Much has been said over the years about the gaping abyss that separated young baby boomers from their parents and, indeed, all authority figures in the 1960's. "Don't trust anyone over 30" became the buzz-phrase of the decade. Each generation, of course, rebels against that which precedes it. In MOE'S view, this is a healthy part of the natural process of growing up and discovering one's unique identity, both as individual, and as part of a community of one's peers, a community which often shares a philosophy that clashes with the mainstream or incumbent view. This maturation process is too often portrayed by society and media [as I have noted in the rebel films and the couterculture movement] as a negative phenomenon since a certain degree of resentment and protest against the status quo is symptomatic and inevitable. The term "generation gap" was coined in the '60's to describe this phenomenon and its ramifications. The following excerpts from Time magazine help to shed some light on the rebellious period of baby boomers.Just a word about how writing about something can sometimes yield a truth not hitherto recognized. I had not intended to delve into the world of politics on this site, preferring to focus solely on the popular culture of the period. How naive of ol' MOE, an early boomer! It is, of course, not possible to fully understand the boomer experience without some discussion of the youthful boomer's relationship with authority and a sense of the political climate of the '60's, for cause and effect comes into play in so many events and trends of the era. The following excerpts from TIME will be helpful, therefore, in defining the 'generation gap' as it applied to many of the young boomers of the 1960's. (January 6, 1967) The young have already staked out their own mini-society, a congruent culture that has both alarmed their elders and, stylistically at least, left an irresistible impression on them. No Western metropolis today lacks a discotheque or espresso joint, a Mod boutique or a Carnaby shop. No transistor is immune from rock 'n' roll, no highway spared the stutter of Hondas. There are few Main Streets in the world that do not echo to the clop of granny boots, and many are the "grannies" who now wear them. What started out as distinctively youthful sartorial revolt--drainpipe-trousered men, pants-suited or net-stockinged women, long hair on male and female alike--has been accepted by adults the world over.The young seem curiously unappreciative of the society that supports them. "Don't trust anyone over 30," is one of their rallying cries. Another, "Tell it like it is," conveys an abiding mistrust of what they consider adult deviousness. Sociologists and psychologists call them "alienated" or "uncommitted." In fact, the young today are deeply involved in a competitive struggle for high grades, the college of their choice, a good graduate school, a satisfactory job--or, if need be, for survival in Vietnam. Never have they been enmeshed so early or so earnestly in society. Yet they remain honestly curious and curiously honest. Despite their tolerance of quixotic causes and idiosyncratic roles, the young reflect--more accurately than they might care to admit--many of the mainstream currents in society at large. In 1966, the young American became vociferously skeptical of the Great Society. Though he retains a strong emotional identification with the deprived and spurned citizens of his own and other societies, he recognizes that the civil rights revolution, in which he was an early hero at the barricades, has reached a stage at which his own involvement is no longer vital. And, as a letter to the President signed by 100 student leaders across the nation showed last week, he has become increasing perturbed by the war. You say you want a revolution... Well, you know We all want to change the world... You tell me that it's evolution... Well, you know We all want to change the world... But when you talk about destruction... Don't you know that you can count me out... Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right... You say you got a real solution... Well, you know We'd all love to see the plan.. You ask me for a contribution... Well, you know We're doing what we can... But when you want money for people with minds that hate... All I can tell is brother you have to wait... Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right... Ah ah, ah, ah, ah, ah... You say you'll change the constitution ...Well, you know We all want to change your head... You tell me it's the institution... Well, you know You better free you mind instead... But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao... You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow... Don't you know it's gonna be all right all right, all right... all right, all right, all right... all right, all right, all right... Youthful Americans protested the rigidity and elitism of their universities, and through their actions they expressed the frustration, rage and alienation felt by many of the young about racial inequality, social injustice, the Vietnam War and the economic and political constraints of conventional life and work.] (May 10, 1968) At 2:30 a.m., said one combat-wise cop, "Harlem is asleep." At that propitious hour, 1,000 New York City police, armed with warrants signed by Columbia University trustees, marched on the Morningside Heights campus and dispossessed the student rebels who had occupied five buildings for nearly six days. After successfully capturing the campus buildings, the demonstrators--led by the far-left Students for a Democratic Society and the all-Negro Student Afro-American Society--seemed far more interested in a bloody confrontation with the administration than in any meaningful negotiations.They demanded a complete surrender on all points at issue, including amnesty for all participants in the rebellion. Columbia President Grayson Kirk refused, on the ground that this would mean a complete abdication of all disciplinary authority. A majority of the university's 17,000 students and 2,500 faculty members undoubtedly shared the initial goals of the strike. But many were also appalled by the hooligan tactics of the demonstrators, who had held university officials captive, broken into offices and overturned furniture. Inside Hamilton Hall, 85 Negro students, who had been advised by such cool heads as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark, decided that their most effective tactic would be to file quietly into the vans. It was a model arrest operation--except that no one had brought a key for the main door and it had to be forced open. Elsewhere, the police were less carefully supervised--and less considerate of the rebels. Professors and students who had linked arms to keep police and demonstrators apart were charged by wedges of plainclothes men. Uniformed officers plunged into the breach to smash open the doors, while others broke into through underground tunnels.Neat plans went awry as police kicked and clubbed their way through Fayerweather Hall. Although the action united hopelessly confused Columbia in anger over police brutality, it also moved the campus toward order--and touched off a much needed reexamination of the university's future. (May 24, 1968) A loosely formed amalgam of some 35,000 young people--barely 6,000 of whom pay national dues--the far-left S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) boasts chapters on at least 250 campuses. Opposed to "imperialism" (whatever that means these days), racism and oppression, S.D.S. finds the American university guilty of all three. S.D.S. concentrated at first on civil rights issues. It organized Northern ghetto dwellers in such projects as Chicago's Jobs Or Income--Now (JOIN) and fought to get Mississippi's "Freedom delegation" seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention.The Vietnam War, however, led to a change of tactics. By 1966, S.D.S. had broken with the L.I.D. (League for Industrial Democracy) and decided against working within the existing political framework. Since then, the group has been trying to be what National Secretary Michael Spiegel, 21, a one-time Harvard student, calls "an independent radical force." What draws young people into S.D.S., says Berkeley Sophomore Peter Stone, 20, is a desire to translate their sense of alienation from society into "a political thing." Products of comfortable, middle-class homes, S.D.S. members typically are disenchanted young liberals. Most feel that anti-Communism is an irrelevant stance. Probably no more than 2% of all S.D.S.ers belong to the Communist Party. S.D.S. is animated not by an master plan for revolution but by a sense of moral outrage--to say nothing of a fascination with rhetoric a la Che. Says Columbia S.D.S. Chairman Mark Rudd: "It has energy, and that's why I'm in it." (May 16, 1969) The deluge of disorders made it harder and harder for most Americans to keep the events in perspective. Bewildered citizens understandably forget that most of the nation's 6,700,000 collegians are still quietly studying for final exams. The U.S. has 2,500 colleges and universities; this year, scarcely two dozen have been seriously disrupted. The fact that each incident has a particular context is also frequently overlooked. Because universities differ so greatly, condemnation of all "protest" is not very helpful without an analysis of specifics at each campus. Nonetheless, an underlying pattern has emerged: the American university has suddenly become a political arena--the prime forum for a generation that has lost faith in the ability of regular political institutions to solve such national problems as war, race and poverty. As a result, the university is losing whatever neutrality it professes. In pushing it toward social action, students are helping to create a new U.S. institution: the political university. It is a dangerous role for universities. The growing hooliganism of many protesters threatens to wreck universities in the process. This danger now worries even some New Leftists, not to mention the vast majority of moderate sympathizers, who are more and more weary of having their expensive education constantly disrupted. The fundamental solution, of course, lies far beyond the campus. As Yales' President Kingman Brewster Jr. put it at a press conference last week: "Campus violence will grow worse unless an intense effort is made to end the war in Vietnam, remove the inequities in the draft, solve problems of the cities and improve race relations." [he hippie movement marked another response to the decade as the young experimented with music, clothes, drugs and a "counterculture" lifestyle.] (July 7, 1967)The hippies have emerged on the U.S. scene in about 18 months as a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos from which it evolved. Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence. They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans. Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by "flower power" and force of example. Although that sounds like a pipe-dream, it conveys the unreality that permeates hippiedom, a cult whose mystique derives essentially from the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.Unlike other accepted stimuli, from nicotine to liquor, the hallucinogens promise those who take the "trip" a magic-carpet escape from reality in which perceptions are heightened, senses distorted, and the imagination permanently bedazzled with visions of teleological verity. The key ethical element in the hippie movement is love--indiscriminate and all-embracing, fluid and changeable, directed at friend and foe alike. SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE! proclaims a sign in Los Angeles' Sans Souci Temple, a hippie commune. Today, hippie enclaves are blooming in every major U.S. city from Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans: there is a 50-member cabal in, of all places, Austin, Texas. There are outposts in Paris and London, New Delhi and Katmandu, where American hippies trek the "hashish trail" to get cheap but potent hallucinogens and lessons in Buddhist love. They are predominantly white, middle-class, educated youths, ranging in an age from 17 to 25 (though some as old as 50 can be spotted). Overendowed with all the qualities that make their generation so engaging, perplexing and infuriating, they are dropouts from a way of life that to them seems wholly oriented toward work, status and power. They scorn money--they call it "bread"--and property, and have found, like countless other romantics from Rimbaud to George Orwell, that it is not easy to starve. Perhaps the most striking thing about the hippie phenomenon is the way it has touched the imagination of the "straight" society that gave it birth. Hippie slang has already entered common usage and spiced American humor. Department stores and boutiques have blossomed out in "psychedelic" colors and designs that resemble animated art nouveau. The bangle shops in any hippie neighborhood cater mostly to tourists, who on summer weekends often outnumber the local flora and fauna. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district--a throbbing three-eights of a far-from-square-mile--is the vibrant epicenter of the hippie movement. Fog sweeps past the gingerbread houses of "The Hashbury," shrouding the shapes of hirsute, shoeless hippies huddled in doorways, smoking pot, "rapping" (achieving rapport with random talk), or banging beer cans in time to ubiquitous jukebox rhythms. A major new development in the hippie world is the "rural commune," some 30 of which now exist from Canada through the U.S. to Mexico. There, nature-loving hippie tribesmen can escape the commercialization of the city and attempt to build a society outside of society. TIME (April 5, 1968) After a winter in which the hippie movement seemed so moribund that its own members staged mock burials in honor of its death, the Yippies have suddenly invested it with new life through their special kind of antic political protest. The term 'Yippie' comes from Youth International Party, an amorphous amalgam of the alienated young that coalesced in Manhattan two months ago around a coterie of activist hippies, all in their late 20s and early 30s. "The YIP is a party--like the last word says--not a political movement," argues the East Village's Abbie Hoffman, who last fall tried to levitate the Pentagon.Says Yippie Leader Ed Sanders, 28, of the Fugs rock group: "It's the politics of ecstasy." Ecstasy begins with a platform certain to make any hippie yell yippie: an end to war and pay toilets, legalization of psychedelic drugs, free food, and a heart transplant for L.B.J. "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!" goes the rallying cry, and it has brought to the Yippie standard such underground gurus and goblins as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Realist Editor Paul Krassner and Jerry Rubin, a key organizer of the Pentagon March.Hard-core Yippies may number as few as 400 nationwide, but Fug Sanders reckons that the total following may now have reached 250,000. [Not only the hippies, but many Americans experimented with illicit substances that turned them on, tuned them in and dropped them out.] (September 26, 1969) It used to be that "better living through chemistry" was just another advertising slogan: now it is a sly joke to the young and a grievous worry to their parents. In their quest for sensory experience, an alarming number of kids are swallowing its message whole. Marijuana ("pot," "grass," "mary jane," "weed") is their favorite preparation; in lesser numbers, they are smoking hashish ("hash"), taking mescaline, peyote, , LSD ("acid"), using barbiturates and sedatives ("goofers," "downers," "red devils"), swallowing or injecting amphetamine stimulants ("meth," "bennies," "speed"). The prices of their mind excursions fluctuate almost daily with the black market where kids must make their purchases. These are the pop drugs--the drugs widely taken by middle-class young people, most of whom are white. Their use is growing; marijuana smoking, in particular, is increasing. (Heroin use, by contrast, remains comparatively static.) "For the first time," says California Psychopharmacologist Dr. Leo Hollister, "pot is entrenched in our society, with untold millions using the drug. We have passed the point of no return." Its signature is everywhere. Rock musicians use drugs frequently and openly, and their compositions are riddled with references to drugs, from the Beatles' "I get high with a little help from my friends" to the Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. Growing numbers of adults are taking up the habit. Many veterans return from Vietnam with a taste for grass; some military and civilian observers estimate that marijuana is smoked by as many as half the men below the rank of captain. TIMELINE 1960-The year Abbie Hoffman said he was "pychologically born." October, 1967-Hoffman arrested while attempting to measure the Pentagon.December, 1967- Hoffman and Rubin meet to discuss possibility of having demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.January 24, 1968- The National Mobilization Committee (MOBE) meets in New York to discuss possible demonstrations in Chicago. Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden are in attendendence.March 17, 1968- A press conference is held to announce that the Yippies will sponsor a "Festival of Life" in Chicago during the upcoming Democratic Convention.March 23, 1968-A meeting sponsored by MOBE is held near Chicago to debate whether to hold demonstrations at the Convention. In attendance are Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin.March 26, 1968-Yippies submit application for demonstrations to Chicago Parks Department.April 11, 1968- Amid concerns about rising protests of the Viet Nam War, Congress enacts the Anti-Riot Act of 1968. August 5, 1968-Deputy Mayor Stahl indicates his unwillingness to grant permit application for sleeping in Chicago parks.August 9, 1968- A National Mobilization Committee meeting is held in Chicago to discuss planned demonstrations. Davis allegedly suggests disrupting traffic and creating havoc in the Loop.August 14, 1968-ACLU suit seeking an injunction requiring issuance of permit is withdrawn after hearing amid concerns that court might instead enjoin demonstrators.August 22, 1968- Davis tells city officials it would be "suicide" not to allow demonstrators to sleep in city parks.August 25, 1968-Police club persons attending a music festival in Lincoln Park who refuse to leave at curfew. Davis and Hayden meet to lead march to the Conrad Hilton, the main Convention hotel. At 9 p.m., police confront and attack some demonstrators. Rubin allegedly urges demonstrators to attack police. At 10:30 p.m., two police officers observe Hayden letting the air out of tires of their police car.August 26, 1968-Hoffman calls Deputy Mayor Stahl to protest decision to forcibly drive people out of park. Hayden is arrested in the afternoon for the squad car incident. Hoffman and Rubin allegedly urge demonstrators to hold Lincoln Park. Davis urges demonstrators "Don't let the pigs take the hill (high ground near a statue in the park)."About 3,000 demonstrators gathered in park for chanting, singing songs, and talking are attacked by police with clubs and tear gas after 11 p.m. curfew. Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, nucleus of 'The Chicago Seven'March 20, 1969-A federal grand jury indicts the Chicago Eight. November 5, 1969-The trial of Seale is severed from the trial of what now becomes the Chicago Seven.February 18, 1970-The jury returns its verdict, finding five of the seven defendants guilty of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968. Froines and Weiner are acquitted.May 11, 1972-The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the contempt convictions of the Chicago Seven and their two defense attorneys, Leonard Weinglass and William Kunstler.November 21, 1972- The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the convictions of Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden.1974-Hoffman has plastic surgery and goes underground in upstate New York for seven years to avoid trial on cocaine charges. He serves a sentence in a work-release program in 1981-82.Chicago Seven Trial Trial Account by Douglas O. Linder What did it all mean? Was the Chicago Seven Trial merely, as one commentator suggested, "a monumental non-event"? Was it, as others argue, an important battle for the hearts and minds of the American people? Or is it best seen as a symbol of the conflicts of values that characterized the late sixties? These are some of the questions that surround one of the most unusual courtroom spectacles in American history, the 1969-70 trial of seven radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. QUOTES FROM THE SEVEN "It's going to be a combination Scopes trial, revolution in the streets, Woodstock Festival and People's Park, all rolled into one." -- Abbie Hoffman"It's going to be the most important political trial in the history of the United States." -- Jay Miller, director of the Illinois Division of the American Civil Liberties Union "The Seven" in protest"This is a criminal trial, not a political trial. I intend to play it as straight as possible. They can monopolize the rhetoric. I'm interested in the jury." -- Thomas Aquinas Foran, the United States Attorney "Gentlemen, let's get something straight. The police aren't in the streets to create disorder; they are in the streets to preserve disorder." -- Mayor Richard DaleyABBIE HOFFMAN: Are you asking if I had those thoughts or if I wrote that I had those thoughts? There's a difference. RICHARD G. SCHULTZ, THE ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY: It's a convenient difference, isn't it Mr. Hoffman? ABBIE HOFFMAN: I don't know what you mean. I've never been on trial for my thoughts before."Those who incite to violence should be punished whether or not freedom of speech is impaired." -- Congressman Robert L.F. Sikes (Democrat, Florida), during debate on the "antiriot' provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act. "The Conspiracy in the streets needs: freedom, actors, peace, turf, money, sunshine, musicians, instruments, people, props, cars, air, water, costumes, sound equipment, love, guns, freaks, friends, anarchy, Huey free, a truck, airplanes, power, glory, old clothes, space, truth, Nero, paint, paint, help, rope, swimming hole, ice cream, dope, nookie, moonship, Om, lords, health, no hassles, land, pigs, time, patriots, spacesuits, a Buick, people's justice, Eldridge, lumber, panthers, real things, good times." -- Leaflet handed out by the Conspiracy office in the week before the trial."Conspiracy ? Hell, we couldn't agree on lunch." -- Abbie Hoffman "They understood that you didn't have to attack the fortress anymore. You could just surround it, make faces at the people inside and let them have nervous breakdowns and destroy themselves." -- Norman Mailer "Would you like your children to grow up like them?" -- A Chicago Seven Trial juror "Our strategy was to give Judge Hoffman a heart attack. We gave the court system a heart attack, which is even better." -- Jerry Rubin
Just a word about how writing about something can sometimes yield a truth not hitherto recognized. I had not intended to delve into the world of politics on this site, preferring to focus solely on the popular culture of the period. How naive of ol' MOE, an early boomer! It is, of course, not possible to fully understand the boomer experience without some discussion of the youthful boomer's relationship with authority and a sense of the political climate of the '60's, for cause and effect comes into play in so many events and trends of the era. The following excerpts from TIME will be helpful, therefore, in defining the 'generation gap' as it applied to many of the young boomers of the 1960's.
(January 6, 1967) The young have already staked out their own mini-society, a congruent culture that has both alarmed their elders and, stylistically at least, left an irresistible impression on them. No Western metropolis today lacks a discotheque or espresso joint, a Mod boutique or a Carnaby shop. No transistor is immune from rock 'n' roll, no highway spared the stutter of Hondas. There are few Main Streets in the world that do not echo to the clop of granny boots, and many are the "grannies" who now wear them. What started out as distinctively youthful sartorial revolt--drainpipe-trousered men, pants-suited or net-stockinged women, long hair on male and female alike--has been accepted by adults the world over.
The young seem curiously unappreciative of the society that supports them. "Don't trust anyone over 30," is one of their rallying cries. Another, "Tell it like it is," conveys an abiding mistrust of what they consider adult deviousness. Sociologists and psychologists call them "alienated" or "uncommitted." In fact, the young today are deeply involved in a competitive struggle for high grades, the college of their choice, a good graduate school, a satisfactory job--or, if need be, for survival in Vietnam. Never have they been enmeshed so early or so earnestly in society. Yet they remain honestly curious and curiously honest.
Despite their tolerance of quixotic causes and idiosyncratic roles, the young reflect--more accurately than they might care to admit--many of the mainstream currents in society at large. In 1966, the young American became vociferously skeptical of the Great Society. Though he retains a strong emotional identification with the deprived and spurned citizens of his own and other societies, he recognizes that the civil rights revolution, in which he was an early hero at the barricades, has reached a stage at which his own involvement is no longer vital. And, as a letter to the President signed by 100 student leaders across the nation showed last week, he has become increasing perturbed by the war.
Youthful Americans protested the rigidity and elitism of their universities, and through their actions they expressed the frustration, rage and alienation felt by many of the young about racial inequality, social injustice, the Vietnam War and the economic and political constraints of conventional life and work.]
(May 10, 1968) At 2:30 a.m., said one combat-wise cop, "Harlem is asleep." At that propitious hour, 1,000 New York City police, armed with warrants signed by Columbia University trustees, marched on the Morningside Heights campus and dispossessed the student rebels who had occupied five buildings for nearly six days. After successfully capturing the campus buildings, the demonstrators--led by the far-left Students for a Democratic Society and the all-Negro Student Afro-American Society--seemed far more interested in a bloody confrontation with the administration than in any meaningful negotiations.
They demanded a complete surrender on all points at issue, including amnesty for all participants in the rebellion. Columbia President Grayson Kirk refused, on the ground that this would mean a complete abdication of all disciplinary authority. A majority of the university's 17,000 students and 2,500 faculty members undoubtedly shared the initial goals of the strike. But many were also appalled by the hooligan tactics of the demonstrators, who had held university officials captive, broken into offices and overturned furniture.
Inside Hamilton Hall, 85 Negro students, who had been advised by such cool heads as Negro Psychologist Kenneth Clark, decided that their most effective tactic would be to file quietly into the vans. It was a model arrest operation--except that no one had brought a key for the main door and it had to be forced open. Elsewhere, the police were less carefully supervised--and less considerate of the rebels. Professors and students who had linked arms to keep police and demonstrators apart were charged by wedges of plainclothes men. Uniformed officers plunged into the breach to smash open the doors, while others broke into through underground tunnels.
Neat plans went awry as police kicked and clubbed their way through Fayerweather Hall. Although the action united hopelessly confused Columbia in anger over police brutality, it also moved the campus toward order--and touched off a much needed reexamination of the university's future.
(May 24, 1968) A loosely formed amalgam of some 35,000 young people--barely 6,000 of whom pay national dues--the far-left S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) boasts chapters on at least 250 campuses. Opposed to "imperialism" (whatever that means these days), racism and oppression, S.D.S. finds the American university guilty of all three. S.D.S. concentrated at first on civil rights issues. It organized Northern ghetto dwellers in such projects as Chicago's Jobs Or Income--Now (JOIN) and fought to get Mississippi's "Freedom delegation" seated at the 1964 Democratic Convention.
The Vietnam War, however, led to a change of tactics. By 1966, S.D.S. had broken with the L.I.D. (League for Industrial Democracy) and decided against working within the existing political framework. Since then, the group has been trying to be what National Secretary Michael Spiegel, 21, a one-time Harvard student, calls "an independent radical force." What draws young people into S.D.S., says Berkeley Sophomore Peter Stone, 20, is a desire to translate their sense of alienation from society into "a political thing."
Products of comfortable, middle-class homes, S.D.S. members typically are disenchanted young liberals. Most feel that anti-Communism is an irrelevant stance. Probably no more than 2% of all S.D.S.ers belong to the Communist Party. S.D.S. is animated not by an master plan for revolution but by a sense of moral outrage--to say nothing of a fascination with rhetoric a la Che. Says Columbia S.D.S. Chairman Mark Rudd: "It has energy, and that's why I'm in it."
(May 16, 1969) The deluge of disorders made it harder and harder for most Americans to keep the events in perspective. Bewildered citizens understandably forget that most of the nation's 6,700,000 collegians are still quietly studying for final exams. The U.S. has 2,500 colleges and universities; this year, scarcely two dozen have been seriously disrupted. The fact that each incident has a particular context is also frequently overlooked. Because universities differ so greatly, condemnation of all "protest" is not very helpful without an analysis of specifics at each campus.
Nonetheless, an underlying pattern has emerged: the American university has suddenly become a political arena--the prime forum for a generation that has lost faith in the ability of regular political institutions to solve such national problems as war, race and poverty. As a result, the university is losing whatever neutrality it professes. In pushing it toward social action, students are helping to create a new U.S. institution: the political university. It is a dangerous role for universities.
The growing hooliganism of many protesters threatens to wreck universities in the process. This danger now worries even some New Leftists, not to mention the vast majority of moderate sympathizers, who are more and more weary of having their expensive education constantly disrupted. The fundamental solution, of course, lies far beyond the campus. As Yales' President Kingman Brewster Jr. put it at a press conference last week: "Campus violence will grow worse unless an intense effort is made to end the war in Vietnam, remove the inequities in the draft, solve problems of the cities and improve race relations." [he hippie movement marked another response to the decade as the young experimented with music, clothes, drugs and a "counterculture" lifestyle.]
(July 7, 1967)The hippies have emerged on the U.S. scene in about 18 months as a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos from which it evolved. Hippies preach altruism and mysticism, honesty, joy and nonviolence. They find an almost childish fascination in beads, blossoms and bells, blinding strobe lights and ear-shattering music, exotic clothing and erotic slogans. Their professed aim is nothing less than the subversion of Western society by "flower power" and force of example. Although that sounds like a pipe-dream, it conveys the unreality that permeates hippiedom, a cult whose mystique derives essentially from the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.
Unlike other accepted stimuli, from nicotine to liquor, the hallucinogens promise those who take the "trip" a magic-carpet escape from reality in which perceptions are heightened, senses distorted, and the imagination permanently bedazzled with visions of teleological verity. The key ethical element in the hippie movement is love--indiscriminate and all-embracing, fluid and changeable, directed at friend and foe alike. SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE! proclaims a sign in Los Angeles' Sans Souci Temple, a hippie commune.
Today, hippie enclaves are blooming in every major U.S. city from Boston to Seattle, from Detroit to New Orleans: there is a 50-member cabal in, of all places, Austin, Texas. There are outposts in Paris and London, New Delhi and Katmandu, where American hippies trek the "hashish trail" to get cheap but potent hallucinogens and lessons in Buddhist love.
They are predominantly white, middle-class, educated youths, ranging in an age from 17 to 25 (though some as old as 50 can be spotted). Overendowed with all the qualities that make their generation so engaging, perplexing and infuriating, they are dropouts from a way of life that to them seems wholly oriented toward work, status and power. They scorn money--they call it "bread"--and property, and have found, like countless other romantics from Rimbaud to George Orwell, that it is not easy to starve.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the hippie phenomenon is the way it has touched the imagination of the "straight" society that gave it birth. Hippie slang has already entered common usage and spiced American humor. Department stores and boutiques have blossomed out in "psychedelic" colors and designs that resemble animated art nouveau. The bangle shops in any hippie neighborhood cater mostly to tourists, who on summer weekends often outnumber the local flora and fauna. San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district--a throbbing three-eights of a far-from-square-mile--is the vibrant epicenter of the hippie movement. Fog sweeps past the gingerbread houses of "The Hashbury," shrouding the shapes of hirsute, shoeless hippies huddled in doorways, smoking pot, "rapping" (achieving rapport with random talk), or banging beer cans in time to ubiquitous jukebox rhythms.
A major new development in the hippie world is the "rural commune," some 30 of which now exist from Canada through the U.S. to Mexico. There, nature-loving hippie tribesmen can escape the commercialization of the city and attempt to build a society outside of society.
TIME (April 5, 1968) After a winter in which the hippie movement seemed so moribund that its own members staged mock burials in honor of its death, the Yippies have suddenly invested it with new life through their special kind of antic political protest. The term 'Yippie' comes from Youth International Party, an amorphous amalgam of the alienated young that coalesced in Manhattan two months ago around a coterie of activist hippies, all in their late 20s and early 30s. "The YIP is a party--like the last word says--not a political movement," argues the East Village's Abbie Hoffman, who last fall tried to levitate the Pentagon.
Says Yippie Leader Ed Sanders, 28, of the Fugs rock group: "It's the politics of ecstasy." Ecstasy begins with a platform certain to make any hippie yell yippie: an end to war and pay toilets, legalization of psychedelic drugs, free food, and a heart transplant for L.B.J. "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!" goes the rallying cry, and it has brought to the Yippie standard such underground gurus and goblins as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Realist Editor Paul Krassner and Jerry Rubin, a key organizer of the Pentagon March.
Hard-core Yippies may number as few as 400 nationwide, but Fug Sanders reckons that the total following may now have reached 250,000. [Not only the hippies, but many Americans experimented with illicit substances that turned them on, tuned them in and dropped them out.]
(September 26, 1969) It used to be that "better living through chemistry" was just another advertising slogan: now it is a sly joke to the young and a grievous worry to their parents. In their quest for sensory experience, an alarming number of kids are swallowing its message whole. Marijuana ("pot," "grass," "mary jane," "weed") is their favorite preparation; in lesser numbers, they are smoking hashish ("hash"), taking mescaline, peyote, , LSD ("acid"), using barbiturates and sedatives ("goofers," "downers," "red devils"), swallowing or injecting amphetamine stimulants ("meth," "bennies," "speed").
The prices of their mind excursions fluctuate almost daily with the black market where kids must make their purchases. These are the pop drugs--the drugs widely taken by middle-class young people, most of whom are white. Their use is growing; marijuana smoking, in particular, is increasing. (Heroin use, by contrast, remains comparatively static.) "For the first time," says California Psychopharmacologist Dr. Leo Hollister, "pot is entrenched in our society, with untold millions using the drug. We have passed the point of no return."
Its signature is everywhere. Rock musicians use drugs frequently and openly, and their compositions are riddled with references to drugs, from the Beatles' "I get high with a little help from my friends" to the Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. Growing numbers of adults are taking up the habit. Many veterans return from Vietnam with a taste for grass; some military and civilian observers estimate that marijuana is smoked by as many as half the men below the rank of captain.
TIMELINE
1960-The year Abbie Hoffman said he was "pychologically born."
October, 1967-Hoffman arrested while attempting to measure the Pentagon.
December, 1967- Hoffman and Rubin meet to discuss possibility of having demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
January 24, 1968- The National Mobilization Committee (MOBE) meets in New York to discuss possible demonstrations in Chicago. Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden are in attendendence.
March 17, 1968- A press conference is held to announce that the Yippies will sponsor a "Festival of Life" in Chicago during the upcoming Democratic Convention.
March 23, 1968-A meeting sponsored by MOBE is held near Chicago to debate whether to hold demonstrations at the Convention. In attendance are Dellinger, Davis, Hayden, Hoffman, and Rubin.
March 26, 1968-Yippies submit application for demonstrations to Chicago Parks Department.
April 11, 1968- Amid concerns about rising protests of the Viet Nam War, Congress enacts the Anti-Riot Act of 1968.
August 5, 1968-Deputy Mayor Stahl indicates his unwillingness to grant permit application for sleeping in Chicago parks.
August 9, 1968- A National Mobilization Committee meeting is held in Chicago to discuss planned demonstrations. Davis allegedly suggests disrupting traffic and creating havoc in the Loop.
August 14, 1968-ACLU suit seeking an injunction requiring issuance of permit is withdrawn after hearing amid concerns that court might instead enjoin demonstrators.
August 22, 1968- Davis tells city officials it would be "suicide" not to allow demonstrators to sleep in city parks.
August 25, 1968-Police club persons attending a music festival in Lincoln Park who refuse to leave at curfew. Davis and Hayden meet to lead march to the Conrad Hilton, the main Convention hotel. At 9 p.m., police confront and attack some demonstrators. Rubin allegedly urges demonstrators to attack police. At 10:30 p.m., two police officers observe Hayden letting the air out of tires of their police car.
August 26, 1968-Hoffman calls Deputy Mayor Stahl to protest decision to forcibly drive people out of park. Hayden is arrested in the afternoon for the squad car incident. Hoffman and Rubin allegedly urge demonstrators to hold Lincoln Park. Davis urges demonstrators "Don't let the pigs take the hill (high ground near a statue in the park)."About 3,000 demonstrators gathered in park for chanting, singing songs, and talking are attacked by police with clubs and tear gas after 11 p.m. curfew.
Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, nucleus of 'The Chicago Seven'
March 20, 1969-A federal grand jury indicts the Chicago Eight.
November 5, 1969-The trial of Seale is severed from the trial of what now becomes the Chicago Seven.
February 18, 1970-The jury returns its verdict, finding five of the seven defendants guilty of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968. Froines and Weiner are acquitted.
May 11, 1972-The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the contempt convictions of the Chicago Seven and their two defense attorneys, Leonard Weinglass and William Kunstler.
November 21, 1972- The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the convictions of Hoffman, Rubin, Dellinger, Davis, and Hayden.
1974-Hoffman has plastic surgery and goes underground in upstate New York for seven years to avoid trial on cocaine charges. He serves a sentence in a work-release program in 1981-82.
Trial Account by Douglas O. Linder What did it all mean? Was the Chicago Seven Trial merely, as one commentator suggested, "a monumental non-event"? Was it, as others argue, an important battle for the hearts and minds of the American people? Or is it best seen as a symbol of the conflicts of values that characterized the late sixties? These are some of the questions that surround one of the most unusual courtroom spectacles in American history, the 1969-70 trial of seven radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
What did it all mean? Was the Chicago Seven Trial merely, as one commentator suggested, "a monumental non-event"? Was it, as others argue, an important battle for the hearts and minds of the American people? Or is it best seen as a symbol of the conflicts of values that characterized the late sixties? These are some of the questions that surround one of the most unusual courtroom spectacles in American history, the 1969-70 trial of seven radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
"It's going to be the most important political trial in the history of the United States." -- Jay Miller, director of the Illinois Division of the American Civil Liberties Union
"The Seven" in protest
"This is a criminal trial, not a political trial. I intend to play it as straight as possible. They can monopolize the rhetoric. I'm interested in the jury." -- Thomas Aquinas Foran, the United States Attorney
"Gentlemen, let's get something straight. The police aren't in the streets to create disorder; they are in the streets to preserve disorder." -- Mayor Richard Daley
ABBIE HOFFMAN: Are you asking if I had those thoughts or if I wrote that I had those thoughts? There's a difference.
RICHARD G. SCHULTZ, THE ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY: It's a convenient difference, isn't it Mr. Hoffman? ABBIE HOFFMAN: I don't know what you mean. I've never been on trial for my thoughts before.
"Those who incite to violence should be punished whether or not freedom of speech is impaired." -- Congressman Robert L.F. Sikes (Democrat, Florida), during debate on the "antiriot' provisions of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.
"The Conspiracy in the streets needs: freedom, actors, peace, turf, money, sunshine, musicians, instruments, people, props, cars, air, water, costumes, sound equipment, love, guns, freaks, friends, anarchy, Huey free, a truck, airplanes, power, glory, old clothes, space, truth, Nero, paint, paint, help, rope, swimming hole, ice cream, dope, nookie, moonship, Om, lords, health, no hassles, land, pigs, time, patriots, spacesuits, a Buick, people's justice, Eldridge, lumber, panthers, real things, good times." -- Leaflet handed out by the Conspiracy office in the week before the trial.
"Conspiracy ? Hell, we couldn't agree on lunch." -- Abbie Hoffman
"They understood that you didn't have to attack the fortress anymore. You could just surround it, make faces at the people inside and let them have nervous breakdowns and destroy themselves." -- Norman Mailer
"Would you like your children to grow up like them?" -- A Chicago Seven Trial juror
"Our strategy was to give Judge Hoffman a heart attack. We gave the court system a heart attack, which is even better." -- Jerry Rubin
