128
10
1775
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/dfff34b3cd0fbfcd65047b625774d0d8.pdf
89314649581d799b67bd65581a1ba504
PDF Text
Text
BINGHAMTON
B E R S I T XY
Y
H N 1
STATE U N IVE R S I T Y OF N EW YO R K
ede
D E P A R T M E N T
THURSDAY
MIDDAY CONCERT
a
;
o (14
YS
RW b
K ;4
K ;4
b Y
\7’<
€/
THURSDAY
DECEMBER 2, 2010
1:20 P.M.
CASADESUS RECITAL HALL
�PROGRAM
Sonata for Trombone and Piano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Dangan
(1930–1999)
III. Rondo and Chorale
William Marsiglia, trombone
Pej Reitz, piano
J i n g l e B e l l s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J a m e s L o r d P i e rp o n t
arr. T. Blumenthal
erry Christmas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 00 vi English
We Wisk Y o u M
arr. Alec Wilder
BU Low Brass Ensemble
Kerianna Krebushevski, soprano
ChaiKyou Mallinson, piano
Donald Robertson, director
Bill Marsiglia, Rob Menard, Drew Perotti, Mogana Jayakumar,
Trombone
Jay Bartishevich, Bass Trombone
Matt Gukowsky, Tuba
O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion . . . . . . . . . G. F. Handel
Rudolphus Rubrinasus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J o h nn y Marks
Ve l v e tSh oes............................Ra n da11T h o mpson
(1899–1984)
Molly AdamsToomey, soprano
ChaiKyou Mallinson, piano
Christmas Candle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Eliner Remick Warren
Mary Burgess, soprano
William James Lawson, piano
)
(19001991)
Hannukah Prayer for Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ryan Brechmacher
and lan Pomerantz
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frederick Silver
The Twelve Days o f Christmas .
Members of the Harpur Chorale
Peter Brown, director
e
J o y T o T h e W o r l d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . r e H
arr. T. Blumenthal
D e c k T h e H a l l s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . e . . . . . 0 l d Welsh
arr. T. Blumenthal
T h e F i r s t N o e l . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Franz Gruber
arr. Alec Wilder
(19091985)
arr. Philip Brunelle
The Canterbury Choir
Willam James Lawson, piano
Peter Bush, Claude Cornwall, Benjamin Elling, Russell Feinstein
Kent Lo, David Pastor, Edward Shephard, Daniel Romberger
Wm. Clark Snyder, Shane Thorn, Joshua Thorpe, Phil Westcott
OHolyNight............................AdolpheAdam
Victoria Cannizzo, soprano
Jonathan Biggers, piano
teri Irin. «
i
n
t
Jonathan Biggers, piano
Pej Reitz, piano
ANGSSON
i RETO (1908–1975)
�Bingha mton Univers ity Music D epartme nt’s
U PCO M I N G E V E N T S
Thursday, December 2 — Harpur Chorale & Women’s Chorus — 8 p.m. —
Trinity Memorial Church, Binghamton — free
Friday, December 3 — Flu te Studio an d Flute Chamber Concert — 10:30
a.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
Friday, December 3 — Compose r’s Concert ( students o f C hristopher L oy)
— 8 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
Sunday, Dec ember 5 — W ind Sympho ny: American Variations, h onoring
veterans and serving mili tary — 3 p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall —
free
Sunday, Dec ember 5 — V iolin Recital: Janey Choi, violin, Michael Salmirs,
piano and gu est artist Rebecca Ansel, violin — 7:30 p.m. — Casadesus
Recital Hall — $10 general public; $5 faculty/staff/seniors; $2 students
Thursday, December 9 — Jazz MidDay Concert wi th guest arti st — 1:20
p.m. — Osterhout Concert Theater — free (Cosponsored by the Binghamton
University Music Department and the Harpur Jazz Project)
Thursday, December 9 — Harpur Jazz Ensemble Concert with g uest artist
— 8 p.m. — Osterhout Concert Theater — $10 general public; $5
faculty/staff/seniors; free for students (Cosponsored by the Binghamton
University Music Department and the Harpur Jazz Project)
Friday, December 10 — Singing Chinese Class Recital jo ined by the
Beginning C hinese Flute Class — 7 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
Saturday, December 11 — Amahl an d the Night V isitors — 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. —
Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for
families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Sunday, Dec ember 12 — Amahl and t he Night Vis itors — 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. —
Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for
families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Monday, Dec ember 13 — “Italian Nigh t” Class Rec ital (Maria Co ok,
Instructor) — 8:00 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
For ticket information, p/ease cai/ the
Anderson Center Box Office at 777ARTS
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: PDF / Rosetta
PDF with Rosetta audio/video link
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
42:50:00
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146414">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146414</a>
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thursday Mid-day Concert, December 2, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-2
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Dangan, Thompson, Handel, Waren. Silver
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Marsiglia, William
Reitz, Margaret A
Krebushevski, Kerianna
Mallinson, Chai-Kyou
Adams-Toomey, Molly
Burgess, Mary
Lawson, William-Jacobs
Menard, Robert
Perotti, Drew
Jayakumar, Mogana
Bartishevich, Jay
Gukowsky, Matthew
Bush, Peter
Cornwall, Claude
Elling, Benjamin
Feinstein, Russel
Kent, Lo
Pastor, David
Shephard, Edward
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9acded826206905fb21d7c34015c2711.pdf
fc478d6ce0c46f378a0815438eb68bb3
PDF Text
Text
BINGHAMTON
U N I V E R S I T Y
S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K
wdee
(4
D E P A R T M E N T
A H O L I D A Y
CHORAL C ONCERT
THE WOMEN’S CHORUS
Bruce Borton, conductor
Jushin Choi, graduate student conductor
William Lawson, pianist
T HE H ARPUR CHORALE
Peter Browne, conductor and organist
Thursday, December 2 " , 2010
8:00 p.m.
Trinity Memorial Church
Binghamton, New York
�PROGRAM
L
III.
Peter Warlock
(1894–1930)
Tyrley, Tvrlow (Three Carols)...........................
Stephen Paulus
(b.1949)
Hallelu
.. Traditional Latvian
Arr. Andrejs Jansons
Two Latvian Carols
Maria Wiegenlied..................................................
Jushjn Choi, conductor
B
e Bells
Z. Randall Stroope
(b.1953)
There is no Rose
Traditional Yiddish
Arr. Elliot Levine
Three Channukah Songs
Mi zeh hidlik
Boruch ate, zingt der tate
Gut yontef aykh kinder
Mark Rossnagel, organ
ti
..........Morten Lauridsen
O magnum Mysterium
(b. 1943)
o
.. William Mathias
(1934–1992)
A Babe is Born............
Max Reger
(1873–1916)
M. Leontovitch
(1877192 1 )
4
Chanukah Prayer for Children
Adam Hess, bass
i
4,
j
4
i
i
Ryan Brechmacher and
Ian Pomerantz
Baruch Cohon
Arr. W. Ellen Fleischmann
Al HaNisim
Good King Wenceslas...............................
1
I
The Twelve Days After Christ mas
II.
Improvisation on “Adeste Fidelis
Peter Browne, organ
Marcel Dupre
(1886–1971 )
from Piae Cantiones
Arr. Reginald Jacques
( 1 894–1 969)
Nuala Gaffey, soprano
Alexander Turo, baritone
Good King Kong Looked Out
Th e Women ’s Chorus
Bruce Borton, conductor
William Lawson, piano
Antonio Vivaldi
(1680–1743)
Gloria in Excelsis Deo (Gloria in Dma)
Th e Ha r pur Chorale
Peter Browne, conductor
P.D.Q. Bach
( 1 8081742)?
Frederick Silver
(b.1936)
�S
TRANSLAT IONS
Ziemas svet ki sa brauk usi
Lo, behold a sleigh is coming, stall ion prancing, bells jingling.
Hurry, children, wait no more, Winterfest is at the door.
Look and see how nobly dressed is the steed of Winterfest:
Golden reins and ribbons streaming, diamonds in the bridle.
O ’er the hilltop God is slowly riding, gently guiding,
Light the way with fires. Bring him into your humble dwelling.
Balts sniedzins snieg uz sku jinam
A gentle snow is on the ground, on bush and tree.
The sleigh bells jingle and I am happy.
Tonight I feel my spirit fly into the heavens
Where angels sing on golden clouds and pearly seas.
Tonight I feel that I could be like the heavenly angels,
And shine like sta rs above the worl d and those I love.
I am happy as a child can be, surro unded by family.
I am finely dressed for Christmas E ve and feeling blessed.
I feel content and whole, my heart is filled with delight.
Will it always be this way? Or will it change?
G ut yontef aykh, k inder
We come to you children, with gre etings heartfelt:
a dreidel, a candl e, and Chanukah gelt.
l
l
~
O magnum Mysterium
O great mystery and wondrous sacrament,
That animals should see the newborn Lord lying in their manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
Was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
AI HaNisim
For the miracles and the wonders,
For the redemption and the battles t hat you made for our forefathers,
In those days at this time.
M i ze hidlik
Boruch ate, zing t d e r t at e
“Blessed art Thou ” the father sings as he lights the candles.
And the mild. del icate light falls upon his pale face.
A fire that ’s holy and precious shines in his eyes:
And this stooped, tired man begins to stand erect.
And it seems to me — and we believe it —
There still is som ething here, there remains much to love.
The hour is a hol y one.
Old sounds, long forgotten? But no, they are still resounding.
Sing father, “Boruch Ate. . I am still your child.
Gloria in excelsis
Glory to God in the Highest.
Chan ukah P rayer
Maoz tzur Rock of ages.
Y’shuati l’cha naeh let our song praise
L ‘shabeiach your saving powe r.
M a ri a Wiegenlied
Mary sits in the rose bower, rocking her Jesus Child,
Softly through the foliage the warm wind of summer blows.
At her feet there sings a brightlypl umaged bird:
Go, sweet child, to sleep, go now to sleep!
Lovely is your sm ile. lovelier your slumber’s joy,
Lay your weary l ittle head close to your mother’s breast,
Go, sweet child, to sleep, go now to sleep!
Who is it who has lit these thin candles like stars abo ve.
The children themselves know that today is Chanukah.
Every happy candle, every dear candle, burns, hints, sparkles.
The children stand around and thei r joy is boundless.
I am a dreidel, I lose and I win,
With a nun and a gimel a hey and a shin.
I am a candle, I burn and give light,
To brighten this dark world for us on this night,
I ’m Chanukah gelt, you can keep me to day
But tomorrow to poor friends please give me away.
We come to you children . . .
I
1
�T H E WOMEN’S CHORUS
Bruce Borton, conductor
m ton
t
uniy
m
om
r e) Cingha
{~') B
Orchestra
William Lawson, performance pianist
Jushin Choi, student conductor and rehearsal accompanist
Elyssa Ackerman
Molly AdamsToomey
Sophie Bass
Carrie Buck
Jiaying Cheng
Meredith Collins
Rebecca Dinhofer
Annie Ferro
Sheena Finlayson
Samantha Grieco
Ashley Grumman
Briana Hanson
Ashley Koo
Bora Lim
Stephanie Naru
Jessica Pyne
Hayley Rein
Julia Rose
Christine Scherer
Siobhan Sculley
Hyeyon Seo
Hannah Wentz
The Binghamton Community Orchestra
20102011 SEASON SCHEDULE
Saturday, April 9, 2011, 7pm
Sunday, November 21. 2010, 7pm
Helen foley Theatre
at Binghamton High School
Sarah Jane Johnson Church
Johnson City, NY
with the Binghamton Youth
Symphony Drchestra
Barry Peters. Conductor
Tim Perry, Conductor
Frieda Abdo, Soprano
Binghamton Community Orchestra
Annual STMIA Winners Concert
For more information:
www.BCOrchestra.com, conductor@BCOrchestra.com or 607 7599004
T H E HARPUR CH ORALE
Peter Browne, c onductor
Women
Men
Michele Aronson
llyssa Baine
Samantha Banton
Katie Besemer
Tahnee Fallis
Eliana Frim
Nuala Gaffcy
Alexandra Kirby
Kerianna Krebushevski
Yiting Liang
Marisa Sweeney
Samantha VanAdelsberg
Mookey Van Orden
Adam Demetros
Brian Evans
David Frey
Matthew Francis Gawors
Ariel Hausman
Adam Hess
Tomas Kerr
Gabriel Lotto
Gavin McClelland
Glenn Parker
Mark Rossnagel
Joshua Rovou
Joshua Setren
Leander Tanner
Alexander Turo
l
I
I
So met hing O l d
Som ethi ng N ew
A C om m un i ty Si ng wi t h Alice Pa rker
Sarurday, October 16, 2010, 3:00 pm
First P resbvtenan Church, 42 Chenango Street, B
mton, N Y
Fol k S on g I nsp i rat i ons
l
Durected by Anne Borer
l
S it’ , October 17, 2010, 4:00 ¢
Trinity M e m on a l Episcopal C . . . . ‘ 44 Maun Street, Bingh am ton, N Y
l
L essons a n d Carols for C h rist m as
[
i
l
l
l
l
:
Cotten
Saturday, November 2 7, 2010, . . p & Sunday, November
h ‘ie HoleI ’m. " ' 346 P rospect Street Bingl
C1
2010, 4:00 p m
C hora l J our neys : D e pa rt u res. D esti nations a n d D rea ms
Led by Bruce Borton. candidate for Arasuc Director
aday, . Luci: 20, 2011, 4:00 A
go S J ...B_ '
, 42 Ch
resb . mm. Ch
F A
All’s Fair : Songs of Love & War
Led by James
S
F
Nibloc k, candidate for Artist ic Di s
v, Mar 22 2011, 4 : pm
Pies
n C h
42C
ango Street,
o nt, N
Y
The Madrigal Choir of Bingham ton + 20102011 + 33rd Season
For ticket information visit www.madr igalchoir.com or c all 6077294767
4
�Bingham ton Universit y M usic D epartmen t’s
CCvents
2v
C o na
Friday, December 3 — F lute Studio and Flute Chamber Concert — 10:30 a.m. —
Casadesus Recital Hall — free
Friday, December 3 – Composer’s Concert (students of Christopher Loy) — 8 p.m.
— Casadesus Recital Hall – free
Saturday, December 4 — University Symphony Orchestra : America’s Inner Life —
3 p.m. – Osterhout Concert Theater — $10 general public; $5 faculty/staff/seniors; free
for students (Group rate $8 per person)
Sunday, December 5 — W ind Symphony : American Variations, honoring veterans
and serving military — 3 p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall – free
Sunday, December 5 — Violin Recital : Janey Choi, violin, Michael Salmirs, piano
and guest artis t Rebecca Anse l, violin — 7:30 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — $10
general public; $5 faculty/staff/seniors; $2 students
Thursday, Dece mber 9 — Jazz MidDay Concert with guest artis t — 1:20 p.m. —
Osterhout Concert Theater — free (Cosponsored by the Binghamton University Music
Department and the Harpur Jazz Project)
Thursday, December 9 — Harpur Jazz Ensemble Concert w ith guest artist — 8
p.m. — Osterhout Concert Theater — $10 general public ; $5 faculty/staff/seniors ; free
for students (Cosponsored by the Binghamton University Music Department and the
Harpur Jazz Project)
Friday, December 10 — S inging Chinese Class Recital joined by the Beginning
Chinese Flute C lass — 7 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
Saturday, December 11 — Amahl and the N ight Visitors — 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. —
Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for families
with 2 adults and 4 children)
Sunday, December 12 — Amahl and the Night Visitors — 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. —
Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for families
with 2 adults and 4 children)
Monday, December 13 — “Italian Night” C lass Recital (Maria Cook, Instructor) —
8:00 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
For ticket information,
.
AR TS
please call the Anderso n Box Office at 7 77
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: PDF / Rosetta
PDF with Rosetta audio/video link
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:05:35
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146576">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146576</a>
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
PDF Layout
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Options:
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'Continuous' - All pages are visible in one scrollable column and Zoom will be set to page width.
'Facing' - Up to two full pages will be visible and Zoom will be set to page height.
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Single
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Harpur Chorale and Women's Chorus, December 2, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-2b
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Warlock, Paulus, Wiegenlied, Reger, Leontovitch, Stroope, Vivaldi, Mathias, Jacques
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Choi, Justin
Borton, Bruce
Lawson, William-Jones
Browne, Peter
Hess, Adam
Gaffey, Nuala
Turo, Alexander
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-02
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/6bb4a72a74d55f888448491872766b8c.jpg
166c9b4a3addc899fe2650582315c9ca
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/eba6b20100b0b3295511a96b460dcc8e.mp3
b9e17a219011bfe65d2195e978db761e
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
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Stephen McKiernan
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Binghamton University Libraries
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English
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In copyright.
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Date of Interview
2010-12-03
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Jo Freeman
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Jo Freeman is an American feminist, political scientist, writer, and attorney. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and she became active in an organization involving the civil rights movement. In addition, she authored feminist articles and papers on social movements."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13057,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Jo Freeman is an American feminist, political scientist, writer, an attorney. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and she became active in an organization involving the civil rights movement. In addition, she authored feminist articles and papers on social movements.</span>
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Binghamton University Libraries
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audio/mp4
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2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
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Audio
Duration
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211:56
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"University of California, Berkeley; Liberalism; Radicals; San Francisco; Students for a Democratic Society; Sexism; Ronald Reagan; Free speech protesters; Women's Rights Movement."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":515,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":16370588},"12":0}">University of California, Berkeley; Liberalism; Radicals; San Francisco; Students for a Democratic Society; Sexism; Ronald Reagan; Free speech protesters; Women's Rights Movement.</span>
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Feminists—United States; Political scientists; Authors; Lawyers; Civil rights movements—United States--20th century; Freeman, Jo--Interviews
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Interview with Jo Freeman
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Freeman, Jo ; McKiernan, Stephen
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audio/wav
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Feminists—United States; Political scientists; Authors; Lawyers; Civil rights movements—United States--20th century; Freeman, Jo--Interviews
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Jo Freeman is an American feminist, political scientist, writer, and attorney. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and she became active in an organization involving the civil rights movement. In addition, she authored feminist articles and papers on social movements.
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Binghamton University Libraries
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2010-12-03
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In copyright
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eng
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McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.102a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.102b
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2018-03-29
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McKiernan Interviews
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211:56
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https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/8c88eb894f70071cc1591da72d8a968f.mp3
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Audio interviews
Title
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McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
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Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
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Binghamton University Libraries
Language
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English
Rights
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In copyright.
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Date of Interview
2010-12-03
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Robert Edgar, 1943-2013
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Robert William Edgar (1943-2013) was a businessman, administrator and politician. Edgar was a member of the Democratic Party and congressman in Pennsylvania for 6 terms. He received his Bachelor's degree from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity degree from the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Edgar died from a heart attack after running on the treadmill at his home."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15105,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,0],"15":"Arial","16":10}">Robert William Edgar (1943-2013) was a businessman, administrator, and politician. Edgar was a member of the Democratic Party and congressman in Pennsylvania for 6 terms. He received his Bachelor's degree from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity degree from the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Edgar died from a heart attack after running on the treadmill at his home.</span>
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Religion; Bishop Fulton J. Sheen; National Council Churches; Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Environment; Poverty; Televangelist; Ronald Reagan; Brown v. Board of Education; Baby boom generation; Fox News; MSNBC; Pete McCloskey; Anti-War Movement."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":13689059}}">Religion; Bishop Fulton J. Sheen; National Council Churches; Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Environment; Poverty; Televangelist; Ronald Reagan; Brown v. Board of Education; Baby boom generation; Fox News; MSNBC; Pete McCloskey; Anti-War Movement.</span>
Duration
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137:41
Subject LCSH
Legislators—United States--Pennsylvania; Democratic Party (Pa.); Edgar, Robert, 1943-2013--Interviews
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Robert William Edgar
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 3 December 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:01):
Thank you very much for agreeing to be part of this. The interview itself includes questions that have been asked to all people, but there are also some specific questions that have been geared toward your life as well. How did you become who you are? Could you describe your upbringing, your high school and college years, and maybe some of the role models and or historic figures you read about that inspired you?
BE (00:00:31):
I am glad I gave you a copy of my book so you can find out all the details because the book is more of a biography of how I have done what I have done. As you know, I have been a United Methodist minister. I have been a congressman. I have been a faculty member at Swarthmore College. I ran a finance area for Senator Paul Simon of Illinois when he ran for president. I was head of the Committee for National Security under Paul Warnke, who negotiated the SALT II agreement. I spent 10 years as president of a graduate school. I spent seven and a half years as head of the National Council of Churches. And now I have been three years as president of Common Cause. All of my vocational life in all those different professions have centered around my mantra, which I have kind of rephrased in the last couple of years. But it is to address fear, fundamentalism, and Fox News with a commitment to peace, poverty, and planet Earth. My wife of 46 years, who I have known for 52 years, will tell you I only have one speech and a thousand illustrations, focused on ending the poverty that kills, healing the earth, and working on peace and nonviolence issues. Now, you asked the question, how'd I get started? I grew up in a blue-collar family, in a white-collar community. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia. While we were in a lower economic bracket than our neighbors and friends, my father never owned an automobile, never drove a car. I taught my mother how to drive when she was 48 years old. We did everything on buses and trolleys between Philadelphia, upper Darby, Chester, Media, communities around Philadelphia. We were, my brother and I, my older brother, we were sent to church so that my mother and father could sleep in on Sunday mornings. And I went to Sunday school and church services in the Methodist Church. And in those days, which was in the 1950s, there were an awful lot of progressive ministers who were linking gospel messages to civil rights, human rights, people's rights. When I became 15, 16, I went to a church camp, and I discovered some ministers that taught me that ministers do not have to be boring, that they can be committed to social justice. I also took a tour of some poverty areas in Philadelphia and was surprised by my reaction to seeing poor people. In June of 1968, the Methodist Church sent me to 11 countries in Europe... not (19)68, in 1961, they sent me to 11 countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, France, but I also got in behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1961. And one of the most powerful experiences was in an orphanage that we visited in Naples, Italy. You had to travel by bus through a terrible slum, seeing the worst poverty you could see. And the bus went through a large, gated building, and inside were a couple hundred children who were orphans, all clean, all dressed, all cared for by faith-related folks, all singing and joyful. And so the contrast between the abject poverty on the outside of the building and the care that was given on the inside, had an impact on me. I had decided pretty early on to be a minister and thought that my whole life was going to be in the ministry. I wanted to be an urban minister, and in fact, that is the direction I went. A couple other incidents shaped my thinking. One was at age 19, I became pastor of my own church called the Gilberton United Methodist Church in Gilberton, Pennsylvania. This is June of 1962. I am all of 19, had never been to a funeral. I was given permission to do communion and baptisms and weddings, and most of it was to pay my way through college. After they had given churches to ordained elders in the Methodist church and retired ministers and seminary students, they had churches left over. And so as a young, beginning my second year in college, I was pastor of a church. And the interesting thing was, the church in Gilberton, the whole town was owned by the Gilberton Coal company. All of the parishioners were related to the coal mine. They owned only the inside of their houses. The coal company owned all the land underneath their houses. And it was a strip mining area. The men were all dying in their 50s of black lung disease. And even though the people were very poor, they were very loving and caring and adopted a young preacher, taught me a lot. So those kinds of experience began to move me. I would say another defining experience, which I do describe in the book, is in February of 1968, I was invited by William Sloane Coffin, who was at that time the chaplain at Yale, later to become a minister at Riverside Church in New York. But Bill Coffin invited a group of people concerned about the Vietnam War to a meeting here in Washington at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. And I boarded a bus in northern New Jersey where I was at seminary and traveled to Washington for the first time. And as we got to the door of the church, the bus came to the curb. The radical religious right of that day was a guy by the name of Carl McIntire, and he was out of Cape May, New Jersey. He was the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson of that day. And he had organized a protest carrying signs that said, "Kill a commie for Christ's sake," and trying to get us not to cross his picket line. And as coming out of a blue-collar union family, I broke my father's dictum, never to cross a picket line, and went inside the church, went up into the balcony of the church, and listened to speaker after speaker connect the issue of poverty and war. And in doing that, I began to recalibrate my own thinking. And the keynote speaker was a young guy, 39 years of age, by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.
SM (00:08:48):
Oh, my God.
BE (00:08:48):
This is five weeks before he was assassinated. And he inspired me. I think of myself as a disciple of Dr. King, read his material. Less than 10 years later, by accident, I got elected to the United States Congress. And a couple years after that, I was one of 12 members of the Select Committee on Assassinations, looking into the death of Dr. King. These books over here are all the documents on the committee that was researching the death of Dr. King and John F. Kennedy. So I interviewed James Earl Ray, the assassin, as a young member of Congress. So Dr. King, by accident, has had quite an impact. This just gives you the smallest. It is only those persons that were serving-
SM (00:09:57):
Walter [inaudible]. Yes. Remember him, and met him briefly in California. Yep.
BE (00:10:02):
Yep. Chris Dodd. Bob Edgar. So this is a long answer to your short question. I think poverty and King vaccinated me to care about ending the poverty that kills, connecting poverty to war. And it was my father who connected me to the environment. He loved the trees and the land that he worked so hard on. So he paid $13,000 for a house in the suburbs without the ability to have an automobile or car. He worked 37 years at the same desk, testing relays for General Electric. Died at age 56, probably killed by the chemicals he was using in the workplace or the fact that he smoked a lot. He was offered a million dollars for his piece of land to build a shopping center, and he turned them down because the trees on his land were more important and the environment. And he introduced me to the early books in the (19)60s, The Greening of America. Some of the early conversations about the environment. When I decided to run for Congress, I became kind of the environmental candidate. And if the Republicans had run any candidate against me who cared about the environment, or cared about women's issues, I would have lost, because my district was the most Republican district in the nation and I am a Democratic congressman. And I got elected at age 31, as you know.
SM (00:11:56):
Yep. When you were in that room with, I did not know you were in the room with Dr. King six weeks before he was assassinated, I am-
BE (00:12:05):
We also marched in Arlington Cemetery that same day together.
SM (00:12:11):
Wow. He touched your life, obviously, with his words, and obviously, he was a great preacher in his delivery and everything, but I interviewed another person whose husband was in Harvard when Dr. King came, or excuse me, Michigan State, when Dr. King came to speak, and he had said that it was the greatest experience he had ever had in his life listening to him. But I do not know if he is putting me on, but he said there was something about the aura and the atmosphere that he said, "I did not think this guy was going to live long." And that was a commentary from his Michigan State speech when this person was in college there. I do not know if you felt that at all, because he was certainly different in his... he had a lot of enemies.
BE (00:13:09):
At the time, I was not smart enough to think those thoughts. I was all eyes and ears. Except for the assassination of President Kennedy, I was lulled into thinking we were a peaceful nation, but if you look back on the assassination of Kennedy, King, Bobby Kennedy, and the attempt on Wallace's life, and you go back and look in history in terms of all the attempts on presidents' lives, you realize we are a pretty violent nation. I think there is an author that wrote a book, Violence in America, [inaudible] Demery. It was a very popular book in the (19)70s and talked about Native Americans and all the things that we had done to people itself. It is interesting, we are about the same age, and I think I mentioned to your secretary that my grandfather was a Methodist minister, Peekskill, New York, from (19)54... excuse me, from 1936 to 1954, and he died in (19)56. And then I went to Methodist Church in Cortland, New York growing up as a kid, and Dr. Nason was our minister. And it is interesting you said about social messages. My mom used to tell me a story that we would go to church, I do not remember this, but we would go to church and I used to say to her, "I wish they'd cut all the singing out," because all I cared about was hearing his message. And this is a second-, third-, fourth-grade kid. There were messages that he gave. So you were right on about the social messages. One of the things, when one talks about the (19)50s and (19)60s, one rarely talks about the religious leaders that influenced the Boomers growing up this. So when I look at religion, not just politics, religion itself, I think of Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very religious, Bishop Sheen, who-
SM (00:15:25):
Happy trails to you.
BE (00:15:25):
But they were very religious too, and they had Christmas albums and they took in kids. Bishop Sheen was on TV then. And then, of course, Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel and Jesse Jackson, Reverend Schuller, Pat Roberson, these are people that I think influenced Boomers over... founding of the National Council of Churches was founded in 1950, was very much part of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown versus Board of Education. The National Council Churches had, I was General Secretary of the Council, but in 1957, had Dr. King as its keynote speaker. Had a lot of lay people, including there was a guy by the name of Jay Erwin Miller. He was a layperson, and in October, 1967, Esquire Magazine had a cover that says, "The man who ought to be the next President of the United States." He was head of Cummings Engine, which was a big industrial thing. He was a Republican. Also, he was chair of the board at the National Council of Churches. And he was one of the founders of Common Cause. He worked with John Gardner. There were three Republicans who were on the articles of incorporation. One was a guy by the name of Andrew [inaudible], who was head of Time Publishing, one was John Gardner and one was Jay Erwin Miller.
SM (00:17:06):
Yeah, I had Gardner [inaudible].
BE (00:17:06):
You look at some of these pictures, Jay Erwin Miller is with Dr. King, in some of the signing of the Civil Rights Movement issues. And so there's a whole bunch of Republican, mainly, moderate Republican, Eisenhower Republicans, who began to speak up on civil rights, human rights, and people's rights, who were also people of faith. And I think it goes back to winning World War II. I am born in 1943, May 29th, Life or Look Magazine came out that week and had Rosie the Riveter on the cover, the woman who symbolized women working in factories to win the war. But the war is won, and the Congress passes the most important piece of legislation after the war, which was the GI Bill and-
SM (00:18:22):
(19)48.
BE (00:18:28):
-all of the blue-collar workers who went to war came back and became the white-collar workers of the (19)50s and (19)60s. Some of them became ministers, some of them became teachers, some of them became lawyers and doctors and other kinds of things. Sprawl started, people started to get wealthy from development of communities and suburbs expanded, people were moving out of the cities. Churches were being built, every few minutes a new church was being dedicated, and churches were packed. It was a sense of victory. We fought evil and we won. And every child will do better than their parents did. And their parents are doing better than their parents did. And the American dream is alive and well, and we had that sense. Brown versus Board of Education happens in (19)54. And some of the hostility of civil rights. And suddenly in the (19)60s, you have got not only the war in Vietnam, you have got the burning in the cities, you have got the tension around civil rights and human rights, you get the Commission on Poverty that comes out with a scathing report, that Johnson began the War on Poverty efforts. And I think the faith leaders had read the Bible thoughtfully enough to discover that God cares about poor people. I think some of the new religious leaders, the conservatives, have read the Bible and somehow did not find out that Jesus cared about poor people and misread all of those stories and somehow come out of the text believing God is a god of wealth, God is a god of prosperity. But the (19)50s and (19)60s, we were vaccinated by faith leaders who challenged government to respect people by race, regardless of creed or color and were willing, in a sense, to fight a civil war over it. And we did not go back to the battlefield with the South in terms of military war, but we did send in troops to make sure that schools were integrated and people who were part of our society became full partners. And Dr. King was kind of the disciple of that movement.
SM (00:21:23):
It leads into the area with I wanted to address, and that is these periods that Boomers have been alive. Keep in mind that those people born, say, between (19)37 and (19)45, I think are closer to the Boomer, the front-edge Boomers, that were born between (19)46 and (19)56 than those born between, Boomers, that are from (19)57 to say (19)64 because they were graduate students, they inspired, and were right by the side of many of the older Boomers. But when you look at the different periods in America since 1946, and we are talking 64 years here now, it was the first Boomers now coming into Social Security this year. You have already said something very important. When you look at church, and I can take the experience of my life, I love going to church, when every Sunday, all throughout the (19)50s, when in the (19)60s, then my dad moved and we were quite away from the church, but it was that period that I saw church attendants seemed to wane as we started to head into the (19)60s. And then something happened, like you mentioned, in the (19)70s, and I would like your thoughts on this. In the late (19)70s, the religious right seemed to come into power. Jerry Falwell, whether it be Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson.
BE (00:22:57):
Jim Bakker, Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart. What happened was that (19)50s and (19)60s were upward mobility, growing of the suburbs, challenge with racism, challenge with poverty, but a society that said, we have got to address these issues if we are going to be great. By the early (19)70s, parents were telling their kids, "Do not go into ministry, do not go into social service, get an education, go to college. Some of us got to college by the skin of our teeth, but you're smarter than we are, so get a degree so you can make money." And the prosperity gospel got caught in. And on the political side, you had the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's loss and the conservative political right. And then you had the emergence of religious conservatives who stayed out of politics mostly. Billy Graham stayed out mostly. And many of the evangelists were talking about personal salvation and not very interested in politics. But you get into the (19)70s, and alongside of the secular effort to make money, you had a whole bunch of what I call charlatan religious leaders who said, "Send us a dollar and we will pray for you. Put your hand on the radio set, and when we finish this prayer, write us a check for a dollar-
SM (00:24:54):
The Reverend Schuller?
BE (00:24:57):
-5 dollars, 10 dollars. And this is Jimmy Swaggart and Jimmy Bakker and those guys, the televangelists. They did not want the money as much as they wanted your name and address because they were smart enough to use computers and know that they could amass large amounts of wealth by putting those names and addresses on a computer and keeping track and talking to them by region and by area, and initially, putting a stamp on a newsletter and getting it out to folks, but then getting it into a computer, so it was even cheaper.
SM (00:25:38):
Like the DNC today.
BE (00:25:39):
Right. Well, I think in 1980, there was a civil marriage, probably started in (19)76, (19)77, (19)78, a civil marriage between these charlatan religious radical right and the political right that made Ronald Reagan the Christian president and Jimmy Carter an also-ran. Ronald Reagan would not go to church, but he was envisioned as being the guru. He was going to stop Roe versus Wade, which was an early (19)70s Supreme Court decision that all the conservatives hated. And the religious right and the political right out-hustled the left. The left took 50 minutes to answer a question. The left did not deep frame from the justice language. Whereas the religious right, the political right, were willing to sloganeer simple statements. And so the left gets out-hustled, and I think the religious right thought that if they had this civil marriage with the Republicans, that they would turn back Roe versus Wade. That they would be able to prosper in kind of not just the old-time religion, but focused on personal salvation. And the wealthy were blessed by God because they were wealthy, God must be blessing them. I think they forgot the passage that talks about how hard it is for a rich man to enter Heaven, where they said it is easier for a camel than go through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter Heaven. And they saw Jesus in a tuxedo more than touching the hem of a prostitute, hem of the dress of a prostitute, or touching the leper or hugging a poor person. And so you have got this tension that I think has actually grown into the split in our country. We are divided three ways, radical Christian and political right on one side, moderate to progressive liberals on the other side, and a whole host of people that are in the middle. And the reason I wrote the book, Middle Church, which goes against... the reason I wrote that book was to go after Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the religious right, but it is middle church, middle synagogue, middle mosque. And my argument in the book is that the religious left failed, and we failed because we would do point-counterpoint with the religious right, we forgot to evangelize the middle. And you have got a whole host of Americans in the middle who are too easily swayed by patriotism and false morality that many on the left have forgotten to use that patriotism and morality language. And that book could have been called Middle America, it is more of a secular political book than a churchy book, but it will give you some idea if you read it, of some of these thoughts.
SM (00:29:50):
But where would you place... we all know what the Beatles did. They went into, not organized religion, they went off to the Maharishi or whatever. It was fairly common that a lot of people were going off into Zen Buddhism. I interviewed Peter Coyote and he told me, the actor, that if it was not for Zen Buddhism, he would not be alive today. I mean, it's that important for him to relax. He's been doing it for 35 years. And so a lot of people became Zen Buddhist. A lot of people like the Beatles, and not just the Beatles, because they were well known, but other people, got into all these Maharishi, and they came to college campus in the late (19)60s. You had the Moonies that were everywhere. And there was this attitude, and correct me if I am wrong, that a lot of the Boomer kids and a lot of the young adults for some reason went against anything that were position of authority. They were against their political leaders, they were against their religious leaders, they were against politicians, the college administrators. So the inner spirituality became the thing in the late (19)60s, in the (19)70s. Your thoughts on this inner spirituality where you do not need to go to church, it's just that kind of-
BE (00:31:14):
I will answer that question, but let me challenge something you said. I would not use the phrase "a lot." I would use "some" because I think the majority did what their parents told them to do. Go to college, become something, get a profession. But the (19)60s and (19)70s are marked by a search, a search religiously, a search psychologically, a search for meaning, a search for life. And not only did folks search alternative religions, but they also searched alternative lifestyles, commune movement, and others. And you remember some of this came out of Woodstock, some of it came out of the anti-war movement, the draft was there, and people had to ask themselves, "Is the United States worth dying for? And if not, do I go to Canada? What do I think about 58,000 people being killed in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands being wounded? And what do I think, if I care about integration, about the fact that liberals were disappearing here and there, being killed and lynched and blacks were being attacked," and it was a big struggle for the identity of America. So there is not one issue, it was a small, important cluster. I remember when I got elected to Congress, some of my friends said, "Why would you do that? Why do not you stay on the outside of government and fight the corruption, fight the bad guys who are in government?" And those days, you know, had Watergate and you had a lot of lack of modeling of good behavior. And I think there was that tension in our society. My own personal view is that you need people inside the tent and people outside the tent, people inside government, people outside government. I have got five honorary doctorate degrees, but only four arrests for civil disobedience. If I have any regrets in my life, it is that I have not been arrested enough.
SM (00:34:13):
Dr. King would be proud of you because Dr. King used to always say that, "If you are not willing to go to jail for your beliefs, what are you out there for?"
BE (00:34:20):
Right.
SM (00:34:21):
Not doing violent things, but.
BE (00:34:23):
My friend Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary sings a song for me once in a while about, have you been to jail for justice? Good words in that song.
SM (00:34:33):
You are right. Right. One of the things, you well know that when President Kennedy, well, when he was running for president, the issue with the Catholic Church and that religion would influence his decisions. Obviously, that did not happen, but what did that say about the America of 1960, about fearful that the Pope was going to run the United States government, and. The Pope was going to run the United States government, and John Kennedy obviously saw the concern, but he said that is not going to happen with him.
BE (00:35:11):
Yeah. Well, like John Kennedy, I believe in the separation of church and state but not the separation of people of faith and institutions of government. You want your elected officials to have an active faith statement, but you need to always remember that you are not serving in public office a particular denomination or religious tradition. Henry Waxman, who is Jewish, was elected with me in 1974. I want him to be a faithful member of the Jewish community, but he would never intend to have the Jewish community make the United States a Jewish nation. I think it is true of Muslims who might serve in Congress. I want them to be faithful. I want them to read the Koran, but I do not want to have Sharia law be the law of the land. For conservative Protestants, I want them to be themselves. I do not have any animosity to people who are in the religious right unless that religious right once elected thinks that it can make this a Christian nation. Our founding fathers were very smart to help all of us understand this is a nation that believes in religious pluralism, and we want people of faith and people of no faith to use morals and values that grow out of their tradition, but not to ever allow any individual faith tradition to dominate. In our history, we used to hang people who were Roman Catholics, and we used to torture people who were a different kind of Protestant than we had. I think the founding fathers and mothers said, "Wait, that is not going to make us a very healthy nation, so let us respect everybody's religious tradition."
SM (00:37:29):
What is interesting is that we all know the founding of this country, and the people that come here are made up of people who left their homelands because of religious persecution in many cases. We all know that America is a xenophobic nation that is afraid of people who are different. It has been the whole history. I mean, the Irish. I was even educating my dad more about some of the things that happened between England and Ireland and the Potato Famine and so forth and the treatments. What amazes me today, I am very concerned about that, and I like your thoughts. Some of the attacks on President Obama, and some people say his close links with the Muslim faith. Some people say he is a Muslim. He says he is a Christian. They will not listen to his word. They have their personal opinions. It shoots me back to what was happening in 1960 about the fear of the Pope. Well, now there is a fear that Islam will take over. I know they use the issue of terrorism, but I see this continuing oftentimes a trend where-
BE (00:38:38):
Just remember that the kid that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City was a Roman Catholic, raised in the United States. And if there are terrorists in 60 countries, we do not stop terrorism by bombing capitals. Part of our problem in this country is racism. Part of our problem is fear of the other, and part of our problem is we carry around in our head World War images of what war is about. I think some of the leaders that Obama has, many of the leaders that Bush had were focused on World War II images of the world, and we got to change that view. We need an international police effort on terrorism, but we ought to cut in half our military expenditures. I laugh when I read the newspapers with a tear in my eye when I think about all of the conservatives who say, "We have got to balance the budget, but you cannot cut defense. We have got to balance the budget, but we are going to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq without paying for it, without raising taxes." And we got these big deficits. "Oh, those deficits are caused by overspending on healthcare and education and Social Security." That is hogwash. We are in this predicament because we, after 9/11 were manipulated by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush on the issue of fear. We went after a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 called Iraq. We went after it even though the inspectors were there. There was no hint that they actually had nuclear weapons, or nuclear capability. On the one hand, the political right and the religious right want more expenditures on defense, more expenditures for war, but somehow that does not impact on their thinking on deficits.
SM (00:40:53):
Do you see the link here? You're talking about the fear. Now. The fear in the (19)50s was the fear of the Cold War, the boomer generation when they were younger. The fear of the Cold War, of the potential-
BE (00:41:11):
The Cold War fear started this before the Boomers were elected. The fear of the Cold War grew out of separation of Germany right after World War II. The building of... Russia was a world-class military but a third-class country without the ability to really have an economy that worked. There were all these myths about the former Soviet Union, and I think people who lived through World War II saw it in terms of the exchange of nuclear weapons. I think by the time the boomers got here, and they were very small and children at the time, that fear not only got intensified with the East West struggles, but it also pointed out that even when you tore down the Berlin Wall, you had to find another enemy to be fearful of. So, I think Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to use 9/11 as a way of tapping into the fear that people have. My complaint about Americans is we are dumb. We do not learn from history.
SM (00:42:34):
We do not read history.
BE (00:42:35):
We do not read history. And we do not realize that we have got to send our young people to get an international education and not just a domestic education.
SM (00:42:47):
Global? Yeah. That is been the tough. We have to prepare students for the global world. I remember Henry Cisneros at a conference, way back in the early (19)90s. He was speaking from a Mayor I think of San Antonio. This beautiful college administrator stood up and said, "Well, what is America be going to be like if it is the majority are minorities?" It was shocking to hear it from her, but she was asking a question. I will never forget what he said. He said, "You should not be fearing the future. You should be preparing for the future, because you are going to have bosses who are Latino. You are going to have bosses who are Asian-American, from India, you name it. So we have to prepare students for the world they are going to face because it is a global world." You raised some good points. It is interesting also that McCarthyism, which was trying to label people who spoke up or were politically active as Communists. I see sometimes today for people who may support Muslims in America, they are sometimes paying a price, too. We did a conference, Islam in America, at Westchester University. It was my last coup before we left. We packed the place the entire day, and we brought in the spiritual leader from Detroit who had written a book, and we brought in two authors from New York and we did a tremendous program. It was nine straight programs. We had 400 for every session, and we got criticized for it. In fact, some of our professors went out to speak at other universities and they had people in the audience trying to, "Do you remember when you were at that conference?" That kind of stuff.
BE (00:44:46):
It is the same thing that is happening to Obama by calling him a Socialist and some of the Tea Party folks making him a Fascist. They do not know what a Fascist is. My own concern is that he is not socialist enough.
SM (00:45:05):
One of the things too, that I think it is important, when you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, and you think of the Boomer generation, and particularly the activists of that period who were anti-war, they were involved in all the movements. Many of them were the New Left, so they attacked liberals as well as conservatives because LBJ was a liberal, and he was running the war. Nixon, even though he was conservative-
BE (00:45:33):
They defeated Humphrey because Humphrey was not liberal enough.
SM (00:45:37):
Right. How we doing time wise?
BE (00:45:41):
I have got about 15 minutes and then I have got to close up. Sorry. I talk too much.
SM (00:45:46):
That is okay. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?
BE (00:45:56):
It is a silly question.
SM (00:45:56):
It is a silly question?
BE (00:45:56):
I am pulling your leg.
SM (00:45:56):
Okay.
BE (00:46:03):
It began 1960. It ended 1969. I think the (19)60s, this is going to sound strange to you, but since you are talking about the boomers, I do not think the (19)60s had as much impact on the boomer generation than the 1970s had on them. I think the 1960s had more of an impact on my generation, those of use that were born in the late (19)30s and early (19)40s and came to adulthood in the (19)60s. And those of us... I was... In 1961, entered college (19)65, graduated from college, (19)68, graduated from graduate school June of (19)68, was full-time minister in city of Philadelphia, riding with the Philadelphia police clergy unit. I think that, starting with the assassination of President Kennedy, where we all were taught about guns in America and war and violence, plus the civil rights tension and the dogs and the fire hoses and that kind of thing, I think that had much more of a psychological impact on my generation. I think that the boomers coming were teenagers in the (19)60s, some of them. Early boomers. Some were tainted by the drug culture and LSD and that kind of thing. But most of them who got into adulthood in (19)71, (19)72, (19)73, where they were tainted, they were tainted by Watergate. They were tainted by prosperity gospel. They were tainted by some of the televangelist movements. They were tainted by money being God as opposed to God being God. And I think it led to the resurgence. They brought us Ronald Reagan, they brought us George Bush. They modified a little bit with Bill Clinton, but I think of President George Bush Jr. was not as impacted by my generation as he was by the...
SM (00:49:03):
1960s.
BE (00:49:05):
Well, more of the 1970s. I think the late (19)60s, (19)70s part of that. So to answer your question, for me the 1960s have not ended.
SM (00:49:21):
You are not the only person who said that.
BE (00:49:24):
Okay. But it is diminishing in that it is smaller and smaller group of us who were impacted by the (19)60s. And I think the next generation is going to be modified by resource depletion. Dr. Jonas Salk spoke at a group of us in Congress before he died. He invented the polio vaccine. And he had a great lecture about what he called epoch A and epoch B. Epoch A for him was those that came after World War II. They are going to raise their kids, they are going to have more money, everything is going to get better. And epoch A was symbolized by consumption, quantity of life, competition. And he said, we need to evolve into epoch B, where we replace competition with cooperation, quantity of life, with quality of life, where the whole limited lifestyle was his view of the future compared to the past. Someone asked him, "Dr. Salk, how do you get from Epoch A to epoch B?" And he said, "Well, in every change in human history, there have been intellectual mutants." And he said, "What we need are teachers and ministers and prophetic leaders who help to bridge the old and the new view." And I think that is at the heart of our current political trauma. We have got people who are lamenting the demise of epoch A, and resisting moving to more stewardship of fragile resources, and are denying things like global warming, denying that we are running out of fossil fuel oil denying that we are running out of natural resources. So I think there is, kind of put it this way, I think there is a new civil war going on that is going on without guns and weapons, but it is going on for the heart and soul of Americans. And in a sense, the heart and soul of the world. And I think those of us who are progressive and liberal need to figure out how we do a better job of being the intellectual mutants that we need for this time.
SM (00:52:22):
The generation gap was certainly well documented. If you remember, there was a Life magazine cover with a young man with the glasses on, and he had the father pointing a finger at him, and the son was pointing a finger back. And in 1980, because you are a very... You care about Vietnam vets, that is where I first met you for the first time when you did a symposium on Agent Orange in Philadelphia. And this book was called The Lost Generation. And it was Senator Webb, Phil Caputo...
BE (00:53:07):
Ford Foundation found out that I had been a leader of working on Agent Orange back in the late (19)70s and early (19)80s, and forcing our government to care for our veterans that they sent me to gather a religious allegation and go to Vietnam and see the impact 35 years after the war on the children and grandchildren of the Vietnamese who are being exposed to Asian Orange.
SM (00:53:35):
Can I have a copy of this?
BE (00:53:36):
That is yours.
SM (00:53:37):
Because that is how I first met you. You probably do not remember, this is even before you came to Western. You were at a symposium, I think it was down near Temple. It was full of Vietnam vets, and you were talking about Agent Orange. And I was very impressed, and I know I am a friend of Harry Gafney. I do not know if you know Harry. And Dan Fraley and Steve Silver and that whole group, Dwight Edwards. And that is how... That was the beginning of I getting to know a lot of the Vietnam vets. And what I am trying to get at you here...
BE (00:54:07):
Do you need more than one copy?
SM (00:54:12):
If I could have a couple of these, I had appreciated it. I think I am going to turn this... It was a book that had a symposium documented, and the symposium was with Phil Caputo, Jim Webb, I think it was Bobby Mueller and James Fallows. And one other person, it was unbelievable.
BE (00:54:42):
Bobby Mueller is working with us on this.
SM (00:54:45):
Well, Bobby was at my retirement. I asked Bobby to come. He is one of the six people that was at my retirement. And what came up in this program is that I think they were talking about the generation gap and Jim Webb made a comment. The comment was, the generation gap is not between parents. Well, it is between parents and sons and daughters, but the real generation campus is within the generation between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not. And Bobby will remember this. It was a great interaction. And it was documented in the Wounded Generation book. Your thoughts on that commentary, whether, and this gets into my real big question here is, as a nation, I ask a question oftentimes, have we healed from the tremendous divisions that took place in the (19)60s and (19)70s between those who supported the war and against, between those who are black and white and all the other issues? And I took students to Washington to meet Senator Musky in 1995, and we asked this question to him, and I will give you his response in a minute. And I know Senator Nelson said it affected the body politic. But people do not want walk around Washington saying, I did not heal from the Vietnam War. Your thoughts on whether we as a nation have a problem with healing within this generation that grew after World War II, particularly those who served in Vietnam, 3 million plus, and those who may have been the anti-war people.
BE (00:56:25):
Well, before I answer your question, let me just say, I was the first anti-war activist on the Veterans Affairs Committee. And had I not been put on the Veterans Affairs Committee, I would have lost my elections. And at first, I did not want to be on the Veterans Affairs Committee, but I learned that even though you oppose the war, you can love the warrior. And even though you oppose the war, you can work on things like readjustment counseling centers, Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder, et cetera. I would go to your question about the healing. I would only modify the comment about the generation gap being between those who went to war and those who did not. I think it is more complicated than that. I think it is between those who went to war and those who did not. Those who supported integration and those who did not. Those who understood the need for African Americans to be part of the quality of life in America and have resources. Expanded to those who believe that you cannot build walls to keep out Mexicans or people crossing your border, because the world has gotten complicated. I think there is a division between those who live by the God of money and those that live by the commitment to social justice and caring for people. So it is too simplistic to say it is just as though every... Because every veteran who served in Vietnam was not a hero.
SM (00:58:24):
So you know that from me, Eli, right?
BE (00:58:27):
Yeah. Many were. But there were good people and bad people in the war, and there were good people and bad people in the anti-war movement. And as human beings, what we have done to each other has been to pour salt on the wounds of race, the wounds of violence. And I think there is a division, a generation gap between those who think you can solve the world's problems by military action, and those who think you need to solve the problems with something like three cups of tea. The book that gentleman wrote is my thinking about how we should have handled Afghanistan. We are handling it with weapons and war, and every time we inadvertently kill a civilian, we have made a family of terrorists. And that is where the gap is. And I think you see it every day on nightly news. The gap is between Fox News and MSNBC. The gap is between Colbert and Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck is the hero of the anti-movement. And I would say both the left and the right, but mostly the right love and thrive on not allowing the nation to heal. And you see it internally in the Senate today where McConnell says, we are going to be the... We are going to be no until we can defeat Obama. And we do not want Obama to succeed. And one of the reasons I am president of Common Cause is I think John Gardner was right, that everybody had special interest in Washington except the average, ordinary people. And hostility of the generation gap is an internal gap between those who, once elected, serve the public interest as opposed to the special interest. And money is a corrosive influence in our whole system. So it is too simplistic to say it is those who went to war and those who did not, because those of us who did not go into the war, many of us worked very hard to provide the warrior healing through Regis counseling centers, the new GI Bill for the all-volunteer military, and to make sure that whether you are for or against a war, you are always for healing the soldier who goes to war. Some of us work to try to stop war.
SM (01:01:42):
Do you believe that the people who were the anti-war people, many of them are college students and well-known anti-war people, that they consider themselves veterans of the war too?
BE (01:01:59):
They are. We just gave an award, a lifetime Achievement Award to Daniel Ellsberg.
SM (01:02:06):
I am interviewing him. I am interviewing him a week from Monday.
BE (01:02:10):
He just received the John Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award in California. And he was introduced by Pete McCloskey, a marine. Former congressman. Former Democrat now... Former Republican now Democrat. But Pete McCloskey introduced him. The three of us were on the same stage together. There is two former congressmen and Daniel Ellsberg. I think of Dr. King as a hero. I think of William Sloane Coffin as a hero. I think of Kate McCloskey as a hero. I think of Daniel Ellsberg as a hero.
SM (01:02:52):
Daniel and Philip.
BE (01:02:53):
And Philip. I think of...
SM (01:02:57):
Malcolm Boyd.
BE (01:02:58):
Malcolm Boyd was a hero. Yeah. You do not have to go to war to be a hero. I think that people have given their lives for justice, peace, they are heroes too. My picture, and I have got to leave... My picture of a real hero, is the Chinese guy with two shopping bags standing in front of the tank.
SM (01:03:28):
We do not know whatever happened to him.
BE (01:03:30):
He is my hero.
SM (01:03:38):
Wow.
BE (01:03:38):
I guess I respect those who are willing to stand in front of the tanks.
SM (01:03:42):
Do you have any final thoughts on the boomer generation itself with respect to... A lot of the boomers when they were young, felt that they were... Last question. They were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society, that they were going to hopefully end war, bring peace, end racism, sexism, really kind of cure everything. Kind of be the panacea for a lot of the issues that were facing us in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. Do you feel that because of the fact that we still have a war and that we still have a lot of the, we still have racism, although we have come a long way, we still, as David Garrow said to me, the historian, I said, the accomplishments for gay and lesbian Americans has been unbelievable in terms of one of the results of the (19)60s. And of course, you got the environmental movement of Gaylord Nelson.
BE (01:04:42):
Let me answer your question because I got to go. I think that the every generation makes its contribution. When I grew up, everybody I knew smoked. No one smokes anymore. When I grew up, women were making 30 cents on the dollar that men were making. That gap is closing, and there are more rights and privileges according to women. When I grew up, there was segregation. There is still separation of the races, but much more tolerance, much more sharing, much more riding in the same bus together, in all the seats, any seat being used. So in terms of racism, there have been good movements. Environmental movement has been good. Much more quality of life issues have been improved over time. So there is good things. And one other good thing we have not talked about, which I want to think about in your book, I think the Boomer generation is going to teach us how to retire better than previous generations. They are going to want exercise rooms and theater and all of the amenities to be close to retirement. But hopefully they will also teach us that there is life after retirement. That 65 to 95-year-old need a job. They may not need a...
SM (01:06:22):
I am going back to work in a year.
BE (01:06:24):
They may not need as much of a salary, but they will need a stipend and benefits. We need a whole Peace Corps for senior adults. We need to find out how the 65 to 95-year-old can make a contribution to our society. So there is lots of positives. I think the negative is that there has been an increase in greed. Hold on second. See what happens when you talk about greed, whole thing goes up.
SM (01:06:50):
Let me just turn this over here. This is the slow one. There we go.
BE (01:07:08):
I think there has been an increase in greed, an increase in selfishness and cause of the religious right's personal salvation push, There is too much everyone for themselves. And I think one of the negative legacies that this generation is leaving us, and part of my generation is responsible for it too, is that nobody wants to pay taxes. And if you think about it, all the states are now moving to casinos to fund their schools and their elderly programs because nobody wants to pay taxes, even though we pay less in taxes than we did 30 years ago as a percentage of our income. And I think that is a very damaging legacy to leave. The other damaging legacy that has been left by those who are about to retire is that too many politicians have been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. And too few young people see public service as an honorable profession. And my tears this week over Charlie Rangle was more about how many young blacks will avoid going into public service because they saw an 80-year-old black politician tarnished by his own lifestyle. And much of Charlie Rangel's problem was not corruption, it was sloppiness and arrogance and all of those kinds of things.
SM (01:08:48):
And how about the Vietnam veteran Cunningham, who was revered for his Vietnam service, now he is in jail.
BE (01:08:54):
Well, he took almost $5 million from military folk. So the handful of boomers who modeled bad behavior impacted more than a handful of others and other generations to have soiled views of the future. I have got to go.
SM (01:09:23):
Let me take two more pictures and then... I am going to take one definitely with only the backdrop. So this one is the one you are going to give to your wife. So if you stand right in front of it, and I will make sure the only thing I have in the back. Okay. Right there. So the only thing I am going to have in the backdrop is going to be that.
BE (01:09:42):
I think you should turn it on.
SM (01:09:42):
Yeah. And maybe one more.
BE (01:09:42):
That camera still have film in it?
SM (01:09:53):
Yes, it does.
BE (01:09:54):
Oh man, you are old fashioned.
SM (01:09:56):
Yep. Well, I have a digital, but this camera is good. There you go. Very good. Do you think when Janrus wrote his book...
SM (01:10:03):
Very good. Do you think when Jan Scruggs wrote his book, To Heal a Nation, that the wall has done some sort of a job in healing the nation? He not only talked about healing Vietnam vets and their families, but he talked about the nation itself.
BE (01:10:17):
It has helped, but remember Ronald Reagan said, "Tear down the wall." Maybe we need to tear down walls, but we need memorials. So I think that more as a memorial. Memorials are healing.
SM (01:10:36):
Here, if you can sign that to me, and I am glad you are in charge. I have John Edgar... Oh, not John Edgar, John Gardner's books. I have. I think I have all of them. Remember I read, No Easy Victories and then I had his book that I remember. I kind of encourage students to read, which is his book-
BE (01:10:54):
What do you go by in terms-
SM (01:10:56):
Stephen.
BE (01:10:57):
Stephen?
SM (01:10:57):
Yep.
BE (01:10:57):
P-H?
SM (01:11:12):
Yep. P-H-E-N. The interview itself includes questions that have been asked to all people, but there are also some specific questions and that have been geared toward your life as well.
BE (01:11:21):
Okay.
SM (01:11:22):
How did you become who you are? Could you describe your upbringing, your high school and college years, and maybe some of the role models and or historic figures you read about that inspired you?
BE (01:11:35):
Well, I am glad I gave you a copy of my book so you can find out all the details because the book is more of a biography of how I have done what I have done. As you know, I have been a United Methodist minister, I have been a congressman, I have been a faculty member at Swarthmore College. I ran the finance area for Senator Paul Simon of Illinois when he ran for president. I was head of the Committee for National Security under Paul Warnke who negotiated the SALT II agreement. I spent 10 years as president of a graduate school. I spent seven and a half years as head of the National Council of Churches, and now I have been three years as president of Common Cause. All of my vocational life in all those different professions have centered around my mantra, which I have kind of rephrased in the last couple of years. But it is to address fear, fundamentalism, and Fox News with a commitment to peace, poverty, and planet Earth. My wife of 46 years, who I have known for 52 years will tell you I only have one speech and a thousand illustrations focused on ending the poverty that kills healing the earth and working on peace and non-violence issues. Now you asked the question, how did I get started? I grew up in a blue collar family in a white collar community. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia while we were in a lower economic bracket than our neighbors and friends. My father never owned an automobile, never drove a car. I taught my mother how to drive at age, when she was 48 years old. We did everything on buses and trolleys between Philadelphia, Upper Darby, Chester, media, communities around Philadelphia. Yeah, we were, my brother and I, my older brother were sent to church so that my mother and father could sleep in on Sunday mornings. And I went to Sunday school and church services in the Methodist Church. And in those days, which was in the 1950s, there were an awful lot of progressive ministers who were linking gospel messages to civil rights, human rights, people's rights. When I became 15, 16, I went to a church camp and a couple ministers that I discovered, some ministers that taught me that ministers do not have to be boring, that they can be committed to social justice. I also took a tour of some poverty areas in Philadelphia and was surprised by my reaction to seeing poor people. In June of 1968, the Methodist Church sent me to 11 countries in Europe, not (19)68. In 1961, they sent me to 11 countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, France. But I also got in behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1961. And one of the most powerful experiences was in an orphanage that we visited in Naples, Italy. You had to travel by bus through a terrible slum, seeing the worst poverty you could see. And the bus went through a large gated building, and inside were a couple of hundred children who were orphans, all clean, all dressed, all cared for by faith related folks, all singing and joyful. And so the contrast between the abject poverty on the outside of the building and the care that was given on the inside had an impact on me. I had decided pretty early on to be a minister and thought that my whole life was going to be in the ministry. I wanted to be an urban minister. And in fact, that is the direction I went. A couple other incidents shaped my thinking. One was at age 19, I became pastor of my own church called the Gilbert and United Methodist Church in Gilbert and Pennsylvania. This is June of 1962. I am all of 19 had never been to a funeral, had never... I was given permission to do communion and baptisms and weddings, and most of it was to pay my way through college. After they had given churches to ordained elders in the Methodist Church and retired ministers and seminary students, they had churches left over. And so as a young, beginning my second year in college, I was pastor of a church. And the interesting thing was the church in Gilbert, the whole town was owned by the Gilbert and Coal company. All of the parishioners were related to the coal mine. They owned only the inside of their houses. The coal company owned all the land underneath their houses, and it was a strip mining area. The men were all dying in their (19)50s of black lung disease. And even though the people were very poor, they were very loving and caring and adopted a young preacher, taught me a lot. So those kinds of experience began to move me. I would say another defining experience, which I do describe in the book, is in February of 1968, I was invited by William Sloan Coffin, who was at that time the chaplain at Yale, later to become a minister at Riverside Church in New York. But Bill Coffin invited a group of people concerned about the Vietnam War to a meeting here in Washington at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. And I boarded a bus in northern New Jersey where I was at seminary and traveled to Washington for the first time. And as we got to the door of the church, the bus came to the curb. The radical religious rite of that day was a guy by the name of Carl McIntire, and he was out of Cape May, New Jersey. He was the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson of that day. And he had organized a protest carrying signs that said, kill a commie for Christ's sake, and trying to get us not to cross his picket line. And as coming out of a blue-collar union family, I broke my father's dictum, never to cross a picket line and went inside the church, went up into the balcony of the church and listened to speaker after speaker, connect these with poverty and war. And in doing that, I began to recalibrate my own thinking. And the keynote speaker was a young guy, 39 years of age by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King.
SM (01:19:22):
Oh my God.
BE (01:19:22):
This is five weeks before he was assassinated. And he inspired me. I think of myself as a disciple of Dr. King, read his material. Less than 10 years later by accident, I got elected to the United States Congress. And a couple of years after that, I was one of 12 members of the Select Committee on assassinations looking into the death of Dr. King. These books over here are all the documents on the committee that was researching the death of Dr. King and John F. Kennedy. So I interviewed James Earl Ray the assassin as a young member of Congress. So...
SM (01:20:13):
Wow.
BE (01:20:14):
Dr. King by accident has had quite an impact. Let us just give you the smallest, it is only those persons that we are serving-
SM (01:20:27):
Walter Cronkite.
BE (01:20:28):
Yes. Remember him and Sam briefly in California.
SM (01:20:31):
Yep. Yep. Chris Dodd.
BE (01:20:34):
Yep.
SM (01:20:37):
Wow.
BE (01:20:39):
So this is a long answer to your short question. I think poverty and King vaccinated me to care about ending the poverty that kills, connecting poverty to war. And it was my father who connected me to the environment. He loved the trees and the land that he worked so hard on. Someone... He paid $13,000 for a house in the suburbs without the ability to have an automobile or a car. He worked 37 years at the same desk testing relays for General Electric, died at age 56 with probably killed by the chemicals he was using in the workplace or the fact that he smoked a lot. He was offered million dollars for his piece of land to build a shopping center. And he turned them down because the trees on his land, the environment were important and environment and introduced me to the early books in the (19)60s, The Greening of America.
SM (01:21:48):
Oh yeah.
BE (01:21:49):
Some of the early conversations about the environment. When I decided to run for Congress, I became kind of the environmental candidate. If the Republicans had run any candidate against me who cared about the environment or cared about women's issues, I would have lost because my district was the most Republican district in the nation. I had a Democratic congressman.
SM (01:22:16):
Yep.
BE (01:22:17):
And I got elected at age 31 as you know.
SM (01:22:19):
Yep. When you were in that room with, I did not know you were in the room with Dr. King six weeks before he was assassinated, I am-
BE (01:22:28):
We also marched in Arlington Cemetery that same day together.
SM (01:22:31):
Wow. Did... He touched your life obviously with his words and obvious he was a great preacher and his delivery and everything. But I interviewed another person whose husband was in Harvard when Dr. King came, or excuse me, Michigan State, when Dr. King came to speak. And he had said that it was the greatest experience he had ever had in his life listening to him. But I do not know if he is putting me on, but he said there was something about the aura and the atmosphere that he said, I did not think this guy was going to live long. And that was a commentary that from his Michigan State speech, when this person was at college there, I do not know if you felt bad at all that because he was certainly different and he had a lot of enemies.
BE (01:23:27):
At the time. I was not smart enough to think those thoughts. I was all eyes and ears except for the assassination of President Kennedy. I was lulled into thinking we were a peaceful nation. But if you look back on the assassination of Kennedy, King, Bobby Kennedy, and the attempt on Lawless' life, and you go back and look in history in terms of all the attempts on president's lives, you realize we're a pretty violent nation.
SM (01:24:06):
I think there is an author that wrote a book, Violence in America. Olga Demery was a very popular book in the (19)70s and talked about Native Americans and all the things that we had done to people in the south, you... It is interesting, we are about the same age. And I think I mentioned to your secretary that my grandfather was a Methodist minister Peekskill, New York from 54, excuse me, from 1936 to 1954. And he died in 56. And then I had, we went to Methodist Church in Courtland, New York growing up as a kid. And Dr. Nathan was our minister. And it is interesting you said about social messages. My mom used to tell me a story that we would go to church, I do not remember this, but we would go to church and I used to say to her, I wish they would cut out the singing out. Cause all I cared about was hearing his message. And this is like a second, third, fourth grade kid. There were messages that he gave. So you were right on about the social messages. One of the things when... The one talks about the (19)50s and (19)60s, one rarely talks about the religious leaders that influenced the boomers growing up. So when I look at religion, not just politics, religion itself, I think of Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who were very religious, Bishop Sheen that-
BE (01:25:33):
Happy trails to you...
SM (01:25:33):
But they were very religious too. And they had Christmas albums and they took in kids. Bishop Sheen was on TV then. And then as we, and of course Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel and Jesse Jackson, Reverend Schuh and Pat Robertson, these are people that I think influenced Boomers over the-
BE (01:25:49):
Founding of the National Council of Churches was founded in 1950, was very much a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Brown versus Board of Education, the National Council of Churches had, I was General Secretary of that Council, but at 1957, had Dr. King as its keynote speaker, had a lot of late people, including a guy by the name of J. Irwin Miller. He was a late person. And in October 1967, Esquire Magazine had a cover. It says, 'The man who ought to be the next President of the United States.'
SM (01:26:28):
Wow.
BE (01:26:29):
He was head of Cummins Engine in, which was a big industrial thing. He was a Republican. He was also chair of the board at the National Council of Churches. And he was one of the founders of Common Cause. He worked with John Gardner.
SM (01:26:49):
John Gardner. Yeah.
BE (01:26:50):
There were three Republicans who were on the articles of incorporation. One was a guy by the name of Andrew High School who was head of Time publishing. One was John Gardner and one was J. Irwin Miller. And you... I had Gardner look at some of these pictures. J. Irwin Miller is with Dr. King in some of the signing of the Civil Rights Movement issues. And so there's a whole bunch of Republican, mainly madder Republicans, Eisenhower Republicans who began to speak up on civil rights, human rights, and people's rights who were also people of faith. And I think it goes back to winning World War II. You get, I am born in 1943, May 29th Life or Look Magazine came out that week and had Rosie the Riveter on the cover, woman who symbolized women working in factories to win the war. But the war is won and the Congress passes the most important piece of legislation. After the war, which was the GI Bill-
SM (01:28:20):
(19)48.
BE (01:28:25):
All of the blue-collar workers who went to war came back and became the white-collar workers of the (19)50s and (19)60s. Some of them became ministers, some of them became teachers, some of them became lawyers and doctors and other kinds of things. Sprawl started, people started to get wealthy from development of communities and suburbs expanded and people were moving out of the cities. Churches were being built. Every few minutes a new church was being dedicated and churches were packed. The sense of victory, we fought evil and we won. And every child will do better than their parents did. And their parents are doing better than their parents did. And the American dream is alive and well and had that sense. Brown versus Board of education happens in (19)54 and some of the hostility of civil rights. And suddenly in the (19)60s, you have got not only the war in Vietnam, you have got the burning of the cities, you have got the tension around civil rights and human rights. You have got the Commission on Poverty that comes out with a scathing report on the, that Johnson began the war on poverty efforts. And I think the faith leaders had read the Bible, thoughtfully enough to discover that God cares about poor people. I think some of the new religious leaders, the conservatives read the Bible and somehow did not find out that Jesus cared about poor people and misread all of those stories and somehow come out of the text believing God is the God of wealth. God is the God of prosperity. But the (19)50s and (19)60s, we were vaccinated by faith leaders who challenged government to respect people by race regardless of creed or color. And were willing in a sense, to fight a civil war over it. And then we did not go back to the battlefield with the South in terms of military war, but we did send in troops to make sure that schools were integrated and people who were part of our society became full partners. And Dr. King was kind of the disciple of that movement.
SM (01:31:07):
It leads into the area where the ones you address, and that is these periods of boomers have been alive. Keep in mind that those people born, say between (19)37 and (19)45, I think are closer to the boomer, the front edge boomers that were born between (19)46 and (19)56. Then those born between boomers that are from (19)57 to say (19)64 because they were graduate students, they inspired and were right by the side of many of the older boomers. But when you look at the different periods in America since 1946, and we are talking 64 years here now in the First Boomers now coming into Social Security this year, you talk very, you have already said something very important when you look at church, I can take the experience of my life. I love going to church when every Sunday, all throughout the (19)50s, when in the (19)60s, then my dad moved and we were quite away from the church. But it was that period that I saw church attendants seemed to wane as we started to head into the (19)60s. And then something happened, like you mentioned in the (19)70s, and I like your thoughts on this. In the late (19)70s, the religious rights seemed to come into power. Jerry Falwell, whether it be Oral Roberts, they were very Pat Robertson.
BE (01:32:36):
Jim Bakker, Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart. What happened was that (19)50s and (19)60s were upward mobility, growing of the suburbs, challenged with racism, challenged with poverty. But a society that said, we have got to address these issues if we're going to be great. By the early (19)70s, parents were telling their kid, do not go into ministry, do not go into social service, get an education, go to college. Some of us got to college by the skin of our teeth, but you're smarter than we are. So get a degree so you can make money. And the prosperity gospel got caught in. And on the political side, you had the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's loss and the conservative political, and then you had the emergence of religious conservatives who stayed out of politics mostly. And Billy Graham stayed out mostly. And many of the evangelists were talking about personal salvation and not very interested in politics. But you get into the (19)70s and alongside of the secular effort to make money, you had a whole bunch of what I call charlatan religious leaders who said, send us a dollar and we will pray for you. Put your hand on the radio set. And when we finish this prayer, write us a check for $1, $5-
SM (01:34:25):
Reverend Schuller or-
BE (01:34:28):
$10. And this is Jimmy and Swaggart and Jimmy Bakker and those guys, the televangelists, they did not want the money as much as they wanted your name and address because they were smart enough to use computers and know that they could amass large amounts of wealth by putting those names and addresses on a computer and keeping track and talking to them by region and by area. And initially putting a stamp on it, on a newsletter and getting it out to folks, but then getting it into a computer. So it was even cheaper.
SM (01:35:06):
It is like the DNC today, right?
BE (01:35:08):
Well, I think in 1980, there was a civil marriage between, probably started in (19)60, in (19)76, (19)77, (19)78, a civil marriage between these charlatans religious radical and the political right that made Ronald Reagan, the Christian president and Jimmy Carter and also ran Ronald Reagan would not go to church. But yeah, he was envisioned as being the guru. He was going to stop Roe versus Wade, which was an early (19)70s Supreme Court decision is all the conservative state and the religious right and the political right out-hustled the left. The left took 50 minutes to answer a question. The left did not deep frame some of the justice language. Whereas the religious right, the political right were willing to sloganeer simple savers, and so the left gets out hustled. And I think the religious right thought that if they had this civil marriage with the Republicans, that they would turn back Roe versus Wade. That they would be able to prosper in kind of not just the old time religion, but focused on personal salvation. And the wealthy were blessed by God because they were wealthy. God must be blessing them. I think they forgot the passage that talks about how hard it is for a rich man to enter heaven, where they said, it is easier for a camel than go through the eye of a needle and for a rich man to enter heaven. And they saw Jesus in a tuxedo more than touching the hem of a prostitute, hem of the dress of a prostitute or touching the leper or hugging a poor person. And so you have got this tension that I think has actually grown into the split in our country. We are divided three ways, a radical Christian and political right on one side, moderate to progressive liberals on the other side, and a whole host of people that are in the middle. And the reason I wrote the book, Middle Church, which goes against, goes against now that is-
SM (01:37:54):
Oh, Okay. Yep.
BE (01:37:55):
The reason I wrote that book was to go after Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the religious right. But it is middle church, middle synagogue, middle mosque. And my argument in the book is that the religious left failed, and we failed because we would do calpoint, point, counterpoint with the religious right. We forgot to evangelize the middle. And you have got a whole host of Americans in the middle who are too easily swayed by patriotism and false morality that many on the left have forgotten to use that patriotism and morality language. And that book could have been called Middle America. It is more of a secular political book then a churchy book. But it will give you some idea if you read it, some of these thoughts.
SM (01:39:01):
But where would you place in, we all know what the Beatles did. They went into any now organized religion. They went off to them, Maharishi or whatever. It was fairly common that a lot of people are going off into Zen Buddhism. I interviewed Peter Coyote and he told me, the actor, that if it was not for Zen Buddhism, he would not be alive today. I mean, it is that important for him to relax. He has been doing it for 35 years. And so a lot of people became Zen Buddhist. A lot of people like the Beatles, and not just the Beatles, because they were well known, but other people got into all these maharishis and they came to college campuses in the late (19)60s. You had the Moonies that were everywhere. And there was this attitude, and correct me if I am wrong, that a lot of the boomer kids and a lot of young adults for some reason went against anything that was in a, were position of authority. They were against their political leaders. They were against their religious leaders, they were against politicians, the college administrators. So the inner-inner spirituality became the thing in the late (19)60s, in the (19)70s. Your thoughts on this inner spirituality where you do not need to go to church. It is just that kind of-
BE (01:40:21):
I will answer that question, but let me challenge something you said. I would not use the phrase a lot. I would use some because I think the majority did what their parents told them to do. Go to college, become something, get a profession. But the (19)60s and (19)70s are marked by a search, a search religiously, a search psychologically, a search for meaning, a search for life. And not only did folks search alternative religions, but they also searched alternative lifestyles, commune movement, and others. And you remember some of this came out of Woodstock, some of it came out of the anti-war movement. Some of it, the draft was there. And people had to ask themselves, is the United States worth dying for?
SM (01:41:30):
Yeah.
BE (01:41:31):
And if not, do I go to Canada? What do I think about 58,000 people being killed in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands being wounded, and what do I think if I care about integration, about the fact that liberals were disappearing here and there being killed and lynched and blacks were being attacked. And it was a big struggle for the identity of America. So there is not one issue that it was a small important cluster. I remember when I got elected to Congress, some of my friends said, why would you do that? Why do not you stay on the outside of government and fight the corruption, fight the bad guys who are in government in those days, you know, had Watergate and you had a lot of lack of modeling of good behavior. And I think there was that tension in our society. My own personal view is that you need people inside the tent and people outside the tent, people inside government, people outside government. I have got five honorary doctorate degrees, but only four arrests for civil disobedience. If I have any regrets in my life, it is that I have not been arrested enough. And-
SM (01:43:09):
Dr. King be proud is because Dr. King used to always say that, if you're not willing to go to jail for your belief, what are you out there for?
BE (01:43:16):
Right.
SM (01:43:17):
Not doing violent things.
BE (01:43:18):
But my friend Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary sings a song for me once in a while about, "Have You Been To Jail For Justice." Good words in that song.
SM (01:43:28):
You are right. Right. What other things we... Well know that when President Kennedy, well when he was running for president, the issue with the Catholic Church and that religion would influence his decisions. Obviously, that did not happen. But what did that say about the America of 1960, about fearful that the Pope was going to run the United States of government? And John Kennedy obviously saw that the concern, but he said that is not going to happen with him.
BE (01:44:05):
Yeah. Well, like John Kennedy, I believe in the separation of church and state, but not the separation of people of faith and institutions of government. You want your elected officials to have an active faith statement, but you need to always remember that you are not serving in public office a particular denomination or religious tradition. Henry Waxman, whose Jewish was elected with me in 1974, I want him to be a faithful member of the Jewish community, but he would never intend to have the Jewish community make the United States a Jewish nation. I think it is true of Muslims who might serve in Congress. I want them to be faithful. I want them to read the Quran, but I do not want to have Sharia law lead the law of land.
SM (01:45:02):
Right.
BE (01:45:02):
I do not want to have Sharia law be the law of the land. For conservative Protestants, I want them to be themselves. I do not have any animosity to people who are in the religious right, unless that religious right once elected thinks that it can make this a Christian nation. Our founding fathers were very smart to help all of us understand this is a nation that believes in religious pluralism. We want people of faith and people of no faith to use morals and values that grow out of their tradition, but not to ever allow any individual faith tradition to dominate. In our history, we used to hang people who were Roman Catholics. We used to torture people who were a different kind of Protestant than we had. I think the founding fathers and mothers said, "Hey, that is not going to make us a very healthy nation, so let us respect everybody's religious tradition." What is interesting is that you do not know the founding of this country and the people that come here are made up of people who left their homelands because of religious persecution in many cases. We all know that America is a xenophobic nation, that is afraid of people who are different, in the whole history. I mean, the Irish. I was even educating my dad more about some of the things that happened between England and Ireland and the Potato Famine and so forth and the treatment. What amazes me today, I am very concerned about it, and I would like your thoughts on some of the attacks on President Obama, and some people say his close links with the Muslim faith. Some people say he is a Muslim. He says he is a Christian. They will not listen to his word. They have their personal opinions. It kind of shoots me back to what happened in 1960, about the fear of the Pope. Well, then there is a fear that Islam will take over. I know they use the issue of terrorism, but I see this continuing, oftentimes a trend where-
SM (01:47:17):
Just remember that-
BE (01:47:19):
The kid that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City was a Roman Catholic raised in the United States. And if there are terrorists in 60 countries, we do not stop terrorism by bombing capitals. Part of our problem in this country is racism. Part of our problem is fear of the other. And part of our problem is we carry around in our heads, world war images of what war is about. And I think some of the leaders that Obama has, many of the leaders that Bush had were focused on World War II images of the world, and we got to change that view. We need an international police effort on terrorism, but we ought to cut in half our military expenditures. I laugh when I read the newspapers with a tear in my eye when I think about all of the conservatives who say, "We have got to balance the budget," but you cannot cut defense. We have got to balance the budget, but we're going to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq without paying for it, without raising taxes, and we got these big deficits. All those deficits are caused by over-spending on healthcare and education and social security. Hogwash. We are in this predicament because we, after 9/11, were manipulated by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush on the issue of fear, we went after a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 called Iraq. We went after it even though the inspectors were there. There was no hint that they actually had nuclear weapons or nuclear capability. And on the one hand, the political right and the religious right wanted more expenditures on defense, more expenditures for war, but somehow that does not impact on their thinking on deficits.
SM (01:49:24):
Do you see the link here? You are talking about the fear now. The fear in the (19)50s was the fear of the Cold War from the boomer generation. They were [inaudible] the fear of the Cold War, the potential-
BE (01:49:41):
Cold War fear started before the boomers were elected. It was the fear grew of the cult war grew out of the separation of Germany right after World War II and the building of... Russia was a world-class military, but a third-class country without the ability to really have an economy that worked. And there were all these myths about the former Soviet Union, and I think people who lived through World War II saw in terms of the exchange of nuclear weapons. And I think by the time the boomers got here and they were very small and children at the time, that fear not only got intensified with the East-West struggle, but it also pointed out that even when you tore down the Berlin Wall, you had to find another enemy to be fearful of. And so I think Rumsfeld and Cheney were able to use 9/11 as a way of tapping into the fear that people have. And my complaint about Americans is we are dumb. We do not learn from history and-
SM (01:51:01):
We do not read history.
BE (01:51:01):
We do not read history, and we do not realize that we have got to send our young people to get an international education and not just a domestic education.
SM (01:51:10):
Global. Yeah. That has been the talk. We have to prepare students for the global world. I remember Henry Cisneros at a conference, golly way back in the early (19)90s. He was speaking for a mayor, I think, of San Antonio. And this beautiful college administrator stood up and said, "Well, what is America going to be like if it is the majority are minorities?" And it was shocking to hear it from her, but she was asking a question and he said... I will never forget what he said. He said, "You should not be fearing the future. You should be preparing for the future because you are going to have bosses who are Latino. You are going to have bosses who are Asian American and from India, you name it. And so we have to prepare students for the world they are going to face because it is a global world." And you raised some good points. It is interesting also that McCarthyism, which was trying to label people who spoke up or were politically active as communists. I see sometimes today for people who may support Muslims in America are sometimes paying a price too for... We did a conference, Islam in America at Westchester University. It was my last coup probably before we left. We packed the place the entire day and we brought in the spiritual leader from Detroit who had written a book, and we brought in two authors from New York, and we did a tremendous program, and it was nine straight program. We had a 400 for every session, and we got criticized for it. In fact, some of our professors went out to speak at other universities and they had people in the audience trying to, "Do you remember when you were at that conference," and all that kind of stuff.
BE (01:53:04):
Well, it is the same thing that is happening to Obama by calling him a socialist, and some of the Tea Party folks making him a fascist. They do not know what a fascist is. And my own concern is that he is not socialist enough.
SM (01:53:19):
Well, one of the things too that I think is important. When you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, and you think of the boomer generation, and particularly the activists of that period who were anti- war. They were down in all the movement. Many of them were the new left. And so they attacked liberals as well as conservatives because LBJ was a liberal when he was running the war. Nixon was the... Even though he was conservative-
BE (01:53:47):
They defeated Humphrey.
SM (01:53:49):
Right.
BE (01:53:49):
Because Humphrey was not liberal enough.
SM (01:53:51):
Right. How are we doing time-wise?
BE (01:53:54):
I have about 15 minutes and then I have got to close up. Sorry. I talk too much.
SM (01:53:59):
That is okay. When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion, and when did it end?
BE (01:54:03):
It is a silly question.
SM (01:54:12):
Silly question?
BE (01:54:14):
I am just pulling your leg. It began in 1960 and it ended in 1969.
SM (01:54:18):
Oh, yeah.
BE (01:54:27):
I think the (19)60s... This is going to sound strange to you, but since you are talking about the boomers, I do not think the (19)60s had as much impact on the boomer generation than the 1970s had on them. I think the 1960s had more of an impact on my generation, those of us who were born in the late (19)30s and early (19)40s and who came to adulthood in the (19)60s. And those of us, I was... In 1961, entered college in (19)65, graduated from college in (19)68, and graduated from graduate school. June of (19)68 was a full-time minister in the city of Philadelphia, writing on the Philadelphia police clergy unit. I think that starting with the assassination of President Kennedy, where we all were taught about guns in America and war and violence plus the civil rights tension and the dogs and the fire hoses and that kind of thing. I think that had much more of a psychological impact on my generation. I think that the bloomers coming were like teenagers in the (19)60s, some of them early boomers. Some were tainted by the drug culture and LSD and that kind of thing. But most of them who got into adulthood in (19)71, (19)72, and (19)73, where they were tainted, they were tainted by Watergate. They were tainted by the prosperity gospel. They were tainted by some of the televangelist movement. They were tainted by money being God as opposed to God being God. And I think it led to the resurgence. They brought us Ronald Reagan. They brought us George Bush. They modified a little bit with Bill Clinton, but I think of President George Bush Jr. was not as impacted by my generation as he was by the...
SM (01:57:05):
1960s.
BE (01:57:08):
Well, more of the 1970s.
SM (01:57:08):
(19)70s, yeah.
BE (01:57:12):
I think the late (19)60s and (19)70s were part of that. So to answer your question, for me, the 1960s had not ended.
SM (01:57:22):
You are not the only person that said that.
BE (01:57:27):
Okay. But it is diminishing in that it is a smaller and smaller group of us who were impacted by the (19)60s and think the next generation is going to be modified by resource depletion. Dr. Jonas Salk spoke at a group of us in Congress before he died. He invented the polio vaccine, and he had a great lecture about what he called Epoch A and Epoch B. Epoch A for him was those that came after World War II. They are going to raise their kids. They are going to have more money and everything is going to get better. Epoch A was symbolized by consumption, quantity of life, and competition. And he said, "We need to evolve into Epoch B, where we replace competition with cooperation, quantity of life with quality of life," where the whole limited lifestyle was his view of the future compared to the past. Someone asked him, "Dr. Salk, how do you get from Epoch A to Epoch B?" And he said, "Well, in every change in human history, there have been intellectual mutants." And he said, "Well, we need our teachers and ministers and prophetic leaders who helped to bridge the old and the new view." And I think that is what is at the heart of our current political trauma. We have people who are lamenting the demise of Epoch A and resisting moving to more stewardship of fragile resources and are denying things like global warming, denying that we are running out of fossil fuel oil, denying that we are running out of natural resources. So I think there is kind of a... Put it this way, I think there is a new civil war going on. It is going on without guns and weapons, but it is going on for the heart and soul of Americans and in a sense, the heart and soul of the world. I think those of us who are progressive and liberal need to figure out how we do a better job of being the intellectual mutants that we need for this time.
SM (02:00:13):
The generation gap was certainly well-documented. You remember there was a Life magazine cover with a young man with the glasses on, and he had the father pointing a finger at him, and the son was pointing a finger back. And in 1980, because you are a very... You care about Vietnam vets. That is where I first met you for the first time when you did a symposium on Agent Orange in Philadelphia. And this book was called The Lost Generation, and it was Senator Webb, Phil Caputo... Wow.
BE (02:00:55):
Ford Foundation found out that I had been a leader of working on Agent Orange back in the late (19)70s and early (19)80s, and forcing our government to care for our veterans that they sent me to gather a religious delegation and go to Vietnam and see the impact 35 years after the war on the children and grandchildren of the Vietnamese who are being exposed to Agent Orange. So, I-
SM (02:01:21):
Can I have a copy of this?
BE (02:01:22):
That is yours.
SM (02:01:23):
Because see, that is how I first met you. I am trying to remember, this is even before you came to Westchester. You were at a symposium. I think it was down near Temple. It was full of Vietnam vets and you were talking about Agent Orange. And I was very impressed, and I know I am a friend of Harry Gaffney. I do not know if you know Harry and Dan Fraley and Steve Silver and that whole group, Dwight Edwards. And that was the beginning of my getting to know a lot of the Vietnam vets and what I am trying to get at here-
BE (02:01:52):
You need more than one copy?
SM (02:01:53):
Yes. If I could have a couple of these, I would appreciate it. I think I am going to turn this one over. The question I have is, there was a book called The Longest... Let me get this here. Sorry. It was a book that had a symposium documented, and the symposium was with Phil Caputo, Jim Webb, I think it was Bobby Mueller, James Fallows, and one other person. It was unbelievable.
BE (02:02:28):
Bobby Mueller is working with us on this.
SM (02:02:32):
Yeah. Well, Bobby was at my retirement. I asked Bobby to come. He was one of the six people that was at my retirement. And what came up in this program is that I think they were talking about the generation gap, and Jim Webb made a comment. The comment was, "The generation gap is not between parents. Well, it is between parents and sons and daughters, but the real generation gap is within the generation between those who went to Vietnam and those who did not." And Bobby will remember this. It was a great interaction. And it's documented in the Wounded Generation book. Your thoughts on that commentary, whether... And this gets into my real big question here. As a nation, I ask a question oftentimes, have we healed from one of the tremendous divisions that took place in the (19)60s and (19)70s between those who supported the war? And again, between those who are Black and White and all the other issues? And I took students to Washington to meet Senator Musky in 1995, and we asked this question to him, and I will give you his response in a minute. And I know Senator Nelson said it affected the body politic, but people do not want walk around Washington saying, "I did not heal from the Vietnam War." Your thoughts on whether we as a nation have a problem with healing within this generation, the group after World War II, particularly those who serve in Vietnam - 3 million plus - and those who may have in the anti-war people?
BE (02:04:06):
Well, before I answer your question, let me just say, I was the first anti-war activist on the Veterans Affairs Committee, and had I not been put on the Veterans Affairs Committee, I would have lost my elections. And at first, I did not want to be on the Veterans Affairs Committee, but I learned that even though you oppose the war, you can love the warrior. And even though you oppose the war, you can work on things like readjustment counseling centers, Agent Orange, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, et cetera. I would go to your question about healing. I would only modify the comment about the generation gap being between those who went to war and those who did not. I think it is more complicated than that. I think it is between those who went to war and those who did not, those who supported integration and those who did not, those who understood the need for African Americans to be part of a quality of life in America and have resources expanded to those who believe that you cannot build walls to keep out Mexicans or people crossing your border because the world has gotten complicated. I think there is a division between those who live by the god of money and those that live by the commitment to social justice and caring for people. So it's too simplistic to say it is just as though every... Because every veteran who served in Vietnam was not a hero. We know that from Eli, right?
SM (02:06:01):
Yeah.
BE (02:06:01):
Many were, but there were good people and bad people in the war, and there were good people and bad people in the anti-war movement. And as human beings, what we have done to each other has been to pour salt on the wounds of race, the wounds of violence. And I think there is a division, a generation gap between those who think you can solve the world's problems by military action. And those who think you need to solve the problems with something like three cups of tea. The book that gentleman wrote is my thinking about how we should have handled Afghanistan. We were handling it with weapons and war, and every time we inadvertently kill a civilian, we have made a family of terrorists. And that is where the gap is. I think you see it every day on Nightly News. The gap is between Fox News and MSNBC. The gap is between Cobert and Rush Limbaugh. Glenn Beck is the hero of the anti-movement. And I would say both the left and the right, but mostly the right love and thrive on not allowing the nation to heal. And you see it internally in the Senate today where McConnell says, "We are going to be no until we can defeat Obama, and we do not want Obama to succeed." And one of the reasons I am President of Common Cause is I think John Gardner was right, that everybody had a special interest in Washington except average ordinary people. And the hostility of the generation gap is that internal gap between those who once elected, serve the public interest as opposed to the special interest. And money is a corrosive influence in our whole system. So it is too simplistic to say it is those who went to war and those who did not because those of us who did not go into the war, many of us worked very hard to provide the warrior healing through Regis counseling centers, the new GI Bill for the all-volunteer military, and to make sure that whether you are for or against a warrior, you are always for healing the soldier who goes to war, and some of us work to try to stop wars.
SM (02:09:05):
Do you believe that the people who were the anti-war people, many of them are college students and well-known people, that they consider themselves veterans of the war too?
BE (02:09:21):
They are.
SM (02:09:21):
And we-
BE (02:09:22):
We just gave an award, Lifetime Achievement Award to Daniel Ellsberg.
SM (02:09:28):
I am interviewing him. I mean, a week from Monday.
BE (02:09:31):
He just received the John Gardner Lifetime Achievement Award in California. And he was introduced by Pete McCloskey, a Marine, former congressman, former Republican, now Democrat. But Pete McCloskey introduced him. But the three of us were on the same stage together. There are two former congressmen and Daniel Elizabeth. I think of Dr. King as a hero. I think of William Sloane Coffin as a hero. I think of Pete McCloskey as a hero. I think of Daniel Ellsberg as a hero.
SM (02:10:11):
Daniel and Philip.
BE (02:10:12):
And Philip. I think of...
SM (02:10:15):
Malcolm Boyd.
BE (02:10:16):
Malcolm Boyd was a hero. And you do not have to go to war to be a hero. I think that people have given their lives for justice and peace. They are heroes too. My picture... And I have got to leave. My picture of a real hero is the Chinese guy with two shopping bags standing in front of the tank.
SM (02:10:44):
You do not know whatever happened to him.
BE (02:10:46):
He is my hero.
SM (02:10:48):
Wow.
BE (02:10:53):
I guess I respect those who are willing to stand in front of the tanks.
SM (02:10:56):
Do you have any final thoughts on the boomer generation itself with respect to... A lot of the boomers when they were young felt that they were going to... This will be my last question. They were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society, that they were going to hopefully end war to bring peace, end racism, sexism, and really kind of cure everything. Kind of be the panacea for a lot of the issues that were facing us in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. Do you feel that because of the fact that we still have of war and that we still have a lot of the... We still have racism, although we have come a long way. We still, as David Garrow said to me, the historian said the accomplishments for gay and lesbian Americans have been unbelievable in terms of one of the results of the (19)60s. And of course, you got the environmental movement, Gaylor Nelson, and...
BE (02:11:54):
Let me ask you a question because I got to go.
SM (02:11:56):
Yep.
BE (02:11:59):
I think that every generation makes its contribution. When I grew up, everybody I knew smoked. No one smokes anymore. When I grew up, women were making 30 cents on the dollar that men were making. That gap is closing, and there are more rights and privileges according to women. When I grew up, there was segregation. There is still a separation of the races, but much more tolerance, much more sharing, much more riding in the same bus together at all the seats, any seat being used. So in terms of racism, there have been good movements. Environmental movement has been good. Much more quality of life issues have been improved over time. So there is good things. And one other good thing we have not talked about, which you might want to think about in your book. I think the boomer generation is going to teach us how to retire better than previous generations. They are going to want exercise rooms and theater and all of the amenities to be close to retirement, but hopefully, they will also teach us that there is life after retirement. That 65 to 95-year-olds need a job. They may not need a-
SM (02:13:30):
Yeah, I am going back to work in a year.
BE (02:13:31):
They may not need as much of a salary, but they will need a stipend and benefits. We need a whole Peace Corps for senior adults. We need to find out how the 65 to 95-year-olds can make a contribution to our society. So there are lots of positives. I think the negative is that there has been an increase in greed and an increase in selfishness. And because of the religious rights of personal salvation push, there is too much everyone for themselves. And I think one of the negative legacies that this generation is leaving us, and part of my generation is responsible for it too, is that nobody wants to pay taxes. And if you think about it, all the states are now moving to casinos to fund their schools and their elderly programs because nobody wants to pay taxes, even though we pay less in taxes than we did 30 years ago as a percentage of our income. And I think that is a very damaging legacy to leave. The other damaging legacy that has been left by those who are about to retire is that too many politicians have been caught with their fingers in the cookie jar and too few young people see public service as an honorable profession. And my tears this week over Charlie Wrangle was more about how many young Blacks will avoid going into public service because they saw an 80-year-old Black politician tarnished by his own lifestyle and much of Charlie Wrangel's problem was not corruption. It was sloppiness and arrogance and all of those kinds of things.
SM (02:15:37):
And how about the Vietnam veteran Cunningham, who was revered for his Vietnam service? Now, he is in jail.
BE (02:15:43):
Well, he took almost $5 million from military folk. So the handful of boomers who modeled bad behavior impacted more than a handful of others and other generations who have soiled views of the future. I got to go.
SM (02:16:10):
Let me take two more pictures and then I am going to take one definitely with only the background. So this one is the one you are going to give to your wife. So if you stand right in front of it, and I will make sure the only thing I have in the back... Okay. Right there. So the only thing I am going to have in the backdrop is [inaudible] do that.
BE (02:16:29):
[inaudible].
SM (02:16:29):
Yeah. Three, six. One more.
BE (02:16:29):
That camera still have film in it?
SM (02:16:39):
Yes, it does.
BE (02:16:39):
Oh, man. You are old-fashioned.
SM (02:16:41):
Yep. Well, I have a vision over this camera is good.
BE (02:16:44):
There you go.
SM (02:16:45):
Very good. Do you think when Jan Scruggs wrote his book To Heal A Nation that the wall has done some sort of a job in healing the nation? He not only talked about healing Vietnam vets and their families, but he talked about the nation itself.
BE (02:17:02):
It helped. But remember, Ronald Reagan said tear down the wall. Maybe we need to tear down walls, but we need memorials. So I think of it more as a memorial. Memorials are healing.
SM (02:17:20):
If you can sign that to me. I am glad you're in charge. I had John Edgar... Oh, not John here. John Gardner's books. I think I have all of them. I read No Easy Victories and then I have his book that... I remember I kind of encouraged students to read, which is his book.
BE (02:17:37):
What do you go by in terms-
SM (02:17:38):
Steven.
BE (02:17:38):
Steven.
SM (02:17:39):
Yeah.
(End of Interview)
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Interview with Robert William Edgar
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Edgar, Robert, 1943-2013 ; McKiernan, Stephen
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audio/wav
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Legislators—United States--Pennsylvania; Democratic Party (Pa.); Edgar, Robert, 1943-2013--Interviews
Description
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Robert William Edgar (1943-2013) was a businessman, administrator, and politician. Edgar was a member of the Democratic Party and congressman in Pennsylvania for six terms. He received his Bachelor's degree from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity degree from the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Edgar died from a heart attack after running on the treadmill at his home.
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Binghamton University Libraries
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2010-12-03
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In copyright
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eng
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Sound
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McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.45a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.45b
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2017-03-14
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McKiernan Interviews
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137:41
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https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/83d21fc4339ae9f1b2b213e7b3b0e7db.pdf
35a2d09d92a8933a58868adb20a7385e
PDF Text
Text
COMPOSITION SEMINAR
STUDIO RECITAL
Music from the Seminar
original compositions by students of Christopher Morgan Loy
Friday, December 3, 2010
8:00 p.m.
Casadesus Recital Hall
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Shane T. Thorn
Electricity: The Alphabet and You
Shane T. Thorn
D I O N T a n . V i :
Christopher Morgan Loy, piano
Kenrick Georges
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Steven Zank, piano
David Gaita
Meditations
Shane Thorn, viola
;
David Ga ita
Meditations In Meditations, the enlightened one reaches an Indescribable
state, which like a dream, Is forgotten upon waking.
David Gaita
How Sweet the Sound
David Gaita, piano
Shane T. Thorn
Prelude for Viola Is essentially In the mold of any of the preludes one would
find at the beginning of a suite for violin or cello/viola by 1.S. Bach, the
formal model for the piece. Tonally, however, the piece derives its content
from the two whole tone modes, with slight alterations at points of cadence
to create a sense of closure, though only on a momenttomoment basis, as
there is no single tonal center to the work.
I I
Carroll Street at Dusk
Lyndsey Meyer, alto saxophone
James Mayr, clarinet
David Galta, piano
Maxim Pekarskiy
Nuvoletta
Kenrick Georges, trumpet
David Galta, piano
Kristine Beckmann, contrabass
David Gaita
Stan Burt, tenor sax
David Galta, piano
Kristine Beckmann, bass
A B O U T
Shane T. Thorn
Air For Viola and Piano Is an arrangement of an orchestral piece I
being In a more or
composed several months ago. I t Is fairly straightforward,
less neoromantic style, In the key of D flat major.
Shane T. Thorn
Prelude for Viola
Shane Thorn, viola
l ctronci s/effects
Shane Thorn, voci e/ee
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Kenrick Georges
The Image Of A Garden
Laura MacAvoy, soprano
Christopher Morgan Loy, piano
Letting Go
David Gaita
Piano Duo
David Gaita, piano
Michael Salmirs, piano
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How Sweet the Sound A drunken man In moumlng sings “Amazing Grace”
at the top of his lungs. Screeching and out of tune, i t i s beautiful.
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Carroll Street a t D
Carroll Street Is a street in downtown Brooklyn where I took my first fencing
lessons. I was fourteen, and my long trips up to the club were one of the first
things I really did all on my own. I would walk back to the train station a t dusk
after an Intense practice and feel a sense of accomplishment, of internal peace.
“Internal peace?“ you might ask, “what does a fourteen year old have to worry
about?” I was proud to see my fencing come together with the hard work I put
in, I was excited at the prospect of coming home almost at midnight, and being
as the first time I didn’t
so In control of where I was and what I was doing. I t w
feel like a child anymore. When I begin a piece of music, the first thing I consider
Is the mood, an atmosphere I’d like to convey. These long walks to the subway
station through Carroll Street bring back memories of growing up I never want
to let go.
As a student composer, I am constantly trying to break out of the simple
harmonic structure I am accustomed to. This jazzy trio was a great opportunity
to step outside the usual tonal progressions that I work with and forget about
what the underlying key Is. Moreover, I wrote i t c ompletely away from the
computer another rare and rewarding experience. By their nature, 7, 11, and
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13 chords allowed me to change keys while retaining common notes between the
as a great experience to be able
chords. While the piece Is undoubtedly tonal, i t w
to let go of worrying about every chord I’m working with and swim In this sea of
smooth transitions and common tones. Though Initially, I expected to step out of
my comfort zone while writing jazz since I have so little experience In this style,
I actually discovered a whole another side of my composition in fusing calm,
arpeggiated musical motifs with more traditional, syncopated jazzy harmonies.
In the end, this piece is more intimate to me than a lot of my previous,
harmonically constricted works.
David Gaita
Nuvoletta *..And into the river that had been a stream (for a thousand of
tears had gone eon her and come on her and she was stout and struck on
dancing and her muddled name was Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singuit
ean for those crylove fable fans who are ‘keen’
tear, the loveliest of tears ( I m
on the prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for
i t was a leaptear.” James Joyce, Flnnegans Wake
David Gaita
Piano Duo Computers chant and seas sings. The war between technology
and nature never began and will always be.
Shane T. Thorn
n the Boadifront Is a prerecorded piece made entirely from my
I Saw I t O
voice, with studio alterations/effects. The text is entirely improvised.
Shane T. Thorn
Electricity: The Alphabet and You Is a mostly prerecorded piece made
using several sound generations and editing programs available to me, as
well as text of my own composition. I t employs a microtonal system of
harmony derived from a division of the octave into twentysix equal parts ; In
other words, a twentysix tone equally tempered scale. The possibilities for
this are wideranging Indeed...
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Shane Thorn Is a native of the Binghamton area, and attended
Susquehanna Valley High School In Conklln, NY, before coming to BU. He Is
now a Senior majoring In Music composition, which he has studied with Paul
Goldstaub and Christopher Morgan Loy. He has played extensively In the
University Orchestra In addition to chamber music groups on campus, has
studied viola, voice and piano, and sings In the Canterbury Choir and
University Chorus. He has also studied creative writing, piaywritlng, and
*
MIDI. His Interests as a creative artist extend beyond the boundaries of the
concert hall, and he is currently exploring directions In performance art and
literature. The world of dreams and the subconscious, as well as the most
basic pattern recognitions of the brain and the lnstlnctuai associations we
make through experience ls of great Importance.
Da vid Ga ita Is a sophomore at Binghamton University, majoring In music
and biology. He plans to pursue a career In medicine. He has been playing
piano for twelve years, and composing for two. He currently studies piano
with Professor Salmlrs. He Is also an artist and poet under the name Escobar
Marzapan.
Ma xim P eltaroldy ls currently a junior a t Binghamton University pursuing a
double degree In music composition and financial economics. A classically
trained violist, Maxim’s early music training was spent playing the symphonies
of the greats and lots (and lots) of Bach. A successful collaboration at the
Interlochen Arts Festival In Michigan sparked Maxim’s Interest in film music
and opened up his musical horizons. He Is now writing as much jazz, rock, and
ambient electronica as he does orchestral music. Maxim hopes to pursue a
career In film scoring. He has studied viola with Richard Spencer and Roberta
Crawford, and composition with Paul Goldstaub and Christopher Morgan Loy.
Outside of music, Maxim enjoys fencing, the study of decision making, and
meeting people from faraway places.
t
�
Dublin Core
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Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: PDF / Rosetta
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Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
01:16:41
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146579">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146579</a>
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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Composition Seminar Recital, December 3, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-3
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Thorn, Georges, Gaita
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Loy, Christopher
Thorn, Shane
Gaita, David
Pekarskiy, Maxim
Georges, Kenrick
Zank, Stephen
MacAvoy, Laura
Meyer, Lindsay
Beckmann, Kristine
Burt, Stan
Salmirs, Michael
Mar, James
Publisher
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Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-03
Rights
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In copyright
Type
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sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/e0018e4624b8d046adc1b7cc2733f42e.pdf
3fa7671f3b8b82851bfe83495405fbbf
PDF Text
Text
BINGHAMTON
U N I V E R S I T Y
STATE UNIVERSIT Y O F NEW YORK
zed eC
D E P A R T M E N T
Sho
red
W
nd i Symphony
PRESENTS
AMERICAN
VA R I AT I O N S
HONORING VETERANS AND ACTIVE MILI TARY
FEATURN
IG
THE BU SAXOPHONE ENSEMBLE
Sunday, December 5, 2010
3:00 PM
Anderson Center Chamber Hall
�The Musicians
Robert G. Smith,
Piccolo
Music Director and Conductor
Kathleen Spelman
Rebecca Falik
Program
The StarSpangled Banner................... .......... ..arr. Jack Stamp
A love song for our country
(b. 1954)
commando March......................ccceeeeeenennen.....Samuel Barber
(19101981)
legy ForA Young American()..........................Ro nald LoPresti
(19331985)
\ Gathering of Angels.
Jared Spears
(b. 1936)
:termal Father, Strong To Save.
..Claude T. Smith
(19321987)
Intermission
’ a s t i m e : Salute to Baseball.............................. ...Jack Stamp
(b. 1954)
itephen Foster Revisited
. Stephen Foster
o
The BU Saxophone Ensemble
(18261864)
arr. Bill Holcomb
Christopher Murdock, soprano saxophone
Andrew Block, Alex Horspool, alto saxophones
Bradley Alder, Raymond Hendricks, tenor saxophones
Dean Papadopoulus, baritone saxophone
Professor April Lucas, director
’ariations on “America”. . ...... .
Composed for organ in 1891
.
Flute I
E m i l y Morris, principal
Mark Zhuang
Lindsay Ralbovsky
Kathleen Spelman
3Clarinet
rd Bb
Kevin Hannon, principal
B b Bass Clarinet
Carolina Montenegro
2nd Bb Trumpet
Nick Quackenbush
Peter Schwarz
Eb Alto Saxophone I
Chris Murdock, principal
Lauren RossHixson
Flute II
Raquel Goldsmith
Judy Kahn
Kimberly Horn
Rebecca Falik
E b Alto Saxophone II
Christina Peregine
Anthony DeGelorma
RECORDER
Alexander Baron
Oboe
Kimberly Muller
Sun Hao
1st Bb Clarinet
Kerry Goodacre, coprincipal
Jaclyn Adler, coprincipal
Sophia Schneiderman
Alex Horspool
Charles Ives
( 18741
9 54)
Orchestral transcription by Wm. Schuman(1963)
Wind Band transcription by Wm. Rhoads
he Stars and Stripes Forevever................. ....John Philip Sousa
(18541932)
Olivia Santoro
3rd B b Trumpet
Samuel Weintraub
Brian Lee
John Marschhauser
Russell Feinstein
Kevin Koes
Bb Tenor Saxophone
Bradley Alder
Eric Seaman
Stephen Kassinger
EBaritone
b
Saxophone
Dean Papadopoulus
Toni Bruno
F
Horn
Carrie Buck
2nd B b Clarinet
Mark Dello Stritto
Abbey Cohen
Vanessa Kay
1st Bb Trumpet
David Morrissey
Gregory Norman
Trombone
Drew Perotti
Trombone
Derek Moran
Trombone
Matthew Kratenstein
Euphonium
Andrew Kaufman
TUBA
Matthew Gukowsky
Percussion
Benjamin Ramos
Mike McManamon
Rose Steenstra
John Erdman
Adam Goldenberg
�ROBERT G. S MITH is Music Director and Conductor of the University Wind Symphony. Prof.
Smith also teaches advanced instrumental conducting and graduate wind conducting at BU. His
career includes 32 years as a public school music educator. He conducts the annual Triple Cities
TubaChristmas and is former conductor of the Maine Community Band, the oldest band of its kind
in the United States. He has guest conducted allcounty bands throughout New York State. Among
other ensembles Smith has conducted are the Goshen College(IND) Wind Ensemble and Orchestra,
The United States Army Ground Forces Band(GA), the Southern Tier Concert Band(NY) and the
Vestal Community Band(NY). An active performer, he currently plays principal euphonium with
the Southern Tier Concert Band and tuba with the Brass Nickel quintet and the Crown City Brass
sextet. Smith is past president of the Broome County Music Educators Association and recipient of
the 2005 BCMEA Distinguished Service Award. Professional memberships include The Broome
County Music Educators Association, the New York State School Music Association, the Music
Educators National Conference, The National Band Association, The Association of Concert Bands,
The Conductors Guild, The World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles, The College
Band Directors National Association and the International Tuba and Euphonium Association.
Comnig “Censt
Sunday, December 5 – Violin Recital: Janey Choi, violin, Michael Salmirs, piano
and guest artist Rebecca Ansel, violin – 7:30 p.m. – Casadesus Recital Hall –
$10 general public; $5 faculty/staff/seniors; $2 students
Thursday, December 9 – Jazz MidDay Concert with guest artist – 1:20 p.m. –
Osterhout Concert Theater – free (Cosponsored by the Binghamton University
Music Department and the Harpur Jazz Project)
Thursday, December 9 – Harpur Jazz Ensemble Concert with guest artist – 8
p.m. – Osterhout Concert Theater – $10 general public; $5 faculty/staff/seniors;
free for students (Cosponsored by the Binghamton University Music Department I
and the Harpur Jazz Project)
Friday, December 10 – Singing Chinese Class Recital joined by the Beginning
Chinese Flute Class – 7 p.m. – Casadesus Recital Hall free
Saturday, December 11 – Amahl and the Night Visitors – 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. –
Anderson Center Chamber Hall – $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for
families with 2 adults and 4 children)
' Sunday, December 12 – Amahl and the Night Visitors – 3 p.m. & 5 p.m. –
Anderson Center Chamber Hall – $8 adults; $5 students ($25 maximum for
families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Monday, December 13 – “Italian Night” Class Recital (Maria Cook, Instructor) –
8:00 p.m. – Casadesus Recital Hall – free
For ticket information, please call the
Anderson Center B ox O ffice at 7 77ARTS.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: PDF / Rosetta
PDF with Rosetta audio/video link
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
37:34
32:17
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146582">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE146582</a>
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Wind Symphony, "American Variations," December 5, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-5
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Stamp, Barber, LoPresti, Smith, Foster, Sousa
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Smith, Robert
Lucas, April
Murdock, Christopher
Block, Andrew
Horspool, Alex
Alder, Bradley
Hendricks, Raymond
Papadopoulos, Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-05
Rights
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In copyright
Type
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sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/529974513854146a16545dc31be5554b.pdf
8bd9cc6a7a5de57276b5c1f548254c55
PDF Text
Text
BINGHAMTON
U N I Y E R S I T Y
S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K
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8:00 p.m.
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P. Wilson
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Davis
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Arranged by Mike Tomaro
. M. Davis
’ reen Green
Bul gniG
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Arranged by Les Hooper
Here’s Tha t Rainy Day............cccccerinrcennciiiscanannnnnnna Van Heusen
Arranged by Dee Barton
H. Silver
Song For M y Father
Arranged by Ian McDougaIl
When I Fa ll In Love..........cc.cceeeeeeeeeennnnne....... Heyman & V. Young
Arranged by Gordon Goodwin
..
The Jody Grind .....
..H. Silver
Arranged by John Clayton
PART II — Featuring Kris Jensen
(To be selected from the following)
Early Autumn..............................d. Mercer, R. Burns, & W. Herman
.. B. Mintzer
Elvin‘s Mambo
E.K.Ellington
Fantazm
I Got It Ba d (and Tha t Ain’t Good)............ D. Ellington & P. Webster
Arranged by Drake Smith
0
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Lo Slo Blues
. .J Coltrane
Moment’s Not1ce
Arranged by Drake Smith
B. Mintzer
Tribute
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�Having established himself a s one of the premier voices on his
instrument today, saxophonist / composer Kris Jensen has forged a
career that spans over 20 years in nearly as many professional settings.
A native of Binghamton, NY, Jensen received excellent training as a
young student in both the Binghamton Public Schools and at The State
University of New York at Binghamton. Upon graduating Binghamton
High School, Jensen enrolled at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford,
CT where he began what would turn out to be a 15year apprenticeship
with the late great jazz saxophonist and composer Jackie McLean.
While working as an associa te professor alongside McLean, Jensen
helped to develop some of the finest young saxophone talents on the
scene today including Connecticut saxophonists Jimmy Greene, Kris
Allen, Wayne Escoffery, Lummie Spann, Ray McMorrin, Andy Breskin
and Nicholas Biello. Jensen also worked as a teacher at The Artists’
Inc. teaching woodwinds and jazz studies in Hartford s inner
a
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As a performer, Jensen’s first major professional experience was
as lead alto saxophonist for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines’ Division of
Entertainment. Jensen had the opportunity to play the lead alto
saxophone chair for Ben Vereen, Red Buttons, Patti Page, Bob
Florence, Frank Gorshin, Al Martino and many other famous
entertainers. Since then, Jensen has recorded or performed with a
plethora of well established and emerging artists, including:
percussionists Jesse Hameen, Pete Escovedo and Giovanni Hidalgo,
trumpeters Eddie Henderson, Valery Ponamarev, Richard Boulger,
saxophonists Jackie McLean, Phil Woods and George Coleman,
trombonists Eddie Bert and Steve Davis pianists John Hicks, Hotep Idris
Galeta, David Hazeltine and Brad Mehldau guitarists Melvin Sparks,
Randy Johnston, Rodney Jones, Rohn Lawrence and Tom Dempsey,
bassists Paul Brown, Nat Reeves, Dennis Irwin and Dwa yne Burno and
pianists/ vocalists Michael Feinstein, Dena DeRose and Kevin
Mahogany.
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In 1996, Jensen received a great honor, being selected as a
semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone
Competition in Washington, DC. Kris played alongside 12 of the world’s
best young saxophonist before a panel of some of jazz’s
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�THE BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY MUSIC DEPARTMENT
IN CONJUNCTION WITH TRICITIES OPERA PRESENTS
greatest saxophone legends. From 1999–2004, Jensen toured North
America with both Dickey Betts and Great S outhern and Maynard
Ferguson and Big Bop Nouveau. Betts, the classicrock guitar legend
and composer of such hits as Ramblin Man and In Memory of Elizabeth
Reed, recorded the albums Let’s Get Together and The Collector’s Vol.
I, which prominently features Kris’s sax. W hile with Betts, Jensen also
1 had the opportunity to perform with the Charlie Daniels Band and in
I August 2003 with the Dave Matthews Band. With the blazing trumpet
\ virtouso Maynard Ferguson, Kris was a prominently featured soloist. In
¥ January 2004, Kris joined the trumpet legend on a tour which included a
week in Bangkok, Thailand performing the compositions for the king of
Thailand, His Majesty Bhumipol Adulyadej. Jensen’s tenor sax was also
heard “round the world” with the Kendrick Oliver New Life Jazz
Orchestra on N.P.R.s annual jazz radiocast “Toast of the Nation ” for
New Year’s 2007 edition.
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TWO PERFORMANCES DAILY AT 3 & 5 P M
ANDE R SON CENTE R C HAMBE R HALL
T I C K E T S : $8 AOULTS; $5 STUDENTS
" $ 2 5 MAXIMUM FOR FAMILIES WI TH2 ADULTS & 4 CHILDREN
FOR TICKETS, CALL
( 6 0 7 ) 7 7 7 A R T S
Currently, Jensen keeps a busy schedule as an active freelance
musician and music instructor throughout New England and the New
York TriState area. He is currently helping to develop two school bands
in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, NY and can be heard with ma ny
different groups including Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band and the Kendrick Oliver
New Life Jazz Orchestra.
�ABOUT THE SERIES
The Harpur Jazz Ensemble studies and performs bigband
repertoire and appears frequently on and off campus. Guests
who have appeared in concert witht his popular ensemble include,
among others, Clark Terry, “Slam” Stewart, Manny Albam, Urbie
Green, Frank Wess, Phil Woods, Jimmy Owens, Marian
McPartland, Steve Brown, Mel Lewis, Slide Hampton, Peter
Appleyard, John Faddis, Rufus Reid, Houston Person, Walter
White, Sherrie Maricle, Tia Fuller, Eddie Allen, Bruce Johnston,
Bill Easley, Mike Davis and Tony Kadleck.
ABOUT THE HARPUR J A Z Z ENSEMBLE
The Harpur Jazz Ensemble director, MICHAEL J.
CARBONE, is a native of Utica, New York. He moved to the
Binghamton area in 1981 and is an instrumental music teacher in
the Johnson City School district where he is Director of Concert
Band and Jazz Ensemble at the middle school. He joined the
Binghamton University music faculty in 1997 and serves as the
Director of the Jazz Studies Program and the Director of the
Harpur Jazz Ensemble. He holds a B.M.E. from the Crane School
of Music and a M.M. from Binghamton University. Carbone has
performed with many wellknown artists including Al Marino,
Natalie Cole, Tommy Tune, Mel Torme, The Jimmy Dorsey
Orchestra, Danny D’Imperio’s Big Band Bloviation, the Central
New York Jazz Orchestra, and The Temptations.
The 2010 Fall semester of the Harpur Jazz Ensemble
includes the following:
SAXOPHONES
Andrew Block
Zal Mirza
Dean
Papadopoulos
Ray Hendricks
Mercedez Koo
1% alto
2 ” a lto
1° tenor
2 ” t enor
Baritone
Joey Lieber
BASS
Paul Watrobski
Sax
TRUMPETS (alphabetical
order)
Mark Adler
Tomasz Falkowski
Ryan Levitan
John Marschauser
TROMBONES
PIANO
Nicholas Carter
Mo “Reese” Taylor
Andrew Rosenberger
Mogana Jayakumar
Jay Bartishevich
DRUM SET
Devan Tracy
Andres Castillo
VIBES & PIANO
Bailey Rabideau
PERCUSSION
Keaton Rood
�Binghamton University Music Department’s
U P C O M I N G E V E N T S
Friday, December 10 — Singing Chinese Clas s Recital joined
b y the Beginning Chinese Flute Class — 7 p.m. — Casadesus
Recital Hall — free
Saturday, December 11 — Amahl and the Night Visitors — 3
p.m. & 5 p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5
students ($25 maximum for families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Sunday, December 12 — Amahl and the Nigh t Visitors — 3
p.m. & 5 p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5
students ($25 maximum for families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Monday, December 13 — “Italian Night ” Class Recital (Maria
Cook, Instructor) — 8:00 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
For ticket information, please call the
Anderson Center Box Office at 777ART5.
To see all events, please visit music. b inghamton. edu
Become a fan on Facebook by visiting
Binghamton University Music Department
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: PDF / Rosetta
PDF with Rosetta audio/video link
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
1:11:04
56:12
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE147768">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE147768</a>
Accessibility
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Harpur Jazz ensemble, December 9, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-9
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Wilson, Davis, Van Heusen, Silver, Heyman, Mercer, Burns, Mintzer, Ellinton, Webster, Owens, Coltrane, Harris
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jensen, Kris
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/ac5143b39019a7d733b519cdb8c41662.pdf
bafea58030e19f281008e529e5299408
PDF Text
Text
BINGHAMTON
U N AV E R S I T Y
S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K
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D E P A R T M E N T
THURSDAY
JA Z Z M I D D AY CONCERT
L L A N E S A X O N S ”
KRIS JENSEN
I a “
Thursday, December 9 , 2 0 / 0
1.20 p.m.
Osterbout Concert Theater
4
�ABOUT THE PERFORMER
PROGRAM
Program selected from the following:
Heyman, Sour, Eyton, & Green
Body and Soul
Cottontail........................................................Duke IEINE REIN!
D
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.
.
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i
i
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a McLean
Just Friends...............cceeevvvneneenn.....Sam Lewis & John Klenner
Red C l a y . . . . . . . s e c a a s h a n m Hubbard
Recordame................................................... Joe Henderson
Take Your P
i
c
k
H
a
n
k Mobly
Arr. By D. S ic k ler Edited by A. Hamme
There Will Never Be Another You.....Harry Warren & Mack Gordon
Midday Musicians
Kzgs Jensen – Saxophones and Flute
Gene Cotbran, Fiano
Ford Watrobsks, Bass
Devan Tracy, Drums
MIKE Carbone, Saxophones
Having established himself as one of the premier voices on his
instrument today, saxophonist/composer Kris Jensen has forged a
career that spans over 20 years in nearly as many professional settings.
A native of Binghamton, NY, Jensen received excellent training as a
young student in both the Binghamton Public Schools and at The State
University of New York at Binghamton. Upon graduating Binghamton
High School, Jensen enrolled at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford,
CT where he began what would turn out to be a 15year apprenticeship
with the late great jazz saxophonist and composer Jackie McLean. While
working as an associate professor alongside McLean, Jensen helped to
develop some of the finest young saxophone talents on the scene today
including Connecticut saxophonists Jimmy Greene, Kris Allen, Wayne
Escoffery, Lummie Spann, Ray McMorrin, Andy Breskin and Nicholas
Biello. Jensen also worked as a teacher at The Artists’ Collective, Inc.
teaching woodwinds and jazz studies in Hartford’s inner city.
As a performer, Jensen’s first major professional experience was
as lead alto saxophonist for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines’ Division of
Entertainment. Jensen had the opportunity to play the lead alto
saxophone chair for Ben Vereen, Red Buttons, Patti Page, Bob Florence,
Frank Gorshin, Al Martino and many other famous entertainers. Since
then, Jensen has recorded or performed with a plethora of well
established and emerging artists, including: percussionists Jesse
Hameen, Pete Escovedo and Giovanni Hidalgo, trumpeters Eddie
Henderson, Valery Ponamarev, Richard Boulger, saxophonists Jackie
McLean, Phil Woods and George Coleman, trombonists Eddie Bert and
Steve Davis pianists John Hicks, Hotep Idris Galeta, David Hazeltine and
Brad Mehldau guitarists Melvin Sparks, Randy Johnston, Rodney Jones,
Rohn Lawrence and Tom Dempsey, bassists Paul Brown, Nat Reeves,
Dennis Irwin and Dwayne Burno and pianists/vocalists Michael
Feinstein, Dena DeRose and Kevin Mahogany.
In 1996, Jensen received a great honor, being selected as a
semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone
Competition in Washington, DC. Kris played alongside 12 of the world’s
best young saxophonists before a panel of some of jazz’s greatest
saxophone legends. From 1999–2004, Jensen toured North America
with both Dickey Betts and Great Southern and Maynard Ferguson and
Big Bop Nouveau. Betts, the classicrock guitar legend and composer of
such hits as Ramblin‘ Man and In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, recorded
the albums Let’s Get Together and The Collector’s Vol. I, which
�prominently features Kris’s sax. While with Betts, Jensen also had the
opportunity to perform with the Charlie Daniels Band and in August 2003
with the Dave Matthews Band. With the blazing trumpet virtouso
Maynard Ferguson, Kris was a prominently featured soloist. In January
2004, Kris joined the trumpet legend on a tour which included a week in
Bangkok, Thailand performing the compositions for the king of Thailand,
His Majesty Bhumipol Adulyadej. Jensen’s tenor sax was also heard
“round the world” with the Kendrick Oliver New Life Jazz Orchestra on
N.P.R.s annual jazz radiocast “Toast of the Nation” for New Year’s 2007
edition.
Currently, Jensen keeps a busy schedule as an active freelance
musician and music instructor throughout New England and the New
York TriState area. He is currently helping to develop two school bands
in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, NY and can be heard with many
different groups including Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band and the Kendrick Oliver
New Life Jazz Orchestra.
Binghamton University M usic D epartment’s
W
U PC O M I N G E V E N T S
W
W
Friday, December 10 — Singing Chinese Cla ss Recital joined by the
Beginning Chinese Flute Class — 7 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall —
free
Saturday, December 11 — Amahl and the Nigh t Visitors — 3 p.m. & 5
p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25
maximum for families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Sunday, December 12 — Amahl and the Night Visitors — 3 p .m. & 5
p.m. — Anderson Center Chamber Hall — $8 adults; $5 students ($25
maximum for families with 2 adults and 4 children)
Monday, December 13 — “Italian Night ” Class Recital (Maria Cook,
Instructor) — 8:00 p.m. — Casadesus Recital Hall — free
For ticket information, please call the
Anderson Center Box Office at 7 77ARTS
To see all events, please visit music. b inghamton. e du
Become a fan on Facebook by visiting
Binghamton University Music Department
�
Dublin Core
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Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1960's - present
Title
A name given to the resource
Binghamton University Music Department Tape Recordings
Subject
The topic of the resource
Concerts ; Instrumental music ; Live sound recordings
Description
An account of the resource
Binghamton University Music Department recordings is an audio collection of concerts and recitals given on campus by students, faculty, and outside musical groups. The physical collection consists of reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, and compact discs. The recordings <a href="https://suny-bin.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Binghamton%20University%20Music%20Department%20tape%20recordings&tab=LibraryCatalog&search_scope=MyInstitution&vid=01SUNY_BIN:01SUNY_BIN&mode=basic&offset=0&conVoc=false">have been catalogued</a> and are located in <a href="https://www.binghamton.edu/libraries/about/special-collections/">Special Collections</a>. In addition, the collection includes copies of programmes. <br /><br />The Libraries have begun making some of the collections available digitally on campus. These recordings are restricted to the Binghamton University Community. Please contact Special Collections for questions regarding access off campus.<br />Email: <a href="mailto:speccoll@binghamton.edu">speccoll@binghamton.edu</a>
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
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Original Format
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1 audio disc
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
56:40:00
Streaming Audio
Streaming URL
<a href="https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE147772">https://eternity.binghamton.edu/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE147772</a>
Accessibility
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thursday Jazz Mid-day Concert Featuring Saxophonist Kris Jensen, December 9, 2010
Recital Tape 2010-12-9b
Description
An account of the resource
Works by Heyman, Sour, Eyton, McLean, Lewis, Hubbard, Henderson, Warren
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jensen, Kris
Cothran, Gene
Watrobski, Paul
Tracy, Devan
Carbone, Michael
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
-
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1f04ded7dd5330a1bc263a204320e220.jpg
bca0f11ffca39d132e5411e14d810949
https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c9afb1ec0b0eafa9985b6aa4ae998780.mp3
65268b98da9b0d3527a5b2690a01f0cb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
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Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
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Date of Interview
2010-12-13
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Richard Flacks
Language
English
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of Making History: The American Left and the American Mind and Beyond the Barricades. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":13057,"3":{"1":0},"11":4,"12":0,"15":"Arial","16":10}">Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of <em>Making History: The American Left and the American Mind</em> and <em>Beyond the Barricades</em>. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.</span>
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
2 Microcassettes
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Teacher unionism; McCarthy period; Red Diaper Baby; Brooklyn College in the nineteen fifties; Cuban missile crisis; Port Huron; Nineteen sixties; Baby boom generation; Student activists; Women's movement"}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":3,"3":{"1":0},"4":{"1":2,"2":13228792}}">Teacher unionism; McCarthy period; Red Diaper Baby; Brooklyn College in the nineteen fifties; Cuban missile crisis; Port Huron; Nineteen sixties; Baby boom generation; Student activists; Women's movement</span>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
161:24
Subject LCSH
Political activists--United States; College teachers; Sociologists; University of California, Santa Barbara; Flacks, Richard--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Richard Flacks
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 13 December 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:04):
Testing one, two. My first question is how did you become who you are as a person? Could you give me a little bit of background on your growing up years before you went off to graduate school at Michigan? What I have-
RF (00:00:25):
I was born in Brooklyn, New York of parents who themselves were left wing folks. They were both New York City school teachers, very active in pioneering teacher unionism and community work in... My mother worked in black community [inaudible] she taught school there, first grade. And they were both... And Brooklyn, in the years I was growing up, World War II and after, was a pretty progressive left wing environment, generally in terms of where people's political identifications were. And there was a widespread left wing culture in New York. I went to children's camps that were interracial and progressive, and most of my parents friends were of similar mind. But then came the McCarthy period, and my parents were among a couple hundred teachers who were purged [inaudible] their alleged political affiliations from the schools. And that was part of this much broader climate in the country, of course, the political repression that I experienced from the time I was about 12 years old on, this was very significant part of my sense.
SM (00:02:16):
How did your parents... Because I have talked to quite a few other people too, that had similar experiences being labeled red diaper babies, but the question is, as a young person growing up as a child or young teenager, how did your parents... Did they sit down with you and tried to explain why this was happening?
RF (00:02:36):
McCarthy, period?
SM (00:02:37):
Yeah, yes.
RF (00:02:39):
Well, they did not need to... I was attentive enough and aware enough, and I did not need a lot of sitting down and explaining. I got it from an early time, and, of course... And I attended public meetings where people who were dissenters from the McCarthy atmosphere would speak. I mean, it was just very much a part of my life and it did not just, me and my parents sitting down. I mean, I must have asked them a lot of questions all through my childhood. But by the time of the... And in fact, the place that probably I got the most sense of awareness about all this was in the camp that I went to where a lot of the kids have families going through similar kinds of things. So there was a great deal of discussion and exchange about that.
SM (00:03:52):
What were your undergraduate college years like before you went off to Michigan?
RF (00:03:57):
I went to Brooklyn College, which is now part of the city university, precollege. And that was at the height of the (19)50s, sort of red scare. I was politically active, I joined the Young Democrats and became president of the Young Democrats. And I was part of a little group of more lefty kids who met and discussed things. But generally, when the Young Democrats and other groups try to get students to just signed petitions, for example, about civil rights issues, very mainstream seeming issues, well supporting a law to federal law against the poll tax, would they [inaudible]. Kids would say, "My mother told me when I get to college, do not sign anything. I will get into trouble in the future." There was a lot of that feeling among students.
SM (00:05:10):
One of the things about the (19)50s, before we get into the (19)60s is the (19)50s is always kind of labeled as a quiet time on university campuses. Although there was a lot of activism, obviously in the Civil Rights Movement.
RF (00:05:26):
Well, the civil right... In (19)55 and (195)6 was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there were other things. A woman named Autherine Lucy tried to get into the University of Alabama. That was a major event that I remember. And yes, in fact, all through the (19)50s in college, you were aware that there was a kind of subterranean, bohemian, counter-cultural process going on for a lot of young people. Identification with beat poets and the jazz and folk music cultures, and New York was filled with those kinds of opportunities for college kids to go to and be part of. And so even though there was this miasma of political withdrawal, on one hand, there certainly was this cultural rebellion that you could immediately sense if you were a college student. And there were incidents, Brooklyn College was a particularly repressive college. The president of Brooklyn, Harry Gideon, was famous for having been brought to Brooklyn College in the early... Or I think it was in the, yeah early (19)50s, to clean it up from the communist influence on the student body. He literally abolished student government and set up a censorship regime over the student paper. Every year that I was there, by the end of the year, the student editors had resigned because of the restrictions being placed on them. And so there was a contingent of students even then at Brooklyn who were... And in the years, I was there, (19)54 to (19)58 were increasingly antagonistic to the administration and staging events. The most interesting sort of collective action that I remember, talking to you right now was when at the time that McCarthy was going to be censored, [inaudible] by the [inaudible], and there was a national movement called the Green Feather Movement. I do not know if you have ever heard of this.
SM (00:08:11):
No.
RF (00:08:11):
And all it was wearing a button with a green feather on it. Now, the root of that was that in Indiana, there was a move in the state legislature to ban Robin Hood because Robin Hood stole from the rich gave to the poor, he was clearly a communist.
SM (00:08:28):
Oh yeah.
RF (00:08:31):
So people started to wear these buttons, and it was almost like this feeling, well, yeah, we have been underground in our feelings, now this is a way to express it. And though by the time I was ready to graduate, I felt there was a loosening of, in many ways, of the atmosphere on... Even at Brooklyn College in terms of questioning. And in fact, there was a march on Washington, a couple of them called Youth March on Washington for integration that acquired Rustin.
SM (00:09:10):
Oh, yes.
RF (00:09:12):
That, and these were just small compared to later things, 20,000 people maybe went. But I remember going on one of those. So yeah, the more you can dig into it, the more you realize that there was a lot of permit, I would put that.
SM (00:09:36):
Right. In fact, there is a picture of Dr. King, I think in 1957 at the Lincoln Memorial.
RF (00:09:41):
Yeah.
SM (00:09:42):
Everybody thinks of (19)63, the March on Washington, but there was one previous, and of course by-
RF (00:09:47):
Yeah well, and Rustin got practice in staging those events because for 63, which he led to [inaudible], so yeah.
SM (00:09:59):
You know he is from Westchester?
RF (00:10:02):
Okay.
SM (00:10:03):
Yeah, and we did a national tribute to him in 1999 on our campus. So we had a lot... He is a historic figure from our area. One of the things, the Beats, it is interesting when I ask some of the people that I have interviewed, when did the (19)60s begin? Several individuals said that it really began with the Beats because they were anti-authoritarian, kind of did their own thing, they were very independent minded. They were a lot different, and of course, a lot of people think they were all secluded in New York City and San Francisco. So how could they really have that much of an influence? Kerouac and Ginsburg and [inaudible] Getty, and their-
RF (00:10:49):
Yeah, but they were featured. The big mass media in that era were magazines like Life Magazine and I remember that Life Magazine covered the Beats. And once that happens... And by the way, the same thing happened in (19)65 with SDS when Life did a big spread on it and we had never been heard of before. So once Life... In those in those years, Life and Look Magazines gave that kind of big pictorial display, these things were on the cultural map for a lot of people in middle of there, between the coast, so to speak. And I think I remember feeling to some extent, indeed that the Beats were something of a media hype. Because if you grew up in New York, you were aware that there was a much longer tradition of Bohemian cultural expression in Greenwich Village and so on and so on. We were attracted to going to the village on weekends and stuff, not just because of the Beats, but they were just the visible... In a way you could say the Beats nationalized Greenwich Village, made it national whereas [inaudible] they really were. But there were elements of what they were into Eastern religion so forth that were not fully in the awareness of a lot of... I knew.
SM (00:12:39):
The mains in the television tried to portray the Beats in a very humorous way with Maynard G. Krebs, remember that?
RF (00:12:47):
Well, there was a lot of that, yeah. And by the way, it is not just... I think music was a more important subcultural, and always has been, subcultural center than simply so called Beat... I mean, the jazz on the one hand and folk music on the other, there were two big overlapping circles of people who were orienting to this music because... And away from commercialized mass culture music during the (19)50s. And music because it was played in clubs and other social venues, people congregated around it. And that, I have always felt was crucial for what happened in creating a student movement was that there was this subculture around folk music, particularly.
SM (00:13:58):
Yeah. When you think of the Greenwich Village, you still think of Bob Dylan.
RF (00:14:02):
Yeah.
SM (00:14:03):
And you think of-
RF (00:14:06):
[inaudible] and many others of his type. It was interesting that a whole bunch of young troubadours emerged all at the same time, and they all went to Greenwich Village, that is where they... When they wanted to begin a career, because there were a bunch of small clubs there that they could be booked into and do record labels right there. It was like a little nexus for creating this.
SM (00:14:38):
Then you had some of the great comedians come out of there too, with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. They were certainly different, and they were from that kind of period too.
RF (00:14:49):
And all of that was the mix that I remember in my college year. And that is the (19)50s, yeah.
SM (00:14:57):
Now, talk about your college years at Michigan. I did some reading on... I have quite a few of your books, by the way.
RF (00:15:05):
Well, that is nice.
SM (00:15:06):
And I even have your book that you... One of the very early books, I was able to get ahold of that and read it. But talk about your college years at Michigan and your links to Tom Hayden. I know Tom, I have interviewed him twice. We brought him to our campus and he is unbelievable person as a human being and an intellect. And I can see how he influenced people like you. But you were a graduate student, but talk about Michigan a little bit.
RF (00:15:34):
Well, I went to Ann Arbor to study social psychology in 1958, graduated Brooklyn. At that time, there were three others of us who went at the same time, the Michigan Psych Department and Social Psychology program, were the... If you were interested in that topic and that subject, that was the place to go. So we were very lucky, the feeling that we had gotten into Michigan Social Psychology. And social psychology, I just add is an interesting discipline, whose roots to a great extent were in intellectuals who were German refugee intellectuals who were escaping from Hitler and wanted to understand how the German population, which was supposed to be so culturally advanced, could have fallen under Hitler's sway and so forth. That is the social psychology, that is part of what got me interested in that kind of topic. So anyway, but I had graduated from college in 58 with the feeling that I wanted to be in academia because there was no political future. I was a political guy, but I did not see any way to express that vocationally or in life terms, and that I was very good academically, and that is where I could maybe have more a chance to understand the world and express myself. I did not think politics was possible in the United States anymore. And if change in the world were to happen, it would be happening from third world revolutionary movements and things like that. But I did not really expect anything to the left in this country to happen. And in Ann Arbor, interesting by the way, this bohemian thread that I was talking about in New York was very evident in Ann Arbor, but somehow felt pressure, it felt... And it was actually more political for the kinds of expressions people were making. And there was the underground film community. There was the same kind of coffee house book music world, of course, there were artists and poets, and this is when we first got there. And the thing that crystallized so much in the (19)60s, I believe this is crucial, that when the students sat in, in Greensboro in North Carolina, February 1st, 1960, it was immediately efforts in Ann Arbor and a lot of other college towns to do sympathy demonstrations, picketing the Woolworths stores in those towns, and telling people to boycott Woolworths as long as segregation persisted in the South, in those same stores in the South. And so people came to these pickets, let us say 100 people picketing the Woolworths store on Stage Street in Ann Arbor. And most of them did not know each other. I mean, we did not know each other before we got there. Somehow by word of mouth, I do not even remember how the word went out that this was something to do. And so what you are seeing there is this interesting moment where people are making public statement, which most of them had not done about their political belief and in the presence of other people with like-mind who they had not met before. This was a formula that sociologists can write almost about how a social movement can begin is where you have this collective self-mutual discovery of common ground, common grievance, common... And what is beautiful about this issue of segregation as a force for change is that it presents a target that is so clear and so morally right, that people could... And that you can see how it can be overcome. That is very important in the social movement that you take action that might really make it different, not just express yourself symbolically. And that was all present when you got together on a picket line at Woolworths in Ann Arbor in February 1960, that was a moment. And so from then on, there was even before SDS, various kinds of... Mostly turned out to be... Well, not mostly, it was a combination of civil rights activism and peace activism was going on there, and that was true really all over the country, but it was certainly evident in Ann Arbor. Small groups of people, it was not ever felt, I do not think you ever felt in that period that you could really reach and change the behavior of most students. Matter of fact, in (19)62, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, a bunch of us staged a march and we were met of protest. No, it was not the Cuban missile... It was the Cuban... It was the Bay of Pigs invasion. That is what it was.
SM (00:21:51):
(19)61, yeah.
RF (00:21:55):
And all these fraternity kids came out with fines, Bob Havana and screaming at us. I may be mixing up something that might have even been about Vietnam. But anyway, it does not... The point is there that there was the sense... Most of the students, undergraduates were Republican, Midwestern Republican. We were different. And there were a lot of graduate student types, probably in the pro civil rights peace world. As well as, I am going to say another thing about Ann Arbor, and this may have been typical of other places, is a sizable Quaker community that was always very peace oriented and wanting to promote pacifist activism. And several faculty, including the great economist, Kenneth Boulding was a leader of that. And then at the same time, and my wife was part of this because we had gotten married, shortly after graduate school. And she came out in 1960 and she was going to City College, got finished in 60, or came out. Anyway, she was part of this group Women's Strike for Peace, which is somewhat forgotten, but important early development in the (19)60s movement history. And they were mothers and wives, not undergraduate women at all, who were trying to do creative activity to promote opposition to the arms race and pro-peace activity. And that became a loose national organization that a number of Ann Arbor women, including my wife, were active in. So these are the elements even before SDS came on the scene. As you know, Hayden was the editor of the Michigan Daily.
SM (00:24:23):
Yes.
RF (00:24:23):
Well, let me... I am not going to give you a good chronology. I do not have any in front of me to remember all this. So I will be more general about it. The story is well known, Al Haber, whose father was a big professor at Michigan who was politically. Just a little bit older than... He was a little even older than I was and in (19)60, I was 22. So in (19)62 I was [inaudible]. 62 in [inaudible] I was 24, so that is a few years older. Hayden was only... Well, he was 22 [inaudible 00:25:07], yeah, I guess. Anyway, Al started... He was based, he lived in Ann Arbor, so that is made Ann Arbor in the future, an important part of the SDS history. Al went to New York to recreate this organization, which became the student lead for industrial democracy, which became SDS and he began to recruit other people around the country, students, into this formation. Very innovative, brilliant idea, really had turned out to be, but at the time, no one was sure of anything. I had never heard of it. In Ann Arbor, I had never heard of it until I got... Some people started... Hayden was editing the Michigan Daily, very impressive articles that he wrote about an emerging student movement. And I think he himself said later he was trying to create the movement through his worth, I mean knowing... In other words, if you write these long descriptive, emotionally powerful pieces describing students on the march, you are creating an awareness that this might be possible. No one had been thinking really of a student movement, or not very many people until... And I do not think he alone was thinking about it, but it was an emerging idea more than a reality in (19)61, (19)62. Anyway, there was a student party, political party on campus called Voice. And that too was parallel that some of the other big universities, a lefty political party at Berkeley, it was called Slate.
SM (00:27:12):
Yes.
RF (00:27:13):
And then University of Chicago, there was another one, [inaudible] Madison, a few examples of this. And those were local, they were not tied to any actual group, but Al Haber saw that he could recruit the leaders of Voice into this SDS. And so when the planning for Port Huron starting to get going, and Tom wrote this draft of what became Port Huron [inaudible], that is when I was first exposed to the fact that this was happening. I had other friends who knew Tom before I did, introduced us a little. So I began... Yep, he was a... You may find him impressive now, but he was even more impressive as a 21 [inaudible]. Brilliant speaker, brilliant writer. And for those New York, Jewish, rusty kids, red diaper babies, here is a guy who did not have that background. He grew up in a very conservative Catholic community in Detroit and came out of there. And that is significant. If you have the view, which I did that well, the left wing in America's going to be really isolated in these pockets of distinctive cultural pocket like the New York Jewish world or Union World of San Francisco, Bohemian Union World. And it will not reach out beyond that. There is little traditions of leftism around America, but it will not become a force. And suddenly you are seeing people like Hayden who coming out of nowhere, so to speak, with a very sharp, critical awareness, a new, fresh way of thinking about what it meant to be on the left. You left. And so that captured me immediately, as soon as I read this draft of [inaudible], this is what I have been wanting and would never believe could happen. So I decided to go to Port Huron. This is part of my story, I do not know how much you want. Is this a personal story or?
SM (00:29:38):
Yeah, it is a personal story because it is part of the (19)60s. And this is important, and I even had a question here. Why was Port Huron picked to be this-
RF (00:29:47):
I mean that is sort of well known, I mean they were looking... Among the connections that Al had made was with a young woman named Sharon Jeffrey, who was one of the leaders of the Voice party is Michigan. Her mother was Mildred Jeffrey, who was Walter Reuther UAW-
SM (00:30:05):
Oh, yes.
RF (00:30:08):
Was a right-hand woman. She was a very powerful, well-known figure in Michigan politics and in the Union. And so I guess that Millie Jeffery just suggested you could use the Port Huron camp or whatever it was called that the BUAW owned up there for the meeting and it [inaudible]. So that was a great resource, you felt like perfect for... I do not know if they even charged... Let us just do it. Yeah, so it was that UAW connection was very important and I think has lessons for today. The UAW... We need a new student movement. I may be getting ahead of my story, and UAW is willing to sponsor SDS without knowing what that would mean. In other words, they took a risk politically in backing these upstart students with not only Port Huron, they gave some money to things like that. So anyway, where were we? So yeah, here I was a red diaper baby and SBS required for membership that you sign a statement saying that you were not part of the communists, basically. Which I was not, but I hated, and I was... Many of us red diaper babies hated that kind of loyalty statement. And I was not sure how we would be received, my wife went with me, given our background. So I went there. There was a left wing paper at the time called the National Guardian, which I had a lot of friendship connections with some people there. And I said, "Well, let me cover the Port Huron meeting for the Guardian." And I will go Port Huron under that rubric, not knowing whether I was able to or willing to join the organization, so to speak. So when we got there, we realized that there was... One of the key things about the meeting was going to be to overturn that loyalty oath and really transform the organization's identity. Not to be pro-communist, but to denounce this kind of Cold War categorizations that was-
RF (00:33:03):
... kind of Cold War categorizations that was killing the left, really, that kind of Cold War thinking. So almost immediately we got to Port Huron I knew I was part of this, and incidentally did write pieces for The Guardian, which they did not want to publish. They did not publish, because they did not trust SDS. "Well, it is still social democratic part of the league for industrial democracy. They were red baiters and so on." Even though I tried to explain that this was something new, the Guardian editors did not buy that story right away and they did not care what I thought so that was an interesting... The part of the left that I had identified with up to them was The Guardian and the magazine Monthly Review. These were independent Marxist oriented publications. They were not Communist Party publications, but they were not anti-communist in the Cold War then. So I liked those. But neither magazine understood SDS at the beginning. They just did not get the idea of a New Left until later. Is that important? I do not know. Anyway, so that is how we got there. We very involved in the discussions there. I helped the right, or I wrote the redraft, matter of fact, of the communist statement in the Port Huron statements, the passages about communism and anti-communism. Not to make them less anti-communist, but I actually thought Tom was too soft on the communist [inaudible] when he had written the original draft. So we were very involved at that point. I always take credit of being one of the founders of SDS, that is part of my identity that I was at that founding meeting and I actually helped conceive what the organization was to be along with, of course, a dozen other people.
SM (00:35:42):
How important was President Kennedy's inaugural speech on some of the students at Michigan? "Ask not what your country can do for you as what you can do for your country." Because when he campaigned in (19)60 and of course then he won, and then in (19)61 he gave in his inaugural those words that did inspire a lot of people. Of course the Peace Corps meeting that took place outside of the University of Michigan library-
RF (00:36:08):
Well, let me tell you the exact-
SM (00:36:09):
Yeah.
RF (00:36:11):
And the anniversary of that is just been, so-
SM (00:36:14):
Right.
RF (00:36:15):
Yeah, that was during the presidential campaign. He was scheduled to come, not the library, the Michigan Union, the student union, he was to appear on the steps there. People waited for hours. He was late, like 2:00 AM as I recall, thousands of kids waiting there. In that speech he says, "Would not you like to serve your country giving aid to people in Ghana?" I forget the exact words, but he was posing almost the idea that instead of military service, there would be this other option. Immediately a guy named Al Guskin, who had been my roommate before we both got married when we first got to Ann Arbor, he was another Brooklyn College guy, Al and a few others, formed a group right away that next day, I think, to support the Kennedy idea. They went to see Kennedy at another campaign stop, I think, a few, couple weeks later to say, "We are behind this, we want to work for it." Some people say that Peace Corps would not have gelled as an idea where it not for the fact that there was this spontaneous student response to it in Ann Arbor that pretty much spread pretty quickly, I think, around the country. A matter of fact, that is how I met Hayden is because Guskin reached out to the editor of the student paper Tom Hayden, and then Al starts telling me, "There is this guy, Hayden, you have got to meet him." Anyway, the SDS people were not in love with Kennedy at all. I would say the psychology of that moment was, on the one hand, yes, we have the first president born in the 20th century. There is a fresh feeling of a turning point in history, but it was as much the sit-ins in the South and the civil rights uprising than as Kennedy. Kennedy was the more conservative, a lot of the liberal young wanted Adlai Stevenson to be the Democratic nominee in (19)60. That was a completely impossible idea. But Kennedy was not considered the darling of liberal Democrat at all. By the time of SDS, there had been the Cuban invasion. There had been a big acceleration of the arms race under Kennedy, big reinvestment in military. By the way, can I take a little bit of a diversion here?
SM (00:39:25):
Yes.
RF (00:39:25):
I remembered another important thing that was going on in Michigan. There was an academic center called the Center for Study of Conflict Resolution, which was essentially a peace research center that a number of my mentors, faculty types, were involved with. I got a research job there. Actually, my wife also worked there in a clerical capacity. The reason I am bringing it up is because that center sponsored a number of really significant to me, formative academic type conferences on the arms race and disarmament issues. I learned a tremendous amount at that time about what policy debates were inside the administration, some of the key players. So McNamara came from Ann Arbor, Secretary of Defense. So there was a connection intellectually and even personally between the Ann Arbor faculty that were concerned with arms issues and Kennedy administration, but they were not favoring Kennedy. There was a feeling, McNamara was a target of their anger, and then later McNamara wrote and talked a lot about how he had so much contributed to the acceleration of the arms race, missile race, and that rather than praising himself, he thought they had made a terrible move at that point. So those of us involved with the SDS development, we were very conscious of this about Kennedy. Plus on the civil rights side, there was a tendency in the Kennedy administration, a strong tendency, to try to dampen down the civil rights movement. Bobby met with a bunch of African American intellectuals, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, and I do not know who else was in the room. There was a shouting match. They were saying, "You are not doing anything much to support." That was a real issue for us, failure of the Justice Department to really defend the civil rights workers who were being jailed in the South. Instead, what the Kennedys were promoting was the idea to stop the civil disobedience campaign and start voter registration in the South. There was a lot of money generated through foundations to get the civil rights movement to promote voter registration rather than direct action. This turned out to be actually a good thing historically, but it was the appearance to those of us who identified with SNCC, we were very connected with SNCC, that the Kennedy administration was certainly not providing the kind of support that the Constitution seemed to mandate that they do. Now, the dynamic, if you look back on this period, the very recalcitrance of the Kennedy administration helped the movement grow. Again, one of these things that you can really figure out after the fact how a movement can merge. If you have an administration in Washington that says, "Civil rights is a profoundly moral correct path," and then they failed to fulfill their rhetoric with adequate action, that is a framework for grassroots action. At least at that time it was. So I am saying there was ambiguity, and the Kennedy you are talking about, and the sacrifice, "Ask not what you can do for your country," seemed to some of us, maybe, we did not use this term then, but an imperial message, not a message promoting service in the sense that we meant it. Now I have to add that when Kennedy made a famous speech June (19)63 promoting detente with the Soviet Union, there were things he was moving toward before he was murdered that were very much more on line with what we had been hoping for. So it was complicated. It is funny how people now are attacking Obama from the left, and they sort of [inaudible] Kennedy as Obama has, I have read people saying, "he has betrayed the Democratic Party's principals." And they hold up Kennedy as well as FDR, as exemplars of this. By no means, from the point of view of the equivalent lefties back in the early (19)60s, Kennedy did not look good from that point of view. But he did create space and the worst moment was the Cuban missile crisis. I can describe how significant in SDS history and in Ann Arbor. You do not mind me rambling like this?
SM (00:45:43):
I have a couple specific questions about the 60 people who met, but if you have some comments on the Cuban missile crisis-
RF (00:45:52):
Let me just finish the Cuban thing.
SM (00:45:54):
Yep.
RF (00:45:55):
Tom Hayden had traveled in the South after he graduated for a year and then became SDS president, married Casey Hayden. They moved back to Ann Arbor and lived in a house which had a basement, which unfortunately for their marriage but fortunately for SDS, we converted the basement into a headquarters for SDS in Ann Arbor. It was not just for locality. It had a lot of outreach beyond that and had a mimeo machine there, and we had a lot of meetings and so on and so forth. Well, when the Cuban missile crisis began, a bunch of us gathered there for a lot of time there making calls around the country. It was an important moment for reaching student activists at a number of other schools who we had not met yet. SDS had not met, let us say the Harvard Peace activists, like Todd Gitlin, calling them up. "What are you doing? How are you responding?" Creating by phone, a national network of people who were trying to figure out what to do in response to this missile crisis. In fact, there was a march on Washington pretty spontaneously organized that week, and we all went to Washington on that Saturday. When the crisis reached a head, we thought when we were marching that there was going to be a nuclear war. We actually-
SM (00:47:44):
Wow.
RF (00:47:45):
Because I. F. Stone had given a speech to the assembled people there, and he said, "I hate to say this, but I cannot see any way out. This might be the end of human history." People were screaming. Yet two hours later, the Russian ships had turned around and the crisis eased, which was [inaudible] liberating moment of my life. So my point being that Cuban Missile Crisis for the SDS group fitting in Ann Arbor was formative in terms of our opposition to the Kennedy administration and to the war machine as we find it then and so forth. So anyway, go ahead.
SM (00:48:44):
Yeah, there were 60 people that met at Port Huron-
RF (00:48:49):
Approximately.
SM (00:48:50):
... to hash out the statement you and Tom were involved in writing. Who were the 60? I know about you and Tom and I know about Al Haber, but who were the 60? Just briefly, what was their composition, male, female?
RF (00:49:07):
It is hard to generalize. Hayden and Haber had gone to the National Student Association meetings. I do not know where the one was prior to Port Huron, but those were national conventions of student government leaders that were very important in that period for the student world in the US. The NSA meetings provided opportunities for debates among political groups, for tables with literature and for recruitment. So a number of the people at Port Huron were either editors of major... Like Robb Burlage was there, Robb was-
SM (00:49:56):
How do you spell that name?
RF (00:49:58):
University of Texas student paper. There were guys from Madison who were head of student government. So one type of person at Port Huron were very successful student government or student organizational leaders from different campuses. Paul Booth, he had come from Swarthmore. I do not know what he was, president of the student body or something significant as a worker there. So that was one group. The second contingent, and that was not really a contingent, but it was a type of person who was there. Then there was a group from New York, there is a guy named Steve Max who became a full-time SDS organizer and who to this day is one of the leading mentors and theorists of community organizing in America. But Steve was a young red diaper baby in New York, and he had created a little organization in New York, local group, not connected to SDS, but they decided to affiliate with SDS so several of their members came to Port Huron. I forget the name of his group, but it became a New York chapter of SDS, probably right before the Port Huron. Somehow there were other people, I do not know exactly where some of the other people that I can think of. Oh, there was several SNCC leaders. There was Chuck McDew, who was the national head of SNCC, I believe at that time. And a guy named Tim Jenkins, who was an African American guy who was a very active in NSA. I think he might have been an empowered person. I do not know what has become of him. There was Casey Hayden and Bob. There was a very well-known white southern SNCC activist who was there, and I am blanking on his name right now. There was a woman, Maria Varela, she came from a Catholic college and has later became Maria Varela. She is one of the most revered leaders of Latino or Mexican American community organizing now in New Mexico. That is been where she has been for years, ever since Port Huron. But she was there as a young college person. So there was interesting to us from New York background, was a kind of liberal Christian, both Protestant and Catholic, element at Port Huron who had been mobilized by the Civil Rights movement, but were part of things like YWCA or the other liberal Christian formations in the South and Midwest. So if you remember what I said before that it was important to meet people who were not from our background, who were identifying with the left, Port Huron was paradise. All of these young people who came, they were not red [inaudible].
SM (00:54:14):
Were most of the men or how many women were-
RF (00:54:16):
No, I would say-
SM (00:54:18):
About 50/50.
RF (00:54:18):
Yeah.
SM (00:54:18):
Good. Now what has become of most of them? You have made reference to some have gone on to some excellent careers, Steve Max and the Latino leader who's in New Mexico. But there is a lot of perceptions that people have written about activists of the (19)60s, that there are a few that stayed the course like Tom Hayden and obviously you and your teaching and so forth, but the majority did not. They went on any other generation?
RF (00:54:50):
Well, I have written a whole book on this before.
SM (00:54:51):
Yeah, I know.
RF (00:54:54):
Okay. But the people of Port Huron, I do not think... Well, there may be a few that we have lost complete track of that I do not know where they are. But I would say none of them became mainstream American. They remained true to some important part of the identity they were forming at that time. So Paul Booth, he is one of the most respected labor leaders in America. He is vice president of the AFSCME.
SM (00:55:27):
I interviewed his wife a week ago, Heather.
RF (00:55:32):
She was one of my students, by the way, university of Chicago. And Burlage is a healthcare policy and political activist in New York. Some people have had very visible careers. Well, Bob Ross is vice president of SDS then, he was from Ann Arbor. He is a well-known sociology professor in Massachusetts. I guess a number of people ended up in sort of academic framework. I do not have the whole list of folks, but I do not-
SM (00:56:25):
Well ever since we all know that when Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980, a lot of history books have been written that say that the last 30-plus years in America has really been defined by the right. That right has really dominated our politics.
RF (00:56:47):
Okay, well I have a lot to say on that.
SM (00:56:51):
And the New Left, they are there, but they are not as powerful as the right.
RF (00:56:59):
Well, they do not say that. Well, I do not know that there has been much good history writing from my point of view about, not just from the time of Reagan, but the (19)70s are a very important decade, and that decade in which feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation really became important forces in American life. Those are not (19)60s movements, those are (19)70s by and large. Many of the people who were active in the New Left were the foundational, catalytic figures in those movements in the (19)70s, the new social movement, came out of that activism that people went on after the (19)60s and after the resolution of the war issue and the Vietnam issue and the civil rights issues, people move into other domains with their activism. The thing that got most publicity was sort of identity politics. I have always felt that that was a mistake to just simply say the (19)70s was about identity politics. Feminism is not simply identity politics. Gay liberation is not simply that. Then you did have not only environmental movement nationally, but a tremendous array of local activism. This has been my experience and my wife's experience, we moved to this town in 1969 and we have been here for all those years since. We are leaders of this community in promoting environmental and social justice politics. The whole town is transformed. It is not the town we moved into, which was conservative, potentially right wing dominated community. I mean, if you look at California alone, you could not make a story out of the right wing dominance. The Republican Party right now in California is virtually the power of the Latino and other immigrant communities politically as voting block in terms of new leadership, tremendous labor movement here with many former New Leftists in the labor movement as leaders, big political force. It is the only state where the labor movement has been growing actually in terms of percentage of population. I do not want to overstate, but the point I would make is, and is California isolated? No, I think there are many, many towns and regions where after the (19)60s a political movement toward the left is the real story. You look at a state like Oregon, a city like Portland, the state of Washington, similar dynamic go on there. What happened is that a lot of the (19)60s counter culturally influenced young people, moved to certain neighborhoods, certain towns, college towns in particular, but other towns, and became politically potent, and the odd thing that I cannot explain sitting here very well is that the national politics moved rightward and a lot of that was fed as a kind of backlash against the [inaudible]. If you look at national voting patterns of white people-
SM (01:01:06):
Can you hold on one second?
RF (01:01:07):
... they are far right wing.
SM (01:01:08):
I have to change my tape here. Hold on a second.
RF (01:01:08):
Okay.
SM (01:01:08):
Other than that, it is cold.
RF (01:01:08):
Terrible weather in the Midwest.
SM (01:01:22):
Yeah. All right, I am back.
RF (01:01:24):
Anyway, what I start to say is, yeah, the national politics has shifted. The Republicans have tended to dominate since Reagan, as you have said, although there have been important episodes of [inaudible]. But to me it is a far more range and complicated, even nationally. I mean, Obama was elected president, nobody thought that could happen. But not by white people. The white vote, especially white male vote, is far to the right. That is, to me, the biggest shift in consciousness towards right occurred among white male, middle class, working class voters, the so-called Reagan Democrat vote, which was part of the New Deal Coalition, and then has broken away. It is understandable if you add together the civil rights and Black movement reaction against that or feeling threatened by it, feeling threatened by feminism and by economic decline in the loss of manufacturing economy, those things help explain why large numbers of white men in particular decide they were conservative and wanting to protect what they were losing. I think that that is, but that means that they are reacting against something that they see as real, which is that there is a rising tide on the other side.
SM (01:03:18):
One of the-
RF (01:03:18):
The very thing the Republicans in California are dead because they tried to play an anti-immigrant politics. That has united Asian-American, Latino voters, and that accounts for a lot of what has happened in California. I am sure the anti-immigrant vote policy proposal, those ideas appeal to a certain significant number of white folks in the state, but they do not have the capacity to mobilize even a sizable minority of the vote at this point.
SM (01:03:54):
One of the questions I have asked everyone is a takeoff of what we were saying, talking about Ronald Reagan and the backlash. The right or the conservatives have said that most of the problems we have in America today begin in the (19)60s and (19)70s when Boomers were identified as the reason for the breakup of the American family unit, the reason why we have a divorce rate, the drug culture, the illicit sexual mores, the welfare state where everybody wants a handout, a lack of respect for authority in law and order, a "I want it" mentality with no discipline financially. Some of them even criticize for the financial crisis we are in. And a culture where victimization takes center stage in many of the (19)60s and (19)70s involvement groups. Your thoughts. Again, Newt Gingrich has made comments in (19)94 about this when Republicans came to power, and George Will writes about it a lot in his books.
RF (01:05:02):
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
SM (01:05:03):
And certainly Huckabee and Glenn Beck and all this.
RF (01:05:07):
Well, I have thought a lot about that. The point I would make in response is A) the consumer economy that grew up after World War II, many people were saying promoted values that ran counter to traditional. This has nothing to do with social movement to the (19)60s. This has a lot to do with the promotion of values of consumption and what you were saying, sort of immediate gratification and the idea of simply focusing on hedonism and pleasure counter to what used to be called the Protestant ethics. That story was written about in the (19)50s that was happening to this country. And in many ways...
RF (01:06:03):
...that was happening to this country. In many ways, the (19)60s counterculture was a rebellion against that, against consumer values, against materialism for a more spiritual way of life. Now, the thing that people in the counterculture did not quite get when they were in the early stages is that the counterculture could become part of the consumer culture. It could transform and translate many of the practices of the counterculture into commodities for promotion, whether it is water beds or drugs themselves. As a sociologist, I would say some of what we call the counterculture and the youth rebellion, and I have written about this, is not about an organized effort by people to challenge the status quo. It is about more like symptoms of the loss of meaning that people felt because the Protestant ethic was so out of phase with the kind of economy, kind of social order that was growing up after World War II, looking for new values, looking for ways of life, feeling [inaudible] in a disrupted moral order. Now, the second answer I would give is the highest rates of everything you said, divorce, alcoholism, whatever else you mentioned, drug use method, methadone use, is in the reddest areas of the country, the most conservative areas of the country. I wish people would face this. There is a sense to that, but it is not about the damage in the (19)60s, it is about the damaged lives that a failing economy creates. It is about the difficulty of traditional religious institutions and generally institutions to manage the kind of social change that is created by mass media, by the consumer economy, and by the degree of mobility, physical mobility that people have to have undergone. I mean, just the fact that people have moved so much in order to find work or to find a reasonable life. Highest rates of divorce, that is what I was [inaudible] in those areas. So to me, the anti-authority aspect of the (19)60s has a lot to do with the Vietnam War, I felt. If you wage a war like that with a conscript army and people come to realize that the whole war is a lie and they are being asked to die, forced to die, fight and die on that, you have done a great deal of damage to people's trust and certainly a lot of events of the (19)60s challenged priority. But to me, the sad part of the post (19)60s era in terms of the new left is that many of the ideas that people in the new left have had about how to restructure America have gotten lost in... I mean, take the idea of participatory democracy, which is a central theme of the [inaudible] statement. I still think people struggle on their community level for voice. What that phrase refers to really is the impulse people have to want to have a say in decisions that affect them, that are being made in the political world, but also in the economic world. This is still going ... you see this all the time, almost every day, in our town, that people are challenging... it is not challenging authority for the sake of challenging authority. They are saying, "You are acting without hearing us." Yet there are not people very visibly now on the national political scene proposing ways that our institutions can be restructured so that voice could be more easily gotten by average people. I still think that if a political movement or leadership came along or trying to articulate that, they would make an impact. But because of the Reagan revolution and post Reagan era, a lot of the new leftists ended up defending things we were criticizing, the welfare state. We acted on the assumption that the welfare state was permanent and that what needed to happen is to make it democratic and responsive and not bureaucratic. That was an example of the central part of our story, what we were trying to say. We believe in decentralized governance, but if you are going to where communities have more voice, but if you are going to basically prevent the adequate funding of institutions that people depend on, that takes priority over how people are going to be able to organize their local life to have more voice. In other words, in the post Reagan period, people have been more defensive on the left of the existing definition. People now, and I am very critical of contemporary left because they think their main job is to defend government. I would say their main job is to defend democracy. But it is very hard not to be in the position of defending government when you have a political force on the right that wants to stop government from functioning. You see what I am saying?
SM (01:13:31):
Yes-yes.
RF (01:13:35):
In the absence of government, we are going to get a corporate dictatorship. We are pretty far along in that.
SM (01:13:40):
Many Boomers felt that they were the most unique generation in American history. A lot of young people on college campuses, I know on my campus they felt that way, and they were going to better everything. They were going to show other generations caring about others is what it is all about. They were believing in ending war and bringing peace, ending racism, sexism, homophobia, protecting in the environment. How would you rate this efforts 40 years hence? Discuss what you see as the gap between expectations and the hopes of the Boomer activist.
RF (01:14:23):
Well, I am kind of have to say that I always criticize the generational model. I think that is almost a trap because it is saying the change comes from a particular age group or a particular generational cohort, which makes only limited ... there is truth in it, but it is limited truth. In order for the changes to happen, you have to have cross-generational alliances coalition that young people have to reach out to older people. I think that the generational mission idea really did not last all that long. What is a Boomer? I do not even know anymore how you define it.
SM (01:15:25):
It is those born between (19)46 and (19)64.
RF (01:15:29):
I know, but that is one definition. I have seen others that are less broad or more broad or whatever. You can easily debunk that by pointing out that all those people that you just defined were very different from each other. There is quite a lot of political diversity and so forth. That is one side of it. On the other hand, I always have, and I have written about this, that people who were in college or influenced by the movements and who were adolescent in the time, let us say, between (19)67 and (19)70, that little period, that had a tremendous impact. When you have millions of people, kids stopping school and going on strike after [inaudible] and all that, it has an effect on many of those people's sense of who they are. I do not think we have had a good effort to document the full fate of that generation. The book I wrote with Jack Whelan is about people up to 20 years after they graduated, 1970, we have had 20 years [inaudible]. What has happened to those people. I could suggest that some numbers of people who have been more corporate than they thought they would be nevertheless have a side of them that think, "Well, I ought to be giving back" or "I want to retire from this rap race and start doing something more creative." In other words, what is not documented is the degree to which people from that era have continued to try with their lives to make some kind of difference along the lines that you were talking about you. Another way of looking at it is now look at the college campuses, the faculty and administration, people who are on the senior level who are controlling things are the (19)60s generation. Well, that has not produced a whole new type of education. There is many-many-many things about the higher education now that are better or more wonderful than anything back then. But on the other hand, in terms of what you were talking about, in terms of issues about race and gender and sexuality, the campuses are quite a different place. The University of California, which is the one place I know best, many of the dreams of the (19)60s students are now taken for granted as the way the university operates in terms of the diversity of the student body and the diversity of faculty. It is still a long way to go to have fully mesh with American demography, but it is very-very different, and even the curriculum... What I am trying to say is, on the one hand, there has been more ... I think a lot of the change that actually happened we take for granted now and do not recognize which it is. But on the other hand, the limit to that change have not been studied either. What made it not possible to move as far as this or that? You would have thought by now that marijuana would be legal if you were back in 1970. Well, certainly in 40 years you would have thought that the US would be in a different modality internationally, that there would be a real ... we have a tremendously greater questioning of war policy and military policy now than we ever had prior to Vietnam [inaudible] very clear. We do not have a draft, but we still are thinking we are the global superpower that should be the global superpower and so on and so forth. I would have said in the early (19)70s, "Oh, by 40 years from now we might well have corporations run with a lot of internal democracy where workers would have voice in their workplace, where the corporation would be a different kind of governance institution." But I do not think that that has come to pass, although there are examples of that all over the place. But the dominant form remains. What I am trying to say is we do not have a good ... Maybe I will end up doing some of this writing, but one could write a very interesting history of the last 40 years by asking what happened to these dreams and what were the ... the story is not that the dreams failed. In what ways did they not fail, in what ways did they fail and why? Not just describing it, but trying to understand the reason. That would tell you a lot about this country.
SM (01:21:44):
In your opinion, when did the (19)60s begin, when did it end, and what was the watershed moment?
RF (01:21:53):
I would say it makes sense to begin then with Rosa Park was not going to the back of the bus, which is exactly 55 years ago next week. You could say the end of the Vietnam War probably is a good marking point because ... yeah, if you want to think about it that way. It is really a 20-year period. But in some way, and I would put a little hedge on that because when Carter was president, a number of the (19)60s people were in that administration and there were things begun like vista programs and other community organizing effort where people have not documented this well. There was a lot going on in the Carter period that was promising along ... if you were a (19)60s person like me, well, what is going on in the Carter time?
SM (01:23:06):
Sam Brown. That is right.
RF (01:23:08):
Sam Brown is a great case. So it may be that you should really end the (19)60s with Reagan's election, but you could end it with McGovern's defeat. These are arbitrary constructions and you learn something from each of these [inaudible].
SM (01:23:36):
How about the watershed moment?
RF (01:23:38):
Watershed, well, I am not sure what you mean by watershed. One watershed I have mentioned is the sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in February 1960. Because if you really think about those actions, very simple, four guys sit in at a lunch counter where they are not supposed to be, boom. But what flowed from that and the form of that action really has repeated in certain ways throughout the decade, direct action, not waiting. These four guys did not try to persuade a lot of people to end segregation. They broke through. They also had a network of transmission of their actions through their own communication, but also through the mass media. Well, that is the same pattern of spreading innovation in the (19)60s, the Double Parallel Act. The innovators communicate outward, but so do the mass media spread in various ways, positive and distorted, know what they are doing. That to me would be a crucial watershed. There is another watershed, it is sort of obvious, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
SM (01:24:56):
Right, and I got a question on that later on.
RF (01:24:59):
That is the first mass uprising of college students, and so obviously a lot was [inaudible].
SM (01:25:10):
There were a lot of books that influenced members of the Boomer generation, the (19)60s generation that came out in the late (19)60s and (19)70s, and I want your thoughts just briefly. I am going to list them here; do you think these were important books and whether you rate them as really kind of describing the period in the generation. The books I always think of are Charles Reich, the Greening of America, Theodore Roszak, the Making of a Counterculture. Then you had later on Michael Medved's book, Whatever Happened to the Class of (19)65? You had Eric Erickson's book on the academy in descent, Michael Harrington on the Other America. You had Kenneth Kennison's Youth in Descent, Harry Edwards book, Black Students, which really define activists and revolutionaries and militants. Then you had Clark Kerr's Uses of the university. How important were they to you in explaining the America of the (19)60s and (19)70s?
RF (01:26:13):
Okay, well, I think Reich and Roszak are books that explained ... they make an effort to explain to a wider public what they think is happening, what the authors think is happening in the youth world and the counterculture. Greening of America was the best example of that popularization effort. I mean, he really... and when you read it now, it is almost possible to read because it is so silly, in my opinion. But that review... cut that out, that is not that important. But it was a sign. Here is what Reich's book meant to me, that there was an important tendency in the older, elite generation to try to understand the student movement and the protests and the counterculture rather than suppress it. Remember, his book came out about the time of Nixon and Agnew and so forth. I mean, in my judgment, it was important that there was this other elite tendency that says, "Wait a minute, these are our kids. These are our children. You are going to create a tremendous upheaval in America if you keep trying to repress them." It is not that the book prevented the repression, but it did provide another way of looking at things that I think was very helpful to a lot of old parents and older, elite, people in authority how to think about this thing. Roszak probably helped some of the counterculture people with their own sense of who they were, in a way probably more influential within the counterculture than ... Reich's book was not really read [inaudible]. Now, let us see what other. Clark Kerr's book was very important because it was used as a symbol by Mario Savio and other people in the free speech movement to define what it was they were up against, multiversity. Kerr gave them a framework. Oddly enough, he even predicted that there would be student unrest in the multiversity. So it is a bit unfair, I think, to some extent to Kerr's ... although the way he acted as president of the university sort of reinforced what they thought the book was about. Let us see, you mentioned-
SM (01:29:20):
I had the Harry Edwards Black-
RF (01:29:21):
Harry Edwards, I do not think that was an important ... I mean it is Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice was a very important book in defining Black consciousness on a sort of mass scale.
SM (01:29:34):
Michael Harrington's The Other-
RF (01:29:35):
Wait a minute, and the Frantz Fanon Wretched of the Earth.
SM (01:29:42):
Oh, yes.
RF (01:29:43):
But Michael Harrington, The Other America, that was a genuinely significant piece of social reporting because it did force onto the national stage the question of poverty, and it allowed Kennedy and then [inaudible] Johnson to ... well, it encouraged this poverty policy framework that was really significant in defining what the welfare state would ... how it would evolve. It was not just Harrington's book. It was, again ... Reich's book appeared in the New Yorker, so the Other America was written up by Dwight McDonald in the New Yorker and that writeup [inaudible] pretty far. All of these books are significant as classroom texts as well, but probably not in the (19)60s so much as [inaudible], although probably Other America-
SM (01:30:45):
Eric Erickson had written several on the [inaudible].
RF (01:30:49):
Erickson is a totally different character. I mean, he influenced me tremendously, as a social psychologist, and Gandhi's Truth, Young Man Luther, but also, he wrote a book on identity, per se. It is very clarifying work on youth consciousness. But a more influential book in the early (19)60s was Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman.
SM (01:31:27):
Oh yes-yes.
RF (01:31:33):
Do not forget that. He has been forgotten, but he was a very significant...
SM (01:31:35):
You mentioned that people like Saul Alinsky, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills were very influential in many student leaders in the (19)60s.
RF (01:31:43):
Absolutely.
SM (01:31:44):
In fact, Tom Hayden wrote a book on C. Wright Mills. Who were they and why were they a big influence, those three?
RF (01:31:51):
Well, for different reasons, but Goodman and Mills were both intellectuals who did not buy into the standard interpretations of the world and especially the Cold War, and both were strong critics of militarism, they were strong critics of corporate power, and they both were pointing in a new direction for the left. They were not using Marxist language, they were using really pragmatist, philosophical pragmatist framework a lot, and they both provided ingredients for what we [inaudible] by our participatory democracy. Their work is really worth the reading now, but at the time it was... when I read Mills in college, it was a completely different way of looking at things from any other sociology or political science books that we were asked to read. The teachers that I had were dismissive of it, of The Power Elite anyway. To some extent, my intellectual life from that point on was trying to show that their dismissal of this was ... I was breaking out of that. The ways I thought were conventional at the time in my learning. Alinsky was not so much as a writer, as a... but he provided a model of community organizing, which later was taken up by SPS in economic .... in so-called [inaudible] projects in northern urban community organizing projects that SPS was involved in, and the war on poverty, neighborhood organizing effort came out of the war on poverty where ... So Alinsky showed that community organization was not just for social work purposes, but for political power, and that has remained. We have a president now who learned at that school.
SM (01:34:32):
As a sociologist, a lot of people do not like the term Boomer generation, I will tell you that right up front and they do not like the greatest generation, the Millennials and all the other titles that are given to groups. But when you look at the period, though, that is defined as Boomers, those from 1946 to today, the oldest Boomers are 64 this year and the youngest are 49. In just a few words, you have already mentioned throughout the interview, but I have broken it down to six different periods when Boomers have been alive. Just a couple words to describe the period, the period 1946 to 1960.
RF (01:35:10):
Well, that was the period in terms of life cycle. Obviously, this was the adolescent period or the growing up and adolescence of the earliest Boomers. But that was the period of the seeming... the post-war so-called conformity era. In many ways, everyone understood of that age, when the (19)50s was going on, that we were rebelling against that time of our lives when the country was seemingly so [inaudible]. It was the time when suburbia developed, when the automobile became primary, when television emerged, and as well as the Cold War and anti [inaudible], the Red Scare.
SM (01:36:13):
The period (19)61 to (19)70.
RF (01:36:13):
Well, that is the period of creativity politically, culturally, that generation helped to... was in the forefront of. Margaret Mead wrote a book, I forget the title, but where she argued, rather fascinating argument, that most traditional societies, old people teach the young, and in a modern society age is not necessarily defined how knowledge is transmitted. But in the kind of society that was emerging, the young teach the old and that is because of something about the rapidity of social change is such that the old people do not understand what is going on, but young people more intuitively grasp it.
SM (01:37:08):
I think that book is Culture and Commitment.
RF (01:37:08):
Okay, that is.
SM (01:37:08):
I read it quite a few years ago.
RF (01:37:20):
So the (19)60s was that time. I do not think she was right about the trend because I do not think that continued to be quite so much to the case. That is a good question too. Why was she right and wrong about that? I do not know. But the point is, in the (19)60s was a time when the young were leading the rest of society in terms of cultural outlook.
SM (01:37:49):
The period 1971 to 1980.
RF (01:37:55):
Well, as I have said that time when there was a large amount of political innovation and experimentation as well as religious and spiritual experimentation. People were trying to redefine their lives and a lot of these things that we think of as (19)60s effects were really happening in the (19)70s.
SM (01:38:19):
The period 1981 to 1990.
RF (01:38:24):
Well, you could call that the Reagan era, when a lot of the established ideas about welfare state and about America's role of the world were coming into question and pre-market ideology seemed to be ascended. But I also make it the time when, on a more local level, a lot of... on a more local level. A lot of local power structures that had been dominant for generations were disappearing in the communities around the country and new political forces.
SM (01:39:18):
How about that period 1991 to 2000?
RF (01:39:24):
Well, I do not know that you can make simple... This is the post-communist era, and that is important. Maybe that is the most important thing about it.
SM (01:39:36):
And then the 2001 to 2000 now (20)11.
RF (01:39:42):
Well, it may be too early to figure it out, but one thing that it will be remembered for is the time of America's evident decline as a superpower.
SM (01:39:58):
Why did we lose the Vietnam War, in your opinion?
RF (01:40:02):
I do not think it was winnable. In fact, about a year ago we visited Vietnam.
SM (01:40:09):
Oh, you did? Oh, wow. I am going there next summer.
RF (01:40:13):
I highly recommend it, very fascinating experience. We just went on a little Smithsonian-led tour with a couple dozen people. But I remember feeling almost from the beginning of the tour that it is obvious now to me why we could not win the Vietnam War. I mean, the Vietnamese people have a lot to do with it. They have a history of hundreds and hundreds of years of being occupied by other powers, of having a tremendous capacity for adaptation to hardship and resiliency. We went down the Mekong River and spent a few days there and realized how could they have possibly thought the US could take over in this jungle area where people were well-organized and historically prepared to hold onto their lives there. I do not mean to romanticize the Vietnamese, but it just seemed like the height... And people, even during the war, in the earliest part of the war, understood some people just... What was going on in Vietnam was, if anything, a kind of civil war. But really, the great majority of people were opposed to the US-imposed regime, not just the US presence. And whether or not they identified as communist, they all identified as nationalist. The communist leadership, Ho Chi Minh, was the nationalist leadership. You see that now, and I am willing to bet when you go there, you will see this thing I am talking about. It is a little hard to...
SM (01:42:11):
I am actually going with vets.
RF (01:42:11):
Are you a vet?
SM (01:42:18):
No, I am not a vet, but I have worked very closely with Vietnam vets. I got to know Louis Poer quite well.
RF (01:42:24):
And they have made a lot. I have other friends who went under those kinds of [inaudible 01:42:32] and they had a very rich [inaudible].
SM (01:42:35):
You were a...
RF (01:42:37):
I think we lost the war because it was even understood by military people before we entered Vietnam Amendment that winning a land war in Asia was not something you could do. And B, especially these people who were already well schooled in resisting foreign intervention.
SM (01:43:02):
You were a key member of the early SDS as you discussed. And what are your thoughts on the SDS members who took the group in a more violent direction, the Weathermen. And then as a kind of a sidelight here, how about groups like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the members of AIM who took their cause in a more violent and radical direction too in the early (19)70s?
RF (01:43:32):
Well, I was very-very dismayed by the Weathermen development, but basically the core group of Weathermen were people who, here is how I would put the... They came from typically privileged backgrounds. They were not just upper middle class. They came from elite background by and large. And their first impulses politically were pacifist service in many cases. They wanted to work in situations where they would be helping poor people and so forth. They experienced this guilt over their privilege. Why did they turn violent? Because they became very disillusioned in their experience with service and poverty and pacifism. And in terms of whether they could have effects that way. Their elite background made them feel this arrogant belief that they had... They did not question their right to make history as individuals. They had a lot of sense of potency because where they came from class terms, and this combined with guilt can be creative, but it can also be very self-destructive. And I think in many ways, I am speaking as a social psychologist, there was a kind of suicidal element that this guilt element of their consciousness. The other thing that was fatal to their thinking was that they formed these tight, cohesive, closed social groups that meant they could not allow each other to question where they were going. They punished each other for deviations from the line. They could not hear reality very well. And that is true of any tight, cohesive group that has that high risk. The cohesion enables them to make these sacrificial actions and to look very brave to themselves and to other people, but it blinds them to reality. And I think most of them in the aftermath, years later, retrospectively believe they were crazy, but crazy not in the mental illness sense, but these factors that I am talking about combining meant you lose touch with reality. I am often dismayed if there are people trying to tell the SDS story as it somehow the Weathermen were on the right path. Really, their way of acting is very damaging to SBS. I do not think it was an absolutely important force in destroying the larger sort of movement. But beyond that is what you are raising with these other groups as well, is in the end of the (19)60s, there was this widespread belief, A, there was no way to change America's short of "revolution." And B, the model of revolution is the Vietnamese or the Cubans who overthrew their dictatorship through violent revolution. And that pacifism non-violent revolution of Martin Luther King, early [inaudible] did not work. Now none of those things were true, but they were powerful plots. And if you wanted to show your commitment to your people, whether you were African American, native American or Puerto Rican or whatever, adopting this revolutionary stance seemed to be important for a few years in that time period. I think the Panthers suffered greatly from getting publicity hype that was, they did not know who they were after a while I do not know too much about them internally, but their leadership became more oriented toward celebrity of a certain kind rather than serious work, even though they had made some strides in a community level. I do not think AIM took up a violent path so much as, I may be wrong on this, as being... Each of these struggles is a little different from each other. The Native American struggle is one defined by AIM and literal sovereignty in terms of the Indian reservation world and so forth. And it is not illogical to say, well, if we have some sovereignty, we need to have some way of defending it militarily as well as politically. Young Lords I do not know much about, but I do not think they were, I do not know.
SM (01:50:11):
Yeah, I think they kind of...
RF (01:50:15):
[inaudible] there were a lot of, the Panthers inspired these other organizations, and I think the best thing to be said about all of them is that after this phase, you are referring to, many of the people who have led those things went on too much more creative political and cultural roles in their communities to this day. That a lot of the California, some of the political leadership that now emerged from Mexican American world probably started with Brown Braid, I know that to be the case just as an example or you have former Black Panthers like Congressman Bobby Rush in Chicago. In fact, if you look at the broad, long history of revolutionary moments in American history, like in the early thirties, late twenties, early thirties, there was this group of young communists who thought they were revolutionary as well. Most of them abandoned that, but they then went on to be union leaders and other leaders of importance. There is a way in which the small seemingly marginal political sect groups that formed very often and they are like little positive side of it as they are like schools where people do see reality after a while and they have developed some skills and leadership and some capacity leadership that then turns out to be good.
SM (01:52:11):
Well, that is a sociologist, the generation gap. You probably studied generation gaps, not only the boomer generation, but other generations, but seemed to be very strong. And of course, I remember the Life magazine with a young man in the front cover with his glasses on with the father on one shade and the son on the other pointing fingers at each other. And it was about the generation gap. But in a book called The Wounded Generation that came out in 1980, there was a panel that included James Fallows, Carol Caputo, Bobby Mueller, Jim Webb, and they talked about not only about the generation gap itself, but they said that the real generation gap, this came up in discussion, was between those who went to war and served in Vietnam and those who did not. The real generation gap is really within the generation as opposed to between generations. Your thoughts on that?
RF (01:53:09):
Well, I do not think so. Yes. People who went to any war there is a strong feeling they have, that they have an experience that they cannot be understood by people who did not. And I never have bought the idea that the anti-war people were anti those who were in the war. That was a myth created mostly post-war myth because many people, anti-war movement fought or active in it, leadership in it thought a lot about how can there be connections. And in fact, there was a whole movement called the GI Coffee House movement, in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s where anti-war activists did go to military base areas and create coffee houses and newspapers and things that they connected with. And the Vietnam Vet organization I do not think they see themselves as cutoff from the anti-war people. There is a movie recently brought out called [inaudible] that describes these Vietnam anti-war that shows them now, it also reviews their history. A Much more complicated story than simply those who went to war and those who did not. There is a new collection, actually, I think 20 plus CDs of songs from the Vietnam era. It is something you ought to get for your library, Bear Family Records. This is very illuminating because it has songs sung by people in uniform in the war, a lot of the anti-war songs, a lot of the pro-war country songs. It is just when you listen to this and look at, it has got a book with it, you realize how much of a mosaic really of feeling there was around the war by people just expressed through these songs. And I feel that those who went to [inaudible] by, or those who were in some ways victimized for their anti- war activity are also veterans of the war and some of the songs that are sung actually by GIs or guys who had been there. This collection where the guy acknowledges the people who died in Kansas City as part of the war dead. That is how I prefer to think about it, there may be that is who would yell at me for this, but I think there are others who would agree.
SM (01:56:42):
I am down to my final three questions here. And I may have to read this one here, I am going to just read this all, then you can kind of take it in and respond. This is about the Free Speech Movement. What are your thoughts on the Free Speech Movement in (19)64-(19)65 at Berkeley? And I break it down into parts here. What were its influences on higher education both then and now? Secondly, do you feel that these students of that era would be disappointed in the university of today? That seems to forget that the university life is about ideas and not corporate control of the university. And finally, this is just an opinion. Are universities today afraid of student activism on their campuses? And maybe it is because they do not want to return to the (19)60s where universities, because today's universities are hurting financially and they do not want anything to threaten their ability to fundraise even at the expense of ideas because money is so important today in higher education. Basically, if Mario was a lie today, and I talked to Bettina and I talked to several students that were in the movement, but to me as a student, I would be very disappointed in higher ed today. But just your thoughts.
RF (01:58:12):
Well, I tend to make things a little more complex, but what was the first question though was about it?
SM (01:58:19):
What are your thoughts on the Free Speech Movement? Its influences on higher education both then and now.
RF (01:58:29):
I think, the Free Speech Movement, itself, but also the vast amount of commentary that happened around it and after it raised all kinds of fundamental questions about higher education and particularly undergraduate education and where the student experience and so on and so forth. And point one, probably a great many curricular reforms and models of obstruction, experiential, all kinds of things came out of that period that now are part of the normal operation of college campuses. And we do not think of it as very innovative anymore, but it would, that is one point. The second point is that the Free Speech Movement became a model of action by student activists on campus, which involved direct action, occupied making demands, trying to negotiate demands, but that failing, you take direct action, civil disobedient, and then there is a confrontation. And of course that became, there is just hundreds and hundreds of cases of episodes like that in the (19)60s. Just amazing numbers, tremendous wave. Again, this is a good example of what I referred to earlier about, here is why were the visions and hopes raised by that period and that wave of protest. What happened to that positive and why, as you say, there is so much movement in higher education towards corporatized models. It is hard for me to speak about this firsthand because I do not see quite that process in the campus that I am at, UC Santa Barbara which I think is more aggressive than it was 10 years ago. And I also think that when you say afraid of activism, my experience has been with an administration that wants to channel activism rather than repress it. And I do not mean in a simply manipulative way. They make efforts because many of the people who were in the administration were student activists back when kids. And especially since the activism that is happened has to do so much with the issues of race and issues of college access and so forth, administrators are sympathetic with demands. And there is much more tendency to negotiate and try to deal with activism and ritualize it. Okay, you can do your civil disobedience, but let us have it between five and seven tomorrow evening and it will all be done in an orderly way. People are afraid of activism, not so much because of money, I think because in general, they do not want it. I am saying I do not know about being afraid of activist because of the financial issue. I think it is more just a fear of disorder that is always there. And I think that here is a proposition people may have learned from the (19)60s how to respond to student protests in ways that are less disorderly. But that has not been tested by the kind of confrontation that students were doing then, in other words, we do not know yet. There is cases of surprising amount of police, even in the University of California, not here at Santa Barbara so much, but in other places on other campuses recently where protests have happened, and police really did come in with a (19)60s like roughing up students. And then there is a case just now in Irvine where a group of Arab students had disrupted a pro-Israel thing from months ago, and now they are being disciplined. I was surprised at that because the story I have heard is they were not that disruptive, they were trying to express themselves. It was a much more able to be interpreted free speech conflict rather than something that should be criminalized. You may be right. And I would guess that administrators are pretty varied in their patience or willingness to gauge rather than suppress.
SM (02:04:22):
My thesis has been that they were much more comfortable with the term volunteerism, and they say that is real activism. And. of course, that is but it is only for limited periods of time. Sometimes it is required in fraternities and sororities and other groups and others do it on their own. Today's college students really have that spirit of volunteerism. I would say 95 percent of college campus students have that from their experiences in high school. But activism is a 24/7 mentality. It is a way one lives their life. And that is where I see the difference and that oftentimes the people that do run the universities are members of the boomer generation, but they were oftentimes not the activists. And that they learned, they experienced it and they know what it was like, so they fear it. I have been in universities for 30 years and I have just kind of sensed that.
RF (02:05:20):
Yeah, no, and I think it varies institutionally and depends on who in the faculty may be influential when these conflict arise and so on and so forth. I think it is an open question. I would make this comment about what you are calling boomer generation faculty. Many of them, even when they have very left-wing political attitudes, do not seem to be taking the degree of responsibility you would have thought they would take if they had been student activists in campus policy and governance. In other words, one of the big trends of the boomer faculty is much more focused in personal career issues, their own work and not getting too involved in the governance domain. And that is part of why corporate influence might grow. If I were giving speeches on this, I would be directing a lot toward my colleagues of my era or slightly younger and saying, what are you doing with respect to the future of the university?
SM (02:06:53):
Two things here, and this is my next to last question, and that is two qualities that I have been asking every one of my interviewees. Number one, do you feel that one of the main qualities inherent in the boomer generation or the (19)60s generation is their lack of trust in leaders in any profession due to all the lies and illegal actions that they witnessed in their youth? Whether it be as a very young child watching Eisenhower lie about the U2 incident, which he did on national television in 1959. About Gary Powers, to the Gulf of Tonkin with LBJ, to Watergate with Richard Nixon, to all the other lies about the number of people dying in Vietnam, that McNamara would often give the numbers and so forth. And so there seemed to be and you probably know this more than anybody, that the college students of the (19)60s and (19)70s oftentimes just did not trust anybody in a position of responsibility, whether it be a minister, a rabbi, a corporate leader, a congressman, a senator, a university president, a vice president of student of affairs. It did not matter. I just do not trust them. And do you think this is a bad quality to link to the generation, or is it a good quality?
RF (02:08:18):
Well, I agree that that was the mood very strongly, and it was also, you think about what term participatory democracy means. It means instead of relying on leadership from above, we want to have voice, we want to participate directly. And SDS had a practice of rotating leaders. You could not be president for more than one year, which I think actually did not turn out to be a great method because for various reasons about stability of knowledge, leadership, knowledge and so forth. But anyway, the paradox is that a lot of that generation did become the people in the positions that you are talking about. And I think some of them are very thoughtful people about remaking those kinds of roles. Being a different kind of college president than the ones that were there when we came in. Being a different kind of rabbi. And I have a number of people I know who became corporate consultants on management for the purpose of helping people manage in a more humane or more less racist sexist fashion or things like that. And then I would say if you talked to a cross section of boomers and said, did you have mistrust and how do you feel about it now? I think many of them might say, I think we went overboard because now they are leadership position. Do not trust anyone over 30, as soon as you get to be 30, you start thinking, wait a minute, I do not trust anyone under 30 now. You know what I mean?
SM (02:10:26):
Right.
RF (02:10:28):
One way you become " mature" is to question some of the enthusiasms or beliefs that you had when you were young. And this is a good area where such questioning probably would be likely, because as you move up the ladder of responsibility, you begin to see things that way. Same thing if you are a parent, you start saying, oh, now I understand my father much better than I did as a kid.
SM (02:10:57):
One thing you learn as a political science major is that you learn it in political science 101, that the stronger a democracy, the greater the need for a lack of trust, because by lacking trust in your government, you are able to speak up and criticize it, which shows that democracy is alive and well.
RF (02:11:20):
Let us add to that the current example of WikiLeaks. My sense is, and Tom Hayden has wrote a piece about this, people of my generation not only do not see anything wrong with WikiLeaks, but think this is the breakthrough in government transparency and making government accountable. And the idea that you are going to criminalize the people who are doing this is something that people, certainly my generation types, who are politically active are going to be very distressed about.
RF (02:12:02):
...the actors are going to be very distressed about. Yet just to be complex, there are people who say, well, exposure for the sake of exposure is not really the best way to proceed. And so there will be some questions about just blanketly throwing out everything out on the table, stuff like that. But I think the main point I am making is the one I wanted to make about WikiLeaks being seen as positive by the same people who lack that, who have that sort of inherent mistrust of what governments say. I mean, governments have to lie. So it is part of democracy. That is why we supposedly have a press.
SM (02:12:53):
The second part of my question was the issue of healing. I have let everyone know in my interviews that I took a group of students to Washington DC in 1995 to meet Senator Muskie. He had had not been well, it was part of our leadership on the road programs, and actually he had been on in the hospital and he just got out, and he talked a lot about the Ken Burns Civil War series. But the question that the students came up with, who were not even alive in the (19)60s, is due to the divisions, the intense divisions, that took place in the (19)60s and early (19)70s between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war and those who were against the war, and they even brought in the environmental debate in there, do you feel that the boomer generation, like the Civil War generation is going to go to its grave, truly not healing from the intense divisions that were part of their growing up years, because they never did in the Civil War?
RF (02:13:58):
Well, I do not think the divisions are quite like that, but they are being... I mean, to me, the big division is between people who welcome change and see the need for the new definition of America's role in the world, and a new definition of authority within America, versus people who are trying to hold on to what they think of as the past. Which involves, in most cases, not only past value, traditional values, but their own relatively advantaged positions. That to me is the division, that is not healed. And that if you elect an African American president, there are people who are so angry at that, that they do not want to believe that he is an actual American. And I do not see on the left the same, maybe I am blind to it, the same furious hatred. Even when in the Bush years, which were the worst years in terms of government practice that I have ever heard of in this country, and people really disliked George W. Bush and Cheney and all that. I do not think the same of pretty wild perspective on these guys was present. There might have been satire. And that is when you look back at some of the art and portrayals, let us say of LJ, they were far more vicious, you might say, than anything that was directed at [inaudible] W. So I do not mean to try to be self-serving and say, well, the left is nice and the right is not. But in fact, my own view is more to what I think Obama's view is, which is that the average American, left or right, does not have these passions to the degree that is being publicized in the media. In fact, when John Stewart made, he is the one who exemplifies the view I am just now saying. When Stewart, you know that march on Washington for that rally, his speech, he said this, he said, look, most people, left or right, do not have the sense of division that is being portrayed as the reality. Fox News is not America, or is not right-wing America, conservative America. And that is my experience and that is my understanding reading polling tea leaves. As a sociologist, I do not think the evidence is there for, on ground, that level of polarization. When it comes to race in particular, my experiences extremely other than that. There has been tremendous amount of coming together of healing, of mutual understanding on the ground and especially among young people. And the other way to answer your question is, if you look at the young generation under thirties, something has happened there in terms of race, sexuality, gender issues with large numbers of young people do not buy into the divisions and categories that you are referring to. And maybe that will change for them as they get older. But...
SM (02:18:05):
What the way Senator Muskie responded to that question on healing, he said, because I think they were thinking he was going to talk about the (19)68 convention and the young people there, he did not even mention. And he said, again, he talked about the Ken Burns series, how so many people had died and everything and how sad it was. He said, we have not healed since the Civil War in the area of race. And then he went on to talk about that in detail, and this is (19)95 and he died in (19)96.
RF (02:18:35):
Well, there is that the south remains different, having this regional difference is very, that is a very strong continuing difference. And many of the people who are speaking for the right wing are actually Southerners. And whether that matters or what that means, I am not sure. But John Stewart the other day who was satirizing some kind of organization that is promoting celebration of the Confederacy and how they were trying to deny that the Confederacy had anything to do with slavery and that it was because people felt overtaxed that they wanted to be [inaudible] and so forth. So there is still, there may well be those divisions. If you look at any of these countries, like in the Balkans that became tremendously bitterly divided and killing each other, I do not know that you could have seen that coming 10 years before. So, what are the conditions under which Americans would actually engage each other physically in combat? Maybe we have not been tested.
SM (02:20:06):
I know Gaylord Nelson, when I first, the late Gaylord Nelson, I remember he was, I was in his office at the Wilderness Society and I asked that question and he said, Steve, if you are asking on me that people are walking around Washington DC with lack of healing on their sleeves or whatever, it is not, it does not happen, it is not happening. But he did say it forever affected the body politic, and that is what he referred to, because we constantly talk about Vietnam over and over again, of course Vietnam syndrome and the links between Afghanistan, Vietnam. So it comes back many times. As my last question-
RF (02:20:47):
You are interested in that topic. Do you know Jerry Lemke?
SM (02:20:51):
Yes, I do. I interviewed him.
RF (02:20:52):
Oh, okay, good. Because he is really thought a lot of Vietnam.
SM (02:20:55):
Spitting image. Yeah, and the new book on Jane Fonda. As a lifelong professor, my last question is a two-parter too, but as a lifelong professor, how would you compare the students of 2010, (20)11 were the students who were your peers, the boomers. Today they are called the millennials. I know we do not like these terms. And then we had that group in between that never seemed to get along very well with boomers. And that is the Generation X-ers.
RF (02:21:27):
Lot of generalization. So I just do not follow.
SM (02:21:31):
How are they alike and how are they dissimilar? So I am talking about the students of the day and the students of the (19)60s and (19)70s.
RF (02:21:41):
I am retired and I have not really taught in the last year or two, so I am a little behind the curve. But point one, the thing I am most worried about is, I think back in the (19)60s, students in large numbers actually read newspapers. And I do not mean that the majority did. I do not know, we do not have, I do not know good data on that. But there certainly was a kind of shared awareness of current events, to put it very simply, which has seriously, seriously, seriously declined in the last period. Now, the majority of students say that they follow the news online, but I do not know that we know much about the content of that. Some students, online news junkies, are tremendously well-informed, equal to people I knew back in the SDS days. But large numbers, I think, are aware of themselves as clueless about a lot of things that are happening. And that is one thing that is worth really discussing, learning more about, trying to understand, what do young people today use as source of information? What is the knowledge base they are working from what and what consequences all that has? I do not see, I have never believed, that there was some fundamental change in the personality or character of people from generation to generation. Because I will show students films of let us say Berkeley in the (19)60s and 30 years later or more, and they will say, whoa, why are not we like that as if they were different. Well, you are not any different. The difference, they are facing a much more constrained framework of economic opportunity, than kids in the (19)60s thought they did, thought they had, in other words, in the (19)60s. And one way to measure it is what does rent cost a kid now, if he graduates from college, what are you going to have to pay for housing compared to then? It is not just inflation, it is much more than inflationary increase in housing prices, for example. It makes it harder to be experimental in your post-college life. People think they are required to find an income, they are in debt, they are paying for their college, they have to work during college. All of those things have effects on the capacity of students even to think they are part of a generation. I mean, they are not living such youthful lives, many, many kids, because they are required to play these economic roles that in the earlier generation of people their age in college, were not that required to do. And I think that has consequences, but it is hard to know exactly what they are. And I will say one other thing on this, which to me is interesting, but I do not have an explanation. The rich kids of today tend to be in a bubble and they are the ones who are not so burdened economically or not at all burdened. But in other words, if you are not working, I have done research on it, so I can talk with authority. If you are not working in college and you are not in debt, you are also not likely to be politically active, not likely to be community active, you are not likely to volunteer. Compared with first generation students who are working, who have debt, who may be the first to go to college in their families, are also likely to be more politically engaged, more service engaged than the rich kids. And the rich kids are partying a lot, binge drinking a lot and that kind of thing. So why is that? Because that class was part of the backbone of the (19)60s counterculture. They were the ones, the rich kids at the (19)60s were questioning authority, they were refusing to draft, they were experimenting with their lives. They thought they wanted to be different from their parents. So I do not have an explanation for this, but I do think it is a difference. The fact that there are plenty of young people now, plenty of college kids who are concerned, we have a global studies major at UCSB with something like 800 student and those are people who want to do something in a world. And that is just one. And that is maybe another difference is that a lot of the serving, socially serving impulses that students had in the (19)60s, they had to figure out on their own how to fulfill them. Now, there is a lot of curriculum, organized curriculum that gives them opportunities in that respect. And that is a good thing, but it may also mean they are less prone to the questioning of authority, the questioning of the status quo. They are trying to make use of their opportunities rather than question why do not they have those opportunities.
SM (02:28:16):
I want to recommend a book that just came out. You have heard of Dr. Alexander Aston?
RF (02:28:23):
Yeah.
SM (02:28:23):
He is a UCLA. Well, he has written an unbelievable book with his wife and one other scholar on the inner spirituality of today's college students. And it is kind of expensive, I am reading it right now. And it is basically that college students today, spirituality is very important to them. And it is always that question they are asking, who am I? Why am I here? What is my role in this world? That kind of thing. But he is finding that there is a direct link between spirituality and how well they do in school, how they get in involved in activities. The more spirituality they have, the inner spirituality, the more they are getting involved on college campuses, doing well in classes. And there is kind of four basic areas. I am just trying to get this off the top of my head here. I know there is a desire for inner understanding, a desire to care, a desire for greater compassion, and to understand their role, their social responsibility role. So those are very positive things when I am thinking about that. Because when you think of the (19)60s and early (19)70s, it seemed that religion was not a major factor. And of course, we all saw the example, the Beatles, and even Peter Coyote, he went into Zen Buddhism. And so they went from established religion into kind of an inner spirituality, even back then. And now it is important. So I recommend that book because I interviewed him for my book and he even said at the end, as did Arthur Chickering, another scholar, that the main issue in higher education today, the thing that disappoints him the most, is the corporate takeover.
RF (02:30:20):
Yes. Okay.
SM (02:30:21):
Yeah. And Chickering said that. I could not believe it when he said it at the very end. My last question is, the legacy. I know, let us forget about the boomer generation, the term, but when you think of this era of young people, and I include people that were, I would say born from (19)35 to about (19)56, because many of the leaders of the (19)60s were the graduate students. Tom Hayden was in the early (19)40s. Richie Havens over and over to me said, I am a boomer, Steve. I may not be a boomer in age, but I am a boomer in spirit. And so when you think of the legacy of this period, what do you think the history books and scholars will be saying? You are a sociologist, but what do you think that they will say about this generation, the legacy, that it is leaving future generations?
RF (02:31:19):
Well, I think the big thing is that it was the pioneer force, the era is the era of overcoming the racial divide. And not that we have fulfilled the dream, but we certainly made big change in race. And secondly, it might be understood, and that then, I should add, that then ramified into many areas of social inequality beyond race. And that the second thing has to do with what we were talking about earlier, the question of authority and hierarchy and a generation that started a process of challenging hierarchical social arrangements and authoritarian social arrangements. Not again that it achieved any dream fulfilled, but that the questions were raised more forcefully on them, for more people about that.
SM (02:32:52):
And one of the things I did not say in that many of the movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s particularly, we did not even talk about the women's movement, but many who went in the women's movement, left the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, because of the fact that they were sexist. And that-
RF (02:33:13):
I do not know if they left it, they felt that the position of women needed to be raised to the forefront in those movements.
SM (02:33:26):
And your personal activism, yourself in the community of Santa Barbara, what have you done during the times that you have been a professor? Are there certain activist causes that you are really linked to yourself?
RF (02:33:40):
Well, when we settled here, it was just a few months after a big oil spill that devastated the coast. And Santa Barbara, at the time we arrived, was beginning to, the community was beginning to see itself as a center for environmentalism on many levels, not just the oil issue, but all kinds of related questions. Any politics around that began to take shape here, which we played an important part in helping and to this day. And so we are, Mickey and Dick Flacks, are seen as community leaders, veteran community leaders on the progressive side. That is one. As a teacher, I have been lucky to be able to teach sociology courses on social movements and politics and even on the university. So right out of my activist history, I can weave a pedagogical work. And so when I retired in 2006, we did a daylong conference about activism where many, many, many people who were students of mine came with different panels and so forth. And I could see this is what a teacher loves, that people you had helped enable a numbers of people that do things that you could feel great about in terms of the work that they have been doing. And that, so as a teacher, I have always felt it is very important to teach, not to get students to agree with me politically, but to think about who they were in, as you were saying, with quoting as them, what the purpose of their lives was in social term.
SM (02:35:56):
Well-
RF (02:35:56):
And how they could helping facilitate goals that they wanted achieve. In the campus scene, I am also, over 40 years, became quite a leader on campus. I did not want to take big administrative roles or even in the academic senate, take top leadership roles. But I am kind of proud of work that I have done. And in the last few years, I took a lot of leadership on admissions policy after the state abolished affirmative action.
SM (02:36:36):
I read that. I read that in the Whip.
RF (02:36:39):
Yeah. So we think we had a good deal of discuss in changing rules that allowed without dealing with the race directly, allowed for more diversity. And I can bore you with all the explanation of how you do that, but essentially just involves questioning the SAT as fundamental tool, but encouraging students' academic achievement in high school to be their measure of their merit or eligibility.
SM (02:37:16):
Well, I want to end this, but not with a question, but two anecdotes of, and I have been thinking about them as I was interviewing you, and they are both dealing with two of my sociology professors at Binghamton University. I graduated from the University of Binghamton, and one of them was in 1967, (19)68 when I was in my early first year or early year there, Dr. Leman, I do not know if you ever heard of him. He was a sociologist at Binghamton University, he was fired for leading a protest in downtown Binghamton in front of City Hall.
RF (02:37:53):
Is that Arthur Lehman? Arthur Lehman?
SM (02:37:53):
I am not sure if his first name, but he was my social 101 teacher. And I thought he was very good yet he was let go because he let a protest and I could not believe it. He was gone the end of the year. The second one was Professor Mahovsky who had just graduated with a PhD at Berkeley, and he was a brand-new social professor, and he was in this class, I think, it is the very second time the students met with him, in the very first semester. And we had a student who was one of our leading radicals on campus, who led a lot of the protests and he was in the back of the room with his dog. And Dr. Mahovsky said, first off, get the dog out of my classroom. So he took the dog outside and tied him up, but he came back in. And then before he had a chance to even say another word, he said, are you going to join us? And Dr. Makovsky said, join you? Yeah, we are going to shut down the administration building this afternoon, because they are bringing in the recruiters for ROTC, and we are going to shut the administration building down. Are you going to join us? You are a Berkeley grad. And I will never forget it, Dr. Mahovsky, who I remember seeing him drive into campus one day with an old Volkswagen, perfect (19)60s guy, he said, no, I have a job now. I am raising my, I have to pay, I have a baby on the way, and so I know I am not going to join you. And those are two memories of my college years from two Soc professors, and I never understood why Dr. Lehman was fired. I just could not understand it.
RF (02:39:42):
Well, maybe there is a way to find out more about that. I do not know if it is Art Lehman, I think he is still on the planet somewhere.
SM (02:39:51):
Yeah. Well, he was a very young professor back then. And maybe, do you remember a professor being fired?
RF (02:40:00):
I remember some kind of, but it is varied in controversies around Binghamton and sociology, but I cannot remember the-
SM (02:40:07):
Well, yeah, I thought that was wrong. He had guts to go downtown. And that is what we want in our faculty members, is to be associates with their students. So I want to thank you very much for a great interview.
RF (02:40:21):
Well, I always enjoy talking about this stuff that helps me formulate my thought. So that was very good. And if you have got stuff to share that you write, I would, certainly-
SM (02:40:34):
Oh yeah, you are going to see the transcript. I have been doing this now. I am going to be spending six to eight months on transcribing all these interviews myself.
RF (02:40:43):
Oh, wow.
SM (02:40:43):
And because I have come some people that told me that they had other people do them and the mistakes were outrageous and they decided to do them themselves. So you will eventually see it. But I am also going to need two pictures of you eventually.
RF (02:40:58):
Well, if you email me, I can send you back.
SM (02:41:00):
Okay.
RF (02:41:01):
Just that is electronically.
SM (02:41:03):
Great. Well, thank you very much for spending all this time with me and have happy holiday season and I will be in touch with you down the road.
RF (02:41:11):
Thank you, man.
SM (02:41:12):
And thanks for writing great books.
RF (02:41:14):
Thank you.
SM (02:41:15):
I love your books.
RF (02:41:16):
Okay, great.
SM (02:41:17):
Thanks. Bye.
(End of Interview)
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Dr. Richard Flacks
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Flacks, Richard ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Political activists--United States; College teachers; Sociologists; University of California, Santa Barbara; Flacks, Richard--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Dr. Richard Flacks is an academic, social activist and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Barbara. He is the author of <em>Making History: The American Left and the American Mind</em> and <em>Beyond the Barricades</em>. Dr. Flacks has a Ph.D. from University of Michigan.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.52a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.52b
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2017-03-14
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
161:24
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Audio interviews
Title
A name given to the resource
McKiernan Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br />
<h3>The McKiernan 22</h3>
<div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li>
<li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li>
</ul>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Stephen McKiernan
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Language
A language of the resource
English
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright.
Template: Simple Audio Player (Amplitude.js)
This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part.
Date of Interview
2010-12-13
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Roberta Price
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
1 Microcassette
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Video or Audio
Audio
Biographical Text
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Roberta Price, born in New York City, is an author, photographer, educator, and intellectual property attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After college, Price lived seven years in the Huerfano (\"Orphan\") Valley and published a memoir of her experiences entitled, Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture. She left the commune to pursue a law degree. Price has a Bachelor's degree from Vassar College and a law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law. "}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":15107,"3":{"1":0},"4":[null,2,16777215],"11":4,"12":0,"14":[null,2,4342338],"15":"Arial","16":10}">Roberta Price, born in New York City, is an author, photographer, educator, and intellectual property attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After college, Price lived seven years in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley and published a memoir of her experiences entitled <em>Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture</em>. She left the commune to pursue a law degree. Price has a Bachelor's degree from Vassar College and a law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law. </span>
Keywords
<span data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Western America; Huerfano Valley; March on the Pentagon; Photography; Commune; Vietnam War; Hippies; Baby boom generation."}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":513,"3":{"1":0},"12":0}">Western America; Huerfano Valley; March on the Pentagon; Photography; Commune; Vietnam War; Hippies; Baby boom generation.</span>
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
86:51
Subject LCSH
Authors, American; Photographers; Intellectual property lawyers; Price, Roberta--Interviews
Accessibility
Copy/Paste below:
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Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>.
Rights Statement
Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Roberta Price
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Price, Roberta ; McKiernan, Stephen
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/wav
Subject
The topic of the resource
Authors, American; Photographers; Intellectual property lawyers; Price, Roberta--Interviews
Description
An account of the resource
Roberta Price, born in New York City, is an author, photographer, educator, and intellectual property attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After college, Price lived seven years in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley and published a memoir of her experiences entitled <em>Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture</em>. She left the commune to pursue a law degree. Price has a Bachelor's degree from Vassar College and a law degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Binghamton University Libraries
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2010-12-13
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.205
Date Modified
Date on which the resource was changed.
2018-03-29
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
McKiernan Interviews
Extent
The size or duration of the resource.
86:51