BOOKS / Jonah Raskin : Blake Slonecker's 'New Dawn' Tells the LNS Story

A New Dawn for the New Left:
Blake Slonecker's valuable history of LNS

“By distributing a common news packet to underground outlets, LNS enabled local rags to cover national and international news to an unprecedented degree, curbing their isolation and giving shape to a vibrant Movement print culture.” -- Blake Slonecker

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / May 14, 2013

[A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties by Blake Slonecker (2012: Palgrave Macmillan); Hardback; 267 pages; $85.]

It’s hard to imagine anyone paying $85 -- the list price -- for Blake Slonecker’s comprehensive book about Liberation News Service (LNS), its eclectic members, and its curious reincarnations and permutations. Published in December 2012, A New Dawn for the New Left offers a close look at LNS, the radical organization that lasted more than a decade and that provided a real alternative to the manufactured news and information disseminated by the Associated Press (AP).

Slonecker, a professor of history at Waldorf College in Iowa, captures the spirit of the freewheeling Sixties, though he’s also a compassionate critic who recognizes the excesses and the flaws of the radical movement and the counterculture that accompanied it in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s not that the book isn’t worth reading. On the contrary, it offers a valuable portrait of LNS as a political collective that aimed to put into practice the rousing slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): “building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” The book ought to be available at a reasonable price and not priced out of the hands of readers.

Of course, Slonecker isn’t to blame for the $85 sticker shock. His publisher is.

The book begins where it ought to begin -- with the notorious heist of the LNS printing press by its two cofounders, the legendary Marshall Bloom and Raymond Mungo. It follows Bloom and Mungo to Montague Farm in Massachusetts, traces the evolution of the rural commune, its deep rural roots, and turn to anti-nuclear protest. At the same time, it looks closely at the LNS collective that regrouped in New York without its troublesome founders.

Slonecker believes that the New York office of LNS was located in Harlem. In the first sentence, he writes, “On the morning of August 11, 1968, something brazen was happening in the Harlem basement of Liberation News Service.” Throughout the book he refers to LNS’s Harlem office.

As a longtime resident of the neighborhood and as a contributor to LNS from 1967 to 1970 who often attended meetings, I can say with a great deal of certainty that LNS was not in Harlem. It was in a basement on Claremont Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, not far from 125th Street and Broadway. Claremont Avenue was a stone’s throw from Columbia University; LNS’s geographical proximity to academia was more significant than its proximity to Harlem.

LNS staff members such as Allen Young, who played a pivotal role in the early days, graduated from Columbia and from the Washington Post and brought to the New Left’s pioneering news organization a wealth of experience in both academia and professional journalism.

Others at LNS came from similar backgrounds: Andy Marx dropped out of Harvard to join LNS; Mark Feinstein came from The New York Times. Not everyone, of course, was an Ivy Leaguer. Katherine Mulvihill, whose picture appears on the cover of the book, was a high school dropout.

Slonecker does a good job of describing the internal politics, including the sexism, at LNS and the role of the collective within the larger political world of the New Left. He looks at LNS and at the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and at gay and women’s liberation, as well as Third World and working class struggles. He also provides vivid portraits of Mungo and Bloom, Marty Jezer, Harvey Wasserman, Sam Lovejoy, and Allen Young. The Rag Blog’s Thorne Dreyer makes a few brief appearances, and so does Vicky Smith.

What Slonecker doesn’t do -- and that he might have done -- is to describe the basement office in more detail. After all, the workplace environment contributed to the state of mind and to the culture of LNS itself. The graffiti in the bathroom was a veritable museum of New Left and counterculture slogans. My favorite was “Stones Cut Beatles.” I also remember the LNS ritual of watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News during the War in Vietnam.

Slonecker might have provided more details about the actual production of the mimeographed LNS packets that went out to underground newspapers all around the country -- to The Seed in Chicago, The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, The Barb in Berkeley, and many others. The cover photo by Anne Dockery, shows Katherine Mulvihill at a machine; a description of the work itself would help.

If LNS went out to underground papers, the papers also flooded the office. I’d spend many an afternoon sitting around with the roar of the Gestetner machines in the background reading The Seed, The Barb, The Rag, and finding out what was happening on a grassroots level in Chicago, Berkeley, and Austin.

LNS was a kind of living library, a real movement hub and, not surprisingly, movement honchos often visited. The New Left, including SDS and the Yippies, took it seriously. When I wrote a review critical of Jerry Rubin’s Do It!, Rubin called LNS and complained bitterly. How could LNS not rave about him and his book? he wanted to know, and was told that LNS wasn’t in the business of writing advertising copy and blurbs for New Left and countercultural writers. Hadn’t he heard about freedom of the press?

A New Dawn for the New Left offers ample remarks from the likes of John Wilcock, the cofounder of the Underground Press Syndicate, and Teddy Franklin, part of LNS’s early core group. “We’re paying LNS $180 a year,” Wilcock complained, “to send us whatever they damn well feel like sending us.”

Some of my own pieces for LNS were widely picked up by papers -- including a critique of hippie culture entitled “The Children of Imperialism” and a review of a concert by the Rolling Stones I did with Franklin. But other pieces -- about books such as B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre -- hardly proved exciting to editors at the feisty rags around the country.

Still, it was to LNS’s credit that odd, quirky pieces were published -- sometimes by leading movement figures like Abbie Hoffman who wrote with real passion about Marshall Bloom’s suicide.

LNS lasted until about 1980, but by then its glory days had long since passed. Allen Young had moved to rural Massachusetts to live on a commune with other gay men. I’d relocated to California. Thorne Dreyer and Vicky Smith had gone to Houston to start Space City!

By the summer of 1972, veteran LNS members such as Teddy Franklin were lamenting the decline and fall of the underground press and bemoaning the sinking numbers of subscribers to LNS. “I’m hard put to name 10 underground newspapers I have any respect for at this point,” Franklin wrote in 1972. “Let’s be honest, we’re losing our readers out from under our feet.”

In part, what happened was a shift from underground newspapers to what were called “sea-level” weeklies or monthlies, such as University Review and The Chicago Reader.

In the 1970s, papers such as the Village Voice grew fatter and fatter with ad revenue and took over the role that had been played by the underground papers. Moreover, reporters for LNS, such as Mike Schuster, moved to much more reputable news organizations such as PBS. The New Left and its countercultural institutions had provided a training ground for a whole generation of editors, publishers, and journalists who went on to work for mainstream magazines and newspapers.

In a sense, LNS and the underground papers died not because they failed but because they succeeded. As one New Leftist put it, “Nothing sucks like success.”

Slonecker’s book makes a substantial contribution to the literature about the Sixties. It joins the company of recent, outstanding books about the underground press such as John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters, Sean Stewart’s wonderfully illustrated On the Ground, and Ken Wachsberger’s multi-volume Voices from Underground. Along with them and young writers like Thai Jones, Slonecker belongs to the generation of historians reinterpreting radicalism in America.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Jonah Raskin : Interviewing Journalist and Gay Activist Allen Young

Allen Young, 2009. Photo by Diane Keijzer.
In and out of the closets:
An interview with journalist Allen Young

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2011

A week before Allen Young celebrated his 70th birthday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill legalizing same sex-marriage. The sexual revolution that had begun in the 1960s reached a crescendo, and there was much to celebrate at Young’s birthday bash.

Born in Liberty, New York six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he’s been a life-long advocate of personal and political liberty, and all his life he’s been opposed to war. Since 1970, Young has been active in gay liberation and has written extensively about the oppression and the liberation of gay men and lesbian women.

In addition to books such as Gays Under the Cuban Revolution and anthologies he has edited with Karla Jay, such as Out of the Closets, he has written about his own region in Make Hay While the Sun Shines.

Once a reporter for The Washington Post, and, at the height of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a mainstay at Liberation News Service (LNS), where he was a colleague of Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Young lives now in Massachusetts, writes a regular column for the Athol Daily News, and is an active citizen in his community.

In this interview with long-time Rag Blog contributor Jonah Raskin, he looks back at his life in journalism, the New Left, and Gay Liberation, and offers his reflections on the United States today: the mass media, right-wing politicians, and small towns.


Jonah Raskin: You’ve been a journalist most of your life. What’s the single most important change you’ve seen in your lifetime?

Allen Young: When I was growing up, the word homosexual rarely appeared in print. I never saw anything in print about gay people that was positive. That’s changed. There’s an often-repeated joke now that “the love that dare not speak its name won’t shut up.”

If there’s one story you’re proudest of writing what story is it?

It took courage to write about the persecution of gay men and lesbians in “revolutionary” Cuba. I’m particularly proud because I did not make excuses for this persecution, as others did, by blaming it on machismo and the Roman Catholic heritage in Cuba. Rather, I focused on the fact that this was ideology imported by Cuba from the international communist movement, going back to Stalinism, and enforced by a police state.

There has been a lot of attention recently to the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s. What would you say was your major contribution to the underground papers?

Although leadership was starting to become a dirty word in the late 1960s, often a synonym for elitism, I played a leadership role at Liberation News Service (LNS). I helped to mold the organization in the late 1960s into a well-organized collective with a stipend for its staff and a commitment to sending out news reliably.

Do you feel oppressed as a gay man in American society today?

I have great joy in my life, being partnered for 31 years, and with many supportive friends both gay and straight. But feelings of oppression linger because millions of Americans still regard people like me as inhuman, immoral, disgusting, and even monstrous. What also weighs heavily on me is the oppression experienced by gays and lesbians in nations around the world, especially Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

You’ve been active in the gay liberation movement over the past 40 years or so. Was life hell before gay liberation?

Despite many outward signs of personal success, such as winning scholarships, becoming editor-in-chief of my college’s daily newspaper, having articles published in The New York Times, and later becoming respected in the New Left, I lived daily with a powerful feeling that I could never tell anyone who loved me (much less strangers) about my true nature. That kind of self-loathing and hiding is indeed hellish.

What would you say changed for you most of all after the arrival of gay liberation?

I could feel good about myself and I could be honest. That was huge. Leftwing ideology did nothing to liberate me as a gay person and this realization led me first to question dogma and then to reject it and all forms of zealotry.

When you see gay men these days who don’t know their history what might you say to them?

Don’t take for granted the freedoms you have and be aware that many people, even those around you, are living in fear. The lives of gay people were very restricted in the past, and a political movement was needed to bring about change. In more than half the states in the U.S., it’s still legal for employers to fire gay workers just because they are gay, for example. A movement is still needed.

Who would you say are the unsung heroes of gay liberation?

The Stonewall Rebellion took place in 1969. There were no more than 1,000 gay men and lesbians (as well as bisexuals and transgendered people) active nationwide in the post-Stonewall gay movement. In New York, there were only a few dozen people who attended meetings of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and who demonstrated against the police, the media, and psychiatrists. To name a few names of heroes from those days: Ron Auerbacher, Bob Bland, Pat Maxwell, Step May, Roni Schnitzer, Ron Ballard, Jerry Hoose, Dana Gillespie, Marty Steffens, Suzanne Bevier, Mark Silber.

You’ve lived in rural Massachusetts for decades? What do you like about rural life?

The challenge of finding a way to relate to people with different worldviews and experiences. In urban environments, and in college towns, it’s too easy to conform and relate exclusively to people who agree with you. Life here is more “real.”

Allen Young, then with LNS, at an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. in 1969. Photo by David Fenton.

Do you think you’ve been shaped by one decade, say the 1960s or the 1970s, more than any other decade?

Every decade of my life shaped me. I think of myself as an aging hippie and a Sixties person. I feel a special affinity with the many people who drastically altered their lives in the 1960s to combat the Vietnam War and “the establishment,” and who enjoyed marijuana and LSD, but much of this continued into the 1970s.

What do you miss about urban life?

Not a thing.

What were the worst aspects of the New Left?

I have negative feeling, even shame, about the fascination with and glamorizing of armed struggle that was common in the New Left. I feel particularly bad about our insistence on displaying the flag of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. While opposing the war, we might have acknowledged that the NLF’s vision for Vietnam did not include civil liberties and democracy. New Leftists did a good job of expanding the ranks, but we did not do a great job of communicating with the rest of America.

And what about the best aspects?

The New Left emerged from the repressive McCarthy era and rejected the rigid and often dishonest dogma of the Old Left. Influenced by the beatniks, New Leftists challenged repressive American culture, including repressive drug laws, while celebrating the joyous and mind-expanding aspects of cannabis and psychedelics. The New Left presented a vision that would end racism, militarism, jingoism, and the exploitation of workers. There were hints of a loving community, though male chauvinism was a barrier.

What has surprised you the most about American life in, say, the last decade or so?

The widespread support for right-wing media, especially Fox News and stars such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I’m also surprised at the extent to which people have embraced political figures I find extremely unattractive and witless such as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. I’m surprised how few people are outraged about the excesses of the rich and powerful.

What if anything would you do differently if you could go back and redo your own life?

I would have come out as gay in my teenage years so I could have enjoyable sex and romance in my life when I was my most youthful. Fortunately, I did have an important and exciting physical and emotional relationship with a college classmate, but it was characterized by a lot of fear and I could not make it endure despite efforts to do so.

Are you hopeful about the future and if so why?

I have mixed feelings about the future. I’m hopeful because I see many young people acquiring an interest in sustainable agriculture. I’m pessimistic because I see powerful forces throughout the world promoting violent solutions to problems and doing nothing to stop global warning and environmental degradation.

What do you look forward to in your own life?

I look forward to remaining active and healthy and enjoying the companionship of my long-term partner, and facing death with dignity. I hope that I won’t suffer from a debilitating disease and die a slow death. I would like to have physician-assisted suicide available to me if I need it.

You have friends and neighbors in your neck of the woods. What do you like most about them?

They make me laugh and appreciate my sense of humor. They share my appreciation of small-town life, the concept of community and respect and love for the natural world. It’s rare, around here, to find people motivated by greed or hatred, or who use violence to solve problems.

What’s best about small town America?

The small towns in New England, at least the ones I know best, accept nonconformity and have a strong sense of community. I like the quiet of country living and the opportunity to grow my own food.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and teaches media at Sonoma State University. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Sue Katz : May Day in Vermont

Poet Verandah Porche (left) and author Sue Katz. Photos from Sue Katz, Barry Hock, and Consenting Adult.
May Day in Vermont

By Sue Katz / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2011

I think you'll get some enjoyment from reading this by Sue Katz, one of my friends from the "old days," a contributor to the anthology Out of the Closets, and a woman with a lovely checkered past and present (and future!).

I was present at this gathering, too, on April 30, a day short of May Day.

What Sue doesn't mention is that this is the Packers Corners commune, founded in 1968, one of the pioneering "back to the land" places in our region (about 30 miles from my house in Massachusetts). Many people present resided at the former LNS-MA (Liberation News Service) commune in Montague, Massachusetts, birthplace of the modern no-nukes movement.

The founders were mostly friends from Boston University, only a few years out of college. This is the place made somewhat famous by one of its former residents, Ray Mungo, who wrote about it in a book he titled Total Loss Farm. (His name for the farm, not the farm's actual name.)

So many wonderful people, and a joyful atmosphere. Sad moments, too, remembering people who have died, including the most recent death (from brain cancer) of Tony Mathews, hippie carpenter extraordinaire of Gill, MA, [LNS founder] Marshall Bloom (I called out his name), Fritz Hewitt, Marty Jezer, and others.

-- Allen Young / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2011

May Day gathering at Packers Corners. Allen Young is third from the right.
PACKERS CORNERS, Vermont -- Although I do not have the time for this, what with trying to get all my work done before my trip abroad, I am unable to deprive myself of my annual trip to Vermont for May Day. The event is held at The Farm, founded by my college posse in 1968, and overseen to this day by my poet darling Verandah Porche. (She's in the red blouse and long skirt in the photos.)

I arrive on Friday afternoon in time to help unravel the silk streamers still wound tight around our May Pole since last year. We sit outside under the welcome sun hoping for a good day tomorrow, when people will come from all over the surrounding countryside and others, like us, from Boston.

Our main task completed, I take a temporary departure from Verandah to go just down the road to the 1840 home of my book binder friend Susan and my antiques expert friend Gilbert. They are putting me up and feeding and watering me.


“Feeding” is too pale a term for what goes on. We’re talking about delicious cheeses and dips to get the juices going and then a dinner of onion-stuffed roasted moist chicken, rich mashed potatoes, for which Gilbert is famous, asparagus that has been kept on ice until it is time to be cooked to an uncanny perfection, eggplant wraps smothered in tomato (from the garden) sauce, all followed by an exquisite apple pie (with ice cream), the top of which is swollen with crispy deliciousness.

Susan stands up to start to clear the table and freezes. “Everyone,” she says to us in a low voice, “stand up and be still.” We obey, looking out the windows overlooking the rear deck. They keep a bird feeder there, feeding to the tune of 10 pounds of black oil sunflower seeds per week, attracting an ornithologist’s wet dream’s array of birds.

But tonight that is not all the feeder is attracting. On its hind legs, a 300-pound black bear is sucking its dinner from one of the feeders. It sits on the deck on its fat butt, a luxurious fall of shimmery long fur cascading around its back, satiating a big case of the munchies. I am frozen. What do I know? I’m from Pittsburgh, for gawd’s sake. “Camera!” I yell, “someone get a camera.”

Gilbert meanwhile runs outside to have words with the bear, who does not seem to welcome confrontation. The bear returns to four well-padded feet and reluctantly, having been shoo’d loudly a few more times, ambles around the back to the side of the house and then up the lawn to cross the road. No one gets a photo in time.

Susan is unhappy that this beautiful creature has been chased away, while inside the house we follow our precious sighting of the bear by switching from window to window, circling the walls for the best view as the animal gracefully distances itself from us.

We sit outside on the deck around a fire pit on steel legs into which Gilbert feeds board after board to warm us up. Susan cannot get over the bulky beauty of the glorious animal and she and Gil reminisce about the time another black bear came right into their living room. Or was it this same one when it was younger? If so, she is so glad it has survived hunting season.

We turn in around 10 p.m. and sleep in the intense darkness that one only gets in deeply rural settings -- and maybe dungeon cells. In the middle of the night there is a screaming crash of glass. I am startled awake and think that it must be a kerosene lamp and perhaps kerosene is all over the floor.

Within seconds the light comes on. It is Susan. I have figured out that some tossing and turning has shifted one of the four pillows sideways, knocking over what used to be a kerosene lamp and what is now an electric lamp, as I know so well, having turned it off when it was sleep-time. In bare feet, Susan tiptoes through the hunks of frosted glass, lifting what is left of the shade to a sideboard. She says that she and Gil were afraid that it was the bear, making its way back in.

We leave the glass with the intention of cleaning it up in the morning light.


Saturday

I wake early and sweep up the glass with a hand brush and dust pan. Gilbert is already preparing a scrumptious breakfast of eggs, sausage, sautéed potatoes and challah. Susan is dressing for her morning climb up the mountain with Verandah and I am checking my email.

Just before one we make our way to The Farm bearing contributions to the pot luck that precedes the annual May Day ceremony. Happily I meet up with my dear niece, nephew, and grandniece Sadie (otherwise known as Verandah’s daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, respectively). Out of my little bag of treats, the beach ball is the biggest hit -- once poor Matt depletes himself of oxygen blowing it up, and I actually get to play with Sadie, a rare treat for me.

The morning had started foggy but the sun clearly wants to participate in this day of joy and is now burning down on flesh made vulnerable by an endless winter. It is a glorious day -- sunny but not scorching. As I explain to one new guest, a young guy, this particular May Day celebration combines three themes: the international day of worker solidarity; the pagan festival of Spring; and the celebration of the end of a harsh Vermont winter that can cause isolation as folks hunker down around their stoves.

I see old friends (like from the '60s) and newish ones and once the many dozens of guests have cleaned their plates it is time to mount the mountain overlooking our once-and-future commune. One friend hoists the May Pole and many others grab one of the colorful streamers and up we go, followed by music makers and stragglers.

At the top, the May Pole is inserted into its usual hole and propped up until stable, so that the rest of us can wind around and around, weaving in and out, both clockwise and counter, to the tunes of Peter Gould’s hand accordion.


Once done, we stand and sit in a circle while the singing commences. The scope of talents and the range of union, worker, and sentimental tunes is startling, and the support of the amateurs by the professionals -- like Patty Carpenter and Melissa Shetler -- and Verandah Porche -- is emblematic of the kind of supportive, collaborative community these folks have constructed.

As always, Verandah asks us to invite in those who have died -- and people around the circle call out names of mutual friends and then individual loved ones. One guy calls out, “My parents!” -- and dozens of echoes of “and mine!” reverberate from around the circle. We are orphaned, but we have each other and the generations behind us.

[Sue Katz is an author, blogger, journalist, unionist, and rebel whose rants and reviews are posted on her blog, Consenting Adult.]

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Jonah Raskin : Yippie Jerry Rubin's 'Do It!' Turns Forty

Image by rhpepsi1 / Amazon.com.
Do It! does it:
Jerry Rubin's Yippie classic makes it to 40

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 31, 2010

Jerry Rubin, the youthful Yippie who turned into a middle aged Yuppie, didn’t coin the popular phrase, “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30.” Jack Weinberg was the first to speak those words at Berkeley during one of the battles of the Free Speech Movement (FSM).

Rubin liked the idea and the phrase; he took it over and used it so often that folks in the counterculture thought it belonged to him. To give him credit, Rubin gave Weinberg credit in Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution -- a classic about cultural revolution in America -- which was published in 1970 when he was already over the age of 30.

Rubin was born in Cincinnati to a middle class Jewish family on Bastille Day, July 14th, in 1938. He was 32 in 1970, though he doesn’t provide that information in Do It!. Indeed, he says, “I was born in the FSM in Berkeley in 1964. That makes me five years old.”

Rubin fudged the facts of his age, and many other facts in Do It! In fact, he didn’t tell a straight story about the creation of the book itself. On the title page, credit is given to his girlfriend at the time, Nancy Kurshan. The title page also says, “Yipped by Jim Retherford,” though Rubin never gave Retherford -- who now lives in Austin and works with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project -- the full and complete credit he rightfully deserves.

Recently, I talked to Retherford, on the phone about the genesis and evolution of Do It!, and his account was eye-opening to say the least. “I went to work for Jerry soon after I lost my job at the Peace Eye Bookstore,” he said. “I was the ghost writer for the book. That meant that I conceptualized the whole book and created a myth so that it would all hang together. I designed it so that it would look and feel like the six-o’clock news, and so it broke out of the linear mode. I was inspired by Quentin Fiore who had worked with Marshall McLuhan on The Medium is the Massage; later we brought in Fiore to be the official designer, and I worked closely with him. That was a fabulous experience, and I went on to become a graphic designer.”

Back in 1969-1970, Rubin wasn’t interested in historical accuracy, but rather in creating myths and in spinning metaphors, which made it possible for him to work with Retherford. Rubin loved to embellish and exaggerate, and so in Do It! we’re told, for example, that “Elvis Presley killed Ike Eisenhower.” “Kill your parents,” was one of Rubin’s most often shouted slogans, and if he didn’t mean it literally, that didn’t matter to him.

Still, if accurate numbers and real dates weren’t essential to Rubin, they do matter to biographers and historians, and to veterans of that era, too, who care about what happened, where it happened, and who really wrote the books. I feel a bit defensive here; I did my own share of myth-making, but it does matter when real historical change heated up in the 1960s, and when the cultural revolution began to cool down, and the society returned to at least a semblance of normalcy.

The year 1970, when Do It! was published -- and became a bestseller -- marked, of course, the start of the decade of the 1970s. If you calculate historical change by calendars on the wall, and precise dates then the 1960s were already over. But “the 1960s” weren’t over if you look at what was happening in the streets and in communes.

Scholars who are partial to early SDS and who dislike the Yippies and the Weathermen tend to ignore 1970, 1971, and 1972. Those years were a time of immense social and political ferment, and, lo and behold, it wasn’t the 1960s anymore on the calendar. There was rioting in the streets from coast-to-coast; resistance to the war in Vietnam, and soon afterward sabotage, in and out of the military, to the widening wars in Laos and Cambodia.

There was the growth of rural communes, the spread of marijuana, the rise of women’s liberation, and gay liberation, too. Nixon was in the White House; John Mitchell was the Attorney General. To radicals, it seemed as though America was becoming a fascist nation, which is why Rubin & Co. used the German spelling for America in Do It!, as in, “I am a child of Amerika,” and “Fuck Amerika.” Rubin was definitely angry -- for intensely personal as well as overtly political reasons. As a young man, he had lost his parents and felt like an orphan and lost.

Do It! – Rubin’s autobiography (or is it a biography?) about becoming a radical -- reflected the fear, paranoia, and irreverence at that particular time. Today, 40 years later, it is, if nothing else, a valuable historical document of that era when the 1960s blurred into the 1970s, and rebellion widened and intensified.

The book that broke linear rules also helped to stir up protest when it was published. In many ways, it's old-fashioned “agit-prop,” to borrow a phrase from the radicals of the 1930s, a decade when leftists used agitation and propaganda to undermine the capitalist system.

Do It! was also what was called “agit-pop” in the 1960s. Indeed, Rubin, Retherford, and Fiore used many of the tools and much of the style of pop culture, including cartoons and graffiti lettering, and presented a cartoon-like view of America in which the good guys were easily distinguished from the bad guys.

“Subvert!!” Rubin and his assistants wrote in the next-to-the last chapter in the book. They added, “That’s the task of every young person. Spread ideas that undercut the consistent world of Amerika, and then top it off by burning her symbols -- from draft cards to flags to dollar bills.” College kids and high school kids did all those things, not only or just because Jerry told them to, of course, but Jerry definitely played a part in making protest and rebellion happen, along with Abbie Hoffman, his fellow Yippie.

Jerry Rubin at microphone with Nancy Kurshan. Behind them are the Chicago Seven defendants (not including Bobby Seale), from the Chicago conspiracy trial. Abbie Hoffman is on the far left. Photo from AP.
Rubin and Hoffman were famous as a result of the Chicago conspiracy trial that ended in 1970 with verdicts of guilty for both of them for rioting during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They both had clout in the counterculture, and they were good for one another, a lesson I learned from lawyer William Kunstler, who pointed out that their sibling rivalry pushed each one of them to creative heights they would not have reached on their own. “Jerry and Abbie were a team,” Kunstler said. “They egged one another on.”

Hoffman, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, committed suicide in 1989; Rubin was killed while trying to cross Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1994. He was jaywalking.

I knew Jerry and Abbie personally, though I identified far more with Abbie than Jerry. In 1970, I reviewed Do It! for Liberation New Service (LNS), and didn’t hide my dislike for it. Rubin even called LNS and complained, but LNS was also partial to Abbie and no one scolded me.

Looking back at the book now, 40 years later, I can see again why it irked me. “Marijuana makes each person God.” So reads a sentence in the chapter, “Keep pot illegal.” I had seen too many stoned college dropouts to accept the view that pot had divine properties. Do It! also proclaims, “The New Left said: I protest. The hippies said: I am.” I had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a new leftist and Rubin’s style of cultural revolution was too dismissive of ideology and organization for my taste. Do It! seemed to make revolution sound inevitable and even easy.

At the very end, there’s a utopian description of the future:

“People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon and fuck wherever and whenever they want to. The United States of Amerika will become a tiny yippie island in a vast sea of Yippieland love.”

It was easy, of course, to laugh at and dismiss those Yippie notions, and many radicals and liberals did laugh, though in his introduction to Do It!, Eldridge Cleaver -- then a Black Panther living in exile in Algeria -- took Yippie ideas seriously, all-too seriously one might add. When Cleaver ran for President in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom Party, Rubin had been his running mate for Vice President.

In his introduction to Do It!, Cleaver admits that not all of Rubin’s ideas appealed to him, but that enough of them did for him to regard Rubin as a brother. “Right on,” Cleaver wrote. “All Power to the People.” It definitely was a time of slogans and gestures.

Jerry Rubin played dress-up when he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1967.
Rubin had a genius for slogan, gesture and costume. He showed up at hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) dressed as a soldier in the American Revolution of 1776. One of the photos in Do It!, shows him at HUAC with his lawyer Beverly Axelrod.

Rubin may have been grandiose and even a hypocrite; he may have turned his back on Yippie ideals when he went to Wall Street to make money and become a Yuppie. But he definitely had courage when he defied HUAC, and he played no small part in helping to dismantle and discredit an institution that had done a disservice to American democracy for decades.

For that role, Rubin deserves to be remembered and lauded. When many others were afraid, he was fearless. He followed his gut instincts. He just did it, and with an exclamation mark, too!

[Jonah Raskin teaches media at Sonoma State University and is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California and The Mythology of Imperialism.]

• Find Do It! by Jerry Rubin on Amazon.com.

The Rag Blog

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Hayden, Dohrn, Joseph : 1960s Radicals Predict Rebirth of Social Activism

The panel moderator, Joshua Micah Marshall, left, with Jamal Joseph, Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and David Fenton. Photo by Chang W. Lee / The New York Times.
1960s Radicals Predict Rebirth of Social Activism
By Manny Fernandez / November 7, 2008

See 'DAVID FENTON: Eye of the Revolution' with vintage photo of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, Below.

Nothing is more non-nonconformist than a nearly two-hour panel discussion. But times have indeed changed, and the three former political radicals who gathered for one on Saturday in Manhattan did not seem to mind.

At a table in the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea, Tom Hayden sat next to Bernardine Dohrn. Next to her was Jamal Joseph.

Forty years ago, Mr. Hayden was a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a driving force behind the movement against the Vietnam War. He was also a member of the Chicago Seven, who were tried on charges of conspiring to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Ms. Dohrn was also a leader of S.D.S., and would later help form a violent splinter group called the Weather Underground that bombed government buildings in the early 1970s. Mr. Joseph was a young Black Panther in Harlem who went to prison in the ’80s for harboring a fugitive.

Today, Mr. Hayden, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Joseph are lecturers, writers and activists. On the Saturday after Election Day, they spoke softly into their microphones and incited no riots among the small audience, but their spirits were high. Though President-elect Barack Obama was not a product of the antiwar movement 40 years ago, the panelists described him as a benefactor of its transformations and predicted he would be the inspiration for social movements.

Mr. Hayden, a former California state senator, said that young Obama supporters “will determine the role of social activism for the next 30 years” and will be inspired by Mr. Obama to pursue community organizing work instead of Wall Street jobs. “A community organizer has been elected president of the United States,” Mr. Hayden said.

Mr. Hayden, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Joseph met at the gallery to discuss the 1960s and the impact of an Obama presidency on the American political left. Of all the radicals, however, the one who played the biggest role in the presidential race, William Ayers, Ms. Dohrn’s husband, was not there.

Mr. Ayers, who also helped found the Weather Underground, is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers was a favorite target of criticism by Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Early on in the panel discussion, the moderator, Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of the political blog Talking Points Memo, asked Ms. Dohrn what it was like for her and her husband to play cameo roles in the campaign.

She said they felt “tremendously lucky to have been together for almost 40 years now.” She added that they were still “proud radicals,” and were “definitively not now, or then, terrorists.”

Of Mr. McCain’s attempts to turn Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Ayers into a political liability, she said: “It didn’t work in this campaign, if work means reaching independent voters, middle America, thinking people.” She added, “We’re fine and really eager to resume our normal lives.”

Ms. Dohrn, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University Law School, teaches and writes about children’s law and juvenile justice. She and Mr. Ayers were indicted in 1970 for inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings, but charges were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct.

The discussion on Saturday was organized to promote an exhibition of photographs by David Fenton, who chronicled street protests and the lives of counterculture figures in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The exhibition, which runs until Nov. 26 at the Steven Kasher Gallery, features more than 75 photographs of Columbia University protests, Central Park be-ins and Black Panther demonstrations. Mr. Fenton went on to become chief executive of Fenton Communications, which represents the liberal antiwar group MoveOn.org.

Mr. Fenton, who also sat on the panel, said he had not seen Ms. Dohrn since he photographed the Days of Rage protests in Chicago in 1969. Mr. Fenton, 56, had dropped out of the Bronx High School of Science in 1968 to pursue photojournalism. “There were demonstrations every week,” Mr. Fenton said. “I don’t know if that will ever happen again. I hope it doesn’t have to.”

Source / New York Times

Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, New York City, October 17, 1968. Photo by David Fenton. Vintage gelatin silver, printed 8 3/4 x 6 7/8 inches.
DAVID FENTON: Eye of the Revolution
Exhibition: October 30th through November 26th, 2008

40 Years after 1968 – 69, an Exhibition and Panel Discussion with Tom Hayden, Bernardine Dohrn, and others.

“These pictures are extraordinary. They capture the last couple of years of the 60s more closely than anything I know.” Norman Mailer, 2005

On October 30th the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea opened the exhibition David Fenton: Eye of the Revolution, a look back at Yippies, Black Panthers, Be-Ins, Weatherman, the Chicago 7, tear gas, protests, and the years that changed America forever. The exhibition and panel will address the question of the lasting impact of the 60s on politics and the media.

Still in his teens in the late 60s, underground news photographer David Fenton –- now CEO of a major public interest communications firm –- photographed the passionate street protest and calculated mass media tactics that still shape U.S. politics and culture today. His photos appeared in anti-war and counter-cultural publications around the world, as well as in The New York Times, Life, Look, Newsweek and many others.

Fenton possessed both a police press pass and behind-the-scenes access to the leaders and celebrities of the era. Eye of the Revolution will feature over 75 photographs, including rare vintage prints. Join Fenton on a countercultural journey from Washington, D.C. to New York City, Oakland and Chicago with stops at Columbia, Yale and Berkeley, looking at Civil Rights, the Peace Movement, Black Power, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, Hippies, Police Riots, Yippies. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, Allen Ginsberg, John and Yoko, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the pig who ran for President.

Since his employment at Liberation News Service – which paid him $25 a week in 1969 – Fenton’s protest-driven view of the world has evolved into Fenton Communications, the nation’s largest progressive communications firm. With clients including MoveOn.org and Nelson Mandela, he is still pushing for change in the tradition of 40 years ago.

The panel discussion on November 8th, the Saturday after the Election, will examine the negative and positive legacies of the 60s, and the evolution of alternative media then and now.

David Fenton: Eye of the Revolution will be on view through November 26th, 2008. Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 521 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011.

Source / Stephen Kasher Gallery / NYC

Go here to see photos from the exhibition.

Also check out David Fenton's website.

Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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