Interview with Dr. Maurice Isserman

Isserman, Maurice ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. Maurice Isserman, born in Hartford, Connecticut, is a professor at Hamilton College and an accomplished author. He got his Bachelor of Arts in History from Reed College and his Master of Arts in American History and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Dr. Isserman specializes in modern U.S. History, American radical movements, and global exploration and mountaineering.

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In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

145:25

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Maurice Isserman
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 26 May 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:06):
Testing one, two, testing. I will be checking this.

(00:00:13):
Could you tell us a little bit about your background? I have read about it in the web and everything, and what fascinates me is several things that I would like you to comment on. You had an Uncle Abraham who took you to the 1967 protest at the Pentagon, that was when they levitated.

MI (00:00:34):
Right.

SM (00:00:34):
I would like you to mention that experience and how important he was. And secondly, your college experiences when you were out in Portland. You were joining the Students for Democratic Society and becoming involved with the Portland experience.

MI (00:00:50):
Right. Well, I was born in 1951, so I am smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boom. And grew up in a small town in Connecticut, which was really not on the cultural or political cutting edge of the era. But I came from a family that was marked by, not one, but two dissenting traditions. One was on my father's side, well, he was Jewish. But in the case of my uncle and to an extent my father as well, influenced by participating in the Communist Party in the 1930s and thereafter. My father was not a communist, but he certainly was sympathetic. And on my mother's side, a Quaker background, she was the daughter of, and the sister of Quaker ministers. People are sometimes surprised to hear the Quakers have ministers, and in the East they tended not to, but in the Midwest, they do. So both of those traditions, I think were influences even before the 1960s, sort of picked me up and threw me in front of the on-rushing train of history. So in the summer of 1967, I was on an American Friends Service Committee work project in Indianapolis, which is where my uncle was a Quaker minister at the time. Bonnie Raitt was on that work project. She was not yet Bonnie Raitt, she was just a high school kid who played guitar. We sang a lot of folks songs that summer. That was high school kids doing good works kind of project, but it was also in that context, it was a lot more because it was the summer of Sergeant Pepper and we were these long- haired kids coming into conservative Indianapolis and getting involved in anti-war protests there, such as it was. I remember we had Vigil Hiroshima Day and reading and talking and thinking about stuff. On the project, that is why I read Michael Harrington's "The Other America" for the first time, and the "Autobiography of Malcolm X." So that was one influence. Then going into that fall, I had been in my first anti-war protest the previous spring in New York City, the spring mobilization, which knocked my socks off to be coming from a little town in Connecticut, to be suddenly marching with 300,000 people down to the United Nations from the Central Park and hearing Martin Luther King speak.

SM (00:03:51):
Wow.

MI (00:03:51):
I am getting my chronology all jumbled here.

SM (00:03:54):
But still those are-

MI (00:03:55):
So there was the spring mobilization, then there was the Summer of Love, which I happened to spend in Indianapolis with the AFSC. Then in the fall I went down to the Pentagon with Uncle Abe. My parents were not entirely on board with this going off to anti-war protests. But somehow because my uncle was taking me, it was... When I say my parents, in that case, my mother and stepfather. So with Abe escorting me, we marched from Washington to the side of the Pentagon. And of course what happened at the Pentagon was not part of the program, which was that there was somehow a line where the MPs were not strong or were not there at all. Somebody tore down a cyclone fence and suddenly 5,000 of us tore up the hillside, were right next to the Pentagon building. Abe, I did not come all the way up to the Pentagon with him, I kind of waved goodbye to him. I was there for several hours. And finally the MPs were picking off small groups of protestors. Actually I think it was federal marshals in this case. The MPs were just standing in a line. I was gassed and thrown down the embankment, then I walked back across the Arlington Bridge to Washington and to the hotel where my uncle was staying. I wrote an article about it, which you may have seen for the Chronicle, and said that all in all, it had been the best day of my life.

SM (00:05:33):
Was that your awakening, you were awakened by other things, but the true awakening, was that it?

MI (00:05:40):
Well, I am not sure. That seems a little melodramatic, but I was certainly awakening for several years there in the mid-(19)60s. Already by 1965, (19)66, I was flipping The Times religiously of articles about Vietnam. I remember Harrison Salisbury reports from Hanoi, which established for American readers for the first time, the fact that it was very heavy bombing of civilian neighborhoods going on in Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities. I would cut out these articles and put them up on my bedroom wall. So even before I was in the streets, I was increasingly aware of what was going on in Vietnam. Before that, the Civil Rights movement, which I had no direct participation in, but was sympathetic to. I mean, I remember watching in 1963, the March on Washington was broadcast live, and I watched King give his speech. We would get Life Magazine every week and there were these pictures of Sheriff Price and the other officers in Philadelphia, Mississippi who had kidnapped Schwerner, Cheney, Goodman. They were sitting at their trial, big fat stereotypical southern sheriffs, laughing and chewing tobacco. I knew which side I was on that one. Then it being the (19)60s, listening to the Beatles and all that was going into the mix. So by 1967, awakening, yes, I was certainly awakened, although I do not think any single event is key. I was also working at my teenage identity and establishing independence issues, going into New York or going down to Washington on my own was a way of showing my parents that I could take care of myself. In 1968, I graduated from high school in June, I am not sure the exact dates, but June 14th, let us say. That night got on a train to go down to Washington for Solidarity Day. King had been assassinated in the spring. The SCLC was calling for people to come down in solidarity with the Poor People's Movement, Resurrection City, the shanties built around the reflecting pool on the mall. So I told my parents I wanted to go down, support this, and they thought, okay, big public March in favor of poor people. What was so bad about that? So I took the train down overnight and took part in the demonstration and then wound up hanging out with the Resurrection City people for the next week, which had not been part of my parents' plan at all. I had some friends in Washington, so I stayed with them. So every day there were marches, I remember Jesse Jackson leading a march to the Department of Agriculture so I was going along. Of course, I was sort of an imposter. I was not a poor person, but in solidarity. Then the announcement was made the next day, a week after I had arrived that the feds were going to close down Resurrection City, that they had had enough of this festering mess in the middle of the Capitol.

SM (00:09:28):
Because it was raining too, was not it?

MI (00:09:29):
It was raining, it was muddy and so forth. So I called up my parents and I said, "I am going to go get arrested tomorrow." And they said, "No, you are not, you are coming home." I said, "No, this is what I got to do." First time I ever hung up on my parents. So I went down to spend the last night at Resurrection City. I went to the main gate and they said, "Well, have you been staying here are you a registered poor person protestor?" And I said, " No, just a supporter." They said, "Well, you cannot come in." So I had my knapsack and I walked down the fence and I propped myself under a tree preparing to spend the night there. It was Washington in June at this point. Somebody looked over the fence and said, "Hey kid, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, I wanted to get in, but they would not let me in." They said, "Oh, here." So they took me through a gap in the fence or something, and they took me to their little shanty. It turned out this was a Blackstone Ranger, which was a notorious Chicago Street gang, which I probably read about it in one of the books for the AFSC, except they were enlisted in the cause of the Poor People's March. So I spent the last night of Resurrection City in a shanty with a bunch of Blackstone Rangers, which is not the kind of company that most suburban kids from Connecticut actually might spend any time with.

SM (00:10:57):
Oh, no.

MI (00:10:58):
They were very pleasant. The next morning we all had breakfast and marched off to the Capitol and demonstrated on the Capitol grounds and were arrested, because it was illegal to demonstrate on the Capitol grounds, and was sentenced to seven days in jail, sent off to a minimum-security prison in Virginia. It was great. It was like an all-day-long political seminar, sitting out on the grass talking with Civil Rights veterans, singing freedom songs with this whole stock of freedom songs. Was talking about nonviolence versus violence and all kinds of issues [inaudible] the movement at the time, eating better than we did when I went off to college the next September, food in prison was much better. So I thought it was this great experience. When I came back and my parents lionized me because I made this heroic sacrifice on behalf of the poor, which they had forbidden me to do, but they knew I survived it.

SM (00:11:59):
How long were you in jail?

MI (00:12:00):
Seven days. But it was like this great adventure. What was I? Summer of 1968, I was 17 years old, turned 17 in March. Then I went off to college in the fall of (19)68. So of all times to go off to college. I had gone to England that summer for a month, which was my reward for graduating school, with a friend and his family, and hooked up with the British Left. So I met Tariq Ali, who-

SM (00:12:35):
Oh yeah, he has written several. I got a couple of his books.

MI (00:12:39):
Led the demonstrations against the American Embassy of Grosvenor Square, which took place in the previous spring when I was not there. Traveled around London, went to several demonstrations I guess about the war. But then while I was there, the Soviet Union invaded, or the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia. The British New Left, as well as a lot of Czech students who were studying in London, were of course outraged. And so there were three nights of demonstrations in the London streets marching on the Soviet Embassy and the Czech students waving the Czech flags. So when I hear charges that the New Left was pro-Soviet, [inaudible] demonstrations, which was clearly anti-imperialist, whether imperialism was our own or the Soviet version. I also was impressed by the London bobbies, and this was a pretty anarchistic crew that was turning out. This was the summer of (19)68. It was after the May (19)68 riots. So people were pretty in the streets and they were not throwing things, but they were truly not obeying the traffic laws. The London bobbies would remove people, but do it quite gently without guns and billy clubs, so it was a model of good crowd control.

SM (00:14:18):
Did you happen to see at the Pentagon in (19)67, the guy that burned himself to death? Were you aware that there was a man there that did it and he did it with McNamara looking out the window?

MI (00:14:29):
Yeah, but that was earlier. That was Norman. What was his name?

SM (00:14:34):
Was that another protest?

MI (00:14:35):
Yeah, he did that as an individual protest and that was a 1965.

SM (00:14:40):
Okay. Yeah.

MI (00:14:41):
Norman Morrison. I was certainly aware that that had happened, but it was on a different occasion.

SM (00:14:49):
Right. You have written some unbelievable books, of course, the one in the (19)60s, but what did you learn from all of your research on the war between the New Left of the (19)60s and the (19)70s?

MI (00:15:10):
Okay. Well, in "America Divided," and when I lecture to students about the era, I make a number of points. One is that although it seemed like all the thunder was on the left in the 1960s, we remember the decade in terms of a series of iconic images connected to Civil Rights protests, anti-war protests, counterculture. The decade also has to be seen as the seed time of a conservative revival that would dominate American politics for the remainder of the 20th and be certainly the beginning of the 21st century, starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and the George Wallace insurgency within the Democratic Party, the rise of a right-wing populist reaction to particularly the Civil Rights, but also to counterculture and the anti-war protests. It was not something that was apparent to me at the time, but looking back, it was obvious that as significant, if not more significant than the left-wing story of the (19)60s is the right-wing story of the 1960s. Ever since, the (19)60s have been a touchpoint, as you suggest, for conservatives who are nostalgic for what they imagine to be the stability and order and morality of the patriotism of pre-1960 America, which I think is a construct. It is a Golden Age, and it is a myth, but it is a powerful argument. I mean, in fact, the 1950s were certainly not a Golden Age if you were Black in America. If you had not had the insurgencies in the 1960s, you would still be having Jim Crow society. So you cannot simply look back and say, "Oh, it was all terrible." But the problem with that right-wing argument is that the forces for the dissolution of the family, or for new family structures to emerge were already coming into place in the 1950s. Moreover, they were not restricted to the United States. If you look at single parent families and so on and so forth, any kind of social parameter you want to use, this is something that is across the industrial democratic West, and even to Eastern Europe as well, which did not have a (19)60s. But these are changes that are somehow connected to, and we do not yet have, not far enough away from it to have a satisfactory historical explanation, but something with modernity, something with what has been happening in industrial and post-industrial society, certainly the decline in the birth rate. The Baby Boom itself is an aberration. That temporary expansion of marriage rates, lowering of the age of marriage, increase in the number of children per family, and so on and so forth, which we now take as the norm is an aberration from well over a century of just the opposite, that women were getting married at older ages, having fewer children and so forth, stretching back into the 19th century. Then for particular historical reasons in certain places, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you see this Baby Boom phenomenon. Again, it is illusory to see that as somehow being the norm. So powerful cultural forces were coming along and were going to change the family. One of the most important reasons why the family has changed is because of the decline in real wages for industrial workers. When you had a secure, stable, industrial base in this country where a male breadwinner could support a family, then you could have women stay at home and be primary childcare providers and cook a hot meal every night that the whole family sat down to eat. Once that is removed starting in the late 1960s and for the last four decades, you see a decline in real wages means women go out to work. If women go out to work, it means that first of all, they have more financial independence so they can contemplate getting a divorce if they are in an unsatisfactory marriage. It also means you are not going to have the Betty Crocker kind of housewives that you had in the 1950s. Families are going to not eat together. They are going to eat more fast food. I mean, the obesity epidemic is probably a byproduct of this. So it is a really complex mix that has something to do with the cultural insurgencies and the counterculture, the 1960s. But only something. I was just reading a piece in the New York Times the other day that pointed out that teenage birth rates, a single parent, unmarried teenage women having babies are much higher in the red states than they are in the blue states. That has something to do with the availability of abortion. There might be more pregnancies in the blue states, but they are not being carried to term. But it has also something to do with the availability of contraception. All you have to do is look at Sarah Palin's daughter, who's now going around as an advocate of teen abstinence.

SM (00:21:34):
She did not do it.

MI (00:21:35):
Well, not really a role model for that. So it is not simply decadent places like Berkeley and Cambridge and New York City where cultural patterns have changed. It is precisely in places where you still have, at least this kind of strong norm for church, family, patriarchal authority, where in fact, the family structure breakdown is most evident, at least as measured by teen pregnancies. So it is a bogus argument.

SM (00:22:13):
It is interesting too; the Boomers for years have said that we are the largest generation in American history. We are not anymore. There are more Millennials now than there ever were Boomers. There is a brand-new book on, I was perusing through it, and it states that it is very difficult to state the exact number of Boomers, anywhere from 74 to 78, but they do know that there are close to 80 to 81 million Millennials now. So to say that Boomers are the large generation of American history isn't true.

MI (00:22:51):
Well, that might have something to do with immigration.

SM (00:22:53):
Yes, you are probably right there too. Obviously, I have interviewed a lot of people and a lot of them give their reasons, but I put down six here, but I would like your thoughts on these. What event in your eyes was the number one reason with respect to why the Vietnam War ended? And here is the six that I am listing. Tet. Number two, Kent State and Jackson State in 1970. Tet was in (19)68. Number three, when middle America, like Ohio, their sons were coming home in body banks. Number four, funding was cut off by Congress. Number five, student protests on college campuses, major effect. And number six, the wrong military strategy.

MI (00:23:40):
Number one, in a broader sense, which is to say that the war was never winnable. I mean, you could annihilate all Vietnamese, you could drop atomic bombs, but you could never build a stable South Vietnamese government there. The material simply was not there to do it. If you did not win politically, did not matter what you did militarily. The Vietnamese were not going anywhere, it was their country. They knew, just like the Americans knew in 1776, that eventually the British would get tired and go home, which was also the Confederate strategy in 1861, except in that case, the North was closer to the South. They were neighbors. But we were not neighbors to Vietnam, so we were never going to win. You could stretch it out, you could increase the number of amount of bloodshed, but at some point, there was going to become a breaking point. Tet was the symbolic breaking point, because thereafter, American people as a whole decided that it simply was not worth fighting in Vietnam. The only way you could fight in Vietnam, as Richard Nixon discovered, was by saying, we were fighting to get out as to say of this Vietnamization program, in fighting for peace with honor, we want to get back our POWs, which was a sort of self-reinforcing rationale for the war, because the longer you fought, the more POWs there were to get back. But in the end, that too was going to run out as a rationale for the war. American people after 1968 simply did not believe the game was worth the candle. Nixon and Kissinger understood that too. This is not a secret. They have this new revisionist history about how we were really winning after 1969. Well, that would have been news to Nixon and Kissinger, who on a number of occasions in the secret White House tapes said, "We cannot win this. We know we cannot win this. We are stretching it out. We want to pass it on. We want the collapse to come after we are out of office. We want a decent interval between the final withdrawal of American troops and the collapse of the Saigon regime." In 1972, they almost lost it. American troops had been wound down. It was only by a massive air expansion of the Air War, bringing the B52s from Guam, that a South Vietnamese route was halted in the summer of 1972 offensive. Two years later signed the Paris Peace Accords, or actually January (19)73, signing the Paris Peace Accords. At that point, even that air offensive was no longer politically possible. So in 1975, when the North Vietnamese again on the offensive, the entire house of cards collapses. When Nixon and Kissinger agreed that both sides would keep their forces in place, they signed South Vietnam's death warrant. Again, you could prolong it if Congress said, "Yeah, here, take another $500 billion, rush aid to South Vietnam." Maybe the final collapse would have come in 1977 instead of 1975, but there was no way it was going to be [inaudible]. So again, that is a long way of saying that, yes, Tet was the most important turning point because at that point, realization dawned on the American people that this was not World War II all over again. There was not a satisfactory narrative that it was going to end in American victory. And it was only a question of how and when we get out, and how many more American lives would be squandered. In the case of Nixon, it could have spared 20,000 American lives and a million Vietnamese lives. The peculiar thing is that if Nixon had simply come into office in 1969 and said, "I would like to win in Vietnam, we all would. But my predecessors have so screwed up everything that we are just going to go to the peace table when we are going to get out," he would have been a hero. He would have been politically invulnerable in the same way that he was when he went to China. No Democrat could open the door to China, but Richard Nixon could have-

SM (00:28:10):
You are right.

MI (00:28:10):
...could have used to get that Communist credentials. And had he done that, there would have been no Watergate, because Watergate was a direct outgrowth of his desire to keep fighting the war, expanding the war in terms of the Air War secretly, while pretending to the American people that the war was winding down. The plumbers were created to fix the leaks in the State Department. That was where the first illegal wiretaps were on the state department's personnel to see who was leaking information about the secret bombing of Cambodia. So Nixon would have gone down in history as the great unifier, the great peacemaker, no Watergate scandal, but instead, he decided he was going to prolong the war for whatever reason.

SM (00:28:58):
What was amazing about him as a person who was... I am only three years older than you are, and what is amazing is that I was in college at the time, what I considered the arrogance of Richard Nixon, that even though he may have been trying to Vietnamization process and have the peace talks and all the other things, he boldly said that no protestor is ever going to influence me.

MI (00:29:26):
Right.

SM (00:29:27):
No one protesting. And he was referring to college students, but I think he, he is referring to more than that, I think anybody. And that was just pure arrogance, was not it?

MI (00:29:35):
Right. But it also was not true because they were very aware of protests. And when he overlooked that with the invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970, that was the last time he used American ground forces to expand the war. He had suddenly understood the limits of his mandate because that strike in May 1970, I mean, again, the Vietnamese won the war in Vietnam, and it had nothing to do with protests at home. If there had been no protest... That had nothing to do with protests at home. If there had been no protests at home, the war still would have been lost for the U.S. However, it did set some constraints on policy. That strike in 1970 is significant because it was not simply places like Harvard and Wisconsin and Michigan and Berkeley that went on strike. It was places like Kent State, which is a commuter school, a working-class school, in the middle of Ohio in the heartland. It was places like Notre Dame, Catholic colleges, Southern colleges, community colleges, even some of the service academies. The Merchant Marine Academy had a protest. It was the entire younger generation in college that was rejecting war, and a lot of other people in addition, and Nixon never risked that again. Even though basically after the spring of 1970, the anti-war movement continued, it was never as powerful again. The protests between 1967 and May of 1970 created a specter of what could happen if you escalated before.

SM (00:31:22):
I am hearing something. You had been very critical of the current Students for a Democratic Society. I know several students at my former school that are in the current SDS, that they glorify the extreme radicals of that particular period, the Bernardine Dohrns, the Mark Rudds, the Bobby Seales. I find that interesting because there is truth to that, because I just got back from Kent State after being there four days. The main speakers were Bobby Seale, Bernardine Dohrn. Mark Rudd, though, I will say about Mark Rudd...

MI (00:31:59):
Mark is very self-critical. I brought to Mark speak here.

SM (00:32:00):
Yeah. I like Mark. He admits he was wrong and he admits that they destroyed a good thing, which was SDS. Sometimes Bobby is confusing, because Bobby says real good things. I do not see the anger in him anymore, but I do see the... what is the word here? He defends that they were not violent in any way. Bernardine Dohrn, to me, has never said anything to apologize for what has been done.

MI (00:32:30):
No. She has forgotten nothing and learned nothing.

SM (00:32:32):
Yeah. Well, your thoughts on why. Kent State was very important, because you had Alan Canfora there and Chic Canfora, and they were students that experienced it, and some of the more radical students at Kent State. They were there when all this happened. Just your observations on why that group is being idealized more than any others by some of the younger anti-war activists today.

MI (00:33:02):
Well, that is a big question. I think people are drawn to iconic figures. Angela Davis, say, or Bobby Seale, would have a great appeal. They are appealing public personalities in a way that say David Harris is not, or he has not chosen to play that role. One of the things I talked about in my (19)60s seminar is the leaders who chose not to be leaders in the 1960s. One of them is a Hamilton alum. Bob Moses is a critical person in the history of the (19)60s, the Freedom Summer.

SM (00:33:55):
He is the math guy too, isn't he?

MI (00:33:59):
Yes, and spoke at the first SDS anti-war march, and the people of 1965 knew. Really a central figure, who pulled out of the movement and went into self-imposed exile for a while. It was a draft business, but I do not think he felt comfortable in the way that the movement was developing. He was not a Stokely Carmichael. John Lewis, another person. Nobody was as important in the history of the civil rights movement as John Lewis, from the Freedom Rights to the march on Washington in (19)63 to the marches in Selma and in Montgomery, leading the march across the bridge. Lewis pulled out. I mean, he was displaced as SNCC chairman by Stokely Carmichael, but he did not try to out-militant Stokely Carmichael. That would have been difficult. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement...

SM (00:35:00):
Mario Savio.

MI (00:35:00):
...Mario Savio, he continued to be politically engaged, but he pulled out of leadership. He had some problems. I just read a biography.

SM (00:35:10):
Oh, I have read it too. It is a great biography.

MI (00:35:12):
It is a very good bio.

SM (00:35:13):
Robert Cohen, I believe.

MI (00:35:14):
Robert Cohen. There were all kinds of interesting, thoughtful people who simply did not fit in with and could not bring themselves to do the celebrity militant politics of the late (19)60s. What we are left with in terms of public memory are the people who did not have a problem with that, people who were not self-doubting in any sense and have these big extroverted personalities and egos to match, and who are happy to offer themselves up to the later generations as the model (19)60s radical. One of my problems with the idea of creating a new SDS was who in SDS were they looking to as leaders. Not the ones, in my mind, who exemplified the best of the movement, but actually those who killed the movement, who killed SDS, as Mark Rudd says. The second problem with the idea of a new SDS is that the essence of SDS, the reason SDS took off, was because it looked back at previous left-wing movements, and some of these kids were coming out of red-diaper-baby backgrounds. Some of them were coming out of pink-diaper-baby backgrounds, Socialist Party backgrounds. They said, "What came before does not suit us anymore. We have to do something new." SDS grew out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Well, what did the League for Industrial Democracy mean to young people at the start of the 1960s? It meant nothing. Industrial democracy meant nothing. They brilliantly renamed themselves as Students for a Democratic Society, which did mean something, and they [inaudible] their own statement, which owed nothing, owed little, to previous left-wing manifestos or ideas. They brilliantly recreated a Left that was relevant to their era and their generation, unlike SDS, which is a brand name. Yes, who would not want to belong to SDS? I would like to belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, but they had their moment in the past. I thought there was an irony involved in paying homage to SDS by doing something very un-SDS-like.

SM (00:37:42):
With Mark, did you talk about that in the class?

MI (00:37:49):
We did talk about that, yeah.

SM (00:37:50):
I interviewed Mark on the phone, then I had dinner with him at the conference. We spent some time together and then the rest of the time, as soon as Bernardine and that group came in, I kind of distanced myself. He has an intellectual, and he likes intellectual conversations. When I interviewed him, he said, "I do not want these fluffy questions. I want something where I can deeply think about it." He is the real deal. He is the real deal, and with respect, he has done some deep thinking about the mistakes that were made. He really admits he is wrong and it destroyed something that he loved deeply, which was SDS.

MI (00:38:27):
Kathy Wilkerson's book is good.

SM (00:38:29):
I have it. I have not read it.

MI (00:38:31):
It is good. I mean, there is problems with it. There is a disconnect at a certain point between her actions. It is hard to see from the book how she changed so dramatically. She came out of Quaker background as well, as did actually quite a number of people in the Weathermen. Jeff Jones, coming out Southern California, I think he had a Quaker-ish background or a pacifist background.

SM (00:39:05):
Well, I know that Thomas Powers wrote the book on Diana Oughton. I have the book, because she is one of the three that died. She was actually the girlfriend of Harris, who ended up marrying Bernardine Dohrn. Not Harris. He wrote a book too.

MI (00:39:24):
Bill Ayers.

SM (00:39:27):
Bill Ayers, yeah, President Obama's friend. I did not realize how close they were.

MI (00:39:32):
Oh, yeah.

SM (00:39:32):
Boyfriend and girlfriend. Okay, we are pretty close to the first half here. How did the New Left of the (19)60s differ from the old left of the (19)30s and the (19)40s? I know personally from what I have read, but what were the defining characteristics in a generation of 74 million? What was the New Left? How did they differ? I say this because I mentioned Mark and how he talked about how he read Che Guevara and these were important ideas. It was all about ideas. When he talked about Mario Savio at the Free Speech Movement, he said, "We are about ideas. We are not about just being here for the corporations. The bottom line, the university's about ideas." The Old Left was more about just pure politics, was not it?

MI (00:40:33):
Well, it was about ideas too, when they were reading their Marx and Lenin. There are a number of crucial differences. One is that the Old Left looked to the industrial proletariat as the agent of social change, so workers organizing around their economic interests would inevitably, through a scientific process that could not be stopped, come to realize their interests were in opposition to that of the employers and eventually they would make a revolution, whether peaceful or violent. People dispute it, but inevitably they would turn to Socialism and seize control of the means of production. That was their idea of who the agent of change was. In the 1960s, the agent of change was young people themselves. Instead of youth organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, being the affiliates of adult organizations, which had always been the pattern ...the Socialist Party had the Young People's Socialist League, the Communist Party had the Young Communist League, the League for Industrial Democracy had the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Instead of seeing themselves as the affiliate supporting this adult project, rather, they said ...C. Wright Mills famously wrote in a letter to the New Left, "Look around the world. Who is in motion? Who is demanding change? It is young people," young intellectuals, young workers and so forth, so there was a generational cast to their politics. "We are people of this generation, uncomfortably inhabiting a world we did not make," something like that. It is the opening lines of the Port Huron Statement. That was one thing. The other thing was organizational. The Old Left was hierarchical. In the case of the Communist Party, it was hierarchical and authoritarian. In the case of the Socialist Party it was more democratic, but still there were national chairs and presidential candidates and so on and so forth. The New Left developed a much more ultra-democratic, unto anarchistic ... not in the violent sense but in the sense of being distrustful of all authority, even authority within their own organizations ...which created a very different movement, a very localized movement. A movement, again, without a formal hierarchy, which had a lot of strengths at times, and also made for an impermanent movement and also opened up the movement for infiltration by people like the Progressive Labor Party, who had their own agenda. Ironically, being ultra-democratic meant that the authoritarians could sneak in the back door. That too, in the sense of who was the agent of social change and what was the correct proper organizational strategy, the New Left was fundamentally different than what had come before.

SM (00:43:57):
I know I see it in the current SDS at my university before I retired, is it takes forever to make a decision.

MI (00:44:04):
All process. Process.

SM (00:44:05):
Oh, it is all process, process. Everybody's got to be included. Well, they never make any decisions. That is frustrating.

MI (00:44:12):
Well, that is where it can lead. It is not an adult form of organization. There is a famous story about SDS had projects called the ERAP, Economic-something-something Action Project. One of the projects... I think it was in Cleveland... spent 24 hours debating whether it should take a day off from work to go to the beach. For young people, who have endless amounts of time and patience for that kind of thing, it is a good form of organization. For grownups, that drives you crazy.

SM (00:44:50):
Yeah. Actually, I was driving a few students crazy to join. They did not know. I think they were remembering the history or studying the history.

MI (00:44:59):
Well, there is a third element, and that is I think the pacifist movement was actually very influential in a number of ways. Not that by the end of the 1960s the New left was pacifist. Increasingly it was turning not to violence but at least to the rhetoric of violence, violent imagery and Black Panthers. The notion of a prefigurative politics, that is to say that your movement should embody the values that you hope to create in a new society, came out the pacifist movement. It came out of groups like the Catholic Worker, but others as well. I think was very influential and shaped, particularly in the mid (19)60s, SDS. You see that.

SM (00:45:46):
Hold that line. Hold that line. Very good.

MI (00:45:56):
We were talking about the impacts of the pacifist movement. You see that kind of prefigurative politics, that your movement itself should embody a more harmonious, a more humane, a more communal atmosphere. That is why these kind of campus takeovers, building takeovers, were so important, because at a place like Columbia, for the five days before the police stormed in, the occupied buildings themselves became a kind of model of what a university could be or what a decent society could be. Of course there was a lot of silliness and utopianism and so on and so forth, but it was an interesting moment. If only the world could be like that.

SM (00:46:49):
You talked about there is two different qualities and I am going to address them now, the issue of healing and the issue of trust or lack thereof. You mentioned that in the New Left, that they did not trust anybody. When you look at the generation as a whole, there is a perception out there that the generation, whether they were involved or not, just did not trust anybody in positions of leadership or responsibility, whether it be a university president as a college student, anybody in leadership roles, whether it be a church or synagogue. Because I know my fellow students at SUNY Binghamton did not trust anybody in the religious community, the corporate community, the university community or the political community. They did not trust anybody in leadership roles.

MI (00:47:32):
Right.

SM (00:47:32):
Do you see that as a major characteristic of the boomer generation overall, and by having that characteristic, it is transferred into their lives over the last 60 years and maybe into their children and into their grandchildren, and is that good?

MI (00:47:52):
I do not know if it is good, but it is certainly a fact. It is a fact. I mean, they were taught that by Lyndon Johnson, and they were taught that by Richard Nixon. The publication of the Pentagon Papers and publication of the Watergate transcripts demonstrated the absolute chasm between the public rationale and justification for issues as important as war and peace and what the private position of the policymakers were. John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense, writes a memo to Robert McNamara and lists statistically... very significant because statistics were the end-all and be-all of the McNamara defense fund... he gives a statistical breakdown of the reasons we were fighting in Vietnam. "Why are we fighting in Vietnam? It is 80 percent to protect our reputation as a guarantor, that is for credibility, 10 percent because we do not want the Red Chinese to take over South Vietnam, and 10 percent because we want the people of South Vietnam to have a free, democratic form of government," which inverted the public rationale, which is like fighting the Nazis, that we are fighting for democracy and free French, and so on and so forth. The lesson was taught, not just to the baby boomers but to their parents as well, that people in Washington would lie to you. At the start of the 1960s, public opinion polls, the Gallup poll or whatever, would ask every year, "Can you trust people in Washington to do the right thing?" 75, 85 percent of Americans, said, "Yeah, you can trust that." "How about corporations?" "Oh, yeah." At the end of the decade, you could not get 30 percent of people to believe that, because they had been through Vietnam, they had been through Watergate. There was a massive collapse in the legitimacy of institutions and leaders, which in one way was a healthy skepticism. You know, you should not trust what public authorities tell you if you do not verify. Trust but verify, as Ronald Reagan once said. On the other hand, I think it also bred a deep cynicism about politics. "Well, if they are all so corrupted they are all liars anyway, the hell of it. I just will not participate." The other thing you see is not only the number of people who trust people in Washington goes down, but voter participation drops down to 50 percent or below. I think by the mid 1970s, it is every election. Richard Nixon wins a landslide election in 1972, but about 10 percent fewer voters are participating than took part in the election 10 years earlier. That was one of the real legacies of the 1960s. That is bounced back a little. One of the interesting things about the Obama campaign is the involvement of young people and really the political participation of young people, which is always lower than that for older people [inaudible] sustained.

SM (00:51:09):
No one believes anybody in Washington today. What is interesting is that the boomer generation, whether they were protestors or not protestors, had I think an attitude that we are going to bring peace to the world. We are going to be different than any other generation, that we are going to end racism, sexism, homophobia. We are going to ... I forget the name of the book. Panacea, this book that we had to read in grad school. Basically, this generation was going to change things. It does not seem to have changed anything. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse. The question is, has the boomer generation as a generation been a failure in terms of their idealism, their hopes and dreams?

MI (00:52:00):
Well, I think it has changed tremendous amounts culturally, if not always politically. I tell my students, "Whatever your politics are, Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative, you would not like the 1950s. You would feel really out of place in the 1950s at the level of the assumption that this was a white society. Blacks are simply invisible. Go back and read Life Magazine. Try and find blacks in the advertisements or in the news stories. The expectations about women's roles." If you go back and read the Smith or Wellesley yearbooks for the late 1950s, they would list all the people who had their, "Mrs. degree," or the number of people who were pinned or who already married, as they were going out into the world at the age of 22. The notion that women would have a career was simply not thought of, so the kind of double standard in sex and sexuality. In many ways, we are a freer, better, more egalitarian, more humane society as a result of the changes that began in the 1960s, that Rand Paul gets shellacked because he says, "I am not sure I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act." Americans might be anti-government and they might be free marketeers and all that, but the idea that a restaurant owner could discriminate on the basis of race is simply no longer possible to sustain. If you cross that line, you get slapped down, as he did. I would have to say that the (19)60s changed an enormous amount in that, in that disillusionment that followed Vietnam and Watergate, there was a disillusionment with government, and that worked against liberals and that worked against the Left. That worked against the Democrats because the Democrats are the party of government, so people did not simply conclude that government was bad because it lied us into Vietnam and could not win in Vietnam. It generalized, that the government is bad no matter what it tries to do. Regulation is bad. Workplace safety regulation is bad. Glenn Beck says fascism grew out of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, so progressivism is the beginning of fascism. I mean, you could not possibly have sold that idea at the start of the 1960s. When people thought about big government, they thought about the New Deal and Social Security and workers' rights to organize and so on and so forth. Once that idea of government as benevolent and competent was tarnished in the 1960s, it allowed the Reagan Revolution to establish a new common wisdom, which was the government's not the solution to problems, government is the problem.

SM (00:55:26):
Yeah. Then one thing when you talk about the Free Speech Movement in (19)64, (19)65 in Berkeley, when you talk about the students demanding to be part of the governance of the university and getting a better understanding of the money coming in and the money going out, the donations and everything, this link to the corporate world was talked about at Berkeley in (19)64, (19)65. You even see Clark Kerr, in a major speech he gives about the corporate, the multiversity and everything. Students at that time were coming in saying, "I do not want to be that IBM person."

MI (00:56:03):
The knowledge factory.

SM (00:56:04):
Yeah, the knowledge factory. You had that happening in the 1960s, and yet today... and that is the beginning of the Research Institute too. I interviewed Arthur Chickering, who wrote Education and Identity, the great scholar who was the Seven Vectors of Development. Integrity was the seventh one. I interviewed him. My degrees are in higher ed, and I basically said, "Is there anything about the universities today that you criticize?" He said, "Yes, that the universities are again under the control of the corporations." That scares him. Correct me if I am wrong, because someone I interviewed said that when you have universities and corporations in control, you have fascism.

MI (00:56:54):
That seems like an exaggeration.

SM (00:56:58):
That the ideas are being controlled from outside rather than inside.

MI (00:57:03):
Well, universities have sort of returned to a credentialing industry for career advancement. I mean, even in the (19)60s, many more people were business majors than [inaudible] history majors. One of the things on which the 1960s protests depended was this sense, that was not universal at the time, that economic prosperity was a permanent fact in American life, that things were going to get better and better. If you talked about poverty, you talked about poverty thinking it is terrible that these people are not sharing the general affluence. "We are a really affluent society. Why cannot everybody have access to it?" If you are a kid in college, you can think, "Well, I do not have to rush towards the degree." First of all, college is very cheap. I got out of college without any debt whatsoever. We were not from a wealthy family by any means, but what was my tuition, $2,000 a year or something? You could take time off, you could drop out, you could experiment, you could go into public service, you could be a schoolteacher or whatever. You did not have to go think of yourself as being a hedge fund manager so you can pay back your college debts. The underpinnings of that economic prosperity collapsed in the late (19)60s and the start of the 1970s with the energy crisis, stagflation, declining real wages and deindustrialization, none of which were thought of as possibilities at the start of the 1960s, but which became the economic reality through the 1970s and thereafter. Much greater instability, a much greater sense of, "You really need to buckle down, because it is a rat race out there." The number of history majors goes down and down and down, and the number of people going to take classes that they think will get them jobs with a hedge fund just goes up and up and up. I forget what the starting point for this question was. Oh, so the state of the university today. Well, I teach at what is a little outpost of the declining ideal of the liberal arts. Very few students. There are millions of college students, but probably 5 percent of them go to colleges like Hamilton, which is not vocational. I mean, you cannot take a business administration... I mean, you cannot take a business administration. You can take economics, which is what a lot of them do. You know where the ideal is, you are going to be schooled to be a better person, a better citizen, a better thinker. Where most of your teachers are tenured or tenured track. You are not being taught by adjuncts. It is a four-year residential program. I mean, that just does not describe the 95 percent of the college and university student population today. Hamilton used to be the norm. It is no longer that. It is a relic and we know that. And even at Hamilton, I am probably part of the last generation to enjoy the benefits of being a tenured faculty member at a place like Hamilton, where life isn't so bad. At least, I remind myself it is better than working in a coal mine.

SM (01:00:59):
I went to Harper College, Arts and Sciences there. I identified more with Harper College, within the school of Binghamton University, than anything. This is the other very important question I wanted to ask. Let me preface this by saying that, in 1995, I took a group of students to Washington DC to meet the late Senator Edmund Muskie, who was part of our Leadership On the Road programs. He had not been well, and we were still able to secure him through Gaylord Nelson, at the Wilderness Society. Took 14 students down there and they came up with the questions. And one of the questions was, they had looked at 1968, they knew he was the vice-presidential Democrat, running mate with Hubert Humphrey. The nation at that time looked like it was coming apart. The nation was torn apart with assassinations that year with the terrible confrontations in the streets of Chicago. The president withdrawing from the race. And then of course, looking at the (19)60s and all the other things going on. But the question is, "Is this generation going to its grave, the boomer generation, comparable to the Civil War generation, that went to its grave not healing, due to all the unbelievable divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who are against the war, supported the troops or against the troops?" It comes down to a lot of things. I even add on here, through the interviews that I have had with people, the divisions also included, certainly between Native Americans and white people and Latinos and the hard hats against the college protestors. The list goes on and on. I will tell you what Senator Muskie said in response to that question, "What is your question? Do you worry that this generation of 74 to 78 million, maybe they do not have a problem, but that they are going to go to their graves without healing from all these divisions because the division still exist?"

MI (01:03:13):
Well, interesting. I guess healing is not a word I would use, as if growing up is a therapeutic process. I would say that the significant portion of that generation was indelibly marked by the 1960s. My politics, whatever year we are in, 2010 are not my politics in 1968 or 1970. But you can certainly see the influence on the way I understand the world, on the way I understand personal responsibility and the morality. All those things are affected by the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Civil War, people voted as a shot. So for the next 40 years, American politics were dominated by that Civil War generation, north and south, and the political allegiances and conclusions that they drew on the basis of the experience of living through that kind of war. We lived through a war too. Now, oftentimes I will ask my students, "What did your parents do in the 1960s?" Actually depressingly, increasingly, their parents were not alive or were just very young during the 1960s. But when I could ask that question with reasonable assurance that their parents were my contemporaries, sometimes they would call home and say, "What did you do in the (19)60s?" And their parents would say, "Well, I missed the (19)60s. [inaudible] nursing school or I had a young child at home. Or I got married at 21. Or I was living in Dubuque and we did not have the (19)60s until the (19)70s." So one wants to avoid generalizing too much about that experience. Some people simply sailed through it. Most people are not involved in public affairs. It is not important to them. It might, every four years, sort of attract their attention, but most people are focused on home and family and relationships and work and so on and so forth. But for those of us who were involved one way or the other, on one side or another, went to Vietnam or protested against Vietnam, sometimes those are the same people. I think we will carry those influences for the rest of our life to our grave. I do not think that is a bad thing. I do not feel like I need to heal from the 1960s. I think we, as a country, need to understand the lessons of the (19)60s, the meaning of the (19)60s, and not simply reduce it to a set of iconic images and a few stereotypes, whether favorable or unfavorable.

SM (01:06:08):
I think originally when I had talked to the students, I think they were a little influenced by me. Because I think what they were really talking about is what you just mentioned, those who protested against the war and those who served in that war. And thinking that when those who protested the war bring their kids or their grandkids to the wall in Washington DC, are they having second thoughts about, "Maybe I should have served. Maybe I should have been involved. Maybe I should not have gotten a deferment." The questioning, because sometimes kids and grandkids ask questions that really make the parents think even deeper about something.

MI (01:06:53):
Well, I never think that when I go see the wall and I go pretty often. I think, what a terrible tragedy that 58,000 lives were thrown away, not to mention 3 million Vietnamese lives, for nothing. And one of the great stereotypes about the 1960s is that anti-war protestors hated soldiers, hated veterans. It simply was not true. When I got involved, when I went to college in (19)68, I started meeting large numbers of Vietnam Veterans who were protesting the war. Vietnam Veterans against the war had just come into existence. And those guys were our heroes. We assumed, maybe [inaudible], that most people going through that kind of war, being of the same generation, would come back opposing the war. And in fact, there were war protests in Vietnam. People wore black armbands, people wore peace signs. People increasingly refused combat duty. I mean, one of the reasons the war came to an end is because it was destroying the American Army, collapsing morale, drug abuse, [inaudible], AWOL's and so on and so forth. The longer you stayed in Vietnam, the less of an Army you were going to have, in any sense, combat ready. So I do not see... Obviously, there were veterans who came back who hated hippies. I do not doubt that there were a few of them who were spat upon. Although, I think that is also one of the great myths, lots of people were being spat on in airports. I certainly remember anybody who spat on a veteran or somebody in uniform. If you think about it is inherently unlikely, given that hippies tend to be sort of not fighters. And these guys are just coming back from Vietnam. You do not hear about the people being sent to the hospital with broken jaws. Which is what you would expect me hear if somebody spat on you, coming to the airport back from Vietnam. So I do not see that as one of the great divisions in that sense.

SM (01:09:04):
What has the wall done? Obviously, the wall was built to heal the Vietnam Veterans and their families and to pay respect for those who paid the ultimate price. And when Jan Scruggs wrote his book, To Heal a Nation, his goal was to heal those families who had lost the 58,000 plus and all Vietnam Vets, to recognize that when they came home, they were not welcomed. They had another war, but that their service was something to be honored. But in the book, itself also, he talks about the fact that, "He hopes it spreads beyond the veterans to really the nation itself." Do you think it is done a good job there?

MI (01:09:47):
Well, again, I am not crazy about the word, "Heal." After the Civil War, every southern town put a memorial to Confederate dead in the town square. And every northern community put a little model of a statue of a Civil War soldier in the town square. It was a memorial. It is a recognizing the sacrifice of the soldiers who fought on one side or the other. Memorial Day itself began as an annual occasion of putting flowers on the graves of Civil War Veterans specifically, and then it became like Iran sort of general occasions to honor veterans of all American wars. So I think that the Vietnam Memorial has to be understood as that, as a memorial, not as a therapeutic device. But in the design, interestingly, there is an ambiguity that is present in those simply heroic statues of generals or private soldiers, which is, that there is a kind of sadness to it and a contemplative. You can see your reflection in the shining stone, and plus seeing all of the names, of course, it is obviously a powerful device. Initially, it was opposed by some veterans groups who said, "It was a black gash of shame," and so forth. They wanted a more traditional statue, and eventually they put up-

SM (01:11:25):
The three-man statue.

MI (01:11:26):
...three-man statue, which to my mind, it detracts from the effect of the original. But the wall has become the most popular tourist site in Washington. So clearly, people do see it as an appropriate memorial to the Vietnam War.

SM (01:11:47):
The Muskie response was that he did not even comment about 1968, which the students thought he would talk about. His comment said, "We have not healed since the Civil War." And dealing with the issue of race, he said, "When 430,000 Americans lose their lives and almost an entire generation is wiped up, particularly in the South, that is a tragedy." And you go to Gettysburg and you see oftentimes the flags on the Southern side. Is there some... Is that a train?

MI (01:12:24):
No, it is the fire siren.

SM (01:12:27):
Oh.

MI (01:12:27):
Tell you also when there is an accident. I hate it.

SM (01:12:32):
This is a question that is kind of different. Is there something about the (19)50s, the (19)60s, and (19)70s, the time when boomers were young, that is rarely discussed, but important in your eyes, with respect to the overall impact that had on 74 million? Something that is rarely discussed but important?

MI (01:12:53):
If it is rarely discussed, I probably have not thought about it or have not discussed it. Well, I do not know if it is rarely discussed, but you often see the baby boom generation counter pose to the Greatest Generation. And recently, we have been living in sort of this Greatest Generation boom let, Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, and [inaudible], The Pacific. I think what has to be understood about the (19)60s generation is of course, they are the children of the World War II generation. And World War II was enormously influential for thinking and worldview. When I grew up, when I was 10, every adult authority figure I had, from my father, to my sixth-grade teacher, to the President of the United States was a World War II Veteran.

SM (01:14:10):
Same here.

MI (01:14:14):
And the war was endlessly celebrated, Longest Day, Great Escape, television shows like Combat and Gallant Men.

SM (01:14:24):
Victory at Sea.

MI (01:14:25):
Victory at Sea, even earlier, Sergeant Rock. So you are kind of living in this. And children's play, Tom Engelhardt has written a good book called, Victory Culture about the way children's play-

SM (01:14:37):
That is with the cowboy on the cover.

MI (01:14:39):
What is that?

SM (01:14:39):
Is a cowboy on the cover? I think there is a cowboy on-

MI (01:14:43):
Oh yeah, I guess.

SM (01:14:44):
...of course. Yeah.

MI (01:14:44):
I guess so, because he takes it back to the narrative victory culture goes back to the Western. But that was the world we inhabited, and there was a tremendous amount of idealism about the United States role in the world as a liberator, liberating force, winning the war as we thought. Because we did not think much about the Soviets. A good war and so on and so forth. I think that idealism carried over into the (19)60s generation just was put into different directions, which was to instead of simply endlessly celebrating American virtues and triumphs, it was to get America action to exemplify the values at its best, it had represented in the past. So lots of people went from being excited about John Kennedy, war hero PT 109, to being excited about the moral qualities of the Civil Rights protestors, people like Bob Moses. And to being disappointed about when America and Vietnam its actions and value, seems so at odds with those World War II values and actions. So World War II did not go away. World War II went away in the 1970s. It would reappear in disguised ways, like the Star Wars Imperial Storm Trooper in helmets, like Nazi helmets and so forth. So it disappeared because of the general war movies went away. People did not want to see movies about war, they had just been through Vietnam. And then at the end of the century, as the veterans were dying off, you quickly realized this generation was not going to be around anymore, then suddenly it returned to the vengeance. But I do not know what I am going to say.

SM (01:16:50):
You made a point there. Why did the children of the World War II generation in the 1950s, all they saw were Westerns, cowboys and Indians. Indians, and guys wearing black hats were the bad guy. And the good guy was always Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Matt Dillon, that whole group. What was the psyche there? Because we grew up as kids with cowboys and Indians, the movies, everything was Cowboys and Indians.

MI (01:17:24):
Well, that had pretty much been the case since the 1890s. I mean, the story of America was the story of Western expansion. And the conflict in Western expansion was the conflict between the cowboys and the Indians or the whites and the Indians. There was little doubt that who was the good guy in that conflict. So it was a powerful story. Hollywood was drawn to it, created its own icons like John Wayne, cowboys and Indians went away in the 1970s.

SM (01:17:56):
Yes, they did.

MI (01:17:58):
Or they changed where the Indians became the good guy, suddenly. That was a product of Vietnam as well.

SM (01:18:07):
Who do you think were the personalities of the Boomer Generation that both good and bad, that had the greatest influence on them, whether they be politicians, activists, writers, you name it, entertainers? Were there things that stood out that really, yes, this was the impact. This person in that group had the greatest impact on everyone, regardless of their politics.

MI (01:18:40):
Well, rock and roll.

SM (01:18:42):
Right.

MI (01:18:42):
I mean, I do not have anything surprising to say about that. But certainly, a lot more people took their politics from music than they did from sitting down and reading a report here on statement. And Dylan, even when he left behind his protest, Woody Guthrie persona for his other personas, he was changing personas every a couple years, but the sort of angry alienation of the mid 1960s music, the, "Do not follow leaders watch the parking meters," was still very expressive of a political worldview. So you cannot underestimate the influence of those pop-cultural figures.

SM (01:19:39):
I know that when I read the March book, Underground, he talked about the importance of Che Guevara. He read about him and thought about him a lot. But why did many of the new left read not only Che, but Mao, David and John Paul [inaudible], Camus? Bertrand Russell, who I loved to read. In fact, the opening of his biography, that first couple lines there, the purpose of his life. I do not know if you remember that line.

MI (01:20:10):
I bet a lot more people wore the T-shirt, than actually sat down than read Che. I bet a lot more people bought and carried around a little red book as a cultural icon, which I did, than actually sat down and read Mao. He was pretty boring. So I do not think, certainly by the late (19)60s, that those figures were so much important as intellectual influences, as they were just as images of heroic gorillas and so forth.

SM (01:20:52):
It is like the thought that a revolutionary can create a revolutionary society. And that socialism, we keep hearing that word today of being labeled against President Obama, which is ridiculous. But that they believed that revolution should happen in the United States. What were they meaning, "Revolution should happen in the United States?" Was it ideas? They were reading this before violence was part of the anti-war effort, before the Weatherman became part of SDS, or they took over SDS, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords in the Latino community, the violence even at the Wounded Knee, which was different than the takeover of Alcatraz in (19)69. So what were they saying here? This was even before violence.

MI (01:21:46):
Well, one of the most powerful texts to come out of the 1960s, published right in the middle of the decade, was the autobiography of Malcolm X. And sales, no doubt, helped by the fact that Malcolm X was assassinated before the book came out. And Malcolm X's story, Malcolm X famously said, "By any means necessary." But he was not himself a violent revolutionary. He simply said, "If that is what it takes to win freedom, then that is what we will do." But the story is really a story of personal transformation, of creating a new identity. He had been a pimp and a drug dealer and a drug addict and a convict who remade himself into this powerful spokesman for Black power, Black pride. And in doing so, it was a very American story. I like to compare it to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is also a story of his recreation. He runs away from Boston and goes to Philadelphia [inaudible] two pennies in his pocket and becomes one of the most important businessmen and inventors and philanthropists, and then later, a revolutionary, a different revolution. I think that that was a very (19)60s message. That idea that you could remake yourself, become a new person, take on a new name. Malcolm Little becomes Malcolm X. So that text strikes me as much more authentically representative of what was driving the politics in the (19)60s, which were a lot about self-transformation, for better or worse. Then Che Guevara's Bolivian notebooks or [inaudible] Revolution, or certainly the Little Red Book, which again, I do not think anybody actually read.

SM (01:23:52):
So you saw that with Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali. And then you saw that with Lew Alcindor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They were all somewhat linked to right Elijah Mohammad. They were never [inaudible].

MI (01:24:03):
Right.

SM (01:24:09):
But anyway, I do not know if you ever had a chance to read Theodore Roszak's book, The Making of a Counterculture and Charles Reich's, the Greening of America. To me, (19)67 to (19)71, they were classic books that we were required to read in our graduate program at Ohio State. And they had a tremendous impact on me. When think of the counterculture and what was happening, would you consider those two of the greatest books to really describe the young people of the era?

MI (01:24:45):
No. I mean, I think they were attempts by well-meaning academics to account for this change. I think if you went back and read them now, they probably would not stand up. I mean, millions of people read them because they wondered, "What the [inaudible] is going on with these kids?" Again, I guess I would turn to novels for one. I turned to a book like, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey. Kesey is an interesting, significant figure. Or Doris Lessing's, Golden Notebooks, especially lots of women, but lots of men were reading Lessing. Again, books about social transformation, identifying with outsiders, people on the margins, On the Road.

SM (01:25:45):
Oh, yeah.

MI (01:25:45):
On the Road was published in 1957 and sells okay. It remains in print, but it is real moments in the 1960s. And what is On the Road? On the Road is an account of this journey of self-discovery, which is in part going to the West, a great American story, but it is also going to the margins. I think a lot of (19)60s politics, youthful (19)60s politics needs to be understood in terms of the identification with people who were on the outs.

SM (01:26:21):
The Beats.

MI (01:26:22):
Well, the Beats, but migrant farm workers. Sal Paradise goes off and picks beans and in Imperial Valley or picks cotton, jazz musicians and so forth. Especially when Kerouac was writing that book, were mostly invisible to most Americans. And the idea that true wisdom, true spirituality... Because Kerouac is nothing if not concerned with things of the spirit, Beat. Beat is the root of beatific and also beaten down. That those notions that you could find truth among people who did not share in that sort of cornucopia of American consumer culture, were not white and middle class and living in suburbs, that was at the center of a lot of (19)60s politics. And so when sharecroppers coming along in the early 1960s trying to register to vote, it was an incredibly evocative image for young people, white and black. That is why Fannie Lou Hamer, who becomes a heroine, because it is this, "Illiterate woman," as LBJ referred to her, stood up to the sheriffs. They beat her and she would not back down. And she says, "If these things can happen, I question America." Well, that had a lot of power. Now, that could translate into things, which looking back, I think we are pretty bad, which is the identification of the Black Panthers, the brothers on the block. Well, they must know something we do not know because they have this gritty, urban, authentic experience. And in fact, [inaudible] about what was going to change America. And in fact, their vision was rejected by most black people. Most black people followed Martin Luther King, they followed Bobby Seale. Black Panthers had 5,000 members at their height.

SM (01:28:30):
Well, can we go over maybe 15 or 20 minutes?

MI (01:28:33):
Sure.

SM (01:28:33):
Because I got about five here. One of the things at the very end, I am going to mention just some names and personalities for just quick thoughts. But when you look at this, this was also a protest generation, or at least protest was very important part. Obviously, you had all the rights movements, from the Civil Rights and Women's Rights, Native American, Latina, environmental groups, certainly the anti-war groups. And they even had, which has led into some of the things today, dealing with ageism and mental rights issues and disability rights and so forth, so it is carried on. And that is a very important part of the... I am getting a lot, [inaudible] here. Of all these movements, and there were a lot of them... The Civil Rights Movement is historic, so I am not even really talking about that. And the anti-war movement, we have talked about. And the Women's Movement somehow was a shoot off because of the fact that there was so much sexism going on in the Civil Rights and in the Anti-War Movement. But of all the movements that took place during that period, and as we have gone into the (19)70s and the (19)80s and the (19)90s, and now in the tens, which of the ones are the most successful in terms of consistency and being on-going? Most successful in terms of consistency and being ongoing in their fight and struggle. Are they all that way or have some kind of taken the back burner? They are not as important anymore, or they do not have the leaders like we had before?

MI (01:30:16):
Well, the civil rights movement was prime formative as, say if you take away the civil rights movement in the (19)60s, it would not have been an anti-war movement. There would not have been witness movement, would not have been in the left counter for anything, would have been small groups like in the (19)50s. But there would not have been movements. It established, it was an inspiration, it was an organizational model. It showed that small groups of people, totally committed, could actually change history. So if you are asking me to rank the movements in terms of importance, I would have to say both in terms of the issues and in terms of the influence that the civil rights movement was the first among equals. Movements can only sustain themselves at that fever pitch of kind of Christ's politics for so many years. The labor movement begins, well just beginning 1930s, but it takes off in the 1930s with the sense that labor is the great news force that is going to transform. Okay. All right. Oh, the labor movement. So the labor movement begins in this kind of fever pitch of commitment idealism and sit down strikes and whatnot. It is going to transform on the world and it becomes institutionalized. It survives, it provides a service function, and in some ways, it becomes bureaucratic in some cases becomes corrupt because you cannot simply be at that crisis edge for forever, wear yourself out. But the moment passes. It is an interesting question. What would have happened to Martin Luther King if he had not been assassinated before 1929? He could well have lived while he had a kind of unhealthy diet, but theoretically he could still be with us today. Would he still be Martin Luther King? Would he be a national icon? Would he be a national holiday after he died? Probably not. Because he would have had to settle down. He would have had to have a life post movement. The people who are around and productive, who came out of that era found a post. John Lewis became a congressman. Loads of good stuff.

SM (01:32:52):
I have interviewed him. He was great.

MI (01:32:52):
[inaudible] (19)60s. Yeah. So you cannot sustain, it is an illusion to think that, oh well, civil rights movement, it is not what it used to be. Well, it could not possibly be. It had its moment. Anti-war protest is waxed and waned in the decades since. There were certainly protests against the Iraq war, although interestingly, the biggest ones were before the Iraq War. Somehow it was hard to sustain once the Iraq War actually came and lasted and lasted and lasted. So I am not surprised, and I do not think it is a commentary on the movements of the 1960s that they are not still around in full force and full throat 40 years later. That is the life of social movements, they come and go.

SM (01:33:44):
One of the criticisms of the social movements today though, is that when protests took place in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, you would see, say for example on Earth Day. Earth Day, Gaylor Nelson consulted with the leaders of SDS before they had the Earth Day on April 22. There was a cooperation and agreement. We do not want us to outshine you, but we would like you to be a participant. There seemed to be signs of all the groups at some of the rallies. Now, this is just my observation. Now, it seems so insular that the gay and lesbian movement is just the gay and lesbian movement signs. The women's issue, just women's movement signs. And civil rights, you do not see any other group. It is all so insular now.

MI (01:34:32):
Okay. Civil rights movement, for a brief moment, to sort of, I am getting coin the phrase, but the we shall overcome moment of basically 1963, 1965 succeeded to the extent that it seemed to embody not simply the needs interests of black Americans alone, but of all Americans. It is to say white Americans who wanted to live in a true democracy, felt that their interests were being represented by the Civil Rights group. They identified with it. What happens post (19)60s, and this is again part of the rise and fall social movements, is that rather than any movement embodying a kind of larger vision, they fragment and they become interest groups, identity politics, is the phrase that is often used. And it is left to the right to pick up that banner. So Ronald Reagan, speaking about his morning in America and government is not the solution. He is the one who has the compelling narrative that this is about all of us, not just about the interest. And part of the problem with Democratic Party, is that it is political platforms and political message seems to become simply a laundry list of the demands of this or that group, without convincingly portraying itself as speaking in the interest of all Americans. And that is why Barack Obama talks about the need for the post (19)60s political paradigm and also kind of reinvent politics. And they will get past those divisive tags left over from the decade, and I wish them luck. Because it does not seem to be happening at the moment.

SM (01:36:27):
He is sometimes labeled by his opponents as the epitome of the reincarnation of the (19)60s.

MI (01:36:33):
Which of course he has no real interest in. I mean Barack Obama is essentially a moderate Republican of the early 1960s. Thinks there is some role for government, it is not central to his vision, thinks some regulation, but he is also a pro-business. I mean, it is ludicrous that people get away with calling it a socialist or a communist, let alone a Nazi dictator. Oh, my God. Do not give me started.

SM (01:37:02):
Yeah, I know. I hear from some of my relatives. I have to walk out of the room.

MI (01:37:09):
Yeah, it is insanity. So anyway, so I am not surprised that the civil rights movement is not what it was or the anti-war movement. If people studied in the 1960s, students studied in the 1960s. I hope what they conclude is that, not that they missed everything, but that you can learn from the example, if not the model. It is certainly not the organizational trappings like becoming from SDS. You can learn how social change happens. Just small groups of people study their situation, understand the need for new kind of politics, new kind of movement, devote themselves to a great cause.

SM (01:37:54):
So many notes here. This is a broad question here, maybe too broad, but what accomplishments lay at the hands of the boomer generation and what disasters lay at the hands of the boomer generation? I think you have already commented on quite a few of them. Anything you want to add to that?

MI (01:38:19):
No.

SM (01:38:20):
Technology, would you say technology is a big plus for this generation?

MI (01:38:24):
Well, not me. I am a technophobe, but I do not even have a cell phone. Right. My children call me a hippie technophobe.

SM (01:38:34):
I have had it for a couple of years. One of the questions back on here, and this is I have asked quite a few people, this particular, not everybody, but in your own words, describe how the following timeframes influenced and developed the boomer generation, between those born between (19)46 and (19)64. I have known already that people told me you cannot generalize. And when we talk about the first 10-year boomers and the second 10-years, it is almost the difference of night and day. But in terms of these periods, just if you were to briefly describe, if you were in a classroom and the students were asking you, professor, would you describe how 1946 to 1960 shape the boomers, just in a couple sentences, what would that be? 1946 to 1960?

MI (01:39:21):
Well, I think it has a lot to do with that post World War II period, the great influence of the war, the prosperity sense of a rising expectations. Sense that anything was possible in your own life. Sense of dissatisfaction with disparity between the idealism absorbed from your parents' experience of World War II and some of the senior sides of American life. And then of course the war itself. The war in Vietnam.

SM (01:39:58):
How about 1961 to 1970?

MI (01:40:01):
Oh, I cannot break it down like that.

SM (01:40:03):
Or (19)71 to (19)80.

MI (01:40:07):
Well, again, my wife was born in 1961. She is a boomer. She got to college in 1979 or 1978. Her life, her experience as a student, her expectations of the world were different to mine. Made a difference, whether it became along the start, middle or the end, used to drive me crazy speaking to when I was doing this kind of interviewing myself with some of the founders of SDS. And they said, "Oh, it is too bad you came along when you did. Too late. You missed everything." Said, "I went to college in 1968. What do you mean I missed everything?" I had to be there in 1962. Really? It was very aggravating. But the experiences were different.

SM (01:40:51):
Well, there is no question though, that when you talk about that period 1980 and beyond, it is as if the whole world of the boomers and it was all when they were young, nothing mattered really when they were older. Because the era of Reagan is 1980 and beyond. Seems like everything has been influenced by him since.

MI (01:41:14):
Right.

SM (01:41:15):
Boomers, instead of criticizing that generation or criticizing the Democratic Party like Barney Frank did and his book, Speaking Frankly, you have got to disassociate yourself from the anti-war and the left wing of the party. Is there anything you can say about the (19)80 to 2010, the last 30 years, in terms of the influence on that generation?

MI (01:41:41):
I mean, again, the pendulum does not swing. We have this tendency to think in terms of decades. So 1980s is the decade of Reagan, just like the 1960s is the decade of John Kennedy and Malcolm X. But I mean, we forget for example, that 1982, the largest war protest in American history, dwarfed the anti-war protests in 1960s took place, people were terrified Reagan’s getting ready to fight nuclear war, nuclear freeze movement was expanding dramatically. And in June of 1982, 3/4 of a million people marched in Washington, not Washington, in New York City. It was the start of the UN session on nuclear disarmament or something to protest Reagan policies. So our history, our selective memory of the past eliminates it. It is like it did not happen. Or in 1981 crushes the [inaudible] strike. Half million people, summoned by the AFL-CIO, go to Washington on Solidarity day, which was in September, maybe late August of (19)81, to protest the crushing of the strike and that gets airbrushed out too. AFL-CIO, it never had a happening in the streets of Washington. Pete Seager was there, singing Solidarity Forever. He was not usually a feature of AFL-CIO, public events. So it is much too simple to say, okay, well boomer generation or the left wing of the boomer generation, has its moment and then sort of packed its bags and went back in its tent and sulked. And things were going on and also, lots of younger people were involved obviously as well. It was not people who gotten their start in the 1960s. I mean, America has never gone, the pendulum has never swung back to where it was in the 1950s. Things remain contested. And certainly Ronald Reagan changed the equation and spoke to a great public disillusionment of the government, which was itself partially a product. Largely a product in the 1960s, Vietnam and Watergate. But it is not simply that the boomers went away.

SM (01:44:17):
A lot of the critics of the boomers say they did. But overall, not everyone, because he cannot generalize.

MI (01:44:24):
So Jerry Rubin started running the meat and meat business so that, you get one sort of iconic figure and you say, oh wow, that is representative of all.

SM (01:44:35):
And Bobby went off, Bobby Seale went off and did a cookbook.

MI (01:44:39):
Well, that is wrong with that? Cooking was a big part of [inaudible].

SM (01:44:42):
He would talk about that at the conference.

MI (01:44:44):
I would talk, actually that reminds me of something, which is food. Food in the (19)50s stank. Food in the (19)70s actually got interesting. And today the concern about food, the local food movement and the slow food movement and the Alice Waters and Michael Pollen and all, that is a product of the 1960s. We were in 1971 when I was in a collective, our Bible and our cookbook was Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Moore Lappe. He is still around and still writing, which was about how you could not sustain a meat-based diet. It was going to be bad for the Earth. It is going to lead global warming because the clearing of land in the Amazon for grazing cattle and so on and so forth. I mean, all of that was a product of the 1960s. And there was a movement that was enormously influential, even on people helping of themselves as part of the counterculture part of the left. But white would like to eat healthfully. That would not have happened if it was not in the (19)60s.

SM (01:45:53):
When you mentioned about food in the (19)50s, I think of two things that immediately come to mind. Number one, milk was brought to your door. Remember they leave milk and then the second thing, they did not have fast food places, but you could not go out and get chicken in the basket. Do you remember that? And that was very popular. What do these things mean to you? These are just quick responses. You already talked about the wall. What does Jackson State and Kent State mean to you?

MI (01:46:20):
Well, personally was sort of the height of the 1960s. All what happened in 1970 was the moment when it seemed like all things were possible. You could stop the war, you could change America. And you know that it was a deadly serious moment, four dead in Ohio.

SM (01:46:46):
What is Woodstock mean to you?
MI (01:46:48):
Well, it means I was 18, I met my girlfriend at Woodstock.

SM (01:46:51):
You were there?

MI (01:46:51):
Yeah. I was there.

SM (01:46:51):
Full four days?

MI (01:46:56):
No, I was only there for a day and night because I was stupid. Because when you went to it, you did not know it was like this historical event. I mean, I bought tickets for a day. I could not afford to buy tickets for the whole time. Nobody bothered to collect your tickets. And then once I got there, it was really cool and really neat. But you did not realize it, 40 years later, be a museum there. And the Jimmy Hendrix would know, sort of have this defining moment on the very last day if I had known that it would have stayed.

SM (01:47:28):
Now what entertainers did you actually see and hear?

MI (01:47:32):
I wrote a piece for the Chronicle Higher Education about them. I had to go check the playlist on Wikipedia. See, I had seen the movie so many times. I was a little confused. But I saw Santana.

SM (01:47:44):
Oh, what a great piece they did, that one.

MI (01:47:45):
I saw Jefferson Airplane and I saw Janis Joplin and I saw Sly and the Family Stone. And those are the ones that spring your mind. Oh, and Country Joe. Although there was a dispute about, on different websites about when Country Joe actually performed. But the website I read that persuaded me was he was after he performed.

SM (01:48:17):
Yeah. And that is where he said, give me an F, give me an O.

MI (01:48:20):
Well he performed twice was the thing.

SM (01:48:22):
How far away were you parked? Did you have to walk miles to get to it?

MI (01:48:26):
Few miles, yeah. I was in the parking lot. Muddy field.

SM (01:48:30):
What do the hippies and the yippies mean to you? The hippies and the yippies, two different groups.

MI (01:48:36):
Well, the yippies were sort of the Abby Hoffman, Jerry [inaudible] for the Chicago Democratic Convention. And it was never really an organization. It was just the people who identified with Hoffman who did in politics, which I did not, especially. The hippies were kind of much broader, diffuse. I mean, when I teach this, I draw circles on the board, overlapping circles. And I would say, okay, hippies, do you mean leftist, anti-war protestors? Here is one circle though, hippies. There is another circle that is a new left. A part of new left, the hippies, here is another circle, it is the anti-war movement. Part of the antiwar movement, were hippies and new leftists, but a lot of them were, so they were not all the same category.

SM (01:49:27):
I interviewed Steven Gaskin, who was a great interview about the farm. Very proud to be a hippie. And they have done unbelievable things too. Inventions. What does Watergate mean to you?

MI (01:49:41):
Well, Watergate proved we were right all along.

SM (01:49:45):
Vietnam, veterans against the war?

MI (01:49:47):
Were central to my understanding of the war. And were heroes to the anti-war movement. And repudiate the motion that there was a split between anti-war protestors, in the one hand, Vietnam veterans on the other.

SM (01:50:03):
What do the communes mean to you?

MI (01:50:05):
Well, lots of us were in communes and thinking that this was an alternative to family and work life and home life, that would sustain itself forever. Of course, it did not but it was certainly an interesting moment. I still find it difficult to cook for less than 13 people because I learned to cook mostly rice and vegetables. But I was cooking for the 13 people I lived with.

SM (01:50:34):
So, you were probably responsible for cooking a meal a week. And then, yeah, because I visited a commune up in Boston, when my brother was a diabetic and everyone responsible for one big dinner a week.

MI (01:50:51):
And you had to clean up too. And that was good training because it meant be cleaned as you cooked. So a big cleanup still.

SM (01:51:01):
How about, what does the counterculture mean to you? And that is counterculture, often defined as the music, the long hair, the clothes, the drugs, the sex, the whole thing.

MI (01:51:12):
Yeah. Well, you just said it.

SM (01:51:13):
Okay. What does the Black Panthers and black power mean to you?

MI (01:51:20):
Well, black power was much broader than Black Panthers. Black Panthers, one organizational expression of it, who unfortunately I think had a very negative effect on terms of their sort of gun idolatry and street thug language, which we took to be represented revolutionary authenticity, but was actually just a sort of cult.

SM (01:51:46):
How about My Lai? What did me My Lai mean to you?

MI (01:51:51):
My Lai was not exceptional, it was representative. I mean, it is not like people were not being killed every single day in terrible ways in Vietnam. It is just the one that we learned about.

SM (01:52:04):
And Tet?

MI (01:52:06):
Tet was the turning point.

SM (01:52:11):
The last part here is, where is my list at? These are just responding very few words. So these personalities or terms? Oh, I do have one question before the final thing here. In about the last 30 to 40 interviews, I have said that there are three slogans that I personally think kind of identify the boomer generation. And the other people had said, we shall overcome. And I wish I did not have on there some. But they are, the more violent aspects of this period are symbolized by Malcolm X, by any means necessary.

MI (01:52:48):
Okay.

SM (01:52:48):
Second is the quote that Bobby Kennedy used. It was a quote from another author, obviously. And that is, "Some men see things as they are and ask why. I see things that never were and ask why not." Which is symbolic of an activism, a positive mentality, non-violent protest. Seeing injustice and wanting to create justice wherever you see it. And the third one is kind of a hippie mentality, that was on a lot of the posters. The Peter Max posters were great for that counterculture in the early (19)70s. And I had one hanging in my room at Ohio State, and that was, "You do your thing, I will do mine. If by chance we should come together, that will be beautiful." Which was a hippie mentality. And then of course the civil rights mentality was, we shall overcome. And the only other one that people have mentioned was Kennedy's, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." And then the other one was Timothy O' Leary, "To an intern on dropout." Are there any other slogans you think really symbolize? Does that cover it?

MI (01:53:53):
Bob Dylan lyrics are endlessly mineable for insights in these (19)60s. I think I already mentioned, "Do not follow leaders, watch the parking meters."

SM (01:54:01):
Right.

MI (01:54:02):
"You do not need a weather man to know which way the wind blows." And so forth.

SM (01:54:05):
Oh yeah.

MI (01:54:06):
Subterranean homesick blues. We used to sit down and play it endlessly and analyze it over and over again.

SM (01:54:13):
Who were your favorite, besides Bob Dylan, who were your favorite rock musicians? Did you have to have a message in your music or did you just, you would like the combination of message and just great sound?

MI (01:54:31):
Well, I mean the Doors, not political group a message except sex is a message. The approach of the apocalypse is a message. So nothing would surprise you. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Credence Clearwater, Country Joe.

SM (01:55:01):
Were there any Motown performers that you really dug?

MI (01:55:05):
Not so much. I mean, although I think that is a weakness in my musical education, but I mean, I am certainly hear about all the time. So it was part of the musical backdrop.

SM (01:55:16):
Did you ever listen to what is going on by Marvin Gay, which is just one of the greatest? We will end with these, history responded with a very few words to these people or [inaudible].

MI (01:55:28):
Actually one local group, local to the West Coast, Joy of Cooking. You do not hear much about them, they were a Berkeley group. Came, when I was in Portland. They would come up and play, were sort of cult followers of Joy of Cooking, partially because they had women lead guitarists, which was quite unusual in those days.

SM (01:55:45):
You were at the Summer of Love too, were not you? Did you say you were there or no?

MI (01:55:48):
I was in Indianapolis.

SM (01:55:51):
Oh, okay. That is right. That is right.

MI (01:55:52):
We were conscious, that was going on. Everybody laughed at the Scott Mackenzie song, which is now sort of seen as this anthem of the Summer of Love. Sergeant Pepper was really the soundtrack for that summer.

SM (01:56:06):
How about, my first one is Tom Hayden. Thoughts on Tom Hayden?

MI (01:56:08):
Tom is a smart guy. I interviewed him myself, many years ago. And I think he had a sort of complicated politics, years that followed. Sometimes it is true, there are no second acts in American lives. And I think he is an example of it.

SM (01:56:32):
He has written a lot of good books though.

MI (01:56:33):
Yeah, well he was absolutely essential in 1960s. Very brave guy. I was a young reporter from an underground newspaper and I was trying to formulate a question. I could not come up with a way of doing it. He very sort of gently steered me to the formula I still use. He said, "Well, some people would argue this. What would you say to that?" Shaping the question for him. Oh, yes. See, I was floundering. He had been a reporter, student reporter, for the Ann Arbor Daily. So whenever I use that formulation, I think of Tom.

SM (01:57:07):
I will remember that.

MI (01:57:07):
Some people would argue. What do you think?

SM (01:57:12):
Jane Fonda?

MI (01:57:14):
Well, Jane got a bad rap. I actually met Jane Fonda. Jane and Tom, in fact, came from Portland and part of the China Peace campaign in 1973. I washed her dirty laundry. That is fine. She is the most stunningly beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life at that point. She was 30 and I was just a kid. So I had never met a Hollywood star. And it is true, they are kind of incandescently walk into a room. Also, your jaw drops.

SM (01:57:44):
And she had lived with what is his name for a long time before she met Tom.

MI (01:57:49):
Roger Vadim.

SM (01:57:50):
Yeah. Roger Vadim. And she did Barbella.

MI (01:57:53):
Barbarella. So I mean, all the stuff about her being Hanoi Jane. Had one bad photograph taken, but lots of people were traveling to Hanoi. John Baez traveled to Hanoi, actually got caught in an American bombing raid. So it was not a treasonous act.

SM (01:58:14):
How about the Kennedy brothers? Just quick thoughts on John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

MI (01:58:18):
Yeah. Well, John Kennedy was a figure in the (19)50s, not the (19)60s, and did not care about domestic reform and was remembered as a reformer, but because of the civil rights movement, picked him up and pushed him in a direction he would not have gone himself. I think Robert Kennedy, under a much more fundamental transformation. He was younger, more attuned to the moment. And it is an interesting question. If Sirhan Sirhan's elbow, had been jostled at the last moment, I think Robert Kennedy would have received democratic nomination in (19)68, and we would not be talking about the onset of the conservative era with Richard Nixon. One of those moments of contingency as we historians, like you say, where a historical accident changes what followed.

SM (01:59:15):
How about LBJ and Hubert Humphrey?

MI (01:59:20):
Well, they are both kind tragic figures. They wanted to be domestic reformers and they wound up creating and apologizing for terrible work.

SM (01:59:36):
Dwight Eisenhower?

MI (01:59:39):
Eisenhower looks better, as the years pass. Partially because the Republican presidents who followed him were so terrible. This is not my insight, but political scientists, what is his name? He said that the New deal was ratified by Dwight Eisenhower because... The New Deal was ratified by Dwight Eisenhower because when he came into office, he did nothing to dismantle it. He was not an anti-government crusader, he in some ways expanded it. The largest public works projects in the history of the United States were the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which he pushed for.

SM (02:00:19):
Right. And the Eisenhower Locks up in the North.

MI (02:00:21):
Yeah. And again, in terms of foreign policy, although John Foster Dulles talked a mean game about rolling back communism, Eisenhower was pretty cautious.

SM (02:00:32):
What about Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

MI (02:00:38):
I tell my students that you only really hate one president in your life, so choose carefully. Because I really utterly, totally loathed Richard Nixon. And there have been Presidents since whose policies I have found repellent, but I cannot summon the level of vitriol that I did for Richard Nixon. And Agnew was joined at the hip with him.

SM (02:01:04):
Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern?

MI (02:01:08):
Well, I have met McGovern, brought him here to speak. And he was the first Presidential candidate I voted for in 1972. I think he would have been a good President. McCarthy had the courage that Bobby Kennedy lacked to challenge a sitting incumbent Democrat, so it is an admirable act.

SM (02:01:30):
You have already talked about Malcolm, but just comparing thoughts on Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

MI (02:01:36):
Well, King was a great... They are often thought of as the moderate and the radical. But King was, to my mind, the better radical. And he really talked of... First of all, he was more realistic politically. He could build coalitions which Malcolm X could not do. And lead great consent, and actually risked his life, while Malcolm was killed by his own followers or ex-followers of the nation of Islam, whereas King was on the front lines of endless confrontations and responded non-violently. King was a real radical, and we forget that the slogan of the (19)63 March on Washington was not just Freedom Now, it was Jobs and Freedom. In the beginning, he wanted to link economic change with social and political change, and that was what he wound up doing at the end. We also forget how unpopular he was. Now, we are so in love with King, we think he is so wonderful. But many Americans hated him for opposing the war. His coming out against the war in spring of 1967 was enormously influential and legitimizing for people like us who were just beginning to cover anti-war politics.

SM (02:02:49):
But of course, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George Bush the first. I make a comment on Ronald Reagan when he came in, he emphatically said, "We are back," which means that the military is going to get stronger again. We are going to change the military. And then of course, Vietnam syndrome is over. And I remember George Bush saying, number one, saying that. So those three, Bush, Ford, and Reagan.

MI (02:03:16):
Well, Ford was an accidental President and was not in office long enough to move or do anything too bad. Reagan's politics, again, I find the antithesis of my own, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. But Reagan is actually remembered as having won the Cold War. Well, I think he contributed to the end of the Cold War in the sense that he actually made an opening to Gorbachev, allowed Gorbachev to be Gorbachev. It was not by saber-rattling or building expensive, useless systems like Star Wars that he brought about the end of the Soviet Empire. Rather it was by seeking agreements. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the only arms limitation agreement which actually is an arms reduction agreement. The IMF, I believe in 1987, all the others, assault ones, simply said, "Okay, you can build more bombs, but you have to stop at this point." And Reagan, again, this is sometimes forgotten, at one point, meaning I think it was at Reykjavik or Reykjavik, however you say that said to Gorbachev, "Why do not we just do away with nuclear weapons all altogether?" Which horrified his own hawkish advisors, Reagan's advisors. Because he actually had this utopian streak. He actually really loathed nuclear weapons, and the idea of nuclear warfare he found genuinely horrifying. And we forget that. So Gorbachev thinking, "Okay, I have got this soulmate in Washington," was then able to step back from Afghanistan, from Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Soviets had 400,000 soldiers in East Germany. And Gorbachev said, "Stay on your bases. Do not interfere." If they wanted to crack down on what was going on in East Germany, they could have put an end to that real quick. But Gorbachev said, "It is a new world. We have to get used to it. If we lose Eastern Europe, we lose Eastern Europe."

SM (02:05:24):
Do you talk to your students at all in the (19)60s course about Ronald Reagan's coming to power as governor of California?

MI (02:05:31):
Yeah.

SM (02:05:32):
And what is really-

MI (02:05:33):
It is another of those ways in which the (19)60s were seed time for the conservative revival.

SM (02:05:40):
I interviewed Ed Meese, and it was great because he was the Assistant District Attorney of Alameda County. And at the time of the free, excuse me, yeah, Free Speech Movement. And he was not working for Reagan at the time, but he heard about him and they did not know each other. And then, of course, he had appointed him to be in his administration. And of course, he was involved with the People's Park crackdown and heavily involved in that. And of course, Reagan came to power dealing with the students.

MI (02:06:15):
Yeah, I will tell you a (19)60s story that has something to do with People's Park. Hamilton had compulsory chapel, been a part of the college since the beginning and had been whittled down over the years so that by 1964, there was only one... You only had to go on Sunday. We used to have to go twice a day every day of the week. But in 1964, Hamilton, which again is a sort of small, isolated men's college in upstate New York, but not the cutting edge of politics. But in spring of 1964, a freshman by the name of Daniel Steinman wrote a letter to the Spectators, this college newspaper, saying, "This is ridiculous. Why do we have to do this? It is an infringement on our conscience, and religious freedom and so on and so forth. I call on my fellow students to refuse to go into chapel on next Sunday, instead sit non-violently, not blocking way, to sit on the chapel steps instead." And 150 Hamilton students did so.

SM (02:07:14):
Oh, my God.

MI (02:07:14):
It is not like this was a hot bed of radicals.

SM (02:07:15):
Oh, yes.

MI (02:07:19):
Most of the people that did so just did not want to go to compulsory chapel. And a month later the trustees said, "Okay, no more compulsory chapel." So this 150-year-old tradition came to an end because this one college freshman said enough is enough.

SM (02:07:33):
That is student empowerment, really. That is the...

MI (02:07:37):
There is a correlation to this.

SM (02:07:38):
Okay.

MI (02:07:40):
So three years later he graduates and he goes off to the University of California to start law school at Bull Palm. And he was elected as the president of ASUP, Associated Students University of California. And at a rally in May of 1969, he is the guy who says, at the end of his speech, "Let us go take the park." So Daniel Steinman, who had gotten his start in radical politics leading a sit-in on the front steps of the chapel was the one who sent the mob marching on People's Park, which resulted in a month of civil disturbance, helicopters, James Rector getting killed, helicopters dropping CS gas on Sproul Plaza.

SM (02:08:19):
That is right. Yeah.

MI (02:08:21):
So I do not know whether he was happy with that distinction, but...

SM (02:08:25):
That is irony, though. He is a historic figure then really, when you think about it.

MI (02:08:30):
Yeah.

SM (02:08:30):
Are they proud of him here at Hamilton?

MI (02:08:32):
I do not think they-

SM (02:08:34):
They hide it.

MI (02:08:35):
Well, neither. I am writing the bicentennial history of the college. I just finished writing it, and I put him into the book just because I thought it was an interesting sideline.

SM (02:08:43):
That is an interesting sideline.

MI (02:08:45):
But I do not know how I stumbled on that fact.

SM (02:08:47):
But that, because I had mentioned People's Park with Ed Meese.

MI (02:08:49):
Right. But I do not know how I found out about Steinman's role, but I thought it was quite interesting. He still practices law. I look him up on the website.

SM (02:08:57):
When I am done with my interview, I want tell you a story that Ed Meese told me. I do not want to ruin it here now, though. The Berrigan brothers, Phillip and Daniel Berrigan and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

MI (02:09:09):
Well, the Berrigan brothers kind of emblematic of the Catholic Left, which also often gets left out of the story. And some relationship to, though independent of the Catholic worker movement, were very significant figures. And of course, Philip Berrigan was... There were crimes that they committed. Crimes? They threw blood on draft records. But Philip Berrigan was at the center of one of these alleged conspiracies, which jurors were rejecting. The Harrisburg Seven were acquitted, like the Gainesville Eight. Nixon Justice firm was setting up these elaborate conspiracy indictments against different groups, Catholic Left and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And by the early 1970s, ordinary jurors, middle-aged, middle class jurors simply were not buying government propaganda, throwing those things out of the court.

SM (02:10:11):
How about Spock?

MI (02:10:15):
I was raised as a Spock baby. Simple version of that is permissiveness. Dr. Spock created this whole generation of so on and so forth. But actually just continued to trend towards child-centered families that had been developing since the early 19th century.

SM (02:10:34):
In my job at the university, we brought Daniel and Phillip to the campus. We brought Daniel, and then we brought Phillip, and Elizabeth McAllister, his wife, and he gave his last presentation in Phillip's library three weeks before he died, his last public presentations at Westchester University.

MI (02:10:52):
Interesting.

SM (02:10:53):
I went, because we had honored Frederick Douglass, who gave his last speech in 1895 at Westchester University. And I went to the administration and I said, "I think we need to put a plaque inside the room that this was the location where Phillip Berrigan gave his last speech." You can guess what they told me to do. Take a hike and jump off a bridge.

MI (02:11:24):
Do you have a watch on?

SM (02:11:24):
Oh, yeah.

MI (02:11:24):
Just to make sure of the time. At some point I [inaudible].

SM (02:11:24):
Yeah. It is 4:00. I only got maybe five, six more minutes here.

MI (02:11:28):
Okay.

SM (02:11:28):
The other ones are certainly the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, H Rap Brown, Huey Newton, that group, they were all unique and different personalities, but they were all part of that group.

MI (02:11:42):
Right. Well, I think overall the impact of the Black Panthers was very negative on the Black left and on the white left as well, with the sort of gun idolatry and the adventurous politics that they represented.

SM (02:12:05):
The others, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

MI (02:12:09):
Ellsberg was central, the original whistleblower, and also a boon to historians. Most histories of the Vietnam War down to the present are simply glosses on the Pentagon Papers. And that was the basic documentary record.

SM (02:12:25):
Angela Davis, she was not a Black Panther.

MI (02:12:28):
No. Well, I think Angela Davis went to Paris on the Hamilton Junior Year Abroad program. She was a Brandeis student, so she had a Hamilton connection. A very charismatic figure. I think she was guilty as health. She was another acquittal, but I have no doubt that she was involved with buying the guns that were used in the Marin County Courthouse Shootout.

SM (02:12:55):
That is the one where George Jackson's brother was involved.

MI (02:12:58):
Dr. Jackson.

SM (02:12:58):
He got killed, did not he? I think.

MI (02:12:59):
He was killed.

SM (02:13:00):
Yeah. Let us see, just a few more here. Robert McNamara and Woodward and Bernstein.

MI (02:13:09):
Well, McNamara, he saw what he had done. He was horrified by it. He was weeping in his office in the Pentagon, but he kept his mouth shut for 30 odd years. And then when he spoke out finally in 1995 about what he really thought, he found himself loathed both by the left and the right, both by people who had supported the war and people who opposed the war. And was not an admirable figure. He was the architect of the war. Kept silent when speaking out might actually have made a difference. On the other hand, you cannot imagine Donald Rumsfeld ever 30 years later saying, "Gee, the Iraq War was not such a good idea after all."

SM (02:13:55):
And Woodward and Bernstein?

MI (02:13:58):
Well, they did not bring down Nixon by themselves. Judge John Sirica was probably much more instrumental in that. But they got on the story early and they pursued it. And they owned it in a way that...

SM (02:14:10):
Timothy Leary.

MI (02:14:12):
Showman, opportunist, obviously influenced a lot of people.

SM (02:14:20):
Muhammad Ali.

MI (02:14:23):
Very important figure, again, in that sort of sense of personal transformation. So central to (19)60s politics and (19)60s culture. Great fighter.

SM (02:14:34):
The female leaders, which Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, some of that group of politicians.

MI (02:14:42):
Yeah. If you go back and you read the Feminine Mystique, in much the same way as we were talking about the Civil Rights movement, it is not really just about women. It is about what kind of families do we want to have? What kind of society do we want to have? And I think part of its success, its influence was that lots of people can identify with it. Obviously, women were her main constituency and readership, but it was one of those moments when the feminism was speaking with a universal appeal.

SM (02:15:25):
SDS and the Weathermen, I think you have already talked about them. How about the American Indian Movement? Your thoughts on... That was a four-year phenomenon, really.

MI (02:15:34):
Yeah. It was an example of the influence of the civil rights movement that all kinds of other subgroups suddenly began to see themselves as having rights that needed to be defended in a confrontational style. They skirted. Well, they did not skirt, they embraced the violent politics, which I think worked against them. And their leader is still in jail many decades later.

SM (02:16:01):
Barry Goldwater and William Buckley.

MI (02:16:05):
Reinvented American conservatism.

SM (02:16:09):
Jackie Robinson.

MI (02:16:13):
Obviously, major figure in terms of the idea that American athletics was all white up through the end of the 1940s is kind of astounding in a sense.

SM (02:16:26):
He was a supporter of Richard Nixon. I could not believe that.

MI (02:16:31):
Right. Well, Nixon, for a while, Martin Luther King thought that Nixon had really good racial politics in the 1950s.

SM (02:16:41):
Chicago Eight.

MI (02:16:48):
You would have to separate them out. Some of them I think were incredibly important. And responsible figures like Dave Bellinger, Hayden obviously left. Jerry and Abby were entertaining clowns.

SM (02:17:03):
Bobby Seale was.

MI (02:17:05):
Bobby Seale.

SM (02:17:05):
Lee Weiner was in that group. He is still an activist. I think he is an environmental activist. And he has actually been involved in Jewish rights all over the world. I am trying to find the two that you do not hear about are Lee Weiner and the professor out in California, the eighth person.

MI (02:17:26):
Yeah, I know.

SM (02:17:27):
Anyways. But they are both still involved.

MI (02:17:29):
Right.

SM (02:17:30):
But you do not hear about it as much. And I guess we will finish with how important you feel the Free Speech Movement was overall and the Peace Corps.

MI (02:17:43):
Well, the Free Speech Movement sort of established a paradigm for campus protestors. Just to say that up to that point, protests had been launched from campuses, but not directed at university policy. And thereafter, university policy would become a central concern of new left activists. The difference was that the Free Speech Movement thought of itself as defending the best principles of the university with general intellectual and liberal arts principles as opposed to sort of the corporate shill aspects of the university. Later on-

SM (02:18:22):
Okay.

MI (02:18:23):
I was saying the Free Speech Movement identified with the universities, even while challenging university policy. But later on, I think unfortunately the universities came to be identified as, he was caught in the bushes, as the enemy, as part of the war machine and just shut it down.

SM (02:18:47):
And the Peace Corps, is this times of service?

MI (02:18:51):
Still here, part of the inspirational, idealistic side of the Kennedy administration.

SM (02:19:00):
The only last ones I have here is, of course, 1963 was the assassination of President Kennedy. Where were you? Do you remember the exact location where you were when you heard he had been killed?

MI (02:19:12):
Yeah, I was in eighth grade. I was in art class. Our teacher, Mrs. Williams, walked in the door and she was weeping, which impressed the heck out of me. I knew something important happened, because I had never seen an adult authority figure, let alone a teacher, crying. So we were all sent home, watched television the next four days, including Oswald's assassination.

SM (02:19:37):
Yes. You saw it live, too.

MI (02:19:38):
Well, I do not think I saw it live.

SM (02:19:39):
I did.

MI (02:19:40):
I saw in endless loop thereafter.

SM (02:19:42):
Yeah.

MI (02:19:43):
And then the funeral, the state funeral on...

SM (02:19:49):
He wants to go in. He wants to go in. I am down to my last three here. Okay. Let us see where my... Yeah. And the second one, do you remember where you were when you heard that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed? Exact moment.

MI (02:20:21):
I do not remember Martin Luther King. I remember it happened. And I remember hearing about Kennedy's assassination the next morning on television. And by that point, assassinations had become so commonplace that I just sort of thought, "There is another one."

SM (02:20:46):
Were you in front of-

MI (02:20:47):
It was so much less powerful an experience than hearing that John Kennedy had shot, which itself is testimony to how common assassination had become.

SM (02:20:59):
Were you very fearful on the Cuban Missile Crisis that we-

MI (02:21:02):
I was not aware of it.

SM (02:21:05):
Okay. And the last one I have here is just the black and white TV of the fifties, which is Walt Disney, Howdy Doody, Hopalong Cassidy, those kinds of television shows. What were your favorite shows as a kid? Did you watch all those, too?

MI (02:21:21):
Sure. I was totally swept up in the Davy Crockett craze, which was the first great-

SM (02:21:26):
And Fess Parker just passed away recently.

MI (02:21:27):
I saw that. I played something for my students from YouTube with Fess Parker David Crockett.

SM (02:21:33):
Oh, wow.

MI (02:21:34):
I could sing all the words when I was five.

SM (02:21:35):
King of the wild frontier.

MI (02:21:40):
King of the wild frontier. Born on the mountaintop in Tennessee.

SM (02:21:42):
Greatest state in the land of the free.

MI (02:21:44):
Yeah. Killed in a bar when he was only three. Lived in the woods, so he knew every tree. Killed in a bar when he was only three.

SM (02:21:49):
Davy, Davy Crockett. Buddy Ebsen was his sidekick.

MI (02:21:52):
Yep. So yes, obviously. And all those westerns, I could bore you by singing theme songs to at least a half a dozen of them.

SM (02:22:03):
Have Gun Will Travel reads the card of a man.

MI (02:22:03):
A knight without honor in a savage land.

SM (02:22:03):
Yep.

MI (02:22:03):
So yes, I was a child with the television.

SM (02:22:13):
And those TV shows, those family, Donna Reed Show, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver. Well, that was the ideal family of the fifties, but, boy, it was really hiding what was reality in the-

MI (02:22:29):
Yeah, I had a working mother, so it did not seem to describe my family. She was not standing around the kitchen in pearls and high heels washing the kitchen floor. Also, our kitchen would not look like theirs.

SM (02:22:42):
The last two Presidents are the Bill Clinton and George Bush. What are your thoughts on them? Because they are the only Boomer presidents.

MI (02:22:49):
That is right.

SM (02:22:49):
And someone said, "When you see their weaknesses, you are saying you can tell they are Boomers." I have had a couple people tell me that. Can you say that they are Boomers by looking at their life and their-

MI (02:23:03):
No. George Bush missed the (19)60s. He was a (19)50s character. He was consumed with his fraternity of skull and bones, or whatever it was.

SM (02:23:14):
Right.

MI (02:23:17):
So he was not really a (19)60s character at all. Clinton, sure, he was a (19)60s character. He was also... It is not like everybody who came out of the (19)60s was a womanizer with a taste for women with big hair. He was who he was. He is like a lot of politicians, which is an interesting point. Compare him to John Kennedy. John Kennedy makes Clinton look like a piker. Bill Clinton only had one affair while he was in the White House. John Kennedy had hundreds of women cycling through. So Clinton famously met Kennedy. He thought the rules had not changed. He thought he could be John Kennedy, the open zipper presidency.

SM (02:23:59):
Wow.

MI (02:24:00):
So was John Kennedy a typical boomer? Hardly.

SM (02:24:08):
Yeah. This is the absolute last question. And that is, when the best history books are written, or sociology books you know as a historian, they are often written 50 years after an event. And my question is when the best history books or sociology books are written on the Boomer generation after the last Boomer has died?

MI (02:24:31):
Probably so.

SM (02:24:32):
Yeah. What do you think history will say about that generation?

MI (02:24:40):
Well, that is one of those impossible questions, isn't it? I think we have much better histories of the Civil War being written now than were written when a Civil War veteran was alive, so I think that is true. We will understand the (19)60s finally when we are all gone. But it is precisely because I am part of the moment. And when I teach this course, I say to my students, "You have to be able to separate out when I am speaking with my historian's hat on and when I am speaking as an artifact." And you can learn from both, but there are some different messages involved.

SM (02:25:16):
Very-very good. Is there a question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask?

MI (02:25:20):
No.

SM (02:25:20):
Well, thank you very much.

(End of Interview)

2010-05-26

Stephen McKiernan

Maurice Isserman

145:25

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

College teachers; Hamilton College (Clinton, N.Y.); Radicalism--United States; Isserman, Maurice--Interviews

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