New Left icons from "the Sixties": Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse

I try to be careful about getting carried away with 10-year anniversaries of historical events. But they are hard to resist sometimes.

This, of course, the 50th anniversary of 1968, the year that has become emblematic of "the Sixties."

Angela Davis was one of the icons of the Sixties in the US. The reliably staid Britannica has a brief sketch of her career, including:

The daughter of Alabama schoolteachers, Davis studied at home and abroad (1961–67) before becoming a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, under the Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse. Because of her political opinions and despite an excellent record as an instructor at the university’s Los Angeles campus, the California Board of Regents in 1970 refused to renew her appointment as lecturer in philosophy. In 1991, however, Davis became a professor in the field of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1995, amid much controversy, she was appointed a presidential chair. She became professor emerita in 2008.

Her initial fame came when she went underground in 1970 to evade conspiracy charges over Jonathan Jackson's escape from a courtroom. " Arrested in New York City in October 1970, she was returned to California to face charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy; she was acquitted of all charges by an all-white jury."

Her professor Herbert Marcuse also became one of the enduring icons of the Sixties, as well. In a 2004 collection of essays on him, Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader (John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb, eds.) her contirubiton, "Marcuse's Legacies," provides this recollections of the '60s:

Despite my chronic critiques of nostalgia as an inadequate substitute for historical memory, I want to ask you to permit me to engage in what I would like to think of as a bit of productive nostalgia. Because I do long for the days of interminable philosophical discussions about such subjects as the historical agents of revolution, when the participants in such discussions might be students and professors, as well as organic intellectuals who were workers and organizers. Marcuse’s interventions as a public intellectual helped to stimulate such discussions. Did the working class still have a revolutionary potential? What role could students play? I imagine that I am nostalgic today because so few people seem to believe that anybody has any revolutionary potential left. [my emphasis]

It's an interesting glimpse into a vital moment in time in New Left history.

Somewhat ironically, Angela Davis was famous figure of the New Left. But she was also part of the Soviet-line Communist Party, which was an emblematic institution of the "Old Left." She was the party's Vice Presidential candidate in 1980.

A cultural footnote on that campaign slogan, "People Before Profits." The fictional character J.R. Ewing on the series Dallas used it subsequently as his slogan on a political campaign he ran. An ironic slogan since the J.R. character was anything but left-leaning.

Davis also studied in Germany with Marcuse's Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno:

At this point in my remarks I would like to make some comments about my own development. I have often publicly expressed my gratitude to Herbert Marcuse for teaching me that I did not have to choose between a career as an academic and a political vocation that entailed making interventions around concrete social issues. In Frankfurt, when I was studying with Adorno, he discouraged me from seeking to discover ways of linking my seemingly discrepant interests in philosophy and social activism. After the founding of the Black Panther Party in 1966, I felt very much drawn back to this country (the US). During one of my last meetings with him (students were extremely fortunate if we managed to get one meeting over the course of our studies with a professor like Adorno), he suggested that my desire to work directly in the radical movements of that period was akin to a media studies scholar deciding to become a radio technician.

During what we now call the Summer of Love, Davis attended a conference in London at which Marcuse "spoke pointedly about the hippies, identifying the more politically radical formations among them – the Diggers and the Provos – as uniting sexual, moral, and political rebellion, as encouraging new sensibilities, as exhibiting 'a non-aggressive form of life: a demonstration of an aggressive non-aggressiveness which achieves, at least potentially, the demonstration of qualitatively different values, a transvaluation of values'.”

For anyone who has read - or tried to read - some of Marcuse's work, this observation is likely to draw a smile:

Today, it seems inconceivable that crowds of people at a political rally would be willing to enthusiastically applaud a philosopher trained in the classical tradition, who might just as easily evoke Kant and Hegel as Marx, Fanon, or Dutschke. It seems inconceivable that people did not complain when this philosopher compelled them to think deeply – and even philosophically – in order to engage with ideas he proposed in the context of a public rally. The lesson I draw from these reminiscences is that we need to recapture the ability to communicate across divides that are designed to keep people apart. At the same time we need to substitute a nostalgic attitude toward Marcuse with one that takes seriously his work as a philosopher and as a public intellectual.

A psychedelic article by a guy who made a stir in more than one way

Given my periodically recurring interest in seeing what people were actually saying in The Sixties, I can across an article called "The Sociology of the Now" in the eleventh and final issue of Psychedelic Review (1970-71).

The piece struck me as largely superficial, the kind of thing that one would have found at the time in standard and generally superficial coverage in the mainstream press about the hippie scene and the "youth movement." Someone would describe the author later in life as "an intellectual dilettante"; more on that below.

But the one thing that struck me as something more enduring was this:

The development of the Beatles and the entire popular-music field in the past few years is reminiscent of the 1909-14 era, when an entire artistic generation rose to heights that have not since been equaled; yet there is a great difference, for Stein, Joyce, Picasso, Matisse, and Schönberg were speaking to an extremely small audience: the pop people are directing their statements to the entire world. The increasingly critical attitude of this new elite with respect to the older generation, and their ability to dramatize their feelings, are rapidly changing the consciousness of an entire generation.

Now even this sounds like advertising copy for an art exhibit. But there is something to be said for the ways in which popular music in the 1960s played a particularly important role in popularizing new ideas and other lifestyles. The Beatles' St. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band album, for instance, included an old-fashioned pop song, "When I'm Sixty-Four"; "Within You Without You," musically and thematically heavily influenced by Indian music and Hindu understanding of life; and the very contemporary "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which reflected a psychedelic imagination, whether or not the title actually was a play on LSD.

Other parts were much less substantial than even that. For instance:

The psychedelics are new forms of energy, whose use will depend upon the situation in which they occur - hence the careful planning of the research worker interested in investigating a few linear parameters: a deep contrast to the teenager who downs 500 ug of LSD and goes out to a rock concert. One has expectations of particular results; the other wishes to experience new structures. One activity is based on a linear model the expansion and improvement of an old form, the energy being directed to maintaining the old game; the other activity opens up the individual to manifold experiences which will allow him to create a new game.

Apart from the likelihood that the kid will take damaging doses of LSD and/or something else, it seems more plausible to assume that most teenagers doing that would mainly have been looking for entertainment, rather than "manifold experiences which will allow him to create a new game." Actually, the more serious LSD researchers would seem to have been more likely to have "a new game" in mind.

There's this notably Reagan-esque comment: "California is quickly becoming overpopulated
and over-extended financially - the paradise has a serpent lurking in the garden." Say what?!

This also jumped out at me:

We can see the same progression in the psychoanalytic world as it moved from individual therapy to group therapy to marathon (twenty-four-to-thirty-six hour sessions) to a situation similar to that of Synanon, wherein the encounter goes on continuously, twenty-four hours a day, until the individual is converted - Wagner's idea of the Gesamtkunst functioning within a totally controlled environment (Bayreuth) that allows for the experience of conversion. We live in the age of the true believer.

He seems to be confusing psychoanalysis with psychotherapy more generally.

And Synanon was a cult, a relatively nasty one even in the cult world. But the author pretty clearly sees it as the cutting edge of a desirable development. Even though even by his description, it sounds like a particularly demanding cult.

I wish I had written down by comments on the article before I did an online search to see what the author, Ira Einhorn, had been up to since 1970: Ex-Fugitive Convicted in 25-Year-Old Murder New York Times 10/18/2002:

Ira Einhorn, a former counterculture leader who preached peace and love while battering his lovers, was convicted today of first-degree murder for killing a former girlfriend in 1977 and stuffing her body into his closet.

Mr. Einhorn, who fled the country and spent nearly 17 years in Europe after being arrested in the death of Holly Maddux, was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

After the verdict, Judge William J. Mazzola called Mr. Einhorn, 62, "an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced."

See also: Joseph Geringer, Ira Einhorn: The Unicorn Killer TruTV.com (n.d,, 08/25/2011?).

Rightwing shrieker Michelle Malkin tried to use the fact that Einhorn was involved in some way with the original Earth Day to slam a later version of the event.

Actually, I did read the original article before I searched for information on his later life. I didn't see anything in the 1970 article that indicated to me he was on track to become a violent criminal. But the original piece does read like hype cobbled together from then currently fashionable notions among the hippie subculture. But most people who write superficial tripe don't murder their ex-girlfriends and hide their bodies in a trunk in the closet for weeks.

Tags: hippies, psychedelics, sixties

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Black Power, Black Panthers

Sharon Riley did an interview with Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., co-authors of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2012) for Harper's The Stream 03/15/2013; the interview has the same title, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Apparently they made joint responses to her questions.

They talk about the period in the 1960s when urban rioting began and Black Power came to be a popular slogan among many African-Americans. This period turned out to be paradigm-setting for segregationists. Because their framing for issues of racial conflict often sound as though they are living in 1969.

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966 in Oakland. I sketched the history of the BPP in The sixties: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party 06/247/2008. It emerged from the conditions that faced African-American urban communities in the 1960s.

The peaceful protests of the civil-rights movement proved powerless to address urban poverty and ghettoization. Large numbers of blacks had migrated to the cities of the North and the West for wartime jobs. White and industrial flight left concentrated urban black poverty, and municipalities responded with brutal containment policing. Urban police and fire departments remained almost exclusively white. Blacks were shut out from political machines, underrepresented electorally, denied access to elite white colleges and universities, and mired in poverty. In the mid-1960s, inspired by the civil-rights victories over legal segregation, young black people in Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and cities throughout the country took up the cry for "Black Power!" They sought new ways of organizing to achieve economic and political power.

In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party emerged as the exemplar. The Black Panthers weren’t alone in theorizing that the black community was a "colony in the mother country" and calling for self-determination as part of a global struggle against imperialism. What distinguished them was their advocacy of armed self-defense against the police. They recognized that young urban blacks were ready to stand up to police, as evidenced by Watts and the spread of urban black rebellion, and sought to organize armed resistance into a political force. Initially, the Black Panthers used the law to challenge police brutality while bearing loaded weapons. Soon, hundreds of black people were rallying armed in legal protests against police brutality. The State of California responded by changing the law to restrict the right to bear arms. But the party adapted. Attracted to both armed self-defense and such community programs as Free Breakfast for Children, young black people from across the country contacted the Black Panthers asking to open chapters. During the party's peak, from 1968 to 1970, thousands of young blacks in close to seventy cities dedicated their lives to the party and to revolution, often at great personal risk. [my emphasis]

The year 1968 was the year membership in the BPP soared nationwide. As they say in their book:

As late as February 1968, the Black Panther Party was still a small local organization. But that year, everything changed. By December, the Party had opened offices in twenty cities, from Los Angeles to New York. In the face of numerous armed conflicts with police and virulent direct repression by the state, young black people embraced the revolutionary vision of the Party, and by 1970, the Party had opened offices in sixty-eight cities from Winston-Salem to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States.

The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. set off urban riots in cities across the country and gave the BPP a sudden new appeal.

But their heyday was a short one. As they recall in the book, "In the early 1970s, the Party rapidly declined. By mid-1972, it was basically a local Oakland community organization once again."

But their memory still haunts today's segregationists.

Many whites found it easy to ask in the 1960s why, after the federal government and white taxpayers had "done so much" for blacks Americans, they were still so angry and staged urban riots. But the lived experience of African-Americans wasn't one of continuing improvement. As John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr, put it in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003):

Between 1949 and 1964 the relative participation of African Americans in the total economic life of the nation declined significantly. During that period the unemployment rate of blacks was at least double that of whites. Even in 1963, a prosperous year, the unemployment rate for blacks was 114 percent higher than for whites. Where blacks were employed, more than 80 percent worked at the bottom of the economic ladder, as compared with 40 percent of employed whites. In later years it was no better. In 1964 the unemployment rate among blacks was 9.6 percent versus 4.6 percent among whites; in 1971 it was 9.9 percent among blacks and S.4 percent among whites. In 1969 the median income of blacks with eight years of schooling was $4,472, while it was $7,018 for whites with the same amount of schooling. In 1970 the Census Bureau, defining poverty as a median income of less than $3,968 for a family of four, reported that one in every three blacks as compared with one in every ten whites was in that category. And the chances for African Americans to move up were greatly restricted not only by general race bias but also by the meager opportunities for apprenticeship training and by discrimination in many labor unions. [my emphasis]

Tags: 1968, black panther party, confederate heritage month 2013, huey newton, sixties

Tags: 1968, black panther party, huey newton, sixties

This should be interesting...

Culture war: the shootin' kind

If this process produces new evidence, that will be an interesting situation: Analysis of 40-year-old tape may reveal whether Ohio Guardsmen were ordered to fire on Kent State protesters by John Mangels The Plain Dealer 04/29/10.

Tuesday, May 4, will be 40 years after the Kent State murders. There is no statute of limitations on murder. No was was prosecuted so far. But then, it took 40 years or more for some murders during the height of civil rights activism to be prosecuted, too.

I posted about the Kent States murders in the context of the "culture war" in The "culture war" in its infancy 05/07/08.

Tags: kent state killings, sixties

A surprisingly good Psych-Out from 1968

I recently saw a 1968 movie called Psych-Out about hippies in Haight-Ashbury called 1968, produced by Dick Clark. (Yes, the eternally young Dick Clark.) I think it's considered a bit of a "cult movie" and I expected it to be entertainingly hokey. But sometimes low expectations are an advantage. It's actually a pretty good film.

It stars Jack Nicholson as Stoney [groan], who has a psychedelic rock band called Mumblin' Jim that's trying to get a gig at the Fillmore, which is called the Ballroom in the flick. He meets a run-away named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) who's searching for her long-lost brother Steve (Bruce Dern) who she believes is in the Haight. Strasberg was 29 or 30 when the movie was made, though she has to look younger for the part. Since Jenny is described as a runaway, presumably she was no older than 17. Here's Jenny meeting her first flower child in San Francisco as she arrives in town on the bus:


I was a little surprised at how familiar the scenery looks. Although since I've lived in the Bay Area most of my life, I guess I shouldn't be. Shoot, I even go to the annual free bluegrass concerts that have happened in Golden Gate Park every October for the last few years. For that matter, I went to the Summer of Love 40th anniversary event in 1967 held in the same place that the bluegrass concerts take place.

Psych-Out has pretty much all of the stock features you might expect: tie-dyed clothes, hippie coffee houses, dope and more dope, paisley designs, beads and crystals, gurus and hippie-sympathizing ministers, stiff cops, group living, a psychedelic sex with Nicholson and Strasberg. And, of course, the bad trips. Pretty spectacularly bad trips, actually. And groovy music.

Stoney (Jack Nicholson) and Jenny (Susan Strasberg)

But what saves it from being hokey is that the writers evidently made some effort to understand the hippie culture as it was at the moment, and the actors play the parts in a serious way, so that it doesn't come across as either a moral instruction tale or as camp. And while it may still have the capacity to scandalize conservative cultural warriors - shoot, even Disney pablum can do that!- it's certainly not a propaganda film for the alternative hippie lifestyle, either. You do get a sense that the characters in the film are looking for more personal and collective freedom than they were finding in "straight" society. (Straight meant non-hippie at that time.) That there were looking for a life with more sense of living in the moment and a greater appreciation of joy in life.

But a character named Dave played by Dean Stockwell has the role in the movie of being a kind of devil's advocate to Stoney as well as a rival for Jenny's affections. At one point, Stoney is about to sneak off to sleep with a groupie but has to explain his absence to Jenny. Dave confronts him with the fact that he either has to stick with his "do your own thing" ethos or with his value of being honest and direct, but can't do both. Stoney winds up lying to Jenny about where he's going. But the scene is played as though this was a serious conversation between two people who were both committed to certain alternative ways of living. Dave doesn't come off as a simple hippie moralist, and Jack Nicholson's Stoney doesn't come off as a manipulative hypocrite.

The movie doesn't demonize the drug culture. But it also makes it clear that there are definite risks involved. Jenny has the mother of all bad trips with flames spurting out of the ground at her and so forth. She winds up right in the middle of Golden Gate Bridge at night in heavy traffic. You don't get the idea that it was a pleasant experience for her.

Another reason the movie doesn't come off as hokey is that it doesn't stick with stereotypes. In one scene, Stoney and two of his band members are helping Jenny search for her brother and they wind up in a junkyard surrounded by street punks. One of the hippie guys is in the middle of an LSD trip. The street punks assume that the hippies are gutless peace-and-love types and start getting aggressive with them. And then the hippies just beat the crap out of the punks. The guy tripping sits out the first part of the fight smiling and saying, "Peace, man!" But then he picks up a thick board and joins in the fight, thinking he's fighting a knight and a dragon. At the end of the fight when the punks are lying unconscious in the dirt, he hugs his club smiling and says, "It was beautiful." This is the funniest scene in the film to me just because it plays so deliberately against the stereotype.

Jenny, in line with the screen conventions of the time, had to cower in fear while the guys did the fighting. There were already some popular culture images like the TV shows The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and The Avengers where women were allowed to kick butt themselves. But the age of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still a ways off.

One of the first scenes is a reminder that long before Starbucks, the hippies had used coffeehouses as a social meeting place.

One of the special features on the DVD is a short about the making of the film, called "Love and Haight". [groan] It features the eternally young Dick Clark from several years ago, before his stroke, talking about making a film. In the process, he makes this comment, which is pretty psychedelic itself:

I've always been a square individual. I mean, I've attracted a very strange group of friends, from Hell's Angels to junkies and psychopaths and a lot of other people. For some reason or other, they're attracted to me, knowing that I'm not of them.

I'm still trying to get my head around the image of Dick Clark hanging out with the junkies and psychopaths.

The Web site of San Francisco's artsy-alternative Red Vic Theater quotes Michael Weldon from the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film calling Psych-Out the "(t)he best Haight-Ashbury drug film".

Someone has posted at least major parts of the movie on You Tube. No telling how long it will be there.

I got another period movie from NetFlix, Getting Straight (1970). I made it through about the first ten minutes and that was all I could take. The hokey stereotypes and the script were so nails-on-the-blackboard bad it was amazing. A real contrast to Psych-Out.

Tags: hippies, psychedelics, psych-out, sixties

Secular conservative culture warriors

Back in the days of Spiro Agnew, when the "culture war" as we know it was in its youth, being secular and a conservative culture warrior didn't seem like such a contradiction. With the dominance of the Christianist Right in today's Republican Party, though, it seems to be an odd eccentricity.

Taki's Magazine is an Old Right isolationist online publication that tries to cling to a lonely brand of secular culture war. This article by Steve Sailer of the rightwing-extremist nativist hate group VDARE, How Multiculturalism Killed the Counter Culture 06/24/09, makes some weird argument about how rock-and-roll music is white ethnic heritage, or some such garbage. Sailer's ideological equivalents in the 1950s were calling the then-new popular music of rock "race music". And they didn't mean the white race, either.

Aside from the bigotry, he makes this strikingly unreflective historical observation:

The late 1960s remain the fastest-changing period in my lifetime. For example, I was recently telling my son about the worldwide demonstrations in 1968, when he asked, “Did feminism play a big role in 1968?”

"Oh, no," I corrected. "Nobody cared about feminism in 1968. Feminism was 1969, not 1968." On further reflection, I helpfully added, "Environmentalism, however, was 1970, not 1969."

At that point, it struck me how bizarre it must seem by today’s slow-motion standards to assign huge historical movements to a single year with such confidence. For a child of the 1960s, however, it seems natural.

Uh, dude, if you're old enough to actually remember 1968, it most likely was the fastest-changing period in your life. You know, puberty, adolescence, acne, first kiss, etc. Maybe a teenager distracted by raging hormones and other things would only be able to grasp such things as fads. And while a young teenager might not realize that feminism long predated 1969 and environmentalism 1970, one would hope that he might have picked up on that sometimes during the subsequent decades.

This column calls to mind what Arlo Guthrie has often said: "Anyone who says they remember the sixties probably wasn't there."

And it's another anecdotal reminder that hardline conservatives are more defined by their image of "the sixties" than anyone else in American society.

Tags: sixties, steve sailer

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic" (2)

Jason Epstein reviewed Tom Wolfe's little tract Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) in Journal du Voyeur New York Review of Books 12/17/1970 (link behind subscription).

He gave this account of the background to Leonard Bernstein's fundraiser for the Panther 21, which I discussed in a previous post:

Sometime in December, [wrioter Murray] Kempton, at the suggestion of the Panthers' lawyers, asked some well-connected and respectable friends who have a town house on the East Side whether they would arrange an evening at home to raise money for the Panthers' defense. Not only were the defendants desperately poor, but Kempton felt it important that their situation be publicized; for, as he wrote at the time, "If they cannot be saved from being tried as strangers, they have no chance to be tried fairly at all." Liberal New Yorkers are quick to respond to such appeals, especially where civil liberties appear to be in jeopardy. Furthermore, the Panthers had by this time gained a certain interest—not to say glamour—as the authentic voice of black misery and rage. One tended to hear in their violent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied it not the sound of revolution but the cry of pain. What liberals found most interesting and hopeful about the Panthers were their efforts to supply dignity and political direction to black street people. Their talk of violent revolution, their identification with third world political leaders, and even the weapons they carried seemed, by contrast, largely rhetoric and theater.

To many liberals it also appeared that the Panthers were right to claim that federal and local officials were out to destroy them. Attorney General Mitchell had begun to talk of preventive detention. Fred Hampton, the Illinois Panther leader, had been shot in his bed by a posse of Chicago police, and Bobby Seale, the national chairman, had been bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial for having repeatedly demanded no more than his constitutional right to defend himself. Moreover, evidence of the torture and murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven—a crime with which Seale had also been charged, to which two Panthers had already confessed, and for which a third was later to be found guilty—had not yet been made public; nor had any other evidence of Panther violence been produced, including whatever evidence Hogan might have had against the New York Panthers. In any case, what was on Kempton's mind was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants but the need to raise money for their defense and to make them visible.

Thus Kempton's friends sent out their invitations. About forty people came, including Felicia Bernstein, wife of the conductor. The Panthers who addressed these guests were articulate and calm. Their problems were obviously genuine. They talked about their breakfast program for ghetto children and said nothing to suggest that they were terrorists. They did, however, insist that they were revolutionaries, an admission that did not deter Mrs. Bernstein from agreeing to arrange a similar meeting at her own house some two weeks hence. Soon thereafter she sent elegantly engraved invitations, in her name but not in her husband's, to perhaps a hundred people who might be interested in the case. Meanwhile, Charlotte Curtis, the society reporter for The New York Times, who had been in touch with Kempton on other matters, learned of his interest in the Panthers and said she would like to write a piece on their wives. Kempton thought this would be useful to the defendants and suggested that she come along to the Bernsteins' party.

Tom Wolfe was another guest whom Mrs. Bernstein had not herself invited, but who came anyway.

Epstein also sees Wolfe's posture in "Radical Chic" as his own version of Nixonian ideology:

This notion, though not the term itself, derives, according to Wolfe, from the sociological theories of [neoconservative scholars] Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer, among others. Presumably it would also describe Edna St. Vincent Millay's interest in Sacco and Vanzetti, Theodore Dreiser's in the coal miners of Harlan County, and Robert Kennedy's in Cesar Chavez.

With equal facility one might propose a theory in reply to the one that Wolfe offers: that his invidious generalization derives from resentment and envy of the rich and talented, fear of the alienated poor, and anxiety over his own precarious situation in between. It is this same resentment of effete snobs and fear of the undisciplined poor that Mr. Agnew, among others, imagines to be the main preoccupation of most Americans.

Epstein's verdict on Wolfe's sneering essay is a good one:

Unself-conscious as always, Wolfe missed what must be the heart of the matter. What he calls Radical Chic is, in fact, only the unhappy residue of the broken promises and defeated politics of the Kennedys, the still flickering desire of an impotent and aristocratic liberalism to restore citizenship to the poor—not, as Wolfe says, to "integrate" the politics of the poor with their own, but to engage the poor as citizens in the political life of the country.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: Tom Wolfe and "Radical Chic"

One literary contribution to the early "culture war" narrative about the snobby elitists who supported liberal-radical-hippie causes was "Radical Chic" by Tom Wolfe, which first appeared in New York magazine June 1970, and was later published in book form in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970).

The "Radical Chic" essay was a rambling meditation and subjective report on a fund-raising event that the famous composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia held in their New York City home to benefit a group known as the Panther 21. This was a group of Black Panther Party members who were arrested in 1969 and charged with plotting to bomb several locations and to kill cops. This obituary of civil rights attorney Sanford Katz, who won the acquital for the 13 that evenutally went to trial, gives some background (Sanford M. Katz, 75, Lawyer for Defense in Panther 21 Trial, Dies New York Times 10/13/05):

Mr. Katz was known for representing unpopular defendants in politically charged cases. His most famous was set in motion in the late 1960's, when the New York Police Department planted undercover agents in the Black Panther Party. In 1969, 21 party members were indicted on charges that included conspiring to bomb various sites in New York - police stations, department stores and other public buildings - and to kill police officers.

Though only 13 defendants were eventually brought to trial, the group was known as the Panther 21. The case became a cause célèbre, moving Leonard Bernstein to hold a cocktail party for the group's legal defense in his elegant Park Avenue duplex.

The trial began on Sept. 8, 1970, and ran for eight months. On May 13, 1971, after deliberating for barely three hours, the jury acquitted the defendants on all counts. (my emphasis)

It's amazing what you can learn from reading obituaries. Seriously.

This letter from a philosophy professor expressing support for the Panther 21 was published around the same time Bernstein was holding his benefit fundraiser, Philosophers & Panthers by Kai Nielsen New York Review of Books 07/02/1970 talks about the problems in the handling of the case and said, "Unfortunately, it would appear necessary in the course of any thorough investigation to consider the possibility that this case is part of a nationwide 'police conspiracy' to destroy the Black Panther Party." Now, of course, we know that there was literally such a conspiracy, directed largely by the FBI's COINTELPRO program.

So, Bernstein was supporting raising money for a the legal defense of group of black radicals who had been arrested on charges so dubious that all of them who went on trial were later acquited, and were being effectively denied bail and reportedly mistreated in custody. "In jail they have been the victims of gross brutality," Nielsen wrote. In other words, Bernstein was neither alone nor irrational in his desire to see that these men received a fair trial.

Wolfe doesn't give his readers any of this background in his own voice. After pages of jive talk about how strange it was to see Black Panthers in leather jackets at a party with respectable wealthy white people, he puts what factual account he gives into the introductory speech of attorney Leon Quat, after spending a page or two ridiculing Quat.

And if you cut through Wolfe's sneering society-column chit-chat, you see that Bernstein and his guests actually engaged in a fairly spirited dialogue, challenging the lead Black Panther speaker, Don Cox, on a number of points.

But not everyone was happy about the notion of wealthy benefactors raising money to help black radicals get a fair trial when faced with very dubious charges. The Times obituary quoted above mentioned Berstein's fund-raiser. But it did not mention how the editorial board of the Times had held Bernstein up to ridicule in an editorial which Wolfe quotes as follows:

Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. [For whom, of course, the New York Times editorial board felt qualified to speak.-Bruce] This so-called party, with its confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist para-militarism, is fully entitled to protection of its members' constitutional rights. It was to make sure that those rights are not abridged by persecution masquerading as law-enforcement that a committe of distinguished citizens has recently been formed.

In contrast, the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstine, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memeory of Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday was solemnly observed through the nation yesterday.

Black Panthers on a Park Avenue pedestal create one more distortion of the Negro image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.

Short version: wealthy white people should not help African-American radicals raise funds or generate publicity to ensure a fair trial for those accused on thin evidence.

Demonstration in support of the Panther 21, New York 1969

Now that he was safely dead, the New York Times was holding King up as a saint of proper conduct on the part of African-Americans. But three years before, when King was still alive and gave his Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam War, the same Times editorialized that King was screwing up the civil rights movement by coming out against the war and his "recklessly comparing American military methods to those of the Nazis". The respectable Life magazine called King's 1967 speech "a demagogic slander that sounded like script for Radio Hanoi". It was only death that made Martin Luther King ultra-respectable to the white Establishment.

Daniel Moynihan, later a Democratic Senator from New York but also a counselor of Richard Nixon's in 1970, also used the Bernsteins' fund-raiser for the Panther 21 as an example of how those who Nixon considered his enemies in what soon came to be known as Moynihan's "benign neglect" memo:

In it Moynihan had presented [Bernstein] and Felicia and their "party" as Exhibit A of the way black revolutionaries like the Panthers had become "culture heroes" of the Beautiful People. Couldn't you just see Nixon sitting in the Oval Room and clucking and fuming and muttering things like "rich snob bums" as he read: "You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday's Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers. Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests. Mrs. Peter Duchin, 'the rich blond wife of the orchestra leader,' was thrilled. 'I've never met a Panther,' she said. 'This is a first for me.

On February 29 [1970] someone leaked the damned memo to the damned New York Times, and that did it. Now [Bernstein] was invested, installed, inaugurated, instituted, transmogrified as Mr. Parlour Panther for all time. The part about their "cocktail party" was right in the same paragraph with the phrase "benign neglect." And it didn't particularly help the situation that Mrs. Astor got off a rapid letter to the Times informing them that she was not at the "party." She received an invitation, like all sorts of other people, she supposed, but, in fact, she had not gone. Thanks a lot, Brooke Astor.

If Wolfe is to be believed, this negative publicity put an immediate damper on what he called Radical Chic among wealthy New Yorkers. Though since he's more focused in the essay on spinning pretty, smug phrases, it's kind of hard to tell. He doesn't even make it clear what Bernstein's own reaction was. Wolfe tries to leave the impression that Bernstein backed off his support for the Panther 21's legal defense. But he quotes Bernstein as saying that the fund-raising meeting's purpose was to defend civil liberties:

"If we deny these Black Panthers their democratic rights because their philosophy is unacceptable to us, then we are denying our own democracy." He now made it clear that he was opposed to their philosophy, however. "It is not easy to discern a consistent political philosophy among the Black Panthers, but it is reasonably clear that they are advocating violence against their fellow citizens, the downfall of Israel, the support of Al Fatah and other similarly dangerous and ill-conceived pursuits. To all of these concepts I am vigorously opposed and will fight against them as hard as I can."

For a civil libertarian, this doesn't sound like backing off to me. That quote just shows Bernstein saying that even though there are aspects of the Panthers' conduct with which he disagrees, even hates, he still sees a larger significance in what was happening to the Panther 21.

Author Tom Wolfe

Wolfe's essay provides a look at how the notion that wealthy liberals were an elite who favored liberal and even radical viewpoints that were hostile to the needs of those regular people for whom Chris Matthews loves to speak was cooked up in "the sixties". The same script that has seemingly become part of the Republican Party's political DNA. After all, when you're running the government and foreign policy blatantly for the benefit of Halliburton and oil giants and turned over much of writing the laws directly to business lobbies, you need some way to make your Party look like the defender of regular folks.

"Radical Chic" is a political tract disguised as light-hearted style and society-page reporting. The real point of the essay is to ridicule the radicals of the day and especially "respectable" people who might find anything about them to support. Wolfe adopts what is apparently meant to be the tone of a wealthy New York socialite to ramble about topics like the need to have white servants at events where the Black Panthers are featured. "So the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants."

The whole essay is full of such sarcastic-sneering observations. Here is one paragraph that gives a good flavor of the tone Wolfe strikes in this essay:

Shoot-outs, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Vietcong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade. The Panther women—there are three or four of them on hand, wives of the Panther 21 defendants, and they are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they'd stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows exactly what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because "the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes." God knows the Panther women don't spend thirty minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners ... And here they are, right in front of you, trucking on into the Bernsteins' Chinese yellow duplex, amid the sconces, silver bowls full of white and lavender anemones, and uniformed servants serving drinks and Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts -

After years of having our leading politcal pundits treat us to their Deep Thoughts about Al Gore's suits, Hillary Clinton's cleavage, John Edwards haircut and now Barack Obama's lapel pins, this kind of style reporting has since been assimilated into mainstream political commentary. At least in 1970, it was taken to be a literary essay that was based on some actual event.

But, like our Big Pundits today, Wolfe for the most part doesn't give us direct quotes from individuals who attented Bernstein's fundraiser about what they actually thought. Was anyone but the writer himself obsessing about whether female Black Panthers were "shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners". Did he ask any of the female Panthers themselves if they used eyeliner or false eyelashes? Or was he too afraid they would sock him if he asked such a dumb question?

But if you actually wanted to know something about the political meaning or legal significance of the Panther 21 case, or even about Leonard Bernstein's political outlook, you wouldn't know very much after reading this essay.

Tags: black panther party, leonard bernstein, new left, sixties, tom wolfe

The sixties: George Kennan vs. the hippies

George Kennan, who puzzled over protesting students in 1968

George Kennan is best known as one of the leading advocates of the "realist" school of foreign-policy thought and as the author of the containment strategy adopted by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. He quickly became disturbed by the over-emphasis on military means in the application of the containment policy. He became a leading advocate for nuclear arms control agreements and was an early critic of the Vietnam War.

So I was surprised when I picked up a book called Democracy and the Student Left (1968), which contains the text of a speech he gave which was printed as an article in the New York Times Magazine of 01/21/1968; responses from students and professors to the article; and a longer essay by Kennan responding to the letters and expanding his comments.

What surprised me was that Kennan's views from the speech on the "student left" and more generally on the New Left and youth movements of that time in the US came off like any crotchety-minded conservative dismayed and perplexed over why he had to take notice of these funny-dressed hippies and rowdy students who were so presumptuous as to think they had a right to be concerned about public affairs. I didn't expect Kennan to be jumping for joy over student protests. But I didn't expect to see such shallow, knee-jerk reactions from him either. Here's one sample from what I'd like to think he later found an embarrassing piece of writing:

One cannot, therefore, on looking at these young people in all the glory of their defiant rags and hairdos, always just say, with tears in one's eyes: "There goes a tragically wayward youth, striving romantically to document his rebellion against the hypocrisies of the age." One has sometimes to say, and not without indignation: "There goes a perverted and willful and stony-hearted youth by whose destructiveness we are all, in the end, to be damaged and diminished."

Amazing that an intellectual of Kennan's stature would have such a clueless reaction to events of that time. "Tragically wayward youth" who are also "perverted and willful and stony-hearted"? Good grief! No wonder there was a student revolt!

I'm not familiar at all with Kennan's family biography. But there are several mentions in the initial essay and in the longer follow-up to his own family. Along with the seemingly uncharacteristic emotionality of his words, I couldn't help but wonder if he had experienced some of these conflicts very close to home. In the second essay, he comments in a footnote about one letter-writer who had rather bizarrely suggested that he stage a nervous breakdown in from of his kids. In one of the only flashes of humor in this book, he comments, "I cannot believe, actually, that my own children are so unaware of my own awareness of my faults that they would be greatly enlightened by such a spectacle, however much they might enjoy it for its unexpected dramatic aspects."

In his speech and Times article, he was already quite alarmed about the state of American civil society, and that was well before most of the events of 1968. He wrote, "Not since the civil conflict of a century ago has this country, as I see it, been in such great danger", making it clear that he was referring mostly to internal conflicts in the US.

Knowing that Kennan was a very religious Christian, I was surprised most of all at the position he took in the speech on civil disobedience:

If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications: either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority. It is surely the latter of these two implications which we must read from the overwhelming majority of the demonstrations that have recently taken place. ...

People should bear in mind that if this - namely noise, violence and lawlessness - is the way they are going to put their case, then many of us who are no happier than they are about some of the policies that arouse their indignation will have no choice but to place ourselves on the other side of the barricades. (my emphasis)

This kind of thing is virtually indistinguishable from the early-stage "culture war" narrative that was already developing around "the sixties". Even rock-ribbed reactionaries would usually make some vague pretence that they were concerned about the evils of society but just put off by the rowdy tactics they saw. In the Deep South, such language was routinely applied to even the most orderly and peaceful civil rights activities. If black Southerners had just been more patient, you see, things would have gotten better on their own, sometime around the time that Hell freezes over. But they were making things worse by demonstrating and such.

He went on to make it clear that he was including the kind of Ghandian civil disobedience that was such a crucial part of the American civil rights movement:

These observations reflect a serious doubt whether civil disobedience has any place in a democratic society. But there is one objection I know will be offered to this view. Some people, who accept our political system, believe that they have a right to disregard it and to violate the laws that have flowed from it so long as they are prepared, as a matter of conscience, to accept the penalties established for such behavior.

I am sorry; I cannot agree. The violation of law is not, in the moral and philosophic sense, a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it. It is not like the privilege of breaking crockery in a tent at the county fair for a quarter a shot. Respect for the law is not an obligation which is exhausted or obliterated by willingness to accept the penalty for breaking it. (my emphasis)

I'm still gobsmacked to see Kennan writing like this. It's impossible to believe that he wasn't aware in some way or another that democratic societies were precisely the environment in which civil disobedience was the most likely to be effective. Because there were voting publics involved who could respond favorably to acts of courage on the part of protesters willing to be arrested and negatively to excesses on the part of the authorities. Those fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators in Alabama changed a lot of white voters minds about the benevolence of the segregation system practiced in the Deep South.

Civil disobedience actions of that kind were not so much of an option in National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia, which Kennan knew well from firsthand experience as a resident diplomat in both places.

Not only would Kennan's position have meant the tactics used by Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement or Ghandi in the Indian independence movement not have been possible. It also means that in situation like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, one of the most notorious pieces of legislation in American history, that citizens would have had no choice but to obediently do everything in their power to help returned escaped human property back to their slavemasters. The Underground Railroad that helped so many to reach freedom and kept the hope of final liberation from slavery alive could never have functioned as it did. Civil disobedience is a serious thing. But so are some of the ills that persisted for far too long.

The letters reproduced in the book don't include all the ones he received. But it's clear that his correspondents took issue with quite a lot about his Times article. A recent UC-Berkeley graduate named David Lee wrote:

Many of Kennan's criticisms of the hippies and New Left have also been made repeatedly by people like myself, offspring of the "Establishment but alienated from the status quo. I agree with his criticisms but I can add only that any man who is not angry and not militant about changing America either does not know or does not care about the brutality perpetrated every day upon the streets of America under the cloak of "freedom" and "democracy."

His letter cited the situation in the African-American Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.

Nicholas MacDonald of Harvard challenged Kennan's attitude in the following passage, which he introduces with the fundamentalist-sounding comment, "But it is science that has become man's worst enemy." (!!!) It's clear in the context he is referring to the application of science to weaponry and other less than humane projects:

And why should anyone wait while more evidence (people killed, cities bombed, troops increased, nuclear war threatened - in Vietnam - and black people humiliated, killed, and oppressed here, at home) is collected. There is plenty of evidence NOW. We do not have the luxury of waiting, in our monastic cells, studying the speeches of LBJ; people die, as time passes, and we study - not to mention that the world could come to an end while we study. It is the Victorian cry of a long-lost century: WAIT - detach yourself, take on the nun's garment, forget the world - WAIT, until you are married.

He's got a point. More recently, we've been through years of that already with the Iraq War: things are improving, The Terrorists are in their "last throes" (Cheney), a tipping point here, a turning point there, the next six months will be decisive, The Surge is working, the Iraqi troops are being trained, violence is down and that's a good sign, violence is up and that's a good sign, and on and on and on. Patience is not always a virtue. Congress has been far too patient on starting to put an end to US military involvement in Iraq.

Barbara Bernstein and Susan Brown of Barnard gave a good statement of something that I think gets lost a lot today in discussions of antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s. Today, in 2008, a large majority of the public is against the Iraq War, and that's been the case for years. That was not the case with the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968, although when the 1968 Tet Offensive completely blew the credibility of the lying generals and administration officials who had been talking about how great things were going and how we were defeating the Communists all over the place and yadda, yadda. When you're in the minority opinion, a big part of the point of protesting is to shake people up enough to make them think about the problem at hand in a new way. Bernstein and Brown wrote:

The government and the establishment would like us to demonstrate and protest - quietly, that is, so as not to make any threatening vibrations. But we are demonstrating, and intend to demonstrate, in a way that the government can neither applaud nor fail to notice. We want to cause discomfort among the apathetic because we want to cause change. The biggest struggle is to shock people like Mr. Kennan out of their smugness.

I had much the same reaction to reading Kennan's Times article here 40 years later! And my reaction comes with the experience of knowing that I've needed to be shaken out of apathy and passivity at times myself.

I was relieved to see that Kennan, in his much longer "Mr. Kennan Replies" essay, at least partially redeemed himself. He takes up the question of civil disobedience again, particularly with reference to Henry David Thoreau's famous essay on the topic, which several writers had commended to him. A big part of his criticism has to do with the individualistic nature of Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience. Kennan at least makes more thoughtful and sensible comments on civil disobedience in the longer essay, though I certainly don't find it convincing on the larger subject. He has a point, though, about Thoreau's individualism in that connection.

Kennan seems to have caught a glimmer of one of the more poignant aspects of his position in his Times piece. He himself was a critic of the Vietnam War. But he somehow couldn't connect his own position, as a scholar and former diplomat used to more orderly ways of asserting his opinions, with young antiwar protesters with their long hair and such. He grumped that many of his correspondents over the article had a "dangerously oversimplified view of a complex situation". Again, the old-as-the-hills argument: you people who want to change what's going own just don't understand the complexity of matters as we, your betters, do. He writes:

For those who may not know it (numbers of people appear not to; several even wrote me that instead of criticizing the students I should get out and oppose the war), I was long an opponent of the policies that brought us to the Vietnam involvement; I made my views public on a number of occasions in ways (including five hours on national TV on one occasion alone) that could scarcely have been more emphatic without defeating their own effectiveness. I continue to regard the war as one devoid of favorable prospects, highly dangerous to world peace, and dreadfully adverse in its effects on our domestic life and world position.

Oh, yes, preserving one's "effectiveness". A lot of Democrats, including many who should have known better, preserved their "effectiveness" by voting for the Iraq War resolution of 2002. Look where that got us.

Kennan seemed to be unaware of the emerging environmental movement among young activists (the essays are specifically focused on the student movement), though in early 1968 it wasn't as prominent as it was to quickly become in the following years. But he himself was very much aware of the issue. Noting toward the end of the second essay that he agreed that ending the Vietnam War was "a prerequisite to almost anything constructive that one can think of in our [national] life" and that nuclear weapons were an "apocalyptic" danger, he proceeded to discuss other issues "that cast no less threatening a cloud over the future of our society":

There is first the question of what is happening, physically, to the natural environment necessary not only to sustain life in this country but to give it healthfulness and meaning. This is a question not just of our own once so magnificent continent, which we are treating with the blind destructiveness of the army ant; it is a question of the purity and life-sustaining quality of the seas and the global atmosphere within which this continent, and we with it, has its existence. How long can man go on over-populating this planet, destroying its topsoils, slashing off its forests, exhausting its supplies of fresh water, tearing away at its mineral resources, consuming its oxygen with a wild proliferation of machines, making sewers of its rivers and seas, producing industrial poisons of the most deadly sort and distributing them liberally into its atmosphere, its streams and its ocean beds, disregarding and destroying the ecology of its plant and insect life ? Not much longer, I suspect. I may not witness the beginning of the disaster on a serious scale. But many of the students who have written me will. And let us not forget that much of the damage that has already been done is irreparable in terms of the insight and effort of any single generation. It takes eight hundred years to produce a climax forest. It will take more than that, presumably, to return the poisoned, deadened waters of Lake Michigan, on the shores of which I was born, to the level of plant and fish life and natural healthfulness that they had at the time of my birth. And even to begin to reverse this process will require a human society far more conscious of its obligation to the continuity of life, and not just the possibilities for life's immediate enjoyment, than anything we see before us today, or have seen in the past. To make it this way will require a vast process of education, which has scarcely yet begun.

Not all of this damage, of course, could be combated or remedied just within the framework of our continent alone. But much of it could be. As the world's greatest industrial nation, as the possessor of the largest single component of its industrial machinery, also as its most wasteful and industrially dirty society, and finally, as the world's foremost nuclear power and one which has yet to give any very satisfactory explanation of the manner in which it disposes of its nuclear wastes, we have a very special responsibility here.

I see in the preoccupations and behavior of our governmental leaders very little recognition of all this. The paltry million or two dollars they devote to the study and treatment of these problems is as nothing compared to what is spent on the Vietnam conflict alone. One wonders whether men have gone mad, to spend such tremendous sums on what they consider to be the military defense of a country which is so extensively destroying the prerequisites of its own life from within. (my emphasis)

It really puzzles me how a guy that could make this kind of concerned, sweeping criticism, that was far from widespread in 1968, could fail to see sympathetic aspects in the student and youth movements of that time that connected with this very concern.

Among his other long-term concerns, he includes race relations (more on that below), the negative effects of advertising, the excessive use of cars, and the need for some kind of regional governments between the states and the federal government.

But I can't say very much for his views of racial problems in the US. Based on the positions he takes in his longer essay, the most charitable thing to say is that he didn't seem to have a particularly well-informed view on the matter. This, for instance, is just downright embarrassing:

Nor is there any evidence [in his correspondents' letters] of a recognition that the Negro has had any part in the creation of his own problem, or is to have any part in its solution. The idea that he could improve his situation in any degree, either by his own effort or by his electoral action, appears to be strange to this cast of thought. He is seen only as the helpless ward of public authority. One gains from the reading of these letters the impression that in the view of their writers, the American Negro is to be held to no standards — that all qualities on his part, whether laziness, dishonesty, irresponsibility and violence of behavior or their opposites, are to be rewarded alike.

Yes, it sounds like Rush Limbaugh. You can't really dress that one up. And, unfortunately, there's more along that line. So even when he gets around to recongizing that something like white racism exists, it's kind of painful to read that what he really appreciates about "the American Negro" is ... good manners:

I say these things with great reluctance, because I know they will be distorted and interpreted as evidence of an outlook I do not really entertain. I yield to none in my admiration for many of the qualities I see in the American Negro. Aside from the distinction of his contributions to music and the drama and humor, he has an exceptionally high sensitivity to people and situations. He has a gift for casual social intercourse that many of us could envy, and one made all the more impressive by the respect and solicitude for the dignity of the other person that underlie it. When not upset by painful racial reactions or demoralized by the various strains and artificialities of urban life, he tends, accordingly, to have better natural manners than a great many American whites. To anyone who believes, as I do, in the overriding importance of good form as an essential of civilized living, these are formidable qualities; and our country, in my opinion, would be distinctly poorer without them. I am perfectly willing, furthermore, to recognize that the responsibility for the present situation of the American Negro is considerably greater on the part of the white community than it is on his. (my emphasis)

He even managed to echo - let's assume it was unintentional - Southern "states rights" defenders of segregation when he wondered at the oddity of a "student in Maine" who felt some sense of responsibility "for the customs and conditions that prevail in Amite, Mississippi." And who went on to assume that if those "fail to crrespond to what he, from his vantage point at a distance of two thousand miles, finds proper and acceptable, it is his business to act personally - not, mind you, through his elected representatives, but directly and in person - to set things to rights". Kennan just seems to have not had much understanding or knowledge about the civil rights movement as it actually unfolded in the decade or more preceding his essay. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that he was more than a little limited in his views by the institutional racism that was very much present then and is still with us today.

But to close with one of Kennan's more enlightened observations, he has some interesting things to say in connection with military conscription and the real issues of duties and obligations to the community involved, even when draftees are being required to fight in a misguided and even immoral war. While I don't fully share his view on draft resistance in the context of that time, this observation does shed some real light on a point that generated a lot of genuine concern and misunderstanding, aside from the cynical ways politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon exploited and twisted them:

The fact remains that the present student attitude toward obligations of military service stands in stark and almost dangerous contrast to concepts that prevailed up until quite recently among the majority of our people. To many older people it is almost bound to appear as a provocation offered to some of their most deeply held feelings. Many will question whether the emergence in so short a time of so drastically altered a concept of the relation of the individual to the state does not spell a fundamental change in the very nature of American national feeling. (my emphasis)

What surprised me was his comment on how much of the attitude of young people of that time against the draft, which appeared to the more traditional-minded to be insufficiently patriotic, cowardly or treasonous, might well be a legitimate and healthy reaction to this:

I wonder whether this attitude is not in part a predictable reaction to the silly cultivation of the externals of an exaggerated hurrah-patriotism that has come over our schools in the past twenty years: the oaths and songs and flaggings and renderings of the National Anthem on any and all occasions. These things are, unless I am much mistaken, relics of the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940's and early 1950's, when the pious and frequent performance of such ritualistic manifestations of love of country became a means of self-defense before the aroused bodies of super-patriots who swept through libraries, schools and colleges, their nostrils quivering for the smell of Communist treason. Many of the students would say, of course, that it is not the country itself but the "establishment" they are rebelling against — not the nation but the reactionary and oppressive policies to which the nation has allowed itself to be committed — that what they are doing reflects not lack of any love of country but rather a shame of country which the very love for it has induced. And in this there would be much truth.

Go, dude! Kennan may have had an irrationally negative reaction to hippie hair and clothing styles. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't the kind of guy to judge a politician's "character" by whether or not he wears a flag pin in his coat lapel. To take an example at random.

Sadly, the superpatriots we have with us always.

Tags: 1968, george kennan, racism, sixties

The sixties: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party

Much of the material in this post is based on the biography Huey: Spirit of the Panther (2006) by David Hilliard with Keith and Kent Zimmerman.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was one of the most prominent icons in the United States of what we now call "the sixties". The BPP was a revolutionary political party founded by two young African-American men in late 1966 in Oakland CA: an Air Force veteran named Bobby Seale and an intellectually brilliant child of the Oakland streets, Huey Pierce Newton. Newton's first and middle names were after Huey P. Long, the colorful Louisiana populist who was admired by many Southern blacks because his economic programs had benefited them. Newton was born in Lousiana in 1942 but his parents moved the the San Francisco Bay Area in 1944, part of the wartime economic boom that brought large numbers of African-Americans to the Bay Area for the first time.

The organization Newton co-founded and led as its "Minister of Defense" began by striking a militant posture, setting up patrols to monitor the mostly white Oakland Police Department in black areas of Oakland, armed with loaded shotguns and pistols during their patrols. The BPP accomplished many other things, promoting self-reliance in black communities through food programs and community schools, for example. But the early images of gun-wielding African-American militants in black leather jackets and berets that first won them nationwide publicity and recruits continued to define them for much of the public, the police and the FBI. As author David Hilliard, a prominent Panther himself, puts it, "The press painted us as wild, gun-toting animals. We had picked up the gun, now we could not put it down; the media froze us in this agonizing posture".

It would be easy for anyone writing today to dismiss the Panther phenomenon as crazy, violent, self-destructive. Given the factionalism rife among radical activists at the time - some but by no means all of it due to police and FBI disruption activities - it would not be difficult to find plenty of people on the left from that time and later who would denounce them in various ways. The BPP itself split over the emphasis on "guns" (armed self-defense), with high-profile Party leader Eldridge Cleaver promoting a more militant posture and advocating alliances with groups like the Weather Underground, while Newton favored emphasizing their social programs, which he rebranded as "survival programs". Hilliard was a Newton partisan in that split, so that perspective inevitably colors his narrative. In other words, if you were looking for "oppo research" material to use in anti-Panther polemics, there's plenty of it to be found. (Rightwinger David Horowitz has built a substantial part of his public reputation on just such writing about the Panthers, who he credits with making him a flaming rightwinger.) But that doesn't help much in understanding why the Black Panthers had the impact they did among urban African-American communities, white radicals and even mainstream liberals.

Hilliard gives a factual account of Newton's life. But it inevitably takes on some of the feel of a story about a romantic outlaw, because that's partly how Newton styled himself. Newton and Seale founded the BPP in 1966. Hilliard makes it clear that Newton was intellectually adapt and personally gutsy. Newton studied enough law to be able to challenge police who threatened Panthers or member of the community with arrest. In 1967, the BPP conducted their own investigation of a very questionable fatal police shooting of a young black man named Denzil Dowell in the Bay Area city of Richmond, an effort which raised their profile locally.

Later that year, a Republican state assemblyman named Donald Mulford moved to tighten the state gun laws of which the Panthers were taking advantage to induce greater police restraint in dealing with the black community. Bobby Seale led a group of Panthers to the State Capitol in Sacramento carrying loaded shotguns and handguns. (I've read one account saying the guns were not loaded. Hilliard's account is clear that they were.) When they walked near where Gov. Ronald Reagan was giving an outdoor speech, Reagan went scurrying away. The Panthers then marched into the Capitol building with their weapons, and some of them walked right onto the Assembly floor. Although the police found an excuse to arrest them afterward, amazingly enough it was perfectly legal at the time to stroll into the State Capitol with a loaded shotgun. Hilliard does not report what position the National Rifle Association took on this incident.

Black Panther Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard

This demonstration earned the Panthers nationwide publicity and BPP chapters began to spring up in cities across the country. The fact that the Party made big mistakes and missed major opportunities in this situation is not surprising. A local organization led by young men with basically no political experience suddenly became a national phenomenon within a year of its founding. Not unlike a high-tech startup, they found a niche and filled it; the popularity of their "product" could cover up for many organizational weaknesses at first. The BPP immediately attracted the very hostile attention of police departments and the FBI. Hilliard recounts a number of actions of the now-notorious COINTELPRO program which made the Panthers a key target. The repression directed against them resulted in anumber of Panthers being killed, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, "Lil' Bobby" Hutton in Oakland and George Jackson in Soledad Prison. Hilliard writes, "By August 1970, a total of twenty-two Black Panther Party members had been slain". Seale, Newton and Hilliard did prison time on various charges. Newton spent time in exile in Cuba, Cleaver in Cuba and Algeria. Newton eventually had charged dropped over the fatal shooting of an Oakland policeman, John Frey, and was freed from prison in 1970 after a famous "Free Huey!" campaign. In 1974, Newton was arrested in Oakland and accused of pistol-whipping a tailor, Preston Callins. For good measure, the Alameda District Attorney also charged him with the murder of a prostitute. Out on bail, he fled that same year to Cuba with his wife Gwen, where they remained until 1977. He returned to Oakland, where he beat the murder charge in court, and Callins declined to press charges on the alleged assault.

Hilliard's book includes one long chapter by Newton's second wife Frederika, giving a more intimate picture of Newton as a private person. Hilliard is frank about the substance abuse problems which both he and Newton experienced. Frederika's account of the drug and alcohol problems is vivid and sad. By 1977, the BPP was a significant force only in the Bay Area, where under the day-to-day leadership of Elaine Brown it had achieved a certain amount of conventional political influence and even respectability in Oakland. The Party's fortunes declined fairly rapidly once Newton took over direct leadership. Hilliard's account doesn't explain the reasons for it, though Newton's state of health no doubt contributed much to that result. Newton was killed by a young drug dealer in Oakland in 1989, apparently in a drug deal gone bad, though Hilliard also writes, "I must say, in 1989, during the last six months of his life, Huey was sober". He also writes, "Huey was later diagnosed as being bipolar and [sic] manic-depressive. Unfortunately, we didn't recognize it at the time. None of us understood the severity of his drug addiction and alcoholism".

The Black Panther was the Party newspaper

There's no question that the Panthers had a significant influence. On the positive side, their "self-defense" program, for all its practical faults, was a significant factor in highlighting the severe nature of police misconduct in poor black urban neighborhoods in many cities, a pattern extensively documented in many cities at the time by various observers, including the Kerner Commission Report of 1968. It's pretty obvious that having armed vigilantes following the police around was no more than a very temporary solution. But it had an effect. The BPP encouraged many activists to direct their energies to constructive organizing in other meaningful community projects. And they helped define a self-confident identity among urban African-Americans, especially outside the South, as the most prominent advocates of the Black Power movement. It would be foolish to ignore those achievements or the experience in community organizing that many people gained in working with the BPP.

At the same time, it would be unrealistic to ignore real problems among the Panthers, some of which I've mentioned already. In Newton's particular case, the murder of Officer John Frey was never resolved. The charge of murdering the prostitute sounds unlikely. The Preston Callins assault charge was simply dropped by the alleged victim. Hilliard writes, "The Black Panthers were a party and a movement, not a gang". And that's accurate enough, in general. But they were a tough bunch operating in a tough environment. Though they fought heroin as a danger to the black community and Oakland drug dealers once put out a hit on Newton, the BPP also tried to organize pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. In their demands for contributions from dope dealers and from some of the shadier establishments in the Oakland area, some of the methods described in Hilliard's account would be hard to clearly distinguish from extortion. They operated on some of the grimmest edges of society, in other words. And that required having a least a partial "gang" aspect. Any serious revolutionary party would have to be prepared to operate outside the law under certain circumstances. (As we've seen the last few years, many Republicans are prepared to do so as well, and not merely in pursuit of personal aggrandizement.)

But that can lead to some ugly compromises. In his famous book Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver had described a black man raping a white woman as an "insurrectionary" act against the white power structure, which in itself is disturbing enough on its face. In a manuscript written long after his break with Cleaver, Newton reported that a black mother complained to the Party that Cleaver had raped her 14-year-old daughter. Newton writes, "When charged by the [Party] central committee, Cleaver's only response was, 'I only wish that she had been 12 years old'." Again, the source had an interest in making Cleaver look as bad as possible. But Newton's account hardly reflects credit on himself or his fellow BPP leaders that they would apparently take no action to at least distance themselves and their Party from him after such a admission on his part. Any organization that considers itself insulated from the normal rules of society, whether its a cult or an established church or a political group, is particularly vulnerable to such abuses. Still, that was an ugly compromise indeed. My point in including that is to say that there were genuinely ugly and indefensible aspects of the real existing Black Panther Party. And you don't have to rely on sources as shaky as David Horowitz to know that. History is not always made by nice people. Or good ones.

But just as it's important to understand those negative aspects, it's also important to understand the social and political context in which the BPP made such an impression on so many people. The Black Panther Party and the their followers and admirers were much more than Huey Newton or Eldridge Cleaver. And to understand that portion of US political history, it's necessary to have some idea about what actions and decisions and leadership factors made their successes possible, however one chooses to judge the nature of those successes.

Tags: 1968, black panther party, huey newton, sixties

The sixties: radical Republican dissenters

I've been quoting several of the essays from a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science (382) Mar 1969, devoted to Protest in the Sixties. One essay that particularly engaged my attention is "The Republican Radical Right" by Sheilah Koeppen. She covers the ideology and attitudes of various groups that were then viewed as on the fringes of the Republican Party; the John Birch Society, the Minutemen militias of that time, Billy James Hargis' Christian Crusade, Fred Schwartz' Anti-Communism Crusade.

She examines five approaches to explaining the appeal of the Radical Right and finds them all wanting to some degree: authoritarianism; alienation (a very fashionable concept in the 1960s); Christian fundamentalism; social-status anxieties among white ethnics; and, anxiety over urbanization. She apparently did not closely examine the "mean, paranoid white people" thesis.

Her analysis of those five explanations is interesting. But I was struck in reading it how little she focuses on issues around race. Then it dawned on me. Her topic is the Republican Radical Right, and the segregationists of the Deep South at that time were only beginning their migration from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

She does observe, though, that even the radical right groups in the Republican orbit were shifting their focus from "a vague and mysterious Communist conspiracy" to more concrete issues such as "the increase in crime, the use of drugs, the ghetto riots, student rebellions and demonstrations, and the Supreme Court decisions which are seen as protecting these 'lawless' activities".

Pickling one's mind in OxyContin had not yet become a key symbol of rightwing radicalism.

Tags: 1968, billy james hargis, radical right, republican party, sixties