The Student Movement Collapses
Those who have lived in California, know it’s a deeply divided state. The big division is between the culture of northern California versus Southern California, or more directly San Francisco versus LA. I had friends and family in the Bay Area, and Alexa hoped the culture of the north would be more down to earth, less flashy and superficial. We moved back to Berkeley in the Fall of 1969.
The Berkeley I remembered from the early sixties was gone. In those days, the most exciting thing you could find in Berkeley was the Old Vienna Coffee Shop on Telegraph Avenue where you get a Viennese coffee, which was regular coffee with a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon, for twice the price of regular cup.
The first espresso coffee house, Il Piccoli’s, had opened on telegraph Avenue. It soon became the renowned Mediterraneum. Several extraordinary book shops like Cody’s followed. Berkeley Bohemians had always wanted a more sophisticated atmosphere and by 1970 they’d gotten it. You could score heroin on Telegraph Avenue.
It was clear that Nixon wasn’t getting out of Vietnam. The peace movement’s efforts to end the war were falling on deaf ears. Between 1965 and 1973, twenty-seven million young men had their lives disrupted by the draft as they reached the age of eighteen, politicizing an entire generation.
Their anti-war cause was aided and abetted by many returning Vietnam Vets. Between 1968 and 1970, two hundred thousand Vietnam vets, the troops that Nixon was pulling out of Vietnam, started coming home. Some were wounded. Some suffered from the psychological effects of combat, some were strung out on heroin, many of them had used Vietnam’s powerful marijuana. Most were disillusioned.
Some of the returning vets joined the peace movement, creating a powerful new anti-war force: Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Images of vets at anti-war rallies in their old army jackets, or in wheelchairs, many with long hair, some holding signs reading “End the War in Vietnam” and “We Won’t Fight Another Rich Man’s War” galvanized protesters.
Peace activists called for a moratorium for October 15th. It swept the country. In some communities, veterans read the names of the war dead. In others church bells were rung for each of the dead. Thousands of small and large towns from Muskogee, Oklahoma to Las Vegas, Nevada took part. One hundred thousand marched in Boston and New York City. Ten thousand gathered in Denver. Two million people participated.
Attorney General John Mitchell watched protesters exchange the American flag on the Justice Department flagpole for a Viet Cong flag. He later said he felt like he was witnessing the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1917.
After the Moratorium was over. Nixon spoke on November 3rd promising to continue the war to reach an honorable settlement. He warned that the enemy could no longer count on dissent in America to give them the victory they could not win on the battlefield. In the weeks after his speech, Nixon’s Gallup overall-approval rating soared to 68 percent, the highest it had been since he took office.
On Saturday, November 15, 1969, anti-war demonstrators descended on Washington. Five hundred thousand peaceful anti-war protesters—the biggest ever single anti-war protest in US history, with Senators Charles Goodell and George McGovern, David Dellinger, Coretta Scott King, and Dick Gregory, and musicians Peter, Paul & Mary, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger.
Nixon surrounded the white house with busses and let it be known that he was watching a football game.
Later that month Seymour Hersh published a report on the Vietnam village of Mai Lai. As many as 500 unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, had been systematically murdered in March of 1968. BBC News described the scene: “Soldiers went berserk, gunning down unarmed men, women, children and babies. … Women were gang raped; Vietnamese who had bowed to greet the Americans were beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some victims were mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into the chest. Time magazine summed up the significance of Hersh’s story: “[M]en in American uniforms slaughtered the civilians of My Lai, and in so doing humiliated the U.S. and called in question the U.S. mission in Viet Nam in a way that all the anti-war protesters could never have done.”
A majority of Americans were finally switching their allegiance to the war. In September a Gallup poll showed that 55 percent of Americans now believed the United States had made a mistake.
The American student movement was at its height. Several hundred underground antiwar newspapers with names like The Guardian, Ramparts, Berkeley Barb, East Village Other, Rags, Space City, Great Speckled Bird, Ann Arbor Sun, and Avatar, published weekly editions in every major city and on every major campus in the country. The newspapers had their own Liberation News Service with photographers and news analysts and correspondents in Cuba, North Vietnam, traveling with the Viet Cong, the early precursors of the Palestine Liberation Organization and guerrilla movements in Latin America.
And then, at this summit of success, the student’s leadership organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960, splintered. It was a complicated situation, but in the end a group of militant radicals calling themselves the Weathermen, took over SDS with a radical revolutionary agenda. They believed they could organize young workers to be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism. Weathermen identified with the Black Panthers. When the police killed Fred Hampton, the Weatherman issued a declaration of war upon the United States government.
The final SDS meeting ended with a speech by John Jacobs. He condemned the "pacifism" of white middle-class American youth. Black kids and poor kids experienced the violence the middle class kids avoided. Jacobs predicted a successful revolution and declared that youth were moving away from passivity and apathy and toward a new high-energy culture of "repersonalization" brought about by drugs, sex, and armed revolution. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," Jacobs said. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
Falling Apart
The Weathermen began a bombing campaign in 1970 when Silas and Judith Bissell placed a home-made bomb under the steps of an R.O.T.C. building at the University of Washington. The bomb didn’t go off because they mis-wired it. On March 6th Cathy Wilkerson’s town house in Greenwich Village, New York, blew up killing several weathermen who were in the process of assembling bombs. Bomb making was more difficult than it appeared.
Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on May 1st, 1970. High school and college campuses erupted. Five days later the National Guard opened fire with live ammunition on a group of students at Kent State. The students were unarmed, standing in a loose group at least a football field away. Sixty-two to sixty-seven bullets killed four kids. One girl bled to death while she waited for an ambulance that came forty-five minutes later. Nearby ambulances reserved for the national guard refused to help her. The authorities had escalated the force used against protesters. They were killing them.
Some Americans applauded the guard’s response. A sister of one of the victims later wrote, “… we were getting so much hate mail …’You’re a communist, and you’re communist-lovers, these students should have been shot.’” Only a few days later, on May 8th two-hundred construction workers attacked an anti-war rally on Wall Street chanting, “Kill the Commie bastards …” At Jackson State in Mississippi police shot and killed two African-American protesters.
After Kent State and Jackson, two and a half million students boycotted classes, shutting down seven hundred colleges. During that academic calendar year, nine thousand protests and eighty-four acts of arson and bombings plagued schools. Thirty ROTC buildings were fire bombed and governors ordered the National Guard to occupy 21 campuses in 16 states.
By 1970, military discipline in Vietnam was breaking down. American soldiers regularly refused commands to fight in the field and purposely avoided enemy engagements. The military recorded 68 cases of fragging—attacks by soldiers against their own officers—and many more cases went unreported. Army desertion rates rose 400 percent and in 1971 were the highest in modern history. GIs rioted at more than 30 military bases and military jails.
In the United States thousands of fugitives were on the run from the draft and draconian drug laws. The Nixon administration initiated the drug laws as a tool against students and African Americans. Nixon’s confidant and domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman explained later: “We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Federal prisons held 3,250 draft resisters and the Department of Defense reported that more than 400,000 men had deserted the armed forces. At least 100,000 people had fled to rural communes. As Tom Hayden later said, “There were different undergrounds. There was a Catholic underground against the draft. There were Panther undergrounds. There were draft resistance undergrounds. Drug dealer undergrounds, marijuana undergrounds. All across America, a lot of people were breaking one law or another.”
Nixon was not about to back down. On April 7th, 1970 Attorney General Mitchell told a Women's National Press Club Cocktail buffet, "Listen, there is no such thing as the New Left. This country is going so far right . . . you are not even going to recognize it.”
On August 24th, 1970, in Madison, Wisconsin, an anti-war group called the New Year’s Gang” blew up an army mathematics research building killing one student. In September, Timothy Leary, in prison on a minor drug charge, escaped with the help of the Weather Underground.
The Madison bombing appalled most people while the Weathermen engineered escape of Leary made them heroes. Here’s Tim Leary writing about the Weathermen in his Confessions of a Hope Fiend: “They are not in hiding but are invisible. They are in every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks, and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope, preparing for the future.” Listen to the revolutionary romance in those lines because it affected millions of Americans to one degree or another. “If you didn’t experience it back then,” Nixon aide Stephen Bull once said, “you have no idea how close we were, as a country, to revolution.”
What seemed least likely, was the possibility of changing the country though non-violent political action. The period of hopeful exuberance about collective, non-violent action to make social change was short-lived, maybe five or six years at most. It’s not that the movement stopped, it just changed direction from structural change to self-realization, the right to be who we wanted.
A piece of graffiti in the men’s room of Café Trieste in San Francisco said it all, “Off the pig inside before you off the pig on the street.” A noble thought, but of course multi-national corporations don't care if you're gay, transgender, white or black, for or against abortion so long as you’re cheap labor or a well-paid protector of the one percent and a high consumer willing to go into debt.
The post second world war progressive movement had been demolished by an anti-Communist Crusade. The 1960s progressive movement was destroyed by savage repression and drugs, both of which turned progressives inward.
An era of self-actualization was about to begin.
The Counter Culture
KQED-TV hired me as a television producer because I had worked in radio with audio tape. Portable videotape cameras were brand new, cumbersome, and not very good. Real filmmakers refused to touch them. I said I’d be happy to use videotape. KQED sent me out with a portable unit made up of a two-inch tape deck mounted in a Samsonite suitcase, which the cameraman carried on his back along with a modified studio camera. Its cumbersome weight limited the images you could capture in the field.
My other limitation was subject matter. KQED had been made aware of my past, and the station manager wouldn’t let me cover anything political. I agreed to report only on cultural issues. I did a series on sailing in the Bay and probably the first television series on organic gardening, why it was important and how to do it. We visited the then experimental organic garden at UC Santa Cruz. It was just four years old and still struggling when I arrived with a video camera crew and talked with the founder Alan Chadwick who taught students French intensive horticultural techniques, the use of composting and the complete elimination of pesticides.
The series focused on Lucy Hupp, whose marvelous garden of luscious vegetable and spectacular flowers became an inspiration for organic gardeners in the Bay Area.
What made the cultural beat so interesting, however, was its inclusion of one of the biggest stories of the early Seventies, the growing counterculture. The young people who took Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” were leaving the cities in droves and moving to free land communes.
My introduction to the rural communes was through Alica Bay Laurel. Alicia lived on Wheelers Ranch for over a year, kept a note book and drew wonderfully simple, elegant line drawings of rural communal life. She turned her notebooks into a self-published “how to” book called Living On The Earth. I heard about it after her first edition sold out 10,000 copies and Bennett Cerf picked it up for Random House. Living On The Earth eventually sold 150,000 copies.
Alicia threw herself into our documentary project. She took me up to Wheeler Ranch. It sat on a ridge with three sides falling into canyons. We drove in on the one passable but treacherous road, about a mile a half off the main highway, through stands of pine and oak. The road was later closed by a Sonoma County judge to all but Bill Wheeler and his family. After that, people had to walk to the ranch from a neighboring ridge.
It’s difficult to describe my first impressions of Wheeler as I now, with the eyes of an elder, look at pictures of the idiosyncratic structures people built in the late Sixties and early Seventies. They look like shacks, really, made of free objects or the cheapest building materials. When I visited with Alicia in 1971, I saw only freedom and hope, young people living out dreams of independence and righteous living.
There was running water and a large vegetable garden that Alicia seemed to keep going. The land was about four miles from the ocean. It was often fogged in, usually in the morning, but like most of coastal California, relatively mild.
Alicia introduced me to people, most of whose names I’ve forgotten, although they probably weren’t their real names anyway. Everyone wanted to get "back to the land" and live a life free of the phoniness and rigid time constrains of mainstream America. Little kids roamed freely over the ranch, living the kind of childhood I lived on Rosedale Road, playing in the woods and fields. There were lots off artists, musicians, poets and painters. There were old and young, hippies and bikers, drunken low lifers and even a cowboy or two. Clothing was optional. The night I stayed there was music. Alicia with her pure voice and guitar, Ramon Sender with his accordion and someone called Snakepit Eddie.
I wanted to animate Alicia’s illustrations for television, and we included a drawing about a trip through Wheeler Ranch composed on a long roll of paper. We steadily unrolled the paper scroll before a stationary camera, intercut with actual images of the Ranch.
The free land movement began with Morningstar, sometimes called the Digger Commune north of San Francisco, just outside of Sebastopol. Lou Gottlieb bought the land. He had made a lot money as bassist and comic spokesman for The Limeliters, a musical trio that produced fifteen albums in the Sixties. Gottlieb held a Ph.D in musicology. Some critics considered him an equivalent of Mort Sahl, Nichols and May, and Lenny Bruce. Gottlieb bought Morningstar in 1967, just as the Haight was being abandoned by the first wave of Bohemians.
Gottlieb said it was “Land Access To Which Is Denied No One.” Anyone could live there. No one would be kicked out, but people assumed that "if you told no one to leave, the land selected the people who lived on it.”
Most locals hated the communes. Sonoma County finally placed a permanent injunction forbidding anyone but Gottlieb's family from living at Morningstar. Gottlieb resisted. The county bulldozed the houses three times and charged Gottlieb for doing so. He received multiple contempt of court charges, many fines and was even jailed for a week.
Bulldozers finally destroyed Morning Star in 1973. Wheeler Ranch was destroyed the same year. On May 20th, the big Cats leveled homes and everything in them, tearing up and mangling the landscape at Wheeler Ranch. To save the land after the bulldozers were shut off for the night, people burned the remaining houses to the ground.
Other free land communes, like the Hog Farm in New Mexico and Vermont, were active throughout the decade. In addition to struggles with local communities, free land communes had their own internal problems. Along with idealists came free loaders, kids really, who had everything to take and nothing to give back. They drank, partied, slept and left a mess to clean up. But others who passed through the free land communes learned essential skills, and many went one to homestead on their own.
Communal Living
Alexa and I bought a small house on Francisco Street in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. must have planned to stay, because I poured endless work into fixing the house up, stripping white paint from the redwood wainscoting in the dining and living rooms , smashing up half the concrete driveway with a 12 pound sledge to put in a vegetable garden.
But single-family dwellings were not where it was at in the early 1970s, at least not in the Bay Area of California. The idea that every man (or family) needed their own castle seemed absurd. What sense did it make for everyone to own their own tools … a gas-powered lawnmower to cut a tiny lawn once every two weeks, for example. Live together. Reinvent the basic family unit. Share tools and responsibilities. Cook dinner once a week. Clean up once a week. Share in childcare.
Communes sprang up in Berkeley, most with a political emphasis and revolutionary names. The Red Family on Bateman where Tom Hayden lived for a while, or Red Sun Rising in several houses on Parker and Hearst Streets, or the Red Mountain Tribe on Ashby, the Fish-Clark House on Dwight, McGee’s Farm, the Circus, Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm, and the Dragon’s Eye founded by Michael Rossman among others.
Alexa and I formed a commune called Rabbit Gulch just across the Berkeley line in Oakland with two other couples, each with a small child. There was a floating group of three or four others who lived in Rabbit Gulch on a semi regular basis. What could go wrong?
At its best, Rabbit Gulch was wonderful. Cost of living dropped considerably, as we shared meals, tools, home repair and baby-sitting. We tore out the back wall of the house and reframed with wide glass doors opening onto the back yard. We put in a large garden. We mounted a sit-down vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner for 26 people in our dining room. We sponsored evenings of folk singing and dramatic readings of poetry.
Like most communes in Berkeley, we knew someone with a country home, in our case Danny and Hilary Goldstine who had a large piece of land in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They blasted a huge pool out of solid granite, built a comfortable house and most weekends twenty or thirty people from Berkeley would descent for a couple of days of sun and song, speculating about revolution in a naked fog of marijuana and LSD. Michael Rossman, a frequent guest, called it “the wedding in the War,” the need to keep living and squeezing happiness out of life even in the dire times of war and repression.
Most people in this larger communal group were young, in their twenties. They were dealing with new careers, new babies, illicit attractions and dangerous flirtations. In the nuclear families we all rejected, these conflicts would be worked out between two people struggling to accommodate themselves to one another. In a communal situation the fights quickly became public and degenerated into general ideological differences. At Rabbit Gulch it frequently came down to power relationships between men and women.
It was about time to have a serious discussion about the role of women in society. Throughout the civil rights and anti-war movements women had played a crucial role, but it was distant from leadership and too often consisted only of fetching coffee, typing papers, cleaning up, and tending to the sick and wounded. Dona Mosses, who led the freedom summer voter drive in 1964 was an exception. That summer was the beginning of the second wave of the women’s movement.
In the first wave, after a much more prolonged and brutal fight than our textbooks mention, women in America won the right to vote in 1920. The struggle to empower Mississippi African Americas in the 1960s to take control of their livers brought on the second wave. Women began to insist on their rightful place.
They started reading Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic, The Second Sex, (translated into English for the first time in 1953). De Beauvoir argued that women would never become truly successful until they ended the wage gap and shared domestic duties with men. It was difficult, she said, because women feared that success would lead to angry husbands or no husband at all. It had to do with the way they were raised. Girls were told to follow the duties of their mothers, whereas boys are told to exceed the accomplishments of their fathers.
In 1962, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which spoke for many college-educated women who felt trapped and unfulfilled. The women in Rabbit Gulch were all fully employed and housework was shared equally, but everyone seemed to be holding "consciousness-raising groups" and Rabbit Gulch got involved. In the women’s meetings, they exchanged stories about family life, sex and work. The men pretended to be similarly engaged, but usually drank beer and played poker.
One Step At a Time
President Nixon’s cynical “war on drugs” made money available to public broadcasting for programs on drug abuse. KQED received a grant to do four programs on successful drug-rehabilitation programs. It seemed like a safe subject for a cultural correspondent, and I was asked to produce them.
I traveled through the Bay Area on research and even went down to Los Angeles to look at Synanon. I interviewed directors of a large variety of rehabilitation efforts and all the conversations went pretty much the same way. At first, a rather formal explanation of the treatment plan and some of the early results, which were always favorable. Pushed a little further, the directors admitted that after the addicts left the program, the majority eventually resumed their addiction.
I wasn’t filming and I didn’t carry a tape recorder on my research trips. At about this time into in my conversations, the directors would hesitate, and ask if I really wanted to know the truth “off camera.” A doctor at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley then explained that he was a weekend chipper, taking heroin Friday and Saturday nights. He asked me with a glint in his eye if I’d ever tried heroin. The director of a half-way house for recovering addicts was a heavy pot smoker. In some clinics methadone was being used to wean addicts off heroine. The doctors all knew, of course, that heroin had been developed to wean addicts off opium!
One exception might have been Alcoholics Anonymous, which had been growing across America since the 1930s, but it was hard to get reliable statistics. Certainly, those who stayed in the program for several years had a much higher chance of recovery, but some statistics suggested 81% dropped out in their first year. Alcoholics Anonymous staff wouldn’t talk to me on or off Camera.
Neither the founder nor staff of another supposedly successful program wouldn’t talk to me either. Synanon was founded in 1958 by an ex-addict, Chuck Dieterick. It worked by replacing whatever addiction you came in with for an addiction to the founder. During the time I was working on the series, Dieterick decided to quit smoking. Everyone in Synanon quit the next day.
Instead of 4 half hours, I gave KQED a one-half hour program called One Step at a Time, based on everything people would NOT say on camera. Actors read the script. KQED gave me a talented 16mm cameraman to film images of the physical and social conditions that seemed to lead people to addition. No short-term anti-drug program really worked. Our documentary was stark and pessimistic, not at all what the drug administration had in mind, but its honesty won One Step at a Time a San Francisco State Journalism award, my first for television.
Spiraling addiction rates and our inability to deal with them, seemed just another sign of a collapsing society, unable to fulfill basic human needs. Movies of that time caught the drift. Robert Altman’s Mash with the theme song, “Suicide is painless, it leads to many changes …” Mash was set in Korea but everyone knew it was a comment on the stupidity of Vietnam. As was Catch 22, which Mike Nichols made from Joseph Heller’s great book of the same name. The madness of the sacred World War II (fought by “The Great Generation”), in which Milo Minderbinder sells his flier’s parachute silk to make money for “the syndicate.”
Michelangelo Antonioni’s bleak Zabriskie Point, where another counter-culture hero is shot down by the police and his grieving girlfriend imagines the destruction of a mega-mansion in the Arizona desert, a scene that Antonini ran for a full five minutes. Macabe & Mrs Miller where Warren Beaty, the small businessman is gunned down by a corporation because he won’t accept their buy-out price while Julie Christie smokes opium. Or The Godfather, which some Americans thought might have been a more honest look at advanced capitalism than most people wanted to admit.
Even the iconic American Western took a dark turn in 1969 when Sam Peckinpah turned the Western on its head in The Wild Bunch by making his aging heroes lack of a moral compass and the cruelty of children its central points.
This culture of hopelessness made Alexa and me think about taking Leary’s advice and dropping out of this toxic environment. I enjoyed my work, we had had our first child and life in the commune was comfortable, but Alexa didn’t like her job writing for a Rolling Stone spinoff called Rags, on the counterculture.