The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  At seven-thirty, when the meeting of the thirteenth workshop was slated to begin, the room was packed and overflowed into the hallway. Jerry Rubin rescinded his endorsement of the leaflet and pronounced it “beyond my comprehension” that he should ever have signed such a thing. Then, having moved that the meeting adjourn and having lost by a small margin, Rubin led the Berkeley delegation and many of the real independents out of the meeting and to Room 407, where the Berkeley delegation held a meeting of its own.

  “That was stylishly done,” said Steve Weissman in Room 407. “But now, as I see it, the Berkeley delegation, as one of the oldest, truly independent committees here, should draft the strongest statement possible denouncing the attempt to split the movement.”

  “Do you think we should lay it on the line that Y.S.A. is behind it?” asked Rubin. “In a way, they’ve packed the delegations and we’re faced with a fait accompli. Y.S.A. chairs the independent committees from San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, just for a beginning, and they’ve got ten years of political indoctrination behind them.”

  Ray Robinson bounded angrily into the room. “I’ve just been caucusing with the Mississippi people downstairs, and they’re going to resign this goddam thing,” he said. “They’re cutting out. Three times now, they’ve been asked to come up to Washington for peace and they have just been used. The infighting has got to stop. One of the girls from down there asked me a simple question. She asked what she came up here for—you dig? She didn’t come here to meet people, and listen to Y.S.A. interpret ideology for the ones who don’t know where they’re at. You college people messed up again, I tell you that, brother.”

  “We know, Ray,” said Weissman. “And we’re trying to draft a statement. But is that all—is there a bitch besides that?”

  “Yeah,” said Robinson. “The Mississippi people just aren’t being made to feel welcome.”

  “I know just what they mean, and it isn’t just the Mississippi people, either,” said Beverly Sterner, a member of C.N.V.A. “The opening of the session was so sterile and so cold. No orientation. No word of welcome.”

  The Berkeley delegation didn’t draft a statement that night. It didn’t have to. Word came upstairs that the thirteenth workshop’s meeting had been persuaded to adjourn, after all, by Rubin, who had gained admission, recanted his endorsement yet again, and confessed that he had been “taken in by Y.S.A.” This last remark was pronounced “not in good taste” by members of the Y.S.A., but for the moment they gave in.

  Late Thursday night, the Mississippi delegation, having decided not to leave, was holding the first of its “soul sessions” at the hotel. The soul session, which has become a tradition of the movement in the South, is a kind of marathon group therapy, with a dash of mysticism. Participants have described it as a drugless “high on talk.” The Mississippi people, who were likely to have experienced more suffering at the hands of society than any of the other delegates, were trying to demonstrate that a revolution can originate in the personal sufferings of people, freely expressed, rather than in a few directives from the top. “Don’t think you have to talk,” Delmar Scudder, a Negro student from Swarthmore, said at the beginning of the session, “until you feel that you can get out some of the pain, and find out where it is.”

  In a room marked “Ideological Overflow,” Al Johnson, a Negro worker for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Washington, said to Weissman, “I’m not sure what this convention has to offer the movement in the South. The argument about structure—we had it all in S.N.C.C., and look where it led. No more local autonomy. Every worker has to file a weekly report. Man, that’s what I’d call a co-ercive structure.”

  “That’s just what I think the movement is all about,” said Weissman. “To see if we can find any structures that are not coercive. Maybe it can’t be done. Maybe there can’t be any participatory democracy in a mass society. But you M.F.D.P. people, and the chapters of S.D.S., and the movement in New York, and we in Berkeley ought to be able to talk to each other about that.”

  The conversations and caucuses and soul sessions went on at the Harrington far into the night.

  · · ·

  Breakfast on Friday in the Harrington cafeteria was a time for introspection and political realignment. (“The trouble with national structures is just what’s happening here. They can be taken over.” “Yes, but how can you confront a national government without a national structure?”) In the lobby of the Harrington, photographers were gathering some of the more bizarre-looking people around and posing them on a sofa as a cross-section of the movement.

  Very few people went to any of the workshops on Friday, and the Students for a Democratic Society held a caucus to plan its own convention in December. “I suggest that we get away from the smoke-disaster syndrome,” said one delegate. “All this boring dialectic in smoke-filled rooms. I think this time we ought to go someplace where we can run in the fields.” The S.D.S. discussed the meeting place for several hours and then reached a consensus: Antioch, if the delegate who had suggested it could get use of the campus.

  “I think S.D.S. ought to stay away from protest for a while,” said Weissman. “The other groups have taken it up, and I’m less concerned with anything we can do about Vietnam now than I am about how we can affect foreign policy seven wars from now. It’s hard for a democratic group to find the levers of foreign policy. In a way, M.F.D.P. and S.D.S. have the same problem about the convention. We don’t want or need a strong central structure at present. We’ve got our local community-action constituencies.”

  That evening, at a plenary session, a delegate from Mississippi read a transcript of ten single-spaced pages of soul session, taken down the previous night. He told the delegates, “Don’t applaud. We don’t care if you agree. The issue is whether we can speak to one another.” The delegates gave him a standing ovation. Immediately thereafter, however, the Young Socialist Alliance broke forth with a complicated new issue, concerning credentials. There was a long and bitter floor fight, which the Y.S.A. lost but which caused one Mississippi delegate to tear up his delegate card in chagrin and another to suggest the possibility of a delegate-card burning. The Y.S.A. made still another attempt to take over, through the seemingly harmless maneuver of suggesting that the movement adopt three slogans—“Let’s Bring the Troops Home Now,” “Self-Determination in Mississippi and Vietnam,” and “Freedom Now, Withdrawal Now”—for the march the following morning. But David Gilbert, of Columbia, among others, pointed out that the “Withdrawal Now” slogan would be unacceptable to SANE and also to many constituents of the Coordinating Committee (who believe in negotiated withdrawal); that the ensuing split would simply feed the movement’s enemies; and that the convention was, in any case, not empowered to adopt slogans without a mandate from the local committees. Throughout this discussion, there were jeers, cries of “Parliamentary nincompoop!,” “Ideologue!,” and “Let him finish!” In the end, the convention allowed each marcher to adopt the slogan of his choice.

  · · ·

  On Saturday, the march itself went off almost without a hitch, and without much excitement, either. Veterans in the vanguard of the procession were shouting, “No more vets! No more vets!” The flags at the base of the Washington Monument made their usual applauding noise. In front of the stage below the monument, a special section was roped off by SANE monitors, to be reserved for veterans, clergymen, writers, celebrities, and, “in case there should be enough room,” the old and the infirm. There were speeches of varying quality, leading up to an appearance by Sanford Gottlieb, who seemed to be showing a certain hostility toward the marchers when he asked, “How many of you can’t hear me back there? Raise your hands,” and then continued, “Oh, well, I see a lot of raised hands. That must mean you can hear just fine.” (As it happened, owing to quirks of the wind, the marchers back there could hear perfectly at times and sometimes not at all.) But the high point for most of the students, and for some of the older people as well, was
the speech by the president of Students for a Democratic Society, Carl Oglesby, who had held himself aloof all week from the Coordinating Committee infighting and who now delivered a scathing yet considered attack not on the administration in Washington but on the institution of American liberalism itself, which, he said, had become so entrenched as to be, in an almost entirely new sense, complacent and reactionary. A bearded young man himself, he said that America had become “a nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals.” He went on, “There is simply no such thing for the United States now as a just revolution,” and he deplored the government’s determination to “safeguard what they take to be American interests around the world against revolution or revolutionary change, which they always call Communism—as if it were that.” Later, he said, “Then why can’t we see that our proper human struggle is not with Communism or revolutionaries but with the social desperation that drives good men to violence, both here and abroad?” The rhetoric of Oglesby’s speech was strangely old-fashioned, but the young people present were moved, and even the older people seemed to feel reassured. The scene ended with Sanford Gottlieb advancing and raising Oglesby’s arm in triumph, like a prizefighter’s, to volleys of cheering.

  At the Harrington, however, many students, who had not bothered to march, were locked in caucus about structure. (The issue of Vietnam, never very clearly in focus at the convention, seemed to have been eclipsed entirely.) Immediately after the march, the presiding committee met in a room at the hotel, while in another room the thirteenth workshop had reconvened and was making a last-ditch effort to form a movement of its own, in a meeting that was turning really ugly. Three young members of the Y.S.A. stood guard outside the door, and unlocked it only for members of independent committees who pledged themselves to vote in favor of founding a separate national committee. When one delegate, remarking that the room had been paid for by the Coordinating Committee, attempted to meet force with force and enter, he was caught for some time in the door, which the guards were pushing shut, and then was forcibly dragged some distance down the hallway.

  “Goons and Storm Troopers,” said one dismayed independent. “This is supposed to be a peace movement.”

  “We’ve never advocated non-violence,” said one member of Y.S.A.

  “And furthermore, there has been no violence here,” said a middle-aged woman emerging from the door. “You didn’t see any, there wasn’t any, and if you insist on misrepresenting things that way I’ll have you escorted out of here.”

  The final plenary session—the meeting on structure—was held on Sunday morning, in a room at the New Dunbar Hotel. Dave Dellinger, the editor of Liberation and a pacifist loved and admired by almost all factions, presided. The Y.S.A. caucus had come up with its own proposals on structure. But Jack Weinberg received permission to make an opening statement and set what he called a “tone” to the meeting. He said that he knew some delegates had reached “the conclusion that we are going to come out of here divided,” and he asked them to “destroy the split before it is carried home to every chapter and there is a vote—a majority and a minority, with two separate affiliations and no consensus—in every community and on every campus.” Then a man leaped to his feet, identified himself as Albert Nelson, of the Spartacist Movement, and, in the first really open allusion in the plenary session to anything that was going on behind the scenes, claimed that “the political infighting ought to be hitting the floor,” that someone was “gutting the convention of its real political issues.” Condemning the Young Socialist Alliance and the Coordinating Committee for their “lack of candor” and loss of the personal touch, he announced that he would abstain from voting for the proposals made by either one. Here Dellinger interposed. “A common interest has reasserted itself,” he said, “but if there are any jokers here we are trying to bring them out. If they take over the national organization, it will be only the shell, because the rest of us will continue under other auspices.”

  After all the votes had been cast (the Coordinating Committee’s proposal on structure was adopted), Elizabeth Fusco, a worker for M.F.D.P. in S.N.C.C. overalls, asked, and received, permission to speak. She announced that the Mississippi delegation had just completed another soul session, said that “they felt they were the only people in the convention dealing with something warm—the pain they feel,” and asked that everyone remain after the plenary to join in. “Will you stay?” she cried. “Will you stay?” Delmar Scudder then climbed to the stage to announce that the Mississippi people were so pleased with their sessions that they were planning to hold a “soul press conference” and to look into “travelling soul workshops and soul education and soul recreation,” adding, “Maybe that’s what we have to offer the American people.”

  · · ·

  When the last soul session of the convention took place, in a room at the Statler Hilton, it was packed, not only with S.D.S. and Mississippi people but with other independents. The Y.S.A. (who were caucusing again) didn’t attend, nor did Emspak, who was on his way back to Madison. The session lasted for a full thirty-six hours, after which everyone claimed to feel refreshed. The Mississippi people returned to their work in their Mississippi counties, and S.D.S. organizers, who were concentrating on community action, returned to their communities and campuses.

  “I guess if you take the soul sessions, and the ideologues, and the kids who just can’t sleep on account of Vietnam, you can get a pretty clear idea which way all this churning up of institutions in search of values is going to lead,” said one delegate, enigmatically, as he boarded a bus to return in time for a class on Monday morning.

  Jacob Brackman

  JUNE 24, 1967

  The put-on is becoming a major communication option in intercourse between artist and critic, or, for that matter, between artist and society at large. This option has been, in some respects, overdue. Artists get asked a lot of stupid questions they don’t feel like answering. Before the advent of the put-on, however, outright reluctance garnered an artist a reputation for surliness; playing along, on an interviewer’s own terms, made him appear shallow or inarticulate. The Interview, a brilliant Ernest Pintoff–Mel Brooks animated cartoon of a few years back, epitomized this hangup. A Monk-type jazz musician, asked questions like “What does your piece express?,” mumbled involuted hipster incoherencies: “You know, man, I start wailing, I’m into that groove, I listen to the other cats, I just blow—you dig, man?” Recently, on a Channel 13 television broadcast, members of the Blues Project were asked this same question. Traditionally, musicians have prided themselves on their inability to talk with civilians. But, without hesitation, a member of the Project replied, “Man, this piece expresses what everybody feels about everything.” Asked how the group got together, he replied, “We’re still not together.” (A classic put-on ploy: knowingly embracing a wrong but semantically plausible meaning—the chief bravura of John Lennon’s prose.) When pressed, the Project member said they met as trolls in the Black Forest.

  In another recent Channel 13 interview, the jazz bass player Charlie Mingus was asked by Dennis Azzarella (who seemed almost a parody of unhip ofay) whether a violent Harlem ballet, Long Hot Summer, contained anti-white feeling.

  “There weren’t even any white people in it,” Mingus replied. “I didn’t see anything hostile, did you? Just a happy little Negro community beating each other up.”

  When pressed about the ballet’s “message,” Mingus said, “When I see your people dance, girls jumping around on the Ed Sullivan Show, I can’t see no messages.”

  “Are you putting me on?” Azzarella whined helplessly, glancing over at his cameraman.

  Ernst von Salomon achieved a masterpiece through the form of interview put-on in his novel Der Fragebogen, which he constructed as a detailed reply to a questionnaire that the Allies circulated in Germany as part of their de-Nazification program.

  The interview, indeed, offers a prime matrix for the put-on. This may be a perverse rejection of the interview proce
ss as a social symbol. (So one enters schools, jobs, the Army, etc.) It is also, surely, a pragmatic response to the difficulty of questions in general. Honest answers are hard, because they can be disadvantageous (How much money are you entitled to deduct from your income tax?), because they are unknown (What do you believe?), or because they are boring (What have you been doing with yourself?). The put-on resolves all difficulties—it breaks up sets, disorients the interviewer, ridicules the interview process, communicates “real” ideas and feelings yet deflates the seriousness of questions and replies. The now classic Playboy interview with Bob Dylan, by Nat Hentoff, must represent the apogee of this option. Hentoff deliberately “chose to play straight man in [my] questions, believing that to have done otherwise would have stemmed the freewheeling flow of Dylan’s responses.” Some excerpts from their dialogue may illustrate the complexity of put-on technique:

  PLAYBOY: What about [your old fans’] charge that you vulgarized your natural gifts?

  DYLAN: It’s like going out to the desert and screaming, and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I’m only twenty-four. These people that said this—were they Americans?