America Dreaming
Page 9
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Logically, or perhaps illogically when it comes to these two characters, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman took the lead in protesting the unfairness of the convention. They and the Yippies created a parallel mock agenda for the convention, called a “Festival of Life.”
A STATEMENT FROM YIP
Join us in Chicago in August for an international festival of youth, music, and theater. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball! Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth-seekers, peacock-freaks, poets, barricade-jumpers, dancers, lovers and artists!
It is summer. It is the last week in August, and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Lyndon Johnson. We are there! There are 50,000 of us dancing in the streets, throbbing with amplifiers and harmony. We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping, and making a mock convention, and celebrating the birth of FREE AMERICA in our own time.
Everything will be free. Bring blankets, tents, draft-cards, body-paint, Mrs. Leary’s Cow, food to share, music, eager skin, and happiness. The threats of LBJ, Mayor Daley, and J. Edgar Freako will not stop us. We are coming! We are coming from all over the world!
The life of the American spirit is being torn asunder by the forces of violence, decay, and the napalm-cancer fiend. We demand the Politics of Ecstasy! We are the delicate spores of the new fierceness that will change America. We will create our own reality, we are Free America! And we will not accept the false theater of the Death Convention.
We will be in Chicago. Begin preparations now! Chicago is yours! Do it!
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Contributing to the demise of these groups’ influence on the national debate about Vietnam and other issues was the growing inclusion of voices from more mainstream groups in the Anti-War Movement. These included, most notably, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, Another Mother for Peace, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the War Resisters League.
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THE DRAFT MYTH: WHO FOUGHT IN VIETNAM?
Approximately two thirds of the men who went to Vietnam enlisted and were not drafted. Most of these enlisted men came from working-class or poor families. On average, those who went to Vietnam were nineteen years old. In World War II, the average age was twenty-six.
For every young man drafted by the military in the ’60s, seven were exempted by their draft boards. The Selective Service policy was “channeling manpower by deferment” into areas vital to national security. In reality, that meant that anyone who was in college received a deferment. Most teachers, engineers, scientists, and many other college-educated professionals received draft deferments. So did most “supervisors” of four or more workers as well as apprentice plumbers and electricians.
The group most creative in avoiding the draft were middle-class and upper-middle-class men. Once they had exhausted their deferments, they were able to find a variety of ingenious strategies to remain out of the military. Many used family connections to enter the National Guard and the Coast Guard. Others found sympathetic doctors or psychiatrists who vouched for their psychological instability or homosexuality. Some claimed to be members of subversive organizations such as the Communist Party. Some went to Canada, from where they could not be extradited back to the States. A half million young men became conscientious objectors and served by doing national service or nonfighting duties in the military. Both the first two Boomer Generation presidents avoided the draft. President Bill Clinton received a deferment, and President George W. Bush joined the Texas National Guard. Historians William Strauss and Lawrence Baskin cynically concluded that it was America’s best and brightest who were able to avoid serving in the military. “The Vietnam draft cast the entire generation into a contest for individual survival…the ‘fittest’—those with the background, wit, or money—managed to escape,” Strauss and Baskin have written.
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The groups were galvanized by the horrors that came both within the country and in Vietnam. On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on Kent State University students protesting President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into neighboring Cambodia. Four students were killed, nine more wounded. Students on campuses across the nation were horrified and immediately called a strike, shutting down universities everywhere. These deaths seemed to announce an apocalyptic end to the era, but out of its ashes would arise a nation united against the war.
Historian Milton Viorst summed up the closing of the decade this way:
The decade ended because the Civil Rights Movement, which was responsible for its conception, no longer contributed to the seed to enrich it. It ended because antiwar protest, discredited at Chicago, never regained popular approval. It ended because a consensus was reached that the country had blundered in entering the war, and because Americans accepted the government’s assurances that only time was needed until the last soldiers came home. The 1960s ended because a society can function at a feverish emotional pitch for only so long, and Americans, after ten years of it, were tired.
Students Killed at Kent State
“four dead in Ohio…”
—Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Ohio”
TURN OFF YOUR MIND RELAX AND FLOAT DOWN STREAM IT IS NOT DYING, IT IS NOT DYING LAY DOWN ALL THOUGHT SURRENDER TO THE VOID
—“Tomorrow Never Knows,” the Beatles
FEELING GROOVY
HIPPIE CULTURE AND ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES
Just as the Beatles quickly moved past political radicalism, so did much of the Youth Movement. American youth was clearly against the Vietnam War, but their focus was on changing the culture, not fighting the political establishment.
TURN ON
HIPPIE—a name originally coined by Beats to refer to young people who were trying to be hip, but weren’t authentic Beats. Youths, however, quickly adopted “hippie” for members of the counterculture.
PUSHING THE CONSUMER BOUNDARIES
“A minority of young people, bored with the legal drugs—tobacco, alcohol—and the other mass-market consumer items that were pushed at them on their TVs and radio with an energy and expertise that surpassed anything heard at school or in church, had begun to experiment with new products and new lifestyles. In pushing past the boundary of permissible consumer behavior they had begun breaking the law and frightening their parents.”
—Historian David Farber
Hippie culture epitomized that spirit with its emphasis on freedom, self-expression, and pleasure. These long-haired youths agreed that the war was a “bad trip” and should be ended, but they would also admit that devoting themselves to protesting it was not their “bag.” They were looking for something larger. They wanted to experience nirvana, a term they learned by reading about Eastern religions. Their route to this enlightened state was not always linear. Rather, it took an indirect route through experimentation with new experiences, such as listening to music, dropping acid, and smoking marijuana, as well as studying meditation, yoga, and other Eastern practices.
The Beatles seemed to internalize this spirit almost immediately. They quickly transitioned from their radical songs, which evoked the political resistance in the country, to a more psychedelic music. Songs like “Yellow Submarine,” “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Good Day Sunshine,” and others contained an exotic, over-the-top, saturated sound that embodied the ecstatic energy of the youth. When their song “Tomorrow Never Knows” appeared on radio stations in 1966, it didn’t sound like anything the Beatles had ever written and performed before, or anyone else for that matter. “In between what sounded like sallies by a vindictive flock of intergalactic crows, the lyrics—about turning off your mind and floating down an undying stream (unless the meaning was that turning off your mind was not the same as dying)—were actually quotations from Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience,” describes historian Charles Perry.
Boomer Alan Aldridge wrote, “I first became aware o
f the depth of the lyrics to the Beatles songs when I went to a party in 1967 during the Sergeant Pepper era. Someone whispered in my ear that ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was a song about an LSD trip.”
And it was a “long strange trip,” to quote one of the Grateful Dead’s songs from the time. Dead drummer Bob Weir has said, “Not much of the ideology survived, but the music, the art, and the feeling behind it flourished.”
COUNTERCULTURE SLOGAN
never trust anyone over 30!
Unlike the radicals who tried to change the system, hippies attempted, in the words of LSD guru Timothy Leary, to “tune in, drop out, and turn on.” Leary and his counterparts, the Merry Pranksters, preached the amazing powers of the drug LSD to change one’s consciousness and lead people into new levels of awareness. Until 1966 LSD was actually legal in the United States. With these proselytizers traveling the country extolling the wonders of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, a whole generation of young people became enamored with getting high. No one yet knew what a “bad trip” it would turn out to be.
Instead, getting high seemed like the perfect response to the pervading feeling of desolation. After the shock of Kennedy’s assassination and the ever-present standoff with the Soviet Union that held the country on the brink of nuclear annihilation, young people were ready for any suggestion of a new way to feel good. The mass market had primed them for the next new thing, and here it was: LSD and other psychedelic drugs. These drugs promised to transform one’s consciousness and bring anyone who “dropped a tab” to a new level of awareness.
SUMMER OF LOVE
The epicenter of this new hippie culture was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. It began in the spring of 1967 and lasted through the summer. America’s youths left their homes and college dorms and made their way to San Francisco, where they were invited by the Haight-Ashbury council to a “Summer of Love,” a months-long festival that became a media extravaganza.
The Council for the Summer of Love was founded by members of the Family Dog, the Diggers, the Oracle newspaper, the Straight Theater, and about twenty-five individuals. The Council was formed, according to their literature, “to serve as a central clearing house for theatrical, musical, and artistic events, dances, concerts and happenings in the Haight-Ashbury district.” The Council also supported the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, the Huckle berry House for Runaways, the Diggers, and free concerts and happenings. In short, they acted as the unofficial host to more than 75,000 young people who trekked to the Haight during these summer months. These youths came to encounter a new way of experiencing the world, to discover new values to guide their lives, and to build a community of young people based on mutual respect and collaboration. With these high ideals, they felt they could create a utopia of their own. This also meant experimenting with something called “free love” and with drugs. The following is a list of the Haight hot spots.
Based on the song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the movie Yellow Submarine revolves around the Beatles’ adventure-filled journey to a peaceful kingdom of Pepperland, where, upon their arrival, they set out to save residents from an invasion by a group of “music-hating ogres” known as the Blue Meanies. Through their music and love, the foursome transform the Meanies into gentle creatures and restore happiness to Pepperland.
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PSYCHEDELIC SHOP: Near the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the store was a kind of cultural center for hippies. It sold drug paraphernalia, books and magazines, posters, flutes, incense, etc.
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THE BLUE UNICORN: A coffeehouse at 1927 Hayes Street. The Legalize Marijuana Movement met at the coffeehouse and held Wednesday night poetry readings. The Sexual Freedom League also met there.
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ASHBURY SETTLEMENT HOUSE: A grammar school and kindergarten that also taught arts and crafts to adults in a storefront on Cole Street, started by former SNCC activists.
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1090 PAGE ST.: In 1966, Chet Helms ran jam sessions in the basement. The band became known as Big Brother and the Holding Company. Janis Joplin would later join the band.
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TAPE MUSIC CENTER:A building full of studios used for modern dance and painting as well as avant-garde electronic music. Staged “happenings” required audience participation and experimental theater productions aimed for either Zen spontaneity or the re-creation of primitive ritual from which all the arts were thought to be born.
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THE MATRIX: A far-out rock-and-roll club opened and the house band was Jefferson Airplane.
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SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE: Performers who combined avant-gardism with radical politics, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty with Brecht’s social didacticism. Founder R. G. Davis was particularly drawn to the burlesque and satiric elements in the Renaissance Italian form of drama called commedia dell’arte. Because they performed outdoors, they risked arrest every time. A group of Palo Alto kids calling themselves the Warlocks initially worked with the mime troupe. Their band eventually became the Grateful Dead.
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LONGSHOREMEN’S HALL: Home of the Trips Festival, a sort of circus that gathered together the Acid Test, the Open Theater, Tape Music Center activities, rock bands, light shows, and much more.
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FILLMORE: Essentially a dance floor with a large balcony, where the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, the Butterfield Blues Band, and countless others performed.
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PANHANDLE: A strip of green among the urban blight where festivals and concerts were thrown.
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CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE: The original counterculture bookstore, owned by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
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COMMUNES: COUNTERCULTURE COMMUNITIES
These communities sprung up anywhere young people could congregate and begin a new way of life. They were called communes because they promoted communal living and the sharing of food and finances. The premise behind communes was to create a community where everyone was completely free to do as they pleased as long as they respected each other. This meant that there was a lot of experimentation in free love and drug use. Communes formed all over the country in apartment-houses, in cities, and in remote rural areas on farms. These places included:
Haight-Ashbury
Fourteenth Street in Atlanta
Old Town in Chicago
Lower East Side of New York City Austin, Texas
Lawrence, Kansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas
Colfax Avenue in Denver
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CORNER OF HAIGHT AND MASONIC
Site of the Full Moon Public Celebration, organized by the Diggers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. They brought a thirteen-foot-square wooden frame, painted yellow, that they called the Frame of Reference and encouraged people to step through it before being served at the daily free feeds.
The Diggers passed out seventy-five six-inch replicas of the Frame of Reference to be worn around the neck. They performed a playlet called “Any Fool on the Street” and then started the intersection game, which was a lesson in the Digger theory of ownership of the streets. Leaflets gave instructions to walk across the intersection in different directions to form various polygons, relying on the pedestrian’s right of way over automobiles: “Don’t wait don’t walk (umbrella step, stroll, cake walk, somersault, finger-crawl, squat-jump, pilgrimage, Phylly dog, etc.).” It was a translation of the civil rights sit-in technique directed against automobiles, and at the same time a terrific goof.
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Media Frenzy
The Summer of Love was perhaps America’s first media event. Scores of journalists, photographers, and television reporters descended on San Francisco. There were so many media people that a running joke started about bead-wearing Life magazine reporters interviewing bead-wearing Look magazine reporters because there were more
of them than real hippies.
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THE DIGGERS
The Diggers were an anarchist group in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury who wanted to break free of America’s capitalistic system. Inspired by the English Diggers (1649–50), they tried to free the world from private property and all forms of buying and selling. Their goal was to create a Free City. They established a Free Store where everything was free for the taking and gave out Free Food every day in the park. The Diggers were at the center of many of the ’60s iconic traditions. They were the first to proclaim the nutritious value of whole wheat bread over white bread with Free Digger Bread baked in one- and two-pound coffee cans. They established the first Free Medical Clinic. They started the tie-dyed clothing craze and communal celebrations of natural planetary events, such as the solstices and equinoxes.
A flyer handed out at Haight and the Panhandle by the Diggers:
FREE FOOD GOOD HOT STEW