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The great year of the hippy may be said to have begun on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, when ten thousand boys and girls assembled in New York Central Park’s Sheep Meadow to honor love. They flew kites, tossed Frisbees, joined hands in “love circles,” painted designs on each other’s faces, and chanted: “Banana! Banana!” after a current hoax, that banana scrapings had psychedelic properties. On the other side of the country that Sunday fifteen thousand youths in San Francisco cheered Dr. Leary’s Pied Piper spiel: “Turn on to the scene; tune in to what’s happening; and drop out—of high school, college, grade school… follow me, the hard way.”
What came next was a nightmare for tens of thousands of mothers and fathers. With the memories of their Depression childhoods still vivid, the parents of the late 1960s could not grasp that the country had become so prosperous it could afford to support tramps, or that their own children would want to be among the tramps. “The kids looked like bums, often acted like bums,” the Associated Press reported, “but they were no ordinary bums. Most had spent their lives in middle-class surroundings, finishing high school, often graduating from college—the American dream.” Now their photographs, forwarded by their parents and accompanied by pathetic messages pleading for news of their whereabouts, were hung on bulletin boards in police stations. The pictures weren’t much help. Taken when the youngsters were straight, they bore little relation to their new life-style.
The police did what they could. The Salvation Army opened a coffee house in East Village called The Answer, where flower children in their early teens were urged to return home. Runaways in Haight-Ashbury were sheltered at church-sponsored Huckleberry’s while mothers and fathers were contacted. A physician opened a free clinic for hippies in San Francisco. Almost immediately he was overwhelmed by pregnancies, cases of venereal disease, and hepatitis caused by dirty syringes. Virtually every hippy in Hashbury had a cold or the flu. Many had tried sleeping in Golden Gate Park, unaware that a hidden sprinkling system automatically started up at dawn.
The greatest health hazard, of course, was the drugs. The hippies had no way of knowing what they were buying; Dr. Louis Lasagna found that many were getting veterinary anesthetics or even plain urine. In that summer many were experimenting with STP, a new compound named for a gasoline additive used in the Hell’s Angels motorcycles. Between 5,000 and 10,000 STP capsules were given away. The flower children, liking it, christened it “the caviar of psychedelics.” Doctors discovered that it was extremely dangerous; when taken in combination with chlorpromazine, an LSD antidote, STP could prove fatal. The “speed freaks” or “meth monsters,” as other hippies called them, were taking methedrine; when high, they were capable of almost anything. Meantime, in Buffalo, Dr. Maimon M. Cohen announced that preliminary findings in an investigation of LSD and chlorpromazine indicated that mixed together the two could result in chromosome damage, spontaneous abortions, or deformed infants.
That summer tourist buses were routed through Haight-Ashbury to provide a glimpse of the strange scene there. (Sometimes a hippy would run alongside the bus, holding up a mirror.) There, and in East Village, part-time flower children, or “plastics,” as they were known—straights who were in effect slumming—were spending their weekends as hippies, returning to their jobs on Monday morning conservatively dressed and well groomed. The attitude of the New Left toward the flower children was equally ambivalent. In the beginning, when Leary succeeded Mario Savio as youth’s demigod, New Left writers praised the hippies for their candor and spontaneity. After the Reagan landslide the situation changed. Many disillusioned militants tossed in the sponge, abandoned hope, and chose instead to stay stoned for days at a time. Flower power, they said, was nonpolitical. Stung, New Leftists retorted that the hippies lacked “stability” and “energy,” that they were “intellectually flabby,” and that they were really “nihilists” whose idea of love was “so generalized and impersonal as to be meaningless.” Of course, the hippies replied; that was their thing, and they were going to do it, and up yours.
The immediate threat to the flower children was not from parents, policemen, tourists, or New Leftists. It came from lower-class ethnic groups into whose neighborhoods they had moved. Haight-Ashbury was a working-class district; New York’s East Village was inhabited by Italians, Negroes, Poles, Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Ukrainians, all of them trying to climb into the lower middle class. The spectacle of idle youth scorning the class status to which the ghetto inhabitants aspired for their own children infuriated them. The AP quoted a twenty-year-old porter who had just been laid off: “These cats want to drop out. How do you think that makes a guy feel who is just trying to get in?”
“We hippies love people,” a flute player protested; “we certainly aren’t bigoted.” The ethnics, he said wonderingly, thought of his neighborhood as “their turf.” They did indeed. A black grumbled that the flower children had “taken over” Tompkins Square Park. The park had belonged to him and his; they didn’t have much, but that, at least, had been theirs, and now these maddening, uninvited kids insisted on sharing it. The inevitable happened. Violence, always a menace in ghettos, erupted against the defenseless hippies. On Memorial Day of that year ethnic boys attacked a twenty-nine-year-old flower girl in Tompkins Square and stripped her naked. In Central Park a fifteen-year-old and her seventeen-year-old lover (characteristically she did not know his name; to her he was simply “The Poet”) were attacked by blacks; she was raped and he was beaten insensible. In California a seller of drugs was murdered and his right forearm hacked off. A few days later another peddler was killed, stuffed into a sleeping bag, and left hanging from a cliff.
Clearly something ghastly was happening to that summer. Exploiters and predators were also stalking the young. In The Family Ed Sanders compared the flower movement to “a valley of plump rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes.” He wrote: “One almost had to live there to understand the frenzy that engulfed the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the spring and summer of 1967. The word was out all over America to come to San Francisco for love and flowers.” But more awaited them in Hashbury than that. “The Haight attracted vicious criminals who grew long hair. Bikers tried to take over the LSD market with crude sadistic tactics. Bad dope was sold by acne-faced methedrine punks. Satanist and satanist-rapist death-freaks flooded the whirling crash pads. People began getting ripped off in the parks. There was racial trouble.” In the midst of it, haunting Grateful Dead concerts in the Avalon Ballroom, was a bearded little psychotic who liked to curl up in a fetal position right on the dance floor, and whose secret ambitions were to persuade girls to perform fellatio with dogs and gouge out the eyes of a beautiful actress and smear them on walls. Later he would be well remembered in Hashbury. His name was Charles Manson.
Hippiedom would survive in one form or another, as beatism had—the bohemian strain runs wide and deep in America—but the movement as it had been known that year was doomed. All that was lacking was a final curtain. That came on the night of Saturday, October 8, 1967. A generation earlier, on June 8, 1931, the death of a New York girl bearing the singularly poetic name of Starr Faithfull had symbolized the magic and the depravity of an era then ending; John O’Hara had based Butterfield 8 on it. Now the squalid Manhattan murder of another genteel girl ended the hippy summer of 1967. Her name was Linda Rae Fitzpatrick. She was eighteen, a blonde, the daughter of a wealthy spice and tea importer. Her home of record was her parents’ mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, but on Sunday, October 9, her naked corpse was found in a boiler room of a brownstone tenement at 169 Avenue B on the Lower East Side.
It was not a good address. Flanked by a flyblown junk shop and a dingy bar and grill, the boiler room reeked of dog excrement and rotting garbage. One naked light bulb shone down on peeling paint, decaying plaster, whitewashed bricks crawling with cockroaches, and a filthy mattress. Linda had come to this noisome trysting place with a tattooed drifter named James “Groovy” Hutchinson. As dete
ctives and the police surgeon put the story together, she had stripped and sprawled on the mattress. At that point Linda and Groovy had discovered that they were not alone. This room was often used as an exchange point for the sale of drugs, and four speed-freaks, all of them flying, decided to share Groovy’s girl with him. She refused. When Groovy tried to defend her, his face was bashed in with a brick. After Linda had been raped four times, her face was smashed, too. The bodies had been left face up; her black lace pants were found in a corner.
Three Negro men were swiftly arrested, but the public was more interested in the girl than in her victimizers. Linda had apparently led two lives. In Greenwich she had been the sheltered, well-bred child of an upper-class home. Like her parents she had been an Episcopalian; her favorite relaxation had been riding on the red-leafed bridle paths of the exclusive Round Hill Stables. The previous August, her father recalled, he had expressed his abhorrence of hippies, and her comments had been “much like mine.” Her mother recalled that “Linda was never terribly boy crazy. She was very shy.” Over Labor Day weekend she had told her mother that she didn’t want to return to Oldfields, her expensive boarding school in Maryland. Instead she wanted to live in New York and paint. “After all,” her mother said afterward, “Linda’s whole life was art. She had a burning desire to be something in the art world.” Her parents agreed to her plan when she told them she had a room in a respectable Greenwich Village hotel. Her roommate, she said, was a twenty-two-year-old receptionist of a good family called Paula Bush.
“Paula Bush?” said the desk clerk. “Sure, I remember Linda, but there wasn’t no Paula Bush. It was Paul Bush.” In East Village she had consorted with many men, her family learned, and she had used money sent from Greenwich to buy drugs for them and herself. Late in September she thought she was pregnant, and she had confided to another girl that she was worried about the effect of LSD on the baby. Saturday evening, three hours before she died, she had told a friend that she had just shot some speed and was riding high. The cruelest part of the sequel for her parents was the discovery that her East Village acquaintances were indifferent to her death. One hippy girl said that though they mourned Groovy, “The chick wasn’t anything to us.”
In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that same week hippies burned a gray coffin labeled “Summer of Love.” In it were orange peels, peacock feathers, charms, flags, crucifixes, and a marijuana-flavored cookie. The ceremony was called “The Death of Hip.” After the mourners had watched the fire while singing “God Bless America” and “Hare Krishna,” they shouted, “Hippies are dead! Now the free men will come through!” Violence had crippled the movement, and so had commercialism. Tourists were crowding craft shops in both the Haight and East Village. Hippies hungering for money were acting in Indian Givers, a full-length psychedelic western, in which the sheriff was being played by, of all people, Dr. Timothy Leary. Ron Thelin, proprietor of San Francisco’s Psychedelic Shop, said dolefully, “The spirit is gone”; then he went out of business, and Roger Ricco, a veteran member of The Group Image, said, “It isn’t the same any more. Where have all the flowers gone?”
Portrait of an American
KARL HESS III
EITHER/OR.
As Karl Hess saw it, every serious man was obliged to take an unyielding stand at one extreme or the other.
Either he was a Minuteman or a Weatherman, a hard-core, better-dead-than-Red ultraconservative or a New Left militant, a Klansman or a Black Panther, an anti-Semite or a gunman of the Symbionese Liberation Army. If you didn’t want the SAC to lob one into the men’s room at the Kremlin, you must advocate blowing up the Pan Am Building. There was no middle ground, just one faith and one enemy of the faith, one way to save the world and one way to destroy it. Society was not marvelously complex; it was magnificently simple. One must merely choose between absolutes, between the black and the white, the good and the evil.
In 1954, as a sleek, well-paid spokesman of the ultraconservative right, he wrote in The American Mercury:
It would not be America really if it did not produce men who suddenly tire of palaver and reach for the rifle on the wall, to use themselves or to hand to the underdog who needs it.
In 1970, as a bearded, ragged oracle of the SDS and the Black Panthers, he proudly displayed an announcement of his appearance on the University of Texas campus:
Union Speakers Comm. (the people who brought you Abbie Hoffman) present: Karl Hess, farout freak, militant, commie, anarchist, pervert!!! Currently assoc. editor of Ramparts.
He never saw that the two poles were really one. Superficially it seemed that he had swung from one to the other. In fact he had not budged an inch. He ended where he had begun—at the farthest possible distance from the political center.
Born on a great Philippines estate in 1923, he was molded not by his father, a flamboyant millionaire, but by his mother, a former Washington, D.C., working girl. When strong-minded Thelma Hess discovered that her husband was a philanderer, she left him, returned to Washington with young Karl, and went to work as a switchboard operator rather than accept alimony. She made a rule: before her little son could have a toy, he must read a book. Entering kindergarten, he had finished H. G. Wells’s Outline of History.
By the time he reached adolescence the husky young Hess had read more than his teachers, and they bored him. To him education was an organized bureaucracy. Already, at fourteen, he had identified the system as his enemy. He fought it by enrolling in two high schools, filing the transfer papers of each at the other. Lying about his age—he looked older than his years—Hess got a job at the Mutual radio network. He was writing news programs when he borrowed his boss’s car one day. A policemen gave him a ticket, his true age was discovered, and he was fired. The system had won. It always would, but he would never quit struggling.
Next, as a copyboy on the Alexandria Gazette, he became fascinated with politics; that, too, would be a lifelong obsession. The Democrats repelled him. He became a right-wing Republican because the ultraconservatives championed individual liberty. Whatever the merit of his views, there was no questioning his ability. By his twentieth birthday he was a rising star on the Washington Daily News. Then the editor phoned him at home to say that FDR had died and he was assigned to the story. Hess replied that Roosevelt’s obituary wasn’t worth getting out of bed; he was fired.
He became news editor of Aviation Week, author of a children’s book on natural science, editor of Fisherman Magazine, and, between 1950 and 1955, press editor at Newsweek. Had he been able to shuck his ideological yoke, he might have had a distinguished journalistic career. As it was, he became increasingly preoccupied with right-wing doctrine, writing an anti-Communist column for the conservative weekly Pathfinder, editing Counter-Attack and H. L. Hunt’s Facts Forum, and founding the National Review with, among others, William F. Buckley Jr. At the same time he was contributing regularly to the American Mercury. In its pages he denounced Robert Oppenheimer, the United Nations, and critics of the National Rifle Association, in which he held a lifetime membership. (“If everybody in Latin America had a pistol, they would have democracy.”) The National Guard, he declared, was the country’s greatest protection against federal dictatorship. He believed in order, deference to military rank, and the “discipline that comes from respect of an obedience to authority.”
By 1960 Hess’s lyrical praise of rugged individualism had brought him a sinecure as assistant to the president of Ohio’s vast Champion Paper and Fibre Company. He lived in an expensive suburban home with a wife, two children, and seventeen custom-made suits. His job at Champion was to discourage aggressive union organizers and instill loyalty to the company in employees. From time to time the firm loaned him to right-wing think tanks. He compiled The Conservative Papers for Congressman Melvin Laird. In 1960 he wrote policy papers for Richard Nixon, and in 1964, as Barry Goldwater’s chief adviser, he dashed off the speech in which the senator accepted his party’s nomination. Goldwater, he said, offered “a
choice, not an echo.”
Then something snapped. Lyndon Johnson not only won the election; he won it with contributions from the very big businessmen who had been Hess’s heroes. Hess discovered that the backer of one of his right-wing publications had been enriched by federal agricultural subsidies. Most traumatic of all, the magnitude of the Goldwater defeat had made Hess a pariah in GOP circles. By custom, men who have served ably in a losing campaign may expect a job in the service of other members of the party who are still in office. On Capitol Hill he went from door to door, hoping for a place on some Republican payroll. He found none. No one wanted him in any capacity. By the following spring he was broke and desperate, ready to settle for a place as a Capitol elevator operator. Even that was closed to him. He wound up welding bulldozers on the night shift in a Washington machine shop.
That was the year of Johnson’s first big Vietnam build-up. Hess was appalled by it. This was the system run amok. He perceived his error, and concluded that “my enemy was not a particular state—not Cuba or North Vietnam, for example—but the state itself.” As he saw it, the anti-Communist zeal of ultraconservatives had led them into a tragic error. They had trusted federal power, and had reaped the triumph of bureaucracy. His new heroes were the Panthers, who called for power to the people, and the Weathermen: “The SDS is raising essential political questions, and the police are beating them down for it.” He began to read anarchist literature and to recommend resistance to authority—flouting of the law, draft resistance, hiding of political prisoners, refusing to move if the government condemns your house.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 168