This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  - Jenny Diski, The Sixties10

  The one segment of the Our World broadcast that endures on YouTube is the one that makes me cry now.

  A camera swoops down and in over the backs of trumpeters and trombonists playing the stirring opening strains of “La Marseillaise,” pauses for a second-long medium shot of three men on stools, then zooms in on the still-angelic face of Paul McCartney, headphones on his ears, crooning, “Love, love, love” in an earnest falsetto into his tootsie-pop microphone, strumming his upside down bass.

  “Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time. It’s easy,” John Lennon sings. He is wearing an ornate, brocaded Sergeant Pepper jacket and jeweled barrette planted on his forehead like a third eye. “All you need is love.”

  A bouquet of balloons in the corner of the studio strains to break free of its leash. The studio floor is drizzled with flower petals, and seated on the floor around the lads is a Who’s Who of English rock and roll—Keith Moon, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Graham Nash, and others, heads bobbing, singing along. Paul, legs crossed and bouncing, seems to single-handedly propel the formally clad orchestra musicians, muscling through their parts as though they were playing Stravinsky. And behind them all, Ringo, resplendent in a silk Indian coat, placidly lays down the simplest of beats. Incongruously, in the pause between lyrical lines, all but George appear to be chewing gum

  As the tune progresses, John, Paul, and George can’t help but exchange smiles. What they are doing is so surpassingly fun. At the end of the song, as the orchestra plays a snatch of “Greensleeves,” a small group of festively festooned luminaries enter the studio wearing sandwich boards, extolling Love, Lamour, Liebe, любовь. A burst of confetti rains down from the ceiling.

  This broadcast, this song, effectively inaugurated the Summer of Love in San Francisco, six months after the Human Be-In event in Golden Gate Park had announced that there could be a new way to live. That thirty-thousand person “Gathering of the Tribes” had danced, smoked, swayed, chanted, and exhorted one another into the conviction that we didn’t need to revolt, or even persuade, that we could instead simply come together and live in a different way, alongside but against the prevailing culture. Inspired by that event, a volunteer group of anarchists who called themselves The Diggers collected unused and discarded food from markets and restaurants, then gave it out; the founders of the Free Store did the same for clothes, shoes, sofas, and plates. For a heady few months—before the tourists and the professional hippy merchandise vendors, before the exploited runaways and drug-seeking addicts clogged Haight-Ashbury—it seemed stunningly simple and clear to many that it was true, that really all we needed was love, and the rest would take care of itself.

  In 1967, three weeks after the Our World broadcast, I sat on a bench in the rec shed of the Shaker Village Work Group, a highly non-traditional summer camp, where a town meeting had been convened to decide what to do about Eric. Separated from his Scarsdale drug dealer and desperate to get high, Eric had astonishingly chosen to believe another kid’s assurance that if you took enough of it, you could get stoned on Midol.

  Crampless but buzzless, with nothing to show for his novel experiment but extreme nausea, Eric now hunched over, peering anxiously out from under a cascade of wavy red hair, waiting for his fellow campers—about sixty other thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds—to decide whether to send him home for violating the no-drug policy, or to give him another chance.

  “This isn’t about the rules, man,” one of the staff said. “It’s about the bigger mission of the group. It’s about not being busted or shut down.”

  “He took Midol, man,” Jon drawled. In his orange bell bottoms, a paisley shirt, and dark granny glasses, he was conspicuously cool, and a good six inches taller than all the other boys his age. “The Staties aren’t going to barge in here just because some guy took chick pills.” Jon would later become one of the founding members of the Glam-Rock band, Twisted Sister, where his fashion sense and simple, bombastic guitar playing would be richly rewarded.

  “Yeah, but this place is about acting in the greater good. Getting high—I mean people should have the right to do what they want…” Amy, freckled and earnest in her Indian print blouse, began to falter. “But getting high is against the rules—I mean not because they’re rules, but just because well, you know, technically it’s illegal or something…” She finally summoned her thought. “I’m just saying we’re here to prove there’s a different way to be, you know? Not so individualistic or something.”

  Of course it was a foregone conclusion that we’d allow Eric to stay. His public humiliation was punishment enough. And besides, probably half the people in that room had smoked the innocuous herbal mix called Shaker Tea by then, in a similarly hopeful but futile quest.

  Investing a community of adolescents with this kind of decision-making authority was one of many features of this experiment in temporary utopia, one that began on the heels of World War II. In 1946, a labor lawyer, Jerry Count, and his wife, Sybil, bought the land and buildings occupied by the rapidly dwindling community of Shakers living on Mount Lebanon, New York, just over the Massachusetts state line, in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains. A year later, they opened the Shaker Village Work Group on the property.

  On the surface, an aging New York lawyer and his chain-smoking English wife were an unlikely pair to preside over a camp of about two hundred white hippies and black urban refugees, and in the latter half of the 1960s, the Shakers were an unlikely choice of role model. But while their celibacy and religious ecstasy were lacking in “relevance” (that quality teenagers in the late 1960s cherished most), many elements of their philosophy and life style had a distinctly counter-cultural quality.

  Jerry and Sybil’s vision was to update and enact many of these values in the new Shaker Village. It would function as a democratic, egalitarian community, and use the full tuition payments of some to finance the scholarships of many others. While the program would allow time for recreation and relaxation, we were there to work—maintaining and improving the property, growing food, and producing items to sell in the crafts store to visiting tourists.

  Though I didn’t know his exact age, to my adolescent eyes, Jerry Count was old. He had white hair that shot straight up like tender leeks, and wore a lumpy red cardigan sweater regardless of the temperature. He had come of age with the Russian Revolution, and drew his inspiration for Shaker Village from a seemingly disparate set of sources—from the work camps established by the Civilian Public Service during World War II to provide conscientious objectors with an alternative to military service, to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or “Shakers,” themselves.

  Every Monday through Saturday morning, Jerry would lead a meeting on the lawn in front of the old Shaker chair factory. Dazed by daylight, some of us breakfasting on single-serving boxes of Frosted Flakes, we’d sit cross-legged on the grass as Jerry or our villager-elected Mayor made announcements and then tried to engage us in a discussion of something that mattered. Often it was a matter of Village policy. Should people be allowed to smoke cigarettes anywhere on the premises? Was it improper for us to buy our own products, the boxes and oven mitt holders and brooms we’d made, from the crafts store?

  Jerry didn’t say much during those meetings, but stood stock still, hands in pockets, listening intently. And when he did speak, it was usually to share some insight from Prince Peter Kropotkin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarcho-syndicalist who was his intellectual idol, and apply it to the most mundane of matters. “In Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, Kropotkin argued that it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation, not competition, that enabled all species, including the human species, to thrive,” he’d say as casually as if sharing the score of the previous night’s Yankees game. “So as you formulate your strategies in Capture the Flag tonight, you may want to bear that in mind.”

  Just before we
embarked on the annual blueberry harvest, Jerry would hold up a berry-filled branch he’d snagged from one of the bushes that surrounded the village, then, with the relish of a gourmet shucking a fresh oyster, demonstrate how to pluck the berry and drop it into a metal milk bucket without damage to either the tender blue sphere or its branch. “You’ve got to be careful,” he’d warn us cheerily. “Blueberries are a renewable resource that supports almost all of our jam production. And that’s important. After all, as Kropotkin always said, ‘Local production obviates the need for central government.’”

  I’d ended up at the Village largely by accident. My parents, now both graduate students, had no money to send my brother and me to summer camp. But they both devoutly believed that summers in the country were as essential to our wellbeing as food and polio vaccines, so every year my mother cobbled together enough camp sessions and visits to friends and relatives with country homes to ensure that we got at least some mosquito bites, campfires, and dawn swims in bracing mountain waters. That year, while scouring the classifieds in the Saturday Review magazine, my mother had found an ad for Shaker Village indicating that they granted scholarships. That was all she needed to know.

  Two months later I found myself side by side with middle-class Jewish hippies from Long Island and working class black kids from Detroit and the Bronx, learning to can and to weave, though few of my bunched and skewed place mats made their way to the store to be sold next to books, sachets, and Shaker paraphernalia. I learned to dig potatoes and pick beans and milk a cow—horrified and thrilled by the sensation of wringing each long teat, the warmth of the watery milk shooting out, the torrential sound it made as it hit the base of the metal bucket. I learned to craft Shaker brooms and boxes—gleaming oval baskets with slender, dovetailed joints, held together by glue and wooden tacks—to make jam from the strawberries and blueberries we picked at the start and end of summer, and can Bread-and-Butter pickles. And, because paid tours and craft store sales helped subsidize the program, I learned enough about Shaker history to escort visiting tourists around the South Family village.

  “The Shakers were founded by a woman, Mother Ann Lee,” I told my small party one afternoon, a collection of middle-aged socks-and-sandals-clad refugees from New York City, who had come to the Berkshires for cooler air and culture. “She came here in 1774 with eight of her followers and began to preach. She was fleeing a violent husband in England, and perhaps that helps to explain her belief in celibacy.” Young and involuntarily celibate as I was, I smirked a little when I said this. “Mother Ann Lee also believed in equality of the sexes. Every village, or ‘family,’ was led by an Elder and an Eldress, and they had equal authority.” I did not smirk when I said this. Other than Golda Meir, I’d never seen any woman besides a teacher in a position of power.

  “You hear that, Hal?” a blonde woman muttered to her husband. “Equal authority.”

  “Why not?” he answered with expansive geniality and a broad shrug. “We’re already celibate.”

  While tour guide, with its transient authority, was one of my favorite jobs, that wasn’t what made Shaker Village a keystone in my life, even now. It wasn’t the Shakers’ invention of the clothespin or the broom, or the fact that the Shakers were the first to sell seeds in paper packages that excited me. No, what mattered is that they were pacifists. More love, went one of the Shaker hymns we learned to sing. “More love, the heavens are blessing, the angels are calling, Oh Zion, more love.” Self-sufficient men and women, the Shakers found righteousness in peace, succor in work, togetherness in song, and ecstasy in dance. And in 1967, we aspired to do the same.

  I hadn’t known that the summer had an official name until one afternoon I read a three-month-old newspaper that I was using to wrap ceramic cups in the gift store. The article quoted an April press conference held by The Council for the Summer of Love. An amalgamation of people from an anarchist group, an underground theatre company, the San Francisco Oracle underground paper, and about twenty-five other locals, The Council had been formed to prepare for the anticipated rush of runaways, hippies, and seekers expected to descend on the city once school let out. Working with churches, food banks, and doctors, they tried to create a Haight Ashbury infrastructure that would support the imminent population explosion. Of course I had no appreciation for their practicality, only for their rhetoric. “This summer,” they declared, “the youth of the world are making a holy pilgrimage to our city, to affirm and celebrate a new spiritual dawn.…This city is not a wasteland; our children will not discover drought and famine here. This city is alive, human and divine...”11

  On the day that I read this, Gray Line Bus tours began their Haight-Ashbury District Hippy Hop tour, “the only foreign tour within the continental United States.” That irony was not lost on my friends and me as we sat outside the craft store three thousand miles away, waiting for tourists of our own to guide, intently leafing through Life magazine’s gaudy photos and Time’s breathless dispatches from San Francisco.

  The July 7, 1967 cover of Time magazine featured a psychedelic picture of musicians—what looked like an amalgam of Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Gracie Slick, Joni Mitchell, and some grinning guy in paisley who could have been Dennis Hopper—amid swirling flowers and swooshes in purple, blue, and gold. “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” read the angled banner at the top right.

  “Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence,” the cover story explained. “They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans. Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by ‘flower power’ and force of example. Although that sounds like a pipe-dream, it conveys the unreality that permeates hippiedom, a cult whose mystique derives essentially from the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.”12

  With its translations of common hippie words and phrases, the article read like a parody: “Though hippies consider any sort of arithmetic a ‘down trip,’ or boring, their own estimate of their nationwide number runs to some three hundred thousand…. They feel ‘up tight’ (tense and frightened) about many disparate things—from sex to the draft, college grades to thermonuclear war.”

  Even reading it today, I find myself taking umbrage at its patronizing dismissal of “the unreality that permeates hippiedom.” Not everyone who aspired to those values was a devotee of hallucinogenic drugs. (Idealistic but fundamentally timid, I certainly wasn’t at the age of fourteen, or ever.) While some kids—too many—ran away from home or dropped out of school and ended up sleeping in doorways in Haight Ashbury or St. Mark’s Place that summer, most of my peers went where our parents sent us, and at least went through the motions of leading the lives we were supposed to lead. Like tourists on the Hippy Hop bus, we were in some respects just passing through, acquiring the tchotchkes of hippiedom while keeping a safe distance from it. But just as one visit to Paris or one swim in a still black lake on a moonlit night is enough to lodge itself in your heart forever, the hippy ethos penetrated us like sunlight, coloring our skin and making our bones stronger.

  What I remember best is dancing—not the stomping but geometrically pristine Shaker dances that we’d re-create on parents’ night—but the nights in the barn when we’d get to dance to our music. Though it hadn’t been used as a barn for decades, the sweet-scented warmth of horses and hay had infiltrated every dry-aged board. Simply standing in that sun-bleached and listing structure, I felt the tender attention of past generations. Dancing, I felt that I was channeling their energy, mingling it with ours. We’d sway to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and ruminate over the lyrics (“It’s clearly about LSD, man.”). We’d shout with The Chambers Brothers —“Time, time, time!”—our voices fusing and frenzied, delirious with possibility, and close out the night with The Doors. The songs started slyly, with a sexy wink and grind from Jim Morrison to the mass of gy
rating youth in the stunned and creaky old barn. Ray Manzarek’s organ, compressed and insinuating, squeezed out the notes as we belted out the words: “We want the world and we want it...now.”13

  Dropping out, simply establishing a parallel, self-contained society of just and peaceful people, seemed possible. It wasn’t even a stretch to imagine it. That we were living in a worthy and self-directed community of teenagers seemed not so much unusual as simply appropriate.

  The fact that this was just a summer, one that our parents had paid or borrowed or applied for, was lost on us. We were young, as naive as we thought we were worldly. At least most of us were.

  There was one camper at Shaker Village in 1967 who wasn’t in the least bit naive. Then fifteen years old, Ben Chaney was a celebrity of sorts. His older brother, James, had disappeared in 1964 while en route from Philadelphia, Mississippi, to the town of Meridian, along with two white Freedom Riders from New York City who had gone South for the summer to help register black voters. Their families raised a ruckus, and when the FBI finally found the bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in an earthen dam forty-four days later—pistol-whipped, mutilated, and shot—the press descended on Meridian, the Chaneys’ hometown, to cover the funeral.

  Nine years younger than James, Ben had idolized his older brother. And for good reason—James had been like a father to him, and brought him along as he organized prospective black voters in the weeks leading up to the Freedom Summer. When twelve-year-old Ben had himself been arrested for demonstrating for civil rights, it was James who had obtained his release. In an interview over forty years later, Ben would say of James, “He treated me like I was a hero.”14