American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Groups inspired by the Beatles, such as the Beach Boys, and duos, such as Simon and Garfunkel, carried a sound even President Reagan would, years later, admit appreciating. But still newer sounds—more moody, less accessible, more personal—emerged from San Francisco bands, and they shifted the center of avant-garde rock from Britain to California.

  Late in 1965 two benefit concerts were held in San Francisco, the first featuring the music of the Jefferson Airplane, with Allen Ginsberg leading three thousand in the chanting of mantras, and the second in the Fillmore Auditorium with the Grateful Dead. On the heels of these successes and at the urging of author Ken Kesey, came the seminal San Francisco “Trips Festival,” “a three-day mixed-media attempt to recreate an LSD experience without the LSD.” The Festival marked the beginning of the Haighl-Ashbury era with its psychedelia, mind-bending drugs, sandalwood, body painting, tribal Love-Ins and Human Be-ins.

  San Francisco also produced Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish (originally called Country Mao and the Fish, after a saying of the Chairman’s, “Every fish in the sea is a potential convert”). The Dead challenged their audiences to fly on LSD, Joplin seduced hers, and Country Joe sang “ 1-2-3 What are we fightin’ for / Don’t ask me—I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s 5-6-7 / Open up the pearly gates / Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee! / We’re all gonna die.”

  Country Joe sang his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock, but that “first Eucharistic Congress” illustrated the tensions between the rock and counterculture and the New Left and antiwar movement. “Rock and Roll, Rock culture, hip, pop, and youth culture,” wrote radical Tom Smucker, “all spring out of middle-class reality, and spring out of capitalism, and all spring out of affluence.” While rock took overtly political forms and served up songs of social significance, typically it described freedom as the road to individual happiness, to personal self-fulfillment—a road that often had the contours of hedonism. Asked what was her “philosophy of life,” Janis Joplin replied, “Getting stoned, staying happy, and having a good time.” The point of drug use, wrote Todd Gitlin, was “to open a new space, an inner space, so that we could space out, live for the sheer exultant point of living.” Though the counterculture assumed that its hedonism was intrinsically anticapitalist, it reflected the established culture’s materialism, with, as William L. O’Neill noted, motorcycles, stereos, and electric guitars taking the place of big cars and ranch houses. Entrepreneurs trafficked in countercultural commodities, pushing strobe lights, Nehru jackets, surplus army clothes, incense, beads and bangles, posters, drugs, and, of course, records. By 1968 records were selling at a rate of nearly a billion dollars a year, and Forbes was counseling “Dad” not to dismiss rock as noise: “Try to dig it … it’s the sound of money.”

  The counterculture’s political vision was of a Utopia from which politics was excluded, a pastoral Arcadia whose currency was amour. “All you need is love,” sang the Beatles. “Love is all you need.” The Jefferson Airplane urged, “Hey people now / Smile on your brother / Let me see you get together / Love one another right now.” SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE, exhorted a sign in a Los Angeles commune. The counterculture was out to save America with a “cultural and spiritual revolution which the young themselves will lead,” but its approach to political action was antipolitical: the young were not to engage the established society but to disengage themselves from it, to drop out, to do their own thing. Social change was to be the outcome of individual self-realization. “We want the world and we want it now!” Jim Morrison snarled, but his vehicle of revolution was what he called “sexual politics.” At a Doors concert, he said, “The sex starts with me, then moves out to include the charmed circle of musicians on stage,” and then the audience. The audience went home, interacted “with the rest of reality, then I get it all back by interacting with that reality, so the whole sex thing works out to be one big ball of fire.” “The idea of leadership is a false god,” said Beatle John Lennon. “Following is not what it’s all about, but leaving messages of ‘This is what’s happening to us. Hey, what’s happening to you?’ ” The Vietnam war was over, he sang, when you wanted it to be.

  This was a sea, Andrew Kopkind noted, in which political radicals found it difficult to swim. Though much of the New Left was “hippyized”— borrowing clothes, long hair, language, sexual and drug practices from the rock culture—that culture, in radical eyes, had evolved too little from its origins as an immature teen rebellion against “adults.” Gitlin, an SDS leader, worried that love should feel ashamed “when it was founded on privilege.”

  Tom Smucker of the Movement for a Democratic Society wondered whether it was politically correct even to participate at Woodstock. When he heard that Abbie Hoffman had wrested from the weekend’s promoters space for a “Movement City,” he decided to go as a “test to see if the Movement could relate to something hip.” But how best to approach the hippies? Various suggestions were made, including: “Point out to people that what they were doing isn’t real. Bread and Circuses, Co-optation, The Plastic Straitjacket, that it was happening under Capitalism and therefore phony.” The MDS set up its booth in Movement City with a small printing press and heaps of literature. But in the City they were far from the center of action—where the “plain old campers” were—and soon they themselves abandoned the booth. “Leaflets blowing through a field, a printing press in the rain that was never used” were the “symbol of all our political activity.” Radicals failed to understand, he concluded, that Woodstock was not a political event but “another Rock and Roll adventure,” another example of “how you survive in affluent middle-class adolescence, and beyond. You take the good things, which are lying here or there, and turn them into something you can dig or turn yourself into someone who can dig them. You ignore the rest.

  “We didn’t build the city, that’s for sure.”

  Perhaps better even than Woodstock, an earlier incident at a Berkeley student strike illustrated the decade’s troubled connection between music and politics. To the audience an organizer shouted, “Let’s sing ‘Solidarity Forever.’ ” But no one seemed to know the words of that epic anthem of working-class revolt and there was an uncomfortable silence, until someone in the back started harmonizing the words of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” These innocuous if familiar lyrics were immediately and enthusiastically taken up by the thousands assembled.

  CHAPTER 10

  Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood

  EARLY IN NOVEMBER 1962, as the glowing colors along the Hudson were turning to autumn sere, Eleanor Roosevelt died in her cottage in the hills above the river. Until the final weeks of pain and confinement she had carried on her private responsibilities, keeping in touch with her five offspring and myriad grandchildren and in-laws and ex-laws, serving hot dogs to youngsters from a school for troubled children, trudging through shops for the right presents at Christmastime, helping a black poet find a publisher, faithfully attending church, where she paid pew rent and put two dollars into the plate on Sunday mornings. Occasionally she faced small moral dilemmas. Offered $35,000 to do a margarine commercial, she struggled with her conscience overnight and in the morning decided she would do it. “For that amount of money,” she said, “I can save 6,000 lives”—through CARE packages.

  She labored under her more public responsibilities as well, lecturing at Brandeis, pressuring John Kennedy about more appointments for women, publicizing the lot of migratory workers, writing her column—now taken by about forty newspapers after all the controversies. She remained as conventional about personal behavior as she was progressive about social responsibility; thus she was visibly annoyed when a granddaughter failed to return from a party by midnight. Her energy and prestige remained so high in her late seventies that Kennedy recruited her to chair his Commission on the Status of Women; from this position she peppered him and others in authority with letters of warm encouragement or gen
tle reproach on women’s issues and much else.

  The long trajectory of Eleanor Roosevelt’s public life had spanned six decades of women’s evolving needs and interests. Opposed in her early years even to woman suffrage, she had expanded her own consciousness as she moved through the world of women’s clubs, the League of Women Voters, reform groups seeking to protect working women, the Democratic party anterooms to which women were relegated, barred from the chambers of power. By the 1960s she had seen it all: the pervasive discrimination against women in education and employment, the crucial role they could play in grass-roots politics, their inability often to perpetuate and institutionalize their gains, their need to establish a base in the political parties—especially her party, of course—rather than wasting their energies on third-party forays. Originally opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment for fear it would jeopardize hard-won legal protection for women, she was open-minded enough later to reverse her position. And she learned that a President’s widow could be voted America’s “Most Admired Woman” sixteen years after her husband’s death and still crave the warmth of intimate human love.

  Always a social reformer rather than a militant feminist, she died on the eve of a profound transformation in the consciousness, behavior, and status of American women. The people she had worked with—Frances Perkins, Molly Dewson, the much-admired black leader Mary McLeod Bethune—had been primarily concerned with women’s pay, living conditions, education for jobs, relegation to the lowest rung of the opportunity ladder. This deep-biting economic inequality was thoroughly documented in the report of the commission transmitted to President Kennedy on the first anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s death and two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Most of the economic problems facing women were centuries old; in the 1960s progress was still coming by inches. While blacks and students and antiwar protesters were seizing the headlines, women on the whole appeared inactive except to the degree they were involved in black and antiwar movements led largely by men.

  Women lacked the kind of event—economic collapse, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam—that was needed to electrify the people and jolt the government out of its semi-paralysis. Their crisis was still an invisible one—a crisis of frustration and desperation. It was a “problem that has no name.”

  Diary of four hours in the life of Marion Hudson, wife of Henry, mother of two, maker of a home of seven rooms, university student, part-time employee.

  5.30 Henry wakes up to go to work. “Trucking” by Marvin Gay can be heard all over the house at full volume. I’m awake. 5.35 Henry turns down the radio just a little. 5.40 Bathroom light is on. Kitchen light is on. Hallway light is on.

  (Why can’t he turn off these lights when he’s finished in a particular room!) 6.00 Monique and Tracey are awake. (Who isn’t after the troops have just been called out—meaning Henry.)

  6.05 Gave Monique a bottle and changed her diaper.

  6.06 Told Tracey he could not have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at this ghastly hour. (Didn’t say ghastly.)

  6.15 Henry is off to the post office.

  6.16 Get up to cut off the lights.

  6.17 Settle down for some sleep.

  6.30 Tracey is up—walking around in the house—scares me half to death.

  6.31 Tracey starts pounding me on my back to wake up. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. His pajamas are wet.

  6.32 I tell Tracey I am going to beat him half to death if he doesn’t change those pajamas.

  6.33 Tracey gets in my bed.

  6.40 We both finally doze off.

  6.41 Tracey is awake again. He wants some Bosco.

  6.42 I threaten him with a severe beating.

  7.00 Thoroughly exhausted from scolding Tracey, I get up and make him some delicious Bosco. (Actually I feel like dumping the whole glass on top of him.) 7.05 It’s no use. I can’t get back to sleep. Tell Tracey to go upstairs and play with his trucks. Nothing else to do but daydream and think of what I have to do and wear.

  7.25 Tracey wants a piece of pie.

  7.30 I get up and turn on Tracey’s TV so he can watch Little Rascals.

  8.00 Monique wants to get out of her crib. I let her yell till 8:30.

  8.30 I’m up and ready. The wheels begin to move into motion.

  8.45 Wash Monique and Tracey. Get them dressed. Fuss with Tracey about what shoes he is going to wear. He wants to wear his cowboy boots instead of the black ones. 9.00 Feed them breakfast. Eggs, Spam and toast. Turn on Sesame Street. Tracey doesn’t want his eggs. More confrontation.

  9.05 Pack the kids tote bag to take over to Grandma’s. Tell Tracey he cannot take his new trucks. “Yes, I have to go to school today.” Clean off kitchen table and stove after Henry and myself.

  9.10 Get dressed. Make up Tracey’s and Monique’s beds. Go into my room and make up the bed.

  9.20 Pack my schoolbooks and coat. Gather Monique’s and Tracey’s coats and hats.

  9.25 Start towards door. Run to freezer—take something out for dinner.

  9.30 Monique just messed in her pants. Back to the bedroom. Change her. Put her coat back on. Meanwhile Tracey is hollering—he wants to go.

  9.40 Get in car—head for Grandma’s.…

  Breaking Through the Silken Curtain

  During the “conformist fifties” Betty Friedan, a young Smith College alumna, had been writing and editing articles with titles like “Millionaire’s Wife” and “I Was Afraid to Have a Baby” for popular magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle. She had also been reading works by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who contended that educated women reached their highest self-realization not through husband and children but through themselves, through their recognition of their own needs and capacities, through “self-actualization.” She had been reading surveys by Dr. Alfred Kinsey which indicated that as American women advanced in education and jobs, as they made “progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society,” they enjoyed higher degrees of sexual fulfillment. In 1963 Friedan achieved her own self-actualization with a book, The Feminine Mystique, that struck thousands of American women like a thunderclap.

  With unflinching certitude Friedan’s book traced the web of myths and illusions that bound middle-class women to the one-dimensional role of housewife and mother—and the social forces that created and bolstered them. After World War II, she contended, educators, social scientists, the mass media, corporate advertising, and Freudian theories of female sexuality treated as “scientific religion” had together instilled in talented women the belief that their only sources of fulfillment were sex, home, and family. The well-educated and affluent suburban housewives she interviewed lived lives of quiet desperation, feeling inadequate, anxious, and depressed in existences ruled by the feminine mystique. The core of the modern woman’s problem, she concluded, was not sex but identity. Just as the Victorian culture barred women from gratifying their sexual needs, “our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.”

  Though Friedan demonstrated that “the problem that has no name” was social and structural, not personal, her remedy was the reverse: that women exercise individual will and choice, that they find their identity by making their own life plans for meaningful work outside the home. She tacitly assumed that, at least for white middle-class women, institutions did not have to change substantially. Friedan ended her book with no call to collective action, no appeal to politics. But politics would not leave her alone.

  Her start as a political activist was triggered by that act “conceived out of wedlock”—Chairman Howard Smith’s failed effort to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by adding “sex” to the title outlawing discrimination in employment. The word “sex” stayed and the measure was enacted, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, evidently considering its addition a fluke and lacking effective enforcement powers, took little or no action on thousands of complaints filed by w
omen. At a June 1966 conference in Washington of state commissions on the status of women— bodies spawned by Kennedy’s original commission that were now a “seething underground of women”—activist women urged passage of a resolution that the EEOC carry out the ban against sexual discrimination in employment. Stunned when the proposal could not even reach the floor—at a conference entitled “Targets for Action”—the activists turned to Friedan, who was attending the conclave to get material for her next book. She had already been urged by women in the underground—especially in the press, government, and unions—to start a movement modeled on the blacks’ successful effort.

  Now the moment had arrived. During the final plenary session two dozen women from government, state commissions, and unions hastily gathered to lay plans. Friedan would later wonder whether the cabinet members and other high officials “who talked down to us at lunch knew that those two front tables, so rudely, agitatedly whispering to one another and passing around notes written on paper napkins, were under their very noses organizing NOW, the National Organization for Women, the first and major structure of the modern women’s movement.”

  When it was formally established in October 1966, NOW had about three hundred charter members, a few of whom were men. The delegates elected Friedan president. Despite the leadership role of Aileen Hernandez, a black and a disaffected EEOC commissioner, who later would succeed Friedan as president, NOW activists were mainly white middle-class professionals in their mid-twenties to mid-forties.