A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (143 page)

Consequently, at the very time that waves of new baby-boomer students were swarming into institutions of higher learning, they were greeted with a torrent of money and a liberal—if not radical—faculty that challenged traditional norms of patriotism, religion, and family. Reinforcing the message of the student radicals, the faculty provided social and intellectual cover for the disruptions that soon occurred, justifying the mayhem as necessary for education and social reform. Under such circumstances, the surprise was not that violent campus revolutions ensued, but that they took so long, especially in light of the Vietnam War, which provided a focal point for anti-American hostility and revolutionary rhetoric.

Red-Diaper Babies

At least some of the unrest emanated from Moscow, which trained and supported an extensive network of radical leaders for the purposes of disrupting American society and alienating youth from bourgeois ideas. Sit-in protests and mass demonstrations at California campuses appeared as early as 1958, usually directed at a specific incident or university policies. After 1964, however, at the University of California at Berkeley, the demonstrations grew increasingly violent under the Free Speech movement. According to the history of the American communist movement, “Communists and other varieties of Marxists and Marxist-Leninists were among the organizers and leaders” of the Free Speech movement.
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SDS leaders, such as Carl Davidson, David Horowitz, Country Joe MacDonald, and other red-diaper babies, proudly proclaimed their Marxist-Leninist sympathies. Bernardine Dohrn, leader of the SDS in 1968, asked if she was a socialist, answered, “I consider myself a revolutionary Communist.”
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Although some in the peace movement discouraged a communist presence, the Left did not need to be taken over in the conventional sense—a takeover from below had occurred in the form of an infiltration by many thoroughgoing communists and fellow travelers. In an absurd scene of supreme irony, suburban radicals such as Tom Bell of Cornell faced harassment and taunting from the audience at the 1968 SDS convention when members of the Progressive Labor wing howled curses at him for being too anticommunist. Here was a revolutionary who wanted to destroy or, at the very least, fundamentally eviscerate the foundations of American democracy and capitalism being called a “red baiter.”
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Consequently, just as the SDS had established itself on 350 to 400 campuses across the country, claiming perhaps a hundred thousand members, communist elements within the organization tore it apart, achieving the goal of the more militant communists of pushing the radical movement toward street violence, yielding its position of influence to the militant Weathermen.
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Thus, campus violence was not a case of emotions getting out of hand, as is sometimes portrayed. Nor was it a case of frustrated student radicals who “lacked the patience and discipline for nonviolent protest.”
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Rather, it represented a predictable evolution of events when a radical minority steeped in revolutionary tactics and filled with an ideology of terror attempted to impose its worldview on the majority by shutting down facilities. But as early as 1964, “spontaneous” protests for “student rights” were revealed to be organized, deliberate disruptions designed to choke off all educational activities.

It is important to establish clearly, in their own words, the goals and objectives of the radicals and to note that traditional means of social control, especially arrest and imprisonment for purposes of rehabilitation, had little meaning to people who viewed arrest as a status symbol. Jerry Rubin, one of the leaders of the New Left Yippie movement, expressed his contempt for the system within which most of the activists operated. Violating the law had no negative connotation for the Yippies, and few feared genuine reprisals from the “repressive establishment” they denigrated daily.
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Destroying property, insulting police and city officials, polluting, and breaking the law in any way possible were jokes to some; to others, arrest only signified their commitment or validated their ideology. Rubin, called into court, laughed, “Those who got subpoenas became heroes. Those who didn’t had subpoenas envy. It was almost sexual. ‘Whose is bigger?’ ‘I want one, too.’”
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The adrenaline rush of activism completely distorted reality. Susan Stern, a member of the violent Weathermen gang that blew up a University of Wisconsin lab, killing a student, had participated in the Chicago riots. Charged with aggravated assault and battery, and assault with a deadly weapon for attacking police (which carried a maximum penalty of forty years in prison), she recalled being “enthralled by the adventure and excitement of my first bust,” oblivious to the prospect that she might spend most of her life behind bars.
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Radicals like Rubin noted that the essence of the movement was twofold: repel and alienate mainstream American society, setting the radicals up as antiestablishment heroes who would have a natural appeal to teens and college students seeking to break away from their parents; and refuse rational negotiation in order to polarize and radicalize campuses (and, they hoped, the rest of the United States). Rubin “repelled” and “alienated” quite well. As he once put it, “We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed.” The hippies took pride in the fact that they “were a public display of filth and shabbiness, living-in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards [who] pissed and s**t and f***ed in public.” Far from hiding their drug use, Rubin noted: “We were constantly stoned and tripping on every drug known to man…[and were] outlaw forces of America displaying ourselves flagrantly on the world stage.”
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For mainstream America, which often received skewed news reports of the ostensible causes of the disruption, it appeared that students only wanted to challenge unreasonable dress codes, or have a say in curriculum, or protest unpopular college policies. These causes for protest masked their true tactics, which were to use any initial demand as a starting point for closing the university, then destroying the rest of society. As radical leaders themselves later admitted, they practiced a strategy of constantly escalating demands so that no compromise could ever be reached with them. Rubin, who drafted many of these early tactics, explained: “Satisfy our demands and we go twelve more…. All we want from these meetings are demands
that the Establishment can never satisfy.
…Demonstrators are never
‘reasonable’
[emphasis ours].” When the demands reached the point that no rational university administrator or public official could possibly comply with them, Rubin noted, “Then we scream, righteously angry…. Goals are irrelevant. The tactics, the actions are critical.”
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Yet Rubin was not being entirely candid:
Short-term goals
were irrelevant, but the destabilization of society as a long-term objective was quite relevant to the activists.

Over time, the movement not only grew more radical but also more blatantly anti-American. Peter Collier, on the staff of
Ramparts
magazine, recalled: “We had a weekly ritual of sitting in front of the television set and cheering as Walter Cronkite announced the ever-rising body count on CBS.”
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Actress Jane Fonda visited Hanoi in 1972 with her then-husband, activist Tom Hayden. In a famous photo, she posed sitting in the gunner’s seat of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun—exactly the type used to shoot down the American pilots who were held nearby in the Hanoi Hilton prison, being tortured and starved—then spoke on Radio Hanoi as American POWs were forced to listen.
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Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll

Enhancing the freedom from responsibility and the associated notion that normal activities such as holding jobs and raising families were somehow meaningless, the new drug culture spread through the underculture like wildfire. Timothy Leary’s famous call to tune in, turn on, and drop out reached innocent ears like a siren song, and many youth, already convinced their parents had lied to them about rock and roll, sex, and Vietnam, listened attentively. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) was the subject of extensive tests by the CIA in the 1950s. One CIA researcher recalled the lab staff using it themselves, saying, “There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation…[because] we felt that a firsthand knowledge of the subjective effects of these drugs [was] important.”
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LSD spread throughout the subculture and by the 1960s, dropping acid was equated with a religious exerience by Beat poet Allen Ginsburg.
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Increasingly, intellectuals in the 1960s advocated chemical use purely for pleasure and mind expansion. And not just LSD, but mescaline, heroin, amphetamines, Ditran, and other mysterious substances, all, of course, undergirded by the all-purpose and ubiquitous marijuana. Writer Ken Kesey credited his LSD trip for his insight in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest;
leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech movement saw drugs as a natural element in their attack on conformity; and indeed drug use was, in their view, “an important political catalyst…[that enabled] questioning of the official mythology of the governing class.”
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Or, as a veteran of the Free Speech movement bragged, “When a young person took his first puff of psychoactive smoke,…[he] became a youth criminal against the State.”
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It was all so much empty rhetoric, but when draped in the language of academia, it took on a certain respectability.

Sexual freedom without consequence was glamorized and pushed by Hollywood and the music industry. Censorship laws, which had eroded since the U.S. Supreme Court’s
Roth
decision (1957), established that obscenity had to appeal to “prurient interests” and run contrary to “contemporary community standards.” Justice William Brennan further eliminated barriers to imposing any limits by ruling that the public could not ban a work unless it was “utterly” without “redeeming social value.”
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This, of course, meant that no town, ever, could prohibit any book or movie, since someone could always find “redeeming social value” somewhere in the work.

The free love movement, supported by the hippies, also reinforced the attack on constraints. Two strains of free love arguments appeared. One held that any breaking of sexual taboos and any attack on censorship represented an advance against the male-dominated power structure. Thus, some supported the women’s movement not because it allowed women to seek self-fulfillment outside the home, but because it undercut capitalism and traditionalism. A second, more radical, wave of sexual politics involved the quest for polymorphous perversity—a call to try everything, do everything, and ignore all restraints against homosexuality, pedophilia, and bestiality—and the destruction of all distinctions between men and women. Any type of affection that affirmed life, these advocates argued, was desirable. Marriage and heterosexuality inhibited such life affirmation and therefore were wrong.

No doubt some Americans held these views in all previous eras, but the physiology of conception placed severe constraints on “If it feels good, do it.” Pregnancy out of wedlock was received with such social ostracism that it curtailed experimentation, even if social mores seemingly punished females more than the often unnamed male partners. The Pill changed that to the extent that the 1999 millennial issue of
The Economist
called it the greatest scientific and technological advance of the twentieth century.
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Without question, the Pill also triggered a boom in women’s education similar to what men had experienced: in medicine, first-year women students tripled within ten years of the spread of the Pill, and female MBA students nearly quadrupled. Whatever its beneficial effects, the Pill exacerbated the erotic impulses already spinning out of control.

Rock music reaffirmed the sexual and drug revolutions at every turn. By 1970, although still exceptionally popular, neither the Beatles nor their bad-boy counterparts, the Rolling Stones, had the aura of hipness, having ceded that to rising new and more radical groups whose music carried deeper drug overtones. Jimi Hendrix sang of flying on giant dragonflies and Jim Morrison of the Doors saw himself as the “lizard king.” Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and Iron Butterfly unashamedly wrote music for drug trips.

By this time even clothing embodied antiestablishment traits. Blue jeans, the antifashion, completely dominated the youth culture, constituting what one author called the “Jeaning of America.”
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The entire genre emphasized sex and free love, pointing to the Woodstock music festival of August 15–17, 1969, as evidence of what a hippie republic would look like. “Peace, love, and rock ’n’ roll,” read the logos on commercial products celebrating the event. “Gonna join in a rock ’n’ roll band…and set my soul free,” wailed Stephen Stills, of Crosby, Stills & Nash (CSN), in the anthem of the three-day concert. CSN popularized the event with a top-forty song called “Woodstock,” and the group starred in a full-length movie that followed. Woodstock was “touted as a new stage in the psychic evolution of the world, a mass celebration of what the 1960s was all about,” an assertion defying reality.
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When up to half a million hippies—the counterculture rock fans (including more than a few chronic drug users)—showed up at Max Yasgur’s farm to hear a cornucopia of headline rock bands, the result was predictable: it had little to do with love or peace and quite a bit to do with money.

As one participant recalled, “There was a lot made of how peaceful the event was. But what else would half a million kids on grass, acid, and hog tranquilizers be? Woodstock, if anything, was the point at which psychedelics [drugs] ceased being tools for experience…and became a means of
crowd control.
”
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Said Grateful Dead guitarist (and drug addict) Jerry Garcia, “You could feel the presence of the invisible time travelers from the future,” but Garcia apparently didn’t see the “kids freaking out from megadoses of acid or almost audibly buzzing from battery-acid crank like flies trapped in a soda can.”
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Having celebrated drug use, within a few years Garcia, Sly Stone, David Crosby, Keith Moon, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, among other participants at Woodstock, either died of overdoses or otherwise destroyed their careers or bodies. Other Woodstock veterans met similar distasteful ends. Felix Pappalardi of Mountain survived one drug overdose only to be shot by his wife in 1983.