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

by Larry Schweikart

  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.”126 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.127 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.’”128 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.129

  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.”130

  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.”131 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.”132 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.133

  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.”134 LSD spread throughout the subculture and by the 1960s, dropping acid was equated with a religious exerience by Beat poet Allen Ginsburg.135

  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.”136 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.”137 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.”138 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 expe
rimentation, 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.139 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.”140 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.141 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.”142 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.”143 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.

  Hendrix, already a guitar legend, wrapped up Woodstock with a “truly apocalyptic” vision of a “battlefield, [with] zombies crawling over a field littered with paper cups, plastic wrappers, and half-eaten food, gnawing on corn husks, slobbering over ketchup-and mustard-smeared half-eaten hot dog rolls sprinkled with ants….”144 The event generated the single largest pile of garbage of any event in human history, and when the perpetrators departed, they left the mess for someone else to clean up.

  Less than a week before Woodstock, on August 9, 1969, the cult followers of Charles Manson broke into the house of director Roman Polanski in Bel Air, California. Polanski was away, but his beautiful pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four of her friends were home. Manson’s gang—though not Manson himself—stabbed and butchered the houseguests, smearing slogans on the walls in the victims’ blood. Reflecting the depravity of the counterculture, the underground paper Tuesday’s Child named Manson its man of the year. Yippie leader Jerry Rubin said he fell in love with Manson’s “cherub face and sparkling eyes,” and Bernardine Dohrn, leader of the Weathermen, exclaimed, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into [Sharon Tate’s] stomach! Wild!”145 If anything, the Manson murders hurled icy water on the sixties myth that drugs made people holy, nonviolent, or pure.

  At any rate, the drug culture and the so-called hippie movement never amounted to more than a well-publicized fringe. It certainly did not outnumber the body of apathetic or apolitical youth, and, even though it enjoyed better publicity, the hippie movement may have had fewer adherents than a growing conservative student movement that had taken root two years before the Port Huron Statement. The media did not view conservative youth groups, such as the Young Americans for Freedom, as newsworthy, and thus they never received the attention or coverage of the radicals, but they were influential nonetheless. Traditionalists and conservatives, those that Richard Nixon would call the Silent Majority, all faded into relative nonexistence from the media’s perspective. It was much more interesting to cover a firebombing or a riot.

  Protests, Mobs, and the Media

  Given the radicals’ dominance of the antiwar movement, it should not be surprising that “the demonstrations at the time of the Democratic convention in August 1968, and the moratorium events of October 1969 were orchestrated by organizations with changing names but with essentially the same cast of leaders.”146 On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson shocked the country with an unexpected announcement that he would not again seek the Democratic nomination for president. Polls had indicated that he probably would lose, especially with a challenge from the dovish side of the Democratic Party. Equally shocking to some was that one of the emerging “doves,” Robert Kennedy, had abruptly repudiated his brother’s war. Suddenly many who still yearned for the presidency of John Kennedy—and the magic of Camelot—found him available again in the person of Robert. But just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy, giving a speech in Los Angeles, was killed by Sirhan Sirhan. The motive given for the assassination—Sirhan was an Arab nationalist—remains puzzling to this day: Kennedy did not have a reputation as a strong friend of Israel, although he did come from New York, which had a strong Jewish lobby. Kennedy’s assassination left a void among the antiwar Left in the Democratic Party, whose dove leadership now devolved to the rather bland Eugene McCarthy. Certainly, though, the antiwar Left would not unite behind Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.

  A tireless legislator and principal author of the affirmative action laws, Humphrey lacked the commanding presence of a national leader and could only have won by sidestepping the turmoil that the antiwar elements promised to bring to the Democrats’ convention. Those groups sought to nominate McCarthy, a sincere-looking, soft-spoken senator from Minnesota who reminded people of a wise uncle. His appearance enhanced his antiwar positions, which were in many respects dangerous. Between 10,000 and 20,000 protesters moved into Chicago, with some of the most radical elements threatening to pour LSD into the city’s water or throw acid into the eyes of policemen. Others promised to lead a 150,000-person march on the Amphitheater. Democratic mayor Richard Daley, having just regained control of the city from race riots, had no intention of allowing a new group to disrupt the Windy City when he authorized police to “shoot to kill” any suspected looters.

  Daley placed the nearly 12,000-strong Chicago police on twelve-hour shifts, augmented by 7,500 army troops airlifted in from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. He dispatched police to guard Chicago’s water supply and assembled “Daley dozers,” jeeps specially outfitted with rolls of barbed wire on the front to clear streets of demonstrators. More important, he had already infiltrated the radical groups, sabotaging their schemes to acquire buses, and giving out false information at phone banks.147 After weeks of denying the protesters march permits, Daley relented. The first riot broke out on
August 25, 1968, when the police charged Lincoln Park, driving the peaceniks out. One policeman told a reporter, “The word is out to get newsmen,” and Daley himself implied that journalists would not be protected.148

  A symbiotic relationship, which developed between the Chicago protesters and the news media, accelerated. But the journalists also failed to see the adroit manipulation by the demonstrators. Witnesses reported an absence of violence until the mobs saw television cameras, at which point they began their act. A later study by the national Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence reported that demonstrators stepped up their activities when reporters and photographers appeared, and, worse, camera crews “on at least two occasions did stage violence and fake injuries (emphasis ours).”149 The city of Chicago issued a report on the riots charging that the news media was guilty of “surprising naïveté,” but in reality the television cameras especially had encouraged and facilitated the rioters, and the images shifted all the blame to the police, who had their share of malignant club-wielding patrolmen. Advocates for maintaining public order were few and far between: NBC Today Show host Hugh Downs asked his viewers if the label “pigs” didn’t apply to the Chicago police. Chet Huntley of NBC complained that “the news profession…is now under assault by the Chicago police,” and Walter Cronkite said on the air that the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” made him want to “pack my bags and get out of this city.”150 Such rhetoric quickly faded as the media quietly reaffirmed its support of the Democratic Party in the general election.