THE OLEO STRUT RISES AND FALLS
The FTA show’s successful tour of America’s military towns brought a great deal of attention to the GI coffeehouse network, and the coffeehouses themselves enjoyed a significant rise in the number of GIs and civilians coming through the doors. However, the excitement generated by the show masked the network’s tenuous position in the military towns occupied by the coffeehouses. In many locations, the FTA show staff discovered coffeehouse projects that were teetering at the edge of survival. At the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas, for example, organizers were facing a growing set of political, financial, and personal crises. In the spring of 1970, the staff had decided to be more open about the coffeehouse’s radical politics, creating educational programs on Marxism that cast the GI movement as part of a worldwide revolution of the working class. The Oleo Strut was transformed from a coffeehouse to a “movement center,” a space that was exclusively reserved for political activity. In an attempt to express an anticapitalist ethos, the staff stopped selling coffee and pastries and replaced the small “head shop” in the back of the store with tables of radical literature.
Part of the motivation for the change was, ironically enough, financial. Even at the peak of its popularity, the coffeehouse never made enough money to support its staff, who lived collectively in a small rented house. By closing down the operation of the Oleo Strut as a money-making enterprise, the staff hoped to free up time for part-time jobs in Killeen to support themselves and their political work. However, as they soon discovered, jobs in Killeen were scarce and low-paying, and by the end of the summer several staff members had dropped out of the project completely and left town, while the remaining few (among them Josh Gould, Jay Lockard, Terry Davis, and David Zeiger) were increasingly demoralized and financially challenged.72 Compounding these problems, in September the Oleo Strut was subjected to an IRS investigation that demanded its owners produce two years of detailed financial records. Since the coffeehouse’s records were in total disarray, the project took months to complete, and the coffeehouse was shuttered as the staff sorted through the mess of paperwork.73
The attempt to convert the Oleo Strut into a radical political movement center proved disastrous. As staff member David Zeiger put it, “In a sense, the Strut was being turned into a place that only a communist could want to have anything to do with, and as such it was on a road that was doomed to failure.”74 By eliminating most of the cultural elements that had first attracted customers, the coffeehouse unintentionally sabotaged its ability to reach large numbers of people. Gone were the rock posters and records, cheap espresso, and psychedelic atmosphere, replaced with ill-attended nightly political education programs. The only things passing as entertainment during this period were film screenings of political documentaries, intended to promote discussion and activism.75
By November 1970, the Oleo Strut’s remaining staff members were broke, demoralized, and uncertain of the coffeehouse’s future in Killeen. They drafted and sent a letter to the USSF, summarizing the coffeehouse’s financial troubles and describing the bleak state of the GI movement at Fort Hood: “During this time . . . [with] the situation on Ft. Hood among those guys who were still active (which due to ETS’s, transfers, and the stockade, and lack of active support from the coffeehouse had dwindled to about five guys), we more or less decided that the next couple of months would be spent trying to rebuild ourselves and the struggle on base.”76 In order to move forward as an effective tool for political organization in Killeen, the staff argued, the coffeehouse needed a permanent source of income and a coherent new political strategy. The letter paints a picture of the Oleo Strut struggling to survive.
Despite its generally pessimistic tone, the November 1970 letter also indicates that the activists at the Oleo Strut were learning from their mistakes and arriving at some important conclusions about the possibilities of their endeavor in Killeen. After a period of uncertainty as to whether the coffeehouse was a moneymaking enterprise or a political movement center, pragmatism led them to decide that it could be both. They acknowledged the necessity of a “restaurant end of things” to support their political work and help get their message to a larger number of Fort Hood soldiers: “In some ways we are going to do some back-stepping towards the days of a less political honest-to-john coffeehouse in order to make the place more popular and raise ourselves from the dead somewhat; like bands on the weekends, more comfort, and a bigger thing with the counter sales.”77 The Oleo Strut staff concluded by the late fall of 1970 that the coffeehouse needed to bring back the element of fun and entertainment that had attracted GIs in the first place. As Zeiger put it, “What’s the use of a movement center if you don’t even have a movement?”78
The Oleo Strut’s new plan of action required significant funding to pay overdue bills and to make the necessary physical changes to the coffeehouse. As it happened, a new USSF office had opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that fall and had begun aggressively fund-raising with some success. The office started sending out vital movement information in the form of newsletters and, more important, monthly stipends to the GI coffeehouse projects. By the end of 1970, the Oleo Strut was beginning to experience a financial turnaround. In December, Jane Fonda returned to the Killeen area to help raise money for the coffeehouse, speaking at three area colleges and donating proceeds from the events. With the combined income from Fonda’s appearances and a series of “emergency fund-raisers” at the coffeehouse, the Oleo Strut was in a position to enact its new strategy in the first months of 1971.
The reinvention of the Oleo Strut consisted of several changes and additions, all based on one newly clarified mission: to draw crowds, turn a profit, and help build the GI movement at Fort Hood. The first major change was the creation of a political bookstore in the back of the Oleo Strut. The bookstore was intended to answer the particular demand of black GIs, who at the time were organizing reading groups on post to discuss radical literature. A letter to the USSF in February reported, “We see the bookstore as an economic venture with an important political usefulness. We believe there’s a strong political need for a broad range of revolutionary books that are easily accessible to GIs.” The store also featured a counter selling a variety of small items like beaded jewelry, records, and postcards. The staff members, who considered themselves anticapitalists, were disappointed in having to engage in the “business” of running the coffeehouse but reconciled their distaste with the desperate financial times they faced: “It’s quite a contradiction to our politics, to become a capitalist business and all, but it’s a necessary one. If we can do this then we would only need enough regular money to keep the paper going, pay for the cost of literature and actions, and pay the staff bills (food and house).”79
By far the most successful element of the Oleo Strut’s new strategy was a renewed focus on live entertainment, most often in the form of rock bands imported from nearby Austin’s popular music scene. As the Oleo Strut became known as a hip place to see live music, the coffeehouse began regularly filling up with GIs and other locals. On performance nights, it was not uncommon to see more than 100 Fort Hood soldiers packed into the Oleo Strut. A staff member recalls that “almost overnight, the Strut became just about the most popular place in town.”80
But the Oleo Strut’s momentum was not to last. The discharge of influential GI activist Wes Williams, who left the army and returned to Oakland, left a vacuum of political leadership at Fort Hood, and activism once again slowed considerably at the end of 1971. The Strut again confronted declining morale and lower overall interest in political work among GIs on post. The fragile racial unity that had been created around issues like riot control and the “Free Harvey and Priest” campaign in the past proved unsustainable. By the time the coffeehouse began planning for the 1972 Armed Farces Day event, the People’s Justice Committee had separated completely from the coffeehouse and the white GIs who made up the Fort Hood United Front. The racial animosity that had been previously overcome,
if only tenuously, began to seriously erode the possibility of further racial cooperation within Fort Hood’s GI movement. At the Oleo Strut, staff members faced a now-familiar set of problems: a stagnant political situation accompanied by bitter infighting and persistent financial difficulties. The coffeehouse’s ability to remain open in Killeen was once again in question.81
As the months wore on in 1972, antiwar activism in Killeen came to a near standstill. The Oleo Strut staff attempted to regroup, but the drop-off in interest had little to do with the operation of the coffeehouses: national events were rapidly changing the landscape of political possibilities for the antiwar movement. Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy had already pulled 400,000 combat troops from Vietnam by the end of 1971, effectively ending the ground war and drastically shifting operations at American military bases around the world.82 At Fort Hood, the immediate threat of being sent to Vietnam, which had provided a real sense of urgency to the local GI movement, was suddenly gone, and the activists at the Oleo Strut found themselves in a consistently empty coffeehouse. Zeiger recalled, “There was an almost instantaneous shift in the mood at Fort Hood; suddenly, there was just no one around.”83 While the Strut staff was still committed to continued antiwar activism, with the onset of Vietnamization the war was “winding down” in the minds of many Americans, including GIs at Fort Hood, and the coffeehouse project was unable to sustain the political and cultural energy it had created so effectively in the past. The Oleo Strut finally closed its doors, permanently, in the summer of 1972.
STAYING POWER: THE SHELTER HALF SOLDIERS ON
For a number of reasons, the Shelter Half coffeehouse in Tacoma, Washington, managed to last much longer than the Oleo Strut. The controversy and publicity surrounding the Shelter Half’s threatened “off limits” designation in early 1970 helped establish the coffeehouse as a fixture of the region’s left-wing community; it survived as an institution for several years after most other GI coffeehouse projects in military towns around the country had closed their doors. The coffeehouse undoubtedly benefited from a strong network of local radical organizations, as well as a surrounding community that was notably more accommodating than many other military towns around the country. But this long-term endurance can also be explained by the coffeehouse’s conscious adaptation to changing political circumstances, both in terms of the Vietnam War itself and in the material conditions of military life at the Seattle-Tacoma area’s numerous bases. As the Shelter Half made the transition from a specifically antiwar, military-oriented establishment to a more broad-based community-organizing center, it remained a consistent source of support for military activism during a period of rapid transition. Recognizing the increased involvement of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in the operation of the war, civilian organizers at the Shelter Half began to consciously orient their support activities toward these more active, non-army bases.84
Although by 1970 the Fort Lewis army post was playing a smaller and smaller role in the actual operation of the Vietnam War, its prominent position in the army’s restructuring process ensured that institutions like the Shelter Half coffeehouse would remain in demand. One civilian organizer later explained, “We have seen that changes in U.S. military strategy have created an even greater demand than ever for [our] work.”85 To activists at the Shelter Half, the army’s program of conversion from a draft system to the modern “all-volunteer force” served only to exacerbate the problems already faced by GIs. Perhaps most of all, as the VOLAR experiment came to Fort Lewis (one of three domestic posts chosen as test cases), coffeehouse organizers realized that antiwar demonstrations no longer constituted the main thrust of their activism and that their support services could be more effectively directed toward the new issues raised by the army’s transition to an all-volunteer system.86
During the army’s transition, many GI movement projects focused on providing military counseling services. Military counseling by civilians had been an important part of the antiwar movement since the beginnings of campus antiwar activism in 1964. Taking a cue from pacifist organizations that had been organizing around draft resistance and conscientious objector issues on college campuses since World War I, Students for a Democratic Society had opened off-campus draft counseling centers near universities throughout the country.87 Later, at GI coffeehouses, antiwar activists converted the counseling strategy to suit the needs of active-duty soldiers seeking advice and information from sources other than military authorities. The service focused mainly on helping soldiers exit the military by filing for conscientious objector status but at various coffeehouses also grew to include legal counseling, help with psychological issues, and assistance in receiving health care. Coffeehouses also encouraged and hosted GI “rap groups,” in which dissident soldiers could discuss their problems in a sympathetic environment. All of the different types of counseling services developed at antiwar GI coffeehouses turned a spotlight on the specific difficulties of military service, laying the foundation for future campaigns aimed at addressing persistent problems like post-traumatic stress disorder, access to health care for veterans, and obtaining honorable discharges.88
The civilian wing’s renewed focus on counseling was embodied most fully by the Pacific Counseling Service (PCS), a network of activists and lawyers created in 1969 to serve the country’s West Coast and Pacific military bases. The PCS became an important force in the evolving focus of military-related civilian activism, creating a model that favored counseling and education over direct antiwar activism. The organization ultimately helped build a bridge from the New Left–style antiwar demonstrations of the late 1960s to the more legally centered GI support functions taken on by the movement as the war began to fade from public attention.89
In the spring of 1970, representatives from the PCS met with organizers at the Shelter Half, beginning a relationship that sustained a constant presence in the area for nearly four years. The PCS ran most of its operations from the coffeehouse, including the production of a number of newspapers and publications. Fed Up! in particular promoted a more overt solidarity with working-class interests, especially as GIs were expressing heightened identification with labor struggles outside of the military. In early 1971, Cesar Chavez’s lettuce boycott, initiated in California, became a rallying cry for activist soldiers around the country when the Department of Defense tripled its order of nonunion lettuce in a clear attempt to break the boycott.90 Fed Up! and other GI papers publicized the lettuce issue and connected the exploitation and inequality experienced by agricultural workers to their own struggles against military injustice.
Organizers from the PCS, along with groups from bases around the Seattle-Tacoma region, played a central role in promoting the heightened cross-movement identification among GIs and American labor. This strategy corresponded with the military’s experiments with an all-volunteer force, which, as many activists pointed out, would serve only to make the burden of military service on the working class even more pronounced. The GI Alliance, a Seattle-based organization of veterans and active-duty soldiers who met frequently at the Shelter Half, stressed the importance of working-class consciousness as the military shifted to a more economically driven system of employment: “GIs, especially in the Army, have always been predominantly from working class backgrounds. This will become increasingly true as the military moves away from the draft system. We feel that our task in the GI movement is to forge deep links between GIs and their class brothers and sisters, promote working class consciousness among GIs, and draw a clear line between them . . . and their class enemies. . . . As GIs begin to move in active opposition to the military, a working class outlook will be crucial in terms of building the understanding that the entire capitalist system is their enemy, not just their particular branch of service.”91
The 1971 lettuce boycott was just one example of the GI movement’s stronger connection to labor struggles in the early years of the 1970s. This connection was most powerful along the West Coast in general an
d specifically at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, where strong local labor organizations complemented the efforts of civilians at the Shelter Half in forging links between different wings of progressive activism. During the first few months of 1971, a constant picket line of service members and civilians distributed literature about the lettuce issue outside Fort Lewis’s gates on a near-daily basis,92 and in ensuing years soldiers from both Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base participated in support of union strikes involving Farah Manufacturing Company and several canneries in California.93
As the GI movement expanded its activities in the 1970s, its planners found themselves dealing with a host of new issues associated with the end of the war and the transition to an all-volunteer force. One more prominent issue was the increased presence of women in the military, which brought unexpected but not unfamiliar challenges to civilian and GI activists accustomed to confronting unequal, unjust working conditions.94 From the beginning of the VOLAR experiment, organizers at the Shelter Half coffeehouse published pamphlets and articles in GI papers that pointed out the rising struggle for women’s rights in the military. “Another [difficult] aspect of VOLAR,” one pamphlet noted, “is the increased recruitment of women to fulfill any of the more menial and clerical jobs once performed by men. By 1976 the Pentagon plans to triple the number of women in uniform. But the military holds similar contradictions for women as for Blacks and other minorities. Although a few reforms have been made in order to allow women to occupy certain jobs, women continue to occupy an expressly inferior position in the military.”95 The efforts of the PCS and other GI organizers to increase awareness of gender issues in the military presaged the continued efforts, in later decades, to address harassment, sexual violence, and other forms of injustice experienced by women in the armed forces.96
Dangerous Grounds Page 16