Charles Reich, a Yale law professor, struck a chord when he published The Greening of America in September 1970. Reich believed that at the heart of the revolution was a change in conscience that challenged the country’s core values. “The [Vietnam] War did what almost nothing else could have,” Reich wrote. “It forced a major breach in consciousness. And it made a gap in belief so large that through it people could begin to question all the other myths of the corporate state.” Reich considered the hippies to be the revolution’s most effective foot soldiers. “The violence with which some older people have reacted to long hair shows that they feel a threat to the whole reality that they have constructed and lived by.” Reich alleged that the sixties shook the foundation of America’s social structure, creating a permanent cultural revolution. “The present revolution goes beyond anything in modern history. Beside it, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution were mere shifts in the base of power,” wrote Reich. The Greening of America climbed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, sold two million copies, and overnight Reich became a celebrated sage. His optimistic take on the social upheaval of the time gave hope to readers who were ardently trying to make sense of the sixties.
The new pursuit of self-determination posed an existential threat to America’s 1950s backbone of traditions, laws, and customs. Jack Nicholson’s character George in the 1969 cult film Easy Rider describes “straight” America’s reaction to the hippie menace to Dennis Hopper’s character, Billy, before George is beaten to death and Billy is shot by southern redneck characters:
GEORGE: They’re scared of what you represent to them.
BILLY: All we represent to them is someone who needs a haircut.
GEORGE: What you represent to them is freedom.
BILLY: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That’s what it’s all about.
GEORGE: That’s what it’s all about all right. But talking about it and being it—that’s two different things. It’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace….When they see a free individual, it’s going to scare them….It makes them dangerous.
—
FORTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, REICH’S utopian vision for America can seem naïvely idealistic, and Reich himself admits that he has spent the last several decades watching the “ungreening of America.” The political revolution never took place. The New Left didn’t overthrow the government. Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, and the Vietnam War dragged on until 1975 (with American troops withdrawing in 1973). Capitalism is thriving, and economic inequality has reached nearly Gilded Age proportions.
From the ashes of the destruction and extremism of the sixties and early seventies rose the victorious Reagan Revolution, and the nation took a turn to the right. As California’s law-and-order governor in the late sixties, Ronald Reagan called the Berkeley campus of the University of California “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants.” Vietnam, our most unpopular war, left a dark stain on the American psyche, and hyperpatriotism became salve on the wounds inflicted by a decade of self-criticism and revolt. The sixties and its excesses were a convenient scapegoat in the country’s quest to shed the Vietnam syndrome. Along the road to revisionism, hippies were mocked, New Left radicals vilified, and the antiwar movement tarnished for being traitorous and antiveteran. Now, almost half a century after My Lai, Kent State, and the Moratorium to End the War, we can see with clearer eyes the genetic imprint that the decade’s denouement has left on the DNA of our country.
Generations X, Y, and Z have been raised by their baby boomer parents, many of them members of Woodstock Nation, and the conventional conformism of the 1980s has evolved into gay marriages populating the New York Times wedding pages, medical marijuana legalization in twenty-four states, women permitted to serve in combat positions in every branch of the military, and renewed diplomatic relations with Cuba. America elected our first African American president in 2008, and President Barack Obama (born in 1961) wrote in his memoir The Audacity of Hope, “I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties. In a sense, I’m a pure product of that era.” Obama came of age after the dust settled and, like many members of his generation, he is unscarred by the decade’s political and cultural wars, yet a direct beneficiary of them.
Your opinion of the sixties today—whether you think the rebellion pushed the country toward Shangri-La or Armageddon—may depend on your political views. Former president Bill Clinton (born in 1946 and a Yale Law School student of Charles Reich) describes this divide: “If you look back on the sixties and, on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you’re probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”
Almost everyone born before 1960 has a strong opinion about the sixties and the Vietnam War, and the debate continues. “The war to explain the war has gone on for longer than the war,” former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn told me. “How can we still be fighting Vietnam? But we are. Why? Because it was a mass popular resistance, and the truth was told about it. It was subversive of the whole structure of what we value and what we do.” No other antiwar movement was as widespread and threatening to the status quo as opposition to the Vietnam War. “The 1965–75 peace movement reached a scale which threatened the foundations of the American social order,” said SDS founder Tom Hayden, “making it an inspirational model for future social movements and a nightmare which elites ever since have hoped to wipe from memory.”
—
WITNESS IS A SELECTIVE HISTORY. It provides a snapshot portrait of the many movements and events of 1969–70, and it leaves readers to draw their own conclusions. I tried to understand what motivated people to act the way they did, and capture the visionary idealism and high passion of that year and decade, but I didn’t shy away from revealing the excess and squalor of the times—the drug abuse, sex abuse, commune chaos, radical political irrationality, and violent extremism. Witness touches only lightly on the black experience, feminism, and the music scene, and doesn’t delve into gay rights, Native American rights, the environmental movement, and pop art. There just wasn’t room enough in one book.
Born in 1963, I approached each interview as an intergenerational exploration into a decade that I was too young to know, but which always fascinated me. I grew up in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s; my earliest political memories are of feminist and antiwar activist Bella Abzug’s election to the House of Representatives in 1970, and the first African American woman to run for president, New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, in 1972. Photos of these two pioneers covered the walls of my Upper West Side bedroom. They were my hometown heroines.
When I graduated from high school in 1981, at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, former hippies like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield had become ice cream entrepreneurs, and California kids who had taken LSD in high school were starting personal computer companies in the Bay Area. Some members of the New Left switched to the right, but most dropped their radical ideals and adopted more centrist liberal ones.
When I went to college, I didn’t think twice about coed dorms, women’s and African American studies departments, tenured female professors, and premarital sex. Wars were being fought covertly, the draft would never come back, and the streets were mostly quiet, except for those of us who protested against apartheid in South Africa. When I graduated in 1985, free to pursue the career of my choice, I still felt I had missed the party. The turmoil and passion of the 1960s was a hazy memory, and even hazier was the understanding of what could possibly have mattered so much. Why had so many people just fifteen years before taken to the streets and sacrificed their lives, their livelihoods, their comfort, even their sanity? That is the question Witness to the Revolution tries to answer. What follows is what they told me.
* * *
* Edward Kern, “Can It Happen Here?,” Life, October 17, 1969, quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 10.
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br /> CHAPTER 1
THE DRAFT
(1964–1967)
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
—PORT HURON STATEMENT, STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, 1962
The roots of the Vietnam antiwar protest movement can be traced to the American crusade for civil rights. In August 1964, Congress authorized the use of troops in Vietnam in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident—the alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval ship. That same month, civil rights workers put their lives on the line for voter registration in the Mississippi Summer Project. Seven months later, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis and six hundred protesters were filmed being beaten as they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, at the start of their march to Montgomery for voting rights; the images of the attack on a nonviolent protest vividly dramatized the stakes of the struggle. Just one day after Bloody Sunday, the first U.S. combat troops landed in Vietnam. “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam and can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama,” Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), remarked. The military draft exploded soon after, ultimately calling 2.2 million men to fight in Vietnam. Skills learned on the battleground for racial equality in the South—mass civil disobedience and grassroots organization—were soon employed in the new campaign against the war in Vietnam. In reaction to the disproportionate number of black soldiers being killed in Vietnam, SNCC activists organized one of the first anti-draft demonstrations, at the Atlanta induction center in 1966, and coined the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” The war over there was soon to become a war over here.
DAVID HARRIS
(Stanford student, draft resistance organizer)
I came from Fresno, California, where I was Fresno High School “Boy of the Year” in 1963. Several weeks after I got to Stanford, there was a meeting about volunteers going to Mississippi. This was the first time that the black students in Mississippi had issued an invitation to white students to come down, and they invited students from Stanford and Yale. In the fall of ’64, I started classes and was meeting my girlfriend for dinner and she said, “I was at a meeting. There’s a car going down to Mississippi tomorrow.” They were running a parallel election in Mississippi called the Freedom Vote, to show what would happen if black people were allowed to vote, and they needed volunteers, so I said, “I’m going.” I told my brother to call my parents after I was gone, and I got a seat in the car and left that night.
Two days later, we were in Mississippi. I was worried about missing the great adventure of my time. You didn’t have to have an ideology or politics to go to Mississippi in those days. You just had to have values.
That summer of ’64 we had all been watching what was going on in Mississippi,*1 so it was a no-brainer for me. Campaigning for the right of black people not to be lynched for trying to vote was a pretty easy call. So I went. I was eighteen years old.
WESLEY BROWN (Black Panther, draft resister)
My family moved to East Elmhurst, right near LaGuardia Airport, in 1952. It was formerly an Italian neighborhood, but as more blacks moved in, of course, the whites made their departure. By 1955 it was nearly an all-black neighborhood. These were working-class blacks trying to move up. They saved their money like my parents, and bought a home, and tried to enter the lower middle class. My father was a machinist at a tool and die factory in the Bronx, where he worked for about forty years. Queens at that time was called God’s country. If you could get out of the projects and buy a house in Queens, you were on your way. It was a very solid, tight-knit community where parents wanted to make a better life for their kids. In fact, Eric Holder, President Obama’s first attorney general, lived on our block. My sister used to babysit him and his younger brother, Billy. So it was that kind of neighborhood. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, be responsible, and trying to make a way for themselves and their families. And of course, that leads to a certain amount of conservatism, a wish not to stir things up.
These were black folks who knew their history, because they were only the second generation born after emancipation. My father’s grandmother was born into slavery and he knew her. She would show him her thumb, which was all splayed out and deformed, because when she did something that the overseer didn’t like, he would take a razor blade and split her thumb open, and it would never heal sufficiently before he would open it up again. My father was born in North Carolina and was the tenth of twelve children. These black folks knew what this country had been through with slavery and segregation and they weren’t prepared for their children being boisterous and assertive in a way that they couldn’t afford to be.
DAVID HARRIS
Four of us were working together in a team trying to register people for the Freedom Vote, in the black part of a town called Lambert. After working all morning, we came back to where the car was parked, and the three guys wanted to go to the post office to mail some letters and I said, “I’ll stay here by the car.” I’m standing by our car, and up pulls a pickup truck with two white guys in it. They get out. One’s got a shotgun; the other one’s got a pistol. The guy with the shotgun sticks it right up against my nose and says, “Nigger lover, I’m giving you five minutes to get out of town before I blow your head off.” I’m an eighteen-year-old Stanford student. “Well, what do you mean? Who are you?” And he just says, “Nigger, I said five minutes.” At that point, the other three guys came back, took one look at the situation, and we all jumped in the car and left Lambert, Mississippi.
WESLEY BROWN
I remember vividly the photographs in Jet magazine of Emmett Till in his casket in 1955. His mother wanted an open casket so people could see what was done to him—his misshapen face that was bludgeoned into nonrecognition.*2 And I remember watching those kids in Little Rock in ’57 trying to go to Central High and Eisenhower finally getting the National Guard to come in, so that they could go to school without being killed. The memory of those images and the virulent hatred directed at those kids was indelible for me. And of course, there were the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins by those students from Shaw University in North Carolina, and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. We got our first television in 1949, so all of these images were a part of my coming of age.
DAVID HARRIS
Everything that followed grew out of the Mississippi taproot. We learned how to organize by working with SNCC in Mississippi, and perhaps much more important was the spirit of Mississippi; there was a kind of inspiration in the heroism of the black people in Mississippi. It’s really hard to recapture what that was like. For example, we were working in Quitman County; the county seat is called Marks. There was a seventy-five-year-old black woman there who walked into the registrar of voters office and said, “I want to register to vote.” They arrested her, threw her in jail, tortured her with an electric cattle prod, and then released her from jail. She walked out of jail and down the street to the registrar of voters office and said, “I want to register to vote.” These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what’s of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.
The third thing that came out of Mississippi was the experience of seeing America from a different perspective. You see what was being done to black people for simply trying to exercise the rights that we supposedly won with hard-fought battles a hundred years ago. And to see not only that that was going on, but how the rest of the country had turned a blind eye to it and talked bullshit about the southern way of life, and courtly manners. Isn’t it sweet? These were mean, vicious, narrowminded people, who were standing on the backs of people who were helpless to fight back. And everybody in America let that happen. So suddenly, you come back from that, and you can’t look at
it the same way. It was precisely that perspective that brought the Vietnam War into focus.
WESLEY BROWN
So I was at SUNY Oswego in January 1965, on Lake Ontario, in central New York, and some SNCC workers came to speak. I was already feeling that I wanted to be a part of something that was going on that I felt would make a difference. I was about twenty years old at that point. Their visit changed my life in many ways, and I decided to go to Mississippi.
My parents couldn’t believe that I would put myself in harm’s way, given what had happened in Mississippi the year before. They left the South in the thirties, as many blacks did, because of the Depression, to find work in the North as part of the Great Migration. They couldn’t believe that I would return to a place that they left.
I remember taking a Port Authority bus in June of 1965 to Memphis, about a twenty-eight-hour bus ride, and then having to get another bus to Holly Springs, Mississippi. So that began the four months I spent in northern Mississippi, right near the Tennessee border, working on voter registration.
Credit 1.1
Working on the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi, James Chaney (twenty-one) from Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman (twenty), and Michael Schwerner (twenty-four), both from New York City, were abducted and murdered on June 22 by members of the local Ku Klux Klan. Their bodies were discovered forty-four days later buried in an earthen dam. The murders caused a national uproar.
DAVID HARRIS
Right after I got back from Mississippi came the first major escalations of the Vietnam War, when all of a sudden we went from advisor status to deploying full combat units there, and the rise to six hundred thousand troops began. I marched in my first antiwar march about six months after I got back from Mississippi.
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