CHAPTER SIX: BERKELEY 1971, HIGH TIDE OF THE REVOLUTION
Revolution is a romantic word and a bloody practice. There has not been a significant one among the major nations of the West since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. That seismic event had an analogous effect on revolution to the atomic bomb’s on warfare after World War 2. The bomb unleashed a force so great that a clash of the great nations became unthinkable because so much destruction was mutually assured. The same thing with the Bolshevik Revolution. No matter how corrupt a government and society becomes, people fear that, as in the Bolshevik seizure of power, the destruction accompanying a revolution would assure the society never recovers.
But the romance of overthrowing the old order in an explosion of righteous anger has never really gone away.
Nor has the word, shorn of its violent political meaning, ever gone out of fashion. “Revolution” has been liberally applied to social and cultural trends for decades going back to when the Children of Victory reached adolescence.
Scepticism is necessary about a lot of claims made concerning revolution in the 1960s. America was never seriously close to a violent overthrow of the existing order. But there was a brief period when the political meaning of the word became allied with its cultural use and for those few years revolution meant something closer to what it meant in October 1917 or the spring of 1848.
The University of California at Berkeley was the Revolution’s west coast node.
In the autumn of 1969 I lived in Berkeley, nestled between Oakland and San Quentin prison on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. The Revolution had been underway for five years by the time I arrived.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement is regarded as its starting point.
Briefly:
Some Berkeley students had gone to Mississippi to register Black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964. It was a dangerous act. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi that summer.
After such violence the idea that university campuses were isolated from the political turmoil roiling America seemed untenable. But Berkeley, a public university funded by California taxpayers had strict rules about politics on campus. Advocacy for political causes was not allowed on campus grounds. The university saw itself as a neutral space, a place for education only.
The neutrality rule was probably put in place to avoid offending the taxpayers as much as anything else. They funded the state’s University system. In the mid-60s the cost of tuition throughout the University of California was zero. At Berkeley students paid a registration fee of $300 and that was all. In addition, there was the legacy of the McCarthy era, the Red Scares of the 1950s. Best way to avoid giving hostages to political fortune was to simply stop political speech.
The Free Speech Movement’s founders insisted that in an America where students could be murdered in Mississippi while helping people register to vote, neutrality was no longer a viable position anymore.
Activists set up stalls in Sproul Plaza, the town square of the vast Berkeley campus, to pass out political literature. The police were called in and arrests were made, and so the legend of Berserk-eley was created and a “revolution” called into being.
Five years later I turned up in Berkeley to work on an Antioch co-op quarter. I had driven across country from Yellow Springs, Ohio with my best friend, Dan. 2,400 miles in a little under three days. Dan and most of his family were from Los Angeles and his cousins were enrolled at Berkeley. They put us up in their group house on the south side of campus a short walk from Telegraph Avenue.
The night we arrived there was a party. The male cousin—not mentioning names, the fellow went on to practice law for decades—was coming home from jail. A few months earlier there had been riots over a derelict plot of land owned by the university a few blocks away. Students had begun using it for political activity—a continuation of the Free Speech Movement. People’s Park became a place to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and agitate against the capitalist system.
The governor of California in 1969, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t having it. He ordered his Chief of Staff Edwin Meese to clear the students out of the park. Meese who would serve as Chief Counselor and then Attorney General under Reagan when he reached the White House a decade later, ordered in the police and authorized the use of force. They used shotguns and one student was killed. Then Reagan declared a state of emergency, ordered the National Guard to occupy the Park and put Berkeley on lockdown.
Several hundred people were arrested including Dan’s cousin. The students were given shortish sentences at Santa Rita jail. This was not a country club or day release prison. The students had the full American correctional system experience.
Throwing mostly middle-class white kids, albeit well-versed in revolutionary political theory, into a prison with gang-members and hardened criminals was a fairly cruel thing to do. It was like feeding time on the savannah. My memory of that first evening in Berkeley is of vast pots of chili being prepared and half gallon jugs of Gallo and Almaden wine being emptied. Soul music on the radio and the party breaking up early because Dan’s cousin broke down in tears. Bad things had happened to him at Santa Rita.
Talk of revolution was easy in those days. Stoned or drunk or both there was a lot of facile chat about “when the revolution comes.” Students ached for revolution the way they ached for sex: compulsively and without any sense of consequences.
That evening made the word seem real. In Russia, for more than a century, during Tsarist times and after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian/Soviet state had dealt with revolutionary dissidents by throwing them in prison with hardened criminals. It is an effective way to keep people in check.
The other specific memory of that evening was I rolled out my sleeping bag on the kitchen floor and the house cat nestled between my legs and in the middle of the night urinated on me.
Berkeley’s student body was and still is enormous. In the late Sixties there were 25,000 undergraduates and thousands more grad students in every discipline imaginable. Despite Reagan’s heavy handed attempts to shut political speech down, Sproul Plaza became a kind of open city. Students, street people, ex-cons: a complete cross-section of the Bay Area’s counter culture hung out there. At lunch time it heaved with activity like Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore must have done during the medieval heyday of that city’s university.
Everything under the sun was argued about, things of enormous importance: the war foremost; and the most mundane concerns: late adolescent love lives. By the entrance to the plaza from Bancroft Way, a red-haired evangelist named Hubert harangued students for their souls and endured their banter. He was treated like a bear in an Elizabethan London baiting pit. His face turning a darker carrot color than his thinning hair. In Lower Sproul Plaza a never ending jam session of conga drummers went on. Players dropping in and out to provide a rhythmic beat under the hubbub of people alive, arguing, in motion.
The wind was in the sails of the anti-war movement that autumn. It was the time of the Moratorium Against the Vietnam War. More people went on anti-War marches that October and November than were actually deployed in Vietnam.
Between those two epic events, Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse came to campus to speak in support of philosophy professor, Angela Davis, who had just been fired by UCLA for being a communist.
Marcuse was a living link to the major German philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century. He had studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. A Jew, he had lived through the rise of Hitler and fled the Nazi regime in time.
Thousands of students packed into Lower Sproul Plaza. Marcuse took the microphone to address the crowd and introduce Davis. He was 70-years old. What must he have thought as he looked out at the multitude aching for revolution? When he was the same age as many in the crowd he had participated in the ill-fated Spartacist uprising in Berlin and lived through the rise of fascism in his homeland. I am writing these words at a distance of half a century. My memories are vivid. For Marcuse, it was only three and a half decades since Hitler had seized power and the philosopher had fled Germany. His memories of those days had to be even more intense.
When he warned that the state would bring the full weight of oppression down on us because it feared us, his words carried extra weight. Marcuse had lived it already. And he was right. There would be a lot of deaths in the ensuing year.
In a thick German accent he encouarged the assembly,
Only you: black, white and brown can break this insanity, the global omnivorousness of capitalism.
Then he introduced Angela Davis. He had supervised her doctoral dissertation. She was the perfect person for the state to make an example of because,
She is black, she is militant, she is a communist, she is highly intelligent … and she is pretty.
Well, he couldn’t get away with the last comment in the 21st century but the crowd at the time chuckled.
Marcuse and Davis’s speeches had a theme. University students had to participate in the real world and college campuses should not be safe spaces. They should be places that encouraged students to engage with the dangers beyond their boundaries.
And all the while they spoke, the conga drummers kept at their rhythms.
Berkeley wasn’t entirely given over to revolution. Sweeping through Sproul Plaza were plenty of people preparing for life in the upper echelons of California society. Fraternity brothers and sorority sisters having the normal university experience, except for the occasional whiff of teargas. They were living the life depicted in Mike Nichols’ film, The Graduate.
But even “straights’ among Berkeley students were activists in the dramatic social and cultural changes happening at the same time. The word “revolution” has long been applied to them as well.
The speed with which social and political change overtook American culture in the years after the war is astonishing. It took less than two decades to get from the united social organization necessary to achieve victory in World War 2 to the social fractures of civil disobedience and youth culture that marked the Children of Victory’s adolescence - roughly from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 through the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968.
Cultural change is hard to generalize about in a society as complex as America. The cultural sources that shape people’s lives vary across the country’s wide geography and extremes of wealth and poverty. The physical distances and class differences are reflected in education. The books that are assigned for reading in a high school in suburban Philadelphia are not the same as those assigned in the Mississippi Delta or Seattle or points in between.
Yet cultural commentators can’t help themselves. They keep looking for a theory of everything to explain social phenomena.
People speak of the baby boom, extrapolating a universal cultural outlook shaped by a set of identical experiences for people of a certain age. The increased birth rate in America in the middle of the 20th century was a demographic fact but not much more. I was born the same year and started college the same autumn as Republican political operative Karl Rove, conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry. I assure you beyond our shared birth year we have nothing in common except maybe the television programs we watched.
American children’s television in the 1950’s was filled with warlike heroes drawn from the pages of history. There was a show devoted to Davy Crockett and one to Jim Bowie both of whom died at the Alamo. There was Swamp Fox, about the father of modern guerilla warfare, Francis Marion, who harried the British all over South Carolina during the American Revolution. There was the Grey Ghost, a piece of Civil War revisionism about a kindly Confederate cavalry officer, Major John Mosby. Women weren’t forgotten. Annie Oakley’s life was the basis of a series.
American rebels, heroes, fighters against injustice, makers of a new world entire.
There were more recent heroes to shape a child’s daydreams. My pocket money went on a monthly splurge in the newsagents next door to the Bala movie theatre buying Our Army At War and All-American Men of War comic books which contained the latest adventures of Sgt. Rock and the Combat Happy Joes of Easy Company and those of Gunner and Sarge.
Yet by the mid-60’s this heroic stuff had lost its purchase on many teen-agers in my part of America’s complex social structure: the middle-class cosmopolitan section found on the coasts and within commuting distance of the big cities in the middle.
It wasn’t that we were precociously aware of the McCarthy hearings and the blacklist or the nuclear arms race. Those photos from 1950’s news magazines—the ones with children doing duck and cover drills in case of nuclear attack—imply we were all paralyzed with fear about nuclear annihilation. When you are 8 years old you don’t think like that.
Anyway, it wasn’t that stuff or even the assassination of President Kennedy that made us turn away from the war’s myths.
There comes a moment in everyone’s psychological development, usually in early adolescence, when you realize your parents don’t know what they are talking about. It is usually such a shock that you keep your mouth shut, so you know when this revelatory moment happens but they don’t. Thus, parents never recognize that moment when their sons and their daughters first step beyond their command.
Those first steps away take place in the privacy of your own thoughts; in the ideas you take from the books you read, the music you listen to, the films you watch. All the stuff labeled as culture
As the Children of Victory turned 15 and 16, we found a lively a culture of rebellion already made. It’s foundations were laid by people who had been adolescents during the Depression years.
It’s superstructure was erected by people born during the war. The young people who were freedom riding to Mississippi and founding the Free Speech Movement had been born then. As was the man who wrote “The Times They Are a Changin’,” and all the other musicians creating the revolution in popular culture. Their own adolescent years had been the first time the idea of teen-age rebellion had become accepted as a common social phenomenon.
They had grown up as an iconography grew of rebellious young men, not in business attire or smart casual dress, but in t-shirts—an undergarment.
But the other key factor that drove the shift in the culture towards the edge of revolution was simply the passage of time. The immediate trauma of the war and the astonishing feats of logistics and heroism that had won it had been rehearsed over and over for two decades.
Now, when World War 2 was discussed, frequently it was to analyze how the German nation had gone over to the dark side and to ask if there was a danger that it could happen in the US. There was a lot of focus on the role of mass media propaganda—the Big Lie. The phrase “we were only following orders,” was repeatedly examined in the high and low culture we absorbed.
“We were only following orders” implied a degree of conformity that was socially destructive.
The suburbs, to which it seemed like the entire US was moving, were places of massive conformity. Most 16 year olds want to be heroes. Heroism is a form of non-conformity. Following orders is the conformist’s credo.
The phrase “following orders” was analyzed so often, that soon it became a punchline in stand-up comedy and in Mad Magazine, a popular satirical monthly, that devoted an enormous amount of space to making fun of Madison Avenue and the propagandizing manipulations of the ad industry. It was started by a bunch of guys who used to work in advertising and among its illustrators were some of the fellows who drew All-American Men of War and Sgt. Rock comics.
The literary canon was changing rapidly and most new additions were about how societies come to just “follow orders,” and the price paid for resisting those orders. Several books that had been published in our lifetimes were already on the reading list at Harriton High.
George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984” were top of the list. There was J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” who translated “Don’t Follow Orders” into Holden Caulfield’s constant complaints about “phonies,” an adolescent’s warning against following grown-ups just on their say so.
Then there was “Catch-22.” No book dealt with the problem of “just following orders” better. It was funny and it was dark - the hero, Yossarian, is trying to get out of flying any more bombing missions over Italy. Because he has discovered people are trying to kill him while he’s up there. He can be excused from flying more missions if he is deemed mentally unfit. But to be classed as crazy he has to ask the medical officer to relieve him of duty—which proves that he’s sane. That’s some catch, that “Catch 22.”
The book reeked of authenticity. Its author, Joseph Heller had flown the same bomber missions over Italy as his hero, Yossarian. Another enormously popular novel questioning war, “Cat’s Cradle,” was written by a man with similarly authentic experience. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war being held in Dresden when that city was firebombed in February 1945. He survived by hiding in a meat-locker in the basement of a building.
The Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg broke formal rules but were also read because of the non-conformist way they lived. They were famous beyond the reach of their words for a lifestyle of constant movement along America’s highways and an open attitude to sex and drugs.
The irony of these artists providing a template for mid-60s teen-age rebellion is that Heller and Vonnegut, and Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg were the same age as most of our father’s. J. D. Salinger was just a few years older.
We were rebelling against our parents through culture created by people our parents might have gone to high school with.
Lifestyle rebellion and political rebellion came together with terrific force in the middle of the 1960s. From about 1967—the Summer of Love in White America, the worst Summer of Fire in Black America—they ran concurrently.
In a time of assassinations, the War, and violence unleashed by continued suppression of African-Americans attempting to gain basic rights, these two very different forms of rebellion were bound to come together.
But underneath there was always a difference. Only the political revolutionaries were risking something.
I left Berkeley in the first week of December and drove east, back to Yellow Springs. On the radio during that trip there was a brief news item that Fred Hampton, 21-year old chairman of the Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party had been killed in a shootout with police.
It was not a shootout. It was an extrajudicial killing. An execution by the forces of the state.
Revolution is a form of civil war.
To understand America’s march to calamity it is important to remember that throughout this time most people, even among the Children of Victory, were not interested in political revolution, but there were a few years in our late adolescence when those who wanted political revolution and those living the lifestyle revolution were joined together. Ending the Vietnam War was the unifying force.
But during that same period there were many who did not share that goal. Most young men who were drafted went into the army. Their parents, families, friends and a chunk of the American populace, supported the troops. Just before I arrived in Berkeley a Gallup poll showed 54% of the country approved of Nixon’s handling of the war. Around the time I left Berkeley, a Gallup survey showed 53% of college students supporting Nixon
Richard Nixon and his advisers had finally gained the White House by exploiting divisions over race and they governed by exploiting the fifty-fifty split over the War, as well.
Inside and outside the White House his communication team included people who would create a new template for political messaging. Roger Ailes, William Safire and Pat Buchanan were partisan right-wing populists, happy to divide America into them and us. They were willing to break the boundaries on what was acceptable speech coming from the White House and shameless in their propagandizing.
They understood how broadcast news worked: it’s the most incendiary words in a speech that will get turned into soundbites for the evening news. They wrote speeches full of sound bites for designated attack dogs, particularly Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who told one audience:
Next time you see a mob of students throwing rocks and bricks at the student union just imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets and act accordingly.
Anti-War protestors were demonized as bums and creeps, fascists and communists, un-American.
Anger against students seeped into every corner of America. The towns around Yellow Springs, Ohio were not hospitable places to people from Antioch or those who looked like us.
Throughout the winter of 1970 on campuses, the resentment stoked by Nixon’s campaign to paint students as the enemy smoldered. There were deep concerns about the draft which was still running at high volume despite the fact Nixon had been elected on a pledge to wind down the war.
In early April, 1970 the President announced that 150,000 troops would leave Vietnam. Then on April 28th, Nixon addressed the nation live. American and South Vietnamese troops had crossed into Cambodia to
… attack the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam. This key control center has been occupied by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong for 5 years in blatant violation of Cambodia’s neutrality.
Nixon went on:
This is not an invasion of Cambodia.
And within hours, in a world without internet or mobile phones, we all knew this was an invasion, a massive escalation of war that called for a massive escalation of protest.
At Kent State University in Ohio, not far from Cleveland, students took to the streets around campus.1 Long simmering town and gown and biker tensions about the war—draftees vs draft dodgers—led to violence in a downtown area of bars just off campus. Then the building housing the university’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, ROTC, was set alight. Ohio’s Republican governor James Rhodes, a staunch Nixon ally, ordered the National Guard to occupy the town and then met the press. Pounding a table he promised,
We are going to eradicate the problem. We are not going to treat the symptom.
A Colonel Kranmeyer of the Highway Patrol, part of the military force assembled at Kent, told reporters at the same press conference
Any hoodlum with a gun will be handled the same as any other hoodlum. The next phase we have encountered elsewhere is when they start sniping. They can expect us to return fire.
And it was in this atmosphere: a country whose divisions were being exploited by the President and with troops primed for extreme violence, that several thousand students convened on Monday May 4th at noon on the Commons, the central lawn of the Kent State University campus.
The students were ordered to disperse and refused. Tear gas was fired but borne away by the breeze. The National Guard advanced. The large crowd went up a hill behind the Commons and down the other side, milling about. The Guard followed and then turned away. Suddenly a small group of Guardsmen turned back and opened fire.
Four people were killed. The dead were Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause who were taking part in the demonstration and Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, who were simply on their way to class. The victims were all several hundred feet away from the guardsman.
There are tape recordings of the chaos. Local radio reporters were out in the demonstration. At one point a student shouts,
That general told me I have my orders, just like an SS commander. He don’t give a fuck if he wipes you out.
On campuses all over America the feeling was, “It could have been me.” Higher education ground to a halt. Nearly 900 colleges and universities were shut down, millions of students went on strike.
Everything at Antioch shuddered to a stop replaced by rumours, meetings, and earnest discussions about what phase of revolution the massacre—we called it that immediately—represented: was it 1905, the unsuccessful first attempt at Revolution in Russia or 1917, when bold action seized power?
As if by osmosis, in an age where a payphone in the dorm was the only connection to the outside world, a demonstration was organized for Washington DC on Saturday May 9th.
Dan and I headed for DC. The further we got from campus the more it became clear, it was not 1905 or 1917 or 1848 or any other time when revolution occurred. America was going about its business. The events at Kent hadn’t changed the debate, it was still them and us. Kent student Laura Davis, who had been at the edge of the crowd, went home that evening she remembers her father saying, “They should have shot all of them.” His view was not uncommon.
In New York, a group of students went to City Hall to continue the pressure on Nixon to get troops out of Cambodia. They were confronted by construction workers wearing hard hats and a small riot broke out. But this single incident did not herald another step toward revolution.
As the Hard Hat riot was going on, tens of thousands were gathering in DC, for massive demonstration on May 9th. The weather was hot and many slept rough around the Lincoln memorial in sight of the White House.
Only at the highest level did people act like the country was on the edge of some conflagration. This was clear in the erratic behavior of its President. In the strangest moment of his odd public life, Richard Nixon, wide awake at around 4 in morning, looked across the South Lawn of the White House towards the Lincoln Memorial. He saw people gathered for the day’s demonstration milling around. They too were unable to sleep. He ordered a car and driver from the motor pool and with his valet, Manolo Sanchez, rode the short distance to the Memorial and began chatting with the students. He dictated his immediate recollections for his memoirs2
Perhaps the major contribution I could make to them was to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander.
As the sun rose, Nixon asked to be driven to the US Capitol building and had the House of Representatives’ chamber unlocked and invited Sanchez, a Cuban immigrant, to sit in the Speaker’s chair. He then asked him to step to the lectern used to give the State of the Union speech and give an impromptu talk.
By mid-morning the crowd had grown to 75,000, according to official estimates. I’m reasonably certain it was well-north of 100,000. We milled around for hours wondering what action would be taken, what the consequences would be
Frisbee’s were being thrown, people were frolicking in the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. The mood was half Woodstock, half storm the Winter Palace, the essential divide in the anti-War movement
It was DC hot, a sapping, semi-tropical heat. My friend Dan and I found a small patch of shade and gave in to despair
We walked into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to get some air conditioning. The place was packed with weekend crowds, mostly families touring the nation’s capital. When we had cooled down, we walked back out onto Constitution Avenue, which was an oil and water mixture of middle American families and protestors. Marching up the middle of the road came a phalanx of hard-core politicals, Yippees, carrying coffins which they planned to deposit at the front door of the White House.
We fell in with them. At the corner of 15th street the group turned left. They had to turn right to get to the White House. I shouted out, “No, Yippees, it’s this way! Follow me!” And amazingly they did. I found myself leading this crew towards the White House. Not that there was a hope of getting to the building. The White House grounds were surrrounded by a barricade of empty buses. The wagons were well and truly circled.
Some people did try to push a bus over. One guy seething with the spirit of the moment scrambled under a bus. He reappeared on the other side being held up by two cops while a third smacked him across the head with a club.
On the roofs of the buildings across from the White House, soldiers were sighting their rifles down on us. Given what had just happened at Kent State, it was not a pleasant feeling.
We marched around to Lafayette Square directly in front of the White House and sat down. But there was no plan for what to do next. After a while the police used tear gas and cleared us out. The day ended without major incident.
Students continued to die. The following week, at Jackson State, a historically Black college in Mississippi, two students, Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green, were killed by police.
Kent and Jackson State, two public universities, many of whose students were the first in their families to attain higher education, became linked forever
And then I left America for a junior year abroad at a university in England.
There is a moment just at high tide and a little after, when water calms. The force that will pull it down and out again is not felt yet on the surface. You can see this calm when you sit on the edge of a pier and look down at the water around the pilings, full and sluggish.
America felt like that when I returned. An electricity was missing. There was an after the storm calm, not that the storm had abated.
On the first anniversary of Kent State, tens of thousands of people descended on Washington to shut the government down and end the War. This demonstration was not policed as gently as the event I attended. 12,000 people were arrested.
In August, another prominent young Black man, George Jackson, was killed in a riot at San Quentin prison. He had written a widely read book, “Soledad Brother,” a collection of his letters sent from inside the prisons where he had spent much of his life. They were testimony to a life too many Black men are forced to live in America because of their color and poverty.
Neither event sparked a great reaction. In the case of the May protests it might have been because few of the 12,000 arrested actually faced trial and only 79 were eventually convicted. In the case of Jackson’s death, possibly because it happened in the dog days of summer, when students are off-campus.
Maybe it was the reality that you can’t wage a revolution on the student calendar. Tens of thousands of people had graduated from colleges since the autumn of 1969. They had started their adult lives and gone to work or were bumming around trying to find themselves, removed from the hothouse conditions of campus.
It could also have been that lifestyle revolutionaries and political revolutionaries were pulling apart from each other. John Lennon had written about the fault line between them in 1968.
You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world.
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
The Kent State trauma was working its way through the body politic. The message of that event—you can go only so far and after that the state will kill you—was being internalized by many who had demonstrated against the war with no particular ideology beyond peace. People who wanted to say Peace Now, End the War, did not want their protest hijacked by those who were versed in Marxist-Leninism and had a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book on their nightstand.
But the political revolutionaries had stepped back, as well. Only a handful had gone all the way and moved underground to commit acts of violence. Introspection, not planning for confrontation, occupied the politically committed.
I had about six weeks to kill before classes started at Antioch and drove across country to LA to visit Dan. He had spent his year abroad behind the Iron Curtain in Prague and we had some catching up to do.
We drove up from LA to visit his cousins. Their radical collective had broken up along gender lines. Feminist theory had hit home and the women felt the need to get themselves together outside the purview of the men.
The social revolution had overtaken fraternities and some local chapters of the big national organizations had closed. So the collective of women had rented an empty fraternity house on Piedmont Avenue just above campus. It was an enormous mansion, honeycombed with secret passages and spy holes where the fraternity brothers could watch each other, presumably having sex.
We had dinner, pasta this time instead of chili, and more jug wine and beer. There may well have been some conversation about George Jackson, who had just been killed. Exchanges of rumors and questions: how did he get the gun with which he had started the riot? Why did he even try? He was too smart. It had to be a set up.
Eventually there was dancing. Let’s put on some good old sexist Stones, one of Dan’s female cousins said, and cue’d up “Under My Thumb.” Really. Well, it’s got a steady, slow beat and is good for dancing when you’ve got a full belly of cheap student cuisine and wine.
There was a little observation platform on top of the frat house and someone mentioned that the sunset view was spectacular. I said I would like to watch it. A woman named Sheila offered to show me how to get up to the roof. It was a glorious evening, cloudless on both sides of the Bay. You could see San Francisco clearly. The new TransAmerica building, it’s now iconic elongated pyramid shape not quite finished yet, had completely altered the skyline. The Marin County hills were clear, purple shadows traced the gullies of the Berkeley slopes behind us. A soft breeze blew up from the Bay bringing the sounds of the conga drummers from Lower Sproul Plaza.
We were making small talk, Sheila and I. Flirting. The breeze had blown a few strands of her lank blond hair across her face and I reached over and brushed them back into place and she didn’t seem to mind. We leaned onto the railing our hands brushing but before anything went further we were summoned downstairs. She was on the rota for some household chore or other and, as a man properly educated in the rituals of equality, I had to go do dishes.
When I think of the calmness of that evening with my friend’s cousins and compare it to my first night in their company just two years earlier; when I think of the irony of a radical feminst collective living in an abandoned fraternity house; and the sound of the never-ending conga jam session, the pulse of a revolutionary moment being born up to me gently on the breeze, it was like that instant when the tide is high and the surface of the water is calm and replete.
But already the tide was running out. Political radicals would continue to fragment into ever smaller groups, each trying to get themselves together. The war in Southeast Asia would continue for years but collective action—Black, White and Brown students—campus to campus, city to city working to stop it would fade.
But the lifestyle revolution would thrive. That evening in Berkeley, as I watched the sunset and flirted, somewhere below us Alice Waters was making dinner and serving guests at her new restaurant. Fifty years later, Chez Panisse is still hailed as “revolutionary.”
Revolution is a bloody business and it is a form of civil war. Many years later, working as a journalist, I would meet and interview two men my age, who had truly fought revolutions. Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi and Northern Ireland’s Martin McGuinness.
Meles spent 17 years in a guerilla campaign against the junta ruling his country before achieving victory and becoming President of Ethiopia. McGuinness was an IRA commander who became a political leader of Sinn Fein, and ultimately Deputy First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Both men came from minority groups in broken, impoverished societies and their impulse to revolt came from a sense that it was the only option open to them if they wanted a better and more just country. Speaking to these men made me wonder about Berkeley and Kent and the War. They had walked it as we had talked it. I admired them both and envied them a little.
But revolution is also a romantic word and romance does not change the world, although it keeps the revolutionary spirit alive. The poet William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic movement, would have understood what was happening in those critical years when those born in the middle of the American Century passed through adolescence to adulthood.
Wordsworth also lived in revolutionary times and had been able to travel and see France at the high tide of its’ Revolution before it devoured itself in the Reign of Terror. He loved the idea of Revolution and wrote about what the Children of Victory would experience two centuries later, in a poem titled: The French Revolution As It Appeared To Enthusiasts At Its Commencement. The poem begins:
Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
This is the end of part 1 of History of a Calamity: America from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and Cold Civil War. Part 2, October 1973, begins here
https://www.goldfarbpod.com/four-dead-in-ohio/
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/recordings/dictabelts/DB080_02.mp3
Informative, enjoyable and absolutely spot on on the cataclysmic effect of Russian revolution.
I was living in Australia and attended University between 1968 and 1971. The experience was not as intense. We marched against the War, watched the news on TV and saw what was happening, endured a draft which focussed on the people who couldn't find a way out of it. We didn't change things at all, but had some fun trying. It never became as serious in Australia. However, we did follow what was happening in the USA and this wonderful piece reminded me of the times.