MICHAEL KENNEDY (movement lawyer)
There were a lot of squads, Red Squads, we called them, and they were local police, or state, or federal troops who tried to tie in the antigovernment stances of the young people, particularly into communism, and try to make it clear to the world that these people were traitors, and communists, and were being funded by foreign governments. That’s right, Mao was supposed to be supporting the Weather Underground. That didn’t happen.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
Any suggestion that we were funded from outside the country was just invented from whole cloth. We were always very clear, even when we were off the rails in the beginning, that we were not taking money from outside the country—which was offered to us and rejected—and that we were a homegrown phenomenon. We were not going to be used by somebody else. We made our own mistakes, our own way; which we did, plenty.
* * *
*1 Rudd’s underground aliases, listed in the FBI Weather Underground Summary, August 20, 1976.
*2 Rudd, Underground, p. 214.
*3 A tape recording of Bernardine Dohrn reading the communiqué was dropped off at 7:30 A.M. May 21 in a phone booth near KPFK in Los Angeles, and transcripts were delivered to the Chicago bureau of The New York Times and the Liberation News Service in plain brown envelopes. This became the model for how the Weather Underground would communicate with the outside world. See Thai Jones, A Radical Line (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 210.
*4 Rudd, Underground, pp. 215–16.
*5 Rudd, Underground, p. 216.
*6 Seven people were injured in the New York City police headquarters bombing and the damage was estimated to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The bomb was made with ten sticks of dynamite. New York City offered a $25,000 reward for information about the bombers, and Mayor John Lindsay vowed that the “police investigation now going forward will be relentless.” New York had been riddled with bombings. There had been 121 bombs detonated in the past sixteen months, most of them by antiwar activists. Jones, A Radical Line, p. 212.
*7 On March 1, 1971, the Weather Underground detonated a bomb they had placed in a bathroom in the United States Capitol and issued a communiqué saying that it was “in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos.” President Nixon denounced the bombing as a “shocking act of violence that will outrage all Americans.”
*8 On September 17, 1971, the Weather Underground bombed the New York State Department of Corrections in Albany in retaliation for the killing of thirty-three prisoners (including radical bomber Sam Melville) in the riots at Attica State Prison on September 13, 1971.
*9 Mary Moylan, along with the Berrigan brothers, was one of the Catonsville Nine—Catholic radicals who were convicted for torching Baltimore County draft records with homemade napalm on May 17, 1968. On the day they were to go to jail, April 19, 1970, Moylan and the others became fugitives. Moylan evaded the FBI for ten years, the longest of any of the Catonsville Nine.
*10 Nixon, RN, p. 473.
*11 Nixon directed the FBI to prove that the Weathermen were foreign agents financed by enemies like Cuba, North Vietnam, and China, but despite years of surveillance, the FBI never could find any proof. Hoover ultimately refused to sign off on the “Huston Plan” because he feared it would give the White House too much power. But Nixon’s directive continued unofficially and illegal surveillance, like wiretapping, and black-bag jobs, as well as harassment of the Weather Underground and the Panthers, increased.
*12 The term “black-bag jobs” refers to burglars’ tool bags. Black-bag jobs were illegal entry and search missions such as break-ins, phone taps, mail cover, and other forms of surveillance in search of incriminating evidence.
*13 The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson. Among other things, the bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and set rules for obtaining a wiretap.
CHAPTER 22
CULTURE WARS
(May 1970)
I was interested in two things: overthrowing the government and fucking. They went together seamlessly.
—PETER COYOTE*1
Can the family survive? Students in rebellion, the young people living in communes, unmarried couples living together call into question the very meaning and structure of the stable family unit as our society has known it.
—MARGARET MEAD*2
With campuses in Turmoil, more and more young people disengaged from political protest and voted with their lifestyles. By 1970, the young were leaving colleges and cities in droves and up to three million people had settled in thousands of communes. The president of Columbia University reported that 50 percent of college students belonged to “an alienated culture, hostile to science and technology.” One of the most popular bumper stickers at the time declared, QUESTION AUTHORITY.
Living off the economic grid was another revolutionary way to reject a racist, imperialist, capitalist government. The environmental movement, which was christened on April 22, 1970, when 20 million people participated in Earth Day activities, became the political arm of the back-to-the-land movement. At its core, practicing organic farming, Native American customs, and holistic health remedies required a more intimate relationship to nature. As 1970 came to a close, the euphoria of the psychedelic drug and music scene, and the idealism of the rural counterculture, took a sober turn. Commune poverty and squalor, heroin and cocaine abuse, and politically motivated drug busts brought King Hippie to his knees as he limped, wounded, into a new decade.
MICHAEL RANDALL (cofounder, Brotherhood of Eternal Love)
We thought the Vietnam War was a disgrace. We thought it was an unnecessary war, and we were outraged. But we just kept to ourselves and focused on what we thought we should do, which was to provide as much LSD as we could to as many people as possible. We were just certain that was what God wanted us to do. We were evangelists. We believed that we needed to show the spiritual world to as many people as possible through this magic molecule. Orange Sunshine was the color of the Buddhist robes, and we used a combination of food dyes and yellow dye number six. The most damaging thing for LSD is light, so we chose a color that we thought would protect it.*3
PETER COYOTE (Digger, communard)
I’ve always suspected that the environmental movement was engendered, in some way, by the shootings at Kent State. When people saw that the culture was willing to shoot their own children to keep the war machine going, I think a lot of people moved their energy into the environment where they could see it as a future struggle, but it didn’t engender police resistance and getting shot and killed.
We had already left confrontational politics. By that time we were deep into cultural warfare. So we saw the news of the Kent and Jackson State shootings as the fulfillment of predictions that we had made.
CAROL RANDALL (Michael Randall’s wife)
Sunshine was the number-one acid around. Our doses were pretty strong at that time, and it started scaring a lot of people. I used to say it “scared them into spiritual practice.” Ashrams filled up. We made more of it than anybody else made of anything, and we just thought we should make it strong.
We were the ones that stood up and didn’t want to fight the Vietnam War. And that’s when all the protesting started, because it was all the acid heads. The college kids—God, no—don’t want to do that, don’t believe in that! Before Vietnam, we were all sheep, doing what our parents had lined up for us, instead of just doing our own thing—following this cord from within.
COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD (rock musician)
Things needed to be changed. But what the hippies brought with them was fun, and the lefties needed that. I’m not downplaying it, because the political stuff needed to happen. The politics needed to change. But politics tends to corrupt, because with politics comes power. Hippies don’t have power; we have fun. I mean we weren’t going up into Tilden Park practicing shooting guns and disciplining each other. We were having fun.
The Diggers were cultural revolutionaries.*4 We began to analyze the situation more deeply and realized that the entire culture was producing the Vietnam War—this wasn’t a political aberration. If you accepted the premises of profit and private property, you wound up in Vietnam.
I was in the theater called the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The Mime Troupe was kind of a traditional leftist theater. We were pretty wacky and pretty loose, but there was a definite left-wing tinge to it. We were artists and we wanted a culture in which we could be authentically who we were, and describe the world without the kind of impediments that we were seeing Marxist governments and cultures put on free expression. So the Diggers arose out of these cultural concerns. We felt that SDS and the Weathermen and all these guys were off base, and that Americans were never going to throw themselves on the battle lines to be lumpenproletariat.
A strictly class analysis was not going to play in America. The McCarthy period had already poisoned the well against communists and socialists. People were reflexively against it, as much as they are today, without even knowing what it is or anything about it. So we felt that something else was required and what that might be was to offer people the opportunity to invent their own culture; to imagine it and to make it real by acting it out, and that if they did that, they might defend it. So we set ourselves the task of imagining a culture that would be fun and compelling and cooperative and anonymous, not based on hierarchy and status.
We began this three-year social artwork called the Diggers, where we did everything anonymously and we did everything without money, feeling that if you were not getting famous and if you were not getting rich, you probably meant it. We invented provocative theater pieces, like a free store. What the fuck is a free store? Why is it a store if it’s free? We collected garbage, goods, throwaways, we cleaned it up, we fixed it, and we had a beautiful, elegant storefront on Cole and Carl in the Haight, with clothes and tools and bikes and televisions and anything you need, only it was free.
We sent the women to the farmers’ market, with their babies in their arms, and they charmed the Italian grocers, who gave them ripe, that-day food. We got donations. In a couple of cases we robbed a meat truck, but it was basically done by donations. We cooked these huge stews in big steel milk cans and we set it up in Golden Gate Park. The only requisite was you had to walk through a six-foot-by-six-foot yellow square, painted yellow. It was called “the Free Frame of Reference.” Now, on the other side, we’d give you a little one, an inch by an inch, on a shoelace, put it around your neck, and we’d invite you to look at the world from a free frame of reference. So we weren’t feeding people because they were poor, even though they were needy. The Haight-Ashbury was full of runaways. We were feeding them because we wanted to live in a world with free food.
We believed that there was no sense blaming the pigs or the Man or the system for your malaise. The deeper message was, Why put your life in thrall for a job so that you can become a consumer, when you can get stuff for free? If you’re willing to bypass having the newest and the freshest and the most high status, you can have a life without being an employee, you can keep your time. So we took that on. We fed six hundred people a day for free.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW (Grateful Dead lyricist)
I was not a big fan of bombing anything. I just couldn’t see how we were going to make anything better that way. I headed in that direction at one point, but eventually I became a thoroughgoing pacifist. After graduating from Wesleyan in’69, I got into Harvard Law School. Then I got a letter from a friend who was the son of a maharaja in northern India, who I had met at the London School of Economics. He said that he was going back to India and did I want to come along? So on a whim I spent the next eleven months in India. For the rest of ’69 going into ’70, that’s where I was.
PETER COYOTE
We noticed soldiers in uniform coming into the store, leaving their uniforms, putting on old clothes, and disappearing out into the Haight, and we thought, Well, there’s a kind of antiwar activity that we can get involved in. So we started an ID ring. We had a bunch of draft card blanks, and we had the codes that taught us how to put the appropriate numbers on—like if you were from Georgia, there were two numbers on there that would signify that you were from Georgia. If you had a Social Security number, a couple numbers went someplace. So it became known, and with a little bit of delicacy, a conversation could be initiated, that we could make good-looking ID that would actually hold up to the first supervisory review. So that was direct antiwar intervention.
We had a lot of arguments with the Weathermen types. I always disagreed with their strategies. The United States had an absolute hegemony over violence. I mean, when you looked at the violence that was being perpetrated in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, to think that you were going to whip this beast to its knees by blowing up shit was folly. I also thought that they were under the thumb of black liberation groups.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
I came back in early ’70 and set about to finish this novel that I had a contract for, which was a bit of a challenge because I had become a completely different person. It was like two different people writing it. I was hanging out some with the Grateful Dead for no particular purpose aside from the fact that my official best friend was the rhythm guitar player, Bob Weir, and it was kind of a fun scene to be around. They were on the road a lot and I’d go meet them. I just happened to be there one night when they were trying to write songs, and Robert Hunter, their A-team lyricist, turned to me and said, “Why don’t you write songs with Bob? At least you like him.” I said, “I don’t know how to write songs.” And he said, “I’ve read your poetry; you can probably do it. And besides, I’m not going to write with him anymore.”
So on the strength of that, we decided to try it, and had fairly promising results right off the bat. I ended up staying there for almost twenty years, and I wrote just about everything that Jerry Garcia didn’t sing, “Looks Like Rain,” “Cassidy,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Mexicali Blues,” “Picasso Moon”—about forty of them.
JOHN HARTMANN (music agent, manager)
The thing about the Grateful Dead was, their music was not as commercially successful as many of their contemporaries. Their universal love ethic made them the quintessential hippie band, and they’re the only one that still survived, up until Jerry [Garcia]’s death [in 1995]. I think if you compared their sales to their popularity, there would be a ratio imbalance there, because they weren’t as big in sales as they were aesthetically, spiritually, and the emotional connection with their audience was very deep. Of course, they invented what we now call the “jam band,” long, drawn-out three-hour sets, with long solos by a brilliant musician, and everybody on drugs.
PETER COYOTE
The Grateful Dead felt that they were “changing consciousness.” I used to hear that all the time. Changing consciousness? Like somebody’s going to hear one of your songs and quit their job? But in fairness, the Grateful Dead were the most like the Diggers of all the bands. They ran their operation like a family. Until a couple of years ago, they were a collective, and I respected them for that.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
I was much more political than the band members were. As a culture, they devoutly believed that if you changed consciousness, politics would take care of itself, and that any effort to engage in the political process directly is just going to backfire. There’s a certain wisdom to that and certainly that theory was borne out repeatedly by the way in which the fiercely political became a seamless part of the problem. The brutality of the Weathermen was not so distinct from the brutality from Charlie Company.*5
PETER COYOTE
The Diggers had been basically operating a soup kitchen in San Francisco. All of our efforts were going into getting food, cooking it, running the free store, getting the this, getting the that, but that’s like being in a play for three years. It was interesting, it was compelling, but it was not exactly
what I envisioned for my life, and a lot of people felt the same way. So by this time we were meeting other extended families and communal groups, and we kind of merged with them and evolved into something we called the Free Family. The Free Family was a much larger, more diverse group, and we began living communally because that was the only way we could afford to buy land or rent land. We had virtually no cash. The only cash that the Diggers had was government money that went to mothers or pregnant women. Basically, the women controlled the money because they would get food stamps and welfare checks, so that would be the cash we had to pay the rent and utilities and the stuff that we couldn’t pay for by barter and trade. We were hardscrabble poor. I never made more than twenty-five hundred dollars a year, from 1965 to 1975, and our communes were hardscrabble poor.
If I could have gotten free medical care and education for my children, I’d still be living in communes. It’s just a wonderful way to live—you’re surrounded by friends, it’s stress-free. If you get sick, somebody will watch your children. If you need a nap, somebody will watch your children. You have men and women to work with. You know each other really intimately. At night we didn’t have electricity in most of these places. We’d play cards, Parcheesi, Monopoly, with the kids. We’d make stuff. It was really a self-made culture and it was very sustaining and rewarding. The problem was that it didn’t exactly work with some of our ideologies about absolute freedom, because as children came along, they required certain kinds of order. When you have moms waking up at five in the morning to nurse, you can’t have wino Eddie playing the tom-tom at four in the morning. So, children and their growing needs began to exert a pressure that showed us the flaws in absolute anarchy.
Witness to the Revolution Page 47