23
10
250
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/f5c031940d13559cce27851e51707818.jpg
e15137204ce209d358bdd99bef6ca90d
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/8f6d216511c6d54834ff1e76131d9872.mp3
6e35a1845205bf58cd044ff7ae3d7dd5
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js)
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
27 July 2010
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Sara Davidson
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
31:25
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
MicroCassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
1960s; Berkeley; Sorority; Loose Change; Protests; Sexual revolution; Boomer generation.
Biographical Text
Sara Davidson is a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, radio host, and the New York Times bestselling author. She is the author of eight books, and has written for the New York Times, Esquire, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and other magazines. Davidson created dramas for television and was co-executive producer of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Davidson graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Sara Davidson
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/77b48a955f81cba82ba0e0c5b42e2eb7.jpg
83c078d57c19a4be1f6ff5d95c961fdd
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9f869f88c51b436addacb4dd43e555c1.mp3
15a6f6f115d47bc8e0692015fc0056a9
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-07-01
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Fred R. Harris, 1930-
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Fred Harris is a former Democratic United States Senator elected twice from the state of Oklahoma. Harris received his Bachelor's and Law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He won a special election in 1964, succeeding Robert S. Kerr. In 1976 and he also became a professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":4995,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial"}">Fred Harris is a former Democratic United States Senator elected twice from the state of Oklahoma. Harris received his Bachelor's and Law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He won a special election in 1964, succeeding Robert S. Kerr. In 1976 and he also became a professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
144:35
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Native Americans; Comanche nation; Comanche culture; Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO); Civil Rights Movement; Integration; Taos Pueblo; Menominee tribe; Racial stereotypes; Baby boom generation; Activism; Native American/ American Indian Movement (AIM)."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5009,"3":{"1":0},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":0,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial"}">Native Americans; Comanche nation; Comanche culture; Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO); Civil Rights Movement; Integration; Taos Pueblo; Menominee tribe; Racial stereotypes; Baby boom generation; Activism; Native American/ American Indian Movement (AIM).</span>
Subject LCSH
Legislators—United States--Oklahoma; College teachers; Harris, Fred R., 1930--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Senator Fred Harris
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 1 July 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:08):
Testing, one two. Ba, loud. And again, thank you very much. It is an honor to talk to you. Before we even start, I consider you one of those great senators of the senators that I got to know, I think, that were really men of character back in the time when Senator McCarthy and Senator McGovern and Senator Nelson, who I all know or knew. So again, thank you very much.
FH (00:00:40):
[inaudible] well, thank you, Jeff. That is very nice for you to say.
SM (00:00:41):
Yeah. First question I have is, how did your growing up years in Oklahoma make you the person you are today, including where you grew up, your high school and your college and your early political efforts? I say this because I am very impressed with your background because things that stand out in your background include things like human rights. You dealt with the issue of desegregation, caring about the plight of African Americans, women, and Native Americans. So, just a little bit about how you became who you are.
FH (00:01:18):
Well, I grew up in a working class family. By most standards, we were poor, but we did not really feel poor. We would grow a big garden and we raised our own beef and pork and chickens for food, and I grew up in little town where it was not a place where there was a great deal of economic stratification where there are rich people and poor people; we were all fairly alike. I think that was a big help. Went to public schools there in that little town of Walters, Oklahoma. The interesting thing is, I was just back to a class reunion and it was amazing how many out of my class graduated class there in 1948. There were just two of us, I think. A potential majority got a college educations and a significant percentage, advanced degrees. I do not know, but that seems very unusual to me. I think we just all somehow always thought we would go to college, and did, and I did though no one in my family had ever been in college before. When I was a sophomore in high school, I somehow decided I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was not quite sure what a lawyer was. But I did think, I think now looking back on it, that it was sort of involved with being in politics, too, which I was intrigued by very early. About race, I do not know. I grew up in the school and in the county, the town where there were a lot of Comanche Indians. I later married a Comanche Indian woman, LaDonna Crawford, and some of my closest friends then, and that remained true through the years were members of the Comanche Indian Tribe, and I think maybe that gave me a somewhat different perspective than I might otherwise have had in regard to race. I was writing a memoir book not long ago and I was remembering that in a high school speech class, there was one little project where we had to recite some passage from Shakespeare. I chose the Shylock speech about the Jews, but I changed it. I did not really know anything much about Jews then, and I changed it to "negro." For example, as I gave the [inaudible] I said, "If you prick a negro, will he not bleed," and so forth. Where I got all that, I do not know. But ever since I remember, I had a great deal of interest in equality, ethnic and racial equality. Of course, that was something that I got very much involved in both in private life early and when I was practicing law on integration and then in the Oklahoma State Senate where I offered the bill that created the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission and prohibited discrimination in state employment, and then eventually starting right off in the United States Senate, but sort of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That is a short amount. That is kind of my background.
SM (00:05:54):
Yeah. What really intrigues me about your background is why you became a leader at such a young age. Some people I know... The only other person that was as young as you was Senator Biden, who became a United States Senator in at the age of 29. When I look at your background, and I do not know, I have not studied Vice President Biden, but I know that he was a senator at the age of 30. You both became leaders at a very young age. What was the inspiration there? Did you feel that you were ahead of the time, that you felt you had to play an important role in some of these decisions earlier rather than later?
FH (00:06:36):
Hey, I do not know exactly why, but I do know this. I was always sort of grown, I think. I really enjoyed being around older people and listening to their conversations. It was sort of the practice among the people I grew up with there in Southwestern Oklahoma, and it certainly was true of my own father, that they gave the boys a lot of responsibilities at an early age. That was the way my father was with me and it was, too, of several of my classmates. They treated us more or less like adults and gave us the responsibility. I think that I was considerably more mature than I would have otherwise been. But that was, too, a lot of my high school classmates.
SM (00:07:33):
Do you remember, you have given a lot of important speeches in your life, certainly in the United States Senate, when you were in the State Senate, and maybe even in high school, and even now that you have been a professor for so many years... But do you consider one of your speeches the most favorite of all time? Was there one that you felt dealt with an issue better than anything you had ever dealt with before? What speech stands out?
FH (00:08:04):
I do not know. It is probably obscure kind of a subject outside of New Mexico. But I led the fight in the United States Senate for the return to Taos Indian Pueblo here in New Mexico their 48,006 Blue Lake lands. [inaudible] was not in my home state, but I got very interested in that after talking with the old leaders of the Pueblo. It was a precedent-setting bill that we passed. The tribe had gotten a claim against the federal government, a court of claims that was upheld for the wrongful taking of that land and were going to be compensated for money, but they would not have kept money. They wanted the land back. It was inside of the National Forest at the time. So, it was not in private hands, and we finally got that done. I would say my speaking on the floor of the United States Senate on that circuit was probably something that I am proudest of, though as I said, it is not a thing known much outside of the state here in New Mexico, my adopted state where I have lived now since 1976. Taos Pueblo is such wonderful, generous people, gentle people. They have had I do not know how many different ceremonies where they have thanked me and my then wife, LaDonna Harris, for our help on returning that land to them. That is about to happen again. They are going to have a 40th anniversary celebration this September of 2010 [inaudible] their land returned and again, honoring us.
SM (00:10:22):
Well, that is excellent. Since the project I am working on is, of course, dealing with the boomer generation, and that is those individuals born between 1946 and 1964, and I preface this by saying that many people, one-third of the people I have interviewed, are not boomers; they are older than boomers. Many people that were born, say, around (19)40 to (19)46, many of them consider themselves boomers even though they do not fall into that timeframe. I have had a lot of different people comment on the generation itself. But what I am looking at here is what was America like during the following periods in your eyes? Because you experienced it growing up after the war, after World War II. And of course, you went to college in the early (19)50s, you became a lawyer in the (19)50s and then, of course, you were serving already at that time before you went into the (19)60s into the Senate. But if you, and just your own words, I am looking at the years that boomers have been alive, which means that the oldest boomer now is 64 this year, and the youngest one is 48 this year, if you were to describe the period 1946 to 1960, how would you describe America?
FH (00:11:43):
Well, it was almost a nation. I actually was born in 1930 in the midst of the Depression and Dustbowl days in Oklahoma. I grew up in those years prior to 1946 with people who that...
SM (00:12:20):
Still there?
FH (00:12:22):
...if they had been victims of circumstances beyond their control and that the government had to do something about it, my people who were not active in politics revered Franklin Roosevelt, and I think we grew up thinking that the government could be, it should be your friend. Then came at World War II and the world just radically changed. People moved all from their home place, became very mobile. And that was true of my own family and friends. People scattered and went elsewhere to find jobs and so forth. You had this pent-up consumer demand during the war which suddenly caused enormous economic activity and growth. You had the GI Bill, which provided for those boomer people who would come back from the war, or actually they were earlier than the movement of people that came back from the war, the opportunity for higher education and showed the rest of us, too, that if we would go to school, we could go to college and university, and we did. So, it was just a radical change in American life and the national life about the time these people were born, this boomer generation. I think everybody was growing and developing as the country was, and I think there was just sort of an inevitable optimism as that group was growing up, as was true for me, too, that the possibilities were unlimited, that you could do almost anything you wanted to. It is the kind of thing that the Clintons, one of the boomer generation, used to say, people that played by the rules, worked hard, you could do just about anything you wanted to. I think that was the general feeling of that era.
SM (00:14:59):
Because that is from (19)46 to (19)60. And then we get into the era of 1961 to 1970, which is the Kennedy being elected, and of course we get the Vietnam War. Just your thoughts on that tumultuous decade.
FH (00:15:13):
Well, the Vietnam War of the (19)60s, I think for the first time caused people of that boomer generation, and a lot of rest of us as well, to come to the really shocking and depressing view that the government was not always right. There was a real question whether our leaders could be trusted, and they had gotten into this terrible mess in the war. Then, we sort of papered over, white people had, the terrible fight of the African Americans in particular, Indians, too, and all of that came to the forefront in the (19)60s. We had the terrible riots, which exploded in Black sections in most of America's cities. In the summer of 1967, I was evidently appointed by President Johnson to the President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the [inaudible] commission to report and recommend concerning those terrible events. That was kind of with the war and these horrific conflicts, racial and ethnic conflicts in the country that told us what America was really like, and a lot of us had not thought about it that much. That really sort of destroyed the innocence of the people at that time. I think that made people a lot more distrustful of government, a lot more concern. Maybe there are not any solutions to some of these problems, and made people somewhat more fearful and more self-centered about their own families and their own problems, and less willing, as have been true of that Depression generation, to reach out to others and to cooperate and so forth. The (19)60s was a time of enormous change and rapid depression.
SM (00:18:01):
Where would you place the (19)70s? Because we all remember Kent State and Jackson State in the middle of 1970. Then we get into (19)71. We all know what happened with Watergate and those early years of... A lot of people say, I do not know how you feel about it, that the (19)60s really continued right through about 1973 or (19)74. A lot of people-
FH (00:18:27):
I think that is absolutely true. I think what happened... Back in the (19)50s, we had men all very optimistic and cheerful during the Eisenhower years, that is evidenced by white people and the people in the dominant society. Then the (19)60s really shocked us into a depressing reality, and then with the (19)70s, the beginning of the (19)70s particularly, the events just sort of confirmed the kind of increasing distrust and fearsomeness or fearfulness that had developed in the (19)60s.
SM (00:19:19):
Well, when you get to the end of the (19)70s, Jimmy Carter's ousted from office and Ronald Reagan comes in. Then when you talk about the (19)80s, (19)81 to (19)90, it is really the era of Ronald Reagan and George Bush I. Just your thoughts on the (19)80s and its reaction to the (19)70s.
FH (00:19:45):
There has always been two mainstreams, I think, in American life. One, that we are neighbors and neighbors ought to help each other, and we are all in this thing together. And then the other thing has always been lift yourself up by your own bootstraps; do not be going around begging other people to help you. I think the (19)80s, the advent of the Reagan and Bush administration, the thing that became dominant was this idea that you were on your own. Nobody was going to help you; you got to yourself, and quit complaining and protesting. Straighten up, take care of yourself, or you will be sorry.
SM (00:20:45):
Well, what is interesting, Christopher Lasch, the author wrote The Culture of Narcissism, and he wrote that in the late (19)70s, and he said, many of the people that grew up and were formed by the (19)60s and the (19)70s became so into themselves, they did not care about anybody else. They became narcissistic. They cared about a nice car, a beautiful home, just basically narcissism. Do you believe that?
FH (00:21:18):
I think there is some of that. I think there is something to that. With the riots, for example, in the mid-1960s or later, there was, I think, a feeling that... Well, for example, my own father, who [inaudible] and believed in me, when he read about the Carter Report as a result of those riots, the way he saw our report was that it said, "Mr. Harris, you ought to pay more taxes so we can help poor Black people who live in Detroit," and he was thinking to himself, "Wait a minute. I am paying too much taxes myself and we never protested and rioted, and I do not think we ought to condone or reward that kind of disorder." I think that began this idea of distrusting each other and began to erode that feeling that had developed back in Roosevelt years, that government ought to help those who are left fortunate, who cannot to help themselves and that we ought to help each other. Then I think Reagan, and Nixon to some degree, and then later when Reagan got elected as a benefit of that kind of individualistic tendency in the country.
SM (00:23:08):
Dr. King used to always talk in his speeches about "we." Even though he was up there on a platform, he always looked in the audience and says, "You are me, because it is about we. It is not about me." I think the question that always comes up, there is always exceptions to the rule, but whether as a generation as a whole, when you look at the fact that this generation of 74 million, people I have talked to say that only between 5 percent and 15 percent, depending on who you talked to, was really involved in any kind of activism. The 85 percent just went on with their daily lives, but were certainly affected by everything. So-
FH (00:23:49):
President Carter was a disappointment as president. He did not push enough in the right directions, and very early lost his mandate. He became the greatest and best former president we ever had [inaudible]. Bill Clinton I think sort of turned us back toward this idea that we are our brothers' keepers and that we ought to cooperate together, work together. But Clinton, too, he lost the control of the Congress and really pulled his own horns in on the great issues. He lost on some of them like health insurance, and the nation then just moved on more toward this individualistic kind of tendency [inaudible] before [inaudible]
SM (00:25:01):
Right. You remember this, even whether you liked President Reagan's politics or not, he and Tip O'Neill got along quite well. Remember Tippo used to always say, "All politics is local." They used to debate a lot and had tremendous disagreements, but when the day was over, they would shake hands and if they could have, they would go out and have a drink. But it was just a different time. It seems like when Ronald Reagan came in, maybe it is a result of what from LBJ and Richard Nixon and what they did to America and divided the country, that when Reagan and Clinton were in office and even George Bush II, I mean, the divisiveness and the dislike for them as leaders was immense. What has happened between 1980 and 2010, in your opinion? It has been 30 years in the boomers' lives as their middle years going into their now senior citizen status. What has happened to America in the divisiveness, and do you see any links between this divisiveness and unwillingness to work together and if someone said, "Today, if President Obama likes this, then we have got to be against it even though we might like it, but if he is for it, were against it." I mean, where did this all start?
FH (00:26:22):
Well, I think a few things we ought to think about. One is I think the approach, the appeal of progressives in politics and government, it was not very effective because it tended to be preachy and to call on people to do the right thing, for example, in regards to poor people or in regards to Black people because it was the moral thing to do, appeal to the people's morality and sense of the right and wrong. I thought that back then, and I still do, that it was far more appropriate and effective to, and I called this the populism, to appeal to people's self-interest, to say to a person like my dad, "You are not going to be able to live in a society of self-esteem where there is security and stability unless there is some better distribution of the income and power in this country." You may think that problems of poor Black kids down in Mississippi and [inaudible] education which consigns them forever to poverty, or that heavily discriminated against and unable to reach their full potential, you may think that is not your problem. They are off down there in Mississippi or they are up there in Harlem or something. But we are all in this thing together. They do not stay in one place. For example, they may move from Mississippi to New York [inaudible] state. You are going to [inaudible] these kind of things one way or another. As Jesse Jackson was saying at the time, "It is a heck a lot cheaper to get in on the front end, to give people some real opportunity in their education and so forth, than it is to send them off to prison or put them on welfare or whatever." That is the one thing. I think that we could have made a better...
FH (00:29:03):
That is one thing. I think that we could have made a better appeal on the basis of the [inaudible] of everybody rather than just on morality. And the other thing that we should notice is what was happening in the country, and therefore, in the Congress. When I first went to the United States Senate in 1964, there was no Republican member of the Senate from any of the old 11 Confederate states. And I think there are only about two Republican house members from that whole Confederate area. And all that now has changed. The majority of them in both houses are Republicans. In those days, the Democratic party in those states was an all-white racist, highly conservative party. Well, that all began to change with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So that black people who had been prevented from voting and throughout the south, from as far back as President Wilson's day, suddenly flooded into the voting poll. And they were overwhelmingly Democrats. And the white people fled. And after a little trouble with Strom Thurmond, for example, moved into the Republican ranks. And the same thing was happening all around the country as people, the electorate began to differentiate itself on a long party line based on economic flags. And people working in [inaudible] and below were increasingly Democrat, and the others were Republicans. African Americans and the growing numbers of Hispanics were overwhelmingly Democrat. And they were increasingly different on those who identified themselves as Democrats and those who identified themselves as a Republican on issues. And that was especially true of the party activists, the people who nominate the people of Congress so that the hard right of conservative Democrats in the House and Senate disappeared, and the liberal Republicans in the House and the Senate disappeared, so that we came to have, from the (19)80s on at least, we came to have two parties in each house that were internally homogenous, and therefore, very much unlike the others. All major votes of any conflict became party line votes for a majority of one-party votes against the majority of the other. And very often, nearly all, or sometimes all, of one party voted against nearly all, or all, of the other party. So we have become highly partisan and it has made it extremely difficult to reach any compromise on any major issues.
SM (00:33:05):
I think this was also seen when President Kennedy was elected because he certainly cared about civil rights and the plight of African Americans, but he was a little hesitant knowing that the South was basically southern Democrats, and if he wanted to be reelected, I think there was a concern there. And I like your thoughts on that. But also the fact that on the 1963 March on Washington, when he brought the civil rights leaders into the White House, he was a little hesitant and a little fearful that the march could become a riot. And I know he was concerned about John Lewis's commentary and [inaudible] Randolph told him to really cool it, so to speak. But your thoughts on the... He was a pragmatic politician basically.
FH (00:33:51):
That is right. You take, for example, in the Senate in those days, and when I first went there also, in the Senate, we could not take the position as a party on issues, although we tried a time or two in the Senate talking to do so, because we were split. We had people as liberal as George McGovern, and as conservative as John Stennis and Jim Eastland. And Kennedy was having to deal with that kind of situation, both in the Congress as well as in the country. So as you know, [inaudible] his election back then the first time, he did not want to make a big fight out of civil rights. And the thought was that if he could get reelected, they would begin to pick up that issue after. Johnson who had a great change of heart himself on those kinds of issues, Lyndon Johnson came into office. We had begun to see on television the terrible violent things against black people and the horrible way as many of them were [inaudible], and we would see it on television. And then with the outpouring of sympathy, there was about... on the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was able, finally, to get a filibuster broken in the Senate and pass and the Civil Rights Act of (19)64, the Voting Rights Act of (19)65. But up until President Kennedy's assassination, I think the view of his administration was that a rising tide lifts all boats. And while we will not single out African Americans to help if we do something for all people, particularly in poverty and so forth, that will automatically help them, which was true of course, but it was not enough.
SM (00:36:23):
When you look at that period from (19)46, actually right through to 2010, who were the role models and people you looked up to the most during this timeframe? People you worked with or people that inspired you. It does not always have to be in politics. And who and which leaders do you feel had the greatest impact on boomers themselves, both good and bad?
FH (00:36:50):
Well, a magazine once said that I was the only person in Washington who could have a breakfast with Lyndon Johnson and lunch with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and dinner with Andrew Robert Kennedy. And that was true, and they all knew that I got along with each one of them. But I was closer to Hubert Humphrey and to Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy was my seatmate in the Senate and we lived around the corner from each other in Virginia, and we know each other a lot. [inaudible] work together. And he was, in a way, like me. When I went to the Senate, in the process of becoming himself, he was terribly injured, as you can tell, damaged himself by the defamation of his brother. And he was deepening in his concern about the poor people and about African Americans and others. I liked him in [inaudible]. And then Hubert Humphrey was, of course, the greatest legislator of my generation. And then several others. He was a very well-motivated person who became awfully handicapped by his association with Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, and was very much convened by Johnson, and was put in the terrible position of having to support the Vietnam War until he finally was liberated when he was running for president himself. He almost got... I was together with Senator Walker Mondale, national co-chair of the country campaign for president, and we almost won. The country would have been a much different country had we pulled it out.
SM (00:39:13):
This is important because even in the history books that I have read said that if it had been two more weeks, two more weeks before the election, he would have won, that he was really rising. And even at two or three or a month earlier, he would have showed a difference between Lyndon Johnson and himself, he would have won.
FH (00:39:34):
Well as Larry O'Brien, who was the Democratic chair just before me, and then the National Democratic Chair took advocate, has written, and I have too... Humphrey promised him and promised me and Senator Mondale that he was going to break with Johnson on the war and called for unconditional [inaudible] and for de-Americanization of the war so that we could begin to pull out of there. And we had a platform blanket at the Chicago Convention in 1968 to do exactly that. And then Johnson moved in and blocked it. I bet his office did. And Humphrey backed down a little and compromised, which I found very disappointing. But finally late in the campaign, I was with him and helped write the speech he should have given much earlier on Vietnam, breaking with Johnson. And from that moment, we began to go up in the polls. It was not as strong an anti-Vietnam war speech as I wanted, but it was taken by the country and by people like Ted Kennedy as a peace speech. And Humphrey went up in the polls everywhere from that moment. At the very last, he went down to Texas. It was very well received and the polls in Texas showed that we had gone ahead. We went up from there to California for a last night, a national television program, and the field poll, very respected California poll, showed that we pulled even and were still moving. Other polls showed us that we were really coming up, up to that time, for a long time. Humphrey was the only one who thought he could win, and he just kept working at [inaudible]. So we went to bed that night. We flew back from California with Humphrey to Minnesota so he could vote the next morning. And when we went to bed that night in Minnesota, election night, we were pretty well convinced we were going to win it. But turned out we do not win by... they do not win the presidency by the popular vote. You have to think of states that led up to a majority of electoral college. And the next morning when I got up, I started thinking about that. I could see we were not going to make it, and of course we did not. The country would have been a wholly different country if he had been elected and Richard Nixon had not.
SM (00:42:50):
I agree. Let me... Okay, great. Question here. In John Kennedy's speech, " Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," certainly was a major influence a lot on the young people that... Actually boomers were just going into junior high school at that time. I am one of them. And I mean, that was one heck of a speech. And you all knew it was about the Peace Corps and Vista. And serving in the military, I guess, was maybe not like it was in Korea and World War II, but in the early (19)60s people were still serving. And do you believe the Vietnam War was a class war based on the fact that the large proportion of the minorities, low income people who were white, served, but people that were more educated and were in college and got deferments or hardship cases or went on to grad school and all other reasons for not serving or abated the draft. How would you define that war and the whole concept that really surprises me as James Wood or Senator Webb has said in a book he wrote quite a while back that here was a generation that was inspired by Kennedy to serve, and yet we have so many of the most educated and elite who did not want to serve.
FH (00:44:25):
Well, I think the result, it was people who were in lower economic brackets who did the fighting. There was no press about that mostly, although nobody sat down and [inaudible] on that in advance. But I never was caught up in the Kennedy thing at first because while I could not attend the convention in Los Angeles [inaudible], I had to been a supporter of [inaudible]. I kept hoping that that Stevenson might be able to pull off first nomination. But I did get very excited about the John Kennedy campaign and was a member of the group, an informal group, in my hometown in Oklahoma. So we had to call upon the Baptist preacher and threaten him with campaigning ourselves at church if he continued to speak against Kennedy from the pulpit as he did. And I think he did that as preacher, not so much because Kennedy was a Catholic, although that is what he gave as the reason, but because he was liberal. And so I was very much caught up in the excitement of the campaign. And I do not think we listened clearly to those words about... that were really sort militaristic in a way, in their anti-communism of their breadth. We were just caught up within the thing, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you do for your country." And that was, I think, a great inspiration for people to get involved in public service. I already was. But during that war, I had Robert Kennedy down to Oklahoma one time, and he spoke in the Fieldhouse on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. And he had a question after session, afterwards, that... He was asked at one point, "Do you favor the continuation of the student deferment from the draft?" And he said, "No, I am against that." And they was booing, a lot of booing. And he said, "As long as a person's economic class or income determines whether or not they go to college, which is largely true," he said, "I do not think that there ought be an automatic deferment for college." And then after some other questions and so forth, he said, "Let me ask you all some questions." And he said, "On Vietnam," he said, "how many of you support the position of Senator Eugene McCarthy for an immediate unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam?" Well, there was a smattering of the pause. It was certainly a small minority of the two who agreed with that. "How many of you," he said, "agree with my position that we ought to begin to de-Americanize the war and begin to turn it over, over time, to the Vietnamese?" And again, there were some... it was more applause, but it was still a minority of the students that agreed with that. And then, "How many of you agree with the President Johnson's policy of just sort of continuing to muddle through, doing what we are doing?", and there was more applause but still a distinct minority. And then he said, "How many of you think that we should, as some are suggesting, escalate the war and increase the military involvement and effort?" And there was a huge applause. There was a majority.
SM (00:49:08):
And what year was this?
FH (00:49:10):
It would have probably been about 1967 or somewhere in there, something like that. It was after Robert Kennedy had finally come out against the war, and it was just before I, myself, had finally come out against the war rather late. At any rate, the majority were for escalating the war. And rapidly, just immediately, he said, "How many of you who just now voted to escalate the war also support the student deferment from the draft?" And there was just a gasp in the crowd as people realized what they had just done. And then they break into applause. And I asked him, I said, "Have you done that before?" I asked him afterwards. And he said, "Yeah, I do it everywhere." I said, "Was it different here?" And he said, "No." He said, "It is a minority of students that against to war," but like that Newfield wrote, they are a pathetic minority. They are going be growing. But he said, "The same result, I get everywhere."
SM (00:50:45):
Wow. And of course, after (19)67, (19)68 things really changed.
FH (00:50:48):
Yes, they grew and the percent of people that finally grew into a majority vote in the country... getting out the war.
SM (00:50:59):
And what-what was really amazing, you talk about, you knew Senator McCarthy and Senator Kennedy, and I think there was an extreme dislike between the two. That might be mild. I do not know the whole story. I know when I interviewed Senator McCarthy many years back, the one section that he had kind of hesitated on responding, and he just simply said, "Read it in my book," was when I said what his thoughts were on Bobby Kennedy. Do you feel Senator McCarthy was really upset with him because he decided to run for president after he had told him he was not?
FH (00:51:35):
Yes.
SM (00:51:35):
Is that the main section?
FH (00:51:38):
By the time I knew McCarthy, and he and I were on the Senate Financial Committee together, and I saw him socially too a lot. He was a fairly bitter... He was a very witted person, but his wit was very often sharp and bitter. His first business was against Johnson and also, therefore, Humphrey because Humphrey had sort of dangled the vice presidential nomination back in 1964 in front of McCarthy. And then later, it became clear that he never intended to choose McCarthy; he always intended to choose Humphrey, but had only banded around McCarthy's name like he did Senator Tom Dodd because they were Catholic. And McCarthy was quite bitter about that, and really bitter about Humphrey for that reason too. The Kennedy people, they did not respect McCarthy. They thought, in a way, he was kind of...
SM (00:53:09):
He was what?
FH (00:53:18):
He was...
SM (00:53:18):
Oh, okay.
FH (00:53:20):
He did not really get down him to the trenches and fight like crazy. I do not know if it was true but they thought he was a supporter of the oil companies, for example, on the depletion allowance and on some non-liberal kind of subject like that. I know that they did not think he was the right leader to oppose Johnson and to lead the country on the war and on other issues. And I know that was Robert Kennedy's feeling. But I think that Robert finally decided to run after McCarthy, ran surprisingly well against Johnson in New Hampshire. I think he finally got to see that there was a possibility that this could be done. And there are no questions that, that certainly embittered McCarthy at his... I think he felt, also like Eleanor Roosevelt and others, that John Kennedy was too conservative, and that he and Robert both had been supporters of Joseph McCarthy.
SM (00:54:44):
Right.
FH (00:54:45):
And so there was some of that. But a lot of people felt... A lot of McCarthy's supporters felt that Kennedy was an opportunist, and only after McCarthy showed he might be able to beat Johnson for the Democratic nomination did he finally come in.
SM (00:55:07):
I know that the Clean for Gene group, which was the young people that had their haircut short, and I remember Senator McCarthy really had nothing to do with that. I interviewed the person that was responsible for that. He went along with it, but he was not the guy that told them to cut their hair, but he went along with the people that were advising him. But several of the people that were in the Clean for Gene said they really, when they heard that Kennedy was running, they really would have liked to have switched but feared doing. But I guess the question is, why, after Senator Kennedy, was killed, why he kind of just dwindled, just kind of petered out?
FH (00:55:57):
I think he was really just really very bitter, just generally. And so for example, he would not enjoy Humphrey, and even said then and later publicly some generally good things about Richard Nixon... in a way in support of Humphrey.
SM (00:56:12):
Yeah. The next question, how is your cell phone doing?
FH (00:56:26):
What did you say?
SM (00:56:27):
Is your cell phone still strong?
FH (00:56:29):
Well, hold just a second. I am going to have to... but I will be right back.
SM (00:56:33):
Yep. Okay.
FH (00:56:35):
You mind calling me on this home phone now?
SM (00:56:37):
Yeah. Let me get your phone number.
FH (00:56:49):
It is 5 oh 5-
SM (00:56:49):
505. What is it, 505-
FH (00:56:49):
898...
SM (00:56:49):
What was the last four?
FH (00:56:58):
0860.
SM (00:56:59):
Okay, I got 505-898, and what are the last four?
FH (00:57:00):
0860.
SM (00:57:02):
Okay. I will call you right back. Yep. Okay.
(00:57:08):
I knew because I have interviewed some other people and their cell phones went dead about 45 minutes. My cell phone is actually only good for 45 minutes.
FH (00:57:17):
Well, this is working good here. I live in an adobe house too, and sometimes that does not help the signal. But anyway, we are okay now.
SM (00:57:27):
Okay. Could you discuss a little bit about the anti-war movement? Were the United States Senators at that time, and I am talking really the senators in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, were they sympathetic to the college campus protests? I say this because Nixon was emphatic right around the time of Kent State, where he said that they never affected him or his policies. They can do all the protesting they want. And Johnson, on the other hand, even though he withdrew, he saw Ted in 1968 and he saw what McCarthy did up in New Hampshire.
SM (00:58:03):
1968, and he saw what McCarthy did up in New Hampshire. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, that he was seeing the college students, and what they were saying, and it was a failed policy in the end. So basically, I am saying, how important were the young activists at the time, in shaping the views of Congress?
FH (00:58:21):
I think they were quite important. As I mentioned, Jack Newfield wrote a book, he was a columnist for the Village Voice, he wrote a book called I think, the Prophetic Minority. So his idea was the people particularly the students who were protesting against the war, were a minority to start with. But they were a prophetic bunch of minority, they were going to become a majority. I think that is exactly what happened. Very early right away in the Senate there were a lot of people, Robert Kennedy was one, and so was Ted Kennedy, and George McGovern, and Gaylord Nelson, and some others who I think began to react to that. I think McCarthy came to it late, but for example, I came to it late, but even before I changed my public position, about before, I was busy with the current commission, which is a full-time job in regards to riot. I sort of suspected be to focusing on this before. My daughter, Catherine Harris, now Catherine Harris [inaudible]. She was a student at Harvard and [inaudible] a protest.
SM (01:00:09):
Hello? Hello?
FH (01:00:16):
The effect of those student activists against the war, was especially pronounced when members of Congress had some contact from their own family members, student family members, or directly without the students. And that was certainly true in my case, my daughter Catherine Harris, that was a Harvard student and she came down one weekend with a group of other Harvard students, to take part in an anti-war protest, in Washington DC. This group camped out at our house in McLean, Virginia. The next morning it was just really was very moving to me, as I watched them prepare for their riot, I mean for their protest. They were worried about a police riot, they were worried about getting beat up. So they pinned to their clothes, their contact information, their names, and phone numbers, and so forth. They tapped to their wrist some gauze that had Vaseline on it, that they were going to use. How they knew how to do all this? I do not know. They were going to use in case they got into tear gas. Here they then bravely marched off, these kids to take part in this anti-war protest.
SM (01:02:09):
Wow.
FH (01:02:21):
I found that in just overwhelmingly moving. I think there must have been a lot of other situations like that, where members of Congress saw the same thing. In addition to the public protests, both all that had begun to work.
SM (01:02:23):
As a person who was heavily involved in the campaign of (19)68, began the campaign of Senator Humphrey. Chicago in 1968, was like the epitome of all the tragedies that happened that year. From Dr. King's assassination, Bobby's assassination happened early in the year. President Johnson announces he was not going to run, and there were some riots going on. Just everybody knew that something was going to happen in Chicago, and it did. What are your thoughts as, what were your thoughts then, as a person who was an elected leader in Congress? Secondly, as a person who was helping the campaign to see these students and police going at each other, and there were even skirmishes inside, with some of the newsmen being arrested, I remember Dan Rather was arrested, or he was taken away. It was unbelievable.
FH (01:03:26):
Well, 1968 was just a horrible year for America. Not only that situation, and the convention, and struggle. Also, the earlier assassination of Robert Kennedy, and then the later assassination of Dr. King. Walter Mondale and I, as I said, we were co-chairs with the Humphrey campaign and brought in Mario Bryan, to sort of spearhead it, prior to the convention. We, Mondale and I, started seeing what was likely to happen in Chicago, went to the Attorney General Ramsey Park. That Johnson had sort of put in charge of planning for the convention, Lyndon Johnson had, and we asked him to change the location of the convention to Miami. That was our only other choice, because the Republicans were planning on having their convention in Miami. So the logistics would work on a sort of price basis, and we told Ramsey Park what our concerns were about their Chicago situation, and Mayor Daley, and so forth, the planned protest. He did not agree, I am sure he was protecting something, those feelings, something obligated to Mayor Daley. So we could not get it changed, and our worst fears were realized. We not only had those huge protests against the war and against the auction, but we had all sorts of strikes, communication strikes, [inaudible] strikes. The city was just in a mess, and one scene that was indelible in my mind, backstage of convent watching on closed circuit television, because a lot of it was not on television. My daughter Catherine, and my son Brian, and I, sitting in tears watching the clubbing of these kids and all that. I went out once and rescued a paraplegic Vietnam veteran Tommy Frazier, in his wheelchair up against the hotel where we were, [inaudible] good police cut him into the hotel. Way up on the-the top floors of our hotel, the tear gas came all the way up there. So, it was just a horrible thing, then when the Humphrey.
SM (01:06:57):
That me again? Hello? What is going on here? What is going on here? At the end of the Chicago convention there?
FH (01:07:00):
Yeah, I left the convention after we had had Howard Kennedy's vaccination and then we had all terrible, well Humphrey backed down temporarily on the anti-Vietnam war flank, and we did not get that speech until later. Then the horrible, what the Citizen Commission called, the police riot in Chicago, at the convention. I left there very dispirited and depressed, and I did not get involved again in the campaign until much later, when Larry O'Brien, by then partly my doing I was in on asking him, had become the chairman of the Democratic Party. He asked me, he called me and asked me, to join Humphrey's plane. To be sure that the speech he was-was going to give on national television out of Po Lake, would be a strong enough anti-war speech. So I got back in his campaign then, but that is a horrible year.
SM (01:08:07):
Yeah. One other thing too I just wanted to mention here, is about Martin Luther King's speech against the Vietnam War. Did that surprise you? Or you thought it was appropriate too, because he was criticized heavily, within the civil rights community?
FH (01:08:26):
Well, I thought it was a justified thing. It was quite logical with what else he was saying, but I did not really focus that much on it at the time. I was very much involved with the current commission on Civil Rights, and the anti-poverty program like we recommended.
SM (01:08:58):
What are your thoughts on all those movements that evolved in the late (19)60s, and early (19)70s? We had the women's movement that many people say evolved because of the sexism that was prevalent within the civil rights and anti-war movements. Of course they went on to form the National Organization for Women, and other groups. Again, we talked briefly about the Native American movement, but the period 1969, to (19)73, was a very strong period with Alcatraz in (19)69, and Wounded Knee in (19)73. Of course, you had the environmental movement with Earth Day in 1970, you had Stonewall in (19)69, that was linked to the gay and lesbian movement, kind of inspired it. Then at the very same time within the civil rights movement, during these mid to late (19)60s, you had the more of a black power mentality. Where you had Malcolm X challenging Bayard Rustin. Or Stokely Carmichael challenging Dr. King. Concept of, say some people thought nonviolence going to violence. So that you had, what you had in the early (19)60s, were people like Dr. King, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, John Lewis, and Robert Moses or Bob Moses. Then in the later (19)60s, you have Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Bobby Seal, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, a whole different type of a mentality. I know I am giving an awful lot here, what are your thoughts on these movements that evolved in that period? Because the (19)70s, seemed to be the period where a lot of them really gained strength. Then when the (19)80s came, and they kind of seemed to go separate?
FH (01:10:44):
In 1965, I made a trip with Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, down to in the number of Latin American countries. In one, in Peru, in Lima in it they had the oldest university in this hemisphere, San Marcos University, there in Lima. And found that it was closed down, that the activist students had taken over the campus and they closed down the university. We both thought to ourselves, well that is very interesting that students here and elsewhere in the world have become very active, and we do not see that at home. Well it is just a matter of, wait a minute and you would. The same thing was true, the civil rights movement, I think, began to show people that you have got to stand up and not just beg for what is yours and rightfully yours, but you have got to demand it. We saw that with the student population then, we saw it with women. Frantz Fanon had written that, "Oppressed people," and studies showed this was absolutely true, "Come to have the same, hold the same bad areas about themselves, that the dominant society has." We will not really work, and we are not reliable, or women cannot be managers, and just that. "How you get out of that," he wrote, "Was confrontation." I think, he believed violence. I think it is true, it takes confrontation for people to change their self-image. I think what changed, or the main thing that changed for example, in regard to African Americans in the country, after 200 years. Was that they came to view themselves differently, and they came to feel that they had to stand up. In the process of standing up to authority, they became different people. That is what happened I think with students, with the African-Americans, then with Indians, Indians and Hispanics for example, women profited from the African-American example, but without so much of the terrible violence being practiced against African-Americans. I was very much involved together with my then wife, LaDonna Harris. With people like Gloria Stein, and Betty Friedan, and others formation of the national organization for Women, of Women, the National Organization of Women. And the Women's Democratic talk and so forth. I was involved with them when they eventually ringed around the capital building in action against, the protest against the Vietnam War. I saw that Betty Friedan was quite right, that the old [inaudible] concept, that women had to change their consciousness. They had to begin to change the way they thought about themselves, and that is what had happened in all these groups. So that for example, the success that African-Americans had eventually, in changing the laws and practices. Came as a result of their own effort.
SM (01:15:13):
I know the environmental movement in Earth Day in 1970, Gaylord Nelson, he met with the anti-war group to make sure he was not stepping on their toes. Because they had just had the moratorium in (19)69, and they used to teach in. So even that movement at the very beginning, Senator Nelson was, I am glad he was honored this year at the 40th anniversary, because he is the man that made it all happen.
FH (01:15:44):
Absolutely. He was truly a visionary in regard to that, and the poor people were really that conscious of it. That is a movement too, as your question indicates that benefited from the example of the African-American correction.
SM (01:16:03):
Just a thought, because you have seen this today being a professor on universities, the movements became so special interest. One of the critics, the critics today, the conservative critics say that all these movements, and throw the gay and lesbian movement in there too.
FH (01:16:16):
Yeah.
SM (01:16:17):
Became so special interest, that there seems to be no unity today. In the very beginning they were working together, you could see them at protests, but now they seem to be more insular. Am I correct? This is a perception I have. Do you think that groups have become more insular, and they were not working with the other groups anymore, they were all just doing their own thing?
FH (01:16:42):
Well maybe that is probably true. I do not know. I think that the main problem is, it is both an advancement and a retreat in a way, is that all over the country, I do not care what city you go in, you find all sorts of really successful, vigorous local citizen effort of various kinds. Whether it is against banks redlining poor areas, or black areas. Or against some utility raising freight unjustly, or whatever. In every community in this country, there are those kinds of efforts going on. It is just amazing, and quite successfully in the local community. My friend Jim Hightower.
SM (01:17:36):
Oh, yeah, the journalist.
FH (01:17:38):
Yeah, and a great text to the populist, but he says, and this is the thing we had to fight to do this when I ran for president, is that many of these people, they are willing to work in a place giving out the free food to poor people, but they somehow do not see that you have got to get active in politics in order to change things. So that there will not be so many poor and hungry people, and Hightower feels, and worked for this. That if you could get those people like that, all they seeing their common interests and understanding that if they did not get active in politics and work together, they would be adjusted in principle majority. I think that is a tremendous populous challenge, and one that Hightower is working on, and that I also talk about.
SM (01:18:45):
When you ran for president in (19)72, and (19)76, what did you learn most about America, that maybe surprised you before you ran? And, what did you learn about young people, that you did not know?
FH (01:18:57):
Just about what I said, I will give you an example. One time I went to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and I have put together a tremendous rally. This was in (19)76, (19)72 really, I did not run for president, so much as I jogged. I did not ever enter in, I did not ever, was not able to raise money and get the kind of people that had already signed up with for government. (19)76, I really ran for president. Anyway, I put together this meeting down there which is sort of a metaphor for the whole campaign, and what I learned. There were a lot of African Americans in the crowd, a lot of Choctaw Indians, from nearby reservation. A lot of what I jokingly called, but truthfully called my redneck kin folks, my dad's people all came from Mississippi. I told that group when I got up to talk I said, I was in Minnesota last night, and I told them I was on my way to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and that I was going to put together here the darnedest, the best I could say, the best political rally anybody ever saw, or the damnedest race riot. One or the other. Everybody laughed sort of nervously and so forth. I said, my feeling is you do not have to love each other, I wish you would. All you have to do is recognize that you have common interests and that if you get yourself together, you are a majority in this country. I said, I came down here when I was 12 years old and stayed where the great aunt, who had an elderly black couple come and clean her house all day, washed all the sheets, and aired all the mattresses and everything, washed down the walls of this pine house. She paid them with a jar of end green beans, and a bucket of ribbon cane syrup for their daily work. I am sure she did not realize, that that was one of the causes for the fact that a lot of folks were working for 25 cents an hour. Afterwards I had a great uncle come up me, he had tears in his eyes, and he called me Freddy and he said, "Freddy, I have been waiting all my life to hear somebody talk like that." I think that is the kind of thing that was in the country, we talked to people about their own self-interest that would work. For example, I spoke that same year in Akron, Ohio, where most of the people in the audience were rubber workers. Somebody asked me a question about gay rights and I said, "I think the government has got enough to do, without worrying about what people are doing in the privacy of their own homes." It did not fit in the flow. I said, I really thought it was true. Like George Wallace said at the time, "You be to get the hay down where the goats can get at it."
SM (01:22:53):
Let me change my tape.
FH (01:22:53):
I think it is the McGovern, are you ready?
SM (01:23:04):
Yep, I am ready.
FH (01:23:05):
I thought at the time, that if McGovern could talk that way and couch these matters, in terms of the death interest of his listeners. He could have put that thing together. Instead what Nixon was able to do, and then later Reagan, was to appeal to people's concerns, and fears, and so forth. That trumped what would have been sensible off on economic.
SM (01:23:49):
Both you and your wife LaDonna, have been involved with Native American issues all of your lives.
FH (01:23:54):
Yeah.
SM (01:23:55):
Where is the movement today? I have read some books on the, that the Native American movement was actually pretty strong even in the (19)50s, and the (19)60s. Then of course, then the American Indian movement came about. What were the successes of the 1960s, and (19)70s, with respect to Native American issues? Your thoughts on the American Indian movement, which people say it was only four years from (19)69, to (19)73. It started where they overtook Alcatraz, and then it ended with the violence at Wounded Knee. When you think of the American Indian movement, I think of Dennis Banks, there is one other person I forget his name now, there is two that come to the forefront.
FH (01:24:39):
Yeah.
SM (01:24:41):
Just your thought about that?
FH (01:24:43):
Dennis I thought was, he was a very sensible and steady person, not a kind of wild radical. But I did not agree with a lot of Roseanne people, or lot of the SDS student people. Violence as a tactic, I think that was actually wrong. I often heard people advocating, in those days, violence as a tactic. Who themselves, would not be found within 100 miles of the actual violence. They sort of this thing, let you and him fight. I thought that violence was often hurting people, and was inhumane therefore, and that it was impractical. That you could not beat the government, or those with power. Because, they wind up having a hell of a lot more guns than you got. That set us back somewhat I think, people who advocated or used violence, on a whole range of those issues. It was the more activists, and really very strong and big activists, my former wife Ladonna, who actually accomplished it. What happened with Indian movement, is they were successful. We were able to write into the laws all sorts of provisions for self-determination, for Indians to run their own programs, to run their own schools, and to run their own governments. Princeton governments, courts, Indian courts and so forth, and that is the situation today. There is still, of course those that have not been able to, or were not able to set up casinos, gambling casinos, are still struggling economically. It is pretty interesting that Indians who for a long time were victimized by black people, are now making money off of them.
SM (01:27:01):
Yeah, that that is right.
FH (01:27:01):
I do not like gang.
FH (01:27:01):
... making money off of them.
SM (01:27:01):
Yeah, that is right.
FH (01:27:03):
I do not like gambling, but it has provided a way by which tribes have been able to [inaudible] their governments and their economies, and also to preserve their traditions and ancient ways.
SM (01:27:20):
When I think of the last 20 or 30 years in terms of writers, of course, you think of Dee Brown and I think of Mr. Alexie, Sherman Alexie-
FH (01:27:30):
[inaudible] yeah.
SM (01:27:30):
...who was another great writer, and Vine Deloria.
FH (01:27:35):
Yeah, Vine.
SM (01:27:36):
But then there was also Ward Churchill, who has become very controversial.
FH (01:27:40):
Well, I do not think he is Indian, really.
SM (01:27:42):
Yeah, I do not know what your thoughts are. He has written a lot about the Native Americans. As a lawyer, what were the most significant laws that were passed after World War II during this time frame between (19)46 and 2010? We are talking about the years that boomers have been alive. I have asked this question and I started out by saying that I think Roe v. Wade in (19)73 and certainly the Brown vs. Board of Education (19)54 and the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, (19)64, (19)65, are those the four that really stand out in terms of impact on America, as well as even I could say impact on the generation?
FH (01:28:25):
And I think they are symbolic of a lot of other laws, and I think because a lot of them fit in with what we came to call self-determination for American Indians. It gives people more control over their own lives and knocked down the barriers that kept them from becoming what they want to become.
SM (01:28:52):
Are there any laws that you would like to add to that you think were very important, particularly for this generation that is now between the age of the 48 and 64?
FH (01:29:03):
Well, one important development was we moved toward, but in a fairly meager way, more of federal aid to education. And we need to do a great deal more in that respect, for smaller classrooms and better prepared teachers and so forth. And also a huge hole in our social fabric was the lack of any kind of national health program. And we have made a major step in the right direction there with Obama. Obama's election I think was really historic. And I think that while for the short run, the Republicans are able to delay and block a lot of what he is going to do and wants to do and said he would do, they are increasingly marginalizing themselves, I think. I mean, if you look at the demographic between number of Hispanics and African Americans, the greater progressive activism of students and all of that, I think makes things look pretty bad for the future for the Republicans, but we are going to win out more issues-
SM (01:30:41):
So the criticism of President Obama and some of the politicians of the left... I just interviewed a person a couple days ago. Why does he, and why does the left, and why did the liberals always think that they know better what to do about my life than I do?
FH (01:30:57):
I think that is a serious claim. That is simply not true. All of the things that Obama ran on and that he was pushing are supported by a majority of the people in the country [inaudible]. And he, after all, was elected.
SM (01:31:16):
Right. The Kerner Commission, you mentioned it earlier, but I want to talk about it now, which is the National Advisory Council on Civil Disorders. Why did LBJ form the committee? What were their findings? What were the main reasons for the riots? And was this a change? I guess I cannot read the file. Did this have anything to do about this change between what we called nonviolent protests, the Ghandian type of attitude that King professed, and the more violent protests that was actually happening in our cities?
FH (01:31:57):
Well, we had had a terrible riot in Watts, in the Black section of Los Angeles, in 1965. And we thought that was kind of an isolated thing, but it turned out to be a harbinger of things to come. We had some more of that in (19)66, but not a whole lot. And then terrible explosions in the Black sections of nearly every city in the summer of 1967, and caused enormous concern and fear. I got the Walter Mondale to co-author a resolution in the Senate to create a blue ribbon citizen commission to look into the causes and prevention of such a riot. And I had the resolution sent to my subcommittee that I chaired, the subcommittee on government research. And we held hearings. We had Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not yet in the Senate, and Whitney Young headed the National Open League as witnesses and [inaudible] about it. And then it occurred to me after a day or so that we did not have to wait until Congress passed the law and created that commission, but that the president could do it himself. So I got the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, to say he would bring it up with Johnson at his meeting that night with the president, and also talked with Douglass Cater on the president's staff, and suggested that he do that. And then it was announced that he was going to make a publicly televised speech doing that. And he called me just before his speech and he said, "I am going to appoint you to that commission that you have been talking about, and I am going to put you on it." And incidentally, he said, "I want you to remember" ... Well, first he said, "I do not want you to be like some of your colleagues and I appoint them to things and they never show up." And I said, "Well, I will show up. I will work at it." Another thing, he said, "Fred, I want you to remember you are a junction man." I said, "Yes, sir, I am a junction man." And he said, "If you forget it," he said, "I will take my pocket knife and cut your Peter off." There were some people were back in my living room, we were going to watch this thing on television. And I came back, they knew I was talking to president. They said, "What did he say? What did he say?" And I said, "Well, some of it was kind of personal."
SM (01:35:07):
Yeah, I heard he used to have meetings in his bathroom [inaudible].
FH (01:35:11):
Oh, yeah.
SM (01:35:12):
And then of course, we met with Senator Fulbright when I was working at the university. And Senator Fulbright, when he went against Johnson, Johnson told him, "You will never be invited ever again to the White House." He never was, never invited to a dinner, nothing. There was a complete break.
FH (01:35:32):
Well, we started ... we had just a wonderful staff, David Ginsberg, who just died lately, [inaudible] lawyer, was our executive director, and put together a terrific staff. And we authorized a lot of academic studies and surveys, and then we divided into teams. John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, and I were one team. And we went to various places in the country where there had been riots. And John and I, for example, went to Cincinnati and Milwaukee and just spent the day walking around talking to people. And then we held interminable hearings. I got a room in the Capitol building where we met most of the time. Sometimes we met in the Indian Treaty Room, in the Executive Office Building. And we met days and days and days and days and days. And this was a commission written report. In these hearings, we had witnesses from J. Edgar Hoover to Martin Luther King, and lot in between. And we eventually voted line by line on every word that went into that report. What we found was that... well, the most famous words of course in the report were that America was moving toward two societies, one white, one Black, separate and unequal. And what most people cannot understand is that racism, white racism, is very much involved in what is happening in the ghettos or where people live with inferior schools, no transportation, no jobs or virtually no jobs. Jobs have moved out of the central city and gone to the suburbs or disappeared altogether, gone overseas. And so we recommended vigorous enforcement of the recently passed civil rights laws and massive new federal programs, particularly around jobs, but also the training and education and so forth. We know that a member of the commission leaked to Johnson the idea, I mean we learned later, "That this report," they said to him, "condones riots, and they do not have a good word to say about you." All of that was quite wrong. But our idea was that we would ask Johnson to continue our commission in operation for an extra six months so that we could lobby for and push for our findings for recommendations. And we set up already an official meeting where he would receive the report and so forth. But he canceled that. He would not see us, and he would not agree to have the commission's life extended. There were... both Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, for example, and Willard Wirtz, the Secretary of Labor, and others, who did endorse our findings. Willard Wirtz [inaudible] in the commission, in the words of the great American philosopher Pogo, has said that "We have met the enemy and he is us."
SM (01:39:22):
Golly.
FH (01:39:22):
And Robert Kennedy strongly supported our findings and recommendations and was involved in the Senate hearings where we appeared and [inaudible] the paperback edition of our report, which the New York Times published, was a bestseller, runaway bestseller, amazingly. And we made progress, America [inaudible] of race and poverty for about a decade after the report. But with the advent of the Reagan administration, that progress stopped and we began to go backwards.
SM (01:40:09):
I was reading one of your interviews that you did in 2008 on the web, and I love a quote here that the interviewer said, you remember this. You said in your announcement speech in 1972 something along the lines of, "A lot of people cannot believe America has ever been to the moon because they doubt the credibility of government." That is a classic quote. And then something else here, what you said in this interview that actually I think you have already talked about it, but I want to put it on record here. You said in response to the question to this interviewer, "No, no. Starting with the Vietnam War and with Richard Nixon, we have never recovered from the great skepticism of government. I think the skepticism about government is generally pretty healthy, but I do not like the aspect of it which came out of the Ronald Reagan years; the government cannot do anything right and everything you try turns out badly and so forth. I wish we had a little bit more skepticism of the military than we do, but it is going to be a while before we build back the sort of confidence in the government that we once had." I think that is beautiful.
FH (01:41:18):
That is absolutely true. I think it is true that one of the worst things that come out of the Reagan administration was that government cannot do anything right and that everything we tried, for example, even with a New Deal, failed. That is not true. Virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it or we did not try it enough. And we began to move back toward doing something about all these problems with the election of Bill Clinton, but then we went the other way again with the eight years of George W. Bush.
SM (01:41:59):
Did-
FH (01:42:00):
[inaudible] a very heartening thing that Obama was elected, saying all the things that I believe in.
SM (01:42:09):
I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, who I think is single-handedly responsible for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendments.
FH (01:42:16):
That is right.
SM (01:42:17):
But do you believe ... And this is what she said. She said that she believes that the troublemakers of the (19)60s now run today's universities. And she says they have taken over women's studies, Black studies, Asian studies, Native American studies, environmental studies, Chicano studies, GLBT studies. She was mainly referring to women's studies, but the reference was there toward all of them. Do you believe that?
FH (01:42:42):
Well, she and her fellow right-wingers, they are always critical nowadays of universities and academia generally, because they say, "They need more balance than they need more Republican hired as teachers," and so forth. But it should occur to them, I think, that what most professors believe, they believe because it is correct and it is the sensible position, and that theirs is the more selfish and the incorrect position.
SM (01:43:24):
This is a university question, because you are a professor and have been one since the late (19)70s. And I spent 30- some years in higher ed. But what did universities of the (19)60s and (19)70s teach the universities of the (19)80s and beyond? Did they learn about the importance of student empowerment as opposed to student power? Or are they afraid that it could happen again, what happened in the (19)60s, more controls? What I have seen in some universities is they are trying to get more controls again over students. Students today are so busy, they do not have time to protest or even to be active, although they get involved in volunteer work. And even on college campuses today, space is allocated for protests. They just cannot go anywhere. They can only have a little dinky space on campus. And I know if I was a student, I would be fighting that, but-
FH (01:44:17):
I think there is a distinction in that respect between the faculty and the administration. I have found administration really nervous about any kind of student activism. It worries them. But faculty, I do not think tend to feel that way. They are closer to the students. And on students, I worry about these students being too serious and too intent on getting themselves credentialed with their college and university education. And up until the Obama election, I found them not willing to be active in politics, rather disdainful of politics, and back starting with Reagan, more reflective of their parents' conservative views than is today the case. Now but even then, and especially now, what I have found for years, many years, is that there is an extremely high percentage of students who were involved in some kind of service activity. And a lot of them also began to, I was glad to see, get involved in politics, with the campaign of Obama. I am worried about them, just as I am worried about a lot of progressives who supported Obama, that they were becoming sort of disappointed and disillusioned that everything he advocated and they thought they were fighting for by supporting him cannot be done right away. A lot of them did not realize what an intransigent bunch the Republicans are in Congress, and how the archaic rules of the Senate allow a minority to block [inaudible] majority, and just became disgusted with the long fight over health insurance and so forth, health reform. So I do not know what is going to happen, just a lot of those are not going to be active, I am afraid, in the 2010 Congressional race. We always lose seats, the president's party loses seats in the years after the election. And how many depends primarily on the condition of the economy. So we are going to lose seats. I am worried about disillusion rather than about the economy as to how many we lose.
SM (01:47:08):
One of the things that as a professor who has taught students from... You have probably taught three generations of students now-
FH (01:47:14):
Yeah.
SM (01:47:15):
...the boomers, the Generation Xers that actually were born between 1965 and 1982, and then you have got the millennials that are in college right now-
FH (01:47:25):
[inaudible]
SM (01:47:26):
...with the Generation Ys now being in elementary school.
FH (01:47:30):
That is right.
SM (01:47:30):
And I do not know if you sensed this when you were teaching in the (19)80s, but there seemed to be friction between Generation X and the boomers. We had panels on this, and I do not know if it was just our campus, or my observation is just my observation, but they seemed to have two reactions to the boomer generation. One is they are sick of hearing about the nostalgia, about what it was like then, with all the protests and activities and all the rock and all the music and all this stuff, or they have a feeling, "Gee, I wish I lived then, because you had causes that were important to you. We have nothing." And that was the Generation Xers. We are not talking millennials now. Did you sense that at all?
FH (01:48:17):
Well, I do not know. Here is my overall feelings [inaudible]. When I first started teaching back in 1976 at the University of New Mexico, we still had quite a few older professors who were still having trouble with affirmative action. My chairman said to me one time... We were talking about women, "We ought have more women on our faculty," is what I was saying. And he said, "You know what? I think we ought to just hire people on the basis of qualifications," with sort of the [inaudible] implied idea that if we gave special attention to hiring Black people and women, we were reducing the quality of the people we hired. But all of that has changed quite a bit. But what I found today is that white kids and Black kids really have no idea of how it used to be. And it embarrasses Black kids a little bit in my class when I talk about segregated water fountains, even. In Oklahoma, there was a law that Blacks and whites could not play chess together. And then much more bitter things like killings and lynchings and bombings, and so forth. It was a shock to people to really hear that from a person who lived it and knows it. And from young women, I used to hear this, it is getting a little better, I think, used to hear a lot of them saying, "Well, I think women ought to be able to go to law school and to med school and all right. And I think they ought to have equal pay for equal work, but I am not a feminist. I am not one of those feminists." But just by definition you are [inaudible] believe in those things.
SM (01:50:28):
Right.
FH (01:50:31):
But I think a lot of young people simply think, "Well the way things are now is the way they always have been and the way they were going to be." And it takes sort of eternal vigilance, as Abraham Lincoln said.
SM (01:50:49):
With your kids, did you have a generation gap? I can remember there is a LIFE magazine cover that showed the face of a student wearing sunglasses. I have it framed. And it shows the father and a son arguing. Was the generation gap... was it pretty strong then? And then I followed this up with an interview I had a couple days ago with James Fallows. You probably know him.
FH (01:51:16):
Yeah.
SM (01:51:18):
And I was reading something in a book, I am not sure if he said it, but there was a discussion where the generation gap was not that bad between parents and students. The generation gap is really between those who went to the Vietnam War and those who did not. The real gap is within the generation in between those who served in war and those who protested the war or evaded the draft or service. So the history books say the generation gap is pretty strong.
FH (01:51:50):
I think it was, probably, but it narrowed because of the kids, just like my daughter being against the Vietnam War before I came out against it, and what influence her own example and feelings had on me. Or even smoking, my youngest daughter as a little girl saying, "Daddy, why do you keep smoking?" Or on something even more mundane than that, you threw down the piece of trash or something: "Oh, daddy, you want to see beauty, you have got to leave beauty," straight off the television. So I think there was a generation gap. A bigger gap for a good while was an economic class gap. For example, my dad, [inaudible] farmer in southwest Oklahoma, and my son, he had hair... my son had the hair no longer than the Beatles. But at the time we thought that was long. And my dad would always make it a point to say to my son, "You look like a girl with that long hair." But eventually, and it was not too long after that, you see these country and Western stars out in Nashville with long hair and mustaches and so forth. So things began to change, but there was, I think, an economic class gap on these social issues. And perhaps to some degree there still is.
SM (01:53:45):
And also, you think there was that generational gap too between those who fought and those who did not?
FH (01:53:49):
I suppose that is true. And I think if there was resentment on the part of those who went to Vietnam against those who did not, that would be understandable, because here were people going to college and having a good time and doing all right, while these other people went off to the war. I never heard of what you now hear sometimes people say, that people were disdainful of the Vietnam veterans when they came home, or spit on them, or whatever. I never knew of any such thing as that.
SM (01:54:34):
Yeah. That leads me into my next question. Bear with me as I read this little information here on the Vietnam veteran, because I have gotten to know them quite well, a lot of them. And I pay my respects to the people who served this nation. I have gone to the Vietnam Memorial every year since 1994 on Memorial Day and Veterans Day to pay respects to Lewis Puller, who wrote Fortunate Son. But this is the question here: was the My Lai incident and others like it, including those scenes... I remember there was many scenes on television where Vietnam vets were using their lighters to burn down villages. Do you think that these were the main reasons why vets were treated so poorly upon their return to America, this kind of baby killer image? Secondly, from the veterans I have talked to, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legions, did not want them in as their members, even though they run the organization now. And I worked on a university campus in my very first job, and they were treated so poorly that affirmative action became... they were put into affirmative action plans, which now included hiring Vietnam vets. There seemed to be a hostility on the home front that had been against the policies of the government, but I did not sense that people disliked the vets. They disliked the government that sent them to Vietnam. So there was a lot [inaudible] -
SM (01:56:03):
...the symptoms of Vietnam. So there was a lot going on here. And my final thing, when I throw this in here, is that people who did serve, and came back, also oftentimes had bad experiences at health centers and in hospitals. They had served, like Kennedy had asked them to, but they were not treated well, even in the hospitals. And you can sense this over the years of battles over Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder, which now for all Vietnam vets is recognized as a problem, but it took 20-some years, "Prove that you became stressful and have anxiety due to your experiences." So there was a lot happening here. And I do not know what your perceptions are of Vietnam vets, but just in reaction to what I just said here.
FH (01:56:54):
Well, I never knew of that kind of mistreatment of Vietnam veterans by people back home. But I do know this, even now we have had problems with the Veterans Administration operating in a bureaucratic way. Just like insurance companies try to pull their losses down, and their payments down, I think the Vietnam... I mean the Veterans people, even now, have been much too strict and rigid in recognizing legitimate veteran claims in regard to health and so forth. But I never saw that. I saw the other thing in Oklahoma, where particularly early, until fairly late in the war, where a majority of Americans were for Johnson, and Johnson's war policy on the Vietnam War. When I was beginning changing in the other direction. I remember, for example, I was holding town meetings around the state shortly after the My Lai incident became known, and I had a sheriff and his wife in one meeting, and I think they were drinking a little bit too, so they were pretty vociferous and forceful in the way they talked, but they just thought it was terrible. I said, "Well, now wait a minute, we are going to find out more about the facts, but you do not believe that our people ought to be shooting women, and children, and the innocent non-combatants and so forth, do you?" And they both said, "Hell, they are going to grow up, and they are the enemy, and they ought not to be around there if they are not part of the Viet Cong and supporting them." I heard that kind of stuff a lot, until very late in the war. But I never did see, maybe it is because it was Oklahoma, I never did see the anti-vet.
SM (01:59:09):
Did you have a chance to work with any Native American vets who talked about their experiences? Because even... Again, I read too much. And, again, it is only based on what you have read, and what people have told you, it may not always be fact. But that Native American Vietnam veterans were also felt put upon when they served over there, because they were automatically put on point, because the discrimination there was, well, they are Native American, and they must be great leaders, in terms of being heads of units or whatever. And so a lot of them died, because they were put on as the front of their units there.
FH (01:59:51):
Well, I never was aware of that, and I had not heard it. What I noticed always among American Indians, a very proud tradition of serving in the military and-
SM (02:00:10):
Yes, that is true.
FH (02:00:11):
A warrior tradition. And they are much honored in the tribe and at home. We never had a powwow, or any kind of thing like that, in Oklahoma, during or after that war, that it did not start off with some kind of tribute to the veterans and-
SM (02:00:31):
Good. Well, that is good news.
FH (02:00:33):
Yeah.
SM (02:00:33):
I think that is true, they are very proud. But sometimes it upset them that they used qualities that they thought they possessed, and it cost many, many lives in Vietnam.
FH (02:00:48):
Yeah. I just do not know about that.
SM (02:00:51):
Yeah. Well, we are getting toward the end here. I got a few more questions here. There has been some commentaries too where general statements are made about blaming the generation, or that period of the (19)60s and (19)70s for the problems we have in our society today. Issues like the drug culture, the welfare state, big law government versus small government, the creation of the isms, the divorce rate, all these things, the family is important. So that period of the (19)60s and the (19)70s is oftentimes condemned by many, probably on the right, more conservatives, as opposed to liberals. Do you believe that?
FH (02:01:35):
Well, I think there were just millions of people who, as I was growing up and entering into politics and so forth, who were living lives of quiet desperation, and, well, they decided not to be quiet anymore. Much to their credit. They changed America. They have changed the way they thought about themselves. They developed a much better and stronger self-image in the process. And they changed us too. And they changed society much for the better. So I think that is one of the proud results of the (19)60s, is America is much closer to its ideal than it has ever been in history.
SM (02:02:26):
I know you cannot generalize on 74 million people, because that is how many there were. And some people will not even respond to this, except based on personal experience of people they knew, but are there any positive or negative qualities that you can place on the generation? And when I say generation, I am meaning everyone. This project that I am involved in here, it is not just about white men and women, it is about African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, gay and lesbian. It is not so much about Asian culture, because we do not hear a whole lot about that during this timeframe. But how do you respond to that?
FH (02:03:06):
I think that they are much more aware of the world, and how it worked, and of their place in it. And they are more self-confident than was true of generations before them. I talked to, in the old days, I talked to people like my uncles who went off World War II, and they did not know anything about the world, and they had no self-confidence. They felt like victims. The times were hard, and they had a hard time finding a job that was worth a damn and so forth. I think most people today have a much stronger feeling about things like that than the people-
SM (02:04:01):
In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin, and when did it end, and what was the watershed moment?
FH (02:04:08):
Well, I think the watershed moment probably was with the election of John Kennedy. He was the of that post-war generation himself, and he said the torch passed to a new generation of Americans. And this was a different crowd. I entered the University of Oklahoma in 1948. And a lot of people that were in college with me then, or just before me, were veterans. And they were the kind of people who were not going to take that shit anymore. It used to be, I understood, the hazing of freshman, and all that kind of stuff, and people were ordered around and so forth. And these were people that just were not going to stand for it. And it rubbed off on the rest of us. So I think when John Kennedy came in, in 1960, that tendency was accelerated.
SM (02:05:18):
So the beginning was when Kennedy came in, and the watershed moment. When did it end?
FH (02:05:25):
Well, I do not think it has ended. I think it has been renewed with Obama. We backslid during the Reagan, and Bush, and the second Bush times, to some degree. But, still, I think people just, they will not stand for being held down and pushed around anymore. And I think that is all for the good. And that is true of people who are right-wingers too, they do not want the government telling them what to do.
SM (02:05:58):
That is the Tea Party movement that is going on now.
FH (02:06:01):
That is right. People see, they know... I think the Tea Party movement... People see all these changes in the country, for God's sake a Black getting elected President of the United States, and things are changing, and the world seems as dangerous, and I think they just are very fearful, and unhappy, and angry. And the kind of remedies they talk about do not fit with what the fears are. For example, they say stop raising our taxes, and Obama's taxing us. Well, there is recent studies that show that our combined tax burden now for individuals, their state, local, and federal, is the lowest since the 1950s. But people's perception is, "Well, they just keep taxing us, telling us what to do and so forth." There is just a lot of that. But nobody... I never got elected by a unanimous vote. There has always been a lot of people that are dragging along their thinking, and frame it, and I suppose that is always going to be true. We have to, I think, do our best, as Obama has tried, to reach out to them, and fill their fears, and appeal to their self-interest in doing the right thing. But some of them we just are not going to get.
SM (02:07:45):
...We are here too. Because I got... And your answers are just fantastic. Vietnam... In the university, being in there for so many years, two words that seem to really stir people up when we are dealing with foreign policy on any particular issue, if you mention the word Vietnam, or you mention the word quagmire.
FH (02:08:10):
Yes.
SM (02:08:11):
I can remember, during the Gulf War, when Vietnam vets were coming out saying that they were against the war, a lot of them. Of course, then it kind of waned, it did not last very long. We lost some lives. But certainly the Iraq war, and where we are in Afghanistan right now, and I know it upsets... Many of them are Boomers. They get tired. They say this has nothing to do with Vietnam, and has nothing to do with the quagmire. They do not like going back to that period, because I think, whether it stirs up memories they want to forget, or they want to have amnesia, or... What I am getting at here is that when President Reagan came into power, he said, "We are back." It was kind of a feeling that we are back. And then President Bush number one said the Vietnam syndrome is over. And my feeling about this is that... President Reagan said we were going to have a strong military again. The military fell apart in Vietnam, now we are going to build it up again, and have a strong military, and we are going to bring values back. Our values are gone. And then Bush saying this Vietnam syndrome was over, saying we do not have to talk about it anymore. It is a different world. Your thoughts on those kinds of attitudes by those two presidents?
FH (02:09:27):
Well, the thing, to me, that Republicans began, especially with Reagan, to talk about, we got to get back to family values. Here was Reagan, he never went to church. He had a dysfunctional family, but was talking about family values. Or Phyllis Schlafly, she is against the women working and so on, and that is all she has ever done.
SM (02:09:56):
Or Newt Gingrich talking about values, and he is running around with a woman while his wife is fighting cancer.
FH (02:10:03):
Absolutely. All of that seems awfully hypocritical to me. But I think that over time America rejects elitist warmongers like Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush, and rejects their idea that it is just terrible that people have gotten involved in making foreign policy and national security policy, because it puts too much limits. Democracy has a hell of a time on the world stage, because the people limit what they can do. I think that is a damn good thing. I think I am for a populist of foreign and national security politicians. It has limits on what they can do, because the two worst things a government can do to us is tax us and kill us, or send us to get killed. I would like to have a lot of popular restriction on that. It is, I think, very difficult for a democracy like America to be involved in a long war, because people began to question, as they are now with Afghanistan, saying, "What the hell are we doing? Is this in the interest of our people?" And they begin to say, "Wait a minute, we ought to get out of this. We got a lot of problems here at home we ought to be dealing with, instead of this. Are not we killing a whole lot of innocent people in the process?" I think that is a good development. They will let you do it for a while, but over the long pull, they are going to begin to ask a lot of questions. Just as this Afghan war has become unpopular now. That really irritates the elitists, who some I have mentioned, like Henry Kissinger, and George Bush, and Dick Cheney and so forth, but I think it is good for America to speak.
SM (02:12:10):
This is a question I have asked everybody that is been involved in my interviews, even way back to Senator McCarthy back in 1996. That is a question of healing. I used to take students to Washington DC. I got to know Senator Nelson when we brought him to our campus twice for Earth Day events. And after his first speech, I said I was trying to get ahold of Senator Fulbright. I knew he had a stroke, but he had not said yes, or had not said no, to meeting our students. And finally Senator Nelson said, when he was here, "I will contact him. I will get him over to the Wilderness Society." So it began the first of nine senator visits, where Senator Nelson gave us almost two and a half hours with each of these unbelievable people. And the question, when we went to see Senator Muskie, he had just gotten out of the hospital, he was not feeling well, and he had just seen the Ken Burn series on the Civil War, which had really touched him. But the students came up with this question, and this is the question... Due to all the divisions that took place in America in the 1960s and (19)70s, divisions between Black and white, between male and female, between gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, and were against the troops... Then they brought up the riots in the cities that they had seen in the (19)60s. These were all people who were not born at the time. Do you feel that the Boomer generation that experienced all these terrible events are going to go to their graves... That includes not only the activists, but those 85 percent who were not activists, they were going to go to their graves not healing from a lot of these divisions that were part of their lives? Like the people in the Civil War never healed. That was the question. Do you think we have, as a nation, and particularly the Boomer generation of 74 million, that there is a problem with healing?
FH (02:14:14):
I think most are healing, and will heal, but we are always going to have a minority of people, just like in the South, who still want to complain about the war between the states as they call it. And there is a lot of people who, they do not like to say it aloud these days, but who are worried about women getting out of their place, and the pushy African Americans, and these longhaired kids that are not so longhaired anymore, but that are much too activist and independent. There is always going to be people like that. But I think there is healing. And I think Obama's election showed it.
SM (02:15:11):
Yeah. I think Senator Nelson mentioned that, he said, "People do not walk around Washington DC with a lack of healing on their sleeves." But he said it permanently affected the body politic.
FH (02:15:25):
Yeah.
SM (02:15:26):
And Senator Muskie did not even comment, because the students wanted... They thought they had a golden opportunity, here was the man that was picked at the last minute to be Humphrey's running mate.
FH (02:15:35):
Yes.
SM (02:15:35):
And he did not even comment on 1968. He looked up and he... Actually, he is pretty emotional about it. He looked up and he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War over the issue of race." And then he went on to talk about that. Never even mentioned 1968, which meant the divisions go back to the Civil War. So that was a pretty interesting experience.
FH (02:15:58):
The decision came down to me and Muskie, did you know that?
SM (02:16:01):
Yes.
FH (02:16:01):
Yeah.
SM (02:16:02):
Yeah, I knew that. Well, actually I have read that in books. I read a lot of history. I read your book too, many years ago, but I was rereading it again, and did you feel, right to the last minute, you were going to be the person?
FH (02:16:20):
Well, he had us up to his hotel room, and each in an adjoining bedroom, at the last, and each of us did not know the other was in an adjoining bedroom. But he came in and talked to me awhile. And then he would say, "I will be right back." Do not know where he is going, but it later turned out he was going across the hall into the bedroom with Muskie.
SM (02:16:48):
Oh my gosh.
FH (02:16:56):
And then he came back again, we talked some more. Did I know anything that he should know that might make it difficult for him to choose me and whatever? Then he went across the hall. And then he came back. The last time he came back, had tears in his eyes. We were very close friends. He had tears in his eyes. Humphrey was very emotional. And he said, "Fred, I am going to have to choose the younger man." And so I said, "Well, if that is your decision, I will nominate." And he said, "Will you?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Will you go with me to tell him?" I said, "Yes." I did not know where we were going, but we walked across the hall, opened the door, walked in there, there was a bunch of people just standing by the bureau over in the corner. And Humphrey said what is probably the longest sentence I have ever heard, he said, "Ed, shake hands with the man who is going nominate you."
SM (02:17:49):
That is a great anecdote.
FH (02:17:52):
And I did nominate him. I was the one who nominated him.
SM (02:17:57):
I heard that ... I did not know him that well, but I heard he had a temper at times.
FH (02:18:03):
Oh yeah.
SM (02:18:03):
But, oh my God, the students loved him. He was so good with the students. You could tell he loved students.
FH (02:18:09):
You mean Muskie or Humphrey?
SM (02:18:12):
No, I am talking about Muskie.
FH (02:18:14):
Yes, Muskie, that is true, both. Yeah. See, I told you that though, because what Humphrey gave in his reason, which was a good way to say it properly too, because it did not indicate he saw any fault in me.
SM (02:18:33):
Was not it because you were too young?
FH (02:18:35):
Yeah, that is what he said.
SM (02:18:36):
You were 37 years old.
FH (02:18:37):
Yeah. He said, "Fred, I am going to have to choose the younger man." That is why I told you that anecdote, because that is the reason he gave, and I think maybe that was the main reason.
SM (02:18:51):
Yep.
FH (02:18:52):
He later told somebody that he thought he and I were too... I do not know how he... That Muskie seemed stable compared to me and him. We were both very enthusiastic and so forth. I think the age thing was an indication, sort of, of how he felt about it.
SM (02:19:21):
One of the qualities, that may be a good quality, but I would like your thoughts, is that this generation is often looked upon as the generation that does not trust people, because so many of the leaders lie to them, whether it be Watergate, Nixon, the Gulf of Tonkin with Johnson, even President Eisenhower lying on TV, that we found out later about U-2. There were questions about Kennedy and his knowledge of the overthrow of the Diem regime, although I do not believe President Kennedy ever wanted him killed, but he just wanted him sent off to France or whatever. And, of course, McNamara and the numbers game that was really not really true. Do you think-
FH (02:20:02):
Well, I think that is absolutely true. There has always been, I think, a very healthy skepticism about the government. I have thought there was too much of it, but I see the justification for it.
SM (02:20:24):
Yeah.
FH (02:20:27):
When people say, "Well, we lowered your taxes," well there is a minority of people, the teabaggers and ... who do not believe it. Or say this health thing is going be good for you.
SM (02:20:43):
When I first started asking this question on trust, I did it because I remember a Psychology 101 class that I took in college, and I graduated in 1970 from undergrad, and it was basically the professor saying, "If you cannot trust people, then you will not be a success in life. Trust is a very important quality you must possess." And so I said, "Well, if my generation did not trust anybody, and they are passing this on to their kids and grandkids, that is not good." But then you take Political Science 101, and it says basically that... Because I was a history political science major just like you as an undergrad. And I learned that trust shows that democracy is alive and well, that dissent is part of our society, so lacking trust is a good quality.
FH (02:21:30):
You bet. I think so too. We went through the (19)50s, where we were too satisfied, and did not ask enough questions, and so things got worse. Well, I am sorry, but I am going to have to... They were waving to me here, I have got to take off.
SM (02:21:46):
Can I ask one last question?
FH (02:21:47):
Yeah, you bet.
SM (02:21:48):
What do you think the lasting legacy will be of this generation when they pass on? The best history books are often written 50 years after an event, like the best ones of World War II are being written now. What do you think the sociologists and historians will say after the last Boomer has passed away? Kind of like what they do over in Gettysburg, when the last Civil War soldier died, they have a statue to him over there, he died in 1924. But what do you think they will be saying about this generation that grew up after World War II overall?
FH (02:22:34):
I think they were more self-confident, and more concerned about others, in addition to themselves.
SM (02:22:50):
Well, very good. Well, Senator, thank you very much.
FH (02:22:53):
All right.
SM (02:22:53):
I do not know, you have mentioned your wife, or your former wife, she would be great.
FH (02:22:58):
Yeah.
SM (02:22:59):
How would I get ahold of her?
FH (02:23:02):
LaDonna Harris, and I do not have it right in front of me here the... Well, let us see, if you hold on a second, I can find it.
SM (02:23:09):
Either that, or you can email it to me.
FH (02:23:11):
Yeah. She is in... Well, I will just tell you. Hold on a second. I will look it up. She lives here in Albuquerque. I have been remarried for nearly 30 years. But let me just, if you hold on just a second here, I will look on my Blackberry, and I will tell you what...
SM (02:23:30):
If she has an email or...
FH (02:23:35):
Yeah, her email is AIO, that is the name of the organization which she heads, Americans for Indian Opportunities, aio@aio.org.
SM (02:23:52):
Aio.org. And the last question, how would I get ahold of Senator Mondale?
FH (02:23:57):
I do not know. Somebody just talked to him the other day, and sent me greetings. He is up in Minnesota, but I will be darned if I-
SM (02:24:07):
Yeah, I want to try to get ahold of him. And also Geraldine Ferraro is another one, but she is in New York. Senator, thank you very, very much.
FH (02:24:15):
All right.
SM (02:24:16):
I will keep you updated on everything. You will see the transcripts. I will need your picture though.
FH (02:24:21):
Okay.
SM (02:24:22):
But I will email you on that.
FH (02:24:24):
All right.
SM (02:24:25):
You have a great day.
FH (02:24:26):
All right. Thanks a million.
SM (02:24:27):
And thanks for serving our country, because you did a great job.
FH (02:24:30):
Well, thank you. That is very generous of you. Thank you.
SM (02:24:33):
Yep. Bye now.
(End of Interview)
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Senator Fred Harris
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Harris, Fred R., 1930- ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Legislators—United States--Oklahoma; College teachers; Harris, Fred R., 1930--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Fred Harris is a former Democratic United States Senator elected twice from the state of Oklahoma. Harris received his Bachelor and Law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He won a special election in 1964, succeeding Robert S. Kerr. In 1976, he became a professor of Political Science at the University of New Mexico.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-07-01
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.128a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.128b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
144:35
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/5d4c797751fa45bb17b6ae887e92a43b.jpg
a4c079a074970c3da0c3993789e161d9
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/3b34154c31e6be1c012acf5563be5028.mp3
0e516e7b49bc6ac776ab65f050ed51c0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js)
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
1996-09-21
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Harris Wofford
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span>Harris Wofford is a lawyer, educator, politician, author, and co-founder of the Peace Corps. Wofford has more than sixty years of experience, starting with the Army Air Corps in World War II and continuing through government and community service during the terms of ten Presidents. </span><span>Wofford also served as the first President of SUNY School at Old Westbury and Bryn Mawr College. </span><span>He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and he graduated from Yale and Howard University Law Schools. </span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 Microcassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
62:11
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Vietnam Veterans; Baby boom generation; Contemporary American Society; Rock and Roll; Drugs; Andy Warhol; Jimmy Carter; Gerald Ford; Nineteen eighties; Bill Clinton; John F. Kennedy; Lyndon B. Johnson; Richard Nixon; Spiro Agnew; George H. Bush; George W. Bush; Barack Obama; Vietnam Memorial."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Vietnam Veterans; Baby boom generation; Contemporary American Society; Rock and Roll; Drugs; Andy Warhol; Jimmy Carter; Gerald Ford; Nineteen eighties; Bill Clinton; John F. Kennedy; Lyndon B. Johnson; Richard Nixon; Spiro Agnew; George H. Bush; George W. Bush; Barack Obama; Vietnam Memorial.</span>
Subject LCSH
Lawyers; Politicians--United States; Authors; Wofford, Harris--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Senator Harris Wofford
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Wofford, Harris ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lawyers; Politicians--United States; Authors; Wofford, Harris--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Harris Wofford is a lawyer, educator, politician, and author. Wofford has more than sixty years of experience, starting with the Army Air Corps in World War II and continuing through government and community service during the terms of ten Presidents. <span>Wofford also served as the first President of SUNY School at Old Westbury and Bryn Mawr College. </span>He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and he graduated from Yale and Howard University Law Schools.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1996-09-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.123
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
62:11
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/4c64c733ec9ae4bd0df2466db16abaf4.jpg
ad3c922c6231a85ac929459490f0a6ab
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/3279e67db1969e6c1dd271093ac41629.mp3
849c2ac33c9ee5c4f840ebc53b0dc412
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Shawn Wong, 1949-
Date of Interview
2010-08-23
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
MicroCassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Shawn Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley and his Master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Wong was a Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program, Chair of the Department of English, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13309,"3":{"1":1},"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"9":0,"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Shawn Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley and his Master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Wong was a Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program, Chair of the Department of English, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.</span>
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Communism in China; Baby boom generation, Asian-Americans; Civil Rights Movement; Internment camps; Gender roles; Vietnam War; McCarthyism."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Communism in China; Baby boom generation, Asian-Americans; Civil Rights Movement; Internment camps; Gender roles; Vietnam War; McCarthyism.</span>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
228:32
Subject LCSH
Chinese American authors; Scholars; College teachers; Wong, Shawn, 1949--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Shawn Wong
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 23 August 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:03):
Testing one, two, three. Very good. I got a series of questions here and, of course, a lot of it may be spontaneous too, in response to your replies. I thought before we even start, I just want to say that I think it is very important in this project, when I am looking at the Boomer Generation, that I include everyone, and I have been trying to make this effort. And I also realize that sometimes when you talk about the Boomer Generation, born between (19)46 and (19)64, that ... I am looking at Boomers now more in terms of spirit because some of the people that were born say in (19)38 to (19)45 have told me, in no uncertain terms, that they feel like they're part of the generation, and then some even born afterwards too. So, it is kind of a spiritual thing as well as years-wise. First question. Still there?
SW (00:01:03):
Yeah.
SM (00:01:03):
Could you tell me a ... I have read your background. I know about it, but this is going to be in the book. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself? I know you grew up in Oakland. Your growing up years, what it was like being an Asian American male in Oakland, in the Bay Area, and basically information like who are your role models, people that you looked up to?
SW (00:01:28):
Sure. Actually, I was born in Oakland, but I grew up in Berkeley. We were living at Berkeley at the time, and my parents were students at UC Berkeley at the time. And other than the most obvious, parents being your role models. Both of my parents came from China, so they were part of that generation that came over after World War II, and intended to go back to China. But the communists took over China in 1949, and they elected to stay in the US, and the US allowed them to stay. So, I was born in (19)49, and I think I was lucky in that I was born in the Bay Area, and grew up in the Bay Area, because there were sort of Asian American role models around. I remember my mother always telling me that I was Chinese American but, as a kid, you do not really understand that. She said that my dad and her, they were Chinese, but I was Chinese American. And of course, I did not understand what that meant until years later. But one story that I always tell is that when I was about eight years old, UC Berkeley had a great football team. And I think in 1958, it was the last team to go to the Rose Bowl. But on the football team, they had a Japanese American football player, and his name was Pete Domoto. And I had never seen an Asian American doing something like that. Most Asian Americans were, Asian people, were engineers and doctors, not really any faces in pop culture or sports. And as a kid, I used to go to the Cal football games and, at the end of the game, a lot of kids would run down on the field, and try to get autographs or ... I remember football players often gave away parts of their uniforms, like their chin straps and stuff like that. And I remember running down there, and trying to get a close up look at Pete Domoto to see if he really did look Asian, and to get his autograph. And I never got his autograph, but I remember he was a real role model to me.
SM (00:04:39):
What became of him?
SW (00:04:41):
I will tell you in a second. One of the funny things is that [inaudible 00:04:46] kids, just like other kids at the time, I wanted to be Willie Mays, and things like that, but there were no Asian role models except for Pete, because he was on this famous award-winning football team. He became kind of a target of mine. And when I played football with my friends, my buddies, I would always pretend I was Pete Domoto. He did not play a glamorous position, he was left guard, but that is what I wanted to be. A left guard. And so when I first started ... I used to tell this story a lot, and when I moved up here to Seattle, I remember somebody asking me the same question about role models. And I told this story. And one day I was sitting here in my office at the UW and I get a call, and I answer the phone, and the person says, "This is a voice from your past."
SM (00:05:57):
Oh, my gosh.
SW (00:05:58):
I go, "Who is this jokester?" [inaudible] And you never know who is at the other end. And he said, "This is Pete Domoto." And I was stunned. I felt like I was eight years old. I said, "Pete Domoto? Number 60? Left guard at the Cal Bears?" I knew ... I remembered his number. And he goes, "Yeah."
SM (00:06:28):
Oh, my gosh.
SW (00:06:29):
[inaudible] talking about me. And I said, "Yes, I have." I said, "Wow, I cannot believe you're calling me." And I said, "Where are you calling from?" And he goes, "Well, it just so happens, I am the head of pediatric dentistry here at the University of Washington."
SM (00:06:50):
Oh, my gosh.
SW (00:06:53):
And he says to me, "Would you like to have lunch?" And I go, " Yeah."
SM (00:07:01):
You can get his autograph.
SW (00:07:03):
Yeah. I even said on the phone, "Can I have your autograph?" I reverted to my eight-year-old self.
SM (00:07:12):
My, what a story.
SW (00:07:14):
So, we went and had the lunch, and I remember calling a friend of mine as soon as I hung up, who was an executive at Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch, and he was my age and grew up in Berkeley, and he was also Chinese. And I called him and I said, "Andrew, guess what? Guess who just called me?" And I said, "Pete Domoto." And he goes, "No way." And my friend Andrew said, "I still have his autograph."
SM (00:07:45):
Oh, my gosh.
SW (00:07:47):
So Pete had a, I think, a big effect on Baby Boomer Asian kids growing up in the Bay Area. And this was way before having a role model like Bruce Lee or other Asian Americans who have sort of made it into pop culture. The only Asian images in the movies were these very, very stereotypical images played by actors who were not even Asian, like Charlie Chan. Or we were always the villain or the enemy in World War II movies, or ... there were not really any positive images, or we were Hop Sing on Bonanza. Servant, laundry man, soldier, enemy soldiers, things like that. So, it was important to have somebody like Pete Domoto around.
SM (00:08:53):
Yeah, that is an unbelievable story.
SW (00:08:56):
Yeah. We became friends. I got his autograph. I even brought a ... at his retirement party, he asked me to come and speak at his retirement party. I brought a football. A UC Berkeley football, and I asked for his autograph again.
SM (00:09:15):
Wow. You're talking about growing up in the late forties and (19)50s, a lot of the Boomer kids, and whether ... I read the history books. Now we are talking general histories now, we are not talking Dr. Takaki and some of the others that have really concentrated on the Asian American community. I was a big Iris Chang fan too, and that was a big loss killing herself. But the thing is, what was it like ... when you watch those television shows, a lot of people look at 1950s TV, and certainly if you're an African American, you rarely see a person of color except for Amos and Andy. And then Nat King Cole had a six-week run in the middle (19)50s. And other than that, you wait to the early (19)60s for I Spy and-
SW (00:10:10):
Right. All you had were, if you look at other role models, [inaudible], Tonto.
SM (00:10:19):
Now, you obviously were very conscious of not seeing very many role models. Was that pretty prevalent amongst kids your age for that period?
SW (00:10:32):
Yeah, I think so. We looked at our peers, and lots of our peers had role models. Baseball players, football players. Or we found role models and other people that were involved in pop culture. Musicians, artists, things like that. And I think we were looking specifically for Asian American, not Asians from Asia. Obviously, people would say, "Well, be proud that you are Chinese. Chinese invented gunpowder and paper," et cetera, et cetera. I'd never even been to that country.
SM (00:11:26):
When I first started this process, I remember one person said to me, "You are talking about the Boomer Generation. When I see that term, I think of white men. I do not even think of people of color." And they were not even thinking of women. They were thinking ... but I said, "No, the effort is to try to reach all particular groups, because the Boomer Generation was a boom for everybody." And in your own words, can you describe, as best you can, the Asian American experience in the United States in the following timeframes? I know this is just general, which in ... I know I am going to get more specific later on, but what was America like for Asian Americans during the following periods? And the first one is 1946 to 1960.
SW (00:12:20):
Well, that was a time when, certainly, I was in school, and schools were dominated by pretty much monocultural education, as you know. Columbus discovered America, George Washington never told a lie, et cetera, et cetera.
SM (00:12:41):
He cut down a cherry tree.
SW (00:12:44):
And someone like me never saw an image in any of the books that had any kind of resemblance to reality. Obviously, multicultural education was a long ways off. And I had the good fortune of going to schools that were, for the most part in the Bay Area, and they were very sort of racially mixed, especially in Berkeley. But I do remember, in the second grade, my father took a job as a civilian engineer for the Navy. And my first grade, I was lived on Guam. And second grade, we moved to Taiwan. And that is my first experience being in an Asian country, other than visiting Hong Kong or relatives or stuff like that. But we lived in Taiwan, and the first day of school, the US Navy bus came by to pick my mother and I up, and she went with me. And I remember the story my mother tells me, told me the story, I do not quite remember it, but I remember parts of it, the US Navy bus came by, this gray typical Navy bus, picked us up in front of our house, and we both got on the bus. And as soon as I got on the bus, all the kids on the bus started chanting, "No Chinese allowed on this bus," because it was basically a white ... all for white American kids. And I remember thinking to myself, "Oh, it's okay. She's my mom."
SM (00:14:43):
Wow.
SW (00:14:44):
I think they were referring to me. And I sat down in the chair, and this is the part I do remember. A little girl named Pam came up to my mother and said, "Can I sit next to your son?" She said, "Sure." And she sat next to me and held my hand, and we rode together on the bus every day after that.
SM (00:15:13):
And what was your age?
SW (00:15:15):
Second grade. I was like seven or eight. I think I was seven, at the time. And so, it was really interesting to be an American in a Chinese country, and to have been brought up American, and I did not really speak Chinese. I sort of understood it. My parents spoke Mandarin. But growing up, at that time, that was sort of ... since my father worked for the Navy, we traveled around a lot. And by the third grade, he had come home to Berkeley. My father passed away of lung cancer when I was seven.
SM (00:16:07):
Sorry.
SW (00:16:11):
So we grew up there, and then my mother remarried a few years later. We moved to LA with my stepfather, which was a real awakening, I think. In the sixth grade, I went to inner city school in LA. And sort of been coddled in this nice Berkeley school, suddenly I find myself in the inner city with African Americans and Latinos. And they were hardcore kids, but certainly not as hardcore as they are now. But it was a real wake-up call. The whole school was Asian, and Latino, and Black, and different kinds of Asians. It was really shocking to me, and I thought I would not even survive that last year of [inaudible] elementary school.
SM (00:17:12):
And what year was that?
SW (00:17:14):
That was 1960.
SM (00:17:19):
(19)60.
SW (00:17:20):
And from there we moved to the suburbs, and the school became basically entirely white.
SM (00:17:30):
When you look at that period right after the war right to the time that President Kennedy was elected. Obviously, Japanese Americans had been interred in World War II concentration camps, really, out in the West. And of course, when the war ended, there was this attitude in America against the Japanese. I can remember growing up as a kid in the (19)50s up near Syracuse, and Ithaca, and Cortland, New York, World War II people saying Japs. They always used that term, because they had really ... they had hurt our boys, as they said. They had really done terrible things to our boys. So, the basic question I am asking you, and I know that the Chinese Americans, at that particular time, were working in all kinds of plants. So, they were more favored at that time, were not they, than Japanese? And then the restriction between those groups. So, there's not only cultural issues, but there's groups issues between Asian Americans.
SW (00:18:42):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, in many ways, the history of Chinese in America is that they, in the 18 hundreds, they were the pariah race of America, all these exclusion laws to keep them out of the country. And then, when World War II broke out, they were praised for, basically, not being Japanese, and then received acceptance until, of course, the communists took over China, and then Korean War came, and suddenly China became a threat. So the Chinese went back to being suspect race in many ways. And then, in the early (19)60s, when the civil rights began, Asians were then praised again for not being black, and the depiction of the model minority sort of started. There was a Newsweek article, I think, or US News and World Report article about 1962, I believe it was the first article to reference this model minority thing. And the article was called Out Whiting the Whites, and creating ... and essentially, congratulating Asians in America for their achievement. But the underlying message was you are not Black, and you are not [inaudible] all this ruckus. So, it has been an interesting history of what you might call ... oh, I do not know. In one book I wrote, I called it The Great Suffering and Acceptance Sweepstakes. You go through these periods of acceptance and rejection.
SM (00:20:59):
When you think of the (19)50s, you do not even ... again, I am just using this as a white person who's done a lot of reading and scholars, you hear about the Japanese and the Chinese, but you do not hear about many of the other groups. And occasionally, you might hear a little bit about the Vietnamese even before then, but other than when you're talking Asian Americans, you really ... people are probably only thinking Japanese and Chinese, are not they, really, in the (19)50s?
SW (00:21:27):
Much until after World War II, and then more Filipinos started to come. And after World War II, you had a lot of war brides. And then, of course, after 1961, immigration laws were ... LBJ signed into law reforms on immigration [inaudible]-
SM (00:22:01):
But what do you think the-
SW (00:22:03):
Remove some of the quotas. But essentially there were severe restrictions on Chinese until 1943, and World War II basically removed all of those immigration restrictions against the Chinese. It had to, because now China was an ally.
SM (00:22:28):
The question I always bring up here, particularly for those Asian Americans that were born in the United States, either during World War II or after, I consider them kind of together. I am learning that they need to be together, because that had similar experiences, and spiritually they went through a lot of things together.
SW (00:22:51):
And also judged by the same stereotype. It did not matter if, say, you were Chinese or Japanese. [inaudible] media stereotype [inaudible].
SM (00:23:01):
What do you think the impact on Boomers that were born in that period, who were Japanese and Chinese, the ... were they having the same ... they were having the biases and prejudices within the American society, but were they ... African Americans were still fighting for equality in the South. We had young, even white and Jewish Americans going South, and Catholic priests, to help the African Americans in the early (19)60s. And then, of course, we had the free speech movement. And just so much happening in the (19)50s that really was the forerunner to the (19)60s, and I just want to know the influence that this had on Asian American Boomers.
SW (00:23:54):
Well, I think among the Boomers we identified with the ... we came of age during the civil rights movement. So we stopped being Orientals and became Asian. And the term Asian American was coined. It became a political term just like Afro-American during [inaudible 00:24:19] particularly. So the beginnings of the free speech movement, particularly if you lived in Berkeley, you were affected by that movement. And then I went to UC Berkeley during the ... all the period during a demonstration. And Boomers grew up during the, not only civil rights, but also Vietnam War. And particularly for Asian Americans in which US was fighting a war against an Asian country. Again, when we were children, we were now also depicted as enemy. And so that stereotype of the ... it did not matter whether the enemy was Japanese or Vietnamese or communist Chinese, it all got blended together in terms of popular media. And you're sitting there as a member of the Asian American Boomer Generation, and watching the war unfold on TV, and those images of Asians as the enemy.
SM (00:25:39):
Do you have the number of Asian Americans who fought in the Korean War, and in the Vietnam War?
SW (00:25:46):
Yeah. There was a number of Asian Americans in World War II, and the Korean War. World War II, of course, the Japanese Americans, they got the highest profile for 442nd regiment. But in the Vietnam War, there were a lot of ... I do not know the number, but there were a lot of Asian American veterans. In the early (19)70s, some friends of mine, we had a little radio show on KPFA in Berkeley, in which we interviewed returning Asian American Vietnam men, and the difficult adjustment they had in the military as well as afterwards, in which they were subjected to a daily barrage of racial stereotyping, and the enemy being referred to by all the derogatory Asian names.
SM (00:27:06):
Wow.
SW (00:27:06):
And I remember one veteran telling me when he got to Vietnam, his sergeant told him, "Ever take off your uniform, grow a beard, and do not ever go swimming, because we cannot tell you apart from the enemy." So, there you are living in that kind of state, and listening to the kind of racial epithets every day.
SM (00:27:44):
So basically, the Asian American military experience in Vietnam may be similar to what African Americans were going through, because the nation was really split apart at that time. And African American vets, particularly between (19)67 and (19)71, when they say the military really went downhill, they got involved in drugs and long hair and rock music. Were Asian Americans in the same boat, except they ... they had similar feelings?
SW (00:28:22):
Well, I think so. As you know, the draft was on then. So, the draft, obviously, targeted people who did not have a deferment at the time. No student deferment, no ... so many of the soldiers came from a particular class of America. And then, of course, later in the war, they removed all deferments, so you could not even get a student deferment. As we know, it was not only an unpopular war, but those who did serve, they, I think, got it from both sides. They got it not only from within, the racism that was present within, the culture of the armed forces then, but also on the outside from those of us who did not believe in the war. I think nobody blamed the soldier, but certainly felt alienated.
SM (00:29:35):
When you look at, going the next period, you have talked already a little bit about the (19)60s. But that being an Asian American during that 1961 to 1970 period, I might even say (19)61 to (19)73, because a lot of people say the (19)60s really ended ... went until (19)73, (19)74, and the Vietnam War ended in (19)75. So maybe from (19)61 to (19)75, what was it like to be Asian American in America at that particular time? And I also, and I am going to preface this by saying, were Asian Americans also involved in the anti-war movement?
SW (00:30:15):
Yeah, they definite ... well, I have a little bit of acute view having grown up in Berkeley, so I cannot really speak for all Asian Americans across the country. But certainly Asian Americans were very much politically involved, particularly, from where I stood. And it was not only the civil rights movement going on, but the anti-war movement, but also the rise of the demonstration to establish ethnic studies in universities, and Asian American studies. And everybody was sort of involved in the act of renaming themselves and re-identifying themselves, picking on political labels like Asian American. Negroes stop being Negroes. It became Afro-American. Asians stopped being Oriental, became Asian. Things like that. So, I think, as I recall, it seemed like the entire population was united in all of these efforts to end the war, to make, since we were all in college at that time, to make our universities be relevant to our experience, to recognize us, and to sort of react against that kind of monocultural education that we grew up in. Education ... I did not find out about Japanese internment camps until I was a senior in high school, which little paragraph in the history book. I went to Berkeley High School, and there is this little paragraph, and I remember sitting there going, "What are these?" And what's interesting is even my Japanese friends are saying, "Well, what are these things?" And we were up in arms. Finally, we had a cause.
SM (00:32:31):
Yeah. It is like-
SW (00:32:32):
It rooted itself in history. And I remember my Japanese American friends would go home and say to their parents, "Wow, there are these internment camps." And the parent said, "Yeah, we were in them." And then the kids would say, "Well, why did not you tell me about them?" "You never asked." And it was something that Japanese America was ashamed about and tried to erase.
SW (00:33:03):
About and tried to erase and tried to keep in the background. But the boomer generation that arrived in college now wanted to make some noise. Now wanted to rectify history. Later in the (19)80s, it was that boomer generation that started the redress movement to get redress for town.
SM (00:33:26):
That was the (19)80s to (19)90s period of the Reagan and Bush.
SW (00:33:29):
Yeah. So Reagan finally signed into law redress and Japanese Americans who were in camp got paid redress. Then it was the boomers who finally arrived in positions of influence as civil rights attorneys, et cetera, et cetera. Who brought that cause forward. All of that stuff that was happening in the early (19)60s was our education outside of academia to build a social and political consciousness that would move forward with us into our professional careers.
SM (00:34:17):
Obviously, you were at Berkeley and Berkeley has always been a progressive way ahead, a forerunner of things to come. A lot of people criticize it now that it is not doing that. Except I believe it still is because we see the students protesting their tuition increases. Some graduate students have actually left out of silent protest over those increases. But when you look at the period from the (19)90s, let us say from when Bill Clinton became president through George Bush and then President Obama, that 20-year period, what have the (19)90s and the first 10 years of the 21st century meant? For not only boomer Asian Americans, but Asian Americans as a whole?
SW (00:35:08):
Yeah. Well the face of Asian America changed completely post mid-(19)70s. When I was going to college, even at UC Berkeley, Asian Americans made up 6 percent of the student population in Berkeley. And it was mostly Chinese and Japanese American middle class. And now on any big metropolitan flagship public university, you might have anywhere from 12 to 15 different kinds of Asian ethnic groups on campus. I think the face of Asian America changed drastically with that new immigration. That new first generation gave birth to an Asian American generation that grew up in America and entered college. During that period, the first Vietnamese who came over and after the fall of Saigon, those kids are the ones who just starting college during the period you are talking about. So, what you had was an interesting mix of maybe fifth, sixth, even seventh generation Chinese Americans and the fourth generation Japanese Americans mixed in with brand new immigrants and second generation, southeast Asian generation. And in American Chinatowns for example, the face of an American Chinatown changed drastically. Chinese Americans at the time would go into Chinatown and not recognize any food anymore. Cause new immigrants took the place that traditional American Chinese American Chinatown, the town.
SM (00:37:41):
I know Vietnamese food is unbelievable.
SW (00:37:44):
Cuisine chain. Part of that typical Chinese American fair the Chinese Americans could not even recognize. I remember during that time in maybe the late (19)70s being asked at a restaurant one time, "What kind of noodles do you want?" What do you mean what kind of noodles? And then they rattled off a list of the different kinds of noodles.
SM (00:38:15):
Wow.
SW (00:38:16):
Oh wow. I do not even know what they are. Shanghai noodles and this kind of noodles. And so whereas other ethnic communities tended to stay the same. I remember a great article in San Francisco magazine in which an Italian American in North Beach was lamenting that his buddies, his neighbors, his Chinese neighbors that he's lived with his whole life have moved away. And he's saying, my new neighbors do not even speak English. That was a great comment because he's lamenting that the other Chinese moved away. Replaced by these new immigrants.
SM (00:39:08):
Well, when you look at higher education, and of course the evolution here of going in the 1950s, when you see the numbers of students in the (19)50s and going into the (19)60s and (19)70s, and you see this major progress with the state universities, not only in California but in New York Community college, state university systems. They're evolving at the same time that the increase in population of Asian Americans is happening. And then to me, and this just as a white person who has spent 33 years in higher education, that Asian Americans, their future is so directly linked to higher ed. And they were with it, so to speak, in terms of making for progress and for growth and development and developing careers. They saw the value of education.
SW (00:40:06):
Yeah. Right. I think that a case in which the previous generation who grew up after World War II or even before World War II, our parents' generation, they lived during a time in which there was second class citizenship. You could have been trained to be an engineer, but you could not get a job as an engineer even if you went to college. And my father was an exception that they actually got a job as an engineer. But it was difficult for our parents' generation to, even if they went to college, being able to find work because of there were not any equal opportunity things or [inaudible] laws, stuff like that. This is the time. I remember my mother going on a rant one day about when she was laid off from her job. This was after she had married my stepfather. And she and my stepfather both worked in the aerospace industry. She was a draftsman, an engineer. And she got laid off from the job and she came home and she said her supervisor told her she was laid off because one, my stepfather still worked for the company and two between her and the other guy, the other draftsman had to support his family.
SM (00:42:02):
Oh my gosh.
SW (00:42:04):
Of course, this is also at a time in which women were paid less than men. And I remember my mother just going on this rant because she was a single mother after my father died and she had to work to support us. And just at a time when all of my friends' mothers were home and they were housewives. None of my mother's friends worked. And those are the last vestiges of 1950s America.
SM (00:42:52):
So, people think, again, they always think of these white fathers and mothers where the mother's at home, but this is really America.
SW (00:42:59):
I remember it was my first lesson in gender issues. I remember thinking to myself, that is unfair. I was there when my mother had the struggle.
SM (00:43:16):
Go ahead.
SW (00:43:17):
So I think a lot of that, the boomer generation took forward because we were that first generation who got to go to college and go into the field that we majored in and graduated. Finally, that opportunity was open. I think our parents wanted us to go to college. But also, I think it was different for my parents because they were both college educated and when they came to America, they were already read and speak English. But for families that had to make a big cultural adjustment, they saw that as the opportunity for children to improve.
SM (00:44:25):
I had just some developments that happened in the United States in the world after World War II and wondering how they affected the Asian Americans here on the home front and also the immigration of those who came here during this time. I will just lift these and then you can comment on any of them if you want to. We all think about Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution in the late forties. And of course college students were carrying his little red booklet around college campuses. I know a couple students that actually read it too. So, it was not like it was just for show for some, but what Mao really stood for. Secondly, we know that Nixon went to China and despite what a lot of people dislike about him, a lot of people think that was a very important thing to happen. Thirdly, Iris Chang who passed away, she gave a speech about a couple of months before she died, and she talked about in the (19)90s about the spying about Asian Americans being accused of being spy. So, now Chinese Americans, again, were being looked upon in a negative way. And the fourth item, and you can comment on any of them, de facto may have had on the population as a whole, Tienanmen Square to me, was one of the most important events in my lifetime as a person who devoted my life to higher ed. And to see what happened to those students at Tienanmen Square was like the students at Kent State University. There is no excuse for it. And I just want to know what those events, how those four things affected the Asian American community.
SW (00:46:24):
I think those of us who were born in America and were Chinese American, I think we had a very complicated relationship with those world events. The first being Nixon's visit to China. You have to remember it is a country that our parents may have come from, but we had never been to, and suddenly the world's attention is on. And there was a great CBS documentary that was done just before Nixon went to China and it was called Misunderstanding China. And it was a look at narrated by Charles Kuralt, who had hair then. He introduced the documentary by showing all of these stereotypical movie images. So, this is what we know about China. Then they move into reality, the kind of China that you might be exposed when Nixon goes there in the media. So, I think for many of us, we have been combating media stereotypes of being Chinese in America for such a long time. Now we are on the cusp with Nixon's trip to China and afterwards of reality. And even China of itself is being revealed in a way that has never been seen before. I remember a bunch of things. Insane or really interesting things like the Chinese food is not like the Chinese food we have at home, my God. But there were a bunch of things that happened during that period. I think Chinese Americans fought hard not to be defined by it because it was on everybody's tongue. It was now acceptable to go to China. Nixon opened to China basically, and now Americans could go there to get visas to visit China. And then years later when everybody started to go to China, I remember people would tell me about their visits to China and they would talk to me as if I knew what they were talking about. They would say, oh, you know, Forbidden City. And I would just nod my head. I felt reluctant to tell them, in the (19)90s, but I had not been there. They just assumed I have been there, somehow, I have been there. My first visit to China was not until 1998, and that was to, we were not counting Hong Kong, but that was to Shanghai for three days. I arrived there and I figured it out, but something like 50 years to the day when my parents left China. And so we had this odd relationship, that China not really recognizing Chinese Americans for decades. Because I think China felt that you were in that generation that left China, but you overseas Chinese were basically clumped together. And in China we did not really have an identity in a way. Only recently has China shown real academic interest in Chinese America, Chinese American history.
SM (00:51:02):
The Tienanmen Square situation though in 1989, I would like your thoughts on it because obviously it was a major event in the world. But I can remember coming back to my university in late August, September. No one wanted to talk about it. And what amazed me is we had quite a few students from China, the international student organization, that did not even want to talk about it. And I think maybe they were here on visas and they were fearful of it and I could not understand. So what I ended up having to do was I went to Temple University and got three graduate students who were not afraid to speak up. They were strong activists and I brought them to the university and even still then the Chinese students did not come out to see them for fear that if they were in the audience, they would be watched. We were a small school. What is it about Tienanmen Square? To me it was about democracy.
SW (00:52:06):
Yeah. I think for the foreign students, it was something that they were, I think rightly afraid of to comment on. Get them expelled from the US they thought, or they might have repercussions back home, or their family. But I think for Chinese Americans, boomers particularly, it was something we recognized. It was that kind of public defiance that we grew up with at the (19)60s and (19)70s and it resembled the free speech movement. It had all the earmarks except for the tanks and all the earmarks of the things that we had gone through. But even with the tanks, I mean certainly we got tear gas from helicopters and things like that. And then as you mentioned, Kent State.
SM (00:53:14):
Yes.
SW (00:53:16):
On one event, it captured all of the events of the (19)60s and early (19)70s when our campuses were on fire and on strike and being shut down. Civil disobedience was something Boomers recognized [inaudible] plot. And if you look now you look at China. You think, oh, I do not think this is what Mao had in mind.
SM (00:53:55):
Well, it is interesting though that my nephew went to China about four years ago. And when he got on the plane, they were all counseling. They said one thing you do not talk about when you get over to China, it is Tienanmen Square. And you're going to go Tienanmen Square but if you start talking about the 1989, they will put you on a plane back to America.
SW (00:54:16):
Yeah.
SM (00:54:17):
And I say, you got to be kidding me. No. Then they will not allow any protests even to this day on Tienanmen Square. And-
SW (00:54:25):
You can talk about it now.
SM (00:54:28):
You can talk about it?
SW (00:54:30):
Yeah. I mean, a few years ago I was there on a trip during that exact period you are talking about. When the book Gentleman Papers came out. I was on a trip for the State Department visiting southern China, some universities there, and you really could not talk about it then, but now you can. I was just on a trip there a couple of years ago and as a guest of what the equivalent to like the USIA in China. And they said to us right off the bat, there's a group of writers, you can ask us anything, we will talk about anything. We talked about Tienanmen Square, we talked about banned books. These are officials.
SM (00:55:33):
Based on your experience...
SW (00:55:35):
They were intent on changing. I have never been in a country which the entire country was intent on changing its image. And this was just before the Olympics. We knew we were on the very manufactured kind of visit, but still, they kept reassuring us to talk about anything. We will talk about it. The idea was it's a new China, entirely capitalistic now, and it was. They were trying to change their identity prior to the Olympics.
SM (00:56:26):
One quick question though regarding it. Put your thinking camp on regarding what was happening here in the United States in the fall of 1989. At the university you were teaching at, I do not know if you were at the University of Washington, but was it also quiet there? No one talked about it? Or is it just our college?
SW (00:56:46):
Well, people noted it, I do not know. I do not recall what the Chinese student reaction was. But I think publicly Asian students as a group supported what was going on. And I think it may be different on the West coast.
SM (00:57:13):
My thought was here we have college administrators running universities who were boomers and they immediately saw Tienanmen Square and they thought uh-oh, activism. And so they were very happy that colleges were quiet in the fall. We brought Lee Lu to campus and he believed that one day they would come back and take over the leadership of China. I will get back to the question here in a minute. There was a faculty member on our campus who was probably in her late forties, and I mentioned about Lee Lu and about Tienanmen Square and some sort of a conversation. She went into a rage saying those students were the worst. I lived in China then, and those students were terrible. They tore our country apart. She did not care that they were killed. It was just amazing the reaction of a person who was probably pro-government, an anti-student. Looking at some of these other things here. When you look at the 1950s again, Asian Americans had issues in America during the time that, well, all boomers were younger. These are some of the issues and can just, this is kind of the mentality that was happening in say from the 1950s through the 1980s. We had McCarthyism where there was a fear that people were communists.
SW (00:58:49):
Hang on one second.
SM (00:58:50):
Yep.
SW (00:59:11):
Sorry Steve.
SM (00:59:11):
That is okay. Did McCarthyism and that attitude not only of HUAC, but of McCarthyism in the late forties, and then of course the (19)50s affect Asian Americans? Because in reality, anybody who supposedly had been a member of the Communist Party, they were looking. They were looking for communists everywhere. And that must have made Asian Americans feel tense.
SW (00:59:39):
Oh yeah. Lots of things in Chinatowns, for example, ended during that McCarthy period, Chinatown had a healthy group of labor unions, for example, and all of those disappeared during the McCarthy era. The labor unions whatever manufacturing was going on, or the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and other places, Chinatown, all of those labor unions disappeared because labor unions were looked upon as a socialist construct. And so Chinese went into a period in which the last thing you want to do is be perceived as a communist or any red or pink, and to disassociate yourself with communist China. You had public demonstrations embracing the nationalist Chinese flag in the streets of American Chinatowns during festivals and embracing a country, almost none of the Chinese of Chinatown ever been to. And disassociating themselves from post 1949 China. Not to mention that China, the China that these immigrants had left is no longer in existence.
SM (01:01:18):
Let me turn my tape here. Hold on a second.
SW (01:01:25):
I might take something that was on my iPod.
SM (01:01:31):
Oh yeah. Well I am old school, but they still sell these.
SW (01:01:42):
Or what was it? I picked something on iMovie.
SM (01:01:42):
Well, when you go interview people, you got to have a recorder. You can continue on McCarthyism.
SW (01:01:49):
Right. So again, even in the (19)70s there was a red scare. And Hoover was investigating American Chinatowns for secret communists. He posted these hand bills around Chinatown in Chinese. One second, I will read part of it to you.
SM (01:02:23):
I also know that Lyndon Johnson feared that communists were behind the anti-war movement. The dissonance.
SW (01:02:29):
Hoover posted these leaflets around Chinatown and (19)71 and (19)72. I will just read you the beginning and the end. "Now that you have settled in America, you are not only entitled to enjoy the various blessings of America's free political system, but in addition, we will be able to shoulder the responsibilities of protecting these free traditions." Blah, blah, blah. "Communists frequently engage in secret activities within America's borders and plot to destroy the free traditions of China. While our bureau is on constant alert, it pays close attention to these matters. From now you too may join our defense against communism."
SM (01:03:17):
Oh my gosh.
SW (01:03:22):
"This, while in America you'd become aware of communists or [inaudible] spy who are engaged in intelligence or destructive and subversive activities, you are urgently requested to telephone the local branch of the FBI."
SM (01:03:37):
Wow.
SW (01:03:39):
But down at the bottom they talk about, all you have to do is report. You do not have to carry out your own investigation. And then it says, "You must realize that investigation is a specialized and sophisticated profession, and if ordinary people attempted, they not only risk their own safety, but also risk startling the snake from his hiding place."
SM (01:04:02):
Wow.
SW (01:04:02):
Signed J. Edgar Hoover.
SM (01:04:02):
You got that framed?
SW (01:04:02):
These are posted in Chinese.
SM (01:04:02):
Oh my gosh.
SW (01:04:14):
Around Chinatown.
SM (01:04:16):
That is a collector's item.
SW (01:04:18):
So these leaflets obviously placed the entire population at risk. Of course, now, because it was signed by J. Edgar Hoover, he was a little off his rocker.
SM (01:04:34):
We found out he also wore dresses. I do not know if that is true.
SW (01:04:36):
So yeah, he had a name too for himself, I forgot what it was.
SM (01:04:52):
When you look at some of the other things here. I guess mainly I just want to know that the Asian American boomers and families were well aware that these things were impacting their lives as well. Obviously the Korean War. How were Korean Americans treated in the 1950s during this particular war? We have talked about the Chinese and Japanese, but how were Koreans treated?
SW (01:05:12):
I do not really know too much, but there was not a huge population of Korean Americans around the time, not like there is now. So, their immigration is [inaudible] numbers is basically post 1961, (19)63, when they started to arrive in the larger numbers.
SM (01:05:39):
Were Asian American students or youth boomers involved in the counterculture in the 1960s? I bring these things up. Woodstock and the Summer of Love and 1968, which tore the nation apart and the assassinations obviously, and then even going back to where... And even going back to where Asian Americans aware of Freedom Summer in (19)64 and what young people were doing in the South in early (19)60s, risking their lives.
SW (01:06:12):
They're all certainly part of that. But I think all the boomers, no matter where you were from, got involved in pop culture of (19)60s and (19)70s. I graduated from high school (19)67, the summer of love, lived in the Haight-Ashbury while I was going school and that kind of thing. And I saw around me a lot of Asian Americans who embraced that culture and everything about it, our hair long, but we went to college.
SM (01:07:09):
Yep, and you were influenced like all of them.
SW (01:07:12):
We were doing it. We were not exactly dropping out, but-
SM (01:07:17):
In other words, you were basically inhaling and not-
SW (01:07:22):
No-no.
SM (01:07:23):
You were inhaling but you were not taking, right?
SW (01:07:26):
Right. We were not actually holding it. Going, in those days, you went to other public place and just sort of stood around, you could not help but inhale.
SM (01:07:37):
I know, that is why Bill Clinton saying he never inhales really is amazing.
SW (01:07:41):
If it is a rock concert, you do not have to touch one, but you are inhaling constantly.
SM (01:07:50):
To me, 1975 is a major year. Vietnam means a lot to me. If you can tell, my whole life I have been involved in civil rights, and I have actually worked with a lot of Asian American students. I have advised Asian American students for over 20 years, and so I got to know a lot of them. They were always in my office talking. But one of the areas, I was very close to Vietnamese students, and I still, most of my Facebook is with Vietnamese students, have gone on different careers and so forth. 1975, when the helicopter went off the top of the embassy, we all know the people that did escape and were on the ships and everything, they got back to America or different parts of the world, and of course that was the beginning of the boat people. And then we know what happened in Cambodia with a Khmer Rouge. We have had [inaudible] on the campus, and the exodus of people from Cambodia. I have known students from Laos and Thailand and even India and Pakistan. What is it about 1975 and that helicopter that really not only impacts boomers who were really in the anti-war movement and veterans who were in the war itself, but also to possibly Asian Americans themselves as a symbol of the new flood of immigrants into the United States?
SW (01:09:30):
I am thinking one thing from Asian American point of view, watching the fall of Saigon, in some ways there is a sense of relief. Now the war's over. We're not the enemy in the media every night. And so that image is, people I think felt finally will go away. It may take some time, but it will go away, or at least until the next war against an Asian county. And I think there were two significant events. Prior to the helicopter lifting off from the American embassy, the other one I remember when I was in college was LBJ saying he was not going to run again. And that was, I remember standing there with a bunch of other people, wow. We might see an end. And we thought, I think that too was a significant moment. And I think other people, or Asian Americans, other things happened following that. During the Iranian hostage crisis and stuff like that, when there was talk of any kind of internment, Iranian American, Japanese American boomers spoke. History repeats itself. And I think what happened was, among boomers particularly, is that in the early (19)60s through civil rights and on, not only did Asian Americans sort of reinvent themselves in a political way by renaming themselves, but also, they, I think established a political coalition among all Asian Americans. Whether you were Middle Eastern or Asian from Asia, the idea of things that we learned from history have to be brought up in a way that is politically supportive. I remember Japanese Americans speaking up on behalf of Iranian Americans at the time.
SM (01:12:48):
Well, the boat people is kind of a sad story because as many as 2 million people I think tried to escape and many died. But one of the, I used to mention this to the students, your mom and dad never would have met if they had not met in a camp. And they never thought of it that way, because a lot of the Vietnamese students that I have known, their parents met in camps.
SW (01:13:12):
Yeah, the very first ones who came over in (19)75 were ethnically Chinese. So that was interesting to see that, particularly from our point of view as Asian Americans. When the Vietnamese came over, they were Cantonese speaking Vietnamese. We realize, oh, these folks are Chinese.
SM (01:13:43):
It is interesting, there are a lot of naysayers and doubters and critics. There is still a lot of bigots in this country as you well know. And it's interesting that in the Vietnamese population that came over here in 1975, I have heard this from others, not from students, but from people that I think are a little biased, they say, "Well, if the Vietnamese can come over here in 1975 and be a smashing success in life with good jobs and everything, and they have had to work, some of them worked in the cities and sold things on the streets and they worked their way up, why cannot African Americans do the same? They have been here 200 years." Have you heard this before?
SW (01:14:29):
Oh yeah.
SM (01:14:31):
They always talk about the Vietnamese. It's the Vietnamese comparing them to the African Americans.
SW (01:14:36):
Yeah, I mean it is a popular racist assumption.
SM (01:14:41):
Yep-yep.
SW (01:14:41):
Minority group off against another.
SM (01:14:47):
Yeah, I think that exists today.
SW (01:14:54):
Yeah, oh absolutely.
SM (01:14:57):
Yeah.
SW (01:14:57):
And you cannot fall into that trap.
SM (01:14:58):
Yep. Agree. I am going to go back to Berkeley here. I am all over the place, but you were on the Berkeley campus as a student from (19)67 to (19)71?
SW (01:15:04):
I was actually at San Francisco State for two years, (19)67 to (19)69, during the Hayakawa years.
SM (01:15:14):
Yeah, those were all over the news.
SW (01:15:18):
And I got disgusted with Hayakawa, so I left and went back to UC Berkeley, and I graduated from there in (19)71. And then I went back to San Francisco State for graduate school in creative writing and ended up having SI Hayakawa's name on my diploma.
SM (01:15:37):
Oh my gosh. Well he went out and become a senator.
SW (01:15:40):
Yeah.
SM (01:15:42):
What is interesting about him is-
SW (01:15:42):
Ronald Reagan's name on my diploma.
SM (01:15:47):
Wow. That is a historic document.
SW (01:15:50):
Ronald Reagan.
SM (01:15:52):
Two people that really, really put their careers on the line against students really. People's Park happened in (19)69 when you were there, I believe, at Berkeley, and that was a pretty rough experience. And then of course, Hayakawa had his experience with the African American students at San Francisco State. Just, obviously, again I am asking, maybe repeating myself and the experience that you have, but in your peers and your Asian American students at that time, they were experiencing both of these. How were they taking this in, the People's Park and the SI Hayakawa confrontations?
SW (01:16:36):
Yeah, I mean Hayakawa was, just infuriated Asian Americans because of his, not only his conservative stance, but he also took a very sort of conservative view on the internment camps too.
SM (01:17:07):
Oh wow.
SW (01:17:08):
He was Canadian. He would not even speak out against the internment camps. I forgot what he said, but I remember he said about-
SM (01:17:14):
So where was he during the internment camps?
SW (01:17:14):
Well, he was Canadian, so I do not know where he was, but he certainly did not experience it. But the Japanese Canadian experience is much worse than the Japanese American. Japanese Canadians were sent to abandoned mining towns. Now they were not allowed back to the West Coast until (19)49 or something.
SM (01:17:28):
Right.
SW (01:17:42):
But yeah, Hayakawa was just, every Asian American just wanted to disown him.
SM (01:17:45):
What is amazing is he was a very highly visible person then.
SW (01:17:48):
Yeah, and was just, as I recall it, just infuriating because his stance was basically anti-student.
SM (01:18:00):
Wow.
SW (01:18:00):
I think we went through six presidents that year until the governor finally was able to, because none of the governors wanted to bring police on campus. None of the presidents wanted to bring police on campus at San Francisco State, and so they were fired. And finally, Hayakawa was hired and immediately brought the police on campus, which of course caused the riot.
SM (01:18:30):
You wrote the book, American Knees. Now I have got to admit, I have not read it, but I will within the next month because every person I interview, I must read their books. Now, I read someplace in one of the things on the web that said that it was a cultural, that you wrote American Knees as a cultural response to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. Is that true?
SW (01:18:59):
Oh, I do not think that is quite accurate. I remember somebody saying that, but now I do not know.
SM (01:19:10):
How do they differ? How do those two books differ?
SW (01:19:14):
Well, I mean, Amy Tan's book is a very, very commercial sort of venture. And I mean, for what it is, I have to hand it to her, the chief kind of commercial success that book put on me, but I do not personally agree with her stance in the book which is basically, to put it in a very short form, you read her book or you see the movie version and you come away with one conclusion, which is, Chinese culture sucks. And I have aunts who are the same generation as her main characters and they never talk about their culture like that. If anything, they go the opposite way. They're just boring me to death about how great Chinese culture is. And to represent Chinese culture as misogynistic or more misogynistic than any other culture is, I think, wrong. But my book is certainly not a response to her book. I do make a mention, I allude to her book late in my novel, and that is the only illusion to Joy Luck Club. And that is probably the only dig, and it is really about the readers of Joy Luck Club rather than the book itself.
SM (01:21:00):
Yeah. I read an interview that, you have seen it too on the web, which is the one where you and filmmaker Eric Byler were together?
SW (01:21:09):
Yeah, Byler, yeah.
SM (01:21:09):
And you were talking about the model minority. And I think it gets, in the conversations that I have had with some of the female students who were Asian American, many have gone on to become doctors and nurses and accountants and everything, they really got upset when they hear that term model minority. It really, and it is even today, it is something that just, and they kind of laugh it off and all this other stuff, that we are so much smarter. I know a couple students that had some hard time in math, so you cannot stereotype. But can I read something here, because I want your response to it?
SW (01:21:56):
Yes.
SM (01:22:00):
Because it is from the interview, and I might, it says here, "So now we have Raymond Ding in the novel, a lady's man, almost a womanizer. And so those people who have this agenda, they claim that finally we can say that Asian men are virile, sexual, charismatic, charming. We can finally show that we can dress up in clothes, and we can appropriate their version of masculinity." And then down below here is, "We can be just like you. Is not that what the model minority myth is all about? Where the mainstream culture says, 'Hey, there is a place right here next to us.' It is almost as high, your chair will be almost as high, and that is the best you can do. And all you have to do is follow these little rules: be a model student, be a model minority, be a model prisoner, follow the rules, and you will be next to us." I think that is beautiful because of the fact that is kind of like joining a fraternity and it is-
SW (01:23:01):
It is about conformity.
SM (01:23:04):
Yeah, and I just think at the bottom here it says, "And yet there are performances in American Knees that are very, very Asian, very Asian American, that do not suddenly throw off our own culture in order to burrow into another." And I think that is be who you are and do not be a copy of what other people want you to be.
SW (01:23:26):
Right. Right. Well, actually, Raymond Ding, the main character is very flawed individual and he sort of comes to terms with that during the book, as well as the film. The film's obviously very different from the book. I am thinking only-
SM (01:23:56):
Would you say that Asian American boomer men and women have had to deal with these perceptions, not only today, of the last 20 years, but-
SW (01:24:05):
In a different way. So we work hard to reject not only the most obvious media stereotypes, but also the negative stereotypes, but also those sort of so-called positive stereotypes, being the model minority and college educated, quiet, hardworking. Another statistic out there that says Asian households have highest income, does not take into effect there might be more working members in the household, that kind of thing. That model minority myth is out there, simply as we noted earlier, its main purpose is to pit one minority group off against another. And you cannot accept that label when you realize that it becomes a stereotype. And the goal of any racial stereotype, the ultimate goal of any racial stereotype is to have that racial minority eventually believe in the stereotype. So, if the stereotype is you work hard, but you keep quiet and you do not upset dominant society, and you do not try to be aggressive and things like that, if you believe in that stereotype, then you're doing the work of the oppressor for them.
SM (01:26:05):
Very-very well said.
SW (01:26:07):
Same thing like the gender issues. A woman's place is in the kitchen, not the boardroom. So the ultimate goal of that stereotype is for the woman to believe that, "Oh, I could never be a CEO. My role is in the kitchen." So, believe that, and you are made to believe that stereotype, then dominant society or male dominated society does not have to expend any effort or attention to keeping that engine going.
SM (01:26:41):
I think Phoebe, you know Phoebe Yang?
SW (01:26:44):
Yeah.
SM (01:26:44):
Well, Phoebe was on our campus right after she got married and before she wrote her first really big book, actually it was her second book, and she mentioned she had been a lawyer and was involved with [inaudible] Magazine. Now she's gone on to do unbelievable things, very success in everything she does. But she said she went to China and she was at a conference in China and she was in a boardroom. And they were all sitting around this table in, I think it was in China, and one of the men looked at her and said, "Can you go get me a cup of coffee?" Because he did not, she was the only female in the room. She was a lawyer too. And she said that was so prevalent in China. The attitude that men have over there toward women is go get me a cup of coffee. Well, she did not get them a cup of coffee, but that was a very revealing experience that she told our students. And here she was a lawyer at that time and all the other things, but it was perception people have of women, maybe not only here but around the world.
SW (01:27:52):
Well, certainly, I think so. But to represent, I think it's wrong to represent China as being more misogynistic than any other culture. Look at Italian culture.
SM (01:27:52):
Oh, that is true.
SW (01:27:52):
Or there is somehow, another popular stereotype is to show that China is more misogynistic.
SM (01:27:52):
Did the Asian American community, after World War II, concentrate on dealing with xenophobia and pure racism, excuse me, and pure racism, but once after years they were accepted as Americans or some people label a model minority? I think what I am getting here, because this makes us feel, I guess what I am saying here is could you describe xenophobia in America? Is it as American as apple pie?
SW (01:29:02):
Yeah, I think it is sort of like, as you know, the progress or the latest immigrant to arrive in America always occupies the bottom rung of the ladder. As you recall, so Chinese of course, were once the pariah race of America, but so were the Irish, right, or the Italians or whoever the latest immigrant is. Not only does the racial hatred follow them, but also, and look at the vicious stereotypes of Irish and Italians during the early 20th century. The attention spent on the kind of xenophobic energy is an American tradition certainly, but it has not always been about people of color. And the only difference is, to quote Richard Rodriguez, is that during this history in America, Western Europeans had stopped being who they were, could choose to stop being German or choose to stop being Irish. You could change your name, but people of color did not have that luxury of deciding to stop being whatever culturally ethnic roots they come from. And as you know, even in the 2008 election, America has a very, very difficult time talking about race, and still does. I find it, everybody finds it difficult to talk about race, and we still do not get it right.
SM (01:31:12):
Yeah, there is a professor at, I think he is at New York, is it, no, he is at Columbia. He's an Asian American professor. He has written a couple books and he said-
SW (01:31:21):
Yeah, Gary Okihiro.
SM (01:31:24):
No, I am interviewing him. No, not Gary. One other professor is Lee, Dr. Lee or Lou? Anyways, he has written a couple books about the fact that America's forgetting the issue of racism, and he was really talking about the Bush administration putting it on the back burner. So he's written some really good books. What laws were passed since World War II that have had the greatest impact on Asian Americans?
SW (01:31:54):
I think just, well, just prior to World War, or during World War II, 1943, they ended, Chinese Exclusion Act ended in (19)43. So that had the biggest effect on Chinese American, Chinese. And then the Immigration Act of, some people say (19)61 to (19)63, was revised a few times, but between (19)61 and (19)63, I think the Immigration Act was finally rewritten so that issues of race were removed from immigration laws. It is all about nationality rather than race. And the quotas moved up for the people for every country. In (19)43, when immigration was relaxed or Exclusion Act ended for Chinese, the quota was just, I forgot what it was, 109 per year. So effectively, it was still on, or 105 I think per year, and then there were lots of exclusions to that. So, after World War II, Congress had to pass the War Brides Act, and then after that they had passed the GI Finances Act. And then in (19)53, what is it, the Cable Act. I am a little fogged here, copies for quite a while, but '53 race was removed as a bar to immigration. So, I think all of those things.
SM (01:34:08):
And Brown was very important too, Brown versus Board of Education?
SW (01:34:13):
Oh yeah, Brown versus Board of Education.
SM (01:34:15):
And the (19)64, (19)65 civil rights bills?
SW (01:34:18):
Obviously, the Civil Rights Act, ending second classes citizenship for at least the outward, obvious second class citizenship. And also after World War II, for Asian Americans, World War II actually gave them the opportunity to leave their ethnic community. Hawaiian Americans could leave the plantation and join the army. Asian Americans who were in the Army got the GI Bill, et cetera, et cetera. So the same thing that was happening for women in the workplace was happening now for, I think, minorities. All people of color found opportunity during and after World War II.
SM (01:35:24):
Who are the best writers, the books that you really liked, that had an impression upon you when you were younger in the (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s, (19)80s say, that personally had an influence on you? And then if there is any Asian American writers who think that people need to read this if they really want to understand the Asian American community, not only in the past, but now.
SW (01:35:56):
Well, it is interesting. I mean, when I was at Berkeley, I think I was 20, I decided I wanted to be a writer. And I remember thinking to myself at the very moment that I decided that, I also realized I was the only Asian American writer I knew in the world. I could not name one, and no teacher, no high school teacher had even mentioned the name of one, or no college professor ever mentioned the name of an Asian American writer or assigned a book by an Asian American writer. And I remember going to my American literature professor and asking him, "I am interested in Asian American literature. Can you suggest a book?"
SM (01:36:50):
And what year was this?
SW (01:36:50):
This was in 1970.
SM (01:36:50):
Unbelievable.
SW (01:36:55):
And I decided, well, I got to do this on my own because I cannot be, somebody must have published something before me. I went and started researching the field and I ran into a couple of other young people who were my age or a little bit older, Frank Chin, and Jeffrey Chan and Lawson Inada, and the four of us started looking for Asian American literature for all sort of young writers, pretty much unpublished. And we found them; we found these books. They were out of print. They were in used bookstores, but basically outside of academia. We found these books and we ended up publishing the first Asian American literature anthology in 1974, and it basically started the study of Asian American literature. You read any sort of literary lit crit work on Asian American literature, they always mention our anthology. And at the beginning, they also take exception to our point of view, which is healthy.
SM (01:38:16):
And that is really when Asian studies was starting right then too, correct?
SW (01:38:20):
And so I always say I became a professor by accident because I just wanted to be a writer. And I thought, well, I will end up being a waiter for the rest of my life, or taxi cab driver, like most artists. And when I came out of school, I went to undergraduate school, I went to graduate school in creative writing back in San Francisco State, and while I was in graduate school, ethnic studies departments were just starting. And there was a job at Mills College and- There was a job at Mills College and we had a brand-new ethnic studies department, so I applied for the job. I had no graduate degree yet, no teaching experience whatsoever, and no publications. They asked me, they interviewed me and said, what can you teach? I said, I can teach a class in Asian American literature and only one other person, my colleague Jeff Chan, was teaching a class at the state on the subject in the entire country. They said, you are hired.
SM (01:39:06):
Wow, that is good.
SW (01:39:06):
And I was sitting there thinking, wow, do I really want this job? I was working as a gardener at the time. I think I was making more money, and then I noticed that Mills College was an all-female college and I was 22.
SM (01:39:06):
Oh.
SW (01:39:06):
I said, I think I will start my academic career. But it's funny, I tell people I started my academic career teaching a subject I had to teach myself, that I did not learn that at university.
SM (01:40:17):
That is a story in itself.
SW (01:40:18):
Then we published the first anthology of Asian American literature. It was Published by Howard University Press, and African American publishers were the first ones to recognize Asian American literature. They published our anthology, published my first novel, Homebase, they published my second anthology. So Asian American publishers, I mean African American publishers, were quick to understand where Asian American literature stood. After our anthology came out, Aiiieeeee, it was reviewed everywhere. It was astounding, the reception. We did not think anything like that would happen. It was reviewed in Rolling Stone, New York Times, and Dr. Robert Polls wrote an essay about it in the New Yorker. There I was in my early twenties, and all I was trying to do was legitimize the field of literature I wanted to go into.
SM (01:41:49):
That is-
SW (01:41:49):
I am trying to educate the readers to something called Asian American literature.
SM (01:41:49):
That could be a movie.
SW (01:41:49):
Which I would eventually belong to, tried to belong to.
SM (01:41:50):
It is interesting because as an Asian American you were not able to find anybody who knew anything about Asian American writers or Asian writers per se. When I think of my first contact with learning anything about Asia or any of the countries in that part of the world, I think of Pearl Buck. I think of Graham Green and Tom Dooley. I do not know if you know all three of them.
SW (01:42:15):
Yep.
SM (01:42:15):
Because Tom Dooley was over in Vietnam in the (19)50s, and he was on Jack Paar's show, and, of course, Pearl Buck's right from Bucks County here, and she wrote some things. Now only until Dr. Takaki, we had him on our campus, bless his soul. His books are unbelievable. But you really have a telling true story here.
SW (01:42:43):
In the early (19)70s there were no books available. If you started teaching Asian American studies, there were absolutely no books, zero, available. When I taught Asian American literature, all the books had to be Xeroxed for the students. It is interesting you brought up Pearl Buck because after Nixon opened China, Pearl Buck applied for a visa to go back to China to visit the China of her youth, and the Chinese government refused her visa. In a public statement, the reason that they refused her visa was for the years and years of her distortion of the Chinese people.
SM (01:43:19):
Oh, wow.
SW (01:43:35):
It is interesting that they came out with that statement.
SM (01:43:36):
Wow. I know we are heading a little over. I got two more questions.
SW (01:43:40):
Sure.
SM (01:43:43):
One of the questions is I have asked everyone is the question of healing. I took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995 as part of our Leadership On the Road programs. We worked for the former senator, Gaylord Nelson, from Wisconsin, and we met nine former US Senators, and that day we met with Senator Muskie. So, the students and I came up with this question, and the question was based on, they thought, 1968 with that terrible convention and the cops and the young people, and of course the year was bad with two assassinations, and Tet, and the president, and the whole story. The question is this, due to the divisions that took place during the 1960s, the divisions between black and white, and I got, yellow was not in the question here, but divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops and were against the troops. Do you feel that the boomer generation of 70 plus million will go to its grave, like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the terrible divisions that divided the nation during the time that they were young, and it's subconsciously affected them the rest of their lives? The students knew that only between five and 15 percent of the boomers were really involved in any sort of activism. So, they knew this when they were putting their question together. But there was a belief that if you lived at that time, even if you were not an activist, you were subconsciously affected by everything. So, what is your answer to that question? Do you think we as a nation or that this generation, now your part of it, is going to go to your grave or its grave, and where do you think Asian Americans are on this because all the divisions that they have had in their lives, particularly the boomer generation, as they are heading to social security now.
SW (01:45:50):
That is for sure.
SM (01:45:51):
It is unbelievable.
SW (01:45:52):
I think, well, I tend to be an optimist. I would say that those times, (19)68, et cetera, made us who we are. You cannot sort of say, well, I wish we had not done this, or wish we had not started UC Berkeley on fire. I think that is defined who we were, and it became part of our identity, whether or not you were actually active or not. It drew everybody in, particularly in light of the fact that everybody, because of the draft, for example, you had to have, you were actually out on the street demonstrating because of the draft, and as a young man you were part of it. You were made part of it. When you sat on the floor listening to the radio for your birthday to come up for the draft lottery-
SM (01:47:06):
Oh, yeah.
SW (01:47:07):
[inaudible] deferment. You sat there, and I remember the relief when my birthday came up 324.
SM (01:47:12):
You are lucky. I was 72.
SW (01:47:24):
And my other roommate was 348, but our third roommate was something like 36.
SM (01:47:31):
Oh, boy.
SW (01:47:37):
So, I think part of our generation is that partly you feel that tremendous relief that in one sense you had, and at the same time a guilt, in that you were suddenly you are this outspoken, vocal, committed generation, and then in one minute you were relieved from making that decision of whether you would go into the Army or go to Canada. And at the same time, you're looking at your roommate and he has to report for action physical.
SM (01:48:20):
Wow.
SW (01:48:20):
So everybody knew somebody who was at the wrong end of the ladder or had to go into the Army or died in the war. So, you struggle with the sort of dichotomy of having escaped, being escaped, having to even make a decision and being a part of your peers’ lives who had to endure the next step.
SM (01:48:53):
Right.
SW (01:48:53):
I think our generation was always, sort of had to deal with that kind of dichotomy. At the same time, I remember Tom Brokaw saying something key is that when we look at the world from our point of view of the (19)60s and (19)70s, and we look at the world as it is now, we bring our experience forward. Nobody's asking us our opinion. And he says, at the same time when we were in the (19)60s, did we ask anybody in the 1920s for their advice?
SM (01:48:53):
Yeah.
SW (01:48:53):
But we did not.
SM (01:48:53):
Yeah, that is true.
SW (01:48:53):
So, it is interesting that feel. I think we feel, or at least at times we feel, the generation that struggled to be as relevant as possible is now sort of becoming irrelevant.
SM (01:50:12):
Well, what Senator Muskie said is that he did not even respond to the (19)60s. People thought he would respond to the convention because he was the democratic vice-presidential running mate, and he said, "Well, we have not healed since the Civil War because of the issue of race," then he went on to talk about it. About the issue of race and the loss of lives during that war. So, thought that was interesting. Do you think the Vietnam Memorial, have you been to the Vietnam Memorial?
SW (01:50:40):
Oh, many times.
SM (01:50:42):
Yeah. What was your experience when you saw for the first time, do you think... Jan Scruggs wrote a book called, To Heal a Nation, and I have been to the Vietnam Memorial because to me it is the number one event of the entire boomer generation, Vietnam, and I feel I have to be there. So, I have been there since 1994 for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day experiencing it and trying to get a better grasp of it. And I have seen many Vietnamese there that are in the audience and walking around and thanking the American troops and so forth, and then I see many that are kind of distant and whatever, and the Hmong, I think it is the Hmong, they have been there too, as well. But what was your initial thought the first time you saw, when you walked to that granite wall? And the second part of the question, has it done anything to heal the nation from the war?
SW (01:51:36):
I think, you know, there were two things that struck me. Not only, it is basically everybody up there is my generation and the immensity of seeing 58,000 names inscribed on the wall. It's one thing. But at the very same time, I am also cognizant of who designed it.
SM (01:51:36):
Oh, yeah.
SW (01:51:36):
They hounded her as a young 20-year old architectural student being called all these derogatory racist things. And in the end, what I feel is what everybody feels, at the end she was right.
SM (01:51:36):
Mm-hmm.
SW (01:51:36):
Maya Lin was right. And people often ask me the standard interview question, what person would you most like to meet? And I always say, Maya Lin. I would like to meet her just to say what everybody says, I think. I just want to meet somebody who had that vision, who had that vision so young, and that she knew this was the right thing to do. I want to meet people who knew at whatever age that they knew the right thing to do. So, you feel, one, this intense loss, but you also feel that somebody did the right thing and that she's Chinese America.
SM (01:53:30):
Well, you reach a good point because when we are talking about women's issues too, it is interesting that two of the three statues were designed by, the wall was designed by Maya Lin, but the Women's Memorial was designed by Glenna Goodacre, and then the third design of the three-man statue, I forget his name, but that says a lot about women, too. That in a man's war...
SW (01:53:55):
Right.
SM (01:53:58):
And it was also a woman's war, and we cannot forget that. We continually forget this in history how important women were on the side of the Vietnamese. And so, women were very, and of course the nurses and the donut ladies and all the people involved on our side, so we have a tendency to make this a man's war, but it is a human war.
SW (01:54:20):
Right. As you know, the history of the controversy before the wall was built.
SM (01:54:28):
Right.
SW (01:54:28):
Maya Lin just had to endure all kinds of really vicious racism then.
SM (01:54:38):
Well, there are still people that do not like it. I interviewed a professor up in Boston who is a Vietnam vet, and he still does not like it, but there are a lot of different opinions. But I think it is unbelievable. It is the most widely attracted wall in Washington, I mean for tourists.
SW (01:54:58):
Yeah. I used to work for the, sit on a lot of national endowment for the arts panels in the early (19)90s. Every time I would go to DC, I would go visit the wall.
SM (01:55:11):
My last question then I am done, and it is real fast. And I only got about two, I think two minutes left on my tape here, two or three minutes. I am just going to list these names and neatly when I, as a white person now, as a person, and I am sure a lot of boomers if they were asked to list all besides entertainers now that have come about the last couple years or politicians, these people really stand out to me that had tremendous influences not only in the world, but in terms of... Still there?
SW (01:55:46):
Yeah.
SM (01:55:46):
And still in terms of our attitudes, Mao Zedong, Kim Yao Jung, President Thieu, Vice President Ky, Di Em, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Dalai Lama. I just brought them up. I do not know if they have any significance, to you or...
SW (01:55:46):
Well, they are certainly part of all that. All those names are part of the history of the boomer generation. I think there are probably some Asian American names in there you could probably add.
SM (01:55:46):
Well, Senator Inoyue is another one that is...
SW (01:55:46):
Yeah, Daniel Inoyue and other politicians like Gary Locke, the governor of State of Washington. So, others who actually, well, Daniel, I know he is not, but you know boomer generation Asian Americans who went on to become really figural on the ground stage in any case, or at least in our eyes.
SM (01:57:18):
Yeah. And finally, what do you think the lasting legacy will be of the boomer generation when the best books are written 50 years from now?
SW (01:57:26):
I think I do not want to know. I think the desire to live a life that is relevant and respond to the things that go on around us. The injustice, simply just to be cognizant and relevant to your society, no matter when you are living, even if you are on the cusp of facing social security.
SM (01:57:56):
Right.
SW (01:57:56):
I was speaking up.
SM (01:58:00):
Yep. I agree. Well, that is it. Do you have any questions that you thought I was going to ask that I did not?
SW (01:58:06):
No, I encourage you to watch Bill Moyers, that documentary.
SM (01:58:11):
I have got to. I saw part of it on YouTube, but I have not been able to see the whole document.
(End of Interview)
Description
2 Microcassettes
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Shawn Wong
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Wong, Shawn, 1949- ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Chinese American authors; Scholars; College teachers; Wong, Shawn, 1949--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Shawn Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley and his Master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Wong was a Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program, Chair of the Department of English, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-08-23
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.210a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.210b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
228:32
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/71452f766a696c7ac0d486b0c646a312.jpg
186582db49d866082ffaf50a0f8806d7
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ecd5e87cc4f0e824568aedc123936ff3.mp3
9fd579f7929436c2fb3522d2aeb8dbb8
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-05-13
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Stephen Gaskin
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Stephen Gaskin (1935 - 2014) was an American counterculture Hippie Icon. He was an author of over a dozen books and a political activist. He went to prison in 1974 for marijuana possession and his voting rights were rescinded. Gaskin was a recipient for the first Right Livelihood Award in 1980 and an inductee in the Counterculture Hall of Fame in 2004."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15105,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial","16":10}">Stephen Gaskin (1935 - 2014) was an American Hippie counterculture icon. He was an author of over a dozen books and a political activist. He went to prison in 1974 for marijuana possession and his voting rights were rescinded. Gaskin was a recipient for the first Right Livelihood Award in 1980 and an inductee in the Counterculture Hall of Fame in 2004.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
MicroCassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
138:44
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Sexual Relations; Free Speech Movement; Baby boom generation; Women's Rights Movement; Sex; Drugs; Rock n' Roll; Vietnam Memorial; Healing;Free Speech Movement; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Government Corruption; Woodstock; Hippies; Yippies; Students for a Democratic Society; Weatherman; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Eugene McCarthy; George McGovern; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Panthers."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5009,"3":{"1":0},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":0,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"arial,sans,sans-serif"}"><span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Sexual Relations; Free Speech Movement; Baby boom generation; Women's Rights Movement; Sex; Drugs; Rock n' Roll; Vietnam Memorial; Healing;Free Speech Movement; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Government Corruption; Woodstock; Hippies; Yippies; Students for a Democratic Society; Weatherman; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Eugene McCarthy; George McGovern; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Panthers."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":5009,"3":{"1":0},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":0,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"arial,sans,sans-serif"}">Sexual Relations; Free Speech Movement; Baby boom generation; Women's Rights Movement; Sex; Drugs; Rock n' Roll; Vietnam Memorial; Healing; Free Speech Movement; Kent State; Jackson State; Watergate; Government Corruption; Woodstock; Hippies; Yippies; Students for a Democratic Society; Weatherman; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Malcolm X; Eugene McCarthy; George McGovern; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Panthers; </span></span><span>Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa; </span>Sixties; The Farm; Stephen Gaskin; Ina May Gaskin; Tennessee; United Nations NGO; Community; Activism; H. Rap Brown; Ralph Featherstone; Mo Udall; Black Panthers; Oren Lyons; Jerry Garcia; Grateful Dead; Tim Leary; Pig Pen; St. Stephen; Bobby Seale; Stokely Carmichael; Russell Means; Beatnik; San Francisco State; Midwife.
Subject LCSH
Authors; Political activists--United States; Hippies; Gaskin, Stephen--Interviews
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Stephen Gaskin
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Carrie Blabac-Myers
Date of interview: 13 May 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
0:15
SM: First question I want to ask is, before I even talk about your life and your experiences when the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and what do you think and when did it end?
0:31
SG: Well, the beginning of the (19)60s for me, was a little late because I was finishing up my master's degree, in the real early sixties. And I got my master's, I think in (19)63, I taught (19)64 to (19)65. And the (19)60s began in (19)66 for me. And that was when I realized they were not going to fire me, but I had become too weird to rehire.
1:00
SM: Hmm. And that was when you were in San Francisco State?
1:04
SG: Right, I taught Shree years as San Francisco state, I got my bachelor's there, and my master's.
1:09
SM: Well, obviously, you went off in 1970 form the commune, but-
1:16
SG: We went off in 1970 because [inaudible] tour, we had no idea we were going to make the community. We always say "community", down south people who live in communes are called communists.
1:30
SM: Wow. When did the (19)60s end in your opinion?
1:35
SG: Well, see, people talk about, you know that the (19)70s was such a mess and came apart and stuff but for the (19)70s was the ten years we spent really working smart and loving each other for the work that we did. The (19)70s was make the farm happen so the (19)70 is fine for me. I am not I am not calling things off. I have not forgotten anything. And I am not going to I am not going to [inaudible]-
2:07
SM: When was there a watershed moment for it? Not only for you, but for a lot of members of the boomer generation. Was there a watershed moment when you knew this was a special time?
2:22
SG: Well, my students had to come and tell me when I was teaching at the San Francisco State, and they said, you were fun, and you were smart, you were funny, but you do not know what is happening. I said, oh! And so, they start telling me about it. You got to do a few things for us before we can continue the conversation. Okay, what do I have to do? They said, we will see the Beatles movie, go see the Grateful Dead.
2:48
SM: Oh wow.
2:52
SG: San Francisco State was trying to be kind of new. And they had what they call a mixed media event, which was three teachers reading three different poems and a couple of slides of vectors. I understood the concept but I did not do much. And when we went to see the Grateful Dead, we came in the door to the auditorium and there was a guy in the zebra suit, jumping on a trampoline underneath a strobe light. And you could not even tell what he was.
3:23
SM: Well, that that was a pretty watershed moment!
3:30
SG: And I just suddenly, well I realized that these are my people. And the thing is, I am thirteen years too old to be a boomer.
3:41
SM: Right?
3:42
SG: I am a beatnik. And like they say in the military, you can change from one branch to the other, time and grade, rank and like that. I was able to transfer from the Beatniks to the hippes like that.
3:55
SM: Well, Steven, you know, one thing I have noticed in my interview process is that so many people born in the ten years prior to the boomer period that they, they were kind of boomers, because they have this mentality of like the boomers.
4:11
SG: They kind of built them.
4:12
SM: And yeah, Richie Havens, when I interviewed him was born in 1940. Yeah, and Ritchie says, I am a boomer. I am a boomer. And it is- because it is an attitude. It is a way of thinking,
4:22
SG: I am born in (19)35.
4:26
SM: What you mentioned about your, I get a lot of questions here, but this these Monday night classes that we that you taught when you were at San Francisco State, it says in some of the literature you got up to 1500 students at one time in your class. What were what were some of these experiences over those two years when you taught these classes?
4:50
SG: Well, sometimes we would be in a scholarly way and everybody would be, like one guy came in on the Monday night class one night waving his book. Hey, look at this book, this 'ole monk in the thirteenth century had the same trip, I had last Saturday night!
5:02
SM: [laughs] Oh my gosh.
5:07
SG: We were quite scholarly we were reading a lot, reading all the religions and more we did that. We did not come to San Francisco to convert to religions. We were ransacking religions looking for goodies.
5:20
SM: So subject matter? These students were getting credit for this course correct?
5:25
SG: When it started off, but I had to leave the campus at a time. They got to where they did not peel the political posters off the glass anymore and the revolution taken over San Francisco State.
5:38
SM: Yeah, I know. Yeah. Because you were the president there. I guess he was one of your teachers at one time? Ichiye Hayakawa?
5:46
SG: Hayakawa? I was Hayakawa's student assistant. Hayakawa was one of the media-wise foremost semanticists, general semanticist in the country at that time, although there were about four or five guys smarter than him that did not have the good fortune for his PhD thesis to become a book cult collection.
6:08
SM: Well, he was president during that time when all the student rebellion was happening at the school.
6:13
SG: At the time had split to Ethiopia to get away. They had offered the presidency to all of the faculty and they all turned it down, they say, we are not going to scab and they offered it to Hayakawa and even though he was not full time and even though he did not teach but two courses they made him president anyway.
6:33
SM: What year was that?
6:35
SG: Well golly that would have to be (19)65 or (19)66 something in around there.
6:39
SM: Wow.
6:42
SG: And he came out he came outside wearing a tam o'shanter hat, a very colorful hat thinking he was going to come on like he was a hippie and the hippies snubbed him.
6:54
SM: Oh, wow.
6:57
SG: You know, this is very short time, when in the Free Speech Movement, Mario Savio and those guys pulled up they thought that Hayakawa would like them and he did not. I answered the phone. I told him who it was and he did not like them at all. I am going I am sorry. He does not like you. I do. But he does not.
7:16
SM: My gosh. Yeah, that was (19)64 or (19)65 and that was about the time he became president then.
7:21
SG: Yeah, because he took he took the job when nobody else would do it.
7:25
SM: Wow. Was there any connection with what was going on, on the San Francisco State campus? And what was going on over there at Berkeley?
7:32
SG: Well, we were a little bit different in the sense that they were more the political guys and we was more of the acid guys. But there was not a hard line. It was some of all the same. And I did a class at night that it happened to be in Hayakawa's office with a free speech movement. I was teaching a class that night, one of my an- Francisco State College classes, called a Monday Night Class and so I said, well, we were in solidarity with the guys in Berkeley, according to my understanding that I can say fuck anytime I want, as long as I have the right layers of parentheses and quotation marks around it. And I took a new piece of chalk was three inches long, and used it on its side, take the line about four inches wide. And I wrote FUCK and letters three feet on the blackboard in the front of the room and I went back to the old German origins, you know, and like that, and we thought about it for a while. And I must have said it a couple of hundred times during my class. They were right with me. We were exhibiting solidarity with Berkeley.
8:43
SM: Wow. Those are those were unbelievable times back then. You know, I have interviewed several people [inaudible] in the student protest movement. San Francisco State there was a famous picture of him with African American students look like they were really it was a front of a book cover. I do not know if you remember when the African American students really went after him?
9:08
SG: I do not remember.
9:08
SM: Yeah. So, there was a lot of rebellion. When you think of those years, not only as a student but as a teacher. What was it like being a student what was college life like in the (19)50s or the early (19)60s before this period started?
9:26
SG: Well, that was what I was most likely being more like a beatnik when I was still in school taking class. And I made good grades when I wanted to pay attention. I did not always do it but I did not always pay attention but I graduated cum laude which I used to think was a big deal. And the lady I am married to now was also cum laude. And what I found out was there was a thing that happened to be where I got tired of the papers they were giving. They were so stilted. It was like they were being written for their maiden aunt. I am going to have a heart attack, if they said anything heavy. Something like that. And I complained to them. This is crap you are writing and you are being so careful, you are not saying anything of who you really are and what is really happening. I want to make that assignment for you where I am not going to grade spelling or grammar or anything like that I am more grade [inaudible] and so they sent in a paper like that. And it was a heavy trip man, they like one girl wrote a paper about how her brothers trying to make or give away your half black baby.
10:38
SM: Huh?
10:39
SG: So, the real hard stuff started coming out. And I was knocked out by the, by the content and what I went through a change right there on account of that paper, which was I realized that I loved the students deeply. And I considered the institution to be in the way and not helping out the relationship.
11:02
SM: You said that you were a beatnik. The obviously the beats were very important influence in the (19)50s because they were against the status quo, you know, the Kerouacs, the Burroughs and Ginsburgs.
11:15
SG: The way I got introduced to the beatniks - a friend of mine came to me and says they are having a [inaudible] in the East Coast, where they were having coffee houses, they are drinking coffee, and it goes back in time or Shakespeare when coffee was the dope and folks were uptight about when you talked to much when you did it. There was one down in Laguna Beach, I was in San Bernadino, he says there is one down at Laguna Beach. He goes, do you want it? And we stole the cafe Franken sign, and the plaster cast of the Frankenstein tombstone with a centerpiece and the waitress was in love with the coffee cook and she was spilling over everybody and it was just stoned and sweet and I thought, I think these are my people.
12:12
SM: Did you did you have experiences meeting Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder and the people out there?
12:18
SG: I met Gary Snyder and was my first Monday night class came out it filled up the bookstore, Ferlinghetti's bookstore, the entire window was my book, and the entire glass of the window was the picture of my paper.
12:36
SM: Wow.
12:37
SG: Because everybody - I had been doing the class for several years by then everybody knew was going to come out. No advertising. It got that way by word of mouth. And it just filled up a printing and we have got another printing and sold out a printing and we had another printing like that. And talking to Ferlinghetti about being in his bookstore and I had been. Some of the guys I liked, what is the name of that English guy?
13:08
SM: Neal Cassady or?
13:10
SG: No, I met Neal over in Amsterdam one time more recently. And Neal [inaudible] I knew Big Brother and the Holding Company, when they were an acoustic jug band with no amplifier.
13:32
SM: Now when did they start? That band?
13:36
SG: Well, they what happened to them, as you may recollect, is they were kidnapped by Janis Joplin. [laughs] And that was what happened to them. And so, I knew the guys in the bands and you know, the guy from a Big Brother and the Holding Company came up to me and reminding me of who he was, I said "hey I tell people I know you."
14:05
SM: Wow. So, you when you are talking about the counterculture in the Bay Area, in the (19)60s and the (19)50s, late (19)50s (19)60s and (19)70s, you think primarily in terms of the music and the way people lived their lives? The lifestyle?
14:27
SG: Well, it was it was modern amplification of the music and rock and roll was happening pretty heavy in Europe and then the first rock and roll I ever heard about was referred to as Rock and Roll Riot Detection and by the time I got into San Francisco the Dead you know, Garcia still had black hair.
14:54
SM: Um hmm.
14:55
SG: And the oh, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Cipolina I think one of the crazy real lead guitarists of our time.
15:11
SM: Who was that?
15:12
SG: Cipolina.
15:13
SM: Oh.
15:14
SG: From um, it is tough to remember that name. I had been an English major and then my mother wanted me to be a lawyer and then I ended up being an English major. And I realized I was a creative writing major. And so, I came out as a creative writing major. The thing about a creative writing major is that you get to make up your thesis.
15:43
SM: Hmm.
15:45
SG: It is a group of short stories.
15:46
SM: Right.
15:46
SG: No research, you get to make up your thesis!
15:50
SM: Huh.
15:53
SG: I did that and then on the other side, I was doing general semantics and linguistic study at least the analytical side of the language and the structure of the language. Nothing wrong with the study of a little semantics.
16:09
SM: We you say that when you are around some of these people in two different experiences one in that classroom and another at that club and you say in both instances, I found that people I am most comfortable with. I belong here. Did you feel up to that point, even in your growing up years, with your parents, the years leading up to go into college, even including your military career that you really had not found yourself?
16:39
SG: Yeah, I would say that. I was just doing, you know, after I got in the military, I was supposed to go to school and GI bill, which I did. And I am one of the last people who got out before Reagan screwed the California School System. When I went to San Francisco State to $79 a semester.
17:01
SM: Oh my gosh.
17:02
SG: Not a unit. A semester.
17:04
SM: And what years were those?
17:06
SG: Well, I guess (19)60 - (19)61 something like that I would say. I got it. I took an AA in San Bernadino. And if I uh, well the thing about having that AA is if I had an L I could spell Alabama.
17:36
SM: Yeah you were in the military from (19)52 to (19)55? Right. Now, did you learn anything about war? You were in action over in Korea. You had something, you must have had some feelings coming back from a war?
17:54
SG: Yeah, well, I could not get with the student revolution guys who wanted to send thousands of people up against the administration building and that kind of stuff. I thought that we were supposed to be so media hip and so attractive and neat that we took over that way.
18:17
SM: What was? You were around in during the period many people say is the Summer of Love. Haight Ashbury, that was (19)67. We see all these pictures of Golden Gate Park. It was quiet. He just what was the year 1967 like in San Francisco?
18:38
SG: So, I think that was when we had the we had the first human be- in.
18:47
SM: Please speak up too, thanks.
18:50
SG: So that was just after Woodstock. And we set up in the polo field in Golden Golden Gate Park. And thousands and thousands and thousands of people came.
19:05
SM: Wow.
19:06
SG: I was up on the hill watching it. The meeting was so profound and so powerful, I had to stop and sit down once in a while always walking up to it. A woman there and a mounted policeman: she came up and says, my son is down there! I want to get my son! Help me get my son! Ma'am, all of those people are smoking pot. I cannot go down there.
19:37
SM: Wow.
19:38
SG: And that was also when something happened at later karma which was somebody broke the lines to the stage! The power lines. So, the Hells Angels went out and walked the wires and found them and had a Hells Angel standing on each place the wire was plugged together and protected the jam that way.
19:57
SM: Hmm.
19:57
SG: That is why Garcia had the idea evident for security at Altamont.
20:03
SM: All right, well, that was a disaster.
20:06
SG: Yeah, yeah. Awful.
20:08
SM: Were you at Altamont?
20:10
SG: No, I was with Grateful.
20:12
SM: Wow, because that was the-
20:15
SG: That was one of the low points.
20:17
SM: Some people say that was when everything kind of turned around. But what was it like? The young people, when you look at the boomer generation, you have not only seen them in the classroom, seen them in the communes, seen them in the clubs just experienced them in many different ways, what are their strengths and what are some of their weaknesses in your opinion? Based on the people you knew?
20:46
SG: Well, the strengths and their weaknesses are pretty much the same thing. That was how much they trusted, and how much they were open and how much they were willing to experiment how much they were willing to take along. That stuff is great growth drives, and also can be dangerous. And I loved them and I love hippies still. And in fact, I claim it still. I claim mass affiliation really and say, oh yeah, I am a hippie. And I love the hippies very much and I loved going to rock and roll and I have never had any music that was my own until honor to rock and roll. When I grew up the big hassle was Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. And I thought Sinatra was a better singer but he was such a dick always slapping valet parking people and stuff like that. And Crosby was a nice family man, and not really very interesting or anything and that was what music was when I was a kid. And when suddenly it was rock and roll, man, oh my goodness! People were doing things with guitars that before Rock and Roll would have been considered a catastrophic equipment breakdown. [laughs] You know, when complete and total feedback takes over a whole amp.
22:17
SM: When, when you when you heard young people say, then and many even who are older today say that we were the most unique generation in American history because we were going to end the war, bring peace to the world, end racism, sexism, homophobia, you know, all those other things would not come to fruition all those things and a lot of progress. But what do you what do you say when you hear that this generation feels at times that they were the most unique in our history?
22:53
SG: Well, I think that they are never, there was never anything like that before you because you have never had the social amplifiers that we had. Loud, and using heavy dope. You know, we were we were amplified and, and it was not that we were hiding what we were doing, we were proud of it, we would be dressed different from other folks so that those with like minds, would recognize us. And I still wear my hair long, although it is a little ponytail like a rat tail and smooth on top. I am not going to cut it. They were very afraid. And when I left on the caravan, I left with twenty-five school buses, by the time I got to the farm I had fifty school busses and four hundred and some people who were committed to give it a go. To try to make something happen. And that was one of the things that used to happen is guys would come up to me it was very successful summer dealing. You ever decide you got to go to the land somewhere, let me know, I will help you buy it. Guys like that would come up to me. And I had no personal wealth. I was on the salary, the salary for a teacher. A first-year teacher is not much. And I love those people. And they came here with me. And we have changed since we came here in a bunch of ways because we were wild, wild and crazy both ways as you know. Some folks could not stand us or understand us but then - oh, I would have been with you guys already if I knew that was who you were.
24:56
SM: Here what happened between when the Summer of Love ended (19)67 because we hear stories about (19)68 was a pretty rough year in San Francisco because the many drugs many more drug people came into the Haight Ashbury area and people left like a, like bees.
25:17
SG: What happened when we were on a caravan, which was 1970, we were gone for seven months on the road. And we got back to San Francisco. It has been taken over by crack and cocaine and heroin and alcohol. We did not use to drink as a culture. Hippies did not used to drink the first time Janis Joplin showed up and put a bottle of Southern Comfort down on top of the piano, people were scandalized.
25:46
SM: Oh, wow.
25:47
SG: Yeah. That we were very innocent in our ways. And when we came back off the caravan, we saw that the scene had gone decadent. And we did not know where we were going to get land. But we thought we, we got a good thing going here. We had a very successful tour. Obviously, I was handed over at the state lines from the cop of one state to the next state, hey, they are okay, do not worry about them do not worry about them. When one thing is kind of fun was when we left the first day we left we got busted at the Oregon/California border and the cops had busted us but they had FBI and state police and troopers and a sheriff and whatnot. And they did not know what to do about us at all. But they came out and took my bus and the guy said, I have orders to arrest of the registered owner this bus, well, it was not my bus. This other guy who said What? Gee! What did I do? So, the guy takes out the papers and says I have orders to arrest Stephen Gaskin. But he arrested me and they took me in. I have to admit. The cops did look a little odd. They were counting the change in this great big [inaudible] full of change and small bills that they had bailed me out with. Hey hold on for a second. I got something on the other line I got to take.
27:18
SM: Okay. You were telling the story about the cop and the busses.
27:32
SG: So, they went into court and they want to know who we were. We are the people who are for peace and who are peaceful about being for peace. This is right in the middle of blowing up the Sterling building-
27:52
SM: In Wisconsin, and then the Weatherman.
27:53
SG: And so, we talked to the judge, and the judge says okay. I will tell you what I am going to do, I am going to let you go into speaking tour. At the end of your tour, you got to come back to this courtroom. And I will know where you were. So, I said, okay, and we took off like that. And we went to a lot of changes. We got back off the road and we came back in there. We went into that that office. And he must have got a clipping service or something because all of the walls of the office were covered with pieces of paper for every parcel and point [inaudible]. They had tracked us all the way.
28:34
SM: Unbelievable.
28:35
SG: And the judge, we went back into the courtroom and the judge said, he said, your presence in the courtroom is an embarrassment and you were free to go.
28:51
SM: Hmm.
28:54
SG: When I wrote the Caravan book, the first chapter is half that story in the last chapter is the other half of that story.
29:05
SM: Oh, wow. I got to get that book. Is that book still in print?
29:08
SG: Yeah.
29:09
SM: Oh, I got to order that book. I have a list of all your books here and they are all fascinating.
29:18
SG: I have got it myself and then you hit me up on my website.
29:22
SM: Yeah, because you got forty Miles of a Bad Road.
29:25
SG: That is my master's thesis.
29:28
SM: Yeah. And then you have Monday Night Class, which is one I love.
29:32
SG: Yeah.
29:33
SM: Then you got The Caravan from (19)72 and the one about Haight Ashbury Flashbacks. And An Outlaw in my Heart, a Political-
29:43
SG: Oh, By Heart was the one I put together when I was running against the Ralph Nader for the Green nomination.
29:50
SM: Wow.
29:52
SG: Best thing about that was I got to be friends with Ralph.
29:55
SM: Yeah, I saw Ralph last year when he was talking about his first now when he went around the country. Tell me a little bit about The Caravan. Obviously, you- where did you meet the people that went on the original in the original buses, or cars?
30:13
SG: They were the Monday night class.
30:15
SM: They were all students.
30:17
SG: They were all Monday night classes.
30:20
SM: Then they were off in the Bay Area, most of them?
30:24
SG: Hold on again a minute.
30:38
SM: So, they were mostly, they were students from your Monday night class?
30:41
SG: Yeah. And they were just, we had people there who had PhDs, people that are who were dropped out freshmen
30:48
SM: Oh my gosh!
30:49
SG: They came to the farm and when we get the farm up to a pretty big population and stuff at one time, the farm had more college degrees than the Tennessee State legislature did.
31:00
SM: Oh my gosh, the original when you finally got there. What was your number at the very beginning?
31:11
SG: When we went back, actually, just to land some people dropped off at that point. We came in with about 280 people.
31:19
SM: Wow.
31:20
SG: And we were we were in Nashville, trying to look for land. And we thought, well, as big as we are, we should have a band. A big creature like this needs a voice we should have a band. Philip says, oh, I got to go trade this guitar in. I cannot do rock and roll with a twelve string, I got to get a real rock and roll guitar. He went to get a rock and roll guitar and the lady at the music store says, nobody has lived on my mother's old home place down in Lewis county for about thirty-five years. You guys can go down there and park. They gave us place to land. I found out that they were kind of wealthy liberals.
32:03
SM: Uh huh.
32:04
SG: And the while we were there looking for a tractor, somebody went out came back to the port subtractor with a wide front wheels and low back wheels. And one guy who had ridden with the Hells Angels said, that was not a tractor. And he went out for a tractor and he found this big old John Deere with wheels about, about seven-foot-high and the guy who sold him the tractor said, you guys should buy my place, its 1000 acres and the road does not go through. We went to the bank down in [inaudible] and asked for a loan. And we got to the bank and they said, well it is not just because you are an out of town hippie, it is also because no one has ever asked for a loan as big as that from this bank before. We went back and told Carlos that. And he said, I trust you guys, I will carry it. And that was that was a very important thing because we did not know it but the FBI had every county clerk in the state primed up to let them know have you tried to buy land in their county because they were going to get us.
33:13
SM: [laughs] Oh jeez!
33:14
SG: And because the guy carried the note himself, we were a stranger [inaudible] before they ever heard about us.
33:20
SM: Oh my gosh.
33:26
SG: Some of what I did was I general. You had to have a to have a general because we were facing an organized thing.
33:40
SM: So, they have been being alerted people all over the area that do not lend money to your group.
33:47
SG: Who they had alerted were the county clerks if we came to do a title search or anything.
33:57
SM: They just did not want your type, around did they?
34:00
SG: Well now, we have all become very effusive. They love us.
34:04
SM: Now, what was the, the actual land that you bought finally?
34:09
SG: Well, first, we bought Carlos's 1000 acres. And it is where the highlands where the Nashville basin is, the rim and this land is off of that rim coming down to the lower land it has got a few pretty flat fields not a lot of hills and we are a deciduous oak forest. And anyway, it turned out that the only interest of the place was through about seven or eight other people's driveways. And we bought the land next door, which had an opening on the blacktop. We did that that that the first piece of land was $70 per acre $70,000 for 70 acres. The next piece of land was $100 an acre. 700 acres, same price but we only got 700 but then we had 1700 acres. And then later on, we have had things happen like Japanese land buying companies come in and buy land on our border and clear cut it and stuff like that. By this time, we were big enough that we just chartered a nonprofit corporation and we started buying everything still had trees on it. But now we are up to having six and a quarter square mile, or 6000 acres. I was talking to a guy in Europe about an acre and a hectare. And we finally decided that we had, we had 1000 hectares. And this guy who happened to be the director of the [inaudible] said, you should secede from the union.
35:59
SM: [laughs] Wow. Of the originals that came back in 1970 are there very many still there?
36:13
SG: Not a lot. But, but we were like with other places you were back to be close to their folks or whatnot, you know, we were a very large and well communicated entity and we talked to each other all over the place. Got people. At one time we had twenty-five other farms.
36:32
SM: Wow.
36:33
SG: We had one in Ireland and we had one in India. Like that.
36:39
SM: Wow. How many people live there now?
36:45
SG: I do not think we are up to 300 right now but it was 1500 people and it was also five hippies hitchhiking on every freeway ramp.
36:56
SM: For a while. Cannot hitchhike anymore, though, can you?
37:01
SG: Not much!
37:04
SM: Now, obviously, people think that hippies were very popular in the (19)60s and (19)70s but that there are not very many left. Hippies. You do not hear about them much anymore, except for places like The Farm and that have lived the life. But your thoughts on that? How many? Are there still hippies out there that are young?
37:32
SG: Well, they do not call themselves hippies but they but they are heavy into communication, and rock and roll and they are on the internet and they are a generation that talks to itself more freely than anybody ever has. And they do not call themselves hippies anymore but you hear it used every now and then. And whenever anybody asks me I always say a hippie of course.
38:03
SM: Do you have you have people that actually read about the farm and say, can I come and live there?
38:08
SG: Oh, yeah. We have, when we were big, we had 256-man hours a week in gate.
38:17
SM: Oh my gosh.
38:19
SG: We had we had 150,000 visitors in our first 10 years.
38:26
SM: And what was the process? See it see a person? Well say in 1972 you had been there two years, what was the process for someone to become a part of The Farm?
38:38
SG: We used to call it soaking. We would make you come and live here for a while and work. And we would advise that do not get involved romantically when you are first coming here. But as you get where you cannot tell the difference between falling in love with somebody and falling in love with the farm. And, and after you soak for a while for sure you want to do it, then we check you out and see if we want you. But the beginning you could be a full partner on a handshake and a smile.
39:09
SM: And you said that they were PhDs, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, dropouts.
39:17
SG: Our giant book was backed up by a PhD in organic chemistry.
39:25
SM: Why do you think I know you your experience but why do you think so many people that were in that class or heard about that class said I am tired of this world. I want to get away from it. I want to go back to nature.
39:40
SG: Well, I ended up right on the spot where stuff was happening. I would usually you go check out a scene you go to hear about the scene and its already going decadent. But this one happened right around me. I saw it when it first grew and I love it and hippies love me, you know, because I never sold out. I am 75 years old now.
40:14
SM: Yeah, I was reading in the some of the things in the web, the wall street journal called The Farm the General Motors of American communes.
40:23
SG: [laughs]
40:25
SM: What did they mean by that?
40:28
SG: Well, that we had like a motor pool, and we had a school up through high school. And we had medical facilities. Our midwives are world famous, that is what my wife's doing right now she is off talking about midwifery in Europe. And she, lectures to doctors, doctors come to her lectures. And we were good at what we did. And nobody, nobody around our neighborhood, thinks hippies are dumb. In fact, this is just like, how stuff would happen. We were anti-nukers, of course. And at some point, we said, we were anti-nukers, we ought to be able to tell us something is hot. We ought to have a Geiger counter. So, we got a Geiger counter. And that year's Geiger counter was a pig, it weighed maybe 15 pounds had a big signal letter and battery in it is just a pig, it was before digital measurization, pretty much although our guys are into them somewhat. But we had we had that thing and it did not have a dial on it, it just had a light and it (noises) and people would write down a number or anything and at the same time, one of our people who is on the farm to have a baby the little farm issue, she was having twins. So, the midwives got the Doppler effect, fetal heart monitor, for sensitivity to separate the twin’s heartbeat and the guy on the crew who was working on the cluster, checked out that and he went back and he says, look, that little heart monitor our posture has a delay in averaging circuit eventually if we hook that delaying and averaging circuit up to the Geiger we could time it. It would have a dial and we would have a needle. So, we figured that out and put it together. And our Geiger counter was about the size of a pack 100-millimeter cigarette. And when 911 hit we had to hire more people to that company. And right now, in Lewis County our Geiger counter company is the only one of our companies that is big enough and strong enough to have health care for its employees.
43:06
SM: It is a fantastic story.
43:09
SG: And right now, the Geiger counter company is listed as the only high-tech business in Lewis County. That is one thing about the neighbors not thinking that hippies are dumb.
43:21
SM: Well, you got some pretty good people there and you are at the farm. Boy, some really good and, you know, reading your background, I was very impressed with your background and your wife's background, but to see the information you are given me about some of your fellow people, they are in The Farm over the years, it is pretty impressive, but I am going to change my tape. Okay. I am back. One of the interesting things about communes is that when the in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, a lot of people say the (19)60s ended in around 1973. So, you got to glue those first few years as part of the (19)60s in the (19)70s. But that was when so many people went back to communes and or they-
44:12
SG: Fake unity.
44:14
SM: Yeah. Or they went into a more spiritual feeling. So, they were not going to church as much. And what I have read here, and I like your comments on the critics of communes as a whole, maybe not The Farm, but communes overall, is that this it is about people who dropped out. People who went back to nature, lived off the land became much more spiritual, and they did not have to go to church or synagogues, but they became more inner, inner spiritual. I would like you to your comments on the critics of the communes and define what a commune is.
44:58
SG: First place like I keep saying. We are a commune and total commune is a- the political term and so we say we are an intentional community living together on purpose, because they want to. And the idea is that people have been trying to do that kind of stuff in this country for a long time, the Shakers and those kinds of people like that. And we are not like we used to be in the sense of like, totally collecting did not have to have any money in your pocket and these glasses, you would have a bank lady and like that. And now, we went through changes in 1983 like the world did and people have their own bank accounts and stuff now. And we have come to find out that in Israel, that is a metamorphosis that happens that it is well documented there and it when a kibbutz turns into a musha'a and it this really collective bit like a collective child raising very like. And the musha'a is, people got their own checkbook and their own job and their own money, but they are still collecting. So, we kind of like went like that thing in Israel, using the technicality of that language, I think we are more of a musha'a now but we like to do big projects together and so we still do big projects. Our Plenty organization that we put together. The first thing we did was help the people whose houses had been destroyed by tornados and stuff then we ended up doing a rather large, that diet health program in Guatemala, where we got into a deal with Faith International and pipelined millions of [inaudible] money into Guatemala and organized. We like big projects, but then we were very clear, that Plenty thing belongs to everybody on The Farm. We did not want to have an acronym, we call it Plenty, because there is actually enough if it was fairly strict. So, we explained what Plenty means and that is pretty revolutionary.
47:31
SM: So why, why did The Farm succeed when most of the other communes did not? There may be three or four major communes in the country, and the rest of them are gone?
47:44
SG: Well, I do not know exactly. The first 13 years, I was really deeply involved in everything. And I have not been since about (19)83. I have lived here, I have worked from here but I do not run it. And it was like it went from running Monday Night Class to running The Caravan and now, it would be superfluous for me to try to run things. But you have gone off and been doing things for years and it is really nice to have competent friends. In fact, somebody came to The Farm and do the story and they said they seem to have a religion of competence.
48:38
SM: For example, within The Farm itself, do you each have your own, like homes? And then you have you eat your meals separately? Or do you eat out common area?
48:49
SG: No, we had we, we have community dinners every now and then and also, we will have a community dinner for a cause like the school needs somebody or something who have a community dinner and charge for it. And we do a lot of music and one of the most successful things we have done is our musicians have passed down lots and lots to our kids.
49:17
SM: See, so if you go out on a lecture circuit or your wife for the band goes out and performs or somebody who has a skill goes out in the community and gets paid for it, does that money all come back to the to one big lump?
49:35
SG: No.
49:37
SM: So, you have your own private counts now?
49:40
SG: Oh, sure. Okay. The government you know wants you to have social security numbers and things.
49:49
SM: Right.
49:52
SG: We got to obey the law of the land everywhere we can and I probably am not going to do any more books based on pot. We have got a very good one out now and I do not need any more. I have one called Cannabis Spirituality.
50:16
SM: Well if pot was a very important part was very important part of The Farm.
50:21
SG: It is part of the whole hippie movement. Anything remarkable about our pot stuff is how well we kept away from crack, and cocaine and heroin. We were hash and acid and peyote.
50:42
SM: How do you deal with that it is illegal in most areas? Still.
50:48
SG: What I do in my own personal areas is be cool. And that is what other people have to do to.
50:53
SM: A one a couple other things here. I am looking at that. One of the when there was the period when and you know this and I know it is not true, but when Charles Manson happened, they thought that that was the kind of a cult and that he was part of a small community and then he had the Symbionese Liberation Army that ended up taking Patty Hearst, and they were supposedly some sort of a commune.
51:26
SG: A commune.
51:28
SM: Yeah, commune I guess. They were small groups, but did some bad things.
51:34
SG: Well the thing about Charlie Manson is, he is not by throwing him in the, the prison system of the United States had him when he was a young man and had him for 20 years before there was ever such a thing as the Haight and he was being educated in the penitentiary system and he is not ours. He was a hitchhiker on us, but we did not make him. And what was the other thing?
52:04
SM: The Symbionese Liberation Army.
52:06
SG: Well, Symbionese Liberation Army, they liked this fancy made up names but they were more of a publicity stunt. They were not going to take anything that was not a revolution or do anything like that would not make any permanent changes or anything. That is not who we are. We vote in our elections here. And when we were big, governors and senators came to our door to talk to us about it. I am a friend of Al Gore's.
52:44
SM: Oh, very good.
52:46
SG: He was by Congressman. And I think the supreme court stole that election completely
52:56
SM: I agree. Life would have been a little different. I think we still might have been attacked though at 911 but still.
53:08
SG: Well the thing about the thing about that stuff is we got to make peace with the Islamic world we cannot cut them off in little pieces and say this is a bad piece and we are going to blow it up and we act like that about a fifth of the world every time we blow up some a little village with a drone.
53:36
SM: A couple of other things regarding just the way the media in the culture of television and movies have portrayed communes. Is Easy Rider? Those scenes when Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper I think Jack Nicholson is in there too, but when they come into this one commune there is that scene and they are kind of talking to them, oh, this would be great because they were referring to all the top potential sex partners they could have within the within the commune that that was very well portrayed in that movie. And then another thing about in (19)98.
54:21
SG: They are rich movie actors.
54:25
SM: So that was really just Hollywood doing a Hollywood thing?
54:29
SG: Complete Hollywood bullshit.
54:31
SM: Yeah, because there was a you may have it. I have a major collection of magazines. There was a Life magazine on the cover with the commune. Do you remember it in the late (19)60s, where it showed a family and a commune and at the top of it says communes and it is very good article that talks about, you know, they, they were not having they had a white they did not have six wives? But there is, there is still that feeling out there that maybe men and women are having more partners than they should.
55:03
SG: They were in the (19)60s but that has consequences, children and stuff. And people want to have the best deal they can for their children and they did not want it to be a haphazard mess because they had to sort it out for the kids.
55:19
SM: Right?
55:22
SG: I do not mind challenging the mores of society I have never been afraid to but I am also not afraid to agree with them when they are useful and necessary for the safety and sanity of everybody else.
55:37
SM: How do you deal with that? I have asked this question, everybody. It is a general question. We have the in 1994, or Newt Gingrich came to power. He kind of he and he still does make commentary about the (19)60s and (19)70s that basically the problems we have in our society today are the problems of the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, the you know, only one parent at home, lack of respect for authority and basically, culture going astray. And of course, George Will, when he gets chances he'll make commentaries. And Mike Huckabee even does it on his television show. And I remember when John McCain was running for president, he made commentary about Mrs. Clinton, that she was kind of like a hippie. Just general comments degrading the period and the time. How do you respond to those kinds of people when they make general statements?
56:41
SG: Well, there is a pretty good school of thought that being a hippie is an ethnicity.
56:50
SM: Mm hmm.
56:51
SG: And that people do it like they, they get racist about it. And that is the thing. I could cut my hair and get a necktie and if I kept my mouth shut, nobody would ever know.
57:05
SM: Right.
57:06
SG: But I will not and everybody knows I will not and you know, proud of my hippie forebearers and what we have done about it is we are not treated that way. We are not treated that way locally. The neighbors come here. We used to we had to ask the neighbors how to sharpen a chainsaw when we got here. And we had people come to be our electricians, our, our tech company is very strong and we are friends with our neighbors, we had a series of debates with the preachers. We had six or seven Church of Christ preachers come every Wednesday for weeks and then they had one up in Nashville in a big hall with about five or six preachers on stage and me. And the one old guy who said that he was the cult expert in Tennessee said that there are 309 nine cults in Tennessee but that The Farm was not one of them. And then had this you know, discussion in front of all these people and it got to the point where the preachers finally said, I cannot make them out to be Christians no matter how hard I try. But I really wish mine lived as well as they do.
58:38
SM: If someone was to ask you, why was The Farm started and then please define the purpose of The Farm. What would your answer be?
58:53
SG: Well, there was a giant worldwide revolution going on and much of it was being blown off on fireworks and wasted and we wanted to fix that very intelligent sweet good directed energy and make it last and give it a history. I have always said that one of the things that we are doing is to redeem the good name of the hippies.
59:18
SM: You obviously have lived a life of activism to not only obviously, when you when The Farm has experiences like I know you have helped with the improvements for the poor. There have been various causes as you were reading in some of your literature about saving the trees, even saving the whales, helping people down in Guatemala. I mean, where there is a tragedy around the country, a group of you will leave the area, your home, to help. That is activism. Could you define what an activist means to you, and any other activist experiences you have had in your life?
1:00:07
SG: Well, I really was not an activist before I was a hippie but me and my wife, we were both activists, and so is everybody else on the farm. If you see something wrong, you should fix it. And I believe that is in the Good Book too it says, what though your eyes need to do your hands should both do it and that is why Plenty started off, we helped a guy that had bad luck with tornadoes then we got word that Honduras at that time, it had a bad crop year, and they were starving. And so, we went to the Mennonite Central Committee and we said, if you guys would give us the money to buy the beans for them and get them shipped down there. And then we needed more muscle down there and we got hooked up with Canada and we were moving government level money. And it is because we are honest, and we have vision, same with the hippies. And so, it is our way, in the first place. Second place is really necessary to do it and we have been we have had people down in Haiti for a long time. I have a press card in Haiti myself. And we have places down in Belize, Honduras they used to call it. That is an interesting kind of Indians. There is Guatemalan Indians, Mayan's speaking Spanish, Belize Indians/Mayans speak English and another old tribe called [inaudible] who are escaped black slaves who are culturally a Mayan. [laughs] We have people just like that come through here now and then. In front of our bus [inaudible] lovely [inaudible] and it said "out to save the world."
1:02:36
SM: That is nice.
1:02:37
SG: Might as well be framed.
1:02:41
SM: If you are in a, I always do these little scenarios if you were in a college classroom today and you were a guest speaker just for that particular day, maybe you were introduced by the professor, the teacher could even be a large High School and a young person stood up and said, geez, you know, that must have been scary leaving San Francisco and going in those cars and vans, not knowing where you were going to end up. What gave you the courage to do it?
1:03:21
SG: That is like the people who say, where did you park 50 busses? Where did you park the caravan? I said red zones, loading zones- [laughs]
1:03:32
SM: Well, yeah, really what I am getting at here is what is the life lesson that others can learn from when they look at the caravan and the eventual development of The Farm but most importantly, it is like a young person leaving home for the first time it is that risk-taking. What does the caravan mean for life?
1:03:55
SG: For several hundred of us and we were well head-smart and pretty big. You know nobody is going to jump on us. Nobody is going to go up and attack a thousand hippies fine. And we would be good. And people got to like us and we made friends with people right along the road. We had a baby, at Northwestern, the first one my wife saw delivered before she was a midwife. And we had another baby in Ripley, New York and we were parked in front of a church and the cops asked what we were doing and she said we are a caravan but we were having a baby and now we need to stop. Oh. Okay, follow us and we will show you where to park and they parked us downtown on parking meters. [laughs]
1:04:44
SM: Wow.
1:04:45
SG: And we had the baby and when the baby was born, the church rang a bell.
1:04:52
SM: Was that the first baby from The Farm?
1:04:55
SG: The one at Northwestern was the first one.
1:04:58
SM: Okay.
1:05:01
SG: There was another one in Rhode Island and a doctor came to see us. His name was Louie LeFer, Louie the Father and he came in and showed them how to do heart message on a baby to help them get started and showed him a bunch of good little tricks and stuff, which they used in the next two birthing. And what I see is that doctors love our midwives. They just love them. And treat them good and take care of them.
1:05:36
SM: I would love to interview your wife when she gets some time. You know, maybe during the summertime, if that might be possible.
1:05:45
SG: Maybe so she does it quite a lot. We both do a lot of media.
1:05:53
SM: Well I know I sent you and I sent you the master email. I can send one to her or you can just share hers, whichever is okay. I noticed that you say your politics is beatnik?
1:06:06
SG: Yeah.
1:06:07
SM: And, that your religion is hippie.
1:06:11
SG: Right.
1:06:12
SM: So just define that a little bit better.
1:06:19
SG: Well, beatniks came out of an artistic thing. It was artists. In fact, before beatniks were bohemian, and it went like that all the way back to a couple of guys sitting with Socrates. And uh, I do not know I am not sure if I understand that question very well.
1:06:57
SM: Well, it basically I was reading that when someone asked you what your religion was you said hippie, and you did not say Methodist or Catholic or, and then your politics instead of saying Democrat or Republican you said beatnik.
1:07:13
SG: Right, right. Well, I we brought some of the first Jews anybody had seen down into Tennessee. And this one guy, someone was questioning him about his religion and being Jewish you know and he said hey, man, I like the red parts.
1:07:39
SM: [laughs] You mean something very important, because when you are talking about the (19)50s, and you think about the Red Scare that was everywhere, McCarthyism in the early (19)50s, even, even the late (19)40s and then to the-
1:07:52
SG: I was in the Marine Corps from (19)52-(19)55.
1:07:54
SM: Right. And then when you talk to you, you made some references I do not know what was jokingly or serious about the fact that when you say commune people think communism. Was there a fear? Was there a fear that was why people did not speak up that much in the (19)50s who may have had attitudes like the beats?
1:08:15
SG: Well there were people in the (19)50s like that but they were more in the arts. They were not you know, I loved Lena Horne when I was a little boy. She was an activist about it you know. She did not have to act like she was black. Nobody would have known if she decided not let them know. But she would do that. She stuck with it. I felt respect for that.
1:08:56
SM: What were the when you look at the counterculture. Counterculture is really defined as being challenging to the status quo in so many different ways. It is not- it is what people oftentimes look upon is not the normal it is then it is not the abnormal, it is just not normal. Theodore Roszak wrote the book The Making of a Counterculture where he talked about the different consciousness. How do you define counterculture?
1:09:29
SG: Well, in the first place, its spontaneous. It is not made by somebody. When I was running for the Green nomination, I was at one thing and this guy had done and said the socialist thing pretty well. You know, and I got my turn to talk and I started off the first thing was what he said and like that, and that caught on so good that the Green people all over the United States were using that to say they agreed with the previous speaker, you know, what he said and like that was a useful thing, you know that he did not have to be in a relationship of the opposite. You know? And one of my favorite things is the only thing that anybody else needs to know about your religion is how groovy it makes you. No need to tell them anything else. Show them how groovy you are.
1:10:45
SM: You talked about the books you have written. But were there any special books that had an influence on you in the (19)50s and the (19)60s in the (19)70s, that were written by other people?
1:10:56
SG: Well, in (19)49 or it was (19)45, my family was living in an army cold weather base in Colorado [inaudible] and my father was a civilian housing manager, and I went to school there. I stole and burned quite a lot of things. And that base was at the end of the war. They were cutting the barracks up and taking them away and stuff and they were going to burn the library. My mother was scandalized by that we had an old (19)39 Cadillac four door and she went over the library and picked out the stuff she thought would be good and picked out a carload of it that we kept. And what she got me was Fools Bet by Mark Twain, Melville, Robert Lewis Stevenson and those guys. And that was what I read growing up. And then when I was an English major, and I am taking a degree in English, I find it is my old friend! My friends from when I was a kid, these guys are American writers. All right. And that is some of the real philosophy of our thing. And I go back through that kind of writers like Thoreau and people like that, and I do not go on a classical religious paradigm as my father never would church, my mother never went to church. My children, say, man it is so cool that your dad got us out of the church.
1:13:05
SM: Was there any movies that when you look at the movies that have been produced and, on the screen, are there when you talk about the boomer generation in the (19)60s and the (19)70s? Or is there is there anything that is realistic to you?
1:13:25
SG: In movies? I think the main thing about movies is that they are not realistic. That is what they are for so, I do not know what you mean by realistic.
1:13:38
SM: Were there any movies that cause a lot of Vietnam vets say that when they see these movies, that is not the way it was.
1:13:46
SG: Yeah well, I is not a Vietnam vet I am a Korean War vet. In fact, I am the kind of a vet that when I see generals on the screen with [inaudible]- [laughs]
1:14:16
SM: A couple other questions here. This is a very important question I have asked everyone. And that is this business about healing. Boomers, of course, were born between (19)46 and (19)64. And the 1960s, the certainly the assassinations of a president, a senator and a civil rights leader. The riots in the cities, the burnings of the cities, certainly the 1968 convention, there was a lot of turmoil. There is a lot of division, as you well know and you live through it just like I did. The question I am asking is this. Do you who feel that the boomer generation is still having problems with healing, due to the extreme divisions that tore this nation apart in their youth? Divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and lesbian and straight. Divisions between those who supported authority and those who are against it, those who criticized the war and or supported it, as well as the troops? And what role has the wall in Washington DC done with helping to heal the nation beyond the veterans?
1:15:36
SG: The Wall?
1:15:36
SM: In other words, what I am asking is, do you feel the boomer generation will go to its grave like the Civil War generation not truly healing?
1:15:45
SG: I think that we are healing and we are healing other people, and that we are continuing bringing healing on down through history. It is the most loving, and healing and humanistic and best philosophy that I have seen. And I have read the other stuff you know but my wife and I, she is writing things now and one of the things that amuses her quite a lot is that guys who we consider to be heavy philosophers have ideas like that men have 32 teeth and women have 28 and to a midwife, that just an inexcusable level of stupidity. [laughs] Philosophers do not make philosophy they pick it out of the society and learn about it. Tim Leary said that he was a stand-up philosopher. Like a stand-up comic.
1:16:56
SM: Um Hmm.
1:16:58
SG: And I think my friend Paul Krasner who was a very good friend of mine who was like that too.
1:17:04
SM: Yes.
1:17:06
SG: And I think I am kind of like that. I am supposed, where I go, I am supposed to make them like me. When I went to penitentiary, I knew exactly what my job was. I was to show them a class act. And I did, and the result of that was that the news was coming to see James Earl Ray every week. And that was kind of a drag. And then I was there, they would see me for more fun and so got to where I was getting three televisions and two newspapers every week until they got so sick of that talking in Nashville that they sent me out to this place where I got put in the hole. And a counselor said I will tell you what, you can stay at my office until they find you. And there were always people helping me out like that. That was what I was about. And my folks went up to you know, get me out of the hole. And Mr. [inaudible] said let him rot, and they pushed me down and they had this guy Bass, Mr. Charles Bass. And Bass was a minister of corrections who had risen from a guard and when they saw him, he said, I am not worried about people who family come out for and he spun me out of the hole and put me in the trustee camp and gave me my mail that had been held back for several weeks and let The Farm bring me vegetarian food. I told him, I said I mentioned you in my book I was talking to him on the phone, I mentioned you in my book. He said when people came to my house, I show that to them.
1:19:03
SM: Wow. So, you believe then really that a generation like this does not have a problem with healing?
1:19:10
SG: I think we are healers.
1:19:11
SM: Okay.
1:19:12
SG: We are doing everything from a better diet. You know, we are talking about the hippie diet. Hippies are going to live a long time and not have, you know, not have high blood pressure diseases. I have been you know, watching my diet and eating vegetarian stuff for a long time and my last heart appointment the doctor says, I have the heart of a teenager and I should be congratulated. I had a prostate examination they say you get an A plus on this exam. [inaudible] I am a very healthy old dude.
1:19:46
SM: You have never had diabetes huh?
1:19:49
SG: No diabetes.
1:19:51
SM: Which is one of the most rampant disease in the country right now.
1:19:54
SG: Yeah. And it is the diet.
1:19:59
SM: When we asked Senator Muskie that question, I took a group of students and Senator Muskie basically, I he did not say anything about 1968 because he was at that convention. Basically, what he said is we have not healed since the Civil War and he was referring to the racism that was still in the country. So
1:20:18
SG: Yeah.
1:20:19
SM: That was what he was referring to because the Civil War in the south a lot of people have not healed according to him.
1:20:29
SG: Yeah, well, we live down here in the middle of all that kind of stuff.
1:20:37
SM: Did you have a generation gap with your kids?
1:20:44
SG: One of my kids decided that he would follow my military thing and became a martial artist that has a black belt in Jujitsu. The other is a computer guy and does that kind of stuff. My other son turned out to be the house holder yogi and I think I am also a house holding yogi.
1:21:10
SM: Because at that period when you were teaching that was when the generation gap between the boomers and their parents was really in its heyday.
1:21:22
SG: Well, my daughter's a boomer and she is quite proud of me.
1:21:30
SM: So, you obviously you were in the commune, but you did not have any like disagreements over politics or anything?
1:21:39
SG: [inaudible] We do not we do not use that word in that way here, we just do not do it.
1:21:50
SM: Why In your opinion, why did the Vietnam War end?
1:21:56
SG: Ran out of money?
1:22:01
SM: And uh-
1:22:01
SG: I think the people in the streets had a lot to do with it. I had a different experience. I came home Korea people said, where you been? You know? We already knew, in Korea we knew what was going to happen. One of the guys had written a little song. (Singing) Pardon me boy, is that an Indochina convoy? Uncle Sam has my fare it is just a trifle to spare. Come to Yokohama Harbor about a quarter to four. Sink a submarine and then you are looking for more. Dinner on the liner. Nothing could be finer than to have your ham and eggs in Indochina.
1:22:44
SM: Hmm.
1:22:45
SG: We knew that [inaudible] was next.
1:22:48
SM: You were a Korean War vet now Vietnam vets were not welcomed home were Korean War vets welcomed home?
1:22:55
SG: Nobody knew they came home. [laughs] And do not think, there were people who were supposed to be for peace who were dumb enough to be bad to soldiers. And I really hate that and regret that. But veterans, veterans, I am straight with veterans and they are straight with me. I am very grateful for my experience that allowed me to bridge that gap.
1:23:24
SM: Let me change I got this [inaudible] Alright, I am back. I guess I get a series of questions. I am going to ask them some of the personalities of the period. But the other thing I want to ask you was the button issue of trust the boomer generation is, as I see, it oftentimes is labeled as a generation that does not trust because so many lies were seen in their leaders, whether it be Watergate with Nixon and certainly the Gulf of Tonkin with President Johnson, you have the body counts that McNamara used to give on a weekly basis and we knew they were not truthful. So a lot of the boomers grew up with their leaders lying and they did not trust leaders and so obviously, this probably came up in some of your classes at San Francisco State where students just did not trust anybody in a position of responsibility or authority, whether it be university president, a corporate leader, or congressman or a senator and or even, you know, anyone your thoughts on the issue of trust, as you have seen him in your life, not only through your experiences in the (19)60s in San Francisco, but your life on The Farm?
1:28:54
SG: Well, the thing about Monday Night Class was, especially after it got bigger, was my role became much plainer and it was that I could not discriminate against questioners. And that if I did not know something I had to say, I do not know. And if I answered a question for somebody, they were the one who got to say was the question answered. I did not stand up in front of my class. I sat in a chair, talking to them. I did not use a microphone to talk to 1000 people. And it meant that it was like meditation with a conversation on top. And the way I treated people set the standard for how easy it would be for them to speak themselves so nobody was afraid to speak up in Monday Night Class. And I also had to be easy to call down. If I said something wrong or something I was supposed to roll right away for it, and do not argue about it. And none of that stuff bothered me, it was going to be obviously the right way to do it. But it developed a conversational style. And also, to talk to a bunch of people like that. There are things that happen, like sometimes you'll see the room catch a joke. And it is like watching the wind on a wheat field. Just really, really close to everybody's mind. And the day the students were shot at Kent State. It was a Monday. And I had Monday Night Class. And about 100 people showed up very noisy, about we got to get guns! They are trying to kill us you know, you cannot be all peaceful like this you got to get out there and do it. And so, I am having that argument with them. And somebody comes up and gives me, a little girl gives me a piece of candy and as I pop in my mouth, she looks so mischievous, I thought- oh! And sure enough, I been loaded a big chunk of acid.
1:31:11
SM: Oh, no.
1:31:12
SG: So, coming onto acid and having this argument about violence. And I finally got to a place where I said look here. All these nights I have been coming in here and saying love and peace. You guys have been saying yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah. I repeat it and you say yeah, yeah. I say love and peace and the whole audience answered me: yeah, yeah. And that showed me that the violent guys were just a little thin fringe in the back. And they noticed it too. They were very well outnumbered by [inaudible] people.
1:31:47
SM: Well.
1:31:48
SG: So, we had that argument about it. And that was what we did. When heroin came, we talked about that. When crack came, we talked about that. We talked to all that kind of stuff. When Scientology came we talked about that.
1:32:06
SM: Hmm. Did you bring guests in? Or was it just you in the students?
1:32:13
SG: Well, no, I did not bring guests in.
1:32:19
SM: Yeah, Kent State. I just got back from the four days there. This is the 40th anniversary.
1:32:24
SG: Yeah.
1:32:25
And it was phew, it was an event that really shocked everyone. April 30th Nixon gave his speech and then on the fourth with the killings of May. So, was that room full that night when?
1:32:42
SG: Oh, yeah.
1:32:42
SM: How many were students were there that night?
1:32:44
SG: It was about [inaudible]
1:32:47
SM: Wow.
1:32:48
SG: The thing is I do not call people [inaudible] I do not call people [inaudible]
1:33:03
SM: Some said that they wanted to go and create violence, others did not. Did anybody talk about the police? What were the main issues on the student's minds?
1:33:13
SG: Well, the guys who had come to class for the purpose of disrupting and trying to turn it toward a violent thing were strong in what they were saying. The usual people who came to class felt that it was an attack on their consciousness and that they did not want to part of it.
1:33:32
SM: What happened at San Francisco State in the in the days after?
1:33:37
SG: Oh, we had we had we had one time where everybody was thrown off the campus by the police. There were hundreds of cops there. So, I was kind of assaulted. On the way out, I stopped in front of each cop, cops all lined up. I would go up and stop in front of each cop and looked him in the eyes until we had caught his eyes. And then I would stop at the next one and I did that to every cop on the line all the way up because I knew I was right and they were wrong.
1:34:06
SM: Yeah, that was a big issue back then is when do you bring in police from off campus and not just choose your own police and that had to be done by the administration was this where Hayakawa got in trouble?
1:34:21
SG: This goes back to the 1700s you know, town and gown. You know, that same thing. We were peaceful. Everybody knew we were peaceful. And there were people who were not but, that they were welcome to come to class and hear what we said.
1:34:41
SM: Did you ever talk about the Black Panther Party across the bay and what the Black Panther Party was doing?
1:34:50
SG: I did not know him but I would shake hands with him and say hi. And there was also one of them, this one guy point guy that was part of that bunch of guys who was an artist. And the best guy I saw in that bunch of guys, he was so good. And he used to, he knew how to do one of those old dances. Throws a little dime to a little black boy and goes dance for your trip. He knew how to do that. The problem with it was, he was really good at it. And he would do that and the other guys would say make it stop, make it stop augh! And he died because they asked him to start H. Rap Brown's car and it was bombed.
1:35:48
SM: Let us say that again? Uh.
1:35:51
SG: This is the guy Ralph Featherstone. Featherstone. And he was the guy who started H. Rap Brown's car but it had been bombed and they killed him.
1:36:02
SM: Somebody sent a bomb in Brown's car.
1:36:05
SG: Yeah.
1:36:06
SM: Unbelievable. And where was that car located?
1:36:09
SG: I do not know.
1:36:09
SM: Oh, Okay, right here in the Bay Area?
1:36:12
SG: I do not think so.
1:36:13
SM: Oh, okay.
1:36:14
SG: I met Ralph Featherstone when we went to San Francisco State college to do the Mississippi challenge for the Mississippi delegation because of the ride. So, I went, I got to meet a few guys, you know up at the, Mo Udall. Udall said, I agree with guys. And my name starts with a "U" and by the time it gets to me, I want to know whether it is going to make it or not. And if it looks like it is going to make it, I will go on with you.
1:36:46
SM: Right.
1:36:46
SG: If it looks like it is going to make it.
1:36:49
SM: Another issue that happened around the time you were at San Francisco State was People's Park over in Berkeley.
1:36:55
SG: Yeah, I got in a little trouble for that. I said that it was an unreasonable expectation, they could not take real estate away from somebody because they wanted to it was not going to wash and the establishment was not going to allow it to happen. And it was going to cause bad confrontations. And it got somebody killed!
1:37:14
SM: That is right, the guy on top of the building.
1:37:17
SG: And I did not like I did not like the general way. Bad tactic, bad strategy.
1:37:28
SM: Did the students ever talk about Governor Reagan? Because he was tough on students.
1:37:34
SG: Yep. Well, the thing about, about Ronald Reagan is that when I was a little boy in Santa Fe, about 12-13 years old, if I would go to the movies, walk about two and a half miles into Santa Fe to see my weekend movie, and if I came to the movie house, and it was a Ronald Reagan movie, I would turn around and go home without seeing the movie that weekend. I could not stand him. I still cannot stand him. If he is not doing a part he has no more expression in his face than a potato. He was not a smart man. What Reagan did! Reagan did not do shit except for he was an actor for some.
1:38:23
SM: I know I interviewed Ed Meese down in Washington, his attorney general.
1:38:27
SG: Yeah.
1:38:28
SM: And he had picked Ed Meese to be his top person when he was governor. He did not know him until that point. But Mr. Meese had been involved with the Free Speech Movement as the assistant district attorney of Alameda County. So, he had already been involved with the Free Speech Movement (19)64- (19)65 but under Reagan, he was in charge of coming down hard on students in (19)69 at People's Park.
1:38:55
SG: Yeah.
1:38:57
SM: So, before I get into some specific questions I am just got names before we end this. Are there any other, we have talked about, you talked about People's Park, you talked about Kent State, you talked about drugs. What were some of the other topics that you talked about with the students? What were what was on the boomer’s minds when they came into that class? Just general issues?
1:39:23
SG: Well, I did thumbnail sketches on all the world's major religions. And that was one of the things that we talked about it. I used to say take all the religions and put them on old fashioned IBM cards, and stack all the old religions up like that and some of the holes would go clear through the stack.
1:39:50
SM: Hmm.
1:39:51
SG: That was what we were interested in. What would have gone clear through the stack?
1:39:57
SM: Did you talk about any of the other movements like the Women's Movement or the Gay and Lesbian Movement or the Native American, American Indian Movement they were very big too.
1:40:08
SG: Yeah, I, when they did the Longest Walk from Oakland to Washington DC, plenty gave them an ambulance for the run. And I went on that run. And when I got the DC, I saw that the security guys- those guys who had red threads braided into their braids to identify that they were security was keeping the press away from the old guys.
1:40:36
SM: Hmm.
1:40:37
SG: I was friends with one of these Indian chiefs, Oren Lyons, he's one of the Mohawk traditional chiefs and I went to Oren, because I knew him and I said look Oren, the security guys are keeping the press away from the old people and the old people are prettiest thing you have got. They should not be doing that. They should be facilitating the press to get to the old people. So, they had a meeting with the [inaudible] that night, and he expressed my opinion to the meeting and they agreed. He came back out and it was like that. And he told me that I was the hippie elder.
1:41:14
SM: Hmm. When you look at you ever see had all these experiences of the musicians that were in the Bay Area, whether it be the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. My golly, I remember learning that Boz Skaggs was from there along with the Huey Lewis and the News and Tower of Power, the list goes on and on in the Bay Area. What musicians and artists that you felt were the most important they had the greatest influence on the boomer generation, in your view?
1:41:51
SG: Musicians and artists?
1:41:54
SM: Yeah, what musicians? When you were at San Francisco State did you ever talk about the musicians in your classes?
1:42:03
SG: Oh, I know. I had musicians in my class. And- [laughs]
1:42:10
SM: I mean, did you talk about what was happening in the music scene?
1:42:13
SG: We had quite a hot discussion one night about who was St. Stephen.
1:42:17
SM: Who was who?
1:42:18
SG: St. Stephen.
1:42:20
SM: Okay.
1:42:21
SG: [singing] Was a rose in and out of the garden. He goes country garden wind in the rain, wherever he goes, people are complaining.
1:42:31
SM: And that created discussion for a couple hours?
1:42:35
SG: Yeah! Some people thought it was, some people thought it was not. I had to kind of go easy because I had been over visiting Garcia concerned about Pig Pen he was getting to be a real bad alcoholic. I want to talk to Jerry about it and I did not know it but one of the, one of the guys that wrote the lyrics was in the next room with the door open while I was there talking to Jerry. And we had all this discussion. And that guy is the guy that wrote the lyrics for St. Stephen.
1:43:09
SM: Oh my god.
1:43:10
SG: Stuff out of my mouth from that visit while I was at Jerry's that I recognized.
1:43:14
SM: What was his name?
1:43:16
SG: I think it was Hunter.
1:43:17
SM: Oh, wow.
1:43:17
SG: I think that was the one. I had a couple of them.
1:43:24
SM: So, you knew Jerry Garcia. Who were some of the other personalities in the Bay Area that you got to know?
1:43:31
SG: Well like I said like I said, I knew Big Brother and the Holding Company before they had amplifiers and that I was a family you know, I did not play anything. I was just unabashedly a fan. And I you know; the Airplane came up with Grace. Wow! The Airplane's got a girl! And then Chester brought Janis up from Texas, then Big Brother had a girl. All that stuff is interesting stuff going on at the time and I suppose people there were some people that just put me out there, nirvana. I love rock and roll.
1:44:22
SM: Did you get to meet Janis?
1:44:25
SG: What say?
1:44:26
SM: Did you get to meet Janis Joplin?
1:44:28
SG: Oh, yeah. She did not like me very much.
1:44:31
SM: What was she like?
1:44:32
SG: Well, the hippes were scandalized when one by two turned up and set a bottle of Southern Comfort on top of the piano because we did not drink hard liquor. The hippies were all surprised by that. But you know, her stuff was kind of blues, that is hard on you to sing. And I had to respect to her heavy weightiness in that class. I liked it most it was raising divine.
1:45:12
SM: She died of an overdose of drugs I believe did not she?
1:45:15
SG: Yeah. And not the kind, nothing that I would take either.
1:45:19
SM: What was? What did she die from?
1:45:22
SG: It was not reefer.
1:45:26
SM: Was she drinking and taking medicine at the same time or?
1:45:30
SG: I think I think that she was like, I cannot talk about other people's dope.
1:45:35
SM: Okay. Yeah. And you knew Grace Slick too then? And how about Stevie Nicks? Did you know her?
1:45:43
SG: Who was the second when you said Grace Slick? Grace. Yeah, I did not know Grace, but I admired her greatly.
1:45:51
SM: And Stevie Nicks is the other one that camp out of the came in the area.
1:45:55
SG: Stevie Nicks?
1:45:55
SM: Yup.
1:45:57
SG: No, that is after my time.
1:45:58
SM: Yeah okay. Any other any of the other political people that you get to meet in may be activists like Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis that group?
1:46:13
SG: I went up to Abbie Hoffman's place up on the St. Lawrence Seaway and let my boy Sam drive his boat. I was at Abbie's last gig and it was funny bus but Leary and Abbie and what was his name? One of the Black Panthers.
1:46:30
SM: Bobby Seale.
1:46:32
SG: Bobby Seale and when the guy introduced us, when he introduced Bobby Seale out in the suburbs it would have been a scary thing but now it is just Bobby Seale, but now it is just Bobby Seale's new outdoor cookbook.
1:46:46
SM: Yeah, did not I think Paul was the moderator was not he? Paul Krasner?
1:46:53
SG: No way, not with that one.
1:46:55
SM: I know he moderated one of those programs.
1:46:57
SG: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing about Tim was that he was a technician. And when it was his turn to talk, he leaned up and he put the first syllable right into that microphone and made the room rain. And he had the intention.
1:47:19
SM: Okay, I am going to, I am just going to list some names here that I do this, I finish each interview with this. And then I have a question on the legacy. But these are just personalities or terms from the era when boomers were young. And that is (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s and (19)80s so and you can just get quick responses, these are either personalities or terms or events. First one, first two are just your thoughts on Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda?
1:47:52
SG: Well, there was good leftists and stuff like that. That was fine. I did not mind Jane Fonda that they were not hardcore hippies or anything they were media people who were sympathetic.
1:48:09
SM: John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
1:48:12
SG: I cried when John was killed.
1:48:15
SM: Where were you? Obviously, people remember where they were when that happened. Do you remember the exact moment that you heard it?
1:48:22
SG: Yes, I came down out of my apartment on Castro Street in San Francisco right at the entrance of the tunnel, I came out and everybody was weird. I could not tell what it was but people were weird. I just walked up to somebody says what happened? And he knew I did not have to explain, he said: They killed Kennedy.
1:48:40
SM: Oh, wow.
1:48:43
SG: I could tell, the street was just freezing.
1:48:46
SM: And then the next everybody remembers the next four days around the TV set. Were you around it to?
1:48:52
SG: Somewhat but I did not have television. I had to go to somebody else’s. I did happen to be around a television set when Martin Luther King gave the "I have a" I got to see that. It was very eerie that they shot him the next day.
1:49:08
SM: Yeah, Bobby Kennedy.
1:49:11
SG: I loved Bobby too. He did not have a chance to develop but he would have been a heavy weight with a chance to develop and in those days look how easily it passed by that it was a Muslim that killed him. These days that would cause a fire.
1:49:32
SM: How about Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern?
1:49:36
SG: They were good guys and they tried hard and I appreciate them but I thought they the Clean for Gene was a bad idea.
1:49:49
SM: Hmm.
1:49:49
SG: He did not want the hippies to look like him. He wanted. They believed in him for his philosophy but he was not visibly supported by them. So, they put out the word Clean for Gene.
1:50:02
SM: So that turned a lot of people off towards Senator McCarthy?
1:50:05
SG: I think so.
1:50:07
SM: I wish he knew that because he was advised to do that.
1:50:10
SG: Yeah.
1:50:12
SM: That was not his idea.
1:50:13
SG: Good!
1:50:14
SM: No, because I already interviewed the guy in my book project here, who gave him the idea.
1:50:21
SG: Ahh.
1:50:21
SM: So that that did not come from him originally. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
1:50:31
SG: Well, I was, in the beginning was a gringo enough that Martin Luther King embarrassed me because of his passion. And Malcolm X. You know, I got to like Malcolm X. I liked him pretty well. And it was one of the interesting things about him was when he went to go visit Islam and he came back. Islam is not a racist religion.
1:51:02
SM: Hmm mm.
1:51:03
SG: Of course, he had to do something to get him killed.
1:51:08
SM: Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?
1:51:15
SG: Cheap ass politicians.
1:51:17
SM: How about Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford?
1:51:24
SG: Ronald Reagan. Like I said, I would not go to a movie that weekend. A Ronald Reagan movie. Gerald Ford got a bum rap. He was not as dumb as they made him out to be.
1:51:34
SM: How about Dwight Eisenhower?
1:51:36
SG: Now there is a general and a president, you know? And a guy that had the nerve to say the thing that they get people to say yet: It was clear and present danger to allow undo power of the United States military industrial complex.
1:51:55
SM: You are right.
1:51:56
SG: Best thing a president ever said.
1:52:01
SM: Hubert Humphrey.
1:52:04
SG: Called him Hugh the Jew but I kind of liked him.
1:52:06
SM: How about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin?
1:52:10
SG: Well, I was at a gig with Jerry Rubin and I said something to him and he said: I did not mean you Stephen! People over thirty.
1:52:19
SM: Remember he was on the Phil Donahue show, and he really gave it to Phil Donahue.
1:52:23
SG: I was on the Donahue show.
1:52:29
SM: Who was on Donahue?
1:52:30
SG: Yeah.
1:52:31
SM: You were?
1:52:32
SG: Yeah.
1:52:33
SM: Really? What year was that?
1:52:35
SG: Well, it was kind of a spoof because Donahue was just about to Marlo Thomas and so he was running a bunch of shows, several a day to build up a little honeymoon time for him. And so, I got some kind of a crew, I never got to meet him. He did not come to the farm. He sent a crew down here. The lady from the crew was having an affair with one of the techs and stuff. Then I got to go talk to him and so I never got to - he did not have a clue who I was when we went on the air. And he said how many billionaires had I cashed out!
1:53:12
SM: How many what?
1:53:14
SG: Millionaires had I cashed out into our commune.
1:53:19
SM: Oh my gosh.
1:53:22
SG: This is Marlo fixed him up, she civilized him. But he did that to me and the result of that was we are coming down on Chicago in our Greyhound bus and the semis that are passing us say - hey look at that their bus man, hey, you guys got any wacky tabacky? Another time, though, we were in the Greyhound and a driver coming the other way said, to look at that old Greyhound, pretty as Dolly Parton in a wet t-shirt. [laughs]
1:53:53
SM: What are your thoughts on Chicago Eight because that was a very big trial.
1:53:58
SG: I knew somebody from then that [inaudible] those guys
1:54:03
SM: That was you know, that was both Rubin and Hoffman and Hayden and Huey Newton and Dave Dellinger and Lee Weiner.
1:54:16
SG: Well, I already told you about the guys I knew.
1:54:17
SM: Yeah. That was well, that was a big event in (19)68. What do you think about the women leaders? I have not been talking about them yet, but Gloria Steinem, Betty Freidan, Bella Abzug, the feminists.
1:54:33
SG: I like them fine they have a hard road to hoe and if they get shrill with it and like that but I am very impressed by their courage although I still think that, it was Johnson who called Bella Azberg was not it?
1:54:59
SM: I am not sure.
1:54:59
SG: [laughs]
1:55:03
SM: Yeah, when we talked one of the big issues within the movements itself, the civil rights, the antiwar, gay and lesbian, American Indian Movement, all the movements basically it was the sexism that took place within the movements in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. It is a lot of reasons why the women left the, the antiwar movement and joined, joined well, started the women's movement, the second wave, so to speak. How has when that happened with the movement, you obviously had men and women in the communes. How are women treated in the commune?
1:55:47
SG: Do not do not call it a commune. If you get in the habit of it you will put it on the page if you get in the habit of calling it that.
1:55:53
SM: The Farm.
1:55:54
SG: The Farm, exactly.
1:55:58
SM: I correct myself, sorry.
1:56:04
SG: [laughs] The way it was on the farm is that there was one pick-up on the farm that would start and it belonged to a midwife.
1:56:17
SM: I did not quite hear that. Say that again?
1:56:21
SG: I said that the way the farm was about that stuff, if there is only one pick-up on the farm that ran it would belong to a midwife.
1:56:28
SM: Okay.
1:56:29
SG: Our, we had guys who went to medical school from the farm and came back as doctors. And so, we had midwives and doctors instead of being the other way. It is one of the reasons that our midwives are so uppity. I love uppity women.
1:56:43
SM: Well that is that is a positive thing then. Your thoughts on the Black Panthers themselves the Huey Newton's, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seales, H. Rap Brown.
1:56:53
SG: You know, I understood it and I loved them a lot but I was just sorry that they were so involved with the guns.
1:57:08
SM: Good point. Would you would say the same thing about the Weatherman?
1:57:11
SG: Yeah.
1:57:12
SM: Yeah and the American Indian Movement went that direction too.
1:57:17
SG: Being a combat veteran I had to carry dead and wounded back out of the rice paddies. It gets rid of making guns seem romantic pretty well. What was the last thing you just said there about?
1:57:29
SM: They were the names of the Black Panthers: Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown that you already mentioned.
1:57:37
SG: I met Stokely. I did not meet H. Rap Brown buy my friend got killed starting his car.
1:57:47
SM: He is in jail now. You want to want to talk about American Indians? Yeah, the American Indian Movement was between (19)69 and (19)73 very strong. They took over Alcatraz and then ended up at Wounded Knee where there was violence.
1:58:09
SG: I know the two guys who got busted.
1:58:20
SM: Dennis Banks.
1:58:21
SG: Dennis Banks and what is his name?
1:58:25
SM: The other one.
1:58:26
SG: Russell Means.
1:58:27
SM: Russel Means. Yeah.
1:58:28
SG: I have a funny relationship with Russell Means he knows I got juice. He does not know why. [laughs] I saw him at a thing with him one time and I said 'Hey, Russell, you are really doing good.' And the look he gave back to me said, who the fuck are you to tell me how I am doing?
1:58:48
SM: He has done pretty well. He has been in movies.
1:58:50
SG: Yeah, well, they called Hollywood before he had ever been in the movie.
1:58:53
SM: Right?
1:58:55
SG: But also, we were at a thing and in Taos and we were supposed to hold it down to ten minutes and Russell says well I expect brother Steve will try to hold it down but I do not know if I can or not.
1:59:09
SM: Wow. Well you know, Alcatraz was happening when you were teaching that class. I believe.
1:59:14
SG: Very likely.
1:59:15
SM: Yeah. Because that was (19)69. And it might have been an issue too. Couple more names here, Dr. Benjamin Spock.
1:59:25
SG: Well, he was considered the godfather of the movement and all that and he said one thing that was like, true, but I was kind of sorry he said it. He said that they did not really pay any attention to us and we knocked all the windows out of the Senate [inaudible] building.
1:59:43
SM: He was in the group that levitated the Pentagon.
1:59:47
SG: Yeah and [inaudible] was in that.
1:59:51
SM: And Norman Mailer was there too. He wrote a book on how about the Barrigan brothers Philip and Daniel Barrigan.
1:59:59
SG: Oh, that is what you call a good Christian!
2:00:03
SM: Walter Cronkite.
2:00:05
SG: I love the one right in the middle of the shit totally hitting the fan. The biggest, best circulation magazine cover was Cronkite and at the wheel of his yacht and it was obviously the ship of the day.
2:00:26
SM: Daniel Ellsberg.
2:00:29
SG: Great dude. Great dude.
2:00:33
SM: How about Walt Disney?
2:00:36
SG: You mean?
2:00:38
SM: The man who created the dynasty?
2:00:43
SG: Dynasty?
2:00:44
SM: Disney, Disneyland, Disney Studios.
2:00:49
SG: I kind of like the dope smokers that used to work for him before he started hiring people who smoked dope.
2:00:55
SM: He is more influential than people realize with the TV in the (19)50s.
2:01:02
SG: Yeah. Well I did not have TV in the (19)50s.
2:01:05
SM: You know, it is interesting Howdy Doody is another one because somebody wrote an article that Howdy Doody was the reason why the (19)60s began, can you believe that?
2:01:18
SG: No.
2:01:18
SM: [laughs] Just a few more here, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali.
2:01:24
SG: Well, I feel that the thing about them is like when Joe Lewis went and knocked Max Schmelling down. And it was that is one of the ways that people can get out is athletics because they break out of their cultural shell that way that those guys showed to break things out that way. I have to admit that I had to smile when he was trying to talk about what kind of a boxer he was and he says just look at me. I am pretty. I am pretty!
2:02:07
SM: [laughs] Yeah. How about Robert McNamara and John Dean?
2:02:18
SG: John Dean was the one they called the young man with the dirty hands of the clean mind. And he has still got a good reputation on the tube, he used to talk all the time. McNamara, the guys were just what do you call them? Apparatchik?
2:02:35
SM: Yeah. How about Watergate and Tet?
2:02:40
SG: Tet? The Tet Offensive?
2:02:44
SM: Yeah.
2:02:46
SG: Well, Watergate was good because it got Nixon in deep personal shit. But the Tet Offensive that was just them finishing kicking us out of Vietnam was not it?
2:03:03
SM: Yeah, Tet was in (19)68, which many people believe is why LBJ decided to withdraw. Because even though we beat them back, they, they had the opportunity to attack us all over the countries of Vietnam that is.
2:03:22
SG: Well, Vietnam was when we took over a place that was being held in an evil political grip from the people who was holding, which was the French. And we just took over somebody else's old Colonial got there and we had to pay the bill for life was ours.
2:03:46
SM: How would you define the hippies? in comparing them to the hippie?
2:03:53
SG: Era? Okay, he was International.
2:03:59
SM: They were they were much more political than the hippies though, would not you say?
2:04:03
SG: Yeah, but politics is not bad when you need it.
2:04:07
SM: Right?
2:04:08
SG: The politics if you are comparing politics to inspiration and stuff.
2:04:14
SM: Yeah
2:04:14
SG: You want to give people guns and things, they got to know.
2:04:14
SM: I have three slogans here that that I have asked each person that I have interviewed, that define the boomer generation, and these are the three slogans: Malcolm X: "by any means necessary" which is symbolizing the more violent aspects, the guns, the radicalism. Then you have got the Bobby Kennedy who gave that those words: "Some men sees things as they are and ask why I see things that never were and ask why not." That was kind of the activist mentality and all the movements without violence. And then what I call the more hippie mentality which is the which was on the Peter Max posters that were so popular in college campuses in the early (19)70s which said, and I had one in my room: "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should get together, it'll be beautiful." And the only other quote that somebody said to me was "We shall overcome" which symbolic of the civil rights movement. Do you think those kinds of define the boomers?
2:05:18
SG: No, no, I do not think so.
2:05:35
SM: Do you have some that you feel would define them?
2:05:46
SG: I do not think of them as the boomers. I think that that is a that is a psychological and media kind of a thing. And it does not have a lot of magic to me.
2:06:06
SM: But the term may not but do the- do the way the people that were living at that time, the younger people, does that kind of cover them? Or are there some quotes that maybe are better?
2:06:21
SG: Well, the first one of that bunch of the ones that you gave me, well, I like this
2:06:32
SM: The Malcolm X?
2:06:34
SG: What was this?
2:06:36
SM: By any means necessary.
2:06:37
SG: Oh no, I do not like that one. By any means necessary is a threat. By any means necessary is trying to justify guns. I do not like that.
2:06:51
SM: Bobby Kennedy's is okay. The Bobby Kennedy ones, okay?
2:06:57
SG: Yeah, I like that. I like that.
2:06:58
SM: How about the Peter Max one?
2:07:03
SG: It is okay. But it gets kind of long and involved, it is not what I am picking out as the writer [inaudible]
2:07:13
SM: Are there any words that you think could better define?
2:07:25
SG: People who talk about how the (19)70s was a drag? When the (9)70s was happening, we were building the farm and we some of our great, finest years. It is like that. I, I sort of parted company [inaudible] when I came out on the road and we came here [inaudible]
2:07:56
SM: You know a lot of people do when they compare the (19)60s in the (19)70s they really put the (19)70s way below the (19)60s.
2:08:03
SG: Yeah.
2:08:04
SM: Particularly after (19)73.
2:08:07
SG: Yeah well, we built The Farm at that time. We were very strong. And you know, we had a United Nations grounds pass because we were an NGO united nation. We were powerful political [inaudible] categories and stuff.
2:08:28
SM: A lot of reasons why people attack the (19)70s as they think of disco music and-
2:08:35
SG: Yeah.
2:08:36
SM: And the lack, and the dying of activism. I think that is oftentimes-
2:08:40
SG: Our guys said they might start a band called the Cisco Ducks.
2:08:47
SM: Oh, that would be interesting.
2:08:50
SG: Which is "Disco sucks" Y.
2:08:52
SM: Yeah, I remember that. Ok, a couple more and then we are done. Vietnam veterans against the war. Your thoughts on them?
2:09:01
SG: Well, the Vietnam War was such a hard on the other people thing, that the guys were just used up like that. And I got big compassion for Vietnam vets and [inaudible]
2:09:15
SM: Have you visited the wall in Washington?
2:09:17
SG: No.
2:09:18
SM: Oh, okay. Have you seen it though? on TV or?
2:09:22
SG: Yeah, sure.
2:09:23
SM: Have you talked to any vets? What do you think that wall means to this nation?
2:09:29
SG: Well, it was supposed to make them notice that a lot of young men were sacrificed but I do not. Let us see Kurt Vonnegut has the place where this guy says we are not going to have any airplanes fly over and celebrate the war heroes. What we are going to do is what we ought to do all of the guys who were in power and had anything to do with it, are going to [inaudible] fluid rub mud on themselves and crawl around on the ground and oink like pigs.
2:10:09
SM: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
2:10:15
SG: Clinton was skillful but unreal. And Jimmy Carter was really real it could have been more skillful.
2:10:24
SM: How about George Bush, the first?
2:10:32
SG: Some rich guy that had no business in politics.
2:10:39
SM: How about the Catonsville nine. Are you aware that? That was the Barrigan brothers.
2:10:44
SG: Well, I thought that they were they were good priests, that is what priests are supposed to do, stand up for everybody.
2:10:52
SM: How about My Lai-
2:10:54
SG: Massacre?
2:10:56
SM: Yes.
2:10:58
SG: Well, there is so much illegal violence in the cleanest war that none of its clean and violence as a way to just threatening people and bullying.
2:11:22
SM: And people think that and a couple other instances is the reason why Vets were not treated well when they came home. Not so much by Americans as a whole but by organizations, veterans’ organizations. Angela Davis and Timothy Leary.
2:11:42
SG: Well, I like Angela Davis accept its a dumb thing to carry a pistol into a courtroom. It was a stupid thing to do and it ruined her reputation. And Tim Leary, I always thought of him as Uncle Tim. Because your uncle does not care what you do as much as your dad does.
2:12:02
SM: Right. And we already mentioned The Weathermen. The year 1968. Just the year.
2:12:15
SG: I met the love of my life who I am still with 40 some years later.
2:12:23
SM: John Lennon.
2:12:25
SG: I liked John Lennon. I was in Germany and when I talked it was being translator. And so, I talked about that when he says, "train car with (...?). He translated it and then I turned to my translator and said, you did not say [inaudible]
2:12:48
SM: Still there?
2:12:50
SG: Yeah.
2:12:50
SM: Okay. Yeah, Barry Goldwater and William Buckley.
2:13:01
SG: Goldwater is an honest whatever he is. And Buckley is not. Well, he was kind of a gross old fart but he had a hard row to hoe and he did pretty good.
2:13:34
SM: How about the Little Rock Nine and the Free Speech Movement?
2:13:39
SG: The Free Speech Movement like I said, I answered the phone when they called [inaudible] but I do not know about that nine? Which nine?
2:13:49
SM: The Little Rock Nine were the, they refused entrance to the school, Little Rock, Arkansas.
2:13:58
SG: I guess I missed those guys.
2:13:59
SM: When the Port Huron statement, which was the SDS manifesto, and the Peace Corps.
2:14:07
SG: Peace Corps was a good thing.
2:14:10
SM: When the best history books are written they are often written 50 years minimum after a period takes place. So, the (19)60s some of the best ones should be written in 10 years. But some say that the best books are written once the generation has passed on, which is one day all 74 million boomers will no longer be around. Your thoughts on what do you think historians and sociologists will be writing in saying about this period, and the young people and you know, they still got 20 more years of life, even though the oldest is 63, and the youngest is 47. So, they are, they are still going to do a lot of things yet. But-
2:15:02
SG: A revolution is that thing that those who can do and those who cannot teach. I did not like being in the penitentiary but it did not hurt me a bit as far as my immediate history.
2:15:23
SM: And you were in the penitentiary for selling drugs?
2:15:26
SG: No, I never sold dope. I was in the penitentiary because guys on the Farm were caught growing grass. I did a year.
2:15:34
SM: Okay.
2:15:38
SG: I had the best penitentiary stay outside of Martha Stewart. I mean the warden would come out and get with me in the yard. One time the guy says, well you are vegetarian, I am a vegetarian, what do I do? And basically, they said, go line up with the black Muslim which I not know what they were talking about. I got there. The black Muslim was not in the chow line, he was pre-arranged [inaudible]
2:16:06
SM: Wow.
2:16:07
SG: So, I said, [inaudible] somebody said I should ask you guys about vegetarian food and the guy says someone has been in the [inaudible] And then when they found out who we were and where we were at, I was in the chow line and that same leader that afternoon was behind me in the chow line. And he kind of shouldered me in the back a little bit and [inaudible] white means 'very clean brother'.
2:16:40
SM: I guess, is there any questions that you felt I was going to ask that I did not?
2:16:49
SG: Well, I do not know. The thing is, I do not depend too much on the on the aphorisms and the media, they use aphorisms like they are important but they are not really that important.
2:17:08
SM: So, you do not like that term? Boomer.
2:17:10
SG: No, not really.
2:17:11
SM: Yeah, because you know, the group that followed Boomers are Generation X.
2:17:16
SG: I can hardly hear you.
2:17:18
SM: Okay, can you hear me now?
2:17:20
SG: Better?
2:17:21
SM: Yeah. The group that found is Generation X, and today's young people are Millennials. So, it is something that educators put on and they call the Greatest Generation, the World War II generation and then the Silent Generation, which was only five years. So, it is the way people put labels on and I found by doing this project that most people do not like the labels.
2:17:49
SG: Yeah.
2:17:50
SM: My last question is this. If you do not like the Boomer Generation, what would what would the Vietnam generation? Woodstock generation? The Protest Generation, what? How would you label the generation?
2:18:06
SG: What generation?
2:18:08
SM: The generation born after World War II.
2:18:16
SG: I do not know that is not how I do my nomenclature. I do not sort names is to maybe complicate things.
2:18:29
SM: He just more really and not-
2:18:32
SG: I cannot get you over your phone anymore.
2:18:34
SM: Are you there? Can you hear me?
2:18:37
SG: Barely.
2:18:38
SM: Well, I am done.
2:18:40
SG: Year what?
(End of Interview)
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Description
2 Microcassettes
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Stephen Gaskin
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Gaskin, Stephen ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Authors; Political activists--United States; Hippies; Gaskin, Stephen--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen Gaskin (1935 - 2014) was an American Hippie counterculture icon. He was an author of over a dozen books and a political activist. He went to prison in 1974 for marijuana possession and his voting rights were rescinded. Gaskin was a recipient for the first Right Livelihood Award in 1980 and an inductee in the Counterculture Hall of Fame in 2004.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-05-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.103a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.103b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
138:44
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ac183043a0a70487c674787765aa9449.jpg
652b25f161722e269d870e640a6484af
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9f6fb06c0c1f42e05dd4c4b54fcb4abe.mp3
b81d237ba176d76e899de5186968a79b
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
1997-07-25
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Steve Gunderson, 1951-
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Steve Gunderson is the former President and CEO of the Council on Foundations as well as the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Gunderson is currently President and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gunderson went on to train at the Brown School of Broadcasting in Minneapolis."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":4487,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"10":2,"11":4,"15":"Arial"}">Steve Gunderson is the former President and CEO of the Council on Foundations as well as the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Gunderson is currently President and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gunderson went on to train at the Brown School of Broadcasting in Minneapolis.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
MicroCassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Baby boom generation; Newt Gingrich; Generations; Activism; Civility; Young generation; Individuality; Robert Kennedy's funeral; Bob Dylan."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":13228792}}">Baby boom generation; Newt Gingrich; Generations; Activism; Civility; Young generation; Individuality; Robert Kennedy's funeral; Bob Dylan.</span>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
35:58
Subject LCSH
Legislators—United States; Council on Foundations; Gunderson, Steve, 1951--Interviews
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Steve Gunderson
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Benjamin Mehdi So
Date of interview: 25 July 1997
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
00:02
SM: First question I want to ask you is a lot of the criticisms today, for example, I have heard Newt Gingrich oftentimes say it I have heard George will say it in some of his commentaries, and I have even read about it in some of the historical books that I read, that if we look at today's problems in America, there is sometimes there is a generalization that a lot of the problems go back to the boomer generation, the breakup of the American family, the increase in drugs in America, the lack of respect for authority, even sometimes the-the lack of civility between people will be placed back on the boomer generation by Boomer generation. I mean, those born between (19)46 and (19)64. What are your thoughts on that kind of thinking? That places the blame on our problems today to a generation?
00:50
SG: I think it is partially true. I think there are dynamics that were resolved with the baby boomers coming of age, that have profound long term generational effects, certainly, the lack of trust in institutions, the polarization of American politics, the willingness to question and take on authority and traditions, all of those important dynamics from the New Age and development years of the baby boomers. That, however, does not answer the more significant questions about the ability of American or international institutions to cope with a dramatically changing nature.
01:43
SM: This is where [audio cuts] [inaudible] reached her in many ways and personally reach. It's a follow up question to that. If you look at the year 1997. And as we're heading into the year 1998, if you could look at, again, this generation, which is just reaching 50, we hear the news a lot about Bill Clinton being you know, more than 46 being kind of the lead of the boomer generation. But what would you say are the accomplishments of the boomer generation thus far? If you were to look at this generation, knowing that they are just reaching the age of 50?
02:21
SG: I think there are some dramatic accomplishments. I think telecommunications and scientific breakthroughs during this generation’s history are more significant than any other generation in history of the world. You just look, you know at 100 different examples of that area. Second, I think here at home, this generation has had two profound effects. They have created an environmental sensitivity that did not exist before. And I think they have clearly created a fiscal sensitivity in terms of the federal government's ability to match income and revenues without [inaudible] allocations.
03:15
SM: The top of that question, if you were to list some of the adjectives, some of the qualities that you think are the positive qualities of boomers, and then list three or four, their negative qualities, and trying to evaluate them, based on your lifetime, when you were young, maybe as you changed over the years, and how you feel now, but looking at the qualities that they may have compared to say, the World War II generation and even today's younger generation,
03:43
SG: Ambitious, motivated, driven goal setting which more so than the generation before us and the generation after us. At the creative side, we also made the regeneration, which is more selfish, which is more consumption oriented or sensitive to appreciation of the arts and culture, community. Throughout the liberal arts generation were educated to be.
04:22
SM: How about the area of passion? One of the things it is like, you know, when you look at the boomer generations made up 65-70 million, I am sure the final the exact number, but they will say that 15 percent were really involved in some sort of activism, could have been conservative activism could be liberal, but basically 15 percent. I interviewed Todd Gitlin in New York two days ago, and he said, let us break it down to 1 percent activism because really only 200,000 of the true activists at that time, leading protests against the war, ending the battle, the civil rights and so forth. Your thoughts on that kind of?
04:58
SG: Oh, I think we were much more activist generations at the expense of our personal families and human community lives. You can look at the percent that was involved in the war, but they taught the other elements of our society. You see activism today in many different areas, you see it in the religious and social right, you see it the women's movement, you see it in the gay and lesbian movement, you see it in the black history and culture movement. Almost all of this is driven by baby boomers who are affected and taught what activism meant, as they grew up. Even if they were not active in their active classroom when I was done an act of history in Vietnam. There is no I would not say I have not been an activist. Right.
05:43
SM: Right. And you would not ever have tried to find so closely that activism is like the liberal left.
05:49
SG: No. I think-
05:50
SM: -That sometimes that is what they portray activism is left of center, as opposed to right of center. Knowing your history, a lot of people involved in the Goldwater movement, were-
06:00
SG: More activism on the right today than on the left.
06:05
SM: How do you feel about people who try to place labels on activism and activism, again, which was supposed to be a quality of the boomer generation, and whether they carried it on as they have gotten older, is a negative quality. I say this because this past week, I interviewed Ron Castile, former DEA of Philadelphia, who was a diehard conservative, and now he is a judge. And he says, do not ever put up the term activism on me even though when he was a college student, he was active on some issues. And also, as he has gotten older, he was responsible for putting the Vietnam Memorial together in Philadelphia, you know, he did something but he that label, that term is seems to have a negative connotation, some people.
06:45
SG: Well, in terms of histories, and the truth is he is an activist, the truth is the [inaudible] even Christian coalition are activists. The truth is that there are many different activists and social and political right.
07:04
SM: I go many directions here in all interviews, I have about 40 Questions from then I have about 100 of them, really. And one of them is that I deal with students’ day in and day out, and you met many. And when you visit our campus, it is interesting that when they look at people from our generation, no matter who they are, what they represent, they will tend to place them into two categories. And there does not seem to be anything in between. Number one is I wish I had lived when you live, there were so many issues. I mean, life seemed exciting. They were tough things and the war in Vietnam and civil rights. And then many of the movements came about the gay and lesbian movement, the women's movement, the Native American movement, the environmental movement, I wish I could have lived then when all these things are happening. And then the other attitude is I am sick of hearing it. I am sick of hearing about the nostalgia all up all the boomers are you live as in the past, you remember the memories of this, this movement and that movement? And the- you know, we have our own problems today, we have our own issues. And so, the issues then are no longer applicable. What are your thoughts on that, and how we can best reach today's young people when they have those kinds of, those kinds of attitudes?
08:10
SG: To restore that one generation and the next role as part of it is parent child. Part of it is there is a basic historical and cultural transition that occurs from one generation to the next. And some of that is simply irreconcilable. So, I am not sure that we can reach him there to question in the mode in which we can reach in his own civility, if we can find ways to be more civil in our discourse and in our activism. And I think that is what really turns off the young people is not a passion to identify and solve problems, but it is the lack of civility that which our generation addresses those issues.
08:54
SM: Would you talk a little bit more about the civility and whether boomers who it's like, there seemed to be at that time and in your face, attitude, you're never going to satisfy the demands that many of the activists had, and whether that's been able to be transferred as people have gotten older. Some people will say they even see it in the halls of Congress of which-
9:14
SG: Oh, sure.
9:15
SM: -You were there and-and people just cannot be civil. And it goes back to those times is like pointing fingers and arguing and not listening. And you are the reason why we have all the problems in the world. As you know that kind of-
09:27
SG: The problem for my generation is that passion was identified as confrontation in reverse. There was no such thing as a moderate opponent to the Vietnam War. Alteration became the regiment of passivity rather than a compliment of style. And so, as a result of that we have learned and carried with us unfortunately, with the way we display our passion on any issue today is to be loud, confrontational and too often rude.
10:08
SM: How is that affecting today's young people, I do not want -
10:11
SG: It is a turn off. It is a great American turnoff, because they increasingly look at both the style and the issues by which we take passion to that degree endeavor I can identify, it is why they turn off the government. It's why they turn on to volunteerism during your generation did not want to debate issues.
10:41
SM: This leads into another area and that is at 50, which is the oldest the front of the door movement, realizing these potential negative qualities that you have raised about the boomers. can things be turned around in terms of can boomers ever change who they are, as they get older, in order for us to be life is supposed to be constantly changing? We teach students day in and day out that you are constantly evolving and developing.
11:06
SG: Oh, yeah.
11:07
SM: So, it can, for example, what happened in congress this past week with someone who Gingrich's closest people kind of stabbing him in the back it was, was amazing scenario.
11:16
SG: But-but the truth is that that is a classic example of where people are motivated simply by politics, rather than by policy. And but he goes in by passion, you are going to have those kinds of dynamics. It is also why the general public, not just the generation expert, the general public, totally tunes out to what is going on Capitol Hill. They were not only increasingly irrelevant, as government's percent of participation in society decreases, but also, when they see the styles of people though they do not want to be relevant to the water we associate with that. But on the other hand, I think we correct this issue because any generation as it ages mellows out, and also, they just historic that the generation often returns to its roots. And as a result of that, I think you will see the baby boomers, find a new interest in community, and neighborhoods. And, frankly, volunteering the day-to-day problems of their fellow man.
12:28
SM: Activism back in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, was basically define defined into two major categories. Of course, it was the Civil Rights Movement, and it was the war against Vietnam. And of course, then a lot of the other movements evolved from the Civil Rights Movement, the movements that we talked about earlier. Today, there is a lot of different kinds of activism. There's activism on the internet, there is, there is all kinds of different things and that, but it's not geared toward one major happening like the war. Could you comment on two things? Number one, how important were the college students in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, in terms of ending the war in Vietnam? This seems to be a controversy with the people I have interviewed that some say they had no influence at all, others say they had a lot of influences. How important were the students on college campus in the war, and how-
13:22
SG: They were very important because they not only affected change themselves, they affected a nation's perception. The reason that others weighed in against the world was because their consciousness had been raised by college kids.
13:36
SM: That was the point blank asked you, what is the number one reason why the war ended? In Vietnam? What would that one reason be?
13:46
SG: American exhaustion, fighting at home, we were tired of fighting over there. We were tired of being in a war that was recently difficult to determine who was right who was wrong and was winning was losing. And we in essence, decided just plain to come home.
14:04
SM: Looking at the Civil Rights Movement, how important were the boomers in that movement, knowing that in the summer of (19)64, which is really Freedom Summer when the oldest Boomer would have been 18 years old in the summer of (19)64. And a lot of great civil rights efforts has been the late (19)50s through that time period of (19)64. How important were the young people of that era in terms of assisting carrying on the message of the Civil Rights Movement?
14:36
SG: I think in many ways they were the people's army rallying to their leaders call whether it be Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, whoever it was we were in many ways the troops, but you were certainly not the leaders.
14:57
SM: As you have gotten older and you know, the war ended, and certainly the-the draft was no longer a problem. So many people thought that, well, since that ended, there is really no more cause anymore. And that was what it was all about. But when you when you look at people of your age group now who are close to 50 have been carried on the idealism of that time have, they carried on in their lives now some people have, but your thoughts on that.
15:25
SG: We are a much more driven and materialistic generation; we are an idealistic generation. That has probably been a great transition for the ideals of our young adulthood. To the deals of our business, and professional experiences.
15:47
SM: That caught me the other end. [chuckles] To me, money is real secondary. I thought, when I was young, and the people I was around, we were going to go into the service professions and serve others. Money was secondary, any, any the friends that are going to go to law school, and they were going to go right back to the university, some went on to be very successful corporate lawyers, but so you do not think the majority of the people really carried that the money was secondary as-
16:13
SG: Well. I mean, I think you have seen that in the increasing apathy of the American people. You have elections for less than a half vote, and you look at who those people are. People that are not voting are the young and baby boomer generations.
16:31
SM: Even statistics are astonishing about how many of the college aged students voted, I just cannot believe we have almost begged students to vote, or we have a voter registration drive, we get about three or 400 registered, but it is not easy. What is in it for me, you know, that kind of an attitude. That is another thing, that quality, that an activist is never supposed to say what is in it for me, an activist is supposed to say I want to serve others, or something for the betterment of society. And you think that most of the mountain a great majority of boomers have taken that quality of what is in it for me mentality, which is the total alien nature of what an activist truly is?
17:10
SG: Well, I think we are a selfish generation, motivated by money and our own economic standing. But I will also say that we have also witnessed the selfishness of our parents’ generation, its- their demands on the government. And so, while we are selfish, we are not selfishly demanding of government to take care of us, we are rather preoccupied on a personal basis to deal with our own economics.
17:42
SM: Did you change your thoughts on this generation over the years, say, when you were in college, and then 10 years out of college 15, 20. Now or 25, or whatever, have you been pretty consistent in your attitudes toward your generation? Or was there a point in your life you saw an awakening and your point of view just totally changed?
18:07
SG: I am using doubt in my opinion of our generation has changed, that we use as a classic example. Through this line by Robert Kennedy used in graduation speeches in colleges and high schools across the country at that time, which was some people see things as they are and ask why I dream things that never were and ask why not? You have not heard that use the last 20 years. You have not heard it used because there are no dreams anymore. People, there are no ideals anymore. People have been much more consumed by their own personal day to day than the greater good. That was driven by Kennedy statements. I mean, I remember as a college student the day Kennedy, the day Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's funeral, going home from college, and listening to that funeral all the way home in the radio. It was not just me it was everybody in the car. I got the record of Robert Kennedy's funeral. There is no way my generation would listen to or buy a record of a US senator’s funeral today.
19:25
SM: You are right.
19:28
SG: Dramatic change.
19:30
SM: In your- Why-why did this happen?
19:38
SG: Um, I think it is a combination. On the one hand, it is a growing disaffection with government and the government's ability to make change. I think second it is a simple reality that most as they moved into adulthood, and family life, became the responsible providers of the family as opposed to the social activists that they have been in their youth. So, I think it is a combination too. Third, I am going to go so far as to say, it is also a lack in the last 20 years of inspirational leaders.
20:17
SM: There is a real good point because I even hear that among African American students in terms of trying to who are the leaders within the African American community. And of course, Jesse Jackson is the one name that always comes forward. But he is older, he is like 55 years old, so-so they see him a sense and another-another going back a rappers with Chuck D people that are on the radio and they were really Sister Souljah people like that is what they are identifying to. They are not leaders, their personalities in the media or in the music world, or something like that. I find that amazing that boomers are inspired by the Bob Dylan's of the world, and you know, the music of the year. But like you say, you also admire the political leaders, you do not see a whole lot of that. Very good observation. Wha- one term that is often used when I was young, and I do not know if you heard it around your peers, but that we are the most unique generation in American history that we are going to be the change agents for the betterment of society. And we thought that when we go into a rally, or we are in an auditorium listening to a speaker of that period on a college campus, and whether that attitude was an arrogance on the part of the young at that time thinking that it was going to carry on, that seems to be a term that I heard all the time, I want to know if you heard that when you were young-
21:34
SG: Sure.
21:35
SM: -That we are unique, and that no other generation before us, and certainly none that will follow will ever be like us. And this goes beyond just the numbers game, which is-
21:43
SG: Well, I think I think certainly, we all grew up believing we were different than anyone before us. I do not know that we would go so far as to see what would include generations after us.
21:55
SM: Another quality of youth then more than anything that you need that [inaudible].
22:01
SG: Well, yeah, because part of what we were doing is we were we were rejecting the status quo of American society. And we knew that we were going to be dramatically changing the status quo. But we were not so naive as to suggest that would not also be done by future generations against us.
22:22
SM: Just a straight point question. We are the biggest generation ever. There may never be another one that vigorousness again, believe I wrote an article last week, so we had 76 million I never knew we had that many in the boomer generation. But what is the most significant? Again, it might be a repetition of an earlier question but what made the generation different beyond their size?
22:50
SG: Their view of the world, their view of the United States, first generation that did not want America to be the superpower.
23:02
SM: Melodramatic flaws here. [chuckles] Good observation.
23:11
SG: Just so you know. I am happy to call you next week and finish. I am real sensitive to time here. I have promised somebody at University of Alabama we would be back to them by 230. And I can miss that for a little bit.
23:26
SM: Are you okay through 2:30?
23:28
SG: No, I have got a draft a letter to get to them. That is what I my concern is, can we go 15 minutes, to 2:20. Cut it off.
23:34
SM: And yet, you want me to come back? Like-
23:38
SG: She thought this was going to be half an hour so.
23:42
SM: Oh, she did.
23:43
SG: Yeah.
23:43
SM: Oh. 1 to 2:30. That was a little late too.
23:46
SG: Hour and a half today. I mean, I am happy to call you, if that works. To save you a trip or if you're back in town. I am happy to fish it up. My problem is [audio cuts]
23:55
SM: Okay, right. I do want to take a picture.
23:59
SG: I apologize for that. But this is unpredicted.
24:03
SM: Do you feel the boomer generation is having problems with healing and I raised this because of the fact that the Vietnam memorial was built with the hope that it would heal the generation, it would heal the nation, it would heal the veterans? Where do you feel we stand right now in the area of healing in this nation and knowing that the divisions in that era were so, so wide? Because people were for and against the war, people got involved with Civil Rights Movements. They thought civil disobedience was a precursor to riots, just your thought about the healing processes in America since that time.
24:39
SG: I do not know that Americans know the importance or value of healing anymore. I do not think it is a goal. I do not think reconciliation is a goal. I do not think mutual respect is a goal. I think all of this is a result of the increasing polarization of a nation of society in the increasing cynicism about our institutions, and the combination of the two, produce an attitude which says everybody else claims to be the victim. So, I must be the victim too. You know we’re each a different victim. You're that academic victim, you are that wasp, male, Father, victim of middle America, I am that gay victim, patties that woman's victim, somebody's the black victim, everybody's a victim.
25:38
SM: How would you define the generation gap from that era between the boomer generation of their parents and today's boomers and their children, you are to define the two generation gaps.
25:51
SG: I think our generation better understand the role and temporary importance of generation gaps. And so, I do not think the gap is as great between us and the next generation as it was between our parents’ generation and us, because for parents’ generation had a much more difficult time understanding the dramatically different visions. Because we had a generation gap with our parents that were better at minimizing the generation gap between us in the next generation.
26:31
SM: What will be the lasting legacy of the boomer generation when the best history books are written and say 50 years from now, your thoughts on what they will be saying, many of us will be long gone. How do you think historians will look at this period? And by this period, I mean, when we were young, the (19)60s early (19)70s impact on America. And as they some of the things you referred to earlier, the qualities they took over.
26:55
SG: It is the generation that broke down all the barriers in the world, and broke down the political boundaries, and said that, frankly, they do not matter. We broke down cultural boundaries, we broke down the communications boundaries. In many ways, we break it down into the language, and the economic boundaries, certainly through trade. This generation more than any other generation has made the world a smaller place and increasingly interdependent.
27:25
SM: When I took students to meet Senator Muskie before he died by two years before he died. And we put a question about the impact of 1968 on America. And the divisions were many of the boomers had an equality at least, which is still a lack of respect for authority even as they have gone into adulthood, people like that, who they report to, and so forth. It was getting into the issue of healing again, and he basically said that we have not healed since the Civil War. And he talked about two different Americans before and after the Civil War. The question I am getting at is this. Do you feel this generation boomers because of the divisions of those times have a real serious healing comparable to the Civil War where there were such divisions in America and they went to their grave of bitterness toward the other side? You think this is an issue with many boomers that there is this feeling within their suffering, something missing because they never forgave a lot of Vietnam veterans maybe never forgave the protestors. Protestors feel guilty that they did not serve, but there is-
28:23
SG: No one can minimize the impact of Vietnam on our generation or society. I would not attempt to do that. I do, however, think that there is a big difference. And I would disagree with Senator Muskie.
28:39
SM: Keeping time to-
28:42
SG: I appreciate it. I think that to be honest, technology did not allow the kind of national consciousness that occurred in this country until before World War II. Before that people really did not care what happened day to day in the world or even in Washington, because then find out about it for days to come. They were much more consumed by their own community. And we are the first generation that the majority of kids growing up will not be employed in their home community. When I talked to young people now, I said, the majority of your class probably will not be employed in the US. I mean, there is a dramatic change of that local consciousness there. So, I would disagree a little bit with Senator Muskies’ basis.
29:31
SM: Three important quality and that is the issue of trust in America. I want to know if you feel one of the qualities of the boomer generation that they will be carried to their graves is the quality or lack of trust. They have in their leaders and refer to it earlier, kind of created a consensus cynicism as America. And just your overall thoughts on the cynical leadership that has happened throughout the lives of boomers. And will they be able to overcome that as well?
30:01
SG: No. Because the only way they could overcome that is if Social Security and Medicare would be without any challenges in their retirement years so that they would be able to live totally economic security and comfort. And they are not going to be able to do that. Also, what you are going to have is you are going to have an increasing two class society, not only among the young and the working, but also among the elderly. You are going to have those elderly who had the ability to either put things away or have great inherent inheritances, and you are going to have the majority who did not, and they are going to be bitter, they're going to say life was unfair to me. Now, my retirement is unfair to me as well.
30:43
SM: In the area of empowerment, which we always try to deal with young people, the sense that your voice counts that when you are working with college students, we need to hear your voice, that empowerment is something we try to develop in people so that as they go online, they are heard their voice counts. Your thoughts on the concept that many boomers felt of sense of empowerment, when they, you know, gets the major issues of the day, the war, civil rights and the movements we talked about. Whether they carry that sense of empowerment into their lives. And whether you feel today's young people have a sense of empowerment, that they are really being listened [audio cuts]. model that we try to work with college students about is developing self-esteem that in [inaudible] trying to work on that. So, your, just your thoughts on that concept of empowerment that so many of the boomers had, and where that may have gone.
31:42
SG: I do not think in the area of high technology and individualism, that you can create group empowerment. And certainly, you cannot create the feeling of generational power. Very difficult for a person growing up with a personal computer, somehow understand how they and everybody else their age are going to make a cumulative difference.
32:04
SM: Does that apply to boomers themselves as they hit 50? Certainly, you as a congressperson felt empowered.
32:11
SG: I think, I think we as a generation, were empowered by our impact on Vietnam. We were empowered by our ability to impact the environmental policies in this country. We were powered by our numbers. So, there were there were signs that gave us reason to be empowered. I do not know if those signs continue, however, as we become almost disseminated into increasingly polarized society. I do not think the- a bond which unites us today is not the bond of our generation.
32:55
SM: When you look back at your life? What was the first one experience, one happening that had the greatest impact on your life? What was that one happening?
33:06
SG: [inaudible] the two. I would have to say, John Kennedy's assassination as a teenager, when they close the school down, and everyone was glued to the TV for four days, or we had a National Day of Mourning as a big impact on a young person. The second was landing on the moon. Vividly, we landed on the moon, watch that on TV. And that was the victory of science and high technology, which-which told our generation that we were a part of something far different than the nation in the world's history.
33:52
SM: What did those two experiences, how do they affect you as you moved on until right now, when you when you saw that assassination of John Kennedy, what did that do to you? And then as you grew up, I am going to do something to make the world better, what-what was the date, did those two experiences really-
34:12
SG: Well, they are, they are, significant for very different reasons. Kennedy's assassination in the events which follow led to a distrust or lack of reliance on the government to my generation. It- everybody produces Vietnam as the beginning of the cynicism. I think they minimize the impact of Kennedy's assassination, the underlying foundation for that cynicism and government. On the other hand, the landing on the moon talks all about technology. And it is, it is so dramatically different from this small town I visited or visited I grew up in, where people did not leave their counties say nothing of leaving their globes. Where you communicated through the operator at the local telephone station not through technology thousands, hundreds of thousands of miles away. I mean, like, what a disconnect. And then we sat and watched TV, which took us from that generation of a past where we were sitting in our living rooms with our parents, to the generation of the future we saw it on television that day. That was the bridge between here and here.
35:44
SM: I got many more questions. I think-think we will cut off here and what I will do is, I will either come back to Washington because I am making three or four more trips down here this summer or call you on the phone at times convenient because the rest of the [audio cuts].
(End of Interview)
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Description
1 Microcassette
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Steve Gunderson
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Gunderson, Steve, 1951- ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Legislators—United States; Council on Foundations; Gunderson, Steve, 1951--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Steve Gunderson is the former President and CEO of the Council on Foundations as well as the former Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Gunderson is currently President and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gunderson went on to train at the Brown School of Broadcasting in Minneapolis.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1997-07-25
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.58
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-03-14
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
35:58
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/40f31bf002884775d26855b70ef32fb6.jpg
a3f7d9d2212eb2508bdb01c39ee2eb97
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b414833457a6c72673270c6c041f5510.mp3
2080ed5ad83ffb3421638e98e06ce630
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js)
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-04-23
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Steven R. Shapiro
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Steven R. Shapiro is an attorney and educator. He is the former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's oldest and largest civil liberties organization. Shapiro also taught taught at Stanford Law School, and the NYU School of Law and he is currently a lecturer in Law at Columbia University. He has a Bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a Law degree from Harvard University."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15107,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,16317180],"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial","16":10}">Steven R. Shapiro is an attorney and educator. He is the former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's oldest and largest civil liberties organization. Shapiro also taught at Stanford Law School, and the NYU School of Law and he is currently a lecturer in Law at Columbia University. He has a Bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a Law degree from Harvard University.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 Microcassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
92:27
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Activism; War draft; NAACP; Civil Rights Movement; Brown v. Education; segregation; Baby boom generation; Assassination of John. F Kennedy; Earth Day; Gaylord Nelson; Lawyers; The financial crisis."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Activism; War draft; NAACP; Civil Rights Movement; Brown v. Education; segregation; Baby boom generation; Assassination of John. F Kennedy; Earth Day; Gaylord Nelson; Lawyers; The financial crisis.</span>
Subject LCSH
Lawyers; Lecturers; American Civil Liberties Union; Shapiro, Steven R.--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Steve Shapiro
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Shapiro, Steven R. ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Lawyers; Lecturers; American Civil Liberties Union; Shapiro, Steven R.--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Steven R. Shapiro is an attorney and educator. He is the former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's oldest and largest civil liberties organization. Shapiro also taught at Stanford Law School, and the NYU School of Law and he is currently a lecturer in Law at Columbia University. He has a Bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a Law degree from Harvard University.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-04-23
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.113
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
92:27
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b409047bd25e39ebfee668a60d4bd2cc.jpg
15fa0a9bcb8248c08db4ac888fee643a
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c2beb946c436e4810a4bf3d4d3fbda76.mp3
f5adf7042a340e92cd35fcad79d644c6
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-06-17
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Susan Brownmiller
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Susan Brownmiller is a feminist activist and author. During the Feminist Movement, she was a writer at ABC-TV. When she saw how much power women have, she began to write about abortion rights. She has written and published books that highlight the hardships women face and how they came to be. She attended Cornell University and studied Acting in New York City."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":6531,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,5099745],"10":2,"11":4,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial"}">Susan Brownmiller is a feminist activist and author. During the Feminist Movement, she was a writer at ABC-TV. When she saw how much power women have, she began to write about abortion rights. She has written and published books that highlight the hardships women face and how they came to be. She attended Cornell University and studied Acting in New York City.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 Microcassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Voter registration; Black Panthers; Black Power; Gay rights; Environmental movement; Sexual revolution; Hugh Hefner; Women's issues; Abortion; Feminists; Women's studies; Antifeminists; Newt Gingrich; Equal Rights Amendment; Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party; Montgomery Boy Boycott; Tallahassee Bus Boycott; Drug culture"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":14281427}}">Voter registration; Black Panthers; Black Power; Gay rights; Environmental movement; Sexual revolution; Hugh Hefner; Women's issues; Abortion; Feminists; Women's studies; Antifeminists; Newt Gingrich; Equal Rights Amendment; Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party; Montgomery Boy Boycott; Tallahassee Bus Boycott; Drug culture</span>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
94:01
Subject LCSH
Feminists; Authors; Brownmiller, Susan--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Susan Brownmiller
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 17 June 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:02):
Ready? [inaudible] somebody recorded too.
SB (00:00:07):
Here we go. I keep checking this because...
SM (00:00:10):
I know. I know that anxiety very well.
SB (00:00:15):
Yeah. Well, I had experience with Charles. Okay. Second wave feminism.
SM (00:00:23):
I am just checking to see it is on.
SB (00:00:25):
Yeah, it is on.
SM (00:00:27):
Okay.
SB (00:00:28):
It has been pretty good. I interviewed Noam Chomsky this past week.
SM (00:00:31):
Oh.
SB (00:00:34):
I have to... That is going. Second wave feminism. When did it start and how is it different from the first wave? What are the...
SM (00:00:45):
Well, the first wave was the suffragette, the Suffragists.
SB (00:00:48):
Right.
SM (00:00:48):
That was first wave feminism starting in 1848.
SB (00:00:54):
Right.
SM (00:00:54):
Yes. So, second wave feminism started about a hundred years later. Probably a really important kickoff was Friedan's book, "The Feminine Mystique", which came out in (19)63, paperback (19)64. That is when I read it. But there were things happening in the left that were making women angry, quite apart from Betty Friedan's book, which was really directed towards middle class white women. The women in the left, in the civil rights movement had gone south to work for equality. They thought they understood that Blacks and whites were equal, but they also thought that males and females were equal, and to their shock in the southern civil rights movement, they discovered that nobody was thinking that women were equal. This wonderful organization, SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was really set up in the image of the-the young black guy in denim coveralls. On the individual projects in the famous Freedom Summer of 1964, several women discovered that in a sense, they were being pushed to the back of the bus. So the other movement that was happening a few years later was the anti-war movement. There again, the women who went into the anti-war movement discovered that they were relegated to running the mimeograph. That is what we had, the mimeograph machines and getting the coffee for the meetings. If they spoke aloud at a meeting, the guys just like would not hear it. Then a few minutes later, a guy would make the same point, and every would say, "oh, yeah, that is it. That is, it." So they were burning too. These were young SDS women, you know that, Students for a Democratic Society. They were anti-war women. So, there were two groups of women in the (19)60s, the civil rights women and the anti-war women who began to think, what about us? Which was exactly what had happened in 1848. This was closer to 1968, (19)65-6. A hundred years later. In 1848, there were all these movements around abolition, new socialist movements, the year of the Communist Manifesto, things like that, and the women in the abolition movement discovered that they were not equal to men in the abolition movement. There was a very famous, I do write this in "Our Time," my history of the women's movement. So that is why I am being so articulate now. I know it well, and I teach it too. There was a very famous anti-slavery convention in London, and couples of abolitionist, because they were mostly married, went to the World Anti-Slavery Conference from America. When they got there, the women were told that they did not have voting rights and that they would sit in the balcony. That is when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and I think it was.
SB (00:05:19):
[inaudible] home.
SM (00:05:22):
[inaudible] They were in such a state, and they were determined to start a women's rights movement, and they did in Seneca Falls, 1948. So women's movements happen infrequently in history, and they always seem to tag along in a period of great militance in the country. People are organizing for these rights, those rights, and suddenly the women who are active in all those movements say, "whoa, what about us? What about us?" Then a women's movement starts. So that is really how it happened in the late (19)60s.
SB (00:06:00):
That is why Frederick Douglass was so ahead of his time, was not he?
SM (00:06:03):
Yes.
SB (00:06:04):
Because he was sensitive to both issues.
SM (00:06:06):
He sure was.
SB (00:06:07):
I can remember taking my dad before he passed away a couple years ago to Seneca Falls and going through the tour there, the room where the sofa was located, and the fact that Frederick Douglass had come there and spent some time with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
SM (00:06:21):
Yes.
SB (00:06:23):
When you think of the times and how they traveled, that had been so difficult. But he was really ahead of his time.
SM (00:06:27):
He was definitely ahead of his time.
SB (00:06:30):
Sure. This is going. Okay, great.
SM (00:06:33):
Yeah.
SB (00:06:36):
I am going to read these to make sure that I get these too. Before you were an activist, something that I read that you went to Hebrew school and that had a very important effect on you. I will mention what it was.
SM (00:06:48):
Tell me what it was.
SB (00:06:50):
Then you were an actress for a short time.
SM (00:06:52):
I do not think it was Hebrew school that had a great effect on me.
SB (00:06:57):
You were a writer. You had been a writer in many years, and you were a student at Cornell?
SM (00:06:59):
Yeah.
SB (00:07:00):
How did a combination, this is before...
SM (00:07:02):
What was the Hebrew thing? Indeed, I went to Hebrew school.
SB (00:07:05):
The Hebrew School said that it was in...
SM (00:07:07):
East Midwood Jewish Center.
SB (00:07:09):
Yes, I think it was, and I have it here. I could show you what the...
SM (00:07:13):
What was it?
SB (00:07:14):
It said that because of the experience of the Holocaust and what had happened to many...
SM (00:07:19):
Oh, I became very Zionist. Is that it?
SB (00:07:21):
Yeah, that, but you became... Man's inhumanity to a man and that kind of thing, the treatment of people. So, you saw, well, how women were treated, and you said, well, when I was younger, I saw how Jewish people were treated.
SM (00:07:38):
I got... That must be from the Jewish archives or something, because that is an exaggeration.
SB (00:07:44):
In fact, I might even find it here.
SM (00:07:46):
Yeah, please do find the source for that. Because I do not recall the going to the East Midwood Jewish Center had much effect on my development as a feminist.
SB (00:07:57):
I will find it here.
SM (00:08:01):
Do not worry about it. I do not think it is true. I mean, I was a rebel. In 1948, Wallace and Taylor ran. I was 13. Roosevelt had just died. Wallace and Taylor were running on a third party ticket for president. At that age, I kind of knew I was for Wallace. I mean...
SB (00:08:26):
He was much more liberal.
SM (00:08:28):
Yes. So that became my political awakening.
SB (00:08:33):
Were there any, in all these experiences, I have a question later on, but I might bring it up now, because in all the years that you worked, now this...
SM (00:08:43):
I am still working.
SB (00:08:45):
You are still working.
SM (00:08:45):
In all the years I have worked.
SB (00:08:48):
When you were in your early years, when you worked for the Village Voice, ABC.
SM (00:08:53):
Yeah.
SB (00:08:54):
You did NBC TV, ABC TV, and then also Newsweek.
SM (00:08:58):
That was earlier.
SB (00:09:00):
... and national affairs. How were you treated as a female? The question is, I was curious as if those experiences in those earlier years, your work experience, not the experience, you are going down south in the summer of (19)64, but those work experiences as a woman in America in the (19)50s, in the early (19)60s.
SM (00:09:23):
Terrible.
SB (00:09:24):
How were you treated in these jobs?
SM (00:09:25):
I was treated like a second class citizen. See, you asked how the movement started you then you said, but you want to ask the personal questions. Again, I suggest you read "In Our Time" because I do describe how, when I worked at Newsweek in (19)63, (19)64 as a researcher, I wanted to be a writer. I was told women do not write it at Newsweek. Men write at Newsweek. You girls as opposed to do research here for two years and then go off and get married. That is what I was told. It was that job that I quit to go down south and work in Mississippi.
SB (00:10:10):
Right.
SM (00:10:10):
Yeah. I wanted to write, and Newsweek, later the women sued at Newsweek. It was one of the first cases with the EEOC against a corporation. I had gone by then, but a lot of the women [inaudible]. Nora Ephron was working there as a researcher. She left, she made an early and very good getaway, the New York Post, but the ones who remained behind as researchers who did not get married. It was an aging firm of researchers, and they saw that those of us who left had gotten somewhere. They got angrier and angrier, and eventually they hired Eleanor Holmes Norton as their lawyer and sued. Yeah. So at ABC, this was after I came back from Mississippi. At ABC, they had one woman reporter network, and I wanted to be a reporter. They had me...I was a news writer, and they said, "we have our woman." That was it. They had their one woman and they're one blackest. We have one Black. We have one woman. I tried every local TV station in the city. We have our woman.
SB (00:11:37):
Now, what year was that?
SM (00:11:39):
I worked at ABC from (19)65 to (19)68. Yeah. We have our woman, and as they say in my book, they said to me, "you are lucky. You have got a man's job to see you're working at the same job that men can work. What are you complaining about?"
SB (00:12:07):
Was there a quote at any time in your earlier years, what they call a magic moment, where it is like any person, this is the first time I feel I have to stand up and say something and become vulnerable. Because standing up and speaking or writing or saying something in public...
SM (00:12:28):
As a feminist?
SB (00:12:28):
Or...
SM (00:12:31):
As a feminist? No, it was easy for me to talk about it when it came to civil rights. I had no trouble
.
SB (00:12:38):
Do you remember the very first experience that really upset you when you said, and you spoke up, whether it be you could been in high school or the first thing that. This is wrong. This is wrong. Was it going to down freedom summer? Was that it?
SM (00:12:54):
No, I think...
SB (00:12:54):
Your experience in New York City?
SM (00:12:55):
I came from a very good public school and high school in Brooklyn, and I had no trouble expressing myself, but having an opinion is quite different from doing something. When the civil rights movement started, which I date from, I date it from Feb 2, 1960 with the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. But of course, I had already been aware of the Montgomery bus boycotts of (19)55. Oh, did I welcome that movement. Did I welcome it? It was not just Montgomery. It spread in (19)55 to a few other cities, but there was no way I could participate really. But in 1960, when the southern sit-ins started, there were picket lines suddenly in front of every Woolworth in New York, or in front of a lot of Woolworths. So, I joined the picket line on 42nd Street, and I met people in CORE, Congress of Racial Equality.
SB (00:14:08):
James Farmer was the leader of that group at the time.
SM (00:14:13):
They said, come to the CORE office, in New York CORE and work with us. So I did for a year, and then I did other things. But I welcomed this, the civil rights movement. I welcomed my chance to participate, is what I am saying. Yes. Right.
SB (00:14:35):
Yeah. I have here talk about your experience in New York City and the effort to integrate the lunch counters because you...
SM (00:14:41):
Yes. Well, that was it. Somebody, a friend of mine said, "Let us go over to 42nd Street. You will see a picket line. I bet you have never seen a picket line in your life." He was [inaudible] and I had never seen a picket line in my life. There were all these people in front of Woolworth on 42nd Street. I was astonished.
SB (00:14:59):
Were there people that were actually on the other side though, screaming at you, or...
SM (00:15:03):
Not at that moment.
SB (00:15:03):
No. So not that moment.
SM (00:15:05):
Oh. But there were always [inaudible]. They were cra- You know, do anything publicly in New York, you attract crazies. There were people who made their own signs... I remember they would march up and down the outside of the line saying, "Futility. Futility." Then I started my own picket line in front of Old Woolworth near Bloomingdale's. Yeah, it was great.
SB (00:15:35):
When you made that decision to go south, because I have spoken to several people that went in the summer of (19)64. Yes. David Hawk, I do not know if you know David. David was on the core organizers of the Moratorium in 1969, and a couple other people that, of course we know Tom Hayden was in that group, Casey Hayden.
SM (00:15:55):
Yes. She is a Facebook friend now.
SB (00:15:57):
...and a couple people that were either in the first training group or the second training group.
SM (00:16:02):
They were there before Casey. Casey, not Tom, Casey was there before.
SB (00:16:06):
I am interviewing her sometime in July.
SM (00:16:09):
Oh, good for you. Give her my regards.
SB (00:16:10):
She has had some issues, I guess. And she has had to put off interviewing or something.
SM (00:16:14):
Health issues?
SB (00:16:15):
No. Not health issues. Just... First of all, she does not do many interviews.
SM (00:16:20):
She does not.
SB (00:16:23):
Mr. Gor- I think Tom Gorman was a friend of hers, and I interviewed Tom and Casey. Anyways, she has agreed to do an interview in July sometime.
SM (00:16:34):
Great.
SB (00:16:36):
But the question I am really getting at here,
SM (00:16:38):
Well, you should read her contribution to that book of-
SB (00:16:41):
I have.
SM (00:16:41):
Women in the-
SB (00:16:43):
I have. That is the one with the kind of a light brownish cover.
SM (00:16:46):
I do not know. I have it over there.
SB (00:16:46):
Yeah.
SM (00:16:47):
It is like eight women, eight white women in the southern... Yeah, something like that.
SB (00:16:52):
What amazes me, because it was a thousand people in that first wave. I know...
SM (00:16:56):
Yes. But she was there before. She was not among those first wave of students.
SB (00:17:00):
Right.
SM (00:17:00):
She started a few years earlier, she got radicalized at Texas where she met Tom Hayden because he was on some committee of a national whatever. She was a white Texas girl who found her way to that southern movement early.
SB (00:17:19):
As one of the individuals who came from the north to go down south. That had to be for anyone in their, whether you be in their twenties, an experience that could be exciting but then you get down there and then you face the reality of what it's really like. Did you fear for your life?
SM (00:17:39):
Yes.
SB (00:17:40):
Because some people that I have talked to did.
SM (00:17:41):
Of course.
SB (00:17:42):
...and particularly those that followed the first after Chaney...
SM (00:17:46):
Yes.
SB (00:17:46):
...Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered.
SM (00:17:48):
Right. Well, I went down with my friend Jan Goodman, who lives in this apartment building. We were in our twenties. We were in our late twenties actually. By then, we were older than the age of the student volunteer. But hey, a movement was starting, but we had the philosophy that everyone had, which was that this was a cause that was worth giving your life to. Now looking back and looking at those pathetic, crazed suicide bombers, wherever they are. I think that this concept of giving your life to a cause is something that you can think about when you are very young, but when you are older, you are what is important enough to end your life for? So, I remember that Jan and I, we volunteered to go to Meridian and Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney had just been declared missing. At our orientation session, which was not at Oxford, it was later, it was in another city, they said, "We need volunteers in Meridian." And they said, "Meridian is really the safest place in Mississippi," And this happened, but it happened outside Meridian in Neshoba County in Philadelphia. So Jan and I, because we were slightly older than, so nobody wanted to go to Meridian. Meridian was a CORE project, and the other projects were basically SNCC projects. Jan and I volunteered for Meridian. Now this is interesting because I quit, Jan quit her job at the Girl Scouts to go, or took her summer leave from the Girl Scouts. She was working as an organizer for the Girl Scouts. I took my leave from Newsweek. Newsweek was not happy that I was going south. Newsweek had two southern reporters who were certain that I was going to mess things up for them, Karl Fleming and Joe Cumming. We had a Newsweek reunion a few years ago, and Joe and Fleming came over to me. We remember the moment and because he objected a lot. He said, "You are sending a young researcher?" No, it is her summer vacation. She is going. He said, "Well, she is going to get arrested, and she is going to be identified with Newsweek, and I have to work both sides of the aisle here." So Newsweek, in its questionable wisdom, took my name off the masthead for the time that I was in Mississippi. Yes. Peter Goldman, who was the Star National reporter. I was his researcher. Peter Goldman, said, she is going to get herself killed. I mean, he was very hostile. Very hostile. But he was writing all the civil rights stories for [inaudible].
SB (00:21:07):
Yes.
SM (00:21:07):
I am sure he told you.
SB (00:21:08):
Yes.
SM (00:21:09):
I was checking the facts. So yeah, Peter was not wonderful at that moment. Yeah. So anyway, Jan and I are driving. She was the driver. She had rented a car. We're driving into Mississippi, and they had told us at the orientation session, I could see her in Nashville, in Memphis, I do not remember. They had told us, when you crossed the border into Mississippi, roll up the windows of your car, and she rolls up the windows of her car. I remember this so well. I said, Jan, what's the difference between where we were two minutes ago and where we are? Why are you rolling up the windows of your car? We were two white women in a car. But she was nervous. Jan stayed in the movement far longer than I could.
SB (00:22:05):
Now You were there just the summer, or...
SM (00:22:07):
Then I went back and yeah, I came back to Newsweek after my summer vacation. It was very hard to resume a bourgeois life.
SB (00:22:19):
I understand that.
SM (00:22:20):
After being in Mississippi.
SB (00:22:21):
What was a typical day like? I know that people were down there, but what was a typical day like when you are trained and when you go off?
SM (00:22:30):
Yeah. Well, it was easy in Meridian. I mean, because everybody was really scared because of Woodman, Schwerner and Chaney. What we did... We were housed with a black family, Jan and I, the Falconers, F-A-L-C-O-N-E-R-S, Falconers. The wife was Johnny May Falconer. She had a daughter named Sandy, and I forget the son's name, and her husband worked for the railroad. In the month that we lived with them, he could never get to sit at the same table with us for a meal. He still could not get him to sit down with the white women. We would take a bus, a city bus to the COFO office, Congress of Federated Organizations. That was the name of the umbrella group that was mostly SNCC, a little bit of CORE. We were doing voter registration, symbolic voter registration for what turned out to be the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We were canvassing Blacks, asking them if they could vote, would they register to vote? Would they? Then they would fill out the forms, and we would pair off in interracial couples to do this. We would also... There were other activities. It was a freedom school, which I think was probably more fun, but...
SM (00:24:03):
... activities. It was a freedom school, which I think was probably more fun, but we did not do that. Then we got a message one day, James Bevel came to town, and he said that Martin Luther King was swinging through on the speech tour, and Jan and I said, "Oh, we could organize that." I mean, yeah, we have done a lot of that sort of stuff. So we helped to organize the turnout for the Martin Luther King rallies in Meridian. So, then we went back to our lives after, when the summer was over, they said, go back to your life. But Jan and I both felt that our lives were too bourgeois. I mean, how could I return? Newsweek was on Madison and 50th, and it was a block away from Saks Fifth Avenue. So, on my lunch share, I would go to Saks Fifth Avenue and shop. How can I do that after Mississippi? So Jan and I, no, I think she had made an earlier arrangement. She hooked up with the MFDP, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. I think Lawrence Guyot was still around and had asked her. So I went back down and worked in the Jackson office, 1017 Lynn Street. I lived on the Tougaloo Campus in a house that was famous for having Casey Hayden having lived in it before. I had come back, it felt very important to vote for LBJ in November. So when I went back to Mississippi, by then the movement ... I was in Casey's house, and Casey's clothes were there, but she had already gone to New Orleans. She was burned out. Also, the movement was questioning whites, because as I am sure you know, not all the blacks in SNCC had welcomed these white students who were not all white and were not all students. They were ministers. They were all sorts of people. Then of course, when all the publicity that summer was because two white guys and one black guy had gotten killed, there was a lot of resentment over that too, because there had been other murders in Mississippi, civil rights connected, but they had not gotten the attention of Goodman Schwerner and Cheney. So, this anti-white feeling was seething. After that summer, the movement really did lose its direction a bit. People said to me, "Listen, you have to make your own project, do your own thing, because there's nobody here to assign you to anything." So I did a little of that. I actually wrote my first story for the Village Voice from Mississippi. They were holding a cotton board election. It's complicated, but there was such a thing called a cotton board. Of course, it only whites would get on the cotton board, but they established the cotton allotments, how much you could plant, and how much you could not plant. So COFO thought it would be very important to monitor the elections, and also to try to get blacks to run for the cotton board. So, I and a guy got sent to, I think it was Edina, to monitor the cotton board elections. Now, I thought it was extraordinary the COFO was doing this, and I tried to get the New York press in the Jackson office, alerted to the fact that the movement was still alive and well and we were monitoring the cotton of board elections. I could not get anybody interested in it. Sometime how after that summer of (19)64, the press lost interest in the Civil Rights movement, and the Civil Rights movement was losing its steam and getting very self-involved in who are we?
SB (00:28:51):
Was that when Black Power really came about?
SM (00:28:54):
Ah, yeah.
SB (00:28:55):
Because Malcolm X died in (19)65, but he was "all white men are devils." But then he changed his attitude when he went to Mecca.
SM (00:29:04):
Right.
SB (00:29:05):
But he did not live very long.
SM (00:29:06):
No, but that is what was happening. Stokely was beginning to speak up about Black Power. So I tried to get the white press. I tried to get Life interested, others interested. Nobody was interested in the cotton election. So, I said, "God damn, I am going to write a story myself." I always wanted to write. So I wrote it and sent it to the Village Voice, and it was the first thing they ever print of mine. Wow.
SB (00:29:32):
Yeah. Black Power. It is interesting. We had Tommy Smith in our campus, the guy from (19)68 Olympics who put his fist up. We had him at our school a year and a half ago, and he was really upset when people said that he was a Black Panther. "I had nothing to do with being a Black Panther." And he had to correct them all the time. This is Black Power. It is about injustice against African-American. Nothing to do with Black Panthers. But I was on college campuses, and I know the split that was also happening there. The intimidation in the late (19)60s. The Afros and the encounter classes that were happening.
SM (00:30:11):
Yeah.
SB (00:30:14):
I have asked a lot of our guests, when we talk about the era that Boomers have been alive. Now, Boomers were born between (19)46 and (19)64.
SM (00:30:21):
Yes. I was quite a bit older.
SB (00:30:24):
Again, the difference between the Boomers from the first 10 years and the second 10 years is a difference in night and day. I have learned that through the interview process. But what was it like being a woman in ... what I am trying to describe about the Boomers themselves, the era that Boomers have lived, the 63 years they have been on this planet, because the oldest Boomers are 63 years old and the youngest are 47. So, I am looking at that period of time since right after the war ended. What was it like being a female in the late (19)40s and the (19)50s, and then in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, the (19)80s, the (19)90s, and the 2010s? I break it down by decades. I know it might even be different to some of the people, but what was it like in-
SM (00:31:16):
It was stifling in the (19)50s. You could not be anything. In the (19)60s at first did not change for women. But there were other forms of activism available that I and a lot of other women joined. Civil Rights, Anti-War. But it was not until the start of the women's movement that I found a movement that was directly concerned with me. Never thought it would happen.
SB (00:31:53):
And that is really the (19)70s then, really.
SM (00:31:55):
Well, (19)69.
SB (00:31:59):
(19)69, (19)70 and the (19)70s are when a lot of the movements really came in.
SM (00:32:03):
[inaudible] That was the women's decade.
SB (00:32:08):
And the (19)80s. What happened in the (19)80s besides Ronald Reagan being one?
SM (00:32:12):
Well, I wish you had read "In Our Time," because I talked about that too, that in the (19)80s, women continued to make strides in terms of employment, things like that. But suddenly you needed two incomes in a family to survive under the Reagan Era. Things had been cheap before then, things were cheap in New York. You could get a cheap apartment and have a part-time job and still have time for your political activism. But that disappeared in the Reagan Era. That was, I think, one of the primary reasons why activism fell off in the (19)80s. It was it the pressure to earn a living with the rising rents and double-digit inflation. It became very difficult.
SB (00:33:09):
Before we go in the (19)90s, the (19)70s was the heyday of the second wave of the women's movement. And obviously that was also the environmental movement because of Earth Day. You might even say because of Stonewall, that was the gay and lesbian-
SM (00:33:24):
Oh, absolutely. All happening.
SB (00:33:26):
Certainly, even the Native American movement, that was (19)69 to (19)73. But why is it that that decade, and I just interviewed Dr. Schulman up in Boston, who just wrote a book on the (19)70s. There is something that happens. People seem to remember the first half of the (19)70s, but they do not remember the second half and I said, "Is it because of disco?" So, what happened as how some people look at the (19)60s as the decade.
SM (00:34:00):
That is right.
SB (00:34:01):
And they kind of knock the (19)70s knowing that when you define the (19)60s, that goes up to (19)73 in most cases, because even people say the (19)60s was from (19)63 to (19)73 or something like that. So, what I am saying-
SM (00:34:15):
Well, I know I have heard that, but I date it a little differently. Hold on. Let get a cough drop.
SB (00:34:19):
Yep.
SM (00:34:25):
People have tried to write the women's movement out of history, that is one thing. I have read accounts of the (19)70s, Rolling Stone asked me to contribute to an account of the (19)70s. And I said, "Well, for your purposes, we got Roe v. Wade."
SB (00:34:51):
I got that later on.
SM (00:34:52):
The editor said, "What? That happened in the (19)70s." I said, "Yes, women won abortion rights in the 1970s." "No kidding." There have been many intellectuals who have tried to bury the women's movement. Tom Wolf, most famously, he is referring to it as "The Me Generation." Todd Gitlin famously refers to as the "Identity generation" me, my identity. He does not consider the issues that emerged to be on the level of his great involvement.
SB (00:35:41):
I interviewed him too.
SM (00:35:41):
Yeah. Well, incredibly important movements arose in the (19)70s. At this point, I would say that the gay rights movement is stronger than the women's movement. The environmental movement has certainly gotten a push from the Gulf spill.
SB (00:36:09):
Oh, yes.
SM (00:36:13):
But by the end of the decade, before the election of Ronald Reagan, there were many of us who felt that somehow we were running out of steam in the women's movement, and the great divisions had arose among us. I was part of a group that formed Women Against Pornography in (19)78, and that became a very divisive issue in the movement. Earlier than that some people, like Phyllis Schlafly, had decided to take a very strong stand on surrogacy. She argued, and I guess would still argue, that a woman who offers her body as a surrogate has a right to change her mind. And others of us thought, well, well, a contract's a contract. If you have volunteered your womb, and perhaps your egg to incubate a baby for somebody else, well, you signed a contract. What is this, a woman has the right to change her mind all of a sudden. So, I was surprised when Phyllis Schlafly turned surrogacy into a woman's right thing. And a lot of people were surprised when I turned anti-pornography into a feminist thing, not I alone. I mean, Schlafly alone seemed to be spearheading the surrogate thing in the case of Mary Beth Whitehead. But pornography split the movement a bit or earlier than that, prostitution split the movement a bit because some leftists in our movement, they named it sex work. They named prostitution sex work and said it was as honorable as any other kind of work, and that all work is basically exploited anyway. I said, "Excuse me, what I do is not exploited as a writer. I do not get exploited except maybe by my publisher." I never have royalty statements. But I thought that the effort to redefine prostitution as sex work was really bad and they keep it up, because this is an international dispute now. Those of us who considered ourselves the ones with the real feminist analysis said, "No one should be allowed to buy a woman's body the way no one should be allowed to buy any person's body. I mean, we eliminated slavery. We have to eliminate prostitution." But that battle still goes on.
SB (00:39:25):
Now, when you look at certainly the (19)50s and the (19)60s, you got to think of Hugh Hefner. I have not brought him up very much.
SM (00:39:34):
An enemy.
SB (00:39:35):
Okay, but I have not brought him up hardly in any of the interviews. Well, you are talking about the sexual revolution. You bring up Hugh Hefner, and some people say that his work was more art, but when you compare a Larry Flint that is more pornography. So, they're in the same boat, but Hugh Hefner was the front runner of all this.
SM (00:40:00):
Well, he has a whole team of publicists who are still promoting his role as a great sexual liberator.
SB (00:40:13):
His kids are going to take over, too. His sons who are like 20, 18, when they do. I had a question here on the organizing of the Women Against Pornography. How effective had that been?
SM (00:40:37):
We lost.
SB (00:40:39):
Obviously, they even had a TV show recently on CNN going into that, in-depth on the business and so forth. So that is-
SM (00:40:52):
The industry, it was a very funny thing at the time, even.
SB (00:40:58):
Make sure this is still going. Yep, we are doing fine.
SM (00:41:07):
We had a slideshow on a carousel, and we would invite audiences to see it. Pictures really, atrocious pictures from Hustler, from Penthouse, from Playboy. That was our technology moving the crank on a carousel on a slideshow. Meanwhile, the industry is moving with VCRs. The porn stores are opening all over the place. You can now buy a VCR, take it home in the privacy of your home seat, you do not have to go to a booth in Times Square and masturbate in a booth. You can take it home. So it was hilarious. It was like the technology changes that we were talking about. But we also had a problem, in addition to the fact that the industry was growing by leaps and bounds, and all kinds of people got the idea into their heads, was that, "Ooh, I want to be a Hollywood director, so the first thing I do is make a porn film, make money on that, and then I can direct a real film." I mean, it permeated everybody in the (19)70s. It was disgusting.
SB (00:42:29):
Well, I do remember Hugh Hefner being interviewed, even recently saying, I do not know what it was, he was on television, and he said, "Well, Playboy was very important to change the attitudes in America that bodies are beautiful, that a women's body is art."
SM (00:42:59):
I know his lines, and I have seen the most recent documentary, which unfortunately, I mean, this Canadian woman fooled me, Pat Boone and I represent the opposition. And everyone, including Jesse Jackson and Mike Wallace is saying, "Oh, Hugh Hefner was such a pioneer." It was horrible. I crept out of the screening. I was mortified that she fooled me. She really hood winked me. Anyway, what were we talking about? We were talking about the changes.
SB (00:43:36):
Yeah, we were talking about changes. Yeah, we were talking about changes.
SM (00:43:37):
Well, the other thing that happened in our anti-pornography movement was little did we know that there were ... we saw pornography as something created by men, that men watched and masturbated over it. That is how we saw pornography. And as for gay-on-gay pornography, it did not bother us. Men want to, that is their thing. We were thinking of heterosexual pornography as being a lie about women. It was always showing rapes, gang rapes that women love. But within the women's movement, it turned out we had people and some identify themselves as lesbian feminists, some identify themselves as straight feminists, who said that they found their sexuality in pornography, and that our images that we thought were so horrible about bondage and things like that they enjoyed and that we were censoring their minds. That is a very serious charge.
SB (00:44:47):
You talk about that-
SM (00:44:48):
We did not mean to censor their minds. We did not think those images were very healthy.
SB (00:44:54):
When you wrote "Against Our ..." I am going to get back to the [inaudible], maybe I will finish this question here on the decades. You talk about how about the (19)90s? Where were the women's movement in the (19)90s and 2000s?
SM (00:45:05):
Well, the movement goes on. There are people working in every aspect of it. It was through our movement that we established the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis centers, the laws against sexual harassment. These were women's movement accomplishments of the (19)70s. In the (19)80s, those forms of organizing, having a battered women's shelter, having a rape crisis center, having a hotline, they got taken over by the establishment, as well they should have. They moved into the mainstream of community service. A town with good people funded a battered women's shelter so you did not need feminist activists to be involved in it any more. In fact, they were pushed out because they did not have social work degrees.
SB (00:46:09):
It is interesting, I cannot remember who I interviewed that said, when I brought up the name Gloria Steinem, they said she is the epitome of a person who is now mainstream. She's the most mainstream of all the feminists.
SM (00:46:24):
Well, I do not know. I think she keeps trying to be relevant. She tries very hard. It is her life. It is her life to be a public speaker and to travel to colleges. So, I do not need to criticize her.
SB (00:46:36):
The (19)90s though itself?
SM (00:46:39):
So, getting to the (19)90s.
SB (00:46:43):
Bill Clinton. Stop. Here we go.
SM (00:46:52):
Yep, it is fine. Okay. It is on?
SB (00:46:54):
Yep, it is on.
SM (00:46:55):
I can say from personal experience, because in the (19)90s I was writing my book called "In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution," I would say that my editor, who had signed it earlier in the decade with great hopes and a big advance, was telling me several years later that the salesmen were reporting to her that no one was interested in a history of the feminist movement, and that there was no chance for this book in the public marketplace. So, something happened out there, in the culture at large, where even though individual women were making strides in their individual lives, the movement was dead as an issue that engaged the public.
SB (00:47:55):
See, that was the same criticism that when people praised the (19)60s, they criticized the (19)70s because ...
SB (00:48:03):
When people praised the (19)60s, they criticized the (19)70s because what happened to all those movements? What happened to all of them?
SM (00:48:08):
They were there.
SB (00:48:09):
They were there in the (19)70s.
SM (00:48:10):
They were not their movements. The civil rights movement split off into black power, which I think was very destructive.
SB (00:48:17):
Right.
SM (00:48:18):
Right?
SB (00:48:18):
Mm-hmm.
SM (00:48:22):
The anti-war people, what happened to them? Most of them went into academia and became professors, which a lot of them did. A lot of them quickly jumped into academia.
SB (00:48:37):
And I know the gay and lesbian movement was in its heyday in the (19)70s,
SM (00:48:40):
Yes, and it was a fantastic improvement in civilization, but some people were so angry at it because they were not gay.
SB (00:48:49):
And then AIDS hit in the (19)80s.
SM (00:48:50):
And then it became a really serious movement, and that is when I saw a split off in the women's movement where the lesbian feminist in our movement discovered they identified more with gay men than they did with heterosexual women. It was profound to see that happen at the time of AIDS. It was such a crisis that lesbians felt, Hey, I have been working in this women's movement and we are always talking about abortion rights, and now suddenly a movement closer to my own identity is talking about we need a vaccine, we need something, we have got to stop this epidemic. And they move, they move right over.
SB (00:49:35):
What is interesting too is that when you see, and I have seen it in the universities over the years, is that the split between the African American community and the gay community, even though they are united in many respects, only through crises do groups like this seem to come together. We had a student who now works in Washington who had the gay and lesbian office right across from the BSU office. He said, I was afraid of even walking in there for fear of what someone might say.
SM (00:50:07):
Yeah.
SB (00:50:07):
And the fact that many in the African American community have been raised in the church that this is wrong by their ministers.
SM (00:50:13):
Yeah.
SB (00:50:14):
And so, you have got that split automatically.
SM (00:50:16):
Yeah, but it also did not fit their idea of machismo black men. What? We're not gay. Oh. It is very complicated, it is very complicated.
SB (00:50:27):
Where did Clinton fall on any of this? And he's-
SM (00:50:30):
Well, he started off pretty good, but the Monica Lewinsky case really did him in, as I keep reminding us. On television, I was watching Colbert last night. I think he wanted to have a much more liberal presidency than he could have. One of his very first acts was he wanted to close some military bases in the United States, and people had forgotten this. People jumped on him. You want to make America-
SB (00:51:07):
One of them was right in Philadelphia, Philadelphia [inaudible] I remember.
SM (00:51:07):
Is that one that he wanted to close?
SB (00:51:08):
Yes.
SM (00:51:08):
Yeah.
SB (00:51:09):
Ireland inspector came right after.
SM (00:51:11):
Yeah. Right. Well, see, I am glad you remember it because very few people remember that it was one of the first acts that Clinton was attempting, and he had not thought that through very carefully in terms of the reaction.
SB (00:51:23):
Do not ask, do not tell was the other-
SM (00:51:24):
The other thing was do not ask, do not tell, which he thought was a progressive move at the time, and everyone's hit him on it.
SB (00:51:31):
Oh, yes.
SM (00:51:32):
Yeah.
SB (00:51:33):
David Mixer was the one that really hit him, and I think resigned over it or something like that or he left the White House.
SM (00:51:39):
Yeah.
SB (00:51:40):
And how about this last 10 years, George Bush and of course, and now President Obama. Any changes there, have you seen?
SM (00:51:53):
I know because I am on the mailing list that the Pro-Choice abortion action groups are still with Obama, but worried a bit about him.
SB (00:52:08):
Yeah.
SM (00:52:10):
But cannot fault his Supreme Court nominations. I do not know. He got hit with more stuff as president than anybody else. And of course, there has been this strange sudden rise or coalescing of a nutty far right, a religious, nutty far right. I work really hard as a volunteer in the Obama campaign, which is interesting because many of my old feminist friends were horrified that I was not for Hillary, and that was another division in those of us who identify ourselves primarily as feminists.
SB (00:52:53):
Yeah. I think we are going to see her run again. And of course, he is going to run again. I see her running in, let us see, 2012, (20)16. But there has been some scenario, I am going into it here, some scenarios where she could run in two years.
SM (00:53:15):
I have heard that too. I have heard that, that they have a deal.
SB (00:53:19):
If there is a chance that there is no way he is going to win or ... There is some things going on right now.
SM (00:53:24):
I have heard it. I have heard the same thing.
SB (00:53:26):
Yeah.
SM (00:53:29):
I do not know. I am not in the in group. I just get a hell of a lot of fundraising requests on my email to help the Democrat, because I gave money for the Obama campaign. And I did a lot of telephone work, so I am on their list, but I am not a fat cat, and I really resent saying, do you believe what Obama said today contribute to the Democratic Party?
SB (00:53:55):
I do not like those emails that are sent in. There was an email where after they took the vote on healthcare-
SM (00:54:03):
Yeah, they wanted us to pay for it.
SB (00:54:06):
Yeah, but give a thank you to Nancy Pelosi. Well, I sent a thank you to Nancy Pelosi for doing that, and now all I have been getting now is from the Democratic Committee, all these, send 25, 59.
SM (00:54:18):
Yeah.
SB (00:54:19):
I did not do that to thank Nancy Pelosi.
SM (00:54:21):
Right. They get your name on the list. I mean, I am furious. I mean, I identify the names now. They all-
SB (00:54:30):
Vogel or whatever his name is. They are always coming from a guy named Vogel. And again, when I look at the boomer generation, I always look at the presidents. Harry Truman was president [inaudible] right through Obama. Now, when you look at that, all those different presidents, do any of them stand out as presidents who ... If you had a conference tomorrow on women's issues, I do not think Obama has been in long enough, evaluating the president since World War II, would any of them get passing grades?
SM (00:55:06):
No. No. It was not a primary issue for any president, and I remember Roosevelt too. I was a child. No. Well, because of the abortion issue in particular, it is a tough one to run on. Yeah. And Obama has made statements that can be interpreted several ways, when he says, we want abortion to be legal, but rare. Well, rare? How rare? Inaccessible or everybody is on birth control, using protective measures? What does he mean by that? But it is a very tough issue. And the biggest change I have seen in the national psyche is that we talked about abortion as a woman's right to control her own destiny. And now it has gummed up with all sorts of other things because of the influence of the religious right. My students think that a first trimester abortion hurts. They go, Ooh. Not that they are not having them, ooh, it hurts. And this whole business of killing a baby. We have not killed a baby, we're just killing a tiny little fetus that we are unprepared to raise. So, I have seen a tremendous setback in young women's attitudes toward abortion. And even my heroes on TV like John Stewart, he has said things, I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of abortion. But I mean, he is bending it, but he is backtracking. Okay, you are taking a life. The point was women's life. Before it is born, it is not a life, so we have lost that.
SB (00:57:13):
I wanted to say too, that I think your work and your book, Against Our Will, as a person who has worked in higher education for over 30 years, you have had impact on higher education and the issue of rape.
SM (00:57:25):
I hope so.
SB (00:57:25):
Oh, yes. It is one of the major issues in universities today. Every university I have worked at, it has been a major ... well, they hired a person. The women's center person is normally linked to it, but it is much, much more than that with a health center. So, you got to realize that your book, Against Our Will, and what you did back in (19)75 by writing about this issue has had direct effect on universities today.
SM (00:57:50):
Yeah, that is what I published at (19)75. I started writing it a few years earlier.
SB (00:57:55):
Again, we do not pinpoint it on fraternities anymore, but still a lot of college men have to still hear this story over and over again. And I know it is like a record to some people. They probably heard it in high school, but it is important because it is a very important orientation wherever I have been. And that women, I think in universities today, at least the universities I have worked at, I have worked at four different ones, feel much more empowered. They know their voice counts. And in this particular issue of rape, I am hoping that the stigma and the fear of going to the public safety ... and that is the one thing we have been trying to do, is the stigma and fear that some of them have. And of course, the worry what the parents might think of them for getting drunk and not knowing what was happening.
SM (00:58:56):
Yeah. Yeah.
SB (00:58:56):
But I just praise you for that. I just praise your work.
SM (00:59:00):
Well, thank you, but it was part of a movement. I did not make this all up by myself. Yeah. It was a movement.
SB (00:59:08):
But you had to know that this is ongoing and will forever have a direct effect on male-female relationships, at least within the universities and colleges and community colleges.
SM (00:59:18):
Oh, sure.
SB (00:59:18):
It is part of the daily life, and even in fraternities now. I worked with fraternities. There was a period of time, oh, I got to go through this. No, not anymore. Most of the fraternity guys now work with some of those other people on the other side to educate their fellow brothers or sisters to be sensitive to this issue.
SM (00:59:40):
Yeah.
SB (00:59:40):
And hopefully the biggest stigma is going to public safety. And that seems to be still the hardest thing for some of the females to go in [inaudible] that they have been raped.
SM (00:59:53):
Yeah. Well, because they are still, I think, afraid of a viral internet smear on their reputation, which has happened to several rape victims.
SB (01:00:04):
Right. I have here that Roe v. Wade was the most important legal decision in 1973 since the end of World War II.
SM (01:00:13):
Yes.
SB (01:00:13):
Do you feel that is the most important legal decision?
SM (01:00:13):
Well, I say since Brown versus Board of Education of (19)54. Yeah. That is how I teach it.
SB (01:00:22):
Are you fearful as a person that one day they will try to change that?
SM (01:00:27):
They are trying.
SB (01:00:28):
They will not succeed though. Today they will not succeed.
SM (01:00:31):
They better not, but they are cutting it back and back and back and back. I was reading about the Miranda Rights from Warren Court era.
SB (01:00:41):
Right.
SM (01:00:41):
They are cutting back on Miranda rights. They are cutting back on a woman's right to have an abortion. In many states you cannot get an abortion now. There are so many qualifications. Now you have to watch an ultra ... it is offered to you. You do not have to watch it. You can close your eyes, but before you get an abortion, in many states, you have to look at an ultrasound of this itty-bitty thing that is inside you. But of course, it's blown up big on a screen, and it looks like something is sucking its thumb. That is just one example. It is the latest tactic is the ultrasound. But the parental notifications, the waiting period, all the picketing that they have done, the shooting of abortion providers, so at least four shootings of abortion providers. So, you cannot say it is one nut somewhere. It is part of their movement, they kill. And what else has happened? Well, the hounding of abortion providers in some of the smaller states. New York, I am sure it is pretty easy to get an abortion, but-
SB (01:02:04):
Yeah, on university campuses, there will be groups that cannot actually be on campus, but they have the right to stand on the streets surrounding campuses because it is a public sidewalk. And they have the okay to hand out literature, the body parts and the ugliest pictures you're can ever see, but not a lot on the campus.
SM (01:02:25):
Well, that is good, but there was something else that they are doing. It just went out of my mind. I have to think about it because it is important. Oh, yeah. I just had gotten an email about it. One of the antis strategies now is to have abortion crisis centers and get them in the yellow pages. And women think this is a place where you can go and get an abortion, and it turns out it is not. It is a place that will tell you about the evils of abortion. And once they grab these young women for whom it was a big step to say, yes, I want an abortion, then they get in the hands of these abortion crisis centers, and they are fed a different line altogether and are under an enormous pressure to bring the child to term and give it up for adoption.
SB (01:03:39):
I just had a question here regarding just some of the other classic figures or writers in the second wave. Whether you want to comment on any of these individuals, I will just read their names and some of them are politicians too, of course. Kate Millet and Sherry Hite, Jill Johnson, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abs, Betty Friedan, Jermaine Greer, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, Rebecca Walker, who I really like.
SM (01:04:05):
Well, I would not put Susan Sontag in a list of feminists if I did not-
SB (01:04:10):
Well, I might put her in the writer area, Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker, who I really think are unbelievable. We have had her on campus. Winona LaDuke, who I think is a fantastic Native American, and Andrea Dorkin, who passed away, and Robin Morgan. I think I have Geraldine Ferrara over here, too, but these are just people when I think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s and some of the books that have been written, and I have some of the books. Oh, I had books of all these people. But what do you think of these people?
SM (01:04:38):
Well, everyone had an important role to play, wish we had more of them, because you are describing ... I mean, your list is made up of the ones who got famous and had extraordinary skills of being articulate, having an ability to write. Not everybody in a movement, although most wish they could, but they do not write, they do not publish, and they cannot speak before a crowd. And yet they are the heart of the movement.
SB (01:05:15):
Yeah. I remember we had a speaker that ... we tried to get Gloria Steinem to come to Westchester. We ended up getting Mary Tom.
SM (01:05:22):
Oh, yeah.
SB (01:05:23):
Now she was very good, but she was very good if you had her on stage interviewing her, but she was not good as a public speaker.
SM (01:05:30):
Well, there you go.
SB (01:05:30):
Yeah. But we wish we had interviewed her because she was great at dinner. What are your thoughts on these conservative women who came to the forefront since World War II?
SM (01:05:41):
Yes.
SB (01:05:43):
These are people that are really against probably women's studies and a lot of the women's issues. And I start right out with Phyllis Schlafly, who I have interviewed, who has been very friendly. We brought her to our campus and our conservative students like her. But her quote is that the troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running today's universities, including all the studies departments, so they are-
SM (01:06:09):
Pardon?
SB (01:06:10):
Women's studies, black studies, gay studies and [inaudible].
SM (01:06:13):
I did say that a lot of former radicals went into academia.
SB (01:06:20):
Right.
SM (01:06:20):
They looked around and said, well, I think I need a steady job for life and a pension.
SB (01:06:28):
So that is truth from-
SM (01:06:30):
I would say it is true. A lot of so-called Marxist, feminist academics, [inaudible] I mean, they just ran into academia.
SB (01:06:39):
And that is been a critic of the university in the (19)80s and (19)90s, that the people of the (19)60s are the liberals who controlled the humanities department. So, they control the liberal arts department, arts and sciences.
SM (01:06:52):
That is probably true.
SB (01:06:53):
What are your thoughts on other ones that stood out during this period, whether they be a Margaret Thatcher, who was during the Reagan era? Anne Coulter, Michelle Malkin.
SM (01:07:05):
Well, I mean, I would not put-
SB (01:07:07):
They are different eras.
SM (01:07:08):
Yeah. No, but they are different kinds of people. Michelle Balkan and Ann Coulter are right wing screamers on television, are not they? Margaret Thatcher was a complicated person, she was conservative. So on one level, I think way, Hey, she got to be Prime Minister. On the other hand, I mean, she destroyed the labor movement in England. But on the other hand, maybe it saved England. I do not know. I am not enough of a student of English history.
SB (01:07:43):
And, well, actually, Colter and Malkin are very popular now because they write books and they go out and speak on college campuses.
SM (01:07:51):
Yeah, very articulate.
SB (01:07:55):
And one of the older ones is Gertrude Himmelfarb, which is I think Bill Crystal's mother, and she is [inaudible] for criticisms of the left.
SM (01:08:03):
Oh, well, yeah. She has been around forever.
SB (01:08:05):
And the other one I have here is, I think it was ... What is her name? Oh, golly. Forget her name now, cannot read my writing here. Oh, Sarah Palin. I have Sarah Palin here.
SM (01:08:19):
Yes. Well, she is quite a phenomenon, isn't she?
SB (01:08:19):
Anita Bryant is the other one.
SM (01:08:24):
Yes. Yeah. Well, just because they are women does not mean that you have to ask me to apologize for them. I mean, what the women's movement did was open up doors for women of all kinds to express themselves, and I guess many of us have been shocked at what has come out of these women's mouths. They are certainly not hewing to a feminist line. In fact, it is very funny. I tangled with one of them on a television show. I do not think it was any of the ones you mentioned. I think she came and went. I think she was with the Heritage Foundation, but it was a Charlie Rose show, and she had been trained to interrupt whatever I said and just go, [inaudible] I could not get a word in and I was so unused to that, and he could not control it either. It was the first time I saw that new women were coming up who ... they did get training in how to speak loudly, forcefully, and not give the opposition a chance. I mean, maybe today they do not need those kinds of training sessions, but at the rise of these right-wing spokespeople, they had training sessions. I just could not believe it. Every time I asked, she said, you believe this, you believe that, duh, duh, duh. And I thought Charlie Rose was supposed to be the moderator here. Tell her to shut up. I do not want to scream too.
SB (01:10:12):
Yeah, we have had-
SM (01:10:12):
But they became fantastic screamers, so many of them with long blonde hair. That is, it. Suddenly we have a generation of long, beautifully thin, blonde-haired screamers on the right, except Sarah Palin-
SB (01:10:26):
Are they on Fox?
SM (01:10:27):
Yeah, they are all on Fox, aren't they? Oh. What have we wrought?
SB (01:10:34):
One of the things the questions I do ask everyone is something that [inaudible] Gingrich talked about when he came into power in (19)94 when the Republicans took over for power. And then I have read some of his writings, and he has a PhD in history too, and he actually is a boomer. And George Will has also made comments in some of his writings, and I know Huckabee has done it on his TV show. And I know when Hillary Clinton was running for President, McCain had made accidentally a reference to her as one of the hippies or whatever from that period. But the question is this, that the reason why we have a breakdown in our society today goes right back to the (19)60s, goes right back to the (19)60s generation and that era, because the increase in the divorce rate, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority-
SM (01:11:30):
And abortion.
SB (01:11:30):
Yeah, and special interest groups.
SM (01:11:31):
Because Gingrich, he is so virulent against abortion.
SB (01:11:36):
But they claim that that is the era when all of the things started going wrong with America, and it is during that timeframe. And they make references to the (19)60s, and they know it is not all boomers, but they make references to the reason why we have these problems, and the isms culture, whatever it might be. And in the end, what they are thinking of is they would like to see a return to the (19)50s.
SB (01:12:03):
In the end, what they are thinking of is, they would like to see a return to the (19)50s, I think, or a period Reagan of what was trying to do in the (19)80s.
SM (01:12:12):
Of course, they are nostalgic for the (19)50s. Women did not have a chance at anything, Blacks did not have a chance at anything. That is what Gingrich really is yearning for. You could not be a public gay, except maybe if you were on Broadway. The changes have been amazing in culture, and who would have predicted the forms they would have taken? It has all been a march forward, except now for this sudden strange rise of the fundamentalist right in this country, and I would add, the strange rebirth of Islamic fundamentalism in the Mid-East.
SB (01:12:57):
What are your thoughts on when Mondale picked Ferraro? In your opinion, was there a seriousness in picking her?
SM (01:13:06):
I thought it was terrific at the moment?
SB (01:13:08):
It was not tokenism?
SM (01:13:10):
Who cares? She was the first candidate of a major party for vice president who was a woman. He should have done more of a background search on her, because John's Zaccaro, her husband... that is the problem. When you have a woman. She comes with a husband who helped her get to where she got. What is his background? That was unfortunate, and she tried to weasel out of it, which made it worse.
SB (01:13:43):
I worked for a woman, Dr. Betty Menson, in my first job at Ohio University. She was very strong in working for the Equal Rights Amendment in Ohio. She worked at Ohio University, and I think she has passed on since I left the university. She worked very hard, and I remember the day as if it was yesterday, when I heard the, "Oh no" in the next room, because it had been defeated at the State House, in Columbus.
SM (01:14:11):
Yeah.
SB (01:14:12):
Why did the ERA fail? I know it passed in some states, but why is it that it will never happen?
SM (01:14:21):
Because the opposition to it was very clever in scaring people about its implications. They kept talking about unisex toilets. They said, "You will not have a separate men's or ladies’ room anymore." Somebody else would say, "Wait a second. First of all, have you ever flown an airplane? You have a unisex toilet. You have adjusted to it on an airplane." That is not a big issue. They were saying that you would have no distinctions between the sexes whatsoever, and that is nuts. People were afraid of it, and I think that now made a mistake in putting so much of its energy into the passage of it, but they did not know they were going to hit these.
SB (01:15:08):
I think Phyllis Schlafly was very strong on the other side, and she organized a lot of people to defeat it. Many people believe she was one of the reasons why it was defeated.
SM (01:15:16):
Well, she has had an interesting career. For somebody who was always championing the role of the stay-at-home wife, she did not stay at home.
SB (01:15:23):
That is right. When you look at the movement itself, the second wave as it stands right now, with the successes in the (19)70s, maybe some of the setbacks in the (19)80s or (19)90s, what have been the major accomplishments of the second wave of feminism?
SM (01:15:43):
That women can work, and have ambitions for career. That women can choose not to be mothers, or to postpone motherhood because of abortion rights. That women have been able to go into what is still called non-traditional work, which is, I think, one of the most important areas of work for women. I care less about a couple of CEOs who are women than I do about seeing women in and police departments, fire departments, bus drivers, train drivers. Those are the jobs that, so much more work has to be done there. The whole opening up of the sexual violence issues was our contribution. That was feminism in the (19)70s, we did that. We made it possible for women to speak up, and for men to understand that sexual assault was a crime. A lot of them still do not get it. The understanding that in war, rape is a very common crime, and that guys who commit rape in war are not psychopaths. They're ordinary young men who, under the cover of war, are acting out of some kind of machismo, because they can get away with it. The courage of a woman to leave a husband that batters her, that is a woman's movement accomplishment. I was called for jury duty last week, and there was a case that none of us wanted to catch, it was very interesting. Nobody wanted to catch it. New York State has a new rule that after a sexual offender, a predator of children, after a child predator has served his term, the state can now put him in a mental facility, obviously to keep him away from children, but also because the state has decided that he is a compulsive molester of children. There was a case, and I think it was the ACLU that was arguing against this continuation of his sentence. It is really a continuation of the sentence. Nobody wanted to serve on this case. We did not want to hear the details, because everyone said, "Lock him up, and keep him locked up," that was the feeling of most everybody. When everybody was being voir dire'd, one after another said, "My girlfriend was raped when she was very young. My sister had an experience. My uncle turned out to be a child molester." People were pouring out this stuff. Nobody would have said this years before.
SB (01:19:19):
Thank God.
SM (01:19:19):
It was amazing. Nobody wanted to sit impartially on a jury that was to determine whether the state had a right to put this guy in another lockup facility. We all did.
SB (01:19:36):
We talked about the sexism that took place within... I know that the Civil Rights movement was rampant, and probably if Dr. King were alive today in his (19)80s, he would be embarrassed by it, but he would have talked a lot earlier on this subject. When we were talking about the movements that took place in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, all of them, I can remember in 1970, when Earth Day was organized, Gaylord Nelson met with members of the moratorium in (19)69, to make sure we were not stepping on their toes, that we were linked, and we were in unity. We both care about ending the war, and we both care about the environment. It seemed like in those days, and again, maybe through the early (19)70s, when you had an anti-war rally, when you had a women's movement rally, when you had a gay and lesbian rally, an environmental rally, you saw signs from all these organizations there in unity, caring for each other's cause. One of the criticisms today is that all these movements have become special interest. They are on their own, they are independent. I know I have talked to some of the gay and lesbian leaders, and they have agreed, this is one of their problems. It is an issue in that community, and they cannot even get people to have a song to sing, which was so important in the movement, "We Shall Overcome" in the Civil Rights Movement. David Mixner, when I talked to him, he said, "It is frustrating, because we proposed that we need to have some songs that we all sing, and no one wants to do it. It is like we are talking to the wind." What I am getting at is, do you think that is part of the problem of all the movements today, just not the women's movement? They have become single issue, special interest, and they do not work with the other movements.
SM (01:21:29):
I have two things to say. One is that the labor movement of (19)30s had folk singers who made up songs to them. The Civil Rights Movement had a spiritual base of songs to rely on, and just change a few words. The women's movement never had songs, and as you said, the gay and lesbian movement never had songs. Songs do not always accompany a movement, that would be the one thing to say. What was the other thing? Oh, the special interest. The amazing thing about the Civil rights movement, and the women's movement, was that our issues were not issues that these larger umbrella groups could successfully address. When we had so-called vanguard parties, talking about the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Socialist Workers party, they claimed to speak for everybody. "We cover all the issues," but they did not. They basically covered the issues that White males felt were important. In terms of civil rights, I would not knock the Communist Party in its effort on civil rights, but their strategies failed. It was an indigenous Civil Rights movement that came out of the South that made the difference. A movement not beholden to these embracive, inclusive, grand vanguard parties of the left. Since then, it has worked that you take your individual issue and you make that your focus, because those other groups never did. They never did.
SB (01:23:23):
One of the heroes, really, of (19)64 was Fannie Lou Hamer.
SM (01:23:26):
Yeah.
SB (01:23:27):
Here is a woman who was really-
SM (01:23:29):
Very religious.
SB (01:23:30):
She was not known, and then, she went to that convention, and Johnson was checking up on her and everything she was saying back in (19)64.
SM (01:23:40):
Sure. She was a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, and tremendously religious.
SB (01:23:47):
I know it is hard to do this, but when you look at the Boomers now, you are older than the Boomers, but almost 40 percent of the people I have interviewed were born before (19)46, but they have lived during the times of the Boomers.
SM (01:24:03):
We are very grateful to the times that allowed us to make a contribution.
SB (01:24:08):
Do you have any thoughts on the Boomer women in particular, as opposed to say some of the more recent women, the younger women that have come on college campuses or in society?
SM (01:24:18):
No, I am not the person to ask that question of.
SB (01:24:20):
Any strengths or weaknesses that you think the generation has, both male or females?
SM (01:24:26):
Women today, and I feel it is another defeat for feminism... my students, let us just talk about the young people that I am in contact with, and the young people I see in the street. They seem to have fallen for some of the traps that we, (19)60s and (19)70s feminists thought we had settled. You do not wear six-inch heels. What is this with pushing your boobs up and forward? You are looking like a tart. This whole business that fashion contributed to, of women looking like babes, "You have to look like a babe," is a big step back, I feel. A big step back.
SB (01:25:21):
The Boomers were not really into that.
SM (01:25:23):
Not at all. People began to dress casually for the first time.
SB (01:25:30):
Do you have any overall thoughts on the generation itself, those people born between (19)46 and (19)63?
SM (01:25:38):
No, that is what you are going to do.
SB (01:25:42):
When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?
SM (01:25:46):
I think it began on February 2, 1960, when those four black students who were quite religious sat in at a local Woolworth in Greensboro. Was not it Greensboro, North Carolina? But, now that I have been doing some reading lately, and I have been thinking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Tallahassee Bus Boycott, Tallahassee was student initiated, unlike Montgomery, which was Rosa Parks initiated. Maybe it should start in (19)55, which would be a year after Brown versus Board of Education, which was the first time-
SB (01:26:39):
In (19)54.
SM (01:26:39):
Yeah. It takes a while.
SB (01:26:47):
A lot of the people of my era, and my college years, felt they were the most unique generation in American history. There was this feeling they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society.
SM (01:26:57):
Yes.
SB (01:26:58):
We were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, bring peace to the world, change it like it has never been before. Be more different than anybody that preceded us, and anybody that will follow us.
SM (01:27:11):
What happened? What do they say now?
SB (01:27:13):
Well, that is my question.
SM (01:27:15):
It is your question to raise and your question to answer.
SB (01:27:21):
The majority of people that I have been interviewing think that is a ridiculous, arrogant statement to make. A lot of people have said, either the generation is arrogant for thinking it, or that some people just do not believe in generations like Boomers, which is happening all the time. They just do not believe in what they call the Greatest Generation, Boomer generation, Generation X. They do not believe in that stuff. It is about a period of time, in decades or even years. There is a lot of people saying that as well. Those that do say unique are those, in many respects, that were very involved, and they have just never been as involved as they were then. It was just great memories. It's a combination of a lot of different things.
SM (01:28:10):
You are asking, what happened to it as a generation? Why did not it continue? I can speak to that.
SB (01:28:17):
Yes.
SM (01:28:18):
But, not as a member of it.
SB (01:28:18):
Yes.
SM (01:28:19):
Because of something we have not discussed at all, is that there were so many casualties of the Boomer generation, and it did have to do with drugs and rock and roll. A Hell of a lot of icons were dead before they were 30, and I am sure Charlie talked about that.
SB (01:28:42):
Yes.
SM (01:28:43):
That is his subject. It is not mine, but I am aware of it. I cannot believe the number of people who just died from an overdose.
SB (01:28:58):
I think what is happening, it is a book that needs... forget about the big names, like Jimmy Hendricks and Janice Joplin, how many young people just died? I know two in particular from my community who, because of drugs, they did not live very long.
SM (01:29:13):
Really?
SB (01:29:17):
That is back in the Ithaca, New York area. I was born in Cortland.
SM (01:29:23):
Oh really? Apple country.
SB (01:29:25):
My dad was transferred down to Binghamton, because he was a Prudential salesman. We lived in a community called Lisle, New York. I do not know if you have ever heard of Lisle, it was on the way between Cortland and Ithaca. I only mentioned that because I know you moved to Cornell there.
SM (01:29:43):
Yeah.
SB (01:29:44):
I have relatives there. Everybody has a different answer to this question, so far.
SM (01:29:52):
I think that many people experimented with freedoms in the (19)60s that they were not prepared to cope with. One was a lot of sexual experimentation, and they were not prepared for it. I have interviewed people who have talked about how, on the college campuses, the head of their department suggested that they all have a group sex thing to get to know each other better, and a lot of people could not take that sort of stuff. A lot of people tried drugs, and then went too far with them. The first thing that I noticed in the press, because they're very quick to sound in-depth now, was that they started to talk about themselves and say, "Boy, I remember my days in the (19)60s, when all I did was smoke dope and stare up at the ceiling, and say, "Wow-wow, wow." Suddenly, that became a popular portrait of the (19)60s. Now, I did not know anybody who smoked that much dope that they looked up at the ceiling and said, "Wow-wow, wow." The (19)60s began to be tarnished very early after, by the Reagan era. People were dis-remembering it. They were remembering it as a time when everybody was just flaked out on drugs, and I do not know why they did that. I just do not know why they did that. Probably they were just doing some colorful writing, but certainly it was in the news magazines, that I would start to read these reminisce. Those who were enemies of the changes of the (19)60s quickly grabbed onto it, and there's a time when very few voices were raised in supportive of the (19)60s. That documentary that Charlie and I are in together, done by Oregon PBS, that is rare.
SB (01:32:21):
Which one is that?
SM (01:32:23):
It is called "The (19)60s." He did not tell you?
SB (01:32:27):
Well, I interviewed him four or five months ago. I bet I have had about 70 interviews.
SM (01:32:32):
That is why he mentioned me, because we are stars of it. They chose him because of his book on the (19)60s, and also because he is a gay man, and he talks eloquently. They chose me as the feminist for that documentary, and I remember, after we both saw it on PBS, we called each other, because we used to be friends. We are not friends, we just do not know each other anymore, but we called each other and said, "You were good." "You were good." It has been shown a lot on PBS lately, because these blessed people in Oregon actually got a documentary done called "The (19)60s" that is pro-(19)60s, and that includes the women's movement.
SB (01:33:18):
I think I own that.
SM (01:33:20):
Look at it again.
SB (01:33:21):
I have to look at it.
SM (01:33:22):
It will give you heart. That is why Charlie thought of me, because we are linked in this wonderful documentary that is now as staple on PBS.
(End of Interview)
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Susan Brownmiller
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Brownmiller, Susan ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Feminists; Authors; Brownmiller, Susan--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Susan Brownmiller is a feminist activist and author. During the Feminist Movement, she was a writer at ABC-TV. When she saw how much power women have, she began to write about abortion rights. She has written and published books that highlight the hardships women face and how they came to be. She attended Cornell University and studied Acting in New York City.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
ND
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In Copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.30
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-03-14
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
94:01
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b23acbbcd1928fd974fd03904286aecc.jpg
935992e3805a8b9cbabc62b6d0785cda
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/5a545cf806c07167fa222b644703b538.mp3
0b36c0c7745429296c80212ed4cfcff0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription
This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field.
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-09-10
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Susan Jacoby, 1945-
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Susan Jacoby is an author and has written twelve books, including The Age of American Unreason. She is a graduate from Michigan University and she now lives in New York City, where she is the program director of the New York Branch of the Center for inquiry."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":13228792},"12":0}">Susan Jacoby is an author and has written twelve books, including <em>The Age of American Unreason</em>. She is a graduate from Michigan University and she now lives in New York City, where she is the program director of the New York Branch of the Center for inquiry.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
173:52
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Women in the Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; women; Anti-war movement; Activism; Tom Hayden; Pat Tillman."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":13228792},"12":0}">Women in the Vietnam War; Baby boom generation; women; Anti-war movement; Activism; Tom Hayden; Pat Tillman.</span>
Subject LCSH
Authors; Jacoby, Susan, 1945--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Susan Jacoby
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 10 September 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:03):
Testing one, two.
SJ (00:00:03):
Do you want test and see if you are getting it?
SM (00:00:12):
Oh, I know it will not. Testing. [inaudible] this one has already started.
SJ (00:00:14):
No problem.
SM (00:00:16):
I am going to read these to make sure that I get these right too. I am all over the place here. And the first question I was going to ask is that you wrote a piece in the Wounded Generation, which was a book that came out in 1980. It was a paperback on Vietnam.
SJ (00:00:32):
Back in the Dark Ages.
SM (00:00:37):
That was back in the Dark Ages. This is the only question I have on that because I have interviewed just about everybody else who was at the symposium. Women in the Vietnam War wrote a piece in the book, in the Wounded Generation on women in the war. How are boomer generation women wounded psychologically, personally, from that war? And how important were they in the anti-war movement?
SJ (00:01:05):
I will tell you honestly. I think that women who were older than the boomer generation were more important in the anti-war movement than women of the boomer generation. The contact that women of the boomer generation had with the anti-war movement, although there were lots of women obviously involved, just as there were lots of men, but the fundamental thing is the women were not subject to the draft, did not have any danger of having to fight in that war. So I think unless a woman had a brother or a husband who is actually in the fighting, and this would be very different, the attitudes of people who came from the social class that did most of the fighting, which then as now meant people who were not going to college, basically blue collar people, they were not as represented in the anti-war movement as were college educated boomer women. So I really do not think that that women were affected in the same way that men were, except that women in general were more anti-war than men. And that was true not just for boomer women, but for all women.
SM (00:02:26):
Right. Let me just... Here we go.
SJ (00:02:32):
Let me see if I can get this guy again.
SM (00:02:33):
Okay. Very good.
SJ (00:02:33):
That is done. My cell phone is back in my purse. That is it.
SM (00:02:40):
Okay.
SJ (00:02:43):
Okay.
SM (00:02:46):
I have read a little bit about your background from going on the web and also in the book, but how did you become who you are? In terms of, who were your mentors, your role models? I know you went to Michigan State starting in (19)63, but who are the people that influenced you the most in your early years?
SJ (00:03:07):
Do you mean by my early years, do you mean when I was a-
SM (00:03:09):
High school.
SJ (00:03:09):
Kiddo?
SM (00:03:10):
Yeah. Let us say high school, college.
SJ (00:03:17):
That is an interesting question. I will preface it by saying that I always wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter from the time I was a kid. And I wanted to be a newspaper reporter because everybody in my family read newspapers and that is what I wanted to do. At Michigan State, my college career was somewhat different from other members of the boomer generation. I did not want to go to college. I was an idiot. I was a classic example of someone who was not at an age where I could most benefit from education. And unlike most people of my generation who stayed in school as long as they could, men because of the war and women for other reasons, I was determined to get out. I grew up in Okemos, Michigan, which is right near Michigan State. I went to Michigan State for one reason and one reason only. They had an honors college which enabled you if you kept up a certain grade point to take as many credits as you want and get through as fast as you could. I graduated in just a little over two years. At a better university, I would not have been able to do that. At Michigan State, I did. And the reason I did that was I knew that if I had to be in college for four years, I would become a dropout. And there was no way a woman was ever going to get a job as a newspaper reporter if she was a college dropout. I think this is important because I am just on the edge of the baby boom generation born nine months before it actually started. So when I went to college, it was between 1963 and 1965. This was before what people think of as "the (19)60s." When I entered Michigan State, there were parietal rules. I was almost expelled for being found doing nothing in a boys' off-campus apartment. That is what the real... In other words, this is a totally different experience from being that age five years later when all of that stuff had gone out the window. So in many ways, things for me at that age were more like what they were for people in the (19)50s than they were for the boomers who came of age only five years later. And I knew I could not stand living under this regime which kept you as a child, particularly if you were a woman. This is before feminism and so I wanted to get through as fast as possible. Nevertheless, I have to say, I took any course I wanted because that is another thing you could do at the honors college. I took Russian. I majored in journalism and there were some great journalism professors there. A lot of them were people who had been newspaper men in Wisconsin during the McCarthy era and had lost their jobs because of it. And John Hannah, who was then the president of Michigan State, hired a lot of those people. He was very strong about McCarthy. Did not like him. He was a liberal Republican, they were still liberal, and the chairman of the US Civil Rights Commission as well, which practically made you a communist to the eyes of the McCarthyites. Anyway, but the best thing my professors did for me was they made me realize I had to have a huge amount of professional experience by the time I got out of college to get a job as a woman. And I did. And they were my mentors. One of them was named George Huff, who is still alive. One of them was named Bud Myers. And so I went to work as a campus stringer for the Detroit Free Press.
SM (00:07:18):
Oh, okay.
SJ (00:07:19):
Michigan State was one of the two biggest universities in the state and it was a source of news. And when I went to interview at the Washington Post in the spring of 1965 for a job, I had a huge professional string book from the Detroit Free Press. So I would say that things worked out for me, although they should not have. My real education came later on.
SM (00:07:45):
Yeah. Gets me right into my next question here. As a journalist in the (19)60s and (19)70s, do you feel the media only went after what was sensational? And by that I mean the drug culture, the long hair, the clothes, the violence, the protests. And there was little coverage of the majority of the young people that were not involved in any of this kind of activism.
SJ (00:08:13):
I mentioned this in the age of American Unreason.
SM (00:08:17):
Right. Right.
SJ (00:08:18):
And it was not that they went after just what was sensational. That was as much a part of the (19)60s as anything else. It was that the media mostly, it is absolutely true, was then and is now, the media was liberal. Reporters who were close to the age of the students who were protesting shared their views. We did not know anything about the things we now know. I knew nothing about fundamentalist religion. And in fact, there was a whole other (19)60s. That whole other (19)60s is represented by George W. Bush and all of the neoconservatives who first got into government under Ronald Reagan and really began running things under George W. Bush. They were there in the (19)60s too and they were drawing quite different conclusions about what was going on around them than people like me who worked for the Washington Post were. I was not aware of what I now call the other (19)60s at all then. I have become aware of it in the last 20 years, but I never thought about it then.
SM (00:09:27):
Well, you brought it up. You are one of the few people that is really brought it up in any detail. When I interviewed Lee Edwards, a historian down in Washington, he said one of the things in all the books on the (19)60s is they do not ever talk about the conservative students and the Young Americans for Freedom, for example.
SJ (00:09:43):
That is right.
SM (00:09:44):
And other groups like that. And of course the importance of the Goldwater election and the links to Ronald Reagan. Why was that?
SJ (00:09:52):
As I said, I think why it was is that the social class of the media was very different from the social class... First of all, in the early 1960s, there was no intellectual right wing. There was William Buckley in the National Review and that was that. But there was not any... Now, there is a whole right wing intellectual establishment as well. There was no right wing intellectual establishment then. There was Bill Buckley and his followers, and that is who it was. But there is something else too, I think just as important as that, is the fact that the (19)60s were the years when the fundamentalists established their kindergarten through college network of education and began to train the generation that has had so much influence on public life for the last 30 years. We did not know those people.
SM (00:10:49):
Well, it is interesting cause you bring up the Campus Crusade for Christ. [inaudible].
SJ (00:10:54):
They were just getting started then.
SM (00:10:56):
Being a college administrator, actually, I have worked with many of those students. But it is interesting about how they used the dress of the (19)60s but they had a different point of view.
SJ (00:11:08):
Well, sure.
SM (00:11:08):
Yeah. And so a lot of people do not even think about the Campus Crusade for Christ when they are talking about the (19)60s.
SJ (00:11:14):
But they were in the (19)60s is when the Campus Crusade for Christ really, it actually was started in the (19)50s, but it did not really have any traction on anything but religious campuses until the late 1960s when they really got started. And one of the things that they were presenting themselves as was an alternative to the drug culture. You can be cool. You can be hip like the Jesus Electric Light and Power Company. You can be cool, you can be hip, but you do not have to share the views of all of those hippies about free love and all of that. And remember, also by the late 1960s, there were a lot of kids who had been involved in the drug scene and so on and were disillusioned with it, were looking for something else.
SM (00:12:02):
Right. You talk about what they call the grateful and the Ungrateful Generation. Define those.
SJ (00:12:10):
Well...
SM (00:12:10):
Because the people that are going to be reading these interviews may not have read your book.
SJ (00:12:14):
Well, the Grateful Generation was my parents' generation. I call them the Grateful Generation, not the Greatest Generation.
SM (00:12:21):
And they are not linked to the Grateful Dead.
SJ (00:12:23):
They are not linked. The Grateful Dead is part of the Ungrateful Generation. But my parents' generation, the World War II generation was the Grateful Generation. These were people who, my mother who is still alive, is a very typical example. Brought up in a blue collar family, first member of her family to go to college. My grandfather, her father, they were blue collar people. My parents, the generation that emerged from World War II as young adults, first of all... In the case of my father it was a little older, but a lot of them went to college on the GI Bill. They came from families where a generation earlier, they would not have been able to go to college. The Grateful Generation, what Tom Brokaw calls the Greatest Generation, they had a lot to be grateful for. One of the things they had to be grateful for is unlike people getting out of the service today, they got to buy houses with mortgages at 4 percent with VA loans. They went to school on the GI Bill. They came of age at a time when, although there were ups and downs, America's economic prospects were good. All of those members of the Grateful Generation who went to school on the GI Bill, enjoyed a standard of living which their own parents could never have dreamed of. So they had good reason to be grateful. And the idea, it was always taken for granted that they would send their own children to college. That was not even a question then. And the thing is-is they expected their children who had so much more than they had had when they were growing up during the Depression when they were coming of age during World War II, they expected their children to be thrilled with the middle-class life they had achieved and to which they so aspired. And why I called us the Ungrateful Generation then, again, only some, but particularly among those who are college educated, turned around and said, "We do not want your ticky tacky houses. We do not like these universities. We do not like what they are teaching. We do not like your war."
SM (00:14:54):
It is interesting. I interviewed Tom Hayden this past week at the follow-up interview that I had [inaudible] for... I interviewed him for almost two hours. And then of course about a year ago I interviewed Todd Gitlin. And they hate the term boomer generation. Both of them.
SJ (00:15:08):
Well, they are not boomers.
SM (00:15:09):
Yeah. Well, yeah, they were 42 and 40, I think.
SJ (00:15:13):
They are not boomers.
SM (00:15:14):
Todd's younger than Tom. But Tom Hayden, I would like your response to this. Because Tom said he does not like even Tom Brokaw's book The Boom, because he says boom is an indication of something being shot out, showing violence. And boom, that is way the Tom [inaudible]. And then the fact that it happened so fast that the boomer generation was insignificant. It was just a short time period in history. So he was attacking the term boom.
SJ (00:15:51):
Well, I think if you will pardon my saying so, he is being a bit of naturalistic in his interpretation. The word baby boom was used beginning in the 1940s, and it did not have anything to do with violence. All it meant is all of these people were having all of these children. Did not have anything to do with the idea of the boomer generation as it was taken over in the (19)60s. Tom Hayden, if he says that, his mind is still in the (19)60s, which does not really surprise me. And as for the boomer generation being a short moment in time, well, he does not know much about demography then. Now, there really are two boomer generations. 1957 was the highest birth rate in American history. It was the exact midpoint of the baby boom generation. After that, the demography tapers off a little. But there are really two halves of the boomer generation. One is people born between 1946 and 1957, the older boomers, and people born between 1957 and 1964, the younger boomers. There is a big difference between them. One of them being that it is only the older boomers who came of age in the late 1960s. The younger boomers came of age in a much more conservative era. And in fact, they are more conservative politically in many ways than the older boomers. Barack Obama is a younger boomer.
SM (00:17:23):
Right. 52 years old, I believe.
SJ (00:17:26):
He keeps trying to dis-identify himself from the baby boom generation, but he is a boomer. And here is the one thing that the older boomers and the younger boomers have in common. And again, Hayden and Gitlin are not boomers at all. They belong to that half generation born, really, between the middle of the depression and the end of the Second World War. And they have some different... Although you are right, they were involved in in fact, what people think of today as a lot of the activities of the boomer generation. But what the younger boomers and the older boomers have in common is this. They both grew up in spite of the recessions of the 1970s, in times overall that were a rising economy in which they expected and in fact did get access to a lot of things their parents never had. And this is true when you think about Barack Obama. In fact, the younger half of the boomer generation that was Black benefited a lot more from these things than the older Black baby boomers, simply because of the achievements of the civil rights movement that were won when Barack Obama was a baby. So the younger boomers and the older boomers have in common, it did not cost them a fortune to go to college. The real rise in college tuition did not happen until the mid 1980s, after even most of the younger boomers were through college. The younger boomers, Blacks and Hispanics benefited from scholarships and things that did not exist for Blacks, for the older boomers. And something else also, which is that the younger boomers... Again, the Obamas are perfect examples of this. They moved into a path that had been paved by the older boomers, which was if you were 20 in the 1950s, you were expected within two years of graduating from college, if you were a girl to be married, if you were a guy, you were not expected to be married till you were 30, if you were a guy to have a good job. And when the boomers who came of age in the (19)60s came along, they pioneered a path in which it was okay not to get married right away and it was okay to stay in school longer, to take some time out, find out what it was you really want to do. Now, when you look at Barack Obama's career in the 1970s, the timeout he took from school before he went back to law school, these are things that, for instance, a young Black man from the older part of the boomer generation, his parents would have gone nuts if he had said, "I want to wait to go to law school. I want to find myself."
SM (00:20:19):
Yeah.
SJ (00:20:21):
Yeah. These possibilities, which are that your life is not set in stone when you are 22, that was a way of living that was pioneered by the older bloomers. When Tom Hayden says this was just a moment in time, he was utterly wrong.
SM (00:20:38):
He was referring to that term boom and he was referring to Tom Brokaw's book. Yeah. So-
SJ (00:20:43):
This is a book being written 40 years after all of this is taking place.
SM (00:20:47):
Right-right.
SJ (00:20:48):
And I do not know what Tom Brokaw means by boom, but maybe Tom Hayden does not know that the term baby boomer became current in the 1940s. It was not an invention of the 1960s.
SM (00:20:58):
I know when I interviewed Richie Havens, Richie said, "I was born in 41, but I am really a boomer."
SJ (00:21:03):
Yeah.
SM (00:21:04):
Because of his spirit. And that is-
SJ (00:21:06):
Well, what happened with the boomers of Tom Hayden's age, and the pre-boomers is the things came along in the 1960s and they took advantage... You are absolutely right. A lot of what is thought of as the boomer activities of the late (19)60s was really carried out by this half generation to which both Todd Gitlin, whom I love, and Tom Hayden belong.
SM (00:21:34):
Yeah. And so did Richie.
SJ (00:21:35):
Yeah. And Richie too.
SM (00:21:36):
Yeah. One of the things that I was curious, you already made reference to it, before the real strong women's movement and feminism and so forth, and what was it like being a female reporter? You said you had two people who were really strong role models for you, men, who-
SJ (00:21:54):
Not role models. They gave me great advice.
SM (00:21:55):
They gave you great advice.
SJ (00:21:57):
They were not role models at all.
SM (00:22:01):
But what was it like to be a female reporter in the early or mid (19)60s?
SJ (00:22:05):
Well, I applied for a job at two places. The Detroit Free Press and the Washington Post. Fortunately, the Detroit Free Press did not hire me, so I was hired by the Post, which was great.
SM (00:22:17):
Right.
SJ (00:22:20):
The Free Press refused to hire me for anything but the society section. This is 1964. Although I had been covering regular stories for them for years because they said a woman could not be out at night if there were a story that came up at night. The Post was a different kettle of fish. They hired me as a regular reporter, but I was only the second reporter, female reporter who did not work in what was then called the society section. However, I think I would have encountered a lot more trouble at the New York Times then than at the Washington Post, because the Post was then expanding. It had a lot of really young reporters on it. It was not a disadvantage to be a woman in the same way as it would have been at the New York Times in the early 1960s.
SM (00:23:09):
I have a couple, you have a quote in your book, this book. "In this increasing illiterate America, not only the enjoyment in reading, but critical thinking is at risk." And the way I really want to ask this question is, is this a direct link to the (19)60s? Because a lot of criticism of today's young people today is they are smart, but they do not know their history.
SJ (00:23:42):
Blaming it on the (19)60s. Well...
SM (00:23:48):
Is there a link between this quote in the (19)60s.
SJ (00:23:55):
Yes and no. Yes and no. In the 1960s, books were still really important to all of us. I can remember when Portnoy's Complaint was published in 1969.
SM (00:24:05):
I read it. Yeah.
SJ (00:24:07):
I can remember. I had heard about this book. I can remember just rushing to the bookstore, just dying to read this book. I do not think anybody rushes to a bookstore dying to read a book at all today. I really think more than the (19)60s, although there is a connection with the (19)60s which I will circle back to, but I really feel that the older boomers belong more to the previous generation in terms of their attitudes toward reading. The younger boomers belong more to the next generation because there was not any internet. There were not any computers before the 1980s. So that we grew up in a society in which if you read, books were important. As far as not knowing history goes, this has gotten worse every year. It did not start in the (19)60s. There were actually some polls from the 1930s which show how little history Americans knew in the 1930s too. But I do think that what happened in the 1960s, nobody could have imagined the internet then. Nobody did. But there were certainly a lot more forms of entertainment began to intrude on time that had once been devoted to reading. Look. The transistor radio, the small portable transistor radio, I think played an important role in this. For the first time, although it was nothing like now, it was nothing like an iPod, it was nothing like computer access 24/7, but for the first time, you could bring your music with you everywhere. I think it was the beginning of a change which was a descending curve that was fairly soft in the (19)60s. I do not think it really takes a sharp downward turn until the 1980s. This is going to be a problem, I think.
SM (00:26:12):
We can move to...
SJ (00:26:13):
Well, there are not any tables.
SM (00:26:14):
[inaudible].
SJ (00:26:18):
Because this guy is talking awfully loudly. All right, well let us... They will not stay there.
SM (00:26:26):
Yeah. You were in the middle of [inaudible].
SJ (00:26:34):
No, that is the way it is. Okay. There is one aspect of the (19)60s that I think does have something to do. And it was really the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. I think in general, student demands are blamed in general by conservatives for watering down of the university curriculum. Now, it is true that students were demanding a lot of bullshit things in the late 1960s, early (19)70s. And I do not believe that their criticisms of the curriculum were justified at all, their criticisms the way universities were run was. But I think what happened in the (19)60s, it was bad that was entirely the fault of the faculty at that time is for some reason they were actually scared of these student demands. And you had two kinds of people. You had had younger faculty members, many of whom threw in their lot with the students who wanted to teach women's studies and so on. And you had older faculty members, the people who wanted to teach the way they always had. The dead white European male curriculum. And they both got their way. And I think it was a very evil and stupid compromise. What they did was they shunted it off, instead of developing a great African American studies curriculum which was taught to every student of American history, they shunted it off into minority studies departments. Instead of including women writers in every English class and making women's studies part of the whole, they shunted it off into women's studies departments. This pleased everybody on campuses. And I was an education reporter for the Washington Post at the time this was happening. It pleased the old guys because they could continue to teach their white studies, their white male studies exactly the way they always taught them. And it pleased the new people because it meant more jobs and more tenure. Everybody got what they wanted. It was bad for education in general. The kind of Balkanization of things that every kid ought to be learning started in the late 1960s. And it was not the fault of the students. It was the fault of the faculty who were supposed to be the grownups but they did not act like it.
SM (00:28:58):
Yeah. You mentioned in the book too, that tenure was something very important in the (19)50s on college campuses, and then when the (19)60s, mid-(19)60s in particular to maybe around the mid-(19)70s, tenure was not that important. It was basically they were involved in the reacting to the social movements that were happening.
SJ (00:29:18):
That is not what I said.
SM (00:29:19):
No?
SJ (00:29:20):
I did not say anything about tenure at all. But in fact, the way things worked out, the way things worked out, everybody got tenure. People who were involved in the social movements of the (19)60s are the tenured professors who will not leave because they cannot retire on college campuses today. Tenure did not have anything to do with whether you were fighting the establishment than at all. Those people got tenure too. Those women's studies professors got tenure, the African American studies... And there are campuses with African American studies departments. Harvard is one of them, [inaudible] where in fact, lots of kids of all races go. But what happened in most campuses was they became an enclave for minority students and meant that the minority students were not learning everything they should learn, and the white students sure as hell were not learning everything they should learn. But as for tenure, that is my whole point. Everybody got it. That is why everybody was happy with what happened.
SM (00:30:19):
You do a great job also in the book of the criticisms of the neocons toward anybody that was involved in any kind of protest or activism at that particular time. Bring up Irving Crystal and Norman, is it Podhoretz?
SJ (00:30:35):
Podhoretz. Well, they are ancient.
SM (00:30:39):
Yeah. And commentary. But they were the old left, and their attitudes toward the (19)60s. How do you react to the current neocons? When New Gingrich came into power in 1994, when the Republicans came in, he made some strong commentaries.
SJ (00:30:55):
Remember, the Newtster was coming of age of the (19)60s.
SM (00:30:58):
Yeah.
SJ (00:30:59):
He was part of that other (19)60s.
SM (00:31:00):
Yeah. Yeah. He was there and then you had the Bill Crystals of the world who were coming on. And then even today on Fox, you see a lot of the criticisms of the (19)60s. There is a lot of the reasons why we are having a problems in our society today was looking back at the drug culture.
SJ (00:31:27):
Well, by the way, those people in Fox do not know any more about the (19)60s than most of America knows about ancient Greek or Latin. They do not know anything about it. There is this image of the (19)60s frozen in time. I think that is probably really what Tom Hayden was objecting to. The idea that people who were protesting things in the (19)60s were just free lovers and dopers and that was it. And that is all there was to the (19)60s. People who wanted to do anything that they wanted to do.
SM (00:31:58):
One of the things, it is a generation gap. It was very obvious. I remember on Life Magazine, they had that front cover with that young man and he had his glasses on. In one side of the glass was his father pointing at him and he was pointing back at his dad. So the generation gap between parents and their kids was very obvious at that particular time. But also in that book, the Wounded Generation, Jim Wetton made a commentary at the symposium back in 1980 that the real generation gap was not between parents. The generation Gap was those who served in Vietnam, and when they were called to serve their nation, they went and those who did not.
SJ (00:32:38):
Well, that was not a generation gap. That is a culture gap.
SM (00:32:41):
But he called it a... And actually, he went even further by saying that oftentimes the (19)60s generation is supposed to be the Peace Corps generation, the Vista, the service, that they took the words of Kennedy and they used it whether to go into service or to go into the Peace Corps. He says they are not a service generation because they did not serve. A lot of them refused to serve.
SJ (00:33:05):
Jim Webb, by the way, is not a baby boomer, I believe.
SM (00:33:09):
I do not know. I think he is about 44.
SJ (00:33:12):
Yeah. He is very young. But I would say that that is true. That in general, all of the children of the (19)60s were not the service generation. But if you go back to Vietnam, to say that people who did not serve were just motivated by selfishness, that is not just wrong. It is true that they did not want to get shot at, but they did not want to get shot at for this particular thing. I do not know whether Jim Webb thinks the Vietnam War was worthwhile or not. I do not to this day think the Vietnam War was worthwhile. What did we get out of it except all of those dead? And Vietnam is now what it was always going to be. A communist country far from our sphere of influence. And the countries we are fighting in now, Iraq and Afghanistan, are going to be Muslim countries far from our sphere of influence when all of this is over. I do. But I think as somebody who remembers the Vietnam War, I think not just somebody who has heard about it, which is all Jim Webb has. He has heard about it. He does not remember the Vietnam War. He knows only what he has been told at the Military Academy about the Vietnam War. And I like Jim Webb.
SM (00:34:31):
Well, he served in Vietnam.
SJ (00:34:37):
He served in Vietnam?
SM (00:34:37):
Yes, he did.
SJ (00:34:37):
Oh. So he is not [inaudible] then.
SM (00:34:37):
No, he served in Vietnam.
SJ (00:34:37):
He did?
SM (00:34:39):
Yes.
SJ (00:34:40):
Are you sure?
SM (00:34:40):
Yes. And of course his son is serving in Iraq-
SJ (00:34:43):
Right.
SM (00:34:44):
Has done two tours.
SJ (00:34:45):
Well, if Jim Webb thinks the Vietnam War was worthwhile, I do not agree with him. And if he thinks that in order to be of the service generation you had to serve in Vietnam, I do not agree with him. You could call young Nazis members of the service generation too. They served the Nazis. And I do not buy that... These members of the service generation too, they served the Nazis. And by that, I assure you I do not mean that people who served in Vietnam were Nazis. I mean, because you do not choose a particular kind of way to serve. But I will tell you this, that I think far worse than anything that happened in terms of culture division in Vietnam is what is happening today. I think that to have an all-volunteer army, which of course was the direct result of the fact that so many people did not want to serve and used education and privilege to get out of the draft, I think the all-volunteer army is far worse. I think the reason that even now, I do not think America is paying any attention to these wars, to how many people are being killed, and I think the direct reason they are not paying any attention to it is that their sons and daughters do not have to go if they do not want to. My parents were moderate Republicans who opposed the Vietnam War. My father was a veteran. They did not think the Vietnam War was worth fighting. They opposed it because they were terrified that their son was going to get drafted, my brother. He did not, but I do not think they would have any position if they were the same kind of people today on the Iraq War. They would not have to worry about my brother being drafted. My father saw absolutely no analogy between Vietnam and World War II, and he was not a liberal.
SM (00:36:42):
When you look at the whole Jane Fonda situation, and I have interviewed-
SJ (00:36:49):
Jane is another one of those iconographic (19)60s people.
SM (00:36:52):
Yeah. We saw her when she was at the New School this past year, I think it was in February, talking about her whole career. It was unbelievable. It was a tremendous hour and a half program there. But when you look at... Oftentimes entertainers themselves are being criticized today. You should just be an entertainer. That is not your role.
SJ (00:37:13):
That is ridiculous.
SM (00:37:14):
When you go back to the (19)60s, you can always remember John Wayne, Martha Ray, Bob Hope, which would be-
SJ (00:37:22):
Of course.
SM (00:37:23):
...The gung ho for the troops. Then you had the Donald Sutherlands, the Jane Fonda, the [inaudible]
SJ (00:37:30):
There is no reason why entertainers should not use their celebrity any way that they want. And by the way, while I am thinking of it, this is not a question you are asking, but you know were asking about boomers and boom and all of that. I do not know about boom, but of course now the boomers... I have a new book coming out in February.
SM (00:37:53):
You do?
SJ (00:37:54):
It is called Never Say Die, the Myth and the Marketing of the New Old Age. And here is another thing, and here is why Tom Hayden is very wrong that this was just a moment in time. Oldest boomers turned 65 next year in 2011, the oldest boomers turned 65. By 2030, unless there is some kind of a catastrophe, which of course there always could be, there are going to be 8.5 million Americans over the age of 85, most of them boomers. Now, there is a... And this is related to the age of American unreason because there is also one thing older and younger boomers have in common: a kind of forever young state of mind, whether they are or not. This is hitting the boomers hard now, and this is what my next book is about. There is now the same kind of propaganda about the New Old Age that there was in about boomers being completely different from their parents, in that there is a mindset that says, if only we live right, if only we work hard enough, this phrase defying old age comes up all the time. It is a boomer mindset, a mindset in which... And it is also very much a mindset of the (19)70s after the (19)60s, the retreat into the personal growth kind of thing. But if you just work hard enough, if you live right, your old age is not going to be at 90. I went to this panel two years ago, three years ago called "90 is the New 50". Jane was in the audience, by the way. Well, I could answer you whether 90 is the new 50. It is not, but the boomers are going to be affecting ideas about old age thus far in a very unrealistic sort of way for quite a while. As far as a lot of boomers are concerned, the only people who get Alzheimer's disease are people who did not exercise enough and who ate too many carbs and got too fat. If you live to be more than 85, you have a 50 percent chance of getting Alzheimer's disease. It is evident. Facts cannot be denied. And that is something that a certain fantasy part of the boomer generation has always tried to do. The Boomer attitude toward old age now is exactly like the attitude of aging boomer women who wanted to have natural childbirth, which is they believed if they only it, childbirth would not hurt.
SM (00:40:37):
Well, I know that boomers do not want to have senior citizen centers.
SJ (00:40:41):
Hell no.
SM (00:40:44):
They want to get rid of that word senior citizen.
SJ (00:40:48):
Look, I used the word old in my new book. The word old is the word boomers hate. Hello, I am just 65. How many 130-year-old do you see walking around? I am not middle aged. They are not middle-aged. By 2030, none of us are going to be anywhere near middle-aged. We are going to be old.
SM (00:41:11):
It is interesting, you go to any park or any place, people are running, walking, exercising, biking. Doctors will say that will extend your lifespan.
SJ (00:41:22):
No they do not. They say it is good for you now. No good doctor says... It is good for you in a million different ways. Whether it will extend your life, your healthy lifespan, is completely unknown. I know the AARP which is now run by boomers, of course, the AARP for which I have written for many times, and God bless them, I love them. The AARP, the attitude about the new old age is this: it is okay to be old as long as you pretend you are not. So as the AARP concentrates on the 95-year-old sky diver, the 90-year-old who are having great sex, of course there cannot be very many of them among women because most women who are 90 years old do not have partners. And if you noticed ads for Viagra, which was actually intended either for people who had things like diabetes or for people over 65, 70, the people in ads for Viagra are all in their 40s. They do not want to present the real age at which Viagra is really aimed. What they want to say in these commercials is that if you take Viagra, it will be just like it was 20, 30 years ago.
SM (00:42:40):
Well, you hit on some...
SJ (00:42:41):
But this is related to the boomer generation.
SM (00:42:43):
Oh, yes.
SJ (00:42:45):
...Because the boomers are getting old.
SM (00:42:48):
And I think when they were younger, they felt... This is another thing too. When I was in school, there was this feeling that we were going to change the world, we were going to end the war, bring peace, end all the racism, sexism, homophobia, clean up the environment. There was this attitude that... Not a hundred percent of the people, but the activists had that they were going to make a difference in this world.
SJ (00:43:14):
And we did make a difference in a lot of ways. Look, would you rather be Black in America today or would you rather have been Black before the Civil Rights Movement? Would you rather be a woman in America today, or would you rather be a woman from Mad Men? These changes in women's lives, and I am not discounting for a minute that what we are seeing now is ugly, and the idea that this was kind of eradicated either then or now is ridiculous, and anybody with their brain in their head knows it. But the fact is the progress that was made in opportunities for minorities, the progress that was made in opportunities for women, is absolutely undeniable. It was not better to be African American or Hispanic or female in 1960 than it is today. It is much better to be all of those things today.
SM (00:44:06):
You talked a lot about –
SJ (00:44:06):
Wait until he gets done with this.
SM (00:44:16):
Busy park. How we doing time-wise?
SJ (00:44:18):
We have been at it for about-
SM (00:44:20):
45 minutes?
SJ (00:44:21):
Oh, more than that. We can go on. I am comfortable here and get this done maybe.
SM (00:44:26):
I forget what I was going to ask. Oh, I will come back to it. When you look at the period that boomers had been alive, which is 1946... Oh, I know the question I was going to ask. Many people have said to me during my interviews, when you look at Bill Clinton and when you look at George Bush number two, you can tell they are boomers. Just a general comment. You can tell they are boomers. What do you think they are seeing when they say that?
SJ (00:44:57):
I have no idea. I mean, they both behave like boomers politically in a sense. I do not know what they mean by that, if you look at them, you can tell that they are boomers. But I can tell that they are boomers because I know they are the age they are. They have to be boomers. I actually do not have any... I cannot venture a comment on that because I do not know what they mean. If they mean a style of politics which is a little less buttoned up, maybe that is what they mean, but I do not know what they mean by if you look at Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, you can tell they are boomers. Do they both smoke pot? Yeah, when they were young. I do not know what that says.
SM (00:45:43):
I think some were referring to George Bush as well, my way or the highway kind of mentality that some of the activists had in the (19)60s and Bill Clinton with his Monica Lewinsky.
SJ (00:46:00):
Well, yeah. As we know, politicians who are not boomers never have extramarital sex. This is ridiculous. There is this tendency on the part of the right to attribute everything they do not like, that they imagine to be true about the boomer generation to it being the boomer generation. How can anybody make this ridiculous statement about Monica Lewinsky being an example of a typical boomer mindset? Exactly what generation of politicians has not had sex scandals? The only difference was in the past is that the public did not know about it because the press did not write about it.
SM (00:46:38):
What did that period, 1946 to 1960, how did that shape the very, very young boomers with respect to the issue of fear? We already talked about McCarthyism, which was on television in the early (19)50s, so the front running boomers would have seen that. Then you had the-
SJ (00:46:58):
It affected... I remember the air raid drills when we would crouch under the desk, which was supposed protect us from radiation. I do not know a single person my age or who was a sentient being in the early (19)50s who does not remember the fear of the bomb. Exactly how much that shaped us, I do not know. The nature of being young is not to be fearful. I can remember the air raid drills and thinking it was silly, but I do not come from a typical family. My family, while they were not liberal or left at all, but they were sort of completely indifferent to that sort of sort of thing.
SM (00:47:46):
I think across the board, whether it is accurate-
SJ (00:47:51):
I think a lot of it would have depended on what kind of a family you came from.
SM (00:47:56):
Well, three adjectives that I lean on here in describing the early life of boomers as a whole is fear, and fear being that you talk about the bomb and growing up with the Cold War and obviously the communist, looking for communists everywhere. Naive, naivety, because I believe that (19)50s television was all about that, and you really had to read between the lines. And being quiet.
SJ (00:48:27):
Quiet?
SM (00:48:30):
Being quiet. I think that history thought boomers really never started speaking, I mean, being outspoken until the (19)60s.
SJ (00:48:41):
Well, first of all, boomers in the (19)50s were little kids.
SM (00:48:41):
They were in the junior high school, though, in the early (19)60s.
SJ (00:48:46):
We do not tend to take down the utterances of little kids, but I think you are very wrong about. I think you are conflating something, the silent generation, which was people who came of age in the (19)50s, with the boomers. I think on the contrary, child-rearing was much more permissive in the 1950s. I do not think people are wrong for good as well as for bad, to say that Dr. Spock's ideas about child-rearing, which while in some ways very traditional, were much freer than the kind of child-rearing people of my parents' generation were brought up with. I think in fact, although boomers, every little word was not taken as seriously as kids are today, I think that boomers grew up in a much freer, more outspoken atmosphere and said things that would not have been allowed for their parents to say when they were children, but I do not think... The (19)60s did not come out of nowhere. They did not come out of nowhere. It is not like a switch was turned on. And you have got to remember that the election of John F. Kennedy, the oldest boomers were 14 when John F. Kennedy was elected, in some ways, that was still the (19)50s, but in some ways too, that also felt like the dawn of a new day. I would say quite the opposite. Yes, there was the bomb and all of that. Did I really think anybody was going to drop a bomb on me when I was... I think, in fact, the boomers were brought up with a great deal more security and entitlement than their parents were. I would say it was quite the opposite of fear. Life was pretty nice for a child in the 1950s if you came from a middle class family. And I do stress that if you came from a middle class family life growing up in the 1950s. If you grew up in a ghetto, or if you were a poor white or black person growing up in the South... Bill Clinton's early life was very different from mine, but what was different by the time he got into college in the (19)60s is there were scholarships for bright young [inaudible]. Bill Clinton, he had been born in generation earlier, he had have been no one. He had have been white trash, because there would not have been any way for a boy like that to go to college.
SM (00:51:09):
Right. You cannot forget about Native Americans as well during the 1950s on the reservations.
SJ (00:51:15):
They were not on the radar at all, but the life of the poor and the middle class and the (19)50s was very different. It was certainly as different as it is today, and you just cannot... That is one of the reasons why a lot of the anger today was there... A lot of the other (19)60s were not just the rich people like the Bushes, it was also working-class people. And there are people who did not make it out of the working class in the 1950s and the 1960s. My family made it out of the working class in the 1950s and their children, there was never any thought that we were going to be part of that blue collar class, which was only a half generation away in our family. But a lot of Americans do.
SM (00:52:05):
This afternoon, I will be speaking to Marvin [inaudible]. He is going to talk about growing up African American in Detroit in the (19)60s.
SJ (00:52:12):
How old is he?
SM (00:52:13):
Oh, he has got same age as [inaudible]. He has got to be probably mid-(19)60s.
SJ (00:52:18):
He is the same age as I am.
SM (00:52:20):
Yeah, and he does not live in America anywhere. He lives in Mexico. He just happens to be visiting friends here.
SJ (00:52:25):
Well, that will be a very interesting interview because Detroit in the mid (19)60s was changing rapidly, and the mid (19)60s is a period when the whites just basically abandoned Detroit and Detroit was just abandoned. That should be a very interesting interview.
SM (00:52:42):
He and another person wrote a book on the labor unions in Detroit at that time and how they took on the black power and the Black Panther mentality in the labor union. In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end, and what was the watershed moment?
SJ (00:53:00):
Actually, I think the (19)60s really began around 1963, and not just with the Kennedy assassination. I think one of the things that you definitely felt when you were a teenager in the early 1960s, there is a big cultural change that started to happen. Although the early (19)60s, Man Men is not wrong about this. In some ways, they were more like the 1950s than they were the later prior to the (19)60s, but in some ways they were not. And one thing that happens in the early (19)60s is that, first of all, there begins to be strong concern in mainstream America about peace. You get movies like On The Beach, which was a big hit. Movies of the kind that would have been considered commie only five years before. You have 1964, you have two movies, Dr. Strangelove, which is an iconic movie, and Fail Safe. The Fail Safe movie came out just before that. What they both were about were movies suggesting that war might happen by accident, not by the evil of communism, and we do not want to be thinking about that. There is a very big change that starts in those early years of the (19)60s. Not exactly at 1960, but I would say that the minute John Kennedy began talking about nuclear disarmament, which coincided with this cultural moment when movies questioning whether war necessarily arose from the total evil of the enemy, I think that is where the (19)60s really begin. They end with the end of the Vietnam War. You have a lot of things. I consider the women's movement, which is really early (19)70s, really it is a (19)60s phenomenon. Although the women's women really does not begin to... Boy, they sure empty the garbage a lot, which is good. I think the (19)60s really end with the end of the Vietnam War and kind of the beginning of the consolidation of what the women's movement was gaining. [inaudible] and women's movement is really the late (19)70s, not the (19)60s.
SM (00:55:32):
Give us a watershed moment. Was there a watershed moment? [inaudible] to pick a moment that stands out.
SJ (00:55:49):
As to when the (19)60s ended?
SM (00:55:49):
No, just the whole period of the (19)60s.
SJ (00:55:49):
Well, to me, the watershed moment was... Of course there is document original about this, it is 1968. It was not when the (19)60s ended, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy within months of each other, it certainly changed my frame of mind about what was possible. This is followed right away by the election of Richard Nixon, and the election of Richard Nixon, it was not just old people who voted for Richard Dixon. The (19)60s were not going to turn out to be a turning point in history toward what I would have said were my values, this becomes pretty obvious by the end of 1968.
SM (00:56:33):
Do you remember the exact moment you heard that John Kennedy was killed. Do you remember the... Most people do. Where were you when you heard?
SJ (00:56:40):
I was buying a dress in a shop in East Lansing, Michigan, but what I remember more and what meant more to me is I also remember where I was when Bobby Kennedy was killed and when Martin Luther King was killed. And when Martin Luther King was killed, I was at home at my house on Capitol Hill, my apartment on Capitol Hill, and I just immediately jumped in a cab and went straight to the Washington Post because I knew that the city was going to go up in flames, which it did. I was a reporter for the post. When Robert Kennedy was killed, I was in Frankfurt Airport changing flames for Kenya where I was going to meet my fiancé. Everybody in Frankfurt airport was crying. And that is when I learned and I said to myself, this is the end of my hope. It was not, of course, but it felt like it.
SM (00:57:36):
As a person has written a lot of great books and analyzed America from different angles, when you look at the assassinations of Kennedy, King, and Kennedy again, what does it say about America? Is it that if you speak up too much, they are going to do you in, or what does it say?
SJ (00:58:11):
What it says to me, and believe you me, I have been thinking about a lot this week, what it said to me is that there is a lot of free-floating anger and rage in our culture, which I do not think it had anything to do with speaking up per se, but when you do become a lightning rod for people who feel threatened, there is no shortage of the true combination of craziness and evil that takes a gun out and shoots. And I have been thinking about that a lot. It feels to me, I am not saying it is, but what is going on right now feels to me very much like things felt to me in the late 1960s. Only worse because-
SM (00:59:06):
Hold that thought. I am want to turn my tapes over here.
SJ (00:59:17):
Well, it feels to me in 2010 as we approach this anniversary of the terrorist attacks, it feels to me, although it is not the same cast of characters, but I have the same really uneasy feeling I had in 1968, which is I have this feeling that anything could happen. That there is a lot of unfocused rage out there added to even more ignorance than existed in 1968 because I do believe people know us. I do believe that the 24-hour news cycle, the web and so on have made us stupider, not smarter. They have given us more information, but I believe in terms of logical thinking, in terms of the ability to remember anything that happened before 10 minutes ago, I think we have a worse and more stupid culture than we did in 1968. But I feel the same kind of anger around me. I am not saying I am right. I am saying it feels kind of the same to me now, which is bad. And that it feels the same to a lot of people who live through that time right now, I have this feeling that I do not know where the ground quite is beneath me, what is going to happen next. When some crackpot leader of a congregation of 50 people in Gainesville, Florida gets a call from the Secretary of Defense begging him not to burn the Quran, it makes me feel like almost anything could happen.
SM (01:00:58):
And also recently with-
SJ (01:01:01):
I hope that this is a feeling and not a fact.
SM (01:01:04):
Well, I have a feeling because I have been studying lately the football player that was killed by friendly fire.
SJ (01:01:11):
Pat Tillman.
SM (01:01:12):
Pat Tillman. Unbelievable. And the latest is that he was murdered because he was going to come back in the United States and be an anti-war protestor. He and his brother had, some of his close associates had seen enough. He was going to finish his time, but he was going to come back, and there was a worry that he would come back and that would be terrible to have the number one guy that everybody know about-
SJ (01:01:44):
Well, what I would say about this, that this idea is around, is part of what makes it feel like 1968. This is probably not true, probably it is just the Army covered its ass, as it always tries to do after friendly fire. But the fact that this rumor, that these conspiracy theories are all out there, and we see more of them on the right than on the left at the moment, but the existence of conspiracy theories in which a lot of people believe... Not saying whether they are true or not, but it is a sign that there is a lot of dangerous anger out there.
SM (01:02:22):
I agree. And of course we all worried about President Obama when he came into power as somebody wanted to knock him off.
SJ (01:02:30):
Well, I am still worried about that.
SM (01:02:32):
Who won the battles in the (19)60s? Who won the battle?
SJ (01:02:39):
Which battle are you talking about?
SM (01:02:40):
Basically the liberals versus conservatives. Who really won? It was very obvious-
SJ (01:02:46):
The left won the culture war, the political war was a draw as we see very well. If the left had won the political war, we would not have the kind of problems that we have today. Richard Nixon would never have been elected President. Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president. Loads of baby boomers voted for Ronald Reagan.
SM (01:03:10):
Yes, I know.
SJ (01:03:13):
So the left definitely did not win the political war, but I said the left won the culture war, it did in the sense that a lot of the lifestyle changes of the (19)60s were adopted on the right as well as the left.
SM (01:03:27):
Nixon always used the term silent majority, and the silent majority, there were a lot of young people that were in that silent majority as well.
SJ (01:03:35):
That is right, that is right.
SM (01:03:37):
And one of the criticisms of the (19)60s generation or the boomers or the activists, they always say that in the generation of 78 million, only about 15 percent were ever involved in any kind of activism. Even some of the strongest activists I have talked to have said 15? It is more like five.
SJ (01:03:58):
Yeah, I would agree with them. But that alone is not a measure because there are a lot of ideas which were shared by people who were not activists. Again, in a way I am atypical, but everybody says this. When I was 24 years old, I got married to the Moscow correspondent to the Washington Post and moved to Moscow with him for two and a half years where I wrote my first book, and did not go back to newspaper writing because I wanted to write books and magazine articles. But I was very affected by my time in Russia in this, that many of the cultural concerns of my contemporaries seemed very trivial to me when I came back. And it also affected me very much after [inaudible] some of the bad educational things that happened in the (19)60s. I was in Russia, a country where there was no such thing as popular entertainment that was bearable. If you wanted to do anything that was fun in Russia, it was listening to classical music, it was reading classics, because those were the only kind of good books that were available. And so that in a way, in Russia, I got the education that I missed when I was in college because there was no such thing as a popular entertainment culture there that was anything but anything but controlled by the party. So in a way, in Russia, I had to read poetry and classics with an intensity that I had never read before, and the only kind of music I could hear was good music. I just laugh. I just laugh when I see this silly book about Bob Dylan, that Sean Wilentz, who is another child of the (19)60s, just published. The idea of Bob Dylan is a great artist, to me, is ridiculous. And I know why it is ridiculous to me. Because when everybody else was listening to The Stones and Bob Dylan... I know who genius poets were. They were [inaudible] and [inaudible]. Bob Dylan is not a genius of a poet. And it is an example of a low educational standards of a lot of my generation, that this guy is taken seriously as anything but a singer of his generation, which in that respect, he was perfectly good.
SM (01:06:23):
What did you think of Rod McKuen?
SJ (01:06:25):
Rod McKuen was the worst.
SM (01:06:28):
How about the beat writers?
SJ (01:06:31):
The beat writers fall a whole different category. They were earlier and after something else. Al Ginsburg is a great poet. Rod McKuen is not. Rod McKuen was liked by both the left and the right, by the way. In a lot of pop culture of the (19)60s, you have a cultural... That is why I say the left and in general stupid won the culture war in the 1960s. 1960s is when you begin to see a lot of decline in a lot of things that I value. I am not sure if I had not spent... Ages 24 to 26, I was in Russia. These are very formative years. I was not listening to The Stones or Bob Dylan. There was a little pot in Moscow.
SM (01:07:24):
What do you consider to be the major failures of the movement? The movement or the movements?
SJ (01:07:40):
I do not think the Civil Rights Movement failed in any way, except in the sense that undermining something as potent as racial discrimination and racial stereotypes in a country that was founded upon slavery is not the work of 10 years or 20 years, or as we see now, to paraphrase John Kennedy, even in our lifetime on this Earth. I do not think the Civil Rights Movement was a failure at all. I think it was a complete success. They failed to persuade probably 25 percent of people in this country now as then that they were right is not a failure. They persuaded a lot of people that they were right. When we got through the Civil rights movement, you heard about anybody being lynched lately? No. I do not think the civil rights movement was a failure in any way. The anti-war movement was clearly a failure. It failed to end the war. It was not the movement's fault. The entrenched nature of what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex is too much for anybody burning their draft cards and American flags on college campuses. Clearly, the anti-war movement, in terms of changing a kind of reflexive respect for the military, was a failure. I would say that one of the greatest disappointments of my adult lifetime is, as far as I can see, to me, the war in Afghanistan resembles the futility of the war in Vietnam much more than any other, that we did not learn anything from our experience in Vietnam. We did not learn much about the limits of American power in a totally different culture, very, very far from home. And by the way, when you think about that war now, when you think about, let us say the Viet Cong and the Taliban, you understand the Viet Cong were practically kissing cousins in relation to us compared to the values of somebody like the Taliban. As we now see, we are a country with all sorts of commercial relations with- See, we are a country with all sorts of commercial relations with Vietnam. Vietnam is part of the world in which we live. The parts of the Muslim world controlled by people like the Taliban are not. But so I would say the anti-war movement was absolutely a failure, both in the short term in the war went on for years until 1975, and in the long term, in terms of making people more skeptical about this kind of careless exercise of American power. The women, the women's movement was a success in that it opened up a lot more educational and economic opportunities to women. Whether, I think it probably was, I would not say that the women's movement was a failure. People say things are still bad for women who want to raise a family and have a career. That is true, but I do not exactly see that as a failure any more than I see the fact that that Americans who hate Barack Obama will not admit that race has anything to do with it today. I do not see that as a failure of the civil rights movement any more than I see the fact that it is still tough to have a family and a career as a woman. I see those as entrenched structural problems that the civil rights movement and the women's movement made a good start on that nobody could have expected would be solved even by now.
SM (01:11:39):
You do not have to go into any sense of detail, but then you have got the Native American movement, which many people felt was only a four-year movement. With aim starting in Alcatraz and ending at Wounded Knee, although the Native American movement had been going on for a long time. And then of course you had the Chicano movement and farm workers and of course the environmental movement and the gay and lesbian movement, so they were all-
SJ (01:12:06):
Well, the gay and lesbian movement, it starts where the (19)60s end really. I mean, I am in the gay rights movement. I mean the enormous chance that has taken place that started at Stonewall, but it really does not begin to, all you need to do is look at the different attitudes of young people and older people and as the difference between people who are not old enough to be boomers and boomers too. Boomers have far more negative attitudes about gay than the next generation down. Our parents have far more negative attitudes about gay than the Boomers did. These things take a long time. I do not think that the gay rights movement has failed because a lot of people still hate gays, and I think that the one thing that has not changed in American society is the vast influence of a very retrograde form of religion, which is unique to the United States, which is something that progressives in every generation, beginning with the deists of the 18th century have thought were going to be gone by the next generation that has not. The influence of fundamentalist religion, and I do not mean evangelical religion, I mean fundamentalist religion, the kind of religion that takes seriously and believes that lives should be ordered by the writings In Sacred Books. The Taliban are fundamentalist Muslims. The fundamentalist Christians are fundamentalist Christians. The Jews out in living in their little Hasidic sheddles in Brooklyn, are fundamentalist Jews. They believe that all of this is to be taken literally, they are a real threat in American society. The biggest threat are the Christians, simply because the fun there are more fundamentalist Christians than there are fundamentalist anything else in America. It is unique. It is a failure. It is a failure. I will not go into a lot of this. Read Free Thinkers if you want to, but it is something that is, we are the only country in the developed world in which a third of our citizens do not accept that evolution is not a scientific reality.
SM (01:14:22):
You talk about the anti-intellectual atmosphere that came out of the (19)60s, but you did talk about how during John Kennedy's three years, there was a hope there that there was an intellectual development taking place because of the people that he hired, the thinkers, the idea people, and of course dealing with the sciences and Sputnik and all the other, but then you see the comparison. Mario Savio in 1964 said that-
SJ (01:14:53):
I still have a Savio for state senate.
SM (01:14:56):
Well, I like the guy. He was right on target and he said that the fact is that the battle in the university should the university's about ideas. It is not about being the corporate takeover of everything.
SJ (01:15:10):
Exactly.
SM (01:15:11):
And we are back to the corporate takeover of everything right now.
SJ (01:15:15):
Well back. We are at a worst place. Yeah, it is in relation to that than we ever were then. Yeah. Well, we did not know what a real corporate takeover of everything was then. We only thought we did.
SM (01:15:29):
Well, Clark Kurt talked about the knowledge factory, but what did the universities learn from the (19)60s that makes them better prepared to work with the student activist in particular today?
SJ (01:15:41):
First of all, there are not any student activists today. I mean, there are few, but the universities did not learn anything from the (19)60s as far as I can see, and what they learned, what the universities learned from the (19)60s was how to dumb down their standards enough to please stupid students that were among the activists as among everybody else. There were highly brilliant activists. I think Mario Savio was one of them, by the way. I had the greatest respect for him. Yes, Todd Gitlin too. There were student active-. There were two activists. He got less smart as he got older. There were student activists who were smart and there were student activists who were dumb. The university never had any ability to distinguish between those two groups at all. The reason they did what they did was they did not want any shortage of their gravy train. They actually, I do not know who told you 15 percent was too high an estimate, but they were right.
SM (01:16:43):
Several people, several people.
SJ (01:16:44):
But somehow the universities actually thought that parents were going to stop sending their kids to college if they did not shut up these activists on campus, which was never going to happen, and so they got the worst of all possible worlds when instead of truly reforming the curriculum in a good way, that would have added the knowledge that people need about every part of history to the general curriculum. They shunned it off into ghetto studies. By ghetto, I mean ghetto women's studies. Ghetto queer studies, which is ridiculous too. Whatever is necessary to know about any minority is necessary for everyone to know. It is not necessary only for the minority or the interested few to know.
SM (01:17:32):
After the Kennedy assassination, I think you said that things changed in the universities, that the Sputnik, and the science, and math, and the importance of those things. But then when he died and then the university, something happened within the university. Clark Clerk talks about it, the knowledge factory. It is like the IBM mentality.
SJ (01:17:50):
The emphasis on science did not change at all. That was right. That is when the money was always there for science, but what changed the late 1960s and largely as a result of faculty yielding to this pressure of this 5 percent or whatever it was, was that people were not required to learn a common core of knowledge. I think that, by the way, I think they are right, people like Diane Ravitch are absolutely right about that. And Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who of course came from the opposite political thing. I think that they are absolutely right about the decline of common core knowledge. I think that as far, I think that the faculty of the late (19)60s and early (19)70s covered itself with disgrace by settling for this non-solution of dumbing down general humanities courses. Telling students they could decide basically what they wanted to take, and there has been a swing the other way, but so much has been lost. So much has been lost in terms of what people have been not required to learn over the last 30 years, but I do not know if anything can ever-
SM (01:19:05):
Well it is a well-known fact-
SJ (01:19:06):
And computers have made it so much worse.
SM (01:19:09):
It was a well-known fact as I experienced it myself, that students of the (19)60s would make demands within the university knowing that if those demands were met, they would demand other things that they could not demand. So nothing would ever please them.
SJ (01:19:26):
Of course.
SM (01:19:26):
Do you think that kind of a mentality of that small percentage of activists who were really publicized highly by the media as the example of the (19)60s-
SJ (01:19:34):
The spokesmen.
SM (01:19:37):
Spokesmen of the (19)60s, has anything to do with the atmosphere that we had today, which was probably the same back then as not listening to each other? It is my way or the highway kind of mentality.
SJ (01:19:51):
Well, again, I think it is worse now beyond anything we could have imagined then. Again, I do mean in a way I agree that the power of the quote activists was exaggerated. Look, I mean, I know a lot of these people were thought to be flame throwing activists. Some of them turned into extremely intelligent great scholars by the end of the 1970s. Some of them did not. But I think what, what is going on now, I do not relate it in a direct line to the (19)60s at all. I think that people, I cannot imagine, for instance, anybody like Sarah Palin even being listened to in the 1960s. When if you think who was the conservative political hero in the (19)60s, Barry Goldwater, if you think about him and Sarah Palin, just put them in the same time. Put them in the same frame for a second, and if you want to see an example of the degeneration of political and intellectual culture, just see that. Barry Goldwater is a giant compared to Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is somebody who knows nothing and is proud of it. There were people like that in the (19)60s, but they were not proud of it. They did not build careers out of it.
SM (01:21:15):
I have a couple quotes here and we will end on these quotes.
SJ (01:21:19):
Okay, I got to stop for you because I am losing my voice.
SM (01:21:24):
You have a quote here. "The denigration of fairness has infected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another."
SJ (01:21:41):
More true now in the second year of Obama than it was when I wrote them in 2007. Sadly, one of the most bewildering things that is that is happened is that Obama, forget about whether you agree with some of the things he does or not. Obama is clearly a man of reason. I think in many ways he got elected because people were sick of the dumbness of George Bush, but when people got him, the biggest criticism made of him is that he is too cerebral. He is out of touch with what ordinary people feel. I think undoubtedly Obama's great strength and weakness is that he is a reasonable man and I do not think he could really believe that so many of his countrymen are as unreasonable and irrational as they are. I think it is a difficult, I think then this could be fatal to him if he does not understand it, that he is dealing with a lot of people who cannot be reasoned with it all.
SM (01:22:43):
Would you also say, and I think you have said this in your book, that in the 1960s, at least on college campuses, when someone came in from a different point of view, students will be there in numbers protesting?
SJ (01:22:55):
Absolutely.
SM (01:22:55):
And challenging, whereas today it is all like-minded people.
SJ (01:23:02):
Absolutely. It is all like-minded people who go to your like-minded people.
SM (01:23:05):
I got two more quotes and then we are going to end. I love this and it is in the introduction here. "In today's America, intellectuals and non-intellectual alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism."
SJ (01:23:29):
Yes, I agree with agree with that writer.
SM (01:23:31):
Yeah. I got a lot of quotes here and my last one here is you put Thomas Jefferson's quote at the very beginning. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
SJ (01:23:45):
That is right. Why do not they just replace In God We Trust on the coins with ignorant and proud of it? I do not think in this book, I do not think that you should neglect religion. I think that-
SM (01:23:56):
I am not going to.
SJ (01:23:58):
Now, I think there were, there is a lot, remember the big-time cover story in 1968, God is Dead. Well, that is a real big mistake we made in the 1960s, and again, the whole fundamentalist upsurge was not something that the media and in liberal intellectuals were aware of at all.
SM (01:24:18):
The Terry Falwells of the world-
SJ (01:24:21):
Unfortunately, not only is God not Dead, I would not care if he were alive for reasonable people, but a particularly unreasonable kind of God is not dead.
SM (01:24:33):
Last question and I know it is hard. Boomers are now reaching 65, as you say, and the youngest ones are getting towards 50. When we are long gone, when Boomers are long gone. What do you think the historians, people like yourself, sociologists, writers will say about this generation or better yet the period that they lived? What do they say about them?
SJ (01:24:59):
Well, a lot of it, like a lot of history, will be a crock. It will depend on which history books they are reading. It will depend on whether they are reading my version of the (19)60s or Todd's version of the (19)60s or Bill Crystal's version of the (19)60s. It will depend to some extent on what they think. But I will tell you one thing, and I think about this a lot as a writer and as a scholar. There is one thing I can say for certain. That getting any kind of a rounded picture of who our generation was is going to be much more difficult for a historian 50 years from now than it is for us say to get a picture of people who were born in 1920. Why? We stopped writing letters in the 1960s. This is before the computer. We stopped writing letters when long distance phone rates went way down and we have stopped writing them almost all together since the advent of computers. There is very little record, except for a video record, of the inner lives of people of our generation. The kind of inner lives, you can write an excellent history of what intellectuals and activists, too, in the 1930s were thinking. The record of what people were thinking except for those who actually wrote books stops around 1970. You will never find out, for example, what my life was like from reading my personal correspondence because I do not have any anymore. Because people stopped writing me back around 1975 and that is when I stopped writing that back. Email has done nothing about this. Email is a totally different, non-reflective, instrumental form of communication.
SM (01:26:55):
You are right on that.
SJ (01:26:55):
It is gone. I think this is one of the most important things is we are never going to have any sense of what the inner life of this generation was like. Historians are going to find it very difficult.
SM (01:27:07):
We took students to see John Culver, the former senator from Iowa who was a close friend of Teddy Kennedy, and this is back in the (19)90s, and he said, now that the interview's over, I want to take it back into my office. And he said, I want you to look at these. Have you ever seen these? These are letters, these are love letters between my mom and dad. Have you ever written a letter? No. And we are talking (19)90s now, right? This is in the (19)90s. So love letters. Have you ever sent a love letter to your girlfriend or boyfriend? No. So John Culver is saying, just you look at these and see how beautiful they are. I am going to end with this.
SJ (01:27:44):
I have just about had it.
SM (01:27:47):
Yep. Barney Frank said, it is in his book. He wrote a book-
SJ (01:27:50):
I love Barney Frank.
SM (01:27:51):
In his book, Speaking Frankly, he said, The Democratic Party to survive, must separate itself from George McGovern, the McGovernites, the people, the anti-war people, all those people that were involved in those movements. If it is to survive this Barney Frank, speaking frankly.
SJ (01:28:10):
What makes Barney Frank think anybody remembers George McGovern. That is why that would be my question to him.
SM (01:28:15):
Book in the (19)90s, Speaking Frankly though, he said, and he was saying, and he was not attacking it as a conservative, he was attacking it as a liberal basically saying, if we are going to survive, we have to disassociate ourselves from those people that were in the counterculture and the people that supported George McGovern in (19)72.
SJ (01:28:36):
And just where does Barney think his place in the party looks to people who think that the Democratic Party ought to disassociated self from people like Barney Frank. He is really, I will tell you, he has really got a nerve. I love him.
SM (01:28:51):
That was (19)92 though, so anyways. Testing. One, two.
(01:29:07):
I certainly will.
SJ (01:29:08):
College guys. Do you want test and see if you are getting a test?
SM (01:29:16):
I do not know about testing. I know this one is, this is my prize one. This one is. Double check.
SJ (01:29:22):
Testing one, two. But I am not going to be talking that loud. I could talk a lot louder out here than I can in the cubicle in the library. No, that is okay.
SM (01:29:35):
We are fine. I will be coming and this one has already started.
SJ (01:29:46):
No-no clapping.
SM (01:29:49):
I am going to read these to make sure that they, I get these right. So I am all over the place here, and the first question I am going to ask you is that you wrote a piece in the Wounded Generation, which was a book that came out in 1980. It was a paper back on Vietnam.
SJ (01:30:05):
Black In The Dark Age.
SM (01:30:07):
This is the only question I have on that because I have interviewed just about everybody else who was at the symposium. Women in the Vietnam War wrote a piece in the book on the, in the Wounded generation on women in the war. How are Boomer generation women wounded about psychologically, personally from that war, and how important were they in the anti-war movement?
SJ (01:30:37):
I will tell you honestly, I think that women who were older than the boomer generation were more important in the anti-war movement than women of the Boomer generation. The contact that women of the Boomer generation had with the anti-war movement. Although there were lots of women obviously involved just as there were lots of men. But the fundamental thing is the women were not subject to the draft, did not have any danger of having to fight in that war. So I think unless a woman had a brother or a husband who was actually in the fighting, and this would be very different, the attitudes of people who came from the social class but did most of the fighting. Which then as now meant people who were not going to college, basically blue collar people. They were not as represented in the anti-war movement as were college educated Boomer women. So that I really do not think that that women were affected in the same way that men were, except that women in general were more anti-war than men, and that was true not just for Boomer women, but for all women.
SM (01:32:02):
Let me just, I will check this one here to make sure.
SJ (01:32:03):
Let me see if I can get this guy.
SM (01:32:03):
Oh, okay.
SJ (01:32:04):
Well, my cell phone is blocking my purse. That is it. Okay.
SM (01:32:13):
Well, I have read a little bit about your background, from going on the web and also in the book, but how did you become who you are in terms of who were your mentors, your role models? I know you went to Michigan State starting in 63, but who were the people that influenced you the most in your early years?
SJ (01:32:33):
Do you mean by my early years? Do you mean when I was a kiddo?
SM (01:32:37):
Yeah, I would say high school, college.
SJ (01:32:43):
That is an interesting question. I will preface it by saying that I always wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter from the time I was a kid. And I wanted to be a newspaper reporter because everybody in my family read newspapers and that is what I wanted to do. At Michigan State my college career was somewhat different from other members of the Boomer generation. I did not want to go to college. I was an idiot. I was a classic example of someone who was not in an age where I could most benefit from education, and unlike most people of my generation who stayed in school as long as they could. Men because of the war and women for other reasons, I was determined to get out. I grew up in Okemos, Michigan, which is right near Michigan State. I went to Michigan State for one reason and one reason only. They had an honors college, which enabled you if you kept up a certain grade point to take as many credits as you want and get through as fast as you could. I graduated in just a little over two years. At a better university I would not have been able to do that. At Michigan State. I did. And the reason I did that was I knew that if I had to be in college for four years, I would become a dropout, and there was no way a woman was ever going to get a job as a newspaper reporter if she was a college dropout. I think it is important because I am just on the edge of the baby boom generation, born nine months before it actually started, so when I went to college, it was between 1963 and 1965. This was before what people think of as quote the (19)60s. When I entered Michigan State, there were parietal rules. I was almost expelled for being found doing nothing in a boys off-campus apartment. That is what the real, in other words, this is a totally different experience from being that age five years later when all of that stuff had gone out the window. So in many ways, things for me at that age were more like what they were for people in the (19)50s than they were for the Boomers who came of age only five years later. And I knew I could not stand living under this regime, which kept you as a child, particularly if you were a woman. This is before feminism, and so I wanted to get through as fast as possible. Nevertheless, I have to say I went to, I took any course I wanted because that is another thing you could do at the Honors College. I took Russian and I majored in journalism, and there were some great journalism professors there. A lot of them were people who had been newspapermen in Wisconsin during the McCarthy era and had lost their jobs because of it. And John Hanna, who was then the president of Michigan State, hired a lot of those people. He was very strong about, not about McCarthy, did not like him. He was a liberal Republican. They were still liberal and the chairman of the US Civil Rights Commission as well, which practically made you a communist in the eyes of the McCarthyites. Anyway, but the best thing my professors did for me was they made me realize I had to have a huge amount of professional experience by the time I got out of college to get a job as a woman, and I did and were, my mentors, one of them was named George Huff, one of them who was still alive. One of them was named Bud Myers, and so I went to work as a camper stringer for the Detroit Free Press. Michigan State was one of the two biggest universities in the state, and it was a source of news. And when I went to interview at the Washington Post in the spring of 1965 for a job, I had a huge professional string book from the Detroit Free Press. So I would say that things worked out for me, although they should not have. My real education came later on.
SM (01:37:01):
Yeah. Gets me right into my next question here. As a journalist in the (19)60s and (19)70s, do you feel the media only went after what was sensational and by that, I mean the drug culture, the long hair, the crows, the violence, the sex, protests? And there was little coverage of the majority of the young people that were not involved in any of this kind of activism?
SJ (01:37:27):
Well, I mentioned that this In the Age of American Unreason. And it is not that they went after what was, just what was sensational. That was as much a part of the (19)60s as anything else. It is that the media mostly is absolutely true was then and is now. The media was liberal reporters who were close to the age of the students who were protesting, shared their views. We did not know anything about the things we now know. I knew nothing about fundamentalist religion, and in fact, there was a whole other (19)60s. That whole other (19)60s is represented by George W. Bush and all of the Neoconservatives who first got into government under Ronald Reagan and really began running things under George W. Bush. They were there in the (19)60s too, and they were drawing quite different conclusions about what was going on around them than people like me who worked for the Washington Post were. I was not aware of what I now call the other (19)60s at all then. I have become aware of it in the last 20 years, but I never thought about it then.
SM (01:38:39):
Well, you brought it up. You are one of the few people that is really brought it up in any detail. When I interviewed Lee Edwards, the historian down in Washington, he said one of the things in all the books on the (19)60s is they do not ever talk about the conservative students and the young Americans for Freedom, for example.
SJ (01:38:54):
That is right.
SM (01:38:55):
And other groups like that. And of course the importance of the Goldwater election and the links to Ronald Reagan. Why was that?
SJ (01:39:02):
As I said, I think why it was is that the social class of the media was very different from the social class. There was first of all, there was no, in the early 1960s, there was no intellectual right wing. There was William Buckley in the National Review, and that was that, but there was not any, now there is a whole right-wing intellectual establishment as well. There was no right wing intellectual establishment then. There was Bill Buckley and his followers, and that is who it was. But there is something else too, I think just as important as that is the fact that the (19)60s, where are the years when the fundamentalists established their kindergarten through college network of education and began to train the generation that has had so much influence on public life for the last 30 years. We did not know those people.
SM (01:39:57):
Well, it is interesting because you brought bring up the Campus Crusade for Christ.
SJ (01:40:00):
They were just getting started then.
SM (01:40:04):
Being a college administrator, actually, I have worked with many of those students, but it is interesting about how they used the dress of the (19)60s, but they had a different point of view.
SJ (01:40:15):
Well, sure.
SM (01:40:16):
Yeah. So a lot of people do not even think about the Campus Crusade for Christ when they are talking about the (19)60s.
SJ (01:40:21):
But they were in the (19)60s as when the Campus Crusade for Christ. It actually was started in the (19)50s, but it did not really have any traction on anything but religious campuses until the late 1960s when they really got started. And one of the things that they were presenting themselves as was an alternative to the drug culture, you know, you can be cool. You can be hip, like the Jesus Electric Light and Power Company. You can be cool, you can be hip, but you do not have to share the views of all of those hippies about free love and all of that. And remember also by the late 1960s, there were a lot of kids who had been involved in the drug scene and so on, and were disillusioned with it. We were looking for something else.
SM (01:41:07):
Right. You talk about what they call the grateful and the ungrateful generation. Define those. Because a couple of people that are going to be reading these interviews may not have read your book.
SJ (01:41:19):
Well, the Grateful Generation was my parents' generation. I call them the Grateful Generation, not the greatest generation.
SM (01:41:26):
And they are not linked to the Grateful Dead.
SJ (01:41:28):
They are not linked. The Grateful Dead is part of the Ungrateful generation. But my parents' generation, the World War II generation was the Grateful generation. These were people who, my mother is a very still alive, is a very typical example. Brought up in a blue collar family. First member of her family to go to college. My grandfather, her father, they were blue collar people. My parents, the generation that emerged from the World War II as young adults. First of all, it was not the case of my father who was a little older, but a lot of them went to college on the GI Bill. They came from families where a generation earlier, they would not have been able to go to college. The Grateful generation, what Tom Brokaw calls the Greatest generation, they had a lot to be grateful for. One of the things they had to be grateful for is unlike people getting out of the service today, they got to buy houses with mortgages at 4 percent with VA loans. They went to school on the GI Bill. They came of age at a time when although there were ups and downs, America's economic prospects were good. All of those members of the Grateful Generation who went to school on the GI Bill enjoyed a standard of living, which their own parents could never have dreamed of. So they had good reason to be grateful. And the idea, it was always taken for granted that they would send their own children to college. There was not even a question then. And the thing is they expected their children who had so much more than they had had when they were growing up during the Depression, when they were coming of age during World War II. They expected their children to be thrilled with the middle class life they had achieved and to which they so aspired. And I call that the Ungrateful generation, then. Again, only some, but particularly among those who are college educated, turned around and said, we do not want your sticky, crappy houses. We do not like these universities. We do not like what they are teaching. We do not like your war.
SM (01:43:54):
Well, it is interesting. I interviewed Tom Hayden this past week as a follow-up interview I had. I interviewed him for almost two hours. And then of course about a year ago I interviewed Todd Gitlin, and they hate the term Boomer generation, both of them.
SJ (01:44:05):
No, they are not Boomers.
SM (01:44:07):
Yeah. Well, yeah, they were 42 and 40.
SJ (01:44:10):
Yeah. They are not boomers.
SM (01:44:11):
Todd is younger than Tom, but Tom Hayden, I would like your response to this. Because Tom said he did not like even Tom Brokaw's book Boom. Because he says, boom is an indication of something being shot out, showing violent and boom, basically Tom. And then the fact that it happened so fast that the Boomer generation was insignificant, it was just a short time period in history. So he was attacking the term boom.
SJ (01:44:46):
Well, I think if you, pardon of my saying, so he is, he is being a bit of anachronistic in his interpretation. The word baby boom was used beginning in the 1940s and it did not have anything to do with violence. All it meant is all of these people were having, all of these children. Did not have any. As all of these people were having all of these children. Did not have anything to do with the idea of the Boomer generation as it was taken over in the (19)60s. Tom Hayden, if he says that his mind is still in the (19)60s, which does not really surprise me. And it is for the Boomer generation being a short moment in time. Well, he does not know much about demography then. Now there really are two Boomer generations. 1957 was the highest birth rate in American history, is the exact midpoint of the Baby Boom generation. After that, the demography tapers off a little. But they are really two halves of the Boomer generation. One is people born between 1946 and 1957, the older Boomers, and people born between 1957 and 1964, the younger Boomers. There is a big difference between them. One of them being that it is only the older Boomers who came of age the late 1960s. The younger Boomers came of age in a much more conservative era, and in fact, they are more conservative politically in many ways than the older Boomers. Barack Obama is a younger Boomer.
SM (01:46:15):
He is two years older, yeah.
SJ (01:46:16):
He keeps trying to dis-identify himself from the Baby Boom generation, but he is a Boomer. And here is the one thing that the older Boomers and the younger Boomers have in common, and again, Hayman and Gitlin are not Boomers at all. They belong to that half generation born really between the middle of the depression and the end of the second world war. And they have some different... Although you are right, they were involved in fact, what people think of today as a lot of the activities of the Boomer generation. But what the younger Boomers and the older Boomers have in common is this. They both grew up in spite of the recessions of the 1970s, in times overall that were a rising economy in which they expected, and in fact did get access to a lot of things their parents never had. And this is true when you think about Barack Obama. In fact, the younger half of the Boomer generation that was Black benefited a lot more from these things than the older Black Baby Boomers, simply because of the achievements of the civil rights movement that were won when Barack Obama was a baby. So the younger Boomers and the older Boomers have in common, it did not cost them enough fortune to go to college. The real rise in college tuition did not happen until the mid 1980s, after even most of the younger Boomers were through college. The younger Boomers, Blacks and Hispanics, benefited from scholarships and things that did not exist for Blacks, for the older Boomers. And something else also, which is that the younger Boomers, again, the Obamas are perfect examples of this. They moved into a path that had been paved by the older Boomers, which was if you were 20 in the 1950s, you were expected within two years of graduating from college, if you were a girl to be married, if you were a guy you were not expected to be married until you were 30, if you were a guy to have a good job. And when the Boomers who came of age in the (19)60s came along, they pioneered a path in which it was okay not to get married right away. And it was okay to stay in school longer, to take some time out, find out what it was you really want to do. Now, when you look at Barack Obama's career in the 1970s, the time out he took from school before he went back to law school, these are things that, for instance, a young Black man from the older part of the Boomer generation, his parents would have gone nuts if he had said, "I want to wait to go to law school. I want to find myself." These possibilities, which are that your life is not set in stone when you are 22. That was a way of living that was pioneered by the older Boomers when Tom Hayden says, "This was just a moment in time." He is utterly wrong.
SM (01:49:20):
He was referring to that term Boom. And he was referring to Tom Brokaw's book.
SJ (01:49:26):
This is a book being written 40 years after all of this is taking place. And I do not know what Tom Brokaw means by Boom, but maybe Tom Hayden does not know the term Baby Boomer became current in the 1940s. It was not an invention of the 1960s.
SM (01:49:39):
I know that I interviewed Richie Havens. Richie said I was born in 41, but I am really a Boomer because of the spirit.
SJ (01:49:47):
Well, what happened was the Boomers of Tom Hayden's day and the pre Boomers is that things came along in the 1960s and they took advantage. You are absolutely right. A lot of what is thought of as the Boomer activities of the late (19)60s was really carried out by this half generation, who was both Todd Gitlin, whom I love, and Tom Hayden belong.
SM (01:50:14):
And thought of Richie.
SJ (01:50:14):
Yeah, and Richie too.
SM (01:50:15):
Yeah. One of the things that I am curious, you already made reference to it, before the real strong women's movement and feminism and so forth, and what was it like being a female reporter? You said you had two people who were really strong role models for you. Men who treated-
SJ (01:50:32):
Not role models, they gave me great advice.
SM (01:50:34):
They gave great advice.
SJ (01:50:35):
We were not role models at all.
SM (01:50:36):
But what was it like to be a female reporter in the early or mid (19)60s?
SJ (01:50:42):
Well, I applied for a job at two places, the Detroit Free Press and the Washington Post. Fortunately, the Detroit Free Press did not hire me, so I was hired by the Post, which was great. The Free Press refused to hire me for anything but the society section, this is 1964, although I had been covering regular stories for them for years because they said a woman could not be out at night if there were a story that came up at night. The Post was a different kettle of fish. They hired me as a regular reporter, but I was only the second reporter, female reporter, who did not work in what was then called the society section. However, I think I would have encountered a lot more trouble with the New York Times then. But at the Washington Post, because the Post was then expanding, it had a lot of really young reporters on it. It was not a disadvantage to be a woman in the same way as it would have been at the New York Times in the early 1960s.
SM (01:51:45):
I have a couple... You have a quote in your book, this book, "This increasing alliterate of America, not only the enjoyment in reading, but critical thinking is at risk." And the way I really going to ask this question is, is this a direct link to the (19)60s? Because with a lot of criticism of today's young people today is they are smart. They do not know their history.
SJ (01:52:14):
Blaming it on the (19)60s.
SM (01:52:25):
[inaudible] Between this quote and the (19)60s.
SJ (01:52:26):
Yes and no. Yes and no. In the 1960s, books were still really important to all of us. I mean, I can remember when Portnoy's Complaint was published in 1969. I mean, can remember I had heard about this book. I can remember just rushing to the bookstore, just dying to read this book. I do not think anybody rushes to a bookstore dying to read a book at all today. I really think more than the (19)60s, although there is a connection with the (19)60s which I will circle back to, but I really feel that the older Boomers belong more to the previous generation in terms of their attitudes toward reading. The younger Boomers belong more to the next generation. Because there was not any internet, there were not any computers before the 1980s. So that we grew up in a society in which, if you read, books were important. As far as not knowing history goes, this has gotten worse every year. It did not start in the (19)60s. There were actually some polls for the 1930s, which show how little history Americans do in the 1930s too. But I do think that what happened in the 1960s, I mean, nobody could have imagined the internet then, nobody did. But there were certainly a lot more forms of entertainment began to intrude on time that had once been devoted to reading. Look, the transistor radio, the small portable transistor radio, I think played an important role in this. For the first time, although it was nothing right now is nothing like an iPod. It was nothing like computer access 24/7, but for the first time, you could bring your music with you everywhere. But I think it was the beginning of a change, which was a descending curve that was fairly soft in the (19)60s. I do not think it really takes a sharp downward turn until the 1980s. This is going to be a problem, I think.
SM (01:54:36):
We can move to...
SJ (01:54:37):
No, there are not any tables. Because this guy is talking awful loudly. All right, well, they will not stay there.
SM (01:54:47):
You were in the middle of [inaudible].
SJ (01:55:01):
No, that is the way it is. Okay. There is one aspect of the (19)60s that I think does have something to do, and it was really the late (19)60s, early (19)70s. I think in general, student demands are blamed, in general, by conservatives for watering down of the university curriculum. Now, it is true that students were demanding a lot of bullshit things in the late 1960s, early (19)70s. And I do not believe that their criticisms of the curriculum were justified at all. Their criticisms the way universities were run was. But I think what happened in the (19)60s that was bad and was entirely a fault of the faculty at that time is for some reason they were actually scared of these student demands. And you had two kinds of people. You had had younger faculty members, many of whom threw in their lot with the students who wanted to teach women's studies and so on. And you had older faculty members, people who wanted to teach the way they always had, the dead white European male curriculum. And they both got their way, and I think it was a very evil and stupid compromise. But what they did was they shut it off. Instead of developing a great African American studies curriculum, which was taught to every student of American history, they shunted it off into minority studies department. Instead of including women writers in every English class and making women's studies part of the whole, they shut it off into women's studies department. Now this pleased everybody on campuses and I was an education reporter for the Washing Post at the time this was happening. It pleased the old guys because they could continue to teach their white studies, their white male studies exactly the way they always taught them, and it pleased the new people because it meant more jobs and more tenure. Everybody got what they wanted. It was bad for education in general. The kind of vulcanization of things that every kid ought to be learning started in the late 1960s, and it was not the fault of the students was the fault of the faculty who were supposed to be the grownups that did not act like it.
SM (01:57:12):
You mentioned in the book, too, that tenure was something very important in the (19)50s on college campuses and then in the (19)60s, mid (19)60s in particular. So maybe around the mid (19)70s tenure was not that important. It was basically they were involved in the reacting to the social movements that were-
SJ (01:57:29):
That is not what I said. I did not say anything about tenure at all, but in fact, the way things worked out, the way things worked out, everybody got tenure. People who were involved in the social movements of the (19)60s are the tenured professors who will not leave because they cannot retire on college campuses today. Tenure did not have anything to do with whether you were fighting the establishment then at all. Those people got tenure too. Those women's studies professors got tenure, the African-American studies. And there are campuses with African- American studies departments, Harvard is one of them, where in fact, lots of kids of all races go. But what happened in most campuses was they became an enclave for minority students and meant that meant the minority students were not learning everything they should learn, and the white students sure as hell were not learning everything they should learn. But as for tenure, that is my whole point. Everybody got it. That is why everybody was happy with what happened.
SM (01:58:26):
You do a great job [inaudible] of the criticisms of the neocons towards anybody that was involved in any kind of protest or activism of that particular time. You bring up Irving Crystal and Todd Hortz.
SJ (01:58:47):
Todd Hortz. Well, they are ancient.
SM (01:58:48):
And commentary, but they were the kind of old left and their attitude toward the (19)60s. How do you react to, because the current neocons, when Newt Gingrich came the power in 1994 when the Republican came in, he made some strong commentaries.
SJ (01:59:01):
Remember the Newtster was coming of age of the (19)60s. He was part of that other (19)60s.
SM (01:59:02):
Yeah. Yeah. He was there and then he had... You had the Bill Crystals of the world who were coming on, and then even today on Fox, you see a lot of the criticisms of the (19)60s. There is a lot of the reasons why we are having the problems in our society today, just looking back.
SJ (01:59:33):
Well, by the way, those people on Fox do not know any more about the (19)60s than most of American knows about ancient Greek or Latin. I mean, they do not know anything about it. There is this image of the (19)60s frozen in time. I think that is probably really what Tom Hayden was objecting to. The idea that people who were protesting things in the (19)60s were just free lovers and dopers, and that was it, and that is all there was to the (19)60s. People who wanted to do anything that they wanted to do.
SM (02:00:01):
One of the things, the generation gap, it was very obvious. I remember on Life Magazine, they had the front cover with that young man, and he had his glasses on and one side of the glasses his father was pointing at him and he was pointing back at his job. So the generation gap between parents and their kids was very obvious at that particular time. But also in that book, the Wounded Generation, Jim Webb made a commentary at the symposium back in 1980s. But the real generation gap was not between parents. The generation gap is those who served in Vietnam, and when they were called to serve their nation, they went and those who did not.
SJ (02:00:49):
So that was not a generation gap, that is a culture gap.
SM (02:00:49):
He called it... And actually went even further by saying that oftentimes the (19)60s generation is supposed to be the Peace Corps generation, the Vista, the service. They took the words of Kennedy and they used it, whether it be go into service or to go into the Peace Corps. He says they are not a service generation, so they incur. A lot of them refused to serve.
SJ (02:01:04):
Jim Webb, by the way, is not a Baby Boomer, I believe.
SM (02:01:07):
I do not know. I think he is about 44.
SJ (02:01:11):
Well, he is very young, but I would say that that is true. That in general, all of the children in the (19)60s were not the service generation. But if you go back to Vietnam and to say that that people who did not serve were just motivated by selfishness. That is not just wrong. It is true. But they did not want to get shot at, but they did not want to get shot at for this particular thing. I do not know whether Jim Webb thinks the Vietnam War was worthwhile or not. I do not to this day think the Vietnam War was worthwhile. What did we get out of it except all of those dead. And Vietnam is now what it was always going to be a communist country, far from our sphere of influence. And the countries we are fighting in now, Iraq and Afghanistan are going to be Muslim countries far from our sphere of influence when all of this is over. But I think as somebody who remembers of Vietnam War, I think not just somebody who has heard about it, which is what all Jim Webb has, he has heard about it. He does not remember the Vietnam War. He knows only what he has been told at the military academy about the Vietnam War. I like Jim Webb.
SM (02:02:25):
Oh, he served in Vietnam.
SJ (02:02:31):
He served in Vietnam?
SM (02:02:32):
Yes, he did.
SJ (02:02:32):
So he is not in his 40s then.
SM (02:02:32):
Well, he served in Vietnam.
SJ (02:02:32):
He did?
SM (02:02:32):
Yes.
SJ (02:02:32):
Are you sure?
SM (02:02:35):
Yes. And of course, his son is serving in Iraq on two tours.
SJ (02:02:40):
Well, if Jim Webb thinks the Vietnam War was worthwhile, I do not agree with him. And if he thinks that in order to be of the service generation you had to serve in Vietnam, I do not agree with him. I mean, you could call young Nazis members of the service generation too. They served the Nazis, and by that, I assure you, I do not mean that people who served in Vietnam were Nazis. I mean, because you do not choose a particular kind of way to serve. But I will tell you this, but I think far worse than anything that happened in terms of culture division in Vietnam is what is happening today. I think that you have an all-volunteer army, which of course was a direct result of the fact, but so many people did not want to serve and use education and privilege to get out of the draft. I think the all-volunteer army is far worse. I think the reason that even now, I do not think America is paying any attention to these wars, to how many people are being killed, and I think there is direct reason they are not paying any attention to it is that their sons and daughters do not have to go if they do not want to. My parents were moderate Republicans who opposed the Vietnam War. My father was a veteran. They did not think the Vietnam War was worth fighting. They opposed it because they were terrified that their son was going to get drafted, my brother. He did not, but I do not think they would have any position if they were the same kind of people today on the Iraq war. They would not have to worry about my brother being drafted. My father saw absolutely no analogy between Vietnam and World War II, and he was not a liberal.
SM (02:04:30):
When you look at the whole Jane Fonda situation, and I have interviewed a lot-
SJ (02:04:39):
Jane is another one of those iconographic (19)60s people.
SM (02:04:40):
You saw her when she was at the New School this past year, I think it was in February, talking about her whole career. It was unbelievable. It was a tremendous hour and a half program there. But when you look at, oftentimes entertainers themselves are being criticized today, you are just being entertainers.
SJ (02:04:59):
That is ridiculous.
SM (02:05:00):
And when you go back to the (19)60s, you can always remember John Wayne, Martha Ray, Bob Hope, which would be gung-ho for the troops. But you had the Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda who were against.
SJ (02:05:16):
Here is no reason why entertainers should not use their celebrity anyway that they want. And by the way, I would like, while I am thinking of it, this is not a question you are asking, but you know were asking about Boomers and boom and all of that. I do not know about boom, but of course now the Boomers... I have a new book coming out in February. It is called Never Say Die, the Myth and the Marketing of the New Old Age. And here is another thing, and here is why Tom Hayden is very wrong, that this was just a moment in time. Oldest Boomers turned 65 next year in 2011. The oldest Boomers turned 65, by 2030, unless there is some kind of a catastrophe, which of course there always could be, there are going to be 8.5 million Americans over the age of 85, most of them Boomers. Now, and this is related to the age of American unreason because there is also one thing older and younger Boomers have in common, a kind of forever young state of mind, whether they are or not. This is hitting the Boomers hard now and there is now, this is what my next book is about. There is now the same kind of propaganda about the new old age, but there was in the about Boomers being completely different from their parents in that there is a mindset that says, "If only we live right, if only we worked hard enough, the phrase defying old age comes up all the time." It is a Boomer mindset, a mindset in which, and it is also very much a mindset of the (19)70s after the (19)60s, the retreat into the personal growth kind of thing. But if you just work hard enough, if you live right-
SM (02:07:06):
[inaudible] exercise.
SJ (02:07:08):
...your old age is not going to be... At 90, I went to this panel two years ago, three years ago, called is 90 the new (19)50s. Gene was in the audience, by the way. Well, I could answer you whether 90 is the new 50. It is not, but the Boomers are going to be affecting ideas about old age thus far in a very unrealistic sort of way for quite a while. But as far as a lot of Boomers are concerned, the only people who get Alzheimer's disease are people who did not exercise enough and who ate too many carbs and got too fat. If you live to be more than 85, you have a 50 percent chance of getting Alzheimer's disease. It is evidence, facts cannot be denied. And that is something that a certain fantasy part of the Boomer generation has always tried to do.
SM (02:08:00):
Yes, exactly.
SJ (02:08:00):
The Boomer attitude toward old age now is exactly like the attitude of aging Boomer women who wanted to have natural childbirth, which is they believed that if they only wanted it, childbirth would not hurt.
SM (02:08:14):
Well, I know that Boomers they do not want to have senior citizen centers.
SJ (02:08:20):
No-no.
SM (02:08:21):
They want to get rid of that word senior citizens.
SJ (02:08:25):
I used the word old in my new book. The word old is the word Boomers hate. Hello. I am just 65. How many 130-year-old do you see walking around? I am not middle-aged. They are not middle-aged. By the 2030, none of us are going to be anywhere near middle-aged. We are going to be old.
SM (02:08:48):
It is an interesting, you go to any park or any place, people are running, walking, exercising, biking. Doctors will say, that will extend your lifespan.
SJ (02:08:58):
No, they do not. They say it is good for you now. No good doctor says it. It is good for you in a million different ways. Whether it will extend your life, your healthy lifespan is completely unknown. I know, I know. The AARP, which is now run by Boomers, of course, right? The AARP for which I written many times, and God bless them, I love them. The AARP, the attitude about the new old age is this, it is okay to be old as long as you pretend you are not. So as the AARP concentrates on the 95-year-old sky diver, the 90-year-old who are having great sex, of course there cannot be very many of them among women because most women who are 90 years old do not have partners. And if you noticed ads for Viagra, which was actually intended either for people who have things like diabetes or for people over 65, 70, the people in ads for Viagra are all in their 40s. They do not want to present the real age at which Viagra is really aimed. What they want to say in these commercials is if you take Viagra, it would be just like it was 20, 30 years ago.
SM (02:10:12):
You hit some-
SJ (02:10:14):
But this is related to the Boomer generation because the Boomers are getting old.
SM (02:10:19):
Yeah. And I think when they were younger, they felt... This is one thing too. When I was in school, there was this feeling that we were going to change the world. We were going to end war, bring peace, end all the racism, sexism and homophobia, clean up the environment. There was the supposed attitude of not 100 percent of the people, but the activists had, but they were going to make a difference in the world.
SJ (02:10:46):
And we did make a difference in a lot of ways. Look, would you rather be Black in America today or would you rather have been Black before the Civil Rights movement? Would you rather be a woman in America today, or would you rather be a woman from Mad Men? These changes in women's lives, and I am not discounting for a minute that what we are seeing now is ugly, and the idea that this was kind of eradicated either then or now is ridiculous, and anybody with a brain in their head knows it. But fact is the progress that is made in opportunities for minorities, the progress that was made in opportunities for women is absolutely undeniable. It was not better to be African American or Hispanic or female in 1960 than it is today. It is much better to be all of those things today.
SM (02:11:33):
You talked a lot about- How we doing time wise?
SJ (02:11:47):
Well, we have been at it for about-
SM (02:11:47):
45 minutes?
SJ (02:11:48):
Oh, more than that. We can go on. I am comfortable here and get this done maybe.
SM (02:11:52):
Yeah [inaudible] I will come back to it. When you look at the period that Boomers have been alive, which is 1946... Oh, another question I was going to ask. Many people have said to me during my interviews, when you look at Bill Clinton, and when you look at George's Bush number two, you can tell they are Boomers. Just a general comment. You can tell they are Boomers. What do you think they are saying when they say that?
SJ (02:12:24):
I have no idea. I mean, they both behave like Boomers politically in a sense. I do not know what they mean by that. If you look at them, you can tell what they are Boomers. But I can tell if they are Boomers because I know they are the age they are. They have to be Boomers. I actually do not have any... I cannot venture a comment on that because I do not know what they mean. If they mean a style of politics, which is a little less buttoned up. Maybe that is what they mean. I do not know what they mean by, if you look at Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, you can tell they are Boomers. Do they both smoke pot? Yeah, when they were young. I do not know what that says.
SM (02:13:06):
I think some were referring to George Bush as well, my way or the highway kind of mentality, but some of the activists had in the (19)60s and Bill Clinton with his Monica Lewinsky.
SJ (02:13:20):
Well, yeah, as we know, politicians who are not Boomers never have extramarital sex. But this is ridiculous. There is this tendency on the part of the right to attribute everything they do not like that they imagine to be true about the Boomer generation to have been the Boomer generation. How can anybody make this ridiculous statement about Monica Lewinsky being an example of a typical Boomer mindset? I mean, exactly what generation of politicians has not had sex scandals? The only difference was in the past is that the public did not know about it because the press did not write about it.
SM (02:13:58):
Look at that period, 1946 to 1960, how did that shape the very, very young Boomers with respect to the issue of fear? We already talked about McCarthyism, which was on television in the early (19)50s, so the front running Boomers would have seen that-
SJ (02:14:18):
It affected... I remember the air raid drills when we would crouch under the desk, which was supposed to protect us from radiation. I do not know a single person my age or who is a sentient being in the early (19)50s who does not remember the fear of the bomb. Exactly how much that shaped us, I do not know. The nature of being young is not to be fearful. I think I can remember the air raid drills and thinking it was silly, but I do not come from a typical family. My family, while they were not liberal or left at all, but they were sort of completely indifferent to that sort of sort of thing.
SM (02:15:03):
I think that across the board, whether it is that-
SJ (02:15:06):
I think a lot of it would have depended on what kind of a family you came from.
SM (02:15:12):
The three adjectives that I lean on here in describing the early light Boomers as a whole is-
SJ (02:15:21):
Fear?
SM (02:15:22):
And fear being what you talk about the bomb and growing up with a cold war, and obviously that the Communist, looking for Communists everywhere. Naive. Naive, hey, because I believe that (19)50s television was all about that, and you really had to read between the lines. And being quiet.
SJ (02:15:40):
Quiet?
SM (02:15:40):
Being quiet. I do not think Boomers [inaudible] thought Boomers really never started to do things. I mean, being outspoken, until the (19)60s.
SJ (02:15:48):
Not, well, first of all, Boomers in the (19)50s were little kids.
SM (02:15:48):
They were in junior high school, though.
SJ (02:15:59):
We do not tend to take down the utterances of little kids. But this I think you are very wrong about. I think you are conflating something, the Silent Generation, which was people who came of age in the (19)50s with the Boomers. I think on the contrary, child rearing was much more permissive in the 1950s. I do not think people around for good as well as for bad to say that Dr. Spock's ideas about child rearing, which while in some ways very traditional, were much freer than the kind of child rearing people of my parents' generation were brought up with. I think in fact, although Boomers, every little word was not taken as seriously as kids are today. I think that Boomers grew up in a much freer, more outspoken atmosphere then. And said things that would not have been allowed for their parents to say when they were children. But I do not think the (19)60s did not come out of nowhere. They did not come out of nowhere. It is not like a switch was turned on. And I mean, you have got to remember that the election of John F. Kennedy, the oldest Boomers were 14 when John F. Kennedy was elected. In some ways, that was still the (19)50s, but in some ways too, that also felt like the dawn of a new day. I would say quite the opposite. Yes, there was the bomb and all of that. Did I really think anybody was going to drop a bomb on me when I was... I think in fact, the Boomers were brought up with a great deal more security and intelligence than their parents were. I would say it was quite the opposite of fear. Life was pretty nice for a child in the 1950s if you came from a middle class family. And I do stress that if you came from a middle class family. Life growing up in the 1950s, if you grew up in a ghetto or if you were a poor white or Black person growing up in the south, Bill Clinton's early life was very different from mine. But what was different by the time he got into college in the (19)60s is there were scholarships for bright young boy. Bill Clinton, he had been born in generation earlier, he would have been no one. He would have been white trash because there would not have been any way for a boy like that to go to college.
SM (02:18:15):
You cannot forget about Native Americans as well during the 1950s on the reservations.
SJ (02:18:21):
They were not on the radar at all. But the life of the poor and the middle class in the (19)50s was very different. It was certainly as different as it is today, and you just cannot... I mean, that is one of the reasons why a lot of the anger today was that a lot of the other (19)60s were not just the rich people like the Bushes. It was also working class people. And there are people who did not make it out of the working class in the 1950s, the 1960s. My family made it out of the working class in the 1950s. And their children, there was never any thought that we were going to be part of that blue-collar class, which was only a half generation away in our family, but a lot of Americans did not.
SM (02:19:07):
This afternoon I will be speaking to Marvin Serff. He is going to talk about growing up African American in Detroit in the (19)60s.
SJ (02:19:07):
How old is he?
SM (02:19:07):
Oh, he is like same age as Alan Wolf. He has got to be probably mid (19)60s.
SJ (02:19:07):
Yeah, he is the same age as Alan then.
SM (02:19:22):
Yeah. But I think he does not live in America anymore. He lives in Mexico. He just happens to be visiting friends here.
SJ (02:19:28):
Well, that will be a very interesting interview because Detroit in the mid (19)60s was changing rapidly and the mid (19)60s are the period when the whites just basically abandoned Detroit and Detroit was just abandoned. That should be a very interesting-
SM (02:19:48):
Another person wrote a book on the labor unions in Detroit at that time, and how they took on the Black Power and the Black Panther mentality in the labor room. In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin and when did it end? And what was the watershed moment?
SJ (02:19:57):
Actually, I think the (19)60s really began- Actually, I think the (19)60s really began around 1963 and not just for the Kennedy assassination. I think one of the things that you definitely felt when you were a teenager in the early 1960s, there is a big cultural change that started to happen. Although the early (19)60s, Mad Men is not wrong about this, in some ways they were more like the 1950s than they were the later part of the (19)60s. But in some ways, they were not. But one thing that happens in the early (19)60s is that, first of all, there begins to be strong concern in mainstream America about peace. You get movies like On the Beach, which was a big hit movie, movies of the kind that would have been considered commie only five years before. But, yeah, you have 1964. You have two movies, Dr. Strangelove, which is an iconic movie, and Failsafe. The Failsafe movie came out just before that. What they both were about were movies suggesting that war might happen by accident, not by the evil of communism, and we all ought to be thinking about that. There is a very big change that starts in those early years of the (19)60s, not exactly at 1960, but I would say that the minute John Kennedy began talking about nuclear disarmament, which coincided with this cultural moment when movies questioning whether war necessarily arose from the total evil of the enemy, I think that is where the (19)60s really begin. They end with the end of the Vietnam War, and we have a lot of things... I consider the Women's Movement, which is really early (19)70s really a (19)60s phenomenon. I think of it as... although the Women's Movement really does not begin to... they sure empty the garbage a lot, which is good. I think the (19)60s really end with the end of the Vietnam War and kind of the beginning of the consolidation of what the Women's Movement was gaining. The high-water mark of women's movement is really the late (19)70s, not the (19)60s.
SM (02:22:15):
What was the watershed moment? Was there a watershed moment? One particular moment that stands out?
SJ (02:22:15):
It was to when the (19)60s ended?
SM (02:22:15):
No, just the whole period of the (19)60s.
SJ (02:22:15):
Well, to me the watershed moment was of course, I mean you got the original about this, it was 1968. It was not when the (19)60s ended, but the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy within months of each other, it certainly changed my frame of mind about what was possible. This is followed right away by the election of Richard Nixon. And the election of Richard Nixon, it was not just old people who voted for Richard Nixon. The (19)60s were not going to turn out to be a turning point in history toward what I would have said were my values. This becomes pretty obvious by the end of 1968.
SM (02:23:20):
You remember the exact moment you heard that John Kennedy was killed? Do you remember?
SJ (02:23:20):
I sure do.
SM (02:23:27):
Most people do. Where were you when you heard?
SJ (02:23:32):
I was buying a dress in a shop in East Lansing, Michigan. What I remember more and what meant more to me is I also remember where I was when Bobby Kennedy was killed, and when Martin Luther King was killed. When Martin Luther King was killed, I was at home in my house on Capitol Hill, my apartment on Capitol Hill, and I just immediately jumped in a cab and went straight to the Washington Post, because I knew that the city was going to go up in flames, which it did. I was a reporter for the Post. When Robert Kennedy was killed, I was in Frankfurt airport changing planes for Kenya where I was going to meet my fiancé. Everybody in Frankfurt airport was crying, and that is when I learned, and I said to myself, "This is the end of my hope." It was not, of course, but it felt like it.
SM (02:24:33):
As a person who has written a lot of great books and have analyzed America from different angles, when you look at the assassinations of Kennedy, King and Kennedy again, what does that say about America? That, if you speak up too much, you are going to be in or what does it say?
SJ (02:24:53):
What it says to me, and believe you me, I have been thinking about it a lot this week. What it said to me is that there is a lot of free-floating anger and rage in our culture. I do not think it had anything to do with speaking up per se, but when you do become a lightning rod for people who feel threatened, there is no shortage of the true combination of craziness and evil that takes a gun out and shoots. And I have been thinking about that a lot. It feels to me, I am not saying it is, but what is going on right now feels to me very much like things felt to me in the late 1960s only worse because-
SM (02:25:46):
Hold that thought. I want to turn my tape here. Yeah, you are bringing up some very interesting-
SJ (02:26:01):
So one thing my throat is getting sore.
SM (02:26:03):
Yep. Okay.
SJ (02:26:07):
Well, it feels to me in 2010 as we approached this anniversary of the terrorist attack, it feels to me, although it is not the same class of characters, but I have the same really uneasy feeling I had in 1968, which is I have this feeling that anything could happen, that there is a lot of unfocused rage out there added to even more ignorance that existed in 1968 because I do believe people know-know us. I do believe that the 24 hour news cycle, the web and so on, have made us stupider not smarter. They have given us more information, but I believe in terms of logical thinking, in terms of the ability to remember anything that happened before 10 minutes ago, I think we have a worse and more stupid culture than we did in 1968. But I feel the same kind of anger around me. I am not saying I am right, I am saying it feels kind of the same to me now, which is bad, but it feels the same to a lot of people who live through that time. Right now, I have this feeling that I do not know where the ground quite is beneath me, what is going to happen next. And some crack pot leader of a congregation of 50 people in Gainesville, Florida get the call from the Secretary of Defense begging him not to burn the Koran. It makes me feel like almost anything could happen.
SM (02:27:44):
And also recently with the fact-
SJ (02:27:48):
I hope this is a feeling and not a fact.
SM (02:27:50):
Well, I have a feeling because I have been studying lately the football player that was killed by friendly fire.
SJ (02:27:57):
Pat Tillman.
SM (02:27:57):
Pat Tillman. Unbelievable. And the latest is that he was murdered because he was going to come back to the United States and be an anti-war protestor that he and his brother and some of his close associates had seen enough. He was going to finish his time, but he was going to come back, and there was a worry that he would come back and that would be terrible to have the number one guy [inaudible] else about.
SJ (02:28:28):
Well, what I would say about this is that this idea is around is part of what makes it feel like 1968. This is probably not true, probably it is just the army covered its ass as it always tries to do after friendly fire. But these conspiracy theories are all out there, and we see more of them on the right than on the left at the moment, but the existence of conspiracy theories in which a lot of people believe, not saying whether they are true or not, but it is a sign that there is a lot of dangerous anger out there.
SM (02:29:05):
I agree. And of course we all worried about President Obama when he came into power and somebody wanted to knock him off.
SJ (02:29:13):
Well, I am still worried about that.
SM (02:29:16):
Who won the battles in the (19)60s? Who won the battle?
SJ (02:29:21):
Which battle are you talking about?
SM (02:29:22):
Basically the liberals versus conservatives. Who really won? It was very obvious-
SJ (02:29:31):
The left won the culture war. The political war was a draw as we see very well. If the left had won the political war, we would not have the kind of problems that we have today. Richard Nixon would never have been elected President. Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president. Loads of baby boomers voted for Ronald Reagan.
SM (02:29:50):
Yep, I know.
SJ (02:29:52):
So the left definitely did not win the political war, but I said the left won the culture war. It did in the sense that a lot of the lifestyle changes of the (19)60s were adopted on the right as well as the left.
SM (02:30:05):
Well, Nixon always used the term silent majority and there were a lot of young people that were in that silent majority as well.
SJ (02:30:14):
That is right.
SM (02:30:16):
One of the criticisms of the (19)60s generation were the boomers, or the activists is they always say that in the generation of 78 million, only about 15 percent were ever involved in any kind of activism. Even some of the strongest activists I have talked to have said, "15? It was more like five."
SJ (02:30:33):
I would agree with them, but that alone is not a measure because there are a lot of ideas which were shared by people who were not activists. Again, in a way I am atypical, but everybody says this. When I was 24 years old, I got married to the Moscow correspondent of the Washington Post and moved to Moscow with him for two and a half years where I wrote my first book and did not go back to newspaper writing because I wanted to write books and magazine articles. But I was very affected by my time in Russia in this, but many of the cultural concerns of my contemporaries seemed very trivial to me when I came back. It also affected me very much apropos of some of the bad educational things that happened in the (19)60s. I was in Russia, a country where there was no such thing as popular entertainment that was bearable. If you wanted to do anything that was fun in Russia, it was listening to classical music, it was reading classics because those were the only kind of good books that were available. And so that in a way, in Russia, I got the education that I missed when I was in college because there was no such thing as a popular entertainment culture there. There was anything but anything but controlled by the party. So in a way, in Russia, I had to read poetry and classics with an intensity that I never read before and the only kind of music I could hear was good music. I just laughed. I just laugh when I see this silly book about Bob Dylan that Sean Wilentz, who was another child of the (19)60s, just published. The idea of Bob Dylan is a great artist to me is ridiculous and I know why it is ridiculous to me. Because when everybody else was listening to the Stones and Bob Dylan, I know who genius poets were. They were Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky and Boris Pasternak. Bob Dylan is not a genius of a poet, and it is an example of low educational standards of a lot of my generation that this guy is taken seriously as anything but a singer of his generation, which in that respect, what he was perfectly good.
SM (02:32:49):
What do you think of Rod McKuen?
SJ (02:32:51):
Well, Rod McKuen was the worst.
SM (02:32:54):
How about the beat writers?
SJ (02:32:55):
But Rod McKuen? Well, the beat writers fall a whole different category. They were earlier and after something else. Al Ginsberg is a great poet. Rod McKuen is not. Rod McKuen was liked by both the left and the right, by the way. You have a lot of pop culture of the (19)60s. That is why I say the left in general was stupid, won the culture war in the 1960s. 1960s is when you begin to see a lot of decline and a lot of things that I valued. Ages 24 to 26 I was in Russia. These are very formative years. I was not listening to the Stones or Bob Dylan. There was a little Pat and Oscar.
SM (02:33:47):
What do you consider to be the major failures of the movement? The movement or the movement?
SJ (02:34:01):
I do not think the civil rights movement failed in any way except in the sense that undermining something as potent as racial discrimination and racial stereotypes in a country that was founded upon slavery is not the work of 10 years or 20 years or as we see now. To paraphrase John Kennedy, even in our lifetime on this earth, I do not think the civil rights movement was a failure at all. I think it was a complete success, but they failed to persuade probably 25 percent of people in this country now as then that they were right is not a failure. They persuaded a lot of people that they were right. We got through the civil rights movement. You heard about anybody being lynched lately? No, I do not think the civil rights movement was a failure in any way. The anti-war movement was clearly a failure. It failed to end the war. It was not movement's fault; the entrenched nature of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex is too much for anybody burning their draft cards and American flags on college campuses. Clearly, the anti-war movement in terms of changing a kind of reflexive respect for the military was a failure. I would say that one of the greatest disappointments of my adult lifetime is, as far as I can see, to me, the war in Afghanistan resembles the futility of the war in Vietnam much more than any other. But we did not learn anything from our experience in Vietnam. We did not learn much about the limits of American power in a totally different culture, very, very far from home. And by the way, when you think about that war now, when you think about the Viet Cong and the Taliban, you understand the Viet Cong were practically kissing cousins in relation to us compared to the values of somebody like the Taliban.
SM (02:36:12):
Yes.
SJ (02:36:12):
As we now see, we are a country with all sorts of commercial relations with Vietnam. Vietnam is part of the world in which we live, with parts of the Muslim world controlled by people like the Taliban are not. So I would say that the anti-war movement was absolutely a failure both in the short term, in that the war went on for years until 1975, and the long term in terms of making people more skeptical about this kind of careless exercise of American power. The women's movement was a success in that it opened up a lot more educational and economic opportunities to women. I would not say that the women's movement was a failure. People say things are still bad for women who want to raise a family and have a career. That is true, but I do not exactly see that as a failure any more than I see the fact that that Americans who hate Barack Obama will not admit that race has anything to do with it today. I do not see that as a failure of the civil rights movement any more than I see the fact that it is still tough to have a family and a career as a woman. I see those as entrench structural problems that the civil rights movement and women's movement made a good start on, that nobody could have expected would be solved even by now.
SM (02:37:47):
You do not have to go into any extensive detail, but then you have got the Native American movement which many people thought was only a four-year movement with AIM starting at Alcatraz and ending at Wounded Knee. The Native American movement had been going on for a long time. Then of course you had the Chicano movement, the farm workers and of course the environmental movement and the gay and lesbian movement, so they are all-
SJ (02:38:08):
Well, the gay lesbian movement, it starts where the (19)60s end really. I mean, I am in the gay rights movement. The enormous change that has taken place that started at Stonewall. All you need to do is look at the different attitudes of young people and older people, and it is a difference between people who are not old enough to be boomers and boomers too. Boomers have far more negative attitudes about gay than the next generation down does. Our parents have problem negative attitudes about gay than the boomers did. These things are take a long time. I do not think that that the gay rights movement has failed because a lot of people still hate gays. I think that the one thing that has not changed in American society is the vast influence of a very retrograde form of religion, which is unique to the United States, which is something that progressives in every generation, beginning with the ideas of 18th century, have thought, "We are going to be gone by the next generation." That has the influence of fundamentalist religion. I do not mean evangelical religion, I mean fundamentalist religion. The kind of religion that takes seriously and believes that lives should be ordered by the writings in sacred books. The Taliban are fundamentalist Muslims, the fundamentalist Christians are fundamentalist Christians. The Jews out living in their little Hasidic shtetls in Brooklyn are fundamentalist Jews. They believe that all of this is to be taken literally. They are a real threat in American society, the biggest threat of the Christians simply because there are more fundamentalist Christians than there are fundamentalist anything else in America. It is unique. It is a failure. It is a failure. I will not go into a lot of this. I read free thinkers if you want to, but we are the only country in the developed world in which a third of our citizens do not accept that evolution is not a scientific reality.
SM (02:40:19):
You talk about the anti-intellectual atmosphere that came out of the (19)60s then, but you did talk about how that during John Kennedy's three years, there was a hope there that there was an intellectual development taking place because of the people that he hired, the thinkers, the idea people, and of course dealing with the sciences and Sputnik and all the others-
SJ (02:40:42):
Well, you know they-
SM (02:40:42):
Do you see the comparison? Mario Savio in 1964 said that the-
SJ (02:40:47):
I still have a Savio for state senate bumper sticker!
SM (02:40:52):
Well, I like the guy. He was right on target and he said that the fact is that the university's about ideas. It is not about being the corporate takeover of everything, and we are back to the corporate takeover of everything right now.
SJ (02:41:07):
We are back. We are at a worst place in relation to that than we ever were then. We did not know what a real corporate takeover of everything was then. We only thought we did.
SM (02:41:23):
Clark Kerr talked about the knowledge factory, but what did the universities learn from the (19)60s that make them better prepared to work with the student activists?
SJ (02:41:31):
They are not-
SM (02:41:33):
In particular, today.
SJ (02:41:37):
First of all, there are not any student activists today. I mean, there are few, but the universities did not learn anything from the (19)60s as far as I can see. What the universities learned from the (19)60s was how to dumb down their standards enough to please stupid students. There were among the activists, as among everybody else, there were highly brilliant activists. I think Mario Savio was one of them, by the way. I had the greatest respect for him. Todd Gitlin too. There were student activist-
SM (02:42:02):
Tom Hayden was smart, too.
SJ (02:42:03):
There were two activists. Well, he got less smart as he got older. There were student activists who were smart and there were student activists who were dumb. The university never had any ability to distinguish between those two groups at all. The reason they did what they did was, they did not want any shortage of their gravy train. I do not know who it was that told you 15 percent was too high an estimate, but they were right.
SM (02:42:30):
Several people.
SJ (02:42:31):
But somehow the universities actually thought that parents were going to stop sending their kids to college if they did not shut up these activists on campus, which was never going to happen. So they got the worst of our possible worlds. When instead of truly reforming the curriculum in a good way, that would have added the knowledge that people need about every part of history to the general curriculum. They shunted it off into ghetto studies, and by ghetto, I mean ghetto women's studies, ghetto queer studies, which is ridiculous too. Whatever is necessary to know about any minority is necessary for everyone to know. It is not necessary only for the minority or the interest in you to know.
SM (02:43:16):
After the Kennedy assassination, I think you said that things changed in the universities, that the Sputnik and the science and math and the importance of those things. But then when he died, something happened within the universities. Clark Kerr talked about the knowledge factory. It is like the IBM mentality.
SJ (02:43:38):
The emphasis on science did not change at all. That is when the money was always there for science. But what changed the late 1960s and largely as a result of faculty yielding to this pressure of this 5 percent or whatever it was, was that people were not required to learn a common core of knowledge. By the way, I think people like Diane Ravitch are absolutely right about that, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who of course came from the opposite political thing. I think that they are absolutely right about the decline of common core knowledge. I think that the faculty of the late (19)60s and early (19)70s covered itself with disgrace by settling for this non-solution of dumbing down general humanities courses, telling students they could decide basically what they wanted to take, and there has been a swing the other way, but so much has been lost. So much has been lost in terms of what people have been not required to learn over the last 30 years, but I do not know if anything can ever-
SM (02:44:43):
It is a well-known fact-
SJ (02:44:44):
And computers have made it so much worse.
SM (02:44:46):
It is a well-known fact as I have experienced them myself, that students of the (19)60s would make demands within the university knowing that if those demands were met, they demand other things they could not demand, so nothing would ever please them. Do you think that kind of a mentality of that small percentage of activists who were really publicized highly by the media as the sample of the spokesman of the (19)60s?
SJ (02:45:07):
[Inaudible]
SM (02:45:07):
Has anything to do with the atmosphere that we had today, which was probably the same back then as not listening to each other, my way or the highway kind of mentality?
SJ (02:45:24):
Well, again, I think it is worse now beyond anything we could have imagined then. I do, in a way, I agree that the power of the quote activist was exaggerated. Look, I know a lot of these people who are thought to be flame-throwing activists. Some of them turned into extremely intelligent great scholars by the end of the 1970s. But I think what is going on now, I do not relate it in a direct line to the (19)60s at all. I cannot imagine, for instance, anybody like Sarah Palin even being listened to in the 1960s. When you think about who was the conservative political hero in the (19)60s, Barry Goldwater, if you think about him and Sarah Palin, just put them in the same frame for a second. If you want to see an example of the degeneration of political and intellectual culture, just see it. Barry Goldwater is a giant compared to Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is somebody who knows nothing and is proud of it. There were people like that in the (19)60s, but they were not proud of it. They even built careers out of it.
SM (02:46:45):
I had a couple quotes here and we will end on these quotes.
SJ (02:46:47):
Okay. I have got a spot for you because I am losing you.
SM (02:46:51):
You have a quote here. "The denigration of fairness has infected those political and intellectualized and is now produced a culture in which disproportionate influences exercised by the loud and relentless choices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another."
SJ (02:47:07):
More true now in the second year of Obama than it was when I wrote them in 2007. Sadly, one of the most bewildering things that that is happened is that Obama, forget about whether you agree with some of the things he does or not. Obama is clearly a man of reason. I think in many ways he got elected because people were sick of the dumbness of George Bush, but when people got him, the biggest criticism made of him is that he is too cerebral. He is out of touch with what ordinary people feel. I think undoubtedly Obama's great strength and weakness is that he is a reasonable man and I do not think he could really believe that so many of his countrymen are as unreasonable and irrational as they are. I think this could be fatal to him if he does not understand it that he is dealing with a lot of people who cannot be reasonable to [inaudible].
SM (02:48:05):
Would you also say, and I think you said this in your book that, in the 1960s, at least on college campuses, that someone came in from a different point of view, students will be there in numbers protesting-
SJ (02:48:16):
Absolutely.
SM (02:48:16):
And challenging us today. It is all like-minded people.
SJ (02:48:21):
Absolutely. It is all like-minded people who go to your like-minded people.
SM (02:48:26):
I got two more quotes and then we are going to end. I love this and it is in the introduction here. "In today's America, intellectuals and non-intellectual alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. The obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism."
SJ (02:48:47):
Yes, I agree with agree with that writer!
SM (02:48:52):
I got lot of quotes here and my last one here is you put Thomas Jefferson's quote at the very beginning. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
SJ (02:49:03):
That is right. Why do not they just replace "In God we trust" on the coins with "Ignorant and proud of it." I do not think, in this book, that you should neglect religion. Remember the big Time cover story in 1968, "God is dead". Well, that is a real big mistake we made in the 1960s and again, the whole fundamentalist upsurge was not something that the media and liberal intellectuals were aware of at all.
SM (02:49:35):
The Jerry Falwells of the world.
SJ (02:49:36):
Unfortunately, not only is God not dead, I would not care if He were alive for reasonable people, but a particularly unreasonable kind of God is not dead.
SM (02:49:43):
This is the last question. Boomers are now reaching 65, as you say, and the youngest ones ever getting towards 50. When boomers are long gone, what do you think the historians, people like yourself, sociologists, writers will say about this generation or better yet the period that they live? What do they say about them?
SJ (02:50:11):
Well, a lot of history will be a crock. It will depend on which history books they are reading. It will depend on whether they are reading my version of the (19)60s or Todd's version of the (19)60s or Bill Kristol's version of the (19)60s. It will depend to some extent on what they think, but I will tell you one thing, and I think about this a lot as a writer and as a scholar. There is one thing I can say for certain that getting any kind of a rounded picture of who our generation was is going to be much more difficult for a historian 50 years from now than it is for us to get a picture of people who were born in 1920 are. Why? We stopped writing letters in the 1960s. This is before the computer. We stopped writing letters when long distance phone rates went way down and we have stopped writing them almost all together. Since the advent of computers, there is very little record except for a video record of the inner lives of people of our generation. You can write an excellent history of what intellectuals and activists too in the 1930s were thinking. The record of what people were thinking except for those who actually wrote books stops around 1970. You will never find out, for example, what my life was like from reading my personal correspondence because I do not have any anymore because people stopped writing me back around 1975, and that is when I stopped writing. Email has done nothing about this. Email is a totally different, non-reflective, instrumental form of communication.
SM (02:51:57):
Wow, you are right on that.
SJ (02:51:59):
I think this is one of the most important things is we are never going to have any sense of what the inner life of this generation was like. Historians are going to find it very difficult.
SM (02:52:09):
We took students to see John Culver, the former senator from Iowa who was a close friend of Teddy Kennedy. This was back in the (19)90s, and he said, "Now that the interview's over, I want to take it back into my office". And he says, "I want you to look at these. Have you ever seen, these are letters, these are love letters between my mom and dad. Have you ever written a letter?" No. And we are talking (19)90s now, right? She was in the (19)90s, so it is love letters. Have you ever sent a love letter to your girlfriend or boyfriend? No. So John Culver is saying, "Just you look at these and see how beautiful they are." I am going to end with this.
SJ (02:52:46):
I am just about had it.
SM (02:52:47):
Yep. Barney Frank said at the very end, he wrote a book-
SJ (02:52:50):
I love Barney Frank.
SM (02:52:51):
In his book, Speaking Frankly, he said the Democratic party to survive must separate itself from George McGovern, like McGovernites, the anti-war people, all those people that were involved in those movements if it is to survive. Mr. Barney Frank is speaking frankly.
SJ (02:53:08):
What makes Barney Frank think anybody remembers George McGovern? That would be my question to him.
SM (02:53:13):
In his book in the (19)90s, speaking frankly though, he was not attacking it as a conservative, he was attacking it as a liberal, basically saying, if we are going to survive, we have to disassociate ourselves from those people that were in the counterculture and the people that supported George McGovern in (19)72.
SJ (02:53:31):
And just where does Barney think his place in the party looks to people who think that the Democratic party ought a disassociated itself from people like Barney Frank. I am sorry, he has really got a nerve. I love him.
SM (02:53:46):
Well that was (19)92 though, so anyway. Okay. Well, thank you.
(End of Interview)
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Susan Jacoby
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jacoby, Susan, 1945- ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Authors; Jacoby, Susan, 1945--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Susan Jacoby is an author and has written twelve books, including <em>The Age of American Unreason</em>. She is a graduate from Michigan University and she now lives in New York City, where she is the program director of the New York Branch of the Center for inquiry.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-09-10
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.69a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.69b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-03-14
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
173:52
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/334827401a45e221446f14b32fc959f1.jpeg
83fe4dc791c3a34e143f9a711354df7d
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/2168a95a663f9ced002e199d99e4889f.mp3
b43bd83558187ec001a4199b90cda78a
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js)
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Susan (Susan Lisa) Rosenberg, 1955-
Date of Interview
2011-05-31
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
224:48
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Susan Rosenberg is a far-left revolutionary, educator, author and advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. She was active in many radical movements and she lived as a fugitive for several years. She was eventually caught and sentenced to 58 years in prison. While in prison, she became a poet, author and AIDS activist. After her release, she continued her work as an anti-prison activist, and taught literature at various colleges. Rosenburg attended the progressive Walden School and later went to Barnard College."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13311,"3":{"1":1},"4":[null,2,4884200],"5":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"6":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"7":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"8":{"1":[{"1":2,"2":0,"5":[null,2,0]},{"1":0,"2":0,"3":3},{"1":1,"2":0,"4":1}]},"9":0,"10":2,"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Susan Rosenberg is a far-left revolutionary, educator, author and advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. She was active in many radical movements and she lived as a fugitive for several years. She was eventually caught and sentenced to 58 years in prison. While in prison, she became a poet, author and AIDS activist. After her release, she continued her work as an anti-prison activist and taught literature at various colleges. Rosenburg attended the progressive Walden School and later went to Barnard College.</span>
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country; Black Panthers; Attica Prison riot; The Midnight Special(newsletter); Abu Ghraib prison; Vietnam War; Generations; Cold War; Anti-War Movement; McCarthyism; Women's Rights Movement."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country; Black Panthers; Attica Prison riot; The Midnight Special(newsletter); Abu Ghraib prison; Vietnam War; Generations; Cold War; Anti-War Movement; McCarthyism; Women's Rights Movement.</span>
Subject LCSH
Left-wing extremists; Social justice; Civil rights workers; Political activists--United States; Prisoners—Civil rights; Rosenberg, Susan (Susan Lisa), 1955--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Susan Rosenberg
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Rosenberg, Susan (Susan Lisa), 1955- ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Left-wing extremists; Social justice; Civil rights workers; Political activists--United States; Prisoners—Civil rights; Rosenberg, Susan (Susan Lisa), 1955--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Susan Rosenberg is a far-left revolutionary, educator, author and advocate for social justice and prisoners' rights. She was active in many radical movements and she lived as a fugitive for several years. She was eventually caught and sentenced to 58 years in prison. While in prison, she became a poet, author and AIDS activist. After her release, she continued her work as an anti-prison activist and taught literature at various colleges. Rosenburg attended the progressive Walden School and later went to Barnard College.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2011-05-31
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.150a: McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.150b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
224:48