukharin be made a hero?’” Nina Fishman recalled. “It was an intellectual fashion, really.” Chris Rowley witnessed “Troskyists [fighting] each other with venom and vituperation beyond anything I could recall from school debating classes . . . . There was no right wing, and the Socialists were the centrists.” The Socialist Society wanted nothing to do with members of the Labour party, who were revisionist scum. Socialism implied revolution, which in turn implied worship of the Vietnamese and hatred of the Russians. Debates usually took place in the Union Bar, perhaps the whole point of the exercise. Bitter political enemies bought each other pints. Argument, like the beer, was lukewarm and flat.48
A change came in February 1966, when David Adelstein, self-proclaimed activist and believer in participatory democracy, became union president. He had no intention of confining agitation to the price of a pint in the Union Bar. Nor was he particularly interested in purely theoretical debate. Quite fortuitously, a few months after his election, the LSE appointed Dr. Walter Adams its new director. Adams had previously been principal of University College in Rhodesia and, much to the dismay of leftist students, had not sufficiently distanced himself from the racist policies of that country.
Adelstein’s outspoken criticism of the appointment prompted university authorities to discipline him. This rather stupid move gave Adelstein exactly what he wanted—namely, proof that the university had no respect for free speech. The university had obviously not been paying much attention to events in the United States, or perhaps felt confident they could be ignored.
In February 1967, during a demonstration against the appointment, an altercation between protesters and a university porter resulted in the latter’s suffering a fatal heart attack. Since the demonstration had been banned, the university felt that it could take stringent action against the organizers, two of whom, Adelstein and Marshall Bloom, were “rusticated” until the following academic year. Radical students reacted by organizing a boycott of lectures and a sit-in lasting eight days. This time, the university took notice. The involvement of otherwise apolitical students convinced authorities that the protest had to be taken seriously. In response, the board of governors suspended the rustications. A new staff/student committee was set up to hear grievances. Students felt emboldened by their victory, but hadn’t a clue what to do next.
The war in Vietnam provided an answer. British students had protested against American policy in Vietnam from as early as 1962, but always politely. After ground troops were deployed in 1965, Vietnam became a prominent issue on campus—virtually every university staged some sort of protest. “The Vietnamese were demonstrating in the most concrete fashion imaginable that it was possible to fight and win,” the radical leader Tariq Ali later reflected. “This fact was critical in shaping the consciousness of our generation. We believed that change was not only necessary, but possible.” “So much seemed at stake in Vietnam,” Angela Carter thought. “The very nature of our futures.” Nevertheless, until 1968 protests remained consistently quiet.49
The war, which seemed to reveal in microcosm the worst aspects of American neo-imperialism, provided the perfect romantic cause. David was taking on Goliath. Poorly armed peasants were using Maoist tactics to defend their country against the American bully, and seemed to be winning. British youths found it easy to support the Viet Cong because they were untroubled by moral dilemma. Protesting the war was not unpatriotic, since no British boys were fighting. Furthermore, since the British had already disposed of most of their colonies, they could freely lay claim to moral superiority. Vietnam provided the perfect gut issue: hating America taxed neither the conscience nor the wallet.
The British antiwar movement reached its climax in Grosvenor Square. The demonstrations were organized by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), a group founded in January 1966 by Ali and Pat Jordan, two Trotskyites. The group, Ali boasted, was “committed to the victory of the Vietnamese people against the war of aggression and atrocity waged by the United States.” Not strictly speaking a student group, the VSC was dominated by young people and, as such, was a marked departure from the older pacifist groups, which had originally protested nuclear weapons. The old tactics of nonviolent moral protest by respectable men smoking pipes and women pushing prams were rudely discarded. Quite suddenly, political protest in Britain was hijacked by a band of desperados intent on mayhem, or what the Observer called “a highbrow version of football hooliganism.” Johnny Byrne, who lived in a proto-commune in London, recalls the arrival of a young American woman named Nadia, a veteran of Berkeley. She “radicalised everybody . . . . She was the one who got them all down to Grosvenor Square during the big demonstration in ’68. I remember endless weeks and weeks of people talking about using their banners as lances, spears, unhorsing policemen and charging them—the tactics of confrontation.”50
This aggression violated the sensitivities of the British Council for Peace in Vietnam (BCPV), a traditional pacifist group. The BCPV accused the VSC of being more interested in drama than message. The VSC defended itself by arguing that stridency was essential: “By adopting a decisive and clear-cut position, it is much easier to mobilize effective support. By watering down one’s aims, one merely becomes so diffuse that one is totally ineffective.”51
The VSC was not simply interested in ending the war in Vietnam. Like SDS, the group also wanted a total transformation of society, and believed wholeheartedly in the necessity of violence to achieve that end. According to the widely accepted dialectic, violence provoked an aggressive response from the authoritarian state, thus radicalizing the people. Jo Durden-Smith experienced this effect firsthand: “You went on a demonstration tentatively: you didn’t know whether you were a radical or not—and one of the things that happened was that it radicalised you. Because it didn’t matter whether or not you were actually a radical—you still got beaten up. It was a collective rite of passage.” That said, commitment based on emotion, rather than belief, meant that loyalty to the cause was often fickle.52
What Ali and his friends did not understand (or perhaps ignored) is that violence provides its own attraction; politically apathetic people join in because mayhem is alluring. Writing in Political Quarterly in 1969, the political scientist James Jupp observed:
[The] Marcusean tactic of “ripping the mask from violence” satisfies the youthful desire to fight. It gives intellectual justification for the kind of behaviour long found among adolescents at football matches and on Glasgow housing estates. The battles between mods and rockers have been replaced by those between “the fuzz” and the forces of good. In so far as violence is directed against the sort of forces which strafe American campuses from helicopters, then Marcuse has opened a window on truth. But where, as so often in Britain, the fight is deliberately provoked to prove a point, then he has simply licensed the creation of a public nuisance.
John Hopkins found the VSC all too transparent and cynical—history provided too many examples, he felt, of demagogues taking advantage of the forbidden allure of mob violence. After the first Grosvenor Square demonstration, in October 1967, he railed against Ali in IT. “Who’s cannon-foddering these people?” he asked. “From that day I took no part in that kind of demonstration.”53
The first march on the American Embassy took place on October 22, 1967, and involved perhaps 10,000 people. “What we felt was that if we were able to smash up a bit of the Embassy it would be a way of demonstrating solidarity with the Vietnamese,” Robin Blackburn later explained. “We were partly hoping that the media might report it and generally add to the view of an American president under siege, even from loyal allies like the British with their tame Labour government.” The demonstration was considerably angrier than anything the English had recently seen. Marchers reached the doors of the US Embassy before police forced them back. Forty-four demonstrators were arrested.54
The next demonstration came on March 17, 1968. Referring to Tet, Ali boasted that the aim was to occupy the building “for just as long as the Vietcong held the American Embassy in Saigon seven weeks ago.” A crowd of between 10,000 and 25,000 took part, depending on who was counting. More important than the size was the way the demonstration revealed an addictive attraction to violence. Durden-Smith, who covered the demonstrations for ITV’s World in Action, felt that the media provided encouragement: “[Television] was the mirror . . .in which our gestures became grandiose.” He saw students prodded from two directions. “The media played a sort of pushing, forcing role: ‘Be like that only more so. Do more, be more extreme.’ At the same time there was this pressure from the radical Left of exactly the same kind, towards more and more revolutionary purity, towards final exorcism of the bourgeois elements buried deep within.” Melodramatic reaction by the Establishment provided further validation: the Daily Mail, Sun, and Telegraph called for demonstrations of this sort to be banned, while in the House of Commons, the MP Tom Iremonger called for the deportation of “foreign scum”—a clear reference to Ali.55
The final demonstration came on October 27,1968. Given the May events in Paris, the media dwelt on the possibility of similar occurrences in London, thus providing even more publicity for the VSC. Alarmists warned of full-scale revolution. The turnout was huge, with perhaps 100,000 taking part. Scuffles between police and protesters provided an interesting manifestation of the class war, as working-class bobbies vigorously defended the Establishment against middle-class troublemakers. On the whole, however, good sense prevailed. The demonstration did not produce the orgy of violence widely expected.
For every individual radicalized by action, many more, it seems, were alienated by it. Prior to the October 1968 demonstration, Geoff Martin, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), issued a statement to the Times in which he urged students not to take part. “The trend to violence must be halted. Ignore the demonstration, it won’t help the Vietnamese people . . . . NUS defends the right to peaceful demonstrations. But we see student political involvement as a matter of brain, not brawn. Many groups planning violence on Sunday are conning the students and the general public into believing their main concern is Vietnam. It is not; their purpose is confrontation with the police . . . . These political hooligans, many of whom are not students, admit they want a ‘weekend revolution.’” Honesty of this sort attracted howls of protest from the NUS rank and file. At a subsequent conference, the leadership was censured for “blatant abuse of their position.” Meanwhile, the Radical Student Alliance and the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation labeled Martin a reactionary stooge.56
John Lennon agreed with Martin. His “Revolution,” released as a single in August 1968, was a reaction to the mindless violence of that year—the shooting of Kennedy and King, Tet, the riots in Chicago and Paris, and the increasing fondness among youths for Maoist tactics. Lennon’s message is crystal clear: if the revolution wished to emulate Mao, count him out. He wanted nothing to do with “minds that hate,” and his demand to be shown the “plan” seems a pointed reference to the fact that “leaders” like Ali did not have one. “Don’t expect me to be on the barricades unless it’s with flowers,” Lennon announced.57
Lennon’s forthright advocacy of nonviolence earned him few friends. McCartney was opposed to releasing the song as a single, fearing it would alienate a significant portion of the Beatles’ fan base. In America, radicals lambasted Lennon for his “betrayal,” calling the song “a lamentable petty-bourgeois cry of fear.” His cozy assurances that everything was going to be “alright” were, according to his critics, no less than could be expected from a millionaire. The jazz singer Nina Simone released a musical rebuttal, and the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, a self-confessed fan of Mao, accused Lennon of apathy. Right-wingers in America, on the other hand, argued that Lennon was simply being clever: his real message was that Maoists risked jeopardizing the revolution by pushing too hard.58
Lennon’s behavior stands in sharp contrast to that of Mick Jagger, who joined the crowd outside Grosvenor Square and took delight in throwing stones. He then went home, wrote “Street-Fighting Man,” and made millions off the revolution. That sort of behavior might have been what Martin had in mind when he railed against “weekend revolutionaries.”
According to the home secretary, James Callaghan, the Grosvenor Square protests were “a demonstration of British good sense.” He praised the “self-control” shown by the vast majority of protesters and complimented the “discipline and restraint” shown by police. The latter, he maintained, “remained completely calm even under the provocation of the disorderly charging and shoving . . . . I doubt if this kind of demonstration could have taken place so peacefully in any other part of the world.” Callaghan was probably right. Remarking on the March demonstration, the Manchester Guardian, a traditionally leftist paper, commented that “it was only after considerable provocation that police tempers began to fray and truncheons were used, and then only for a short time. The demonstrators seemed determined to stay until they had provoked a violent response of some sort from the police.” In other words, the demonstrations are notable for what did not happen. No one was killed. Neither tear gas nor water cannons were used. A Commons bill calling for the imprisonment of the organizers and the deportation of foreign agitators garnered just 62 votes out of more than 600 MPs. The attorney general, Sir Elwyn Jones, briefly threatened to use the 1936 Public Order Act (which prohibited the formation of paramilitary organizations) as a weapon against the VSC, but that turned out to be nothing more than bombast.59
Those who participated in the demonstrations are certain they did their bit to chip away at the American edifice of war. In truth, however, Grosvenor Square was more important for what it revealed than for what it achieved. Britain was and remains a stable society not given to expressing emotions in the street. “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” Pink Floyd would later contend. There always exists in Britain a small core of committed politicos who feel a genuine need to protest, as well as another group of hooligans who love the sound of breaking glass. Occasionally, the two groups form a brief and uneasy alliance, in the process exaggerating each other’s importance.60