155 10 1775 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 The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-12-13 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="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;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.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;: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="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;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&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;: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: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: 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 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/170dd7969ba33a631ded4eeb72cc0ee6.jpg bad2da628bdcdb8f605698446383d94a https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b479aa5fba4ab241b6b90166a6ffe6a3.mp3 30b8f7a08b8319ea585c7c932d786244 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview ND Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed John Filo Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14 year old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14-year-old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer Prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Vietnam War; Vietnam memorial; Baby boom generation; Communism; Vietnam Veterans; Jane Fonda; Timothy Leary; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Power; Tommie Smith; George Wallace; Benjamin Spock.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13228792}}">Vietnam War; Vietnam memorial; Baby boom generation; Communism; Vietnam Veterans; Jane Fonda; Timothy Leary; Lyndon B. Johnson; Black Power; Tommie Smith; George Wallace; Benjamin Spock.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 27:48 Subject LCSH Photographers; Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970; Awards—United States; Filo, John--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: John Filo Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: Not Dated --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:03): Okay, go right ahead. JF (00:04): But screen token, everyone was appalled. Everyone was appalled that young people get their news from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, or listen to the late-night talk people, and they were joking sarcasm, with the powers that be. But, you go and watch it. And you go, they speak way more truth, than they speak comedy and that what maybe is why it is funny. SM (00:33): Right. A couple final quick questions here. Why in your opinion, did the Vietnam War end? JF (00:41): Why did it end? SM (00:41): Yes. JF (00:45): I think people were just tired of it. I mean, why it ended is, there was no good reason to continue it. I mean, it was a civil war going on in that country that we were trying to get involved with. At some point, they realized, communists were not going to get in votes and canoe on over. SM (01:08): Do you think- JF (01:09): See, I mean, I was brought up on that domino effect- SM (01:11): Right. Yep. Yep. JF (01:12): ... in grade school. Well, if you let this country fall, then this country was going to fall, then this country was going to fall and this country was going to fall. But at the same time, communism was losing its influence too, in the world. I do not know. Why it ended? All I know is I was glad it ended. It took too long to end. SM (01:35): Do you feel college students played an important part? If you were to pick between one of these two, college students and protests on college campuses or Middle America, when they finally realized the war was not worth it because their sons and daughters were coming home in caskets. JF (01:53): Well, I do not know so much in caskets, but you had many, once again, I think it is many different levels. Six people, a long time to get a change going on. They do not want to hear it from just one voice. But I think, did you have that friendly fire book? SM (02:14): Yes. JF (02:14): Out about the same time. SM (02:16): Yes. JF (02:18): There were scandalous stories about the bodies that were coming back. Some of them were filled with, in the thoracic cavity, being filled with drugs. There was a drug ring. And there was all kind of nasty little, it was not a generational story anymore. It was just like, and so if we win, what happens? We have an air base closer to... And then again, it is like, you have these submarines patrolling the seas, communist and US. They could wipe out the earth how many times over. It gets to a point where it is just like, okay. And there were leaders long before Kennedy that said, could never get into ground war in Asia. It is an old military thing, we said that. SM (03:18): Has the wall itself in Washington D.C., which I know you visited. How important has that been toward healing the boomer generation? Or is it mostly just the vets and their families? JF (03:32): I think it affects all of us at certain times. But I never understood. But I know there were people that did it, but when I never understood this part, people I knew, I do not think anyone was ever upset at a soldier that they were seeing. You hear the stories. I came back and I was spit upon, as a killer of Vietnamese babies. Where I came from, I think everyone had compassion for the soldier. I think we were all realizing that the soldier was just part of the bigger problem. I mean, because under orders you were drafted, you had to go. And I think this war in Iraq, could have been over too, had there been a draft. But what they have done is send people back, three and four times. SM (04:22): How important has music been in the lives of Boomers and in your eyes, who are the artists you feel shaped the generation, including the songs that had the greatest impact? JF (04:34): Yeah, music was very important. Music was sort of like the thing you could interpret and listen to. And there were still obviously different styles, but I think it all started, for me, I think it started with the folk movement, bodied finally by Bob Dylan. And then you had your other songs, other rock bands that brew against war, killing. I mean, that was a big part of that music of that generation. SM (05:11): When you look at some of the musicians, whether it be Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, Phil Oaks, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, they were popular on college campuses and also because they were activists. So there was that mentality, and they lived their whole lives that way they can continue. Some have passed on and some continue. Richie Havens that whole group. A last question before the general things is, when the best history books are written, and what do you think the lasting legacy of the boomer generation will be? JF (05:50): Well, I do not know. SM (05:50): And that is probably 50 years, after the boomer generation is in their eighties. JF (06:00): I do not know. I honestly do not know. I cannot think of any other generation, other than the roaring (19)20s that you remember having an influence on culture so much. I honestly do not know. I have not really given that much thought. I would think that the fact that it did help America, I mean, it is a very historic time. From coming up through the Civil Rights Movement and wars will somehow always be with us, it seems like, in some small or large aspect. It will not be on that scale that Great Wars were, but it seems to me. But I think within the generation of seeing civil rights and ending with a black president and some shifts that are not yet determined. SM (07:09): And he is still considered a boomer. He is a young boomer. And then of course Bill Clinton was a boomer and so was George Bush. JF (07:16): I mean, I think, that is what it takes. There was a quote somewhere, when [inaudible] Kennedy, [inaudible] or was it Martin Luther. Someone says, how long do you think it would take for America to have a viable black candidate? And I think the quote was back in the six- 40 years. SM (07:43): I think it was Dr. King. JF (07:43): Dr. King. SM (07:44): I think it was Dr. King. So you might have said, in one of his speeches. JF (07:47): 40 years. SM (07:47): Yeah, and it might have been- JF (07:47): It is almost pathetic, almost. SM (07:57): Yeah. I am going to mention just some names here and just get quick responses. Your thoughts on these people, these are personalities from the era. Tom Hayden? JF (08:06): All right. He was a West Coast leader and then became politician. I do not have any comments. SM (08:09): Jane Fonda? JF (08:19): Jane always liked acting and same things. I think she was misused too by the... SM (08:27): Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the hippies? JF (08:30): Yeah. Yeah. I think they sort of took it the other way. Took it to the other side. SM (08:36): Timothy Leary? JF (08:39): Yeah. No way. Yeah. These are people I did not... You would look at and you would go, wow. SM (08:46): Okay. How about Richard Nixon? JF (08:48): You would go wow there too. I mean, I remember him involved in, what was it? Was not there a big scandal in the (19)50s? They found the film in the pumpkin. SM (08:57): Yeah, Checkers. JF (08:59): Checkers. SM (09:00): He had to give his Checkers speech. I am not sure if Checkers is up there in heaven with him. How about Spiro Agnew? JF (09:13): Yeah, battering A bombs of, they get to visit. Yeah, there it is. You are a typical politician. SM (09:16): Yep. JF (09:16): Do not be looking at me, criticizing, even though I am doing something totally illegal. SM (09:21): Eugene McCarthy? JF (09:24): Another leader. SM (09:28): And George McGovern? JF (09:30): George McGovern, same way. World War II veteran. Who heard young voices. I mean, yeah, just could not get it together. He was a real generational candidate. SM (09:53): John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy? JF (09:53): Yeah. As I get older, my feelings are more with Bobby. John, I was too young with. Definitely Bobby, I think. SM (10:02): Lyndon Johnson? JF (10:04): I am sorry. SM (10:04): Lyndon Johnson? JF (10:05): I Know. I think that man, considering his background, I think he did a lot of great things for the country. I mean, that whole great society, is not so much that, but his homework and the civil rights. A surprising person, as far as I am concerned. I would have guessed him to be so mainline politically. So non-controversial. SM (10:31): How about Robert McNamara? JF (10:43): Well, there we go. Yeah. How many years later, apologized. SM (10:44): Mm-hmm. How about the black power, the term black power and the people like Kiwi Newton, Bobby Seal, Eldridge Cleaver, that group? JF (10:52): Well, I think, from being a white person, I think we needed these people to be like, they were pointers. Wow. These people have a lot of, [inaudible] hate. But then you had to, they used to made you find out the reason why. You had to look at the condition of [inaudible]. SM (11:17): And as a fact, and as a photographer, you are the only person I am asking this to. What was your thought of that Tommy Smith picture with him fist raised and John Carlos? JF (11:26): I thought it was a great photo. I thought it was a great photo, it was a very rogue photo. That is the point. They knew the consequences. They knew that they were going to be severely criticized, not ostracized. I think they were. SM (11:45): Yeah. We had Tommy on the campus and I think he knew what was coming, by doing it. George Wallace? JF (11:55): Another drum beater. Oh, wow. I remember, I even met Orville Faubus. SM (12:05): You did? JF (12:05): One on one. He was one of the nice guys. And then you realize, I was not going to let them come into Little Rock. SM (12:14): How about Ronald Reagan? JF (12:15): I do not know. He was a great communicator. SM (12:15): Danielle Ellsberg? JF (12:15): There is another one standing up for [inaudible] rights, right? SM (12:15): Yep. Benjamin Spock? JF (12:35): I got to meet him too and spend some time with him. SM (12:37): Oh, you are lucky. JF (12:38): He is a guy that changed a lot of attitudes, changed a lot of thinking, and boy he got blanks against the war. Just destruction. Longshoreman held up his sailboat delivery and, oh my God. SM (12:56): How about the Berrigan- JF (12:57): Could meet a nicer man. SM (12:59): Phillip and Daniel Berrigan? JF (13:10): Same thing. Had to do what they had to do. SM (13:10): And then some of the women leaders, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan? JF (13:15): Fantastic. What a great thing. What a great thing, pointing out sexism stuff. You just do not realize all this was going on, in the (19)50s. SM (13:34): Barry Goldwater? JF (13:38): Do not remember him. Just, little too conservative. SM (13:45): These are just some of the terms that boomers will remember as they grew up. Tet, T-E-T. You know what Tet was? JF (13:51): Yeah. SM (13:53): What is your thoughts on Tet? JF (13:55): Tet Offensive? SM (13:55): Yes. JF (13:55): Yeah. SM (13:55): That was (19)68. JF (13:58): Wow. Well, that is when a lot of the, are you thinking that is when a lot of the people that were for the war started thinking, "Oh, I do not know"? SM (14:08): It was around that timeframe. JF (14:09): Yeah. SM (14:10): Watergate? JF (14:15): Yeah. That is what you said. Boy, those guys are just power crazy. They probably have the election long ago, but they are going to make sure. SM (14:23): Hippies? JF (14:23): Yeah, hippies were, they are fun. SM (14:30): And how about the yippies? JF (14:32): Oh, the yippies were even stranger. The hippies, they actually believe what they did for a little while. SM (14:39): How about the counterculture? That term, the counterculture? JF (14:44): Yeah. That sort of, you realize you did not have to, I think at a time it had to be known as a counterculture, but then they realized, for you to change thing, you had to be sort of absorbed in the mainstream with countercultures dots. But by saying counterculture, it is sort of, it puts you in another uniform. Like being a hippie or being a yippie. You realize if you are going to make changes, you got sort of dress like them. SM (15:15): Students For Democratic? JF (15:17): I was more impressed with boomers that did go to bat, put on a three-piece suit, go and argue. SM (15:24): What were your favorite clothes of the counterculture? JF (15:27): Favorite clothes? SM (15:28): Yeah. JF (15:29): I do not- SM (15:29): Is there something that stuck out? Everybody heard about the [inaudible] jacket early on. JF (15:33): Well, my favorite or favorite to wear? SM (15:36): No, just the favorite clothes that you liked. JF (15:38): Oh, I think I was impressed with the, since I never had any hips, I was always impressed with hip-huggers and flair pants. And I said, "Man, I must look really cool if I put them on and look like some circus clown." Because I did not have thin legs, thin body to where fashion, the fashion hung. All I did was flare pants pointed to my flaws. SM (16:11): Woodstock? JF (16:13): Yeah. I never went, but it was the idea of it. I was like, wow, you are going to go, it sounds miserable. SM (16:21): Well, a lot of people cleanly were there, that probably were not. JF (16:23): I know. I know. It is like, what is his name, scored his hundred-point game. The NBA. It is like Kent State too. It is like how many people said they were there? SM (16:44): Oh, that is true. That is true. Vietnam veterans against the war? JF (16:44): All right. Yeah. I think they have probably achieved a lot more than anyone gives them credit for. Especially when, you actually had decorated heroes. SM (16:56): Were there any books of the era that stood out amongst any others? Any written books? JF (17:03): Wow. I am trying to think what was... You mean the sort of went pop or sort of- SM (17:12): It could be authors or people who wrote. JF (17:17): All I remember is the new, I mean, everyone read Tolkien, but then Castaneda came along on a separate reality and the native Mexican drug, American kind of drugs off the land kind of thing. Yeah. SM (17:34): How about the favorite movies of the era? JF (17:44): Oh, geez. There was a lot of movies I think it was, that made nothing, what was it? Living at the Ridge or Plaza or something. SM (17:56): There was The Graduate, which was a big one. JF (17:57): So The Graduate. Yeah, it was a... SM (18:00): Midnight Cowboy and that whole group. JF (18:02): Right. SM (18:05): See, anything else here? I have John Dean down here too, only because he was part of the Watergate group. He is the guy that spilled the beans, supposedly. I guess that is about it. I cannot... Oh, communes? JF (18:19): Communes. Yeah. That was just like, yeah, I knew people that went to a few and they go, "Man, it just turned into, it always turns into ugly human center." It seemed like. I mean, I am amazed that some people put out for years. And then someone told me, there are still a few in existence, I do not know if it is going on. SM (18:46): Yeah, I think George Bush is in charge of one. The only thing I am going to mention in terms of the books that were very popular, the two are, Greening of America, if you remember that book? Which was Charles Reich and then the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak. And then Tom Wolf was a big, popular guy during that period too. I guess he still is. Are there any questions that you thought I was going to ask and did not ask? JF (19:22): Not really. Not really. SM (19:23): Nope. And what do you think the lasting legacy at Kent State will be? JF (19:30): Why? SM (19:32): Okay. JF (19:33): I do not know. That sort of needs a guarded, it almost needs a guarded position. I guess, it is whatever groups want have define it as, but I think the legacy for me is that, is there a way to have free speech in this country and in a time of maybe disapproval, without it ever coming to violence? SM (20:04): Mm-hmm. As a person like myself who just worked almost 30 years in higher ed. By the way, I just retired. JF (20:15): Wow. SM (20:15): I had retired to write my book and then I am going back to work because I put this off. I took early retirement so that I could finish this book and then write it and then go back and do the things I want to do, beyond. I forget what I was going to ask here, the final question. Oh no, I lost my train of thought. JF (20:35): Keep going. That happens to me too. SM (20:35): Golly. It was a final- JF (20:40): I mean, you could call me in a couple days and I will say I should have never said that. I should have said that. SM (20:43): Yeah. Well, the question I was going to ask is this, because it goes back to the activism. I think universities, this is just Steve McKiernan I am thinking of writing about it because I have firsthand experiences, not only myself, but others that have worked at other universities. I think there is a fear of activism on university campuses and I am not meaning volunteerism because I think the administrators who are running universities today are mostly boomers. Or down the road will be the children of boomers. And there is a fear of, they will have the memories of what happened in the (19)60s and they will always be out there supporting it and saying they support it. But there is much more controls and fear. Your thoughts on that? Because today's parents, when they send their kids to college, do not want disruption of their sons or daughter's education because they are paying good money and they want their sons and daughters to get a degree. And so there is a fear of disruption and if disruption happens, I will take my son or daughter away. So I do not know. JF (21:44): Yeah, I mean it is, I remember going to all these universities with my daughter. She just finished her freshman year at UMass Amherst and it is like everyone talks about her class. In four years, these will be the people that help you get jobs. And in other words, there was a big strong commitment that you get on this conveyor belt and you are going to get off it in four years. And you are all going to get on it right now and you are all going to get off of it in four years. There is no, well, if it takes you five. The packages are all same. There is your junior year abroad, there is this and there is that, and there is there, go do this in Central America or something. Yeah. There was no room for question of self-discovery thing. Hit your wagon up and we will on hit you in four years. SM (22:54): Yeah. Because in the (19)60s, the boomers, there was a questioning about the IBM mentality of it. And now that does not seem to be, I do not know. JF (23:01): No, there does not seem to be any matter of fact. No one can promise them anything. That is the other thing. There is research grants for government work maybe. And that is about it. And I mean, I am talking to people that are graduating from Columbia, that pay big money to graduate, go to the journalism school. And I am saying, that is great. Now you are going to take a job that pays half that, it cost you to get the degree. Yeah. There is all sorts of free adjustment that have to be made. Now all of a sudden science and the engineering is back in good grace. But on the other hand, I am still, what do we do for a plumber and what are we doing? I mean, I am not saying whatever, but here is my daughter and I said, "What did you just signed up for?" Psychology, but I think I want to move into environmental science. SM (24:10): Yeah. One thing today's college students do not do is, they do not question the money that is coming in or going out from the university. They do not even know what is going in and coming out. So whereas a lot of the students in my era, you are era, questioned that. JF (24:22): Yeah. Absolutely. SM (24:24): I had spoken to Mary when she was at Kent State and last time, and I promised to send her pictures that I took, not as nice as yours, but I sent her the pictures and she was going to interview me, but she has not correspondence since she got my pictures. So maybe she does not want to be a part of the project after all. She is a very private person. JF (24:48): [inaudible] but she always sort of works through. Have you talked to Gregory Payne? SM (24:54): Who? JF (24:55): In Emerson University. He is the one that sort of got it together the first time and she sort of uses him as a sounding board. SM (25:03): What is his name? JF (25:04): Dr. Gregory Payne. P-A-Y-N-E. SM (25:09): Okay. JF (25:09): And he showed up at Kenny. He looked like- SM (25:12): Oh, he said the fitting blonde hair. JF (25:12): Yeah. SM (25:17): Yeah. Well see, when I saw her, she gave me her email and I emailed her. She wanted my pictures and then she said, "I will probably do the interview." And then I sent the pictures and she would not even respond if she got the pictures. So I do not know. JF (25:29): I do not know what is going on. SM (25:33): Yeah, but anyways. Well that is it. JF (25:34): Okay. SM (25:35): Thank you. JF (25:37): So if there is any more questions, just call me back or let me know. SM (25:39): Will do. Well, I interviewed Alan, when he was on our campus many years ago, but I got to, I have never really finished my interview with him. So I might interview him. I would like to interview his sister, Chick. JF (25:50): Yeah. Oh, Chick is great too. SM (25:50): Yeah. But Mr. [inaudible], I am going to call you John. JF (25:55): Yeah. SM (25:55): Thank you very much. That picture was a very important part of my life. And I know you have probably heard that from a lot of people, but that picture touched the lives of college students that you do not even know and you will never know. So you need to know how important that picture was in my life because I went into higher education as a career because of what was happening at Kent State and other universities. So thank you for being the great photographer that you are. And I want to thank you again for the time you spent today answering my questions. I am meeting with a professor, up in [inaudible] college, to be able to help me with the transcribing of all these. So you will sort see the transcription before it is ever going to print. JF (26:39): Okay. But you saying on a different day I might have different answers too. It just seems like, as I get older, I am affected by what is going on around you now. You know what I mean? SM (26:48): Yeah. Well that whole thing of the (19)60s and (19)70s always affected my life. JF (26:53): Oh, yeah. SM (26:54): Well to the day I go to my grave. JF (26:58): Throw up. I mean, you actually questioned us already. I can imagine growing up in the (19)50s and... SM (27:00): Oh, yes. JF (27:03): I am sorry. I am not saying that was a bad time to grow up, but it was just, there was so much that was just accepted. SM (27:08): Yep. Yet during that very same period, our parents loved us so much. JF (27:14): Great. SM (27:14): And they wanted to give us so much. And sometimes I go back and say, "Geez, those were, not knowing what was going on in the world and being innocent as an elementary school kid." Probably like you were. JF (27:27): Yeah. SM (27:27): You had great memories being with your parents. So anyways. Well you have a great day. JF (27:34): All right Scott. And call back me anytime you got any other- SM (27:36): Steve. JF (27:37): If I failed to answer them. SM (27:38): Yep. JF (27:39): Okay. SM (27:40): Thanks a lot. Bye. JF (27:42): Take care. Bye. Good luck. SM (27:42): Yep, thanks. (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 John Filo Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Filo, John ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Photographers; Kent State Shootings, Kent, Ohio, 1970; Awards—United States; Filo, John--Interviews Description An account of the resource John Filo is a photographer who took the picture of the 1970 Kent State shootings, in which a 14 year old girl grieves over the body of a dead young man. This picture won him the Pulitzer prize. He is now a photography director for CBS in NY. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ND Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.51 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. 27:48 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/b89a5d08a08954b62c4d47fe0e16ab26.jpg 03198c17fb2c2298098fe26085eb78bc https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1c8cdbc11084b50b1d1bb92ce849cdeb.mp3 1cc31cdc9881cea5c8f258e6596492b8 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 2011-02-09 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Bob Fass, 1933- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Bob Fass, a native of Brooklyn, NY, is a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, Radio Unnameable. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He has a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show is still on air. You can tune in every Thursday night from midnight until 3:00 am.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Bob Fass (June 29, 1933 – April 24, 2021), a native of Brooklyn, NY, was a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, <em>Radio Unnameable</em>. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He had a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show was on the air until his death.&nbsp;</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="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Theater; Nina Simone; Hippies; Yippies; Black Power; Julius Lester; Sexual revolution; Birth control pill; Counterculture; Generation gap; Jim Webb; Baby boom generation; Voting; Radio show; Musicians; Bob Dylan; Gulley Jimson; WBAI; WFMU; The Horse's Mouth.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13228792}}">Theater; Nina Simone; Hippies; Yippies; Black Power; Julius Lester; Sexual revolution; Birth control pill; Counterculture; Generation gap; Jim Webb; Baby boom generation; Voting; Radio show; Musicians; Bob Dylan; Gulley Jimson; WBAI; WFMU; The Horse's Mouth.</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 223:03 Subject LCSH Radio broadcasters; Soldiers; Fass, Bob, 1933--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bob Fass Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Fass, Bob, 1933- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Radio broadcasters; Soldiers; Fass, Bob, 1933--Interviews Description An account of the resource <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Bob Fass, a native of Brooklyn, NY, is a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, Radio Unnameable. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He has a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show is still on air. You can tune in every Thursday night from midnight until 3:00 am.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:13057,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Bob Fass (June 29, 1933 – April 24, 2021), a native of Brooklyn, NY, was a radio broadcaster in New York for over 50 years. After college, he joined the U.S. Army. In the 1960s, he helped to create a free-form radio on his program, <em>Radio Unnameable</em>. During his career, Fass interviewed many cultural figures about numerous topics. He had a Bachelor's degree from Syracuse University and his radio show was on the air until his death.&nbsp;</span> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-02-09 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.10.2016.50a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.50b 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. 223:03 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9662014448d3709b06841781fe91bb95.jpg 073d4396748bf6d302300527ad5ddca7 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/50390d6b654343b5dd0a4abf5ed8646a.mp3 7ec9a8c11da0672b738894a4bb0ad957 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-08-16 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen Mckiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sara M. (Sara Margaret) Evans, 1943- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from Duke University and received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:4995,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,5099745],&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from Duke University and received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 92:32 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Anti-war movement; Baby boom generation; McCarthy hearing; Middle class; Second-wave feminism; Betty Friedan; Ronald Reagan; Family values; Third-wave feminism; Rebecca Walker; University studies programs; Environmental Studies; Women in the nineteen-fifties.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13228792}}">Anti-war movement; Baby boom generation; McCarthy hearing; Middle class; Second-wave feminism; Betty Friedan; Ronald Reagan; Family values; Third-wave feminism; Rebecca Walker; University studies programs; Environmental Studies; Women in the nineteen-fifties.</span> Subject LCSH College teachers; Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Sara Evans Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 16 August 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Testing one, two. All right, let me get going here. I have got my sheet free. The first question I have is, who were your role models growing up? The teachers or the parents, the leaders that helped you become the person you are? I follow that up, also, as part of the question that I asked Dr. Baxandall when I interviewed her up in Massachusetts about a week ago. If you were in a packed house of 500 female college students today, and one of the students stood up and asked you to name three or four events in your life that made you who you are, the person you are today, what would those events be? It is kind of a combination, two-part question. SE (00:01:03): Well, the role models, when I was a child, I certainly have to talk about my parents. Because my father was a Methodist minister in South Carolina, and my parents were the only white people I knew who thought segregation was wrong, and I grew up in the segregated South. SM (00:01:32): Oh, wow. SE (00:01:33): That is very fundamental to who I became. My mother told me when I was, I do not know, about second grade, "They are going to teach you in school that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but it is." That is probably far and away the most important. I loved school. I had a number of teachers that I adored. I remember my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Holler, and I am not sure I can name any other one, but I had a number of teachers that I cared about very much. I always thought I wanted to be a teacher. SM (00:02:32): Right. SE (00:02:32): It is what I turned out to be. I wanted to teach every grade I was in except eighth grade and that is because, it is not because of the teachers, because the kids. I thought that that would be very hard. SM (00:02:45): Right. SE (00:02:45): I think I will stop at that for role models and- SM (00:02:56): Are there any specific- SE (00:02:58): Go ahead. SM (00:03:00): Events in your life besides the role models, who helped shape you? SE (00:03:07): Sure. There's no question that the civil rights movement changed the world I lived in and, certainly, changed my life. I can think all the way back to 1954 when I asked my students to think about some time when they became aware that history matters. And I say, 'I will tell you mine." I was on the playground and we were arguing about who should have won the war. Then, of course, I made them figure out what war and it is the Civil War. It is a playground in Columbia, South Carolina, and it is about 1954. The fact is, we were arguing about Brown versus the Board of Education. SM (00:04:00): Right. SE (00:04:01): That was what was really going on. So growing up in segregation in the (19)50s meant that the civil rights movement was both, was just a huge relief in a way and an opportunity to act on values I was raised with. I started college in 1962 and became active in the movement there in Durham, North Carolina, soon thereafter. I, also, another important event or experience was that in the summer of 1964, I went to Africa as a... It was after my sophomore year in college. There was a program called Operation Crossroads Africa. I do not think I had ever been out of the country. I went to Africa in an interracial group of college students, my first interracial experience, really, and laid bricks in a country that received its independence the summer that we were there, the little country of Malawi. We even got to be in the stadium and watched the British flag come down and the Malawi flag go up. That summer changed my view of the world because I saw the United States from outside. I discovered colonialism. I began to understand the impact of our country on the rest of the world. For several years, anyway, focused on African studies in my academic life. It framed when I began the next year to think about the war in Vietnam. I thought very differently about it because of having had that experience, so that was pretty fundamental. SM (00:06:23): I wrote this question up that I have asked probably the last 12 people I have interviewed. Since I am writing a book on the boomers, a lot of people have had a problem with defining the boomers. SE (00:06:35): Right. SM (00:06:36): Because the textbooks say it is anyone born between (19)46 and (19)64. But so many of the people that were the leaders of the anti-war movement were born between 1938 and 1945. SE (00:06:52): Right. SM (00:06:52): Many have told me, that I have interviewed have said, "Steve, you have got to think a little different here because the first half of the boomer generation, yes, they were really impacted. But a 10-year-old in the second half?" So I am just dealing with what higher ed defines as generations- SE (00:07:13): Right. SM (00:07:13): And what sociologists have been saying. But the question I am coming up with here deals with the (19)50s. I have a couple questions here. To boomers, and correct me if I am wrong, grew up very naïve. They learned that the meaning of fear stood for being quiet, obeying orders, do not question authority. So I came up with three qualities here that I feel defined boomers in the 1950s. The concept that there was fear, there was a sense of being quiet and there was a sense of being naive. Then the (19)60s and (19)70s came, it was just the opposite. There were lots of injustices and people spoke up. They challenged authority and certainly the students did. So they had to deal with these issues from the (19)50s that they grew up with. Whether it be the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, the bomb, obviously, injustices in the South, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Am I on target here? I read your book, Personal Politics. It's one of the best books I have ever read, in fact. SE (00:08:25): Thank you. SM (00:08:27): I got it right in front of me. Actually, I destroyed it underlining it but I got to get another copy. It is a tremendous book. SE (00:08:35): Thank you. SM (00:08:36): But are those three qualities really what the boomer generation when they were young lived through in the (19)50s? I am not just talking white people. I am talking about African American, gay and straight, you name it. SE (00:08:53): Well, I think it is really hard to apply something like those qualities completely across the board. I was born in 1943, by the way, so I am in that earlier group. I always tell my students that the uptick in fertility took place a lot sooner than 1946. So I do not think the boomer generation should be counted just from (19)46, but that is a different issue. Fear. Let us talk about that one just a little bit. Certainly, I was aware that there was a danger of atomic war, for example. On the other hand, I think African Americans in the rural south lived in a kind of perpetual fear that is not really about the decade of the (19)50s. It is about centuries of suppression. So those things are very different and their links to time are somewhat different. On the other hand, I would say a lot of people think of the (19)50s as a time of tremendous optimism. Think about Happy Days, that movie, that TV series. A lot of Americans became middle class for the first time. We had been through a depression and then a war. Now people were beginning to have a life of material wealth and opportunities to seek higher education, to own automobiles or refrigerators, or use telephones, watch television. All of those things were becoming a part of ordinary American life, so there is an optimism in the 1950s that linked, also, to the Cold War ideology, "We are the best. We are the most wonderful. Look at us." The Cold War both had produced fear because of war. We had come out of a war and now war seemed threatened all the time. This sense of, "We are the best and we are only getting better and we will win." It was all modulated with that. The naivete of many in my generation was linked to that sense of well-being that gets shattered as we discover. I cannot say that I feel participating in this because I grew up in the segregated South, and I grew up knowing that something was deeply unjust about American society. But I think there were many in my generation in other parts of the country who did grow up with the sense that all is well and getting better, until they discovered that children go to bed hungry in this best of all possible societies. The civil rights movement brought segregation and the brutal suppression of segregation to their television screen. Then the Vietnam War, of course, brought others. Your themes are not, I would not say they are completely wrong but, like any stereotype, you need to push them a little bit because they are never going to fit perfectly. SM (00:13:25): The second wave is something you have written about in one of your latest books. What are the major second wave accomplishments, in your opinion? What are the failures or maybe things that were not achieved in the second wave, so far? SE (00:13:46): Well, the second wave, certainly, in many ways, created a revolution in American life. We can look at that on many dimensions. It made a lot of legal changes, of course, so that it is no longer legal to pay women less than men for the same work. It is no longer legal to advertise jobs as men only or women only. It is no longer legal for professional schools, medical schools, law schools, and graduate schools that have quotas and only admit 5 percent women. It is no longer legal to prevent women from serving on juries. That whole edifice of legal discrimination fell apart in the late (19)60s and in the 1970s, mostly in the early part of the 1970s. It is also no longer the case that women are expected to stay home through their adult lives and care for children and tend to the house. Now, that was never a reality for very large numbers of women no matter what. But it was a cultural ideal that was lived out mostly in the middle and upper middle classes. That the revolution of women's labor force participation was not caused by the women's movement, but it interacted with it. In some ways, it was a cause of the women's movement because all those women were running into barriers, discrimination, finding only dead-end jobs. Only women only work available to them. Younger women with higher education who sensed potential in themselves would be discouraged, or not admitted to school, or whatever, so there was an interactive effect there. But in the aftermath of that movement, women and men participate in the labor force on an almost equal basis in terms of numbers. There are many ways in which that movement did not... I think I want to credit it with creating a revolution and also notice that it is far from achieving the goals that it set for itself, which was genuine equality between men and women in American society. There are many ways in which it is far more equal than it used to be, but we still have, in many ways, a double standard. There is discrimination still but it's much more subtle, much more subtle. It is important that we had a woman run for president in 2008 who could have won. That is the first time. We have had women run for president many times but this was a new one. I think it is a real marker that Hillary could have won. SM (00:17:41): I think she is going to run again down the road. SE (00:17:44): She might, she might. We will see. There are a lot of built-in attitudes that I have been distressed to see the sort of casual sexism that was rampant in my childhood, some of that is back. I do not know if you look at movies and that sort of thing, they certainly are better than they used to, but there is still a lot of those themes are there. I think what we did not do was change the way society regards family. Even though families have changed, we offer no support for single-parent family. It is... When it was married couples raising children, women still do more than half, although, at least it is not 90 percent. But they still do more than half of the work of caring for children and families and households. Our labor force offers very few breaks for people who want combined meaningful work and child rearing. There are other countries, particularly in Europe, that have gone much further down this path. We do not offer paid childcare leave. We do not offer them for men, as well as women, except in some places six weeks. But that is not what we need. We make it very hard for people to deal with ill children. We create this competition between these two arenas that are both essential for the future of our society. So you have people hiring nannies that are... People with really high paying jobs, hiring nannies and hardly ever get to see their children. People with really low paying jobs find it very difficult to find decent childcare and children end up in not very healthy situations. SM (00:20:26): When you look at the, I am going to use the years the boomers have been alive, of course, they have been alive since 1946 through today, and the oldest is now 64 years old, and the youngest is 48 going on 49, so there are no spring chickens anymore within this generation. I think they finally realized that maybe, like a lot of generations, that they are mortal. SE (00:20:53): That may be what? SM (00:20:56): That they are mortal. That they- SE (00:20:59): Hello? SM (00:20:59): Are you still there? Can you hear me? SE (00:21:05): Hello? Are you there? SM (00:21:06): Yes, I am here. SE (00:21:09): I think I lost you for a second. SM (00:21:11): Can you still hear me? SE (00:21:13): Yes, I can. SM (00:21:13): Okay. Yeah. SE (00:21:16): You need to know that my telephone works through my wireless. SM (00:21:21): Okay. SE (00:21:22): Because I am in a very remote place, so every now and then it blinks out. SM (00:21:26): Okay. All right. I do have your number if it does disconnect us. What was it like, and you can just give a few examples or just explain it briefly. What was it like being a female during these different periods that boomers have been alive? You did a great job in your book, Personal Politics, about explaining about the young women who were being reared in the 1950s, seeing their moms go to work- SE (00:21:59): Right. SM (00:22:01): And so forth. So they saw some of the experiences that their mothers had to go through. It helped shape them, too, that it was not going to be easy for many of them. SE (00:22:11): Right. SM (00:22:12): But what was it like being a woman in the United States from 1946 to 1960? I am breaking these down according to timeframes, from that time at the end of World War II- SE (00:22:24): Right. SM (00:22:25): Until the time John Kennedy became president? SE (00:22:28): Okay, well, I am assuming you are asking me about my experience as opposed to- SM (00:22:32): Yes-yes. SE (00:22:37): I was born at the end of 1943, so I do not have a lot of memories of (19)46. But the main thing I would tell you is that I had a mother with a college degree and the passion of a scientist, who should have been a scientist, who never thought she had that choice. So I grew up aware of my mother's frustrated potential and anger and depression. I think that really did shape me in some important ways. I did not want to end up in that situation. When I read in 1963, this is outside your timeframe, but when I read Betty Friedan's book, a light bulb went on like, oh, I do not have to make that choice. But I think in the (19)50s, girls in the middle class, which I certainly was, the way we thought about our future was not, what are you going to be when you grow up? When I was really little, I was going to be a nurse because kids did ask that question. SE (00:24:03): I was going to be a nurse, because kids did ask that question or asked that question. But in high school, what I recall is conversations among girls about who would you like to marry? Would you like to be the wife of a lawyer, a doctor, a minister? Those kinds of... It was being the wife of and not being those, not having those professions ourselves, that was presented as how to think about yourself in the future. SM (00:24:38): How about that period? You already talked about Betty Friedan's book that came out in (19)63, but the period 1961 to 1970. SE (00:24:49): Well, that is when things got really revolutionary, and you almost have to talk about that year by year, because it is different year by year. Certainly this mobilization of women is beginning by the mid (19)60s, and with the presidential commissions on women and so forth. I read Betty Friedan in college because one of my professors told me to read it. And at that point, I decided along Betty Friedan's prescription that I could be several woman. I would have a career and I would have a family too and it would not even be hard. But it was in 1967 that I landed in a women's liberation group. And from that moment on, became a very active feminist, and saw the need to transform American society and the way it defined gender and gender roles. SM (00:26:03): How about that period, 1971 to 1980? SE (00:26:10): Well, again, I am really reluctant to just slap labels on decades like that, because they changed so much from beginning to end. The high point of the women's movement in terms of mobilization was the mid (19)70s, just in terms of sheer numbers and actions and so forth. The high point of legislative change was about 1972 to (19)74, in terms of legal transformations. I think young women, coming of age then, and you need to talk to them, because I was moving from my late twenties into my thirties at that point, in graduate school. But for younger women, I think there was a sense of, the sky is limit. Everything is opening up. SM (00:27:13): Then you get into that Ronald Reagan era, from (19)81 to (19)90. SE (00:27:21): Right. Well, and that was a time of tremendous backlash. The backlash got going in the (19)70s, the anti-ERA movement, for example. And I actually think it is important to remember that some women growing up in the (19)60s and in the (19)70s were living lives that were not so different from the women growing up in the (19)50s. There were places in America, from suburbs, from small towns, that were not touched as deeply or thoroughly or whatever. So changes, change always has a ragged quality to it. It is certainly far from uniform. And in the (19)80s, you have, on the one hand, Reagan and all the talk about family values and people openly saying that women should go back home and take care of the kids and be women again. And on the other hand, you have women entering all these professions in massive numbers, because now they have been able to go to medical school and law school and get MBAs in the (19)70s. And so the change is still going on and even Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. SM (00:28:56): That is right. Then we get into the (19)90s, which is the time of Bill Clinton. SE (00:29:04): Right. And I think there is a resurgence of feminism in a new generation. In the early (19)90s, they called themselves the third wave. One of their leaders is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker. SM (00:29:18): We had her at our school. SE (00:29:18): You what? SM (00:29:23): We brought her to this university. She spoke at our school. SE (00:29:27): Oh, great. Yeah, she is quite charismatic. She is quite wonderful. And also, I think in the (19)80s and (19)90s, more and more women and men were discovering how hard it is to live these new lives and have families, and some of the pressure of that is beginning to be felt. SM (00:29:56): And then we- SE (00:29:57): But I would say by the (19)90s, the women's movement and younger generations were less divided by race. Not to say that race was not still really important, but Rebecca's a good example of a new language of talking about race that begins to be possible. I apologize for the fact that there is another phone here, a landline. Can I? SM (00:30:27): Yep. SE (00:30:28): Do you mind if I pick it up? SM (00:30:29): Nope, go ahead, just go ahead. SE (00:30:31): Okay. SM (00:30:31): All right. That is fine. All right. SE (00:30:35): Chuck, are you there? Are you on the phone? So I hang up? Good. Okay. (00:30:44): Okay. Sorry. I am in a very small cabin. SM (00:30:47): Okay. That is all right. Then we got the last 10 years, which is George Bush and now President Obama. Where was everything stand in that decade? SE (00:31:01): Well, when you say everything, what are you talking about? [inaudible] lose the thread here. SM (00:31:09): Well, what is it like being a female today, really? SE (00:31:13): Okay. Yes. Yes. Well, and I think for young women today, it is very confusing. They have an immense number of choices, and they know it. They also know that they are often very hard choices. In some ways, I feel like young women today feel something like that old pressure of family or career. They no longer have the illusion that it will be easy to do both. They expect they will do both, and they will have to do both, but they do not see it as something that is going to be a piece of cake. SM (00:31:57): I have two nieces that are going through it right now. SE (00:32:00): Yeah. No, I think it is very hard. On the one hand, the sky's the limit. On the other hand, you may not be able to ever get there. SM (00:32:11): Right. One of the things that is interested, and I have been asking each of my guests recently, is the difference between mainstream feminism and radical feminism. And it seems to me that oftentimes, when people define mainstream feminism, they say that is liberal. But that radical feminism is like the new left that led the anti-war movement in the (19)60s. And it seems to me that it is always the new left or the more extremes that gets things done. Your thoughts on the difference between the two and defining them? SE (00:32:49): Well, if you read, obviously, Personal Politics is about the origins of radical feminism. And I notice that liberal feminism is being created at the same moment, but I do not go into that. I am completely unwilling to say one does things more or better than the other. And the reason is, I think they need each other. I think this is true of many social movements, that when the radicals raise the questions in a far more fundamental way and set out to show the world how deep change is possible, the liberals who are saying things that in the previous context would have been considered wildly unthinkably radical, suddenly look moderate and are able to accomplish things. My last book, called Tidal Wave, which is a sequel to Personal Politics, covers from (19)68 into the beginnings of the 21st century. And I look at these two streams, I argue that, by the mid (19)70s, you really cannot draw a line between them easily. There is a spectrum, but not a bifurcation, but that they influenced each other enormously. The radicals, lots of people joined the more liberal organizations because they went looking for a radical movement and they could not find it because it was so decentralized, and they landed in the other movement, but they radicalized it. And I do think legal changes matter. I think it matters that we have an equal pay act and that we have Title IX, which [inaudible] in women's participation in sports. I think the Equal Credit Act matters. So the fact that we got, and Roe versus Wade, for goodness sake. But the person who argued Roe versus Wade came out of a consciousness raising group in Austin, Texas. It was part of the radical movement. But what she did was the way the liberal movement functioned. SM (00:35:14): That is Sarah Weddington, correct? SE (00:35:17): Exactly. So I am going to resist that either-or kind of question. SM (00:35:27): Okay. Yeah. One of the things that is very important, and my very first boss at Ohio University was one of the leaders of the ERA movement in Ohio. And I know Dr. Mensen was very disappointed when it did not pass. I remember being in the office next to her when the final vote came in and I think she was crying, and it is a long story, because she had worked two years on this. But why did it fail? And I also interviewed Phyllis Schlafly in Washington about four months ago. Yeah, I interviewed her for an hour, and I interviewed David Horowitz on the phone. And both of them have said this. They say that the troublemakers of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, which are probably the new left or whatever, now run the universities and they control what is taught. And they were making reference to women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, environmental studies, all the studies movements. Your thoughts on their criticism, the studies programs in the universities, whether there's truth to that. And secondly, why did the ERA fail? SE (00:36:35): Okay. Those are really two different questions. The ERA failed in part because the most important things it was going to accomplish were already accomplished in the legal changes that did take place in the (19)70s. And so on one level, in the end, it was not as devastating to lose it as it would have been 20 years earlier when all that discriminatory stuff was still on the books. But it also failed, I think, because people found change in gender roles very frightening. And people like Phyllis Schlafly played on those ears. And it was similar to how frightening voting, the idea of women voting was in the 19th century. And all of that change which was happening to people and they were participating in it, was also scary, and I think there was a lot of demagoguery, and Phyllis Schlafly was the leader of it, talking about why should people be worried about single sex bathrooms, we're going to say, or they made up things that they said the law would do, but they also said women might have to participate in combat in the armed forces. Well, we have got that and we do not have the ERA. The ERA was not going to make it happen, but it was happening and people were not easy about that. And I think there were also women in more traditional roles, and there's a very good book on this by Jane De Hart and Don Mathews about the Equal Rights Amendment in North Carolina. And what they found were that women who were opposed, it was not only men who were opposed, for sure, but women who were opposed shared a deep distrust of men with the people who advocated it and said, "We need legal equality, because you cannot trust them to treat us right no matter what." But they were in traditional roles and still very dependent on men. And their fear was that if men are not forced to play their traditional roles, they will abandon them. And their fear was that if women and men are treated equally in the public arena, in the workplace, and everywhere else, men will say, "I will not support my family. You have got to go out and work." Or they will get divorced and refuse to pay alimony. Or they will simply abandon their family. And their view was really that men have to be coerced to take care of their families, and women are vulnerable, and they were afraid that equality would mean that women would be abandoned, so. And that is really about how deeply uneasy some of these changes made many people feel. So that is one question. Now, remind me again of what your other one was, because- SM (00:40:15): Well, the other one was just- SE (00:40:17): Oh, about the studies sequence. SM (00:40:19): Yeah, Phyllis Schlafly basically said the troublemakers of the (19)60s and (19)70s now run the university's studies programs. SE (00:40:30): Well, that is a right wing attack that is... I could name a number of writers who have made those charges. It certainly is true that the social movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s ask questions that could not be answered within the framework of traditional discipline. And there's an intellectual transformation that follows from that. I have been very involved in women's studies. I wrote women's history and taught women's history. When I was in school, there was no such thing as women's history. And you did not learn about women in any class that you took, because they were considered to be outside of history. So asking the question about where are the women and what are they doing was an intellectual transformation. The same thing with black history. When I was in school, I was taught very little about what life was like for slaves. In fact, in South Carolina, it was assumed that slaves were probably pretty happy. But even in college, we did not know anything about what life was like for enslaved people. But when people started asking about that, there's an amazing amount there to be covered about how enslaved people created a culture from many parts of Africa, speaking different languages, created African American culture and music and religion and family structures and so forth. So I think those studies programs, in fact, were very, very important in bringing previously unthought about and fundamental issues into our intellectual discourse. It's simply not... It is true that a lot of us... I was an activist in the women's movement. I wanted to know, what shoulders do we stand on? Have people like us, i.e. females, ever changed history the way we want to do it, or is it true that women never have made any history? And I felt we needed to know our history, not romanticized, but just to know, as part of the movement. And that drove me into graduate school. And lots of people like me did that. But the implication that our scholarship is purely ideological, that we do not in fact do real research and hold ourselves to rigorous standards, is the right-wing position, that I think is wrong and dangerous. And if you want to say environmental studies, then you are discounting all the environmental science of the last half century. And those are the same people who say there is no global warming, if they want to say environmental studies is a left-wing plot. SM (00:44:08): One of the other points, and I had an hour with her, she was at the CPAC conference, and she was very tired, so I think I got a really quality 30 minutes from her, even though she was there for an hour. And we talked a little bit about whether women in the (19)50s, the parents of boomer women, were fulfilled or were unfulfilled as mothers and housewives, and many not even working. And it was her belief that many were fulfilled, that being a mother and taking care of kids was the duty. And so for the women's movement to say that there is a lot of unfulfilled women who never had a chance to speak their thoughts, just raise the kids and so forth, any thoughts on that? SE (00:45:02): Well, I had a mother who was not fulfilled, so that was my personal experience, a group of one. I suggest that you read a book by Elaine Tyler May called Homeward Bound. SM (00:45:16): Homeward Bound. SE (00:45:18): Yes. A very, very important book about the family in the Cold War era and she has data on this that is really important, and I think anecdotally, you will get people telling you everything. Based on what I know from Elaine May's work and other scholars, I would say, and then packing back to my own experience, I would say, in the first place, of course there were some women who were happy doing that, but that does not tell you that they were all happy doing that. The flood, if you go and read the letters written to Betty Friedan after The Feminine Mystique came out, you would be deluged with thousands and thousands of women writing to say to her, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. I did not think anybody else felt this way." And if you look at the numbers of women who go to graduate school, once the barriers are lifted, and the number of women in the (19)60s, there was a big movement in the (19)60s to create opportunities for women to return to college. And that was very, very successful, called the Continuing Education for Women movement. Huge numbers of women wanted to go back, finish degrees and find something else to do with their lives. Maybe they enjoyed staying home, but then they wanted to do something else. And finally, I have to say for Phyllis Schlafly, so why did she have a career? Her own life does not fit that. SM (00:47:07): Yeah, I have heard that before. She has been a lawyer, created the Eagle Forum and speaks all over the country, and- SE (00:47:15): Right, so she said women should have a role that she never chose to have. SM (00:47:22): One of the things about the second wave movement, I remember reading Johnetta Cole's book, several years back, Sister President, that she wrote about her experiences. And this leads me into this question, has the second wave of the women's movement been all inclusive with respect to women of color, women with different sexual orientations? Because I have read quite a bit from other authors that, even Johnetta Cole said, there was pressure within the African-American community to identify as a black person first and then as a woman second, and then she identified with both, but it was very- SM (00:48:03): And then she identified with both, but it was very difficult for... SE (00:48:08): Well, I think that is true, and I would ask you to please read Tidal Wave because that is a major theme of Tidal Wave. My history of the Second Wave, and it's a functioning part of timing. The Women's Movement started at the same time that the Black Power Movement was in full force. And what seems to me is when you tell this story, on the one hand you have to notice black women and women of color were always there. They started women's groups within all those other movements, which were pretty separated in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. But there were women's liberation committees that raised issues within the Latino movement, with the Chicano movement and the Asian American movement and the Black movement. There were separate organizations, often of women of color, raising very similar issues and often in very similar ways and similar language. But it was a time of such racial polarization that it was very difficult for women to talk across racial minds successfully. And there was tremendous pressure within each of those groups to identify first with their group and then secondly with your gender. So that was true. I would say that the liberal wing of the Women's Movement was more successful, even there, it was not easy, but there were women of color in the leadership from the beginning of the National Organization for Women and of the National Women's Political Caucus. So it is important to notice that, and I discussed it in some detail in Tidal Wave. SM (00:50:18): Do you also include the Native American women? SE (00:50:22): Yes. SM (00:50:25): When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion? And when did it end? And what do you feel was the watershed moment? This is just you personally. SE (00:50:35): Well, I would begin it with the sit-ins in 1960, although it is not hard to push it back to the Montgomery bus boycott since the marker for me is really civil rights. And I am not quite sure how to end it. I would push it well into the (19)70s. But even then, when you try to create a category like that, the early (19)60s and the late (19)60s, (19)70s are also very different times. The early years, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy years, the creation of the Peace Corps, and then the Anti-War Movement and the race riots that happened, and the increasing violence and turmoil is a very different era. SM (00:51:37): Did The Beats have an influence on women? SE (00:51:42): The Beatniks in the (19)50s? SM (00:51:44): Yes, The Beats, because many people have told me they believe that the (19)60s began with the beats because they were anti-authoritarian. They lived their lives. They did not care what other people thought. SE (00:51:58): Oh, I think so. I was not living where they were very permanent. But I am sure that is true. They were extremely sexist, and at the same time, they were very anti-authoritarian and into breaking all the rules. So they are forerunners of the new left. They are very... Are you there? SM (00:52:28): Yes. I am here. SE (00:52:28): They are very sort of nihilistic and they represent some of that side of the (19)50s that says the world is going to blow itself up and recognizing that racism is rampant and so forth, and not feeling very hopeful that any of that can be changed. And the New Left comes along, picks up on a lot of those themes, but says, "Well, hey, we can change it." SM (00:53:06): I know that one person I interviewed said that he identified Neil Cassidy. He is the number one Beat because all the books that were written were basically studies about him. And of course, he became one of the Mary Pranksters. But his attitude toward women was basically conquests. SE (00:53:29): Right. And that is why I have trouble with a lot of those folks. SM (00:53:35): One of the well-known facts that you bring up in your book, Personal Politics, but also, it has been historically documented, is that the sexism that was rampant in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement drove many of the New Left women that were affiliated with those groups into the Women's Movement in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. So now I have some questions that are directly related to your book, Personal Politics. The people who have studied post-World War II activism know that sexism was rampant in the movements I just mentioned. My question is, how bad was it? SE (00:54:13): Well, I would say it was not as bad as in the rest of American society. And I think it is really important to notice that the Women's Movement did not happen in a place where women were treated much worse than they had ever been treated. But rather in a movement that advocated equality but did not treat women equally. And it is that contradiction that women ran into. But they had opportunities to do things, to change history, to go to jail, to stand up for what they believed, to risk their lives, to teach in Freedom School, to take on responsibility for organizing communities. And I think it is the later part of the New Left Act, it became a really massive movement that some of the sexism of the counterculture was much more raw, [inaudible] but the New Left offered women an opportunity to grow and develop leadership. And it also periodically reenacted the sexism that was fundamental to American culture. No surprise. It is not that they were worse, it was that they had not completely transcended everything they had been raised with. And the contradiction is what drove women to name it and act on it. SM (00:55:48): You do a tremendous job in this book. I have read the Free Speech Movement. There is a lot of books on that. And a lot of the students that were involved in that movement, were also in Freedom Summer in (19)64, and many of them were even in down south in the (19)61 (19)62 period. And I have interviewed at least six people who were involved in Freedom Summer and male and female. But can you explain, I know, but this is for the people they are going to read this, how important was the student non-violent coordinating committee with respect to not only the Civil Rights movement, but the Women's Movement? And you also in the book do a great job in one section of talking not only about the SNCC, but you talk about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress on Racial Equality. These are all major groups that were linked to that movement in the (19)50s and (19)60s and beyond. And you talk a little bit about the sexism within those organizations where women were, and you talk a little bit about that. SE (00:57:00): Well, I am not going to be able to tell you any more than I already wrote, but the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was one of the most innovative and radical parts of the Civil Rights Movement. It was on the ground and the scariest parts of the South all over the place. And it often does not get its due when civil rights stories are being told. And the focus is on the big leader, Martin Luther King. It was the place where women found the most equality within the Civil Rights Movement, where they learned the most leadership capacities. And it was the organization that gave women an ideology about living out your value in your daily life. That the idea of the beloved community that we were going to enact among ourselves, the values we were trying to bring about in society. And, it really was fundamental to the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement. It gave them a set of ideas, a deeply egalitarian ideology. It gave them a set of strategies and tactics, consciousness raising, and the technique traces directly back to the way people talked to each other in SNCC and spoke from their hearts and tried to reach consensus and not leave anybody behind. So I think that organization was really fundamentally important. SM (00:59:00): What is interesting here also is when you look at the March on Washington 1963 with Dr. King, and you see the background of all the people around him. The only females you see are Dorothy Height, who is over to the right. And I know Mahalia Jackson, she sang, but it was all Men. So there is a perception out there, and I think you really correct it in your book that women, they were really secondary in the Civil Rights movement. They just were not there. And- SE (00:59:44): A lot of research since then to show, if you look at the Civil Rights Movement on the ground, the things I said that I wrote when I was writing that in the mid to late (19)70s, there is a huge amount more detail about it available now. Because in local communities, women were the leaders. They were towering figures. And SNCC offered role models of older women who risked their lives for what they believed in. And it was in the local communities, those women, they called the Mamas that were so powerful. And if you look at SCLC, what you get is a hierarchical organization in which the top leaders are all black ministers. But there were people like Dorothy Height who is pretty wonderful. SM (01:00:46): You talk about the major role played by white women in the South, and certainly African American women as well to end segregation. And they were involved in voting registration drives and so forth. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like being a white woman during Freedom Summer or any of the voter registration drives throughout the early (19)60s down there? Because I do not think a lot of people realize it, many of these people came back to college campuses and actually were the leaders, and several of them were as the Free Speech Movement. Just talk about- SE (01:01:20): So like Joe Freeman, for example? SM (01:01:27): Yes. Just your thoughts on the women that were involved in with SNCC. SE (01:01:35): Well, again, this makes me uncomfortable because I have written it all, and I would love you to quote from my book too. SM (01:01:43): Well, yes, I have got quotes that I am going to bring up here next, but I- SE (01:01:50): But I do think for many white women, it was stepping outside of the roles that they were expected to fulfill way outside. And when they went south, they found themselves in a movement where there were these powerful black women who became role models, who taught them a different way to be women and a more assertive and self-respecting way to be women. It was for both [inaudible]. SM (01:02:29): With me. All right. SE (01:02:34): And I do not have a whole lot longer, so. I know you planned 90 minutes. SM (01:02:43): We got 27 minutes. SE (01:02:45): I will try. Anyway, I would say for middle class college kids, black and white, male and female, going into the Southern Civil Rights Movement was a searing experience and [inaudible] and committed them, no matter what happened next, to be engaged with making the world a better place. I doubt many students came out of that experience and went back to their old lives as if nothing had happened. For black students, of course, it would have all sorts of other transforming dimensions. But for white students and for white women, it was such a step outside of their traditional roles that many of them came back to their campuses and were prepared. They felt able to lead. They were prepared to question authority. They were prepared to take public stands. And so the students who went south show up in the leadership of the New Left all over the country and the Anti-War Movement, and then the Women's Movement, and they became the leadership. SM (01:04:23): I have two quotes here from the book which are excellent. The first quote is, "These women recognize from the very beginning of their involvement in the movement that they, like their male associates, were at war with their own culture." And the second one is the, "Thus within a movement, young white women have the necessary to forge a new sense of themselves to redefine the meaning of being a woman quite apart from the [inaudible] image they had inherited." And then the third- SE (01:05:01): Do not agree with that. SM (01:05:03): ... One I have here is, "The next generation daughters of the (19)50s grew up with a knowledge that they were identifying roles should be those of wife and mother. But they knew they would probably have a job at some point. They saw mothers with double duty." SE (01:05:19): Great. SM (01:05:19): So any other thoughts on that or that is good? SE (01:05:26): No, I think that is true. SM (01:05:30): Then I have another one that I do want you to respond to. It is on the bottom of page 11. Let us see here, you have got, "The straight jacket of domestic idea to challenge it openly would be too frightening in a rapidly changing world clouded with threat of nuclear warfare and the early bush fires of racial discontent and urban decay, where corporate behemoths trained their bureaucrat into interchangeable parts, fewer ready to face the unnerving necessity of reassessing the cultural definitions of femaleness and maleness." So. SE (01:06:13): And I am in some ways saying the background of what I was saying earlier about how scary it was, how fundamental the changes the Women's Movement was demanding were. And there was great resistance to raising the issue. And once it was raised, there was a big backlash in the (19)70s. And that is because it is pretty fundamental. Our identities as women and men are pretty fundamental to who we think we are in the world. And so if anybody wants to tamper with that and change it, people get upset. SM (01:07:00): You also stated a beautiful quote which is, "Bureaucracy suppressed demotion and passion training its members into interchangeable parts. Bureaucratic values emphasize female traits of cooperation, passivity and security, getting along, being well-liked between new goals." SE (01:07:20): And what I am arguing there in [inaudible] is that men were taking on roles that the qualities demanded of them were things the culture labeled females. And so there is an uneasiness already. Things are shifting in ways. So how do men prove their manhood anymore when they are being placed in these kind of settings to work? So when women start saying, "We want in too," or "We want equal chair," or "We want the right to do this and that and the other." For men, it is like, "Well, so what is left?" How will we know? SM (01:08:06): You bring up also, and other people have mentioned that the election of John Kennedy showed many people that change is good. And of course, change is one of the definitions of the (19)60s. And certainly John Kennedy was a much younger person. So that is true. And you also bring up the fact that McCarthyism was an attitude that many people were afraid of which is to root out subversion from within. And so there was a fear. That is where I get into the fear again of- SE (01:08:39): You are right. McCarthyism did make many, many people afraid. Afraid to advocate change. SM (01:08:46): When President Kennedy asked Eleanor Roosevelt to head the commission on the status of women, I believe that was in 1961. She died in (19)62. SE (01:08:54): Yes. SM (01:08:54): Was he dead serious on that or did Eleanor Roosevelt pressure him to do it because Eleanor had problems with him before supporting him to be president? SE (01:09:13): Well, I do not think it was a top priority for him. I think it was a bone that he threw to the women, but he needed women's support. And there was concern within the Democratic Party about pressure for the Equal Rights Amendment. So one of the ways that he was persuaded to do this was that people like Eleanor Roosevelt who were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, on the grounds, said it would undo protective legislation that her generation had won to protect women workers. So they wanted to have a commission that would say, "We do not need that." What happened, of course, was something altogether different because that commission uncovered the depth of discrimination against women. And so when they did have one committee that said, "We really do not need an equal rights amendment." That stands somehow at odds with all the other things that they did. SM (01:10:22): One other quote I have here that I would like to, if there is any further comments, I think it is another great quote. "Furthermore, having grown up in an era that commoditized sexual intimidation while it reasserted repressive norms, they found themselves living in the ambiguous frontiers of sexual freedom and self-control opened up by the birth control pill. Such contradictions left young, educated women in the (19)60s dry tinder for the spark of revolt." SE (01:10:51): Yes. Well, that early chapter argues basically that a Women's Movement was going to happen. It was almost over-determined. There were too many contradictory pressures. It is almost like tectonic plate crushing against each other and something has to give. SM (01:11:18): The couple of people you talk about in the book, Stokely Carmichael joked in (19)64 that the only position for women was prone. And I have read about that for a long time in a lot of other books. What did the women at that time think of that? And was he just joking or was he dead serious? SE (01:11:42): He was not dead serious. And you can read many other people's descriptions of Stokely Carmichael as being one of the people in SNCC who treated women equally. So it's the implication that he was one of the most macho people around is unfair. It was a joke. It- SE (01:12:03): People around is unfair. It was a joke. It was made at the end of a very long, contentious conference, late at night. It was a joke about the sexual relations that had happened frequently within the Civil Rights movement. It is a movement of young people. And what is important about that quote to me is certainly not to vilify Stokely Carmichael, but to notice that the quote when he said that the people around him just laughed. They were tired. They realized yeah, there was a lot of sex that went around. But when other people reported that quote, and it bounced through the movement on a rumor mill, huge numbers of women heard that quote. And to them, it named the sexism that they had experienced in the movement. It is really not about Stokely, it is about how those words resonated with lots of women who had been active in the movement. So in personal politics, I talk about it some, how I had a hard time tracking down someone who talked to me about that quote, but I heard the quote from many people who were not there, many, many people. And that is what I think is really important is not what Stokely really meant, which was basically, there's been a lot of sex around here. But what it meant to people who heard it. SM (01:13:58): Casey Hayden and Mary King wrote a position paper that women were treated as second class citizens, just as African Americans were treated in the nation at large. How important was that document? Because I think there has been reference that it reveals the origins of the modern feminist movement. SE (01:14:20): Yeah, it was one of the very, very first articulations of the issue of women in relation to the Civil Rights movement. It is the opening shot that you can trace straight from there through a series of other documents to the beginning of the women's movement. So it was very, very important. SM (01:14:50): One other quote, this is from someone else, Belinda Rubbalet, and her quote is, "Feminism did not evolve from the sexist treatment within SNCC, but from the organization liberating philosophy and open structure that fostered challenges to authority." SE (01:15:07): I think that is fair. What I have been trying to say is it took both. I think she is right. That is the most fundamental, but then there was some sexism, and it's that contradiction of the movement that offered this idea of equality, this very liberating idea and this open possibility to take on leadership roles. And then within that context, when traditional American sexism showed up from time to time as it did, as it could not-not have, women had ideas and tools with which to react to it. SM (01:16:01): Yeah. One of the things about that particular comment is also linked to the students for Democratic society, because the participatory democracy, remember Tom Hayden, when he came to our campus, talked about participatory democracy and seems like SNCC was the epitome of participatory democracy. SE (01:16:21): It was the epitome of participatory democracy. And SBS took a lot of those ideas from SNCC. SM (01:16:24): You also mentioned, I read some place that you thought the 14th Amendment was a slap in the face because it only gave African American men the right to vote. SE (01:16:36): No, I did not say that. SM (01:16:37): Oh, okay. SE (01:16:38): It did. It was experienced by the women who had been active in the abolition movement and the Women's Rights Movement in the 1850s and (19)60s, they experienced it as a slap in the face because it put the word male into the constitution. Some of those women said, "Look, we do not like it, but this is all we can get right now. And it's more important to give Black men the vote than to insist on getting everything." But it raised the issue of voting to the forefront in the women's rights movement in the 19th century, from that point on, focused on the right to vote as its key issue. SM (01:17:38): Well, I am down to my final three questions, if that is okay. SE (01:17:42): Oh, good. SM (01:17:44): Because I am going to do the hour and a half. It's been one hour and 17 minutes, and I am going to keep it to one 30. SE (01:17:49): All right. SM (01:17:50): So we got 13 minutes. I took a group of students in 1995 to Washington DC as part of our leadership on the road programs, and we met Senator Muskie. And the students I took, helped me develop some questions to ask him. And one of them was about the issue of healing within the nation and within the generation. The question was this, because they had seen, they knew he was the vice-presidential candidate in (19)68, and they knew about Chicago. They had seen what happened in Chicago that year and the assassinations that year. And the question was this, due to all the divisions that were taking place in the boomers' generation when they were younger, do you think that they are going to go to their graves like the Civil War generation, not truly healing due to the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who were for the war against the war, those who supported the troops or were against the troops? Do you think they are going to go to their grave not healing? And just your thoughts on the whole issue of healing. SE (01:19:03): Yeah, I actually do not think so. And of course you have to again say people are different, some people may go to their grave not healed because they want to hang on to their anger for reasons that are theirs. But I would not say that that is true of a generation at all. I think that there are lots of connections across racial lines within our generation that 45 years ago would have been difficult to sustain. I think that there's certainly men and women in our generation have engaged in deep debates about what it means to be men and women and have come to various kinds of resolutions about that. I think separatism, except for a few people who hang onto it, separatism, is not where people are pulling away and refusing to talk to those who are different. And I think most of us, and here, I will just speak personally because I do not really want to speak for my generation, but I personally feel grateful for having been able to live through the things I lived through. And there was a time that was very divisive and fairly painful because of that. But I do not feel I am stuck in that place at all. And the people that I know in my generation are not either. SM (01:20:46): I know that Senator Muskie in his response, made no reference to anything in the (19)60s, nothing, not even (19)68 convention. He looked up at the students after about 30 minutes, it looked like he had a tear in his eye. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War due to the issue of race." And he went on to talk about that in detail and the loss of life during the Civil War, because he had just seen the Ken Burn series. SE (01:21:16): Oh, that is interesting. That is really interesting. Well, I do think that there are a huge amount of unhealed things in American society, but then we're not talking about a particular generation. And if you look at the immigration debate right now, we have got a lot of some of the same awful stuff going on. SM (01:21:42): My next to last question is a question dealing with, I have talked to many feminists and I talked to one prominent feminist at her home in New York City about six weeks ago. I will not mention her name, but she likes the National Organization for Women. But she says she is disappointed in it because of the fact that if you walk into their headquarters now, the only things you are going to see as far as pickup materials, this is the first perception you have when you walk into an office. They have literature there dealing with abortion, literature dealing with the pill, and I think literature dealing with AIDS. And her comment was, "Those are all important issues, but there is a lot more issues for women than that." And she felt that that they have been hung up on those three issues. SE (01:22:39): And I do not have enough inside information about NOW to make a statement about them and their priorities as an organization. And I certainly think that there is reasons in Tidal Wave, I really wrestled with why the body was so important in the second wave of feminism, and you are lifting up issues that are about that. Also, domestic violence and so forth. But I would agree that we have a huge range of issues, and it is going to take a new generation to articulate a new focus based on their lived experience. Because I think people in our generation, we know what we experienced, but the world has changed in so many ways that we need new generations to clarify where are the flashpoints for them. SM (01:23:43): The plan of question here is the issue of trust. One of the qualities that has often been defined within the boomer generation, and that really includes the entire generation, even the activists, I have read this in books, it is just they are not a very trusting generation. They have not been trusting from the get-go, particularly with respect to the leaders that represent them in government. And as a result of the lies that many of them have seen and the disappointments that they have had in their leaders from the time they were young, right into their twenties and thirties. And they saw Lyndon Johnson, and they knew that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie. They saw Watergate with Richard Nixon. They were questions about President Kennedy's policy on Vietnam. And anybody who was a student, particularly in the first 10 years of the boomer generation, knew that Eisenhower was the first one that lied on national television about the U2 incident. And I had interviewed one person who said that I believe in leaders. And certainly I always believed in Ike until he did that. And everything changed. So we know from history that many of the people in the (19)60s and (19)70s, the people on college campuses did not trust university presidents. They did not trust their religious leaders in the churches and synagogues. They did not trust anybody in corporate leadership. They did not trust anybody in the leadership responsibilities. So the question I am asking, do you believe that that is a negative or a positive within the generation? And I add one other note. The reason why I asked this question, I was in a Psychology 101 class at Binghamton University in my freshman year, and the professors talked for an hour about the importance of trust. And its basic premise was, if you cannot trust, you will never be a success in life. Yet seems like a lot of the movements that came because we did not trust. Women did not trust men; the anti-war women did not trust the leaders in Washington. You got all the movements, so just whether it's good or bad? SE (01:26:03): Oh boy, I need to pull your question apart again. You have got a lot of specifics that are true. People learn to distrust leaders who were not trustworthy. You end up with Watergate. But the issue, I am not quite sure about the framing of your issue, because you are saying, here is a generation that discovered as leaders were not trustworthy, did that condemn them to never being a success? SM (01:26:40): Well, that was a professor saying that, but I am just – SE (01:26:44): I think what it does is put a burden on us to build a democracy in which we in fact do hold our leaders accountable in such a way that we do trust them. And that is a long-term change that we need to work to bring about. And that requires a lot more engagement at the grassroots level. All those ideals about participatory democracy and so forth. Some are not realizable on a large scale, but they create some values that are very important to figure out ways to bring about. And they are pretty, are plenty of people that came in my generation out of the (19)60s as community organizers working at the grassroots level, doing the kind of things that Barack Obama later did. And so that is not just about a negative attitude saying, "Authority is bad," or you that you cannot trust anyone over 30. Well, most of us are maybe double 30. So, problem. But it does raise a question of how do you create a society in which you have leaders that you do trust? Not because you hand off to them responsibility and do not pay attention, but because you are engaged with them and they are accountable to you. SM (01:28:17): Since I have two minutes, so can I ask one more? SE (01:28:23): Okay. SM (01:28:24): And that is the last question. SE (01:28:25): I am making coffee in the background. So you are just going to hear little [inaudible]. SM (01:28:28): That is okay. What do you think the legacy will be of the generation that grew up after World War II when the history books are written 50, 75 years after they are gone? What will historians and... SE (01:28:46): I do not know. I do not know. I am a historian, and that guessing about the future is something that I have a tough time with because I really do not know. I do think it is a demographic bump. It had a particular shared experience as a cohort or some sub cohorts within it, was involved in massive changes in American society. But I think there is a lot more that we need to know about what comes after, before we can make those judgements. SM (01:29:24): You are right, because we are just talking about boomers. SE (01:29:28): We are in the middle of it still. SM (01:29:29): Yeah. We are in the middle and they can change a lot of things. And the one thing I did not mention when I was talking about healing, and that is the fact, how is the Vietnam Memorial itself, I am sure you have been there – SE (01:29:42): Oh, it is very powerful. SM (01:29:43): Yeah. When Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal a Nation, his goal was not only to heal the veterans and their families, but hopefully to heal the nation from that war. What do you think that is done with respect to the healing process, not only for vets and anti-war people, but the nation as a whole? SE (01:30:01): Well, again, I do not have any data on the nation as a whole. I can tell you my own personal experience of that memorial was extremely powerful. And I have talked about it with my students often when I talk about the Vietnam War and how it tore this country of par. And then talk about that beautiful place, which is like a scar and it names the names and it is a place of mourning and grief, and people leave their wreaths and they leave teddy bears and whatever. It honors without glorifying. And I find that very, very profound. SM (01:30:46): And of course, Diane Carlson Evans did a tremendous job making sure the Women's Memorial was there. SE (01:30:52): Right. SM (01:30:53): And she had to go before Congress, and she had to deal with a lot of issues that women have had to face their whole lives through the hearings. SE (01:31:00): Exactly. SM (01:31:00): Was there any question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask? SE (01:31:04): No, I was not quite sure what your trajectory was, but I will be very interested. When do you think you are going to finish this book? SM (01:31:15): Well, the interviews are going to end at the end of September, and then I am going to be hibernating for about six months and transcribing all of them myself. SE (01:31:24): Wow. SM (01:31:24): I am not going to – SE (01:31:24): That is a lot of work. I know. I have done. SM (01:31:26): Yeah, because I do not trust anybody else. Peter Goldman, who I have gotten to know who wrote the book on Malcolm X said he has had nothing but bad experiences handing off transcripts, even when they were covered by grants, he says, "I end up doing them all over again because of the mistakes that are made." SE (01:31:42): Oh. SM (01:31:43): So anyways, I am hoping that next year it will be done and then I am finishing, like I said, I am going to need two pictures of you though. SE (01:31:55): Okay. SM (01:31:56): And I do not know if you can mail them to my home address or I can email you just two. SE (01:32:02): What kinds of pictures? SM (01:32:03): Just – SE (01:32:04): Why do not you send me an email telling me what you're looking for? I can send them to you on email. SM (01:32:08): Okay. I will. SE (01:32:11): So that would be the best way to do it. SM (01:32:13): Well, thank you very much. SE (01:32:14): You are very welcome. SM (01:32:15): And you have a great day. SE (01:32:15): All right. SM (01:32:15): Bye now. SE (01:32:15): 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. Sara M. Evans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Description An account of the resource Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Duke University and received her PhD from the University of North Carolina. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-08-16 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.10.2016.49 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. 92:32 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/1c4a974523c5fe82804cc82aa5c9966f.jpg f3a5133899f8375ed144f5ca9c803eb9 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/68ab30d39a0c9811c453ac4259d5525a.mp3 5c17c9db6b0e7f2db8d79d0f6d21162c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2009-08-06 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed M. Stanton (Medford Stanton) Evans, 1934-2015 Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and his Master's degree in Economics from New York University.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist, and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his Bachelor's degree in English from Yale University and his Master's degree in Economics from New York University.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 2 Microcassettes Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Beat Writers; Communism; The Goldwater Movement; Free Speech Movement; Change agents; Vietnam policies; College students; Activism ;Peace Corps; Conservatives; Trust; Lyndon B. Johnson; The Hollywood Ten; Joseph McCarthy; Richard Nixon; Birch Bayh; FBI surveillance.\n&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15299,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,16119544],&quot;9&quot;:0,&quot;10&quot;:0,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,3355443],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Beat Writers; Communism; The Goldwater Movement; Free Speech Movement; Change agents; liberals; Civil War; Ken Burns; Edmund Muskie; Vietnam policies; College students; Activism; Peace Corps; Voluntarism; Conservatives; Trust; Lyndon B. Johnson; The Hollywood Ten; Joseph McCarthy; Richard Nixon; Birch Bayh; FBI surveillance<br /></span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 113:29 Subject LCSH Journalists; Authors; Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: M. Stanton Evans Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 6 August 2009 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:03): Again, thank you very much. I will be sending a waiver form too, and you will sign it and then you will see the editing before it is ever. ME (00:00:11): Now, how is this an oral interview subject? Are you just going to publish the interviews, are you making a book from the interviews? SM (00:00:17): Well, no, I am actually making a book from the interviews. I take the picture of each individual in the ambiance, the special moment. That is why I like to interview in person. A few people I have interviewed over the phone, and those people I have met and I have taken their picture, so I can feel comfortable with interview them over the phone. This is an oral history project, but I have written a prologue and an epilogue already and I have written that and it is a lot about me and the magic moments for me as a boomer. This is really for an education for students and for general public to read about the boomer generation, some of the questions I ask. I guess it is also discovery for me, because I remember being in psychology classes. I am trying to still discover who I am as a boomer, and this generation I grew up in, I am fascinated by it. ME (00:01:13): I think your generation is more introspective than mine. SM (00:01:18): Tell you what, I am going to leave this close to you, so speak loud. ME (00:01:22): I will get closer up and closer to you. SM (00:01:25): What? Continue on, right on that note there about the introspective. ME (00:01:29): Well, I am looking, every generation has its own introspection, but our era, the era that is chronicled in this book you have, mine here from long ago, was we were very focused on things outside ourselves. Particularly, I am talking late forties, early (19)50s, I was class of (19)55 college. This was the very height of the coal. Korea was going, and all the McCarthy stuff was going on. There were huge battles being fought, all related to this coal question and the survival of the free world. These are the communists. That riveted our attention and everything we did was kind of, not everything, but a lot of what we did was linked to that. Certainly, in my own case, since this is some of biographical, that was the number one issue for me, as opposed to my intensity for something. That is kind of what I meant by that. SM (00:02:43): Right. When you think of the boomer generation, and again, these are the young people born between, and I think we made a few... ME (00:02:50): After the war, right? SM (00:02:53): Yeah, born right after the war up to 1964. ME (00:02:59): Yeah. That is a 20-year span. SM (00:02:59): Yes. ME (00:02:59): End of the war. SM (00:03:03): Yeah. What are your thoughts? If you look at that group of young people that were in college in the early, they would have graduated beginning in around 1965 from high school, and they would have continued for the next 22 years, basically, graduating from high school, going off to college, and they were involved in all these activities. When you look at the bloomer generation, what would you consider their strengths and weaknesses as a generation of 74 million? I know it is very general, but... ME (00:03:33): Yeah. Well, again, the difference in perspective, and I told you this over the phone, that I had never really thought about these matters so much in generational terms. Certainly, that enters in. There is always the tension between the older people and the younger people. That is just built into the situation. I was much more focused, picking up what we were just talking about a minute ago, on the issue aspect of things. That is, there was not so much how old people were, it is where they stood philosophically. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, in college and just out of college, I was much more focused on aligning myself with other people who thought as I did, as opposed to how old these people were. Some of them were quite old. Some of them were 60, 70 something years old then. Some of them were my age, and some of them were in between. It was much more a question of substance, of philosophy, of policy. Then the generational part of it kind of flowed from the avenue, but the generational thing was then itself divided by that. Of course, you have, and I am sure you know this, you had really on the campuses in the (19)60s, which is this book was written in 1961, before a lot of stuff happened in the (19)60s, you really had two different things going on the campuses. One was just one we have all read about, the SDS, and the new left, and the free speech movement, and all of that glorified in the Ken Kesey novels, and the literature of the times, about all the flower people and so forth and so on. That was sort of all on the left end of things to the degree had any philosophical meaning. Then there were whole other thing on the campuses of the conservative kids, Young Americans for Freedom, the Universal Studies Institute, Young Republicans. I read about those groups in this book, people on this campus way back when. Of course, a lot more happened after that book came up. You really had two different things within the same generation, left versus right. You had all the kids who followed Gene McCarthy, but you had a bunch of other kids who followed Barry Goldwater. These were the forces that were contending for leadership politically and intellectually. Those groups continued fighting through all the intervening years, after the Reagan era, and even into today. That is kind of the way I looked at it. SM (00:07:12): It is interesting. I do this in every interview, one of the first questions centers on commentary made by Newt Gingrich and George Will, who are the most well-known commentators on the boomers in the 1990s. Basically, they would, in every chance they could get, whether it be an article in of a magazine or on television, take a shot at the boomer generation for the breakdown of American society in so many ways, whether it be the breakdown of the American family, the drug culture, the lack of respect for authority, the divisions that really came about that continue today. Do you think their commentary was fair to attack that 74 million boomers? ME (00:07:58): I have to hedge on that a bit, because I am not familiar with what they have said, but based on your paraphrase, I do not agree with that. I do not believe quite apart from you and George, that is another, them personally is another question, I do not believe that the problems that we confront in American society were created by that group of people. They were there long before. There had been a long history of philosophical breakdown in American culture for decades before any of these people were ever born. Bill Buckley's book, God and Man at Yale, came out in 1951. SM (00:08:52): Great book. ME (00:08:53): It is. SM (00:08:54): I have a first edition. ME (00:08:55): I was there when it came out. It is a very, I felt a very accurate indictment of what was then happening in Yale in 1951 or (19)50. That was long before these people ever made the scene. To pin it on them, well, some of them made it worse, some of them continued it, some of them whatever, manifested it, but there are others who opposed it in that same generation. That is the side that I was on, and the opposing side. That was the side that produced Goldwater and Reagan. Not an inconsequential movement that you produced with Ronald Reagan. That is where it came from. That is how I look at it. SM (00:09:50): When you look at that period that you have written about, the McCarthy era, and certainly Buckley back in (19)51, the early boomers were like six, seven years old at that time. It was very, for them to grasp much, but I can still remember as a little boy, watching that Black and white TV on the McCarthy hearings, being on the floor and my mother's in the kitchen, and having him say things to people who were testifying. I am not sure if that is subconsciously, I am not sure if I am one of the millions of baby boomers that were on the floor of the living room as the mother was doing her damn things when it was on television, whether that subconsciously went into boomers in any way in their youth. When you look at boomers, the question I want to ask is, boomers really questioned authority, a lot of them did. Again, maybe only 50 percent, but a lot of them questioned authority and challenged the status quo. That was the area that the beat writers came about. Some people will say the beat writers really had a subconscious or early influence, because they really did not respect authority and they wanted to speak up and be different. I do not know. ME (00:11:01): I remember them very well. I remember Kerouac... SM (00:11:02): Right. ME (00:11:02): Ginsburg and so on. Yeah. SM (00:11:06): Some people even say the (19)60s began with the beats, but what are your thoughts on that (19)50s era that could have had a negative influence on the early elementary school? ME (00:11:17): Well, I think that, I do not know. Again, I guess my approach is so different, it is hard for me to kind of put it in this chronological framework. I see it as a long-playing philosophical battle, cultural battle that way predates the (19)50s. Some of the things that are were said about the (19)60s had been said about the 1920s. The flaming youth, the people who were totally disenchanted because of World War I, that generation, the... SM (00:12:00): Pictures. ME (00:12:13): Yeah, sure. You had all the same, everything that would have been said about the (19)60s had been said about the (19)20s. Then of course, you had the depression in the 1930s. You had a very, very serious problem there with a lot of young people. Communists appeal to younger people at that time because of disillusionment with American institutions. The sweep of it is very, to me, much broader and longer than starting with the boomers. I think they just inherited a lot of stuff. One could argue that it is within that group that some kind of resistance was mounted to these tendencies. Again, I go back to the Goldwater, Reagan, and the Goldwater thing was very much fueled by younger people on the campuses, and who would have been in 1964, in their teens or early twenties. They would be boomers. If you get it from 1945, these people, almost all of them, were born after 1945. They led to the Goldwater movement, which then became the Reagan movement. I know this from being on campus, I took a little bit of a generational approach, but mostly I stressed the opposition within these generations, on either side of the question, which divided the older people and the younger people. I was only 26-7 when I wrote that book. I was certainly at that generation myself. Again, to me, that is what it is about. SM (00:14:06): Yeah, I think a lot of people perceive the early boomer lives, everything really started with a free speech movement or freedom summer, when some of them went south when they could. They were 18 years old, 19 years old. ME (00:14:21): Right. SM (00:14:21): Although the majority of them were, I think most of them were, most of the white participants were Jewish that went south, and a lot of African Americans as well. That whole period, a question I want to ask is whether these movements that came about during this timeframe when the boomers were young, the Civil Rights movement... ME (00:14:47): Let me interrupt you a minute, Steve. You done, Mark? ME (00:14:51): Well, no, I found these. ME (00:14:54): Okay. Do what you can. ME (00:14:56): I can come back. I just have to drop Tina off at work. ME (00:15:00): Okay, why do not want you to do that? I will tell you what, do you have to go right now to drop her off this very second? ME (00:15:05): Well, no, I have five minutes. SM (00:15:09): I will turn this up. You can do whatever you want. My time is your time. It is fine with me, because I am here. ME (00:15:16): Thank you. SM (00:15:20): I think I was, you were responding to my question. What was the question? ME (00:15:24): I do not remember. SM (00:15:24): What was my question? ME (00:15:24): I do not remember. SM (00:15:29): Something, oh, the movements, the different movements. If you look at the bloomer generation, people will define it often as the movements they were involved in. ME (00:15:39): You are talking about free speech movement? SM (00:15:41): Yeah, the Civil Rights movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the women's movement. ME (00:15:45): Yeah. SM (00:15:46): Many of these were offshoots from the Civil Rights movement, the environmental movement, the Native American movement. All these movements came about in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s as offshoots from the Civil Rights movement. They often defined them within this particular generation with the exception of the Civil Rights movement, because it was already pretty strong. Your thoughts on trying to define those movements within this boomer generation? ME (00:16:12): Well, I guess that my big disagreement was all the folks you are talking about. It was very manifest at the time, and has been for the intervening 40 years, was that if you go to what was happening in Berkeley, Mario Savio, all that stuff, the new left, SDS, the Port Huron statement, on and on and on. The people involved in that positioned themselves that they were opposing the establishment, that they were hostile to the reigning orthodoxy of the day. They understood that orthodoxy to be liberal, as did I. They were very critical of liberals, and then I worked with the Liberal Establishment back in 1965. Some of the critiques that were made of the liberals were very stringent from the left, was that conformity and big governments, and centralized power, and executive authority out of control, and many-many things that conservatives had said in the past, many of the left were saying in opposition at Lyndon Johnson or letter to Nixon and so forth. For all I had with those folks was that philosophically speaking, they were not any different from the people they were criticizing. That is, they were, in terms of value theory, they were relativists or agnostic to put a mileage, they were not religiously devout people, except in a few cases, like the [inaudible] or something. Most of them are secular, agnostic people. That was kind of the, or liberal orthodox was also secular. In terms of political and economic action, they started out sounding different, but they were collectives. More power to the government, and more coercion, more welfare, more everything of government, obviously, going on now. This was all the same as the thing they were allegedly opposing, [inaudible] senator, who was secular agnostic collectivist, the very parts Bill Buckley made in God and Man in Yale 14, 15 years before. To me, there was no real likelihood that people of that outlook could do anything substantive to change the problems that we had. They could make them worse. They could commit violence. They could have riots. They could capture school buildings or blow buildings up. They could do things like that. In what way did that change anything for the better? I did not think it did. That was my belief then. I wrote that, I had a book, The Future of Conservatism, in 1968, in which I basically said in that book when I had part of it, what I just said to you. I think the history is one of that. SM (00:19:56): I think I know what you are replying, but I want to hear it from the tape. When the boomers said they were the most, I know I was one of them, and I went to college. Some of my peers felt they were the most unique generation in the history of America. At that particular time, they felt comradeship, in many respects, around different causes, that they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society. That they were going to racism, sexism, homophobia, end war, bring peace to the world, bring sanity, so to speak. Then as they age, take on leadership roles and their ideals would continue. Your thoughts on the way boomers thought, and again, I am not talking to the entire generation. ME (00:20:48): Yeah. SM (00:20:49): Most people say that 15 percent were involved in activism, but that is a lot of people, 70 some million. Just your thoughts on the feelings that the boomers had then. I think some boomers still think that now, even though they are in positions of responsibility. Just your thoughts on that kind of? ME (00:21:10): My comment would be repeating what I already said. I think your point is well taken, that there is a lot of people, and there certainly were a lot of people, there are a lot of people, who had such attitudes, but they were not the entire generation. That has to be kept in mind. I think that the only thing I remember from tour, I used to spend a lot of time on campuses. I must have been on a couple hundred campuses in the 1960s, debating these people, and trying to work the other side of the street. The one thing I remember very well is I go to a campus, anywhere, University of Illinois, or I think I was in Binghamton, and some point and all that... SM (00:21:54): Right. ME (00:21:54): A lot of schools up in New York. I would ask the same question. I would not only speak, but I would interview, "Talk to me. I would only find out what is going on." I used to write, I would write newspaper article about stuff. SM (00:22:13): Right-right. ME (00:22:17): One of the questions I would always ask, "What is it like? What is going on here in this campus?" He said, "Well, mostly the students are just really apathetic," over and over and over again, and they were. What you really had, and I wrote about this a little bit on campus, was you had a whole bunch of people sort of in the middle, who were just typical college students, trying to get on with their lives, and go to football games, and have dates with good looking girls or vice versa if they were girls, and have fun, and get through college, and get on with their lives. That was it. There were minorities on the sort of either end of this thing who were intensely committed to certain causes, the left being the ones that were most publicized. Part of that was the fact, what I was talking about before, they were publicized because they fitted the mental framework of the people in the media. The media folks themselves, products of the campuses, saw and the new left in the various manifestations of that group. They recognized, this is what young people should be doing. They should be out demonstrating for the environment, or they should be opposing the Vietnam War or whatever. That is what the media themselves thought. Therefore, they catered to these young people who were preaching that doctrine and holding BNs. I remember I spoke at those things, and they were very well publicized. The teach-ins and all that stuff on Vietnam, I remember it all very well. The media recognized that and they amplified it. They communicated. On the other side of it got almost no attention for the conservative kids, doing what they were doing. They were promoting Goldwater and they were later promoting Reagan. That was the neglected part of it, this other side, the other (19)60s. That, of course, the other (19)60s turned out to be, politically speaking, the winning side. Reagan wanted to be president. George McGovern did not. That is the way they would play out. There is an imbalance there and perception, because it has been, I well remember, it was just so typical of this thing, that the day after, I think I am right, the day after the Gingrich republicans had won... SM (00:25:20): (19)94. ME (00:25:23): In (19)94, the control of the Congress, both house and Senate, which had not happened in ever before in 40, 50 years, the Washington Post, I could go back and get this, you could pull it up to the website, like the day after the (19)94 election, had a humongous article and all in the style section about alumni of the SDS, where are they now? Hello? The republicans are sweeping into control of the Congress, and The Washington Post is glorifying former members of the SDS. Well, that is kind of illustrative, what I am drawing it all. The focus is over here, but things are going over here that are ignored until there is two. All of a sudden, where did Goldwater come from? Where did Reagan come from? Where did Gingrich come from? What is going on here? They were utterly mystified by the development, because it did not fit any of their preconceptions. SM (00:26:29): Has the media changed at all since... People remember back in Watergate, that Woodward and Bernstein created that investigative journalist mentality. That was very popular for a while, but now it is not. ME (00:26:46): Well... SM (00:26:46): It seems like it is disappeared. ME (00:26:49): Well, I would have a hard, again, lots of things that happened. That is where I spent my life, of course, in media. I am a media person and in journalism, so this was very riveting. The media changed in so many different ways. It is hard to generalize. You now have all this blogging, and you have got all the internet stuff, and you have got talk radio, and you have got cable TV, a zillion different outlets all competing for the attention of the public, which erodes the power of the few institutions that used to be the major determinants of public debate. They were very, how well I remember on the TV, the three networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, the big magazines, many of which do not exist anymore, Look, Life, Collier, Saturday Evening Post, these were hugely important, had six, 7 million subscribers apiece, Time, Newsweek, and major newspapers, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and others. There is kind of a handful of really big media institutions that basically, they are in control, but they certainly influenced discourse in a very powerful way. That is all changed. Now, there all these different things. You have got stuff, I am sure you have noticed, and it gets a fair amount of attention. Newspapers are virtually going out of business. SM (00:28:44): Yeah, several going bankrupt. ME (00:28:45): Losing money, losing subscribers, including the Washington Post and New York Times. SM (00:28:46): The Inquirer had problems. ME (00:28:46): The Inquirer, you could list them all, Chicago Tribune. SM (00:28:46): The San Francisco Chronicles and all of them. ME (00:28:58): On and on, it is a long list. Same thing with the networks. They are struggling because cable TV has eroded. They are... ME (00:29:03): And because cable TV has eroded their audiences, although they are still by far the largest entities in television, but not the way they used to be. And you have many, many alternatives now that did not exist back in the (19)60s. And the internet and the talk radio and blah-blah-blah, it is such a totally different ballgame. So, it is really hard to get your arms around it as to what it all means, I am not sure what it means. I do believe that the media, by and large, I am not talking about the blockage because of who knows, but by and large there is still a strong tilt to the left. And the reason for this is basically that the personnel of these institutions come out of the colleges. That is where they come from. And so that they are, and particularly the ones that are interested in journalism, and I have taught journalism for a long time, there is a definite tendency to the liberal side and the surveys of media personnel over the years. It is an 80 to 90 percent voting liberal Democrats and very large majorities. I mean, I have not seen anything like that recently, I must admit and work for it. But that internal reflects the campuses where you have majority, the seven to eight to one in favor of the liberal position among faculty. And they are the ones training these young people then going to the media. So, I think that that problem is still out there in a very large way, but I do not really have a lot of hard data to back it up. That is just what my impression is. SM (00:30:56): Check to make sure the... because it is 45 minutes each side and we are doing fine, okay. I have a question that we asked actually, I am not going to mention the politician. I am not sure if I mentioned on the phone when I talked to you, but took a group of students to Washington DC about eight years ago. Came to DC to see a former senator. And the question that I have been asking all of my interviewees is a general question. And it is about the concept of healing within the nation because of all the divisions that took place in the (19)60s, many people have thought that we came close to a second civil war with all the divisions between Black and white. I like your thought on that, but the divisions between Black and white, those who for and against the war, the divisions are pretty strong. And whether we, as a nation have healed from all those divisions at that time in the (19)60s and the (19)70s, some people might say that the divisions continue right into the halls of Congress because they do not get along. But I do not think they got along even when FDR was president. So, your thoughts on this particular issue of healing within the boomer generation, and I say this because I go to Gettysburg a lot and I have studied a lot about the north and south coming together as they got older and some healed, some never did. Some went their graves never healing. And the senator was Senator Musky. We asked him his thoughts on whether we had healed as a nation since 1968, because that was a real rough year and he did not respond right away. And the 14 students would look at each other. And finally he had some tears in his eyes and he mentioned he just got out of the hospital and he had been watching the Ken Burn series on the Civil War. And that he was so touched by the loss of all the men and the loss of maybe an entire generation of children that we really have not healed since the Civil War, let alone the (19)60s. Your thoughts on both two thoughts on what Musky had to say and then secondly, just a general question on healing since the (19)60s and early (19)70s. ME (00:33:09): Well again, I have a different way of looking at it. It is a matter of the lenses that you are wearing. I did not feel even in the (19)60s that the country in general was that divided. But I did think, and I still think is that there were certain people within the country who were intentionally hostile to the traditional values of the country. I think that is still true. I think that goes on. There are people that are just the [inaudible] blame America, that if there is some controversy overseas, we are the villains, we are at fault. There is a lot of that back then. Those demonstrators on the campuses in the (19)60s, and I saw them face to face, were not against war. They were against the United States and they glory in the victory of the Viet Cong. They were pro Viet Cong. So, they were not just against the war, they were against the United States and they were against the effort by the United States to oppose communism. I happen to be pretty much a critic of the Vietnam policies that were followed by Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon. I was never a big fan of any of those policies. But these people, as I said, I went toe to toe with them campus after campus, after campus. I debated and I was at these teachings. I spoke at these teachings. There was an intense hatred of America there. It was not philosophical oppositions of war, violence of the country. But those people did not represent very much. Those people with those attitudes. Praising the Viet Cong, the people that rejoiced in the fall of Saigon, and they did rejoice in them, did not represent the large segment of American society. Never did. And I think that is gone on. I think that is continuing to this day. There are people that sort of ritualistically take a stance like that on any foreign policy question. We saw it very much in the opposition of President Bush. And again, I was no big fan of his. I think he made a lot of mistakes, but just the hatred of him and Cheney and went way beyond just policy disagreement. And it really was sort of an extension of what I remember seeing back in the (19)60s, this Vietnam stuff. I do not think that those attitudes, which however can be very powerful, represented any large percent of the American people. I mean, most Americans even then and now hold to fairly traditional conventional ideas and do not want to see any big revolutions and any kind of violence or any kind of Vietnam type demonstrations, even though they might be upset about the course of policy. And I have certainly have been, but I am not out the streets bringing turn cars over and buildings. And so again, it is my different way of looking. SM (00:37:02): How important were those college students ending that war in Vietnam? ME (00:37:06): Well they were pretty important. There was a synergism of the college students, the college faculties even more so and the media. And of course, the thing that was different then and which was driving a lot of that had nothing at all to do or very little to do with the merits of the Vietnam War, although it had many things longer than I thought. It was the draft. They did not want to be drafted. Once the draft was not there, you do not see that anymore. There is no draft. So the college students are not in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in all these wars. That is a huge difference. And so that was what was driving a lot of it. SM (00:38:01): Would you say that a lot of times people, I am using a general statement here, but that when you think of the young people of that era, you think of activism. The term activism. I am not talking about volunteerism now. I am talking about activism now. Now we have on college campuses now, and we have had since the (19)90s and the (19)80s, (19)90s, massive amount of volunteers. And if you read the literature on higher education, they say when you have greater numbers of volunteerism or a large percentage of volunteerism, that is the sign of a conservative era. I do not know why people say that, but- ME (00:38:35): I do not either. SM (00:38:39): But that volunteerism is when a person commits himself or herself to so many hours a week toward a cause. But when you think of activism, you think of a 24/7. It is part of being, the human being, it is the whole person's life fighting for issues and causes. And so sometimes people will separate that group of people, the Boomers from the Generation Xers and now the Millennials as a totally different group because they were more 24/7 as opposed to today's young people that are two hours a week or mandatory in volunteer work and not really activists. ME (00:39:19): Well usually if someone is [inaudible] I did not really know. This volunteerism thing is big now, right? SM (00:39:25): It has been big for over 20 years. ME (00:39:27): Oh, it shows how much I know, because I was not aware of that. I knew it was out and how big it was. And that is good. I do not think there is anything particularly conservative about it, but [inaudible] volunteer with a Peace Corps or Action or whatever and that might or might not be conservative [inaudible] But if [inaudible] by desire to help other people, that is a good thing. And philosophically, and I would describe it, but the other thing you are describing, the activism that is the groups I was talking about earlier. Those are the people who are committed, philosophically committed. They are not just partially involved. They are really involved. And so, they are the ones that fight on either end of the spectrum for dominance, in terms of the debate and rhetoric and substance of policy. And I think that is always been the case. Now, I think what has happened recently is a lot of the people that things went in two different directions. All the people from that era back then and now, of course would be in their (19)50s and (19)60s. SM (00:40:53): Yeah. Make sure we are doing okay here. Let is see here, how are we doing? ME (00:41:03): Must be getting done [inaudible]. SM (00:41:03): Should click friend. ME (00:41:10): That the people, alumni of that, all those fights that I was witnessing and in part as a participant in the (19)60s, which is the most intense part of this process that you are talking about, went in two very different ways. And by and large, the more conservative kids went off and one thing that happened is the conservative kids tend to be more oriented toward existing institutions. So, they are looking to make careers of themselves in business or law or medicine or whatever it might be engineering. And so they have very strong vocational orientation. So, they are not going to be out there all the time as activists in the sense that you just defined it. The more leftward kids are not committed to existing institutions. They tend to be much more verbalizers. They tend to be writers, they tend to be speakers, they tend to be the kind of folks that go into media and/or into back into academe. And so you have a buildup on the two sides of this of a very, very strong imbalance to the left on the campuses. And it replenishes itself as more of the people who graduated of that outlook, they tend to come back to the campuses and so what you have now is the tenured people from 40 years ago- SM (00:42:55): I am going to switch the tape. ME (00:42:56): Go ahead. SM (00:42:56): That should have... ME (00:43:08): There is people now who were activists back in the (19)60s who are now professors, much more so than conservatives, have many conservative professors are out there? And the conservatives either went into business or some went into politics. And so you have a lot of people of that generation are Reagan staffers or whatever, work for Republican administrations. And there is a real divide between the philosophical, intellectual, verbalizing people and the more practical everyday people based on these philosophical differences. And I think that is what you have got now in campuses and then that feeds into the media and then it is a self-perpetuating cycle. SM (00:44:04): How did that develop? How did conservative students really develop knowing that the issue of trust is something that seems to be lacking, in my opinion, amongst many voters? Because of what they saw failure in their leaders, lying from their leaders. I say this because we now know about Lyndon Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin and all the fake numbers that came back that McNamara would announce that young people saw on the Black and white television every night. Of course, Watergate and Richard Nixon and then in the revelations even more recently of President Kennedy and his possible link with the Diem overthrow. And then, of course, Eisenhower had lied on national television about the U2 incident. And then you have got the whole issue of, even in later years, Brown Reagan was hard to tarnish. But the Iran-Contra comes out of there. And they even questioned Gerald Ford that there was a behind the scenes move to pardon President Nixon and it was all- ME (00:45:11): Well he did pardon Nixon. SM (00:45:13): Yeah, he did but the question is you cannot trust him, because now he is pardoning him. There was no trust in any of the leaders. What does this due to a generation of young people that cannot trust? ME (00:45:25): It makes you cynical and but it did not affect just... it affected a lot of conservatives kids too. They did not trust their leaders. You talk about the Kennedy overthrow Diem, I knew about that at the time. There was no secret. And that was just a terrible thing. And of course, it led to this collapse of all kinds of chances of resistance in Vietnam, because there was no leadership, the whole thing just went down the drain. But I knew about that. I wrote about it. I wrote a whole chapter done in a book I wrote in the (19)60s about what happened in Vietnam and how that was done. Well it is pretty hard to have much confidence in the leadership that does something like that. Each of the overthrow and murder of our alleged ally. And I have since found, I have a chapter on my book that they tried to do the same thing to [inaudible] to overthrow him, but that was thwarted but I have the documents that show it. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff going on. That was under Truman, the actions and State Department. They are planning to overthrow [inaudible] in 1950. So, it makes you very cynical and very, very doubtful about the honesty of the people running this country when things like that are going on, and I certainly, Lyndon Johnson, I am a native of Texas and I knew about Lyndon Johnson a long before it became common knowledge. Anybody in Texas knew how he got elected in the first place, 1948 when they stole votes down in Duval and Jim Wells counties and people called it Land Slides Lyndon he was called. And the Caro books. You have read them, Robert Caro biography of Johnson. SM (00:47:30): I read the first one. I did not read the second one. ME (00:47:33): Well it is all pretty negative on Lyndon and it was all basically true. And so that pretty hard to have much confidence in that that and again, Nixon [inaudible] here where he and Kissinger were bludgeoning two in Vietnam to knuckle under has come out in recent tapes. Well how do you have any confidence in people that do stuff like that? So yeah, most of the people I knew and was involved with way back when were pretty much disillusioned with a lot of these. We did not know everything we know now. We knew a lot. We knew about Diem, we knew about that and we were very disillusioned by it. No question. SM (00:48:28): The Boomers who, if they were cognizant again of McCarthy and what was going on in the (19)50s, the red baiting and that whole business. And of course, certain movies have come out in recent years, documentaries on the Hollywood 10 and certainly McCarthy. And then you get the enemies list of Richard Nixon in the (19)60s. And then you have got most recently in George Bush, the Patriot Act, that they all kind of come together, a lack of almost a fear of speaking up. Fear of expressing one's views. And if you do, you are either going to go before a hearing in front of McCarthy for being a communist. Your career is going to be destroyed by Richard Nixon's people for standing up against the Vietnam War. And then of course, Patriot Act, even George Bush. What does this say about America? And this is all during the time that the Boomers have been growing into old age. ME (00:49:29): Well I guess I would have to take everything you just said and go step by step through it, because I do not agree with it. And first of all, the McCarthy thing, I wrote a 600 page book going into these questions. And my brother did not call anybody before for disagreeing with him. I do not know of anybody, maybe a couple of people, but most of the people that he was looking at, and the charges he brought were based on information that came from the FBI about the infiltration of our government by communists and Soviet agents. And this stuff had been covered up. It was denied. And we are getting a lot of this information now from recent disclosures from FBI files. I have hundred thousand page of FBI files downstairs. And that is what my book is mostly based on and these files show that these people McCarthy was pursuing were basically what he said they were. They were not just dissenters from [inaudible] So you got that whole thing. That is a whole big deal itself. Then you get into the Hollywood thing. Those were communists. Now, you may want to argue that so what? But they were not just... people like Dalton Trumbo. SM (00:50:52): Absolutely Trumbo. ME (00:50:54): Albert Maltz. They were Stalinist agents. They were communists. They are clearly so, they had party cards. So again, these are not just dissenters, these are agents of a hostile foreign power and Patriot Act? What the Patriot Act tried to do, and I am not sure what the details of it anymore, [inaudible] We had basically in the (19)70s destroyed all of our intelligence agencies. And prevented the FBI from surveilling terrorists, hostile people in our country who were pouring in here, pretty much without any things to hinder them. They were running all around. SM (00:51:54): Is that because of Richard Nixon and they got tired of the enemies list and they give them a, "We are not going to do that anymore." That kind of mentality? ME (00:52:15): [inaudible] I was on that enemies list, by the way. I personally know it, because I was a conservative dissenter against Nixon. SM (00:52:15): It must be a badge of honor then. ME (00:52:15): Well I took care of us. I was never too worried about being on Richard Nixon's enemies list. But what happened was there was a crusade in the Congress led by Teddy Kennedy, Birch Bayh by who was then senator, the father of the Senators in there now. I knew Birch Bayh, I was in Indiana then. And the Civil Liberties Union to dismantle all our intelligence agents. And their position was that you could not conduct surveillance of somebody unless they were in the act of committing a crime. It was just mere advocacy or mere membership at the time in each party or mere membership in any other group was not itself sufficient to justify being under surveillance by the FBI, so called Levy Guidelines imposed under Gerald Ford. And these guidelines basically put the FBI, and then there was FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, these enactments, that was (19)78, basically put the FBI out of the antiterrorism business. So when people were coming in here to do what happened on September 11th, nobody was minding the store. Every entity that could have done anything about them had been shut down. So, what I have known, all those people had died September 11th, died because of them, so the Patriot Act is an effort to correct that. SM (00:54:04): You are a scholar. What were the books that had the greatest influence on the Boomer generation when they were college students when they were teenagers, college students, and young adults? Because there were a lot of non-non-fiction books written at that period that were directly linked to that generation. Plus, there were a lot of novels written by... and then you had the beat writers from the (19)50s. Are there specific ones that you remember? ME (00:54:36): Well again, you got a divide because there was the left and the right. And I was much more familiar with the right. I know the books that were read by young conservatives, they were pretty much the same for a number of years. I think it has changed now. But one of the books that was most influential, although it was mostly a political book, was the Goldwater book, Conscience of a Conservative. Very widely read and it was readable because it was short. It was not a huge tome and it helped promote Goldwater, but also promoted his ideas. So that was very important. But then there were other books that I remember reading myself when I was in college that were read by these other young folks, the Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. Ideas have Consequences by Richard Weaver, The Witness by Whittaker Chambers was white is red and so forth. That was on the conservative side, on the other side. I do not know. I know that there were certain writers who were popular for a time being, but I do not know how much influence, I remember there was guy named Paul Goodman, who was very widely [inaudible] and I read a lot of his stuff and some, what he said to say made sense. SM (00:56:05): He was kind of linked to some of the beats too. ME (00:56:07): He was. SM (00:56:07): Some of his writing. ME (00:56:09): There was an overlap. I remember reading Kerouac and I was about that age. Kerouac, if he was still, I guess deceased. SM (00:56:19): Yeah. ME (00:56:19): If he was alive, he would be about my age. I am 75 years old. But back then I remember reading Kerouac, On the Road and those books. And I kind of identified with some of it. There was this libertarian side to it, the hostility to oppressive authority. There was a lot of that on the right, the Libertarians and people that they are still out there. I do not know if you are familiar of the Cato Institute. SM (00:56:52): Oh yes. ME (00:56:52): Well that is where they are coming from. They are very, very libertarian. They are very against big government. They do not like any kind of big government. They would be more, also, they would be sort [inaudible] what you feel about the Patriot Act. I am not, I am Conservative but I am also a libertarian. And I believe in the limited government of free markets and individual liberty. And I consider that an important component of my own philosophy. So, the beats had some appeal for people like me as well as the more left-wing types. SM (00:57:33): A couple of books that were very popular in the late (19)60s was the Making of a Counterculture by Theodore Roszak, which was- ME (00:57:43): I never read that. SM (00:57:44): And then a Greening of America by Charles Reich. ME (00:57:47): I did read that. SM (00:57:49): And of course, Ken Kesey, who you have already mentioned and Wolf and a lot of his novels. ME (00:57:56): Tom Wolfe? SM (00:57:58): Yeah, Tom Wolfe. ME (00:57:59): Who was the right winner though? SM (00:58:01): Yeah. Mailer. Mailer was red. ME (00:58:03): Norman Mailer. SM (00:58:03): Um, Mailer, Mailer was [inaudible]. ME (00:58:03): Oh, Mailer. Of course, he had been out there a long time. He was actually the first. SM (00:58:04): Right. ME (00:58:11): All true, but all those books were out there, and I am sure had their impact. Wolfe is the one that is different because he is still around. SM (00:58:18): Yeah. Kurt Vonnegut is another one. ME (00:58:22): Vonnegut, mm-hmm, from Indianapolis, and Vonnegut's Hardware, I remember that. I was in Indianapolis for many, many years. I guess you remember that? SM (00:58:29): Mm-hmm. ME (00:58:35): And Wolfe, I could detect, even back when, like the Kesey book and the other stuff he wrote, very interesting, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and Radical Chic. But you could see that he was an equal opportunity critic to me. He was puncturing. Radical Chic was about Leonard Bernstein. I always remember reading that. It was about this cocktail party being thrown on Park Avenue for the Black Panthers, you know. And he ridiculed them. So you see there was kind of a conservative side to Wolfe that became more and more apparent later, Bonfire of the Vanities, and so forth. And he was very influential. And, of course, The Right Stuff, you read things by Tom Wolfe, you do not see too many people whom he respects, but he respected those guys. SM (00:59:33): Yeah, when you think of the (19)50s and (19)60s, you think of Hugh Hefner, too, and Playboy, because- ME (00:59:34): You certainly do. SM (00:59:38): Oh, my God. That is an important... He evolved during the boomer lives. ME (00:59:43): Well, of course Playboy was popular when I was in college so it predates the [inaudible]. But, yeah, of course the playboy ethic and all of that was just a kind of this erosion of traditional standards where anything goes, and if it feels good, do it, and all of that. And that is contributed to some of our problems, no question. SM (01:00:12): I have a question here again. I have got some names here that I would just like you to respond to, some terms and some personalities, if you do not mind? When you think of the Vietnam Memorial, what does that mean to you? ME (01:00:28): It means a lot of people died in a bloody treadmill war, very sad, very tragic, because it was a war... And I am no military type, I do not know much about it first-hand, but I do remember all of that. It was a war, basically, that was fought without any intention of winning it. And there was [inaudible] Goldwater saying, "Why not victory?" Just saying it was the same thing that happened in Korea under General MacArthur, and so you have a lot of people who died, and it is a very tragic thing. That is what I think of it. SM (01:00:59): Why did the war end, to you? Why did we leave? ME (01:01:18): Because we did not have the will to win, and the Congress was undermining what little that we were doing. I remember all of it very well. That was when you had that whole bunch who were elected in (19)74 who were refusing... And I am no Kissinger fan, believe me, but he was trying to play both ends against the middle, and he needed more aid from the Congress, and they would not give it to him. So, we just bailed out once they [inaudible]. SM (01:01:49): When you think of the (19)60s, again, when these boomers where young, we were always talking about white people, white Americans, but certainly African-Americans was a very crucial part of the (19)60s. ME (01:02:00): It certainly was. SM (01:02:00): In fact, Kent State is very meaningful in many ways, because there were no African-Americans to be seen that day. One was near the... They were kind of escorted away. And what was happening on college campuses is that, in (19)69 and (19)70, there was a split where African-Americans just basically, "We are going to fight for civil rights here in America, and you can go ahead and be against the Vietnam War," even though people were saying the Vietnam War had more people of color serving than there were white Americans. And of course that became famous in speech against the Vietnam War. Just your thoughts, when we are talking about boomers and we are conservative students and liberal students to the left, where do the African-Americans fall into the whole scheme? ME (01:02:49): Well, I think you just stated it very well. I remember seeing, not that I knew a lot about it... I did not and do not. But it was very clear that the impulse of the anti-Vietnam stuff was white kids. You did not see too many Black faces, and I did not see too many Blacks there. They had their own struggle, and that was the civil rights struggle. And so, there is a real division there. I think you summed it up really well. And so there were two different things going on there. And I think that it confuses things to kind of lump it all together, but [inaudible] very different things. SM (01:03:36): Yeah, Tommie Smith and John Carlis with the fists in (19)68 at the Olympics. ME (01:03:41): I remember it well. I remember it well. SM (01:03:43): A couple of other things here? What do you think of when you think of Kent State and Jackson State? ME (01:03:56): I think they were, again, great tragedies. You got to remember that the... Jackson State, I do not remember too well, but Kent State, Neil Young, [inaudible] and Ohio. You had scared kids on both sides of that. The Ohio National Guard kids were not any different than the kids who were demonstrating. They were trying to control a scene that they could not control, and so that was the tragedy of it. And those demonstrations, it is a pretty well-known fact, were calculated to produce things like that. The hard left wanted these confrontations. They wanted police brutality. They wanted violence. They wanted open conflict. They felt that would spark... You go back to the days of rage of all those people, the [inaudible] and on, and on, and on, that is what they were trying to do. They were trying to provoke [inaudible] it is all there. It goes all the way back to the Bolshevik Revolution. That is the way you ratchet up your revolution. You get people out in the street. You have conflict with the police or military, somebody gets hurt or killed, that becomes the pretext for more, and it escalates, and that was its deliberate strategy. Those kids that died at Kent State, they were tragic victims of this process. Now who, in fact, is responsible for it individually? I do not know. That is what I think about it. SM (01:05:38): I know some of the students at Kent State that were involved in that. ME (01:05:38): Very sad, very sad. SM (01:05:53): When you think of Watergate, what does that mean to you? ME (01:05:55): It means- SM (01:05:55): What did that mean to America? ME (01:06:00): I got to tell you, Steve, it was the biggest exercise in hypocrisy I ever saw. Nothing that Nixon was accused of doing had not already been done by Kennedy and Johnson, and you mentioned some of the things earlier. They did everything Nixon was accused of doing, and more. The difference was, they got away with it. SM (01:06:25): And he did not admit. He made it much deeper by not admitting it. ME (01:06:28): Well, Kennedy and Johnson did not admit it, but they were not challenged. SM (01:06:32): Right. ME (01:06:33): There is a book by Victor Laskey called [inaudible]- SM (01:06:36): I think I have that book. What is the name of it? ME (01:06:42): It Did not Start With Watergate, and it delves into all that stuff. I mean, they had, again, I wrote about it in Time, plans to use the Internal Revenue Service to silence their critics, use the Fairness Doctrine to keep people from broadcasting hostile broadcasts, this was Kennedy and Johnson, using the power of the FBI to investigate people they did not like. They did break-ins. They did wiretapping. They [inaudible] rifled his office. They drove him out of the government because he was a dissenter. The list is long. And so, there was not a single thing that Nixon was accused of doing that had not already been done by his predecessors. The difference was that the media, Washington Post in particular, hated Nixon, and a lot of left hated him because of the Hiss case. And, of course, he was not any particular favorite of mine. Like I said, I was on the enemies list. I was chairman, at that time, of the American Conservative Union, and we had supported opposition to Nixon in the 1972 primaries by John Ashbrook. So, I wound up on one of these enemies lists as the chairman of this thing. [inaudible] interviewed me about it, and I was not in the least concerned that I was on list. So I was no big Nixon fan, but the whole Watergate was just a complete exercise in hypocrisy. SM (01:08:25): Obviously, that year, 1968, so many things happened then. Your thoughts on that year, not only with Tommie Smith and what was going on at the Olympics, but the (19)68 Democratic Convention, which led to the Chicago Eight trials, the Chicago police going up against protesters. ME (01:08:39): Mayor Daly. SM (01:08:40): Yeah, even some politicians were arrested, and even, I think, Dan Rather was arrested, or something like that. ME (01:08:46): [inaudible]. SM (01:08:48): And then there were a lot of other things. Of course, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the race that year, just so much. ME (01:08:55): That is true. Well, yeah. I wrote about it at the time, and I would have to go back and look, but what I remember writing when I used to be was that what was happening in that Chicago convention, it was a culmination of a long series of things, was the crack up of the Democratic coalition. On one side, you have got Mayor Daly and the big city machine politicians who were supporting Humphrey, who was, of course, the surrogate for Lyndon. On the other side, you had the Eugene McCarthy people, you had the [inaudible] Kennedy camp, Bobby Kennedy campaign. And these elements were at each other's throats within the Democratic Party. And that is what that convention showed. And everything that went on there was internal fighting among Democrats is what it was. And that led, of course, to the collapse of the Democratic Party in that year's election and the election of Richard Nixon, with George Wallace getting 11 million votes, or whatever he got, which was quite a [inaudible] because that separated the South, the Old Roosevelt Coalition, it was all these things. It was the big city bosses. It was the left-wing intellectuals. It was the academics. It was the Blacks. It was Southern Democrats. It was everything. There was a coalition of all these people. That all fell apart in (19)68 and that was the main thing, I think, that showed. SM (01:10:43): And Senator McCarthy was the first person I interviewed for this process back when I started this and my parents were ill, and now I am back finishing it up. But I asked the question I wanted him to answer. I asked him, "Why did you drop out?" I just want an answer, because I have read his books and I know he still- ME (01:11:06): What did he say? SM (01:11:08): Oh, he still got very upset when I asked him about Bobby Kennedy. He said, "Read about it in my book." [inaudible]. ME (01:11:12): He did not like Bobby Kennedy. SM (01:11:18): He did not answer me. He did a roundabout. ME (01:11:18): [inaudible]. SM (01:11:20): I think that is the ultimate question. I saw him three times in my life, and that is the one question I think a lot of people want answered, "Why did you drop out?" ME (01:11:30): I do not think he could have won. I think he knew that. But you would know better. SM (01:11:37): It petered out. He was still strong at the convention. He had a lot of people there. He did not want people to be involved in the violent stuff because they were clean-cut. ME (01:11:47): No, clean for Gene. SM (01:11:50): Yeah. ME (01:11:50): I knew Senator McCarthy. [inaudible]. I did not know the other one. I knew this one. SM (01:11:55): Right. ME (01:11:55): And I got to know him a little bit later, let me say. Also, he was very different from his image. He was not a radical person at all, but he was deeply offended by the war, the way it was being conducted. He did not like Lyndon Johnson. He certainly did not like Bobby Kennedy. And I think what you ran into, and you would know better than I if you interviewed him several times, was that Bobby Kennedy, in his view, opportunistically jumped on a bandwagon that Gene McCarthy had created. SM (01:12:31): Yes. And I believe he thought that there was an agreement that he would not do it. And within a matter of less than three weeks’ time, he did it. ME (01:12:39): I think that is what happened. SM (01:12:43): And then he said, "Read about it in my book." I got that on tape, "Read about it in my book." ME (01:12:46): I think you know the answer to your own question. SM (01:12:49): I will go through these real fast. Just your comments on the hippies and yippies? They were two different unique groups? ME (01:12:58): Hippies and yippies? Hippies were part of this whole thing I was talking about earlier. They are flower children, going to San Francisco with a flower in your hair, and all that. And, I do not know, it was kind of a circus. I do not know what it signified of any great importance but it was there. You had a whole bunch of people drifting around smoking dope and thinking that that is the answer to the world's problems, then you have got problems. And we did. And so the yippies were a tougher breed. I saw some of them down in Miami Beach at the (19)72 Democrat convention. They were a little tougher guys, but I am not sure what they signified except they were hard... they were more the activist types. They were not just floating around saying, "Peace and love." They were activists who were trying to do left-wing things. SM (01:14:06): I thought it was interesting that Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were the yippies, and I saw Jerry when he came to Ohio State. ME (01:14:13): I saw Jerry. SM (01:14:13): He was a really good speaker, and they were both very good speakers. One thing that is tragic, and I will put this as a note, probably, someplace in the book, is that Abbie Hoffman committed suicide. ME (01:14:23): Did he? SM (01:14:24): Yeah. He had $2,500 left. He was living in an apartment in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It is outside Philadelphia. He committed suicide, and in the note, he said, "No one was listening to me anymore." And you know what is really interesting is that the Abbie Hoffman that we saw in the yippies and the Abbie Hoffman that kind of hid all those years, he had changed his look on his face. He had been working to save the Hudson for many, many years. People did not even know who he was. He had to hide his name because he was in hiding. And he came out on the Phil Donahue show, I will never forget that, when I was living in California. He was a man that was totally committed to the cause of saving that river, and people were not listening to him because they kept going back to that earlier period. ME (01:15:14): Yeah, in life, as in the movies, you get typecast. And once you have a strong identity in one thing, it is real hard for people to related to something different. And what you just told me is news to me. But Hoffman and Rubin, I did not know Hoffman. I met Rubin once, and he definitely was a piece of work. I do not remember Hoffman, but Rubin, obviously in some ways, was not serious. He was joking at just anything, craziness. But I guess it all had a serious intent. What exactly it was, I am not sure. SM (01:15:56): They actually debate each other later. ME (01:15:56): Did they? SM (01:15:57): Because he ended up becoming a business man, and Abbie was still Abbie. ME (01:16:05): Well, there you are. SM (01:16:05): A couple of other terms, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which, actually, they took over the anti-war movement in early (19)70s, they were very powerful? Your thoughts on them? ME (01:16:09): I do not know much about them. Then [inaudible] came out of that. SM (01:16:19): Yeah, but a lot of people in that movement did not like him. ME (01:16:20): Yeah. I gathered that from some discussion [inaudible] but I really do not know a thing about them. SM (01:16:28): Here are some of the names, just quick replies. You have already kind of mentioned about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, so I do not have to say anything more. Timothy Leary? ME (01:16:35): Yeah, he is out there with the flower people and the LSD and the drugs and tuning in and turning on and dropping out. What can one say? Anything where you get into drug things, it is a little hard to have any rational discourse about it because it is not a rational- SM (01:16:57): Your thoughts on the Black Panthers, which includes Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis? That, George Jackson, Norman, the one that was killed in Chicago? Just your thoughts on the Black Panther Party? ME (01:17:17): Well, I think the Panthers were a very serious power. I had run into them on the campuses. They were pretty formidable folks. They would come to my lectures with bandoliers of ammunition, and so on. I remember that. Interesting that Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver, I do not know about Kathleen, but Eldridge Cleaver seemed very, very disenchanted with the whole left thing. And what disenchanted him was he went to places like Cuba, and he went into Russia, and he hated it. And, towards the end, he became almost a conservative [inaudible]. SM (01:18:01): I remember that. And he also was living on the streets of LA, very sad. His wife is a lawyer, a very successful lawyer at Emory University Law School. ME (01:18:10): Is she down at Emory? SM (01:18:11): Yeah, she is very good. ME (01:18:15): No, that is the sad thing about some of those folks, and Hoffman, that they ended up like that. SM (01:18:21): Yeah, he was shot, you know? ME (01:18:24): Yeah, well, a lot of them died. SM (01:18:26): Yeah, Angela Davis is still going strong, a professor Santa Cruz. ME (01:18:31): Professor at Santa Cruz, right. SM (01:18:33): Yeah, Bobby Seale is writing cookbooks, or something like that. ME (01:18:36): Is he? SM (01:18:38): Yeah, just a quick comment on Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew? ME (01:18:40): I was never a huge fan of Nixon. Initially, I was not of Agnew. But Agnew, contrary to most people in politics, moved from left to right. Usually, particularly in Republicans, it goes the other way. Nixon is a good example. Agnew started out as a Rockefeller person. I do not know if you knew that? SM (01:19:10): No, I did not. ME (01:19:11): He was the Governor or Maryland here. SM (01:19:12): Right. ME (01:19:13): And he sort of identified with the Rockefeller wing of the Party. And that is one reason Nixon picked him was that he thought he had a way of getting Rockefeller without Rockefeller. And but then Agnew sort of blossomed as this right wing critic in the media, something like Pat Buchanan. And I met Agnew once, only once when he was Vice President. I wrote about him in National Review. And I think that he was sort of truly turned in a more right wing direction. And then, of course, he crashed and burned in (19)73 and that stuff caught up with him from Maryland. I do not know the details about that, but I remember that happening. And Nixon, I always felt, was trying to overcome the problems that he created for himself. In his case, he was always trying to reach out more and more to people on the other side. And I am not sure how philosophically-oriented he might have been. I give him top marks for what he did in his case, [inaudible]. For whatever reason, he was crucial in that case. I have been studying that case very carefully in a book that I am working on. And he was never forgiven for that by the left to this day, and I think he was trying to make up for that in some of things he did. Of course, he was very ambitious. He wanted to be President, became President. And it was always this balancing, and that is what I did not like. SM (01:20:53): Eugene McCarthy? Just quick thoughts on him, and George McGovern? ME (01:21:05): I knew both of them. I personally liked both of them. Gene McCarthy, I just happened to meet. We shared a dais together at some meeting back in the 70s, and I enjoyed chatting with him. I thought he was a very interesting and intelligent person, very different from almost anybody else in American politics that I have known, but liked him. And I supported him in (19)68 being a Republican. Senator McGovern, I debated in 1973. We had a great debate in Indianapolis at Butler University, 3,000 people. SM (01:21:53): Wow. ME (01:21:55): And I liked him. I do not know if he liked be. I thought he was a well-meaning man, a man of principle, principles I did not necessarily agree with, who maybe himself went through some changes later, and I do not know that. But I found he was an amiable fellow and I liked him. SM (01:22:24): He was a World War Two hero and he never talked about it. ME (01:22:25): He was. He was. SM (01:22:27): 28 missions over Europe. ME (01:22:28): Right. That is right. SM (01:22:30): I think he got a Purple Heart for that, and he never talked about it. ME (01:22:32): No, he did not. SM (01:22:33): He was a humble person. ME (01:22:34): He was. SM (01:22:34): John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, LBJ? The three of them, just quick comments? Just your thoughts? ME (01:22:47): The Kennedys are very, very different from their image. They were, essentially, conservative. And I would just point out to you, you were talking about Joe McCarthy, they were friends with Joe McCarthy. SM (01:22:48): Right. ME (01:22:48): And Bobby Kennedy worked for Joe, [inaudible]. And old man Kennedy, Joe Kennedy was McCarthy's [inaudible]. SM (01:22:48): And he dated Sargent Shriver's wife at one time. ME (01:23:22): Yes, Eunice. He did. And there are many interconnections there, McCarthy and the Kennedys. And Kennedy's people were very much of the ilk of conservative, Catholic Democrats. And Jack Kennedy did a mixture of things in his very short time as president, some you would not know. Some of the things he did were [inaudible] tax cuts, were used by the late Jack Kemp to justify the Reagan tax cuts, supply side stuff under Jack Kennedy back in the early (19)60s. And he had all the anti-Communist rhetoric and the Cold War-type posture. But then he had other people around him like Schlessinger and Sorensen. Certainly Sorensen had a very different outlook. So, again, a balancing act. They are all kind of doing things. Bobby, I think, was a much tougher customer, and maybe more calculating. And I think that is what Gene McCarthy did not like. But, again, if you look at the way Bobby Kennedy ran in (19)68, he was running on, basically, a conservative campaign. "We got to get away from big government," is what he was saying. "We need reforms, decentralization of tariffs," talking about stuff like that. But, of course, he was shot down in June of (19)68, so that was the end of that. But they were very different from the image of this Camelot stuff. SM (01:25:12): Your thoughts, quick at the end, McNamara, who just passed away? ME (01:25:20): I never cared for McNamara. I did not know much about him. I thought that the whole approach to the war, which he later repudiated- SM (01:25:32): In retrospect, yeah. ME (01:25:34): Yeah, it was wrong. All this body count stuff. And, of course, you look at it logically, and I am not military expert at all [inaudible], but if you have a war in which you are not trying to win, where you are just trying not to lose, and you do not really try to take strategic objectives... In other words, they are not trying to go out and take Hanoi. They were not trying to do that. SM (01:25:57): Is this the new one? You can continue, okay. ME (01:25:57): Well, again, remind me what we were talking about? SM (01:26:17): You were talking about McNamara. ME (01:26:19): Yeah. You look at the situation there... Getting back to World War Two there was a lot of, "So, today we captured whatever. We crossed the Rhine. We are now on the outskirts of Berlin." That is the way you measured what was happening in that war. Vietnam was not like that. No advancing through, taking Hanoi, or whatever. So how do you measure who is winning and who's losing? The answer is how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count. ME (01:27:03): ... answering how many people you have killed, and that is where the body count came from. I remember even McNamara was [inaudible]. He was seemingly very warm and very [inaudible] as secretary. SM (01:27:12): In my interview with Senator McCarthy, which in retrospect had just come out within six months after I interviewed him, he said it was a bunch of garbage. He was furious at him. ME (01:27:20): Oh, McNamara. SM (01:27:22): Yeah, at McNamara. Because he goes off in (19)67 to go to Aspen and ski, when he left in (19)67. He knew years before that this was a failure, and he should have told President Johnson and really been strong with him. ME (01:27:36): Well, J. McCarthy would have known a lot more about it than I do. SM (01:27:42): A couple other names here. George Wallace, thoughts on him? ME (01:27:45): Wallace was a major factor in what we were talking about earlier, the collapse of the Democratic Coalition, that and the Roosevelt Coalition. That had depended on holding the South. The solid South always meant solidly democratic. Thanks to Wallace, although it had been eroding before, by (19)68 that was no longer the case. And the whole nature of our politics changed because the South was uncoupled from the Democratic Party. Now, if you look at the majorities, most of the people are Republicans. By far, the largest number of their senators are from down there, in the South. Two Republican senators from Mississippi, two from Texas, two are from Georgia, two from South Carolina and so on. Well, prior to 1968 that was almost inconceivable. And now it is just wall-to-wall Republicans all over the place in the South. That was a huge change in American politics, and Wallace was a major factor in that. SM (01:29:07): Of course, he was gunned down as well. ME (01:29:10): (19)72 election. SM (01:29:12): During that- ME (01:29:12): Right out here in Laurel, Maryland. Right here. SM (01:29:15): Your thoughts on the Berrigan Brothers, Daniel and Philip? ME (01:29:18): Do not know much about them. They were just part of that whole mix. That is all I remember. SM (01:29:22): What about Dr. Benjamin Spock? ME (01:29:24): Same thing. I did not pay a lot of attention to those people. They were there, they were being promoted, but I did not spend a lot of time studying what they were doing. SM (01:29:34): How about Tom Hayden? ME (01:29:36): Same thing. Hayden, of course, he and I were kind of on opposite sides from the beginning. Port Huron Statement, SDS, I was [inaudible] statement. SM (01:29:48): Did you ever debate him at all? ME (01:29:49): Never met him. No. I debated a bunch of those people. Clark Kissinger and... but never Hayden. SM (01:29:56): What did you think of that Chicago Eight trial that had Bobby Seale and Rennie Davis, and Dave Dellinger, and that whole group? ME (01:30:05): Well, [inaudible] the same. Joe Hoffman. SM (01:30:06): Julius Hoffman. Right. ME (01:30:13): Yeah. That was just more of that strategy, provoke, provoke, violence, provoke oppression, and then that becomes a pretext for more protest. SM (01:30:19): What about the women leaders like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan. How important would you look at that era? ME (01:30:27): They were pretty darn important. SM (01:30:27): How important were they? ME (01:30:38): They were important. Not in a good way, from my standpoint. What they did was that they were part of this sort of process by which protest against the liberal establishment was always to be more left than the establishment. So that you had a situation where people of my persuasion were protesting against big government and that oppression and so forth and so on, and therefore we need more freedom. All of a sudden comes the feminists saying, with all this oppression we need more regulation. We need to do something to stop people from being oppressive to women, so they sort of... It was sort of a jiu-jitsu effect there of turning the protest thing in a more leftward direction. And that was what I thought mainly about that. I did not follow it very closely. It was kind of hard not to know about it, because it was everywhere. SM (01:31:36): Right. ME (01:31:36): But that is about all I have to say about it. SM (01:31:36): Getting down to the final one here. There is just a couple names. The importance of Tet. How important was Tet? ME (01:31:48): Very important. SM (01:31:49): (19)68. Because that is... ME (01:31:53): Very important. What happened was, and I am sure you know this as well as I, there was actually military defeat for the North Vietnamese, was portrayed the opposite by Walter Cronkite and others as this terrible defeat for the Americans. And that psychology was what it meant, [inaudible] defeat. And really started the negativism. That was also in (19)68. SM (01:32:21): That was early (19)68, yes. ME (01:32:30): But again, there was a guy named Peter Braestrup. I do not know if you know about Peter Braestrup. He wrote a book called the Big Story. His book, you might want to get it. Published by [inaudible]. He was The Washington Post correspondent in Saigon at the time of Tet. SM (01:32:44): Name of the book? ME (01:32:44): Big Story. SM (01:32:44): Okay. ME (01:32:50): And he, Peter, I knew Peter slightly, later, shows it in great detail. And he shows how the media took what was basically a Communist defeat and turned it into a Communist win. And he was a correspondent for The Washington Post. SM (01:33:07): Mm-hmm. ME (01:33:12): So it was huge. It was very decisive in terms of that war, because that war was shit from the beginning. And I, again, I have not studied it carefully, and I had not even thought about it in years. Was a liberal war. It was a war from the beginning under Kennedy and then Johnson fought. McNamara. Dean, Russ, all these people. It was a liberal establishmentarian fight. The best and the brightest [inaudible], who thought they knew what was good for Vietnam. And what was good for Vietnam was to overthrow Diem and get a different government in there that would be more democratic, and so they did that. They overthrew him. And I think McNamara, to his credit, was opposed to that, but Russ was there. And Russ, he had been involved in the previous thing over [inaudible] Chiang Kai‐shek. He knew all about overthrowing our allies. And that whole thing, all that presumption is a good example of why people became very disenchanted with American foreign policy, this idea that it is up to us to go around the world setting it right, everything that is wrong. Is not going to work, for one thing, and it leads to all kinds of wars and problems, and you see that continuing even Iraq and all of that. It is the same mindset. SM (01:34:54): Two thoughts on your response, one of them is things that I have read is that Eisenhower encouraged Kennedy not to get out of Vietnam, and that the actual day of the inauguration, [inaudible] at the White House, before they got into the cars, he was talking to Eisenhower in the White House about Vietnam, trying to get his thoughts on it. Secondly, in Sorensen's recent book, which I read, which I think is pretty good, he is a great writer, he claims that Kennedy wanted the overthrow, but he did not want the murder, and that Kennedy was furious when he found out about the killing. ME (01:35:31): You would have a hard time overthrow without a murder. SM (01:35:34): Yeah. They were supposed to be escorted out of the country to France, that is what Kennedy thought, supposedly. ME (01:35:39): Well, when you have a coup d'etat, the military, little hard to fine tune it. You have got people that know, military guys, that Diem, for all his faults, probably is a more popular leader than they were. Nobody elected them to anything. SM (01:36:01): Mm-hmm. ME (01:36:04): So get rid of him. And they killed him and his brother. So Kennedy had that blood on his hands. [inaudible] "I just wanted a coup, but not to kill him," so that is hard to do. SM (01:36:19): Three more names and then I have one final question. Daniel Ellsberg. ME (01:36:26): Well, it is funny, I read the Pentagon Papers. Why in the world... I am no supporter of Ellsberg. Why the Nixon administration went to the mat to protect those papers, I will never know. They were basically showing how Kennedy and Johnson had screwed up. That is what they showed. And why in the world would the U.S. Government go to the mat... the Nixon government, go to the mat to hold those back, I did not understand. And that is about all I have to remember there. SM (01:37:04): The thing I always remember growing up was the big four, the civil rights leaders and Martin Luther King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, James Farmer. Your thoughts on them as leaders of that time, particularly Dr. King and that group, that foursome. ME (01:37:20): Well, I think he did not want to [inaudible]. SM (01:37:28): He found Farmer. ME (01:37:30): Yeah. Cole. SM (01:37:33): Kissick, I think. ME (01:37:34): Oh, Kissick, [inaudible]. Yeah. SM (01:37:34): [inaudible] Yeah. ME (01:37:37): I did not know a lot about those people. Certainly, Dr. King was a tremendously charismatic leader. There were all kinds of internal things there. I do not know if you have read David Garrow's book about- SM (01:37:50): Yeah, I- ME (01:37:52): Between King and the Kennedys. And all this to-do about the wiretapping of Dr. King that was authorized by Bobby Kennedy. SM (01:37:59): Yeah. [inaudible] ME (01:38:00): And with the approval of Jack Kennedy. So very different from this mythology of all these heroes together, working with civil rights. Here is President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy authorizing this, and they tried to get King to get rid of a couple of people in his entourage. One of them was a guy named Stanley Levison, and the other one was Hunter Pitts O'Dell. They were both commies. They were known commies, so Garrow says, and I think he i's right. And that is why they authorized a wiretap. And King had told them... They took him to the White House, in the Rose Garden, "Get rid of these people. They are bad. They are trying to corrupt the civil rights movement." And King said that he would, but he did not. And so that is why that was going on. Well, that is very different from the standard story about Dr. King and the Kennedys, and Bobby, and civil rights, and they are all in it together. Dion singing you got Abraham, Martin and John, All of that. The reality is quite- SM (01:39:17): I think it is pretty confusing too as to who was the one that encouraged President Kennedy to call the Kings to try to get Dr. King out of jail, because I read Sargent Shriver's book, and supposedly he is involved with getting the credit. I have read that Bobby Kennedy was somewhat involved. But I think the true hero of this is Harris Walker, because I believe it was Harris Walker who- ME (01:39:39): [inaudible] SM (01:39:40): And I know Senator Walker, and he is such a humble man that he would probably take the back seat to... He is the man. ME (01:39:47): Would not had a [inaudible]. SM (01:39:48): Yeah. ME (01:39:50): And Kennedy, he had a political [inaudible]. SM (01:39:51): Right. He was pragmatic. Yeah. Barry Goldwater. ME (01:39:57): Well, I knew Senator Goldwater somewhat, and I was a supporter of his, but he was an unusual person also. And he was very much his own man. He went his own way. He did things that I thought were not wise. I remember sitting in my living room, must have been 1960, what, September of 1964, in Indianapolis. And I am hearing a report that Goldwater had gone to Tennessee and attacked TVA. Was this smart to do this? And then he went to St. Petersburg in Florida and criticized Social Security. So he is going around almost deliberately provoking these constituencies, when he already has enough problems to keep him busy. But it was just his nature. He was a very independent person. And of course, I guess if he had not been very independent, he would not have made the race, because he never had a prayer from the beginning. He knew that. We all knew it. And he was a very courageous man. But he was his own man. He went his own way. Not always the way that I personally would have advised. SM (01:41:21): Two final things, and then the [inaudible] question. The Cambodian invasion of 1970 which ended up [inaudible] Kent State, [inaudible] the country erupting. There were rumors that we had already been in there, and yet [inaudible]. Nixon's speech at nine o'clock on the night of April 30th, 1970 was historic to me, because it set a chain up. Was it necessary to go into Cambodia? ME (01:41:50): Well, again, my knowledge of it is very remote, but basically what I recall is that the North Vietnamese were using that as a sanctuary. SM (01:41:58): Yes. ME (01:42:01): So that was one of the problems in the whole war was that they had these sanctuaries where they could retreat and they were safe. This started in Korea, where [inaudible] get back close to [inaudible], they were safe. And I think, as I remember, the Cambodian government was in favor of what Nixon did. So, the notion that we were invading Cambodia, we were not. We were just trying to stop the North Vietnamese from using it as a raft to invade South Vietnam. But that is about it. I do not really know much more about it. SM (01:42:42): The last question I have, and that is just about the music, the culture of the era. The movies, the rock music, Motown, folk music, social message. I interviewed Peter Seeger from the [inaudible]. ME (01:42:57): Pete Seeger? SM (01:42:59): Yep. Pete was raised by his father to say that making a name for yourself is not what the music is about. It is about making sure that the people- ME (01:43:08): [inaudible] song of Pete Seeger. SM (01:43:09): Well, this is actually Pete Seeger. ME (01:43:11): The Pete Seeger. SM (01:43:12): The Pete Seeger. ME (01:43:12): The man. SM (01:43:13): Yeah, the man. I interviewed him a week ago in Topeka, New York. ME (01:43:16): How old is he now? SM (01:43:16): He is 90. ME (01:43:16): Yeah. SM (01:43:21): But he is still sharp as a... He forgets. He is very forgetful, but when you get him in a room, he is like an encyclopedia. He does not forget things when he is not distracted. And he was taught by his father that the purpose of the music is for people to remember the words so they continue to sing the music. It is not so much that we are remembered as the musicians, it is that the music itself is remembered because of the messages, the social messages. ME (01:43:47): Well, certainly, Seeger, that was what he did. Those people were very skillful with it. And I am sort of an anomaly, because I liked a lot of the music. I am a big pop music fan. SM (01:44:03): Right. ME (01:44:06): So, I remember the (19)60s music very well, and I remember all the different... not everything, but I remember lots of different strains in it, and people who did it. There were a lot of things going on in the (19)60s music that really had nothing to do with revolution. I saw in the paper the other day, maybe a week ago, that Gordon Waller had died. Gordon Waller was Gordon to Peter and Gordon. SM (01:44:29): Oh, that is right. Yes. ME (01:44:39): And he was 60-something. Well, that music had nothing to do with... A World Without Love and Lady Godiva, those were Peter and Gordon songs. I loved those songs. Just good music. They did not really have a lot of social significance, at least that I am used to. But then you think of all the Dylan stuff and... And Dylan is another person who is, I think, in reality, is very different from his image. Dylan, there is an undercurrent in Dylan, had this very negative attitude towards some of these hippy types. And when you think... Do you remember his songs, and one is called- SM (01:45:16): Rolling Stone, I know. ME (01:45:17): Right. And How Does It Feel. I mean, think of that. Think what that song says. To be young, [inaudible], like a rolling stone. It is a very hostile type song. And then Positively 4th Street. These songs are not peace and love, they are very putting down people that he thinks are pretentious. And they are definitely people on that side. And some of this has come out in Dylan recently. I have not paid a lot of attention to Dylan. I was never a big fan of Dylan, but he wrote some really good stuff. Different. Different from what the conventional image is. So to me, that music, some of it is just good music. I like it to this day. SM (01:46:08): Yeah. Of course, folk music of that era, well, you had Pete Seeger, who was about 50 then, at the time that all this is happening, but then you have got Arlo Guthrie, and you got- ME (01:46:19): Guthrie. Woody Guthrie. SM (01:46:21): Joan Baez. ME (01:46:22): Woody before all of them. SM (01:46:23): Then you got Joan Baez and Tom Paxton, and- ME (01:46:26): All of that. SM (01:46:27): David Bromberg. Cohen. The list goes on and on. Judy Collins. Joni Mitchell. But a lot of them had the social messages. I get back to the fact that when the criticism of the generation has a lot to do with their mores and their values, there is a lot of values in this music, because a lot of the words come out. And even as you head into the 1970s, Black music is changing, because Marvin Gaye is doing What's Going On, and making criticism what is going on in the inner-city and... So, it is Black, it is white, it is folk, it is everything. And then of course, you go back to Elvis back in the (19)50s, which is against the modern trend. They could not even show his... That was the year of- ME (01:47:14): The Ed Sullivan Show. SM (01:47:16): And the question is, when people like that went on TV and young Boomers saw them, I mean, what are they hiding here? I mean, come on, man. ME (01:47:24): Well, music is Dionysian really, the desire to express yourself, maybe to destroy things if they are in your way. Music, rock and roll music, has a lot of that in it, there is no question of that. And of course it has the sexual themes, and sometimes the drug themes. But a lot of it is just music is music, and some of it is good and some of it is not so good. I mean, it just depends on... To me, a song like, well, let is go back to Dylan. We were just talking about some of the stuff he wrote. I thought it was pretty good. Pretty darn good music, but some of it I did not like. I did not like everything he wrote. And sometimes I thought his message was very harsh, very negative, but he was a talent. And so, some of it I like, some I did not. And so that would be true of many of these people. I would take somebody even like... You mentioned Arlo Guthrie. I thought The City of New Orleans was a great song. That is just a tremendous song. SM (01:48:41): Alice's Restaurant. ME (01:48:43): Alice's Restaurant. SM (01:48:44): Yeah. ME (01:48:46): But City of New Orleans is a wonderful song, really powerful. And it has... I do not know, what is the significance of it? It is a lament for the fading away of the railroads, and I can totally identify with that. My grandfather was an engineer on the Illinois Central, as you might have [inaudible] in The City of New Orleans line. And I think he might have been on the City of New Orleans. It ran from Chicago down to New Orleans. I think that is just a fabulous song and I can listen to it anytime. SM (01:49:27): The music of that era also, you think that Elvis was an American, but The Beatles were English, and the British invasion just changed American music. ME (01:49:33): Huge. Huge. SM (01:49:34): And of course, folk was here. ME (01:49:36): Well, Peter and Gordon were British. They were both British. SM (01:49:38): Cannot forget the jazz of the (19)50s, that we never really talk much about. That influenced some of the Black entertainers in Motown in (19)60s, and just so much here. When the best history books are written in 50 years after event, what do you think historians will say about the Boomer generation? I know we are talking about... I know you have already given your comments about the- [inaudible] ME (01:49:58): I think- SM (01:49:59): That we must be very inclusive of both conservative and liberal students. When we get beyond 50, as the Boomers pass away, what will they say about this era? The (19)60s, to me, ended in 1973 too. Because a lot of people think the (19)60s were really (19)63 to (19)73, because when streaking started happening on college campuses it was (19)73, and I will never forget Ohio State. Worked Ohio University my first year, they did come on up here... A friend of mine said, "The (19)60s are over." I said, "What do you mean?" "They are streaking. It is over." ME (01:50:39): You were at Ohio University? SM (01:50:40): I worked at Ohio University in Lancaster Campus from (19)72 to (19)76 in my first job. And they had actually purged the students out of Ohio University when I got there from 18,000 to 13,500 campus, and the branch campus were kind of saving the university as backup now, but they were afraid to send their kids off to that liberal Ohio University, which was much more liberal than Ohio State or even Kent State. ME (01:51:08): Yeah. Yeah. I was on many a campus in Ohio in my day. [inaudible] Antioch. SM (01:51:16): Oh, yes. ME (01:51:16): [inaudible] SM (01:51:17): Oh, yeah. ME (01:51:18): They got a liberal campus. SM (01:51:19): Ohio State? ME (01:51:20): Oh, many times Ohio State. SM (01:51:23): You were probably in Mershon, were not you? Were you going to Mershon Auditorium, or... ME (01:51:26): I could not tell you. SM (01:51:27): Yeah. Sykes Union had big spaces there. ME (01:51:27): Ohio Wesleyan. SM (01:51:27): Yep. ME (01:51:32): In Delaware, Ohio. SM (01:51:35): Denison University. ME (01:51:36): Yeah, I have been to Denison many times. Miami. SM (01:51:38): Capital University in Columbus. ME (01:51:40): Not there. SM (01:51:44): Wayne State. That was a Black school. ME (01:51:46): Yeah. Wright State. SM (01:51:47): Yep. Yep. ME (01:51:48): Youngstown. SM (01:51:49): Miami of Ohio. ME (01:51:51): Many times. SM (01:51:53): Yeah. ME (01:51:53): I was always- SM (01:51:55): Bowling Green. ME (01:51:55): Bowling Green. SM (01:51:56): Dayton. ME (01:51:57): Dayton, yep. SM (01:51:58): Yep. ME (01:51:59): All of them. Every one of them. SM (01:51:59): Cleveland State? ME (01:52:00): Not Cleveland State. I do not think. SM (01:52:03): University of Akron? ME (01:52:04): I think I did Akron. SM (01:52:05): Yeah. When the best books are written, what do you think they are going to say? What do you think, if they define the era? ME (01:52:13): Depends on who writes the books. I think that looking back on what happened in the 40 years from 19... 50 years. 1945 to 1990, that if you wanted to sum up what that generation did, it was pretty good. I would not knock it. That was the generation that brought about the fall of Communism. Something I never thought I would live to see. That happened. That was done by people at that age cohort, of course, it is a big cohort, it is huge, [inaudible] so many people [inaudible]. But that is not too bad. So I would tip my hat. SM (01:53:19): To the Boomers. ME (01:53:19): Yeah. SM (01:53:22): Thank you very much. ME (01:53:23): Thank you, Steve. I know you want me to sign this again. I will do it. SM (01:53:26): Yeah, want you to sign that. (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 Medford Stanton Evans Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015 ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Journalists; Authors; Evans, M. Stanton (Medford Stanton), 1934-2015--Interviews Description An account of the resource Medford Stanton Evans was an educator, journalist and author. Stanton was an influential figure behind the modern conservative movement. He received his B.A. in English from Yale University and his masters degree in Economics from New York University. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-08-06 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.10.2016.48a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.48b 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. 113:29 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/abc025a431a1c146a42ddfdd47107bee.jpg e83c83c726c9ee63007c3fd9e77d90e6 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/a61c46fc62f49f369fa26455193be36b.mp3 d5fde6ff7ae3efaa251234a5d7c43478 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-05-26 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Zillah R. Eisenstein Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Zillah Eisenstein is a scholar, political activist and Emerita Professor of Political Science at Ithaca College. Her work focuses primarilly on political struggles for social justice. She was able to document problems such as the rise of neoliberalism (both within the U.S. and across the globe), the growth of imperial and militarist globalization, injustices of racial laws, diseases and affirmative action in the U.S.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:6535,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,5099745],&quot;5&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:[{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;5&quot;:[null,2,0]},{&quot;1&quot;:0,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;3&quot;:3},{&quot;1&quot;:1,&quot;2&quot;:0,&quot;4&quot;:1}]},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;}">Dr. Zillah Eisenstein is a scholar, political activist and Emerita Professor of Political Science at Ithaca College. Her work focuses primarily on political struggles for social justice. She was able to document issues such as the rise of neoliberalism (both within the U.S. and across the globe), the growth of imperial and militarist globalization, injustices of racial laws, diseases, and affirmative action in the U.S.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 86:35 Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party; Communism; Marxism; The Way We Were; Women's Rights movement; Feminism; Baby boom generation; Feminism; Racism; Black women; Abortion; Sexism; Second-Wave feminism; Women's studies; Eleanor Roosevelt.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13689059}}">Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party; Communism; Marxism; The Way We Were; Women's Rights movement; Feminism; Baby boom generation; Feminism; Racism; Black women; Abortion; Sexism; Second-Wave feminism; Women's studies; Eleanor Roosevelt.</span> Subject LCSH Scholars; Political activists--United States; College teachers; Eisenstein, Zillah R.--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Zillah Eisenstein Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 26 May 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:03): Testing one, two. Could you give me a little bit about your background, your growing up years, and what it was like to grow up... The influences that were a force in your life that maybe helped you in your career path? And also, when you are talking about this, I am always asking people about their college experiences. Was there something during their undergraduate years that had an influence on you that... Where you changed and went in a certain direction in your life? ZE (00:00:38): Well, my growing up years were enormously influenced by being the daughter of people who had been in the Communist Party and whose whole life was committed to civil rights activity. So, I had three sisters and we just grew up. Saturday mornings, you went and picketed Woolworths. I mean, that was... SM (00:01:04): So you learned that as a little girl, then? ZE (00:01:06): Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, my politics is from the womb. SM (00:01:12): Right. ZE (00:01:13): So in some ways just giving... As I was walking down here, I just thought, "Well, maybe I should just talk about my parents rather than myself." You know? SM (00:01:26): Talk about your parents, because... ZE (00:01:28): But I will just say just quickly, and then you can kind of do what you want with it. But my mother actually is the woman that... The way we were. You know? SM (00:01:37): Oh, yes. ZE (00:01:39): Okay. Well, it is based on her. Her name was Fanny Price. And I always forget his name, but the guy who wrote and produced the film, mom used to always say, "We were told that," and mom said, "Do not be silly." My mother went to Cornell, she went to the ACT School. She was completely poor, she got the [inaudible] scholarship. That is how she went to school. It was like the ritual story that was always told to us as children about work hard to get your intellect, and then you will go forth with whatever you want to do. But they did that as communists, not as liberals. But anyhow, when he wrote his book, the guy, whatever his name is, in the book finally, it came out I think maybe eight years ago, he says, "The woman who I was mesmerized by in my days at Cornell was Fanny Price." And- SM (00:02:39): The person, Barbara Streisand... ZE (00:02:41): Yeah. SM (00:02:41): Wow. ZE (00:02:42): I mean, my mother was really annoyed, she did not like the film, she said that was not... But mom did. When she was here, she founded the Young Communist League at Cornell. And then, of course, I never really heard very much about this until I got my job at Ithaca College and came here. And then that first semester, I was feeling pretty lonely here. It was kind of strange. And they came up for a weekend and she said, "Come on, let me take you on Cornell's campus and I will show you where I gave the first young communist [inaudible] speech." And it was on Bailey Hall and stuff like that. SM (00:03:20): Oh, my God. ZE (00:03:20): So anyhow, that is my roots and my sister's roots. I mean Sarah, who was Roz's friend, we both did... We did civil rights activism at a very you age. My two youngest sisters, when my father along with Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, the three of them are taught at Atlanta University. Well, no, Staughton was, I think at Morehouse. My dad was at AU, which was the graduate center for the Black colleges. And then Zinn was at Spelman. But there was a picket. I stayed home to study for my SATs, my sisters Julia and Gia, who were very young at the time, like seven and nine, I think. Anyhow, all of them were arrested. And Staughton Lynd came to get me to go help find them because my sisters had been separated from my parents and taken to juvenile detention. So anyhow, that just gives you a flavor. I mean, our life was very difficult and intense and rich as children. But there was a lot of anti-communism, we often were ostracized for that and it was not your typical upbringing. I mean, my father and mother lost their jobs pretty regularly because, still, of the leftovers of the hounding of people out of jobs. And so we grew up just everywhere. I mean, we lived everywhere. SM (00:05:13): What was it like? Because we are talking about the boomer generation, but a lot of people I am interviewing, one third of them are not boomers, they just lived during that time. So it has become much more than just a boomer thing. But when you look at that period after World War II, which is the red diaper babies and the pressures put on people who were affiliated with the Communist Party through the late (19)40s and the (19)50s, even into the early (19)60s, what was it like living in America at that time, being the child or of parents who were communists? And how did you get along with your peers? ZE (00:05:48): Well, I mean, it was very difficult. If you were kind of found out, oftentimes you were found out though, in weird ways. I mean, you would say something in a class discussion and someone would yell, "You are a communist." Like if you said something about equality or whatever. I mean, it is not like you walked around... Nobody walked around saying, "My parents were in the party." You would have to be out of your mind. But at the same time, there was such a vigorous social community that was part of the civil rights movement. That really was the way that an awful lot of communists... I mean, my parents joined the Communist Party primarily because of their stance against racism. And that is really what... SM (00:06:37): Yeah. Like Paul Robeson. ZE (00:06:38): Yeah. Well, I mean most US Communists, it was the place, if you were truly anti-racist, you would be a communist. Although most of the time people think communism meaning the economics... My parents were economic communists as well, but... But even the way that we were brought up, nobody had private money in our household. Nobody. And it has to do with how my own family functions now. But anyway, so that is that. Then I go to college. College already is the Vietnam War period. I do remember I had a job in the kitchens to help pay for school. And I remember waking up one morning and there was a picket line outside the cafeteria. And again, it was just kind of this memory bank. I did not know what it stood for but I knew I could not cross the picket line. That is just how I was brought up. So I remember going back to my dorm and then trying to find out what it was. And I was a student worker, but this was at Ohio University. Most of the people really were Appalachian poor and I worked with women, uneducated. They were at poverty wages, so was I, but I was a student, so it was not comparable. You know? SM (00:08:16): So you were at the Athens campus for your undergraduate degree? ZE (00:08:18): Yeah. SM (00:08:19): What was your major there? ZE (00:08:21): Political Science. SM (00:08:23): And what years were you there? ZE (00:08:23): I was there (19)64 to (19)68. SM (00:08:27): Unbelievable, my first job was at Ohio University. ZE (00:08:31): Oh, yeah? SM (00:08:31): Yeah, I started in (19)72. I went to Ohio State Grad School, in (19)72 got my master's degree. Then I worked at the Ohio University of Lancaster campus as Assistant Director of Student Affairs. And I know it was one of the most liberal schools in the state of Ohio at the time. And what really got me when I got there was the fact that they had purged many, many students out of that school. And they went from a campus of 18-5 to 13-5 in (19)72. And what saved Ohio University, were the branch campuses, which was at Lancaster. I think they had one at... Oh God, [inaudible]. Well, they had three branch campuses. We had 2000 students, so it had really helped them and they did not go under. After Kent State, I guess all hell broke loose. ZE (00:09:20): Yeah. SM (00:09:21): And I had some unbelievable experiences of being in that conservative community in Lancaster. ZE (00:09:26): Yeah. SM (00:09:27): But I lived in Columbus, I commuted. But... ZE (00:09:30): Well, so anyhow. SM (00:09:31): Yeah. ZE (00:09:34): So that actually, the politics there about the strike, became... I became very involved in the class issues that existed in Athens and worked and was trusted very deeply by many of the real workers as opposed to student workers. And then I was pretty active in anti-war stuff. SM (00:10:02): Did you have Dr. Hunt for any of your classes? Ron Hunt? He was a professor for the science labs. ZE (00:10:07): No. SM (00:10:12): Was there any generation gap with your parents? Because obviously they influenced you and you had the same values in terms... ZE (00:10:18): No. There were not... SM (00:10:19): You did not really have any generation gap issues because you were... ZE (00:10:22): No, I mean we were a real community because of the hostility in which our family existed. But later in my life, when I became a graduate student and was doing my PhD in feminist theory and was also becoming very active in the women's movement, as a socialist feminist but still in the women's movement, I had enormous conflicts with my father who really believed that communism was sufficient, you did not need an autonomous women's movement. So the politics, the political struggles that we went through were within progressive politics, they were not your normal left, right, or whatever. SM (00:11:09): I know that Dr. Johnnetta Cole, who I really know... ZE (00:11:11): Oh, sure. I know her. SM (00:11:12): ...I am a big fan of hers. Her very first book, I think, was Sister President. And in that book, I remember reading years ago that she had a conflict there when she was in college because she was first of all, an African American. And second, well, she knew she was a female too, but there was a lot of pressure where she was going to school that you concentrated on race first and gender second. ZE (00:11:36): Right? Yeah. SM (00:11:37): Did you see a lot of that within the African American community during the times you were at... (19)64 to (19)68 in your PhD, that in the women's issues, that it was more dominated by white... ZE (00:11:51): A lot of them were. I mean, the mainstream women's movement, clearly white dominated. I became very involved in the early parts... When was it? I think it was maybe around (19)76 actually. Angela Davis, me, and Bell Hooks, the three of us did a big event at Haverford College. Hortense Spillers was the provost there then, and it was called Racism and the Women's Movement. Clearly, that was just huge conflicts that existed because the assumption about the whiteness of women or even the language that Blacks and women, Blacks are men, women are white. And then of course, Black women would say, "And we are just supposed to be brave." Okay? SM (00:12:40): Right. ZE (00:12:42): That is my whole life. I mean, all of my books, everything is about this question. So it is like I cannot really do it quick. SM (00:12:53): That is what is great about the interview process. We had asked questions I never expected to ask. We had JL Chestnut, the great lawyer who wrote Black and Selma on our campus many years back, 1990s, mid 1990s. We had the Black student union in that room. And the question I am asking is this, he started his lecture to talk about Selma and he looked over in the room and he says... Looked at the African American women and said, "I am very proud of you. You are doing great things." And then he looked at the men and he went after them. And it was almost as if the African American female in mid-1990s was very successful in life, whereas the black male is still having major issues because... Be in prisons and everything. And obviously, these males were going to be successful because they were in college and the... But they were a little shocked by it, and it was a great learning lesson. And to me, when you are talking about women's issues, that African-American women in the mid-(19)90s compared to African-American men in the mid (19)90s, obviously they were way ahead. In this man's eyes. ZE (00:14:03): Yeah. But I mean, we cannot... There is not time to... SM (00:14:05): Right. ZE (00:14:08): That is just also post-Reganism, it is the whole restructuring of the penal system. There is a whole new Jim Crow here and Jane Crow as well. So, I mean a lot of it is structural transformations and repositioning of women's labor, and particularly Black women's labor in the whole global system. I mean late (19)90s already. So the idea that you blame black men or that black men are the way that Cosby talks about it, or even Skip Gates, it is really, I think of incredibly retro politic. What you were asking is about black women, did they see a hierarchy of relationships between gender and race? And Barbara Smith, a well-known black feminist that I often have done stints with years ago. One time she was asked by a kid in the audience, which has been more difficult for you being black or being a woman? And Barbara said, "I am always both. So cannot answer that." SM (00:15:21): Wow. How has the relationship between men and women changed since 1946? Now, this is a broad question here, but we are looking at the boomer generation and I am trying to see what the women of the boomer generation, can you describe some of the changes that have taken place since 1946 with respect to some of the laws that were not in the books at that period after World War II, maybe even the activism, the movements, the creation of organizations, the sexual revolution of just some of the things that kind of define the women that were not born until after World War II? ZE (00:16:08): Well, again, I mean, I just actually started writing a new talk for this keynote that I am doing in Australia in about four weeks. And the question really is, for me, you need new feminisms just always need new politics because the structures of power are always changing. So on the one hand, it looks like everything has changed and everything has changed and nothing has changed. And both of those things are simultaneously true, I think. So mean, again, my answer would be different if we talked just even a year ago, but today, majority of women in the labor force, there are more women in the labor force in the US right now than there are men, first time ever historically. So the fact that there was in the early (19)70s through the (19)80s, enormous access to abortion. Right now, there is much less access to abortion. There are something like 80 percent of counties have no federally funded clinics at all. I have a daughter in medical school right now. In most medical schools, abortion is not being taught. Legally, totally the same. Okay. Roe v Wade, (19)73. SM (00:17:36): (19)73, yep. ZE (00:17:37): All right. But then there have been, and I did a whole book about this. There have been a series of about six different huge decisions that have whittled away at abortion, particularly for younger women, and that you need more consent, etcetera, from parents, doctors, etcetera. But the biggest issue right now is that although, and this is what I would say is abortion remains legal. So women in the US have the right to abortion, but they get to choose to have an abortion, but they do not get to have one. In other words, the access. And that is really. As we have become a much more unequal society since World War II. I mean post-World War II, it was a bit of a boom. And then we have been moving to now where we are one of the most economically unequal, I think one of the top five countries in the world. And what is his name? Jude, what is his first name? He has been writing all this stuff in the New York review of books. He was actually saying that inequality is much more devastating a problem for a society than even poverty is meaning the extremes of wealth and poverty. SM (00:19:00): And women still only make, and was it 80 percent of what a man's salary is? ZE (00:19:07): Anywhere between.72 to.77 cents on the dollar. But then of course, you still have sexual ghettos in the labor force, then you have, where you have women in the labor force in areas that did not used to be the case. You are still.77 cents to the dollar. So the sexual hierarchy of the labor force exists. But again, change. Well, 1971, you have a law that says sexual harassment on the job is illegal, did not exist before (19)71. You have all kinds of, again, laws that have changed the ability to bring charges of rape. You have even date rape law. I mean, all of that is new. Yeah, okay. A lot of the domestic violence law, new. And that all comes from technically a radical feminism that argued that the personal is political. And therefore that really is, I think, just one of the most revolutionary ideas of the last century. That idea has transformed politics every which way, including Bill Clinton and his penis. So... SM (00:20:45): What do you think of, I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, and she was very nice, and we got her on her campus. She is a distinguished lawyer and she has not changed one iota from the Phyllis Schlafly from the (19)50s in terms of a couple of things she said. "The troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running the universities, and they run the departments." And she was, I think, referring to women's studies and some of the other areas. And then she said she was wanted to run for political office, but she asked her husband, her husband said, "Please do not run." And so she did not run because she was one to please her husband. That was the most important thing, was pleasing her husband and not pleasing her. ZE (00:21:30): Oh, I mean, I have written on her. I spoke with her one night. She was disgusting. She comes out and she says, I want to thank, I forget his name, for letting me be here. And when I stood up, I said, I want, I am really happy to say I did not have to thank anyone for being here. SM (00:21:48): The second wave is what happened in the late (19)60s of feminism. One of the things that I have noticed in all the interviews is the amount of sexism that was really prevalent in just about all the movements. The anti-war movement was well known for being sexist in the civil rights movement too. In fact, I remember we had a program once where we had a speaker that said of Dr. King, were alive today and be embarrassed when he was talking about not having very many women. There were Dorothy Heights. You look at 1963 in the march on white, you see Dorothy Height over the right and Mahalia Jackson singing, but very few females. And even in the Native American movement there was sexism, in the gay and lesbian movement there was there is sexism. I could not believe it. It is prevalent in all these central movements. Was that the major thrust as to why women left some of those movements and really started that second wave was because of the sexism and the movements of the late (19)50s and (19)60s? ZE (00:22:49): Well, I mean, clearly, I mean, there is just many, many different ideas about that. But on the whole, for women who were political activists, many of them did feel as though they needed to really make their own autonomous space. And there was even a big difference between saying that they were not separatists, they believed in coalition, but that they really needed autonomy to be able to give voice to themselves within larger communities. And I am a little on the young cusp here in that, I mean, I was very involved in the anti-war movement, but really it was not sexism that took me in that movement that took me to the women's movement. It was actually the intellectual work I was doing. And also given my own upbringing in terms of communism and realizing that there was a system of patriarchy and masculinist privilege that no politics theorizes or addresses. And even today, what is so interesting is the minute you talk about anything that is related to sex or gender, none of the normal political categories work. So you can have right-wingers and even feminists coming together on particular issues because the issue's related to the body. And it has no place in any political theory. SM (00:24:47): I remember that going back to the movie, The Way We Were. I remember the scene where she is out there speaking, and of course people were throwing all these words to toward Barbara Streisand, but it was like they were negative, so to speak. And of course, Robert Redford was fascinated by her in the end, but because she was so different. ZE (00:25:10): Right, exactly. Well, that is what this guy says about my mom. SM (00:25:15): What I said here, the describe the second wave of what were the forces that made it happen and describe the boomer women and the roles they played. One of the things that is been interesting in the people I have talked to is in respect to the Civil Rights Movement, they said, this is not a boomer movement. The Civil Rights Movement was already well established, and the youngest boomers were probably 18 years old when all these things were happening. Although they did Freedom Summer in (19)64, we all know about the white students, predominantly Jewish students who went down with African American students. And so you cannot deny that. And that many of the people of the free speech movement had the experiences of being there and Freedom Summer, even. Abbie Hoffman and some of the hippies were down there at that time, but they were a little older than the boomers. They were like the pre-boomers. And then the other thing in development on the women's studies on college campuses, would you say that is a big plus that boomer women have... ZE (00:26:15): So what are you defining as boomer women kind of starting when? SM (00:26:20): Boomers are born between 1946 and 1964. But I have had issues just about everybody has the issue with, they do not like the term boomers. They do not like defining generations. And many of them do not even like Tom Brokaw. Greatest generation, come on. They do not like these generational things. They talk about events, they talk about periods, not about generations. But when we are defining that young boomer women of the (19)60s and the (19)70s and right into the Reagan period there... ZE (00:27:00): Well, I guess to me, it would make more sense to actually call those particular women. They were feminists at that time. So the most significant movement of my lifetime, for me, was the women's movement. It nurtured me, it gave me strength, it made me very brave. And that is where I got my sustenance. I was in an all-male program, all male professors for my PhD, and I was doing work, it was actually on the relationship between Marxism and feminism and political science, which was for most of my professional life, an enormously male dominated field, when my husband would sometimes go with me to the national meetings, he would say, "This is worse than lawyers." I mean, it is like all men. And now that is changed some, but I did not care. I was fascinated by political theory. It still fascinates me. But I am a political theorist who is an activist as well. I do not think theory, if theory cannot be used, it is not, to me, theory. Theory has to really articulate the presence and movement of your own being. So it is not something that is foreign and disparate. And that is, of course, how I try to get my students to think about it. So the point here though is that these feminists did, many of them fought very hard for women's studies. Now, I would argue that a lot of women's studies programs today no longer have the clarity of politics that they had initially. And I was part of some of the earliest fights at the University of Massachusetts, actually. Some people wanted to call it women's studies and others, including myself, wanted to call it feminist studies. And there was a huge debate about whether women, I women itself is a term that already authorizes a system. And what we were saying is, we do not want to be part of the university as it exists, as feminists. We want to change the university, we want to change the base of knowledge, we want there to be new things to be studied. And there has been, I think that the struggle no longer exists, but through the (19)80s and early (19)90s, it was a fabulous struggle on college campuses, I think. About really whether you wanted to be mainstreamed as a women's studies program or feminist studies or gender studies as it is called more often now, or whether you really wanted to be a dissident location in the university. In other words, that you were trying to... That there is just a contradiction in terms that you cannot really create the kind of knowledge base that you want. Meaning here, again, if the personal is political that no academic discipline is set up without the parameters of those really the borders between those realms in economics, it would have to be that the family is an economic unit, not that the economy exists outside of. So the point here was that it was just huge conflict and that the conflict was good and that, you know, you really wanted to bring that conflict onto your campus. That does not exist today. SM (00:31:20): But where would you put that political correctness? Would that be part of that debate too? The PC thing that was so big in the Chronicle higher education that was books have been written out. ZE (00:31:30): Well, the PC thing, I think, was just really, it was a right wing part of progressive politics, and it was just a way of trying to, again, be able to contain and authorize as though there are only certain answers are acceptable. Whereas I remember a few times in my own classroom where someone would say something and say, "Well, I do not know if this is politically correct." And I said, "No, actually there is no correct. That is the point here." Now think, okay, but the idea that you want to take when people are trying to get you to think openly and then you come back with what the old stuff, which is just to say that there is only one way to think. So to me, that was not even interesting. SM (00:32:36): But what you are talking on basically about this debate over women's studies is like the (19)60s, the debate over the war in Vietnam, the movements and all the issues within the movements, it is a continuation, which is a sign of activism. And activism is continuing. Whereas some people are saying that a lot of those people just went off to make a lot of money, raise their families, and they realized at a certain point that idealism goes by the wayside. Do you believe a lot of people within that generation continue today to believe in the ideals that they had is when they were young? Because one of the critiques of that period is that, it was a period, and it was a unique time, not a unique generation, but a unique and different time that allowed them to have the freedoms that today's students do not have. because they have to work. And so... ZE (00:33:33): Oh, that is just bullshit. SM (00:33:34): Yeah. But how do you feel about your generation or the boomers? ZE (00:33:40): Well, again, the people that I who had been involved with, then none of them went off to make a lot of money. Are there people of the boomer generation who were completely self-centered? Yeah, but that is part of the problem with this phrase, boomer generation. Okay. So I mean, the point here is that you just, I mean, it is kind of a false construction. The boomer generation is just these people who by accident, happen to share a historical moment. Okay. But that accidental or random sharing gives them nothing in common other than the shared historical moment. Yeah. So if you want to say that historical moment was one of opportunity, etcetera, that existed, but simultaneously with that was existing struggles against the Vietnam War, struggles against racism, and then the real struggles against patriarchy and sexism. But those are not... SM (00:35:01): You raised a good point. If you were pressed, and only if you would not even do it if you were not pressed. But if you were pressed and you do not want to use that term boomer, would there be another term? The other terms that have come out is that the Woodstock generation, the Vietnam generation, the protest generation, the movement generation, knowing that when, another thing is one of the criticisms of the generation of (19)74 to (19)78, I do not even know the exact numbers here, is that only really five percent to 15 percent, depending on whatever person you are talking to or book you have read, were involved in any sort of activism. Anyways, the 85 percent to 90 percent, 95 percent people just went on with their lives and were influenced by the times. But we were not out there protesting, and we were talking both conservative and liberals here now were not inbound in any of the movements, but we were still talking about a large number. If we were talking 74 million, even 5 percent to 15 percent is a large number. So yeah, you raise a really good point here, because so many of the people I have talked to cannot stand these terms. ZE (00:36:15): Who, well, I mean, can understand. I think that one can take a term and use it and say that the term itself is, it is important because it creates a continuity of your thought, but that at the same time that continuity is false or I do not like false. The continuity is much more complex than unity. There is no unity here, although there might be continuity. And then the real issue is that within the boomer generation, if you want to give that as the, or Vietnam, I would call them movements, Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, that there were movements and that some people were in multiple movements who also happen to exist in this period called or identified as the boomer generation. But that really, on some level, the problem with the term boomer is the idea that was these were the ones who actually made it, right? But in a lot these movements, nobody was interested in making it. SM (00:37:43): Do you remember that moment where you have already mentioned how important the women's movement was in shaping you, inspiring you, being the force that drove you in your life. Do you remember the moment when you left the anti-war movement or any of the other movements and said, "This is the movement that I most identify with?" ZE (00:38:04): No, because I have always been more, I mean, because the civil rights movement is like when I was five. And I mean, even the work that I do, I have always worked with more black feminists than white feminists. And it is so much of the work that I am recognized for, and the rest of the world is the intersections of political struggles. So when I went to Bosnia or Cuba, I mean, it is always because I refuse to... It is not the problem with seeing the women's movement, even as a singular movement, okay, it is made up of just cacophonous differences. SM (00:39:00): Worldwide. Yeah, global. Look, that is the question I have later on. I will ask it now. And that is, when did the women's movement become global? Because when you talk about the second wave, you know, read the first wave, you talk about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and then you about the period in the early part of the 20th century, and then the suffrage movement. And then you have the second wave movement of the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, but it was the United States movement. It seemed like the only person that seemed to be global was Eleanor Roosevelt who worked... ZE (00:39:41): But there were movements everywhere. I mean, and my newest in my book, Against Empire, one of the problems here is the idea that feminism is western and feminism is the United States. There were Egyptian feminists doing incredible things in the 19th century, you know, you have feminisms everywhere. The idea that now there are some countries that they have not used that term feminism, they will talk about women's movements. That is a much more encompassing concept. But that really what you are, if I can be so bold, what you are really saying is when you say, when did feminism become global? It is really... SM (00:40:37): It has always been? ZE (00:40:38): Yeah. When did the United States begin to recognize, when did the West begin to recognize other feminisms across the globe? All right. And even a lot of people talk about global feminism, and that is a way that they try to, it really means the women's movement in the US across the globe. And in my writing, I always talk about feminisms across the globe rather than global feminism. But if what you are also asking, early 1970s is really the beginning of the global economy. I mean, the modern global economy, and again, working with women of color, given the slave trade, okay, capitalism has always been global, so you got to be careful even about what, but the new modern, cyber, global, early 1970s. And is it interesting that, of course, that is when you start to have much more publicness and public viewing of the feminisms across the globe. SM (00:41:47): Where does Eleanor Roosevelt come into this? Because Eleanor, she was such an exception of a First Lady. To me, FDR was racist in some respects. And well, she put him in his place many times and she protected her husband. But obviously we all know about the incident at the Lincoln Memorial with Marian Anderson and her quitting the daughters American Revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights that she was found in the United Nations. She seemed to be in the 1950s, a female that was so at the forefront of everything. I find it interesting also, it is just a commentary here that the three people that had the biggest FBI records in American history are Martin Luther King Jr. Eleanor Roosevelt, and John Lennon. Eleanor Roosevelt? They must have worried about her because she was saying things that... Does she play in your thoughts, does she play any role at all in terms of an inspiration to those that found she died in 1962? ZE (00:42:53): Well, I think she was an inspiration to what you would call, I mean, of course, Blanche Cook, who... SM (00:42:58): Oh yes. ZE (00:42:58): She thinks... SM (00:42:58): Cook, yes. ZE (00:43:02): Me? No, she was not an inspiration for me and personally. And politically, I think that she is an inspiration within a kind of notion of liberal feminism. SM (00:43:15): I got to turn... ZE (00:43:21): And I do use these terms pretty technically, but liberal feminism here, and I mean that very much in terms of women who basically did believe that women should be given the same chances as men in our capitalist society. There was no criticism of capitalism as needing a system of patriarchy that could never give women equality. And Eleanor Roosevelt, on the whole, she was a liberal feminist, and liberal feminism is imperial. And it is used to, I mean, in my most recent political and intellectual work, I have really argued the way that feminism has been ill used by the United States to justify the wars, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the idea here of women's rights and fighting against the Taliban, etcetera, etcetera. Whereas the United States does not care about women's rights, not there or here. SM (00:44:33): Wow. ZE (00:44:36): But the argument, again, though, I am at this point in my life, I am uncompromising in the importance of the politics of every different form of feminism on this globe. And how could you not think that this is not the most central political struggle when everybody just, they need to wrap up, women not let you see their face need to [inaudible] their bodies to why is it that we have a medical plan? The one thing that could not be agreed on was abortion politics, East/West Germany, when they are trying to come together and unify, the only thing they could not agree on for a united constitution was abortion rights. Hello. So the point here, all right, and this has just been in really recent stuff with all of the issues around immigration, and the silence always is about the female in those dialogues. SM (00:45:50): I find it interesting too, my niece had a baby and she is finding all kinds of issues because of the fact that where she works, they have no place for privacy and this is an un... I have now read that this is a problem all over the country. When they want to nurse their child at work, there is no place for privacy they have to do in the lady's room. And then there is also the thing about the three month of the six weeks or three months, everybody agrees it should be three months of leave. And then it is, well, there has been a lot. ZE (00:46:26): But all I am saying is, how could anyone, right now, with more women in the labor force than men, how could anybody not think that there should be a daycare plan in this country? Yet, not a word. Now, my thing is the more silent something is, the more important it is politically. The noise... SM (00:46:48): Why are not there more people like you? Because of the fact we are talking about, okay, I am overuse this term. We are talking about boomer women who were in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, got involved in the women's movement. Many of them gone on to become corporate leaders and so forth. Where are, are the women who we are talking about... ZE (00:47:08): Those are your boomers who, or someone like Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice. I mean, the point here is, and we have not even gone there, that part of when you asked what has changed, and I said, well, everything has and nothing. So, just the fact that Hillary Clinton is flying around the Secretary of State. But also what is interesting is that she lost her campaign because she could not get it right. She really just screwed herself royally, I think by running as his wife. And that just was not going to do it. She either had to run as her own self and maybe she could have won that way. SM (00:47:56): Some people even said if she had divorced him after his presidency that she may have won. I read that. ZE (00:48:01): Well, no, but she wanted it every which way. But what is interesting is that in the end here, she was radicalized by the people who did support her in the end, which were older white women. That is who supported her. They were probably a lot of your boomer people actually. All right. But everybody else hung her out to dry. So is not it interesting that now that she is Secretary of State, she and Obama have said that women's rights have to be central to the US foreign policy. So I am just, now that is new and different. Okay. That is never been said before. Okay. Now whether that means anything is just something totally different. SM (00:48:53): The great writers of that period, obviously you are really into books and reading and ideas. The free speech movement, to me, I think it is one of the greatest things that ever happened in higher ed. I, that is my degrees and Mario Samuel and Bettina Abigail and all those people, I just love them because it was about ideas. The university is supposed to be about ideas and debate. And so have we gone back in the university, the university, I interviewed Arthur Chickering, who was the great educator education identity, and he was surprised that I asked him to be interviewed, but he is retired now. And he said the biggest problem today on university campuses that he is really upset with is we have gone back to corporate control of universities. And when you look at the free speech movement back in the (19)64-(19)65 of Berkeley, that was one of the reasons they were attacking the university. It was what Clark Kerr was saying about the multi diversity, the corporate takeover. And he said the knowledge factory, just that term factory turned students off. Seems like we are going back to that again. ZE (00:50:05): Oh yeah. SM (00:50:06): And I think that might be part of the problem with the attacks on women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, is that whenever there is a threat to the bottom line, things seem to disappear. Are you worried what is happening on universities today? What I am getting at is that the lot of the people that are running today's universities are those boomers that experienced what we went through in college, but now they are running universities and they are using the experiences maybe in not so good a good way or whatever. ZE (00:50:41): Oh, I think that the university system in this country is in total crisis, total ethical, political, financial. SM (00:50:54): I am sensing the corporate takeover again. Decisions being made... ZE (00:50:58): Well, yeah, I mean there is... SM (00:51:00): Especially in that tough economic times too. ZE (00:51:02): Well, but I think also what is being done is that the tough economic times is also being used to justify political shifts that, and I mean, I said that straight out to our provost. I said, "Look, if you want to make changes, say what you want, those changes. But do not say that it is for the economic crisis because what you are trying to do here has nothing to do with the economic crisis." SM (00:51:30): I think there is the fear of controversy again, and whenever there is controversy, but debate is controversy. ZE (00:51:37): But the other thing that is also difficult is that so many of the junior people now, they really, they have been educated and have moved through and become professionals, and all they know is neoliberalism. SM (00:51:55): How important, what I was getting at here was the books, the writers of the period when you were in undergrad and graduate school, the Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, certainly Gloria Steinem and what she did, the political powerhouse of Bella Abzug. She was from New York and I was from New York. So they were powerful voices, very powerful voices. And Mauricia, I am going to actually be interviewing Susan Brown Miller in a couple of weeks in New York City, and I heard she had some issues with Betty Friedan or debating him or something, but she was also in that group who was also in Freedom Summer and also wrote a book, a children's book on Shirley Chisholm. And it was really involved. Were there any influences? Were any of those people in Kate Millett? ZE (00:52:48): Yeah. No, these are not my people. SM (00:52:50): Those are not your people. ZE (00:52:52): I knew them. I worked with some of them. Bella Abzug actually asked me to, when Carter was president, he held a forum in, actually it was in Texas, and it was, what do women want? And Bella Abzug called me and asked if I would come to the meeting and I said, "No, I will not come." And she said, "Why not?" And I said, "Well, that bullshit. They know what we want. We are supposed to tell them and they are going to give us what we want? No, I will not come." So she actually talked to some other people and they called me about that. And they said, Zillah, go and try to get them to think in the terms that you are talking about. And I said, straight out, "The work I have done is I have tried to get Marxist to become feminists. I do not know how to talk to liberals, why they should become feminists." And so they said, "Well, do it. Try to do it." So I said, "Okay." And that was the beginning of a whole new, I mean, actually the politics that I have done, it is not like I sit in a cubby hole and think about it. That was the next stage of my life. I mean, my earliest work when I was in my 20s was Marxism and feminism, given what I came out of then this was happening in our country, the Betty Friedan's, etcetera, which I just thought, "Okay." But look, who was she writing about? She was writing about white middle class women in the suburbs. Okay. That is not really interesting to me. I mean, definitely not what the age I was, the politics I came from, get a life. So anyhow, so the next stage really was, so why should liberals? And I still remember I was on a run and I thought, "Okay, so what would you say to someone like that? Okay, you want equality with men. Okay, now, okay, as a Marxist sealer, what would you say? Well, which men do you want equality with? Everyone of who you want equality with rich men, right? Rich white men. But how about the working class man? You want equality with him, well we already kind of got that." But anyhow, and then out of that politics came a book that made me pretty well known in a lot of... It is called The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. People there were so open to becoming radicalized as feminists. And therefore, my whole argument was in that stage of my life that if you become a radical feminist, you cannot remain liberal. SM (00:55:49): Wow. ZE (00:55:50): Okay. It is just a conflict in terms. SM (00:55:53): What is a liberal feminist? ZE (00:55:54): A liberal feminist is someone who believes that you can attain equality and freedom for women like men in capitalist, patriarchal society. SM (00:56:07): Is that Gloria Steinem? Is that what... ZE (00:56:08): Mm-hmm. SM (00:56:08): That is And Ms. Magazine and Mary Tom and all that group? ZE (00:56:12): Yeah. Although it is interesting. I mean, Ms. just recently, I mean, I have been doing this work for, what, 35 years? Just recently has really started to say, "Zillah, will you do a block for us?" SM (00:56:24): Oh wow. ZE (00:56:25): So, things change. And politics does get more com, but Gloria Steinem? SM (00:56:37): I think another one was Caroline Bird. You, she wrote some books too. ZE (00:56:40): I do not know that. SM (00:56:41): Yeah, I think we have already gone over this. Where have the women made the greatest gains? I think we have already talked. Where is there still needs, where are the needs still today? What is the goal? We are talking global here now, we are not talking to the United States. What this book is about is mostly about the US. Although I am interviewing a professor at Harvard who teaches Vietnamese history when I am up there, and I am going to talk about boomer generation from the Vietnamese perspective, 3 million that died, which now only the people that survive will make up only 15 percent of the Vietnamese population. But I can really now try to get the other side of those who died. And where do you see, I will say this country, and where do you see the world in terms of things that women need that still have not been achieved? Is there one thing you would like to see in your lifetime that would happened? ZE (00:57:55): No, I mean, if we are, let us just talk about the United States. There is horrible poverty among women in this country. Horrible poverty right now. And there is also less, I mean, when you ask that, what do women... I mean, first of all, I do not really think that there are particular things that women need, but so much of what women need as human beings, they share with men. So, I mean, I have always deeply argued and believed that when people talk about women, you know, you think you are talking about something specific. And when you are talking about men and human, you are talking about the universal and the general. Well, if we look historically, what has happened is that we say that we are talking universally, and we would never get to the specific needs of what women need in terms of what makes us particular, like abortion, like reproductive rights, like prenatal care. I mean, the things that are particular to women. Well, the truth is, if we actually met women's needs, all of their needs, economic, sexual, racial, etcetera, well then everyone's needs would be met. Got to flip it. In other words, the more specific you get here, the more universal and human you become. So when you asked me what is it that women need? Well, what we need is we need a different economic system that does not racially profile, sexually profile, and exploit on that basis. People need to have what they need as human beings. And that does mean food, shelter, clothing, education, dreams, hopes. We are so far away from that in our country right now. SM (00:59:56): Do you feel though that universities are, that professors are sometimes still part of the problem? Because I have actually asked a couple of my fellow students to go into a class where they are talking about poverty, and the professor will always say, "There is the poor, there is the middle income, and there is the rich. And then raise your hand." Why does the professor always have to say that there will always be the poor, the middle class, the rich, and they one actually did. And basically tellable history has shown that there is always poor. So he did not get, it is forever. Itis part of the human condition. It will always be, maybe we need to be asking the question that it does not always have to be. That there is the ultimate, but we still we are always striving for something. ZE (01:00:54): But I just, at this particular moment that I think that our society has become, for your boomers, driven, isolated, competitive, and selfish. SM (01:01:10): How about the criticism of the women's movement, and this may be a right-wing thing, but it is all about identity politics. When the movements took place in the late (19)60s, we are not just talking about the women or all the movement, Civil Rights, the environmental movement, the gay legend, everything. It seemed to be, there seemed to be a unity. Now, whenever there was a rally, a women's issues event, you would see the anti-war people there. You would see the Civil Rights people there. You would see the, they would all be there. Now when you see protests, you see a single issue. It is kind of like the criticism is that it is identity politics now. It is not the, it is single issue, it is women's issues, it is Native American issues. Native American issues are not going to be at an anti-war rallying. Whereas in the late (19)60s, a lot of the movements were together. There was more of a sense of togetherness. And now there seems to be a separateness. You see it on college campuses where self-segregation is very common amongst college students. And when you ask the people who run the Affirmative Action Office or multicultural affairs, who I am very close to, they will say, "Steve, it is their choice. It is a different time. It is their choice. They still believe in working together, but they like to close their doors. They like to be around people of their own kind." When we were hearing that back in the (19)60s. So where has the progress been made? So I am, what I am getting at is, has identity politics really hurt each of the causes that we are talking about here? That when you talk about women's issues around the world, I think you can really identify if it is the United States. But when you are talking about what is going on with the way women are treated in the Middle East, I mean, I cannot even really identify with that. That is just plain wrong. And I would like to see groups coming together again that identify with a certain cause, but then they also care about this cause and so they are going to be over there fighting so that when you have the issues you are talking about that you have the environmental movement saying the what is happening to women here effect directly affects the environment, civil rights, Native American, gay and lesbian rights, you name it, they are all together. ZE (01:03:43): Well, I do think though, that there are, at this point, through some of the environmental work going on and related to actually issues around food and sustainability, that there is more and more, I think there is kind of less identity politics than there was for sure in the (19)90s. But I also think that what we are seeing is the incompleteness of some of what started to happen with what got called as identity politics, specifying particular needs within the larger community, which clearly needed to happen given that the specific needs were not being articulated. Then just as you are ready for some of that to really start to build interesting coalitions, you also have some of the most right-wing politics in this country that really starts to destroy the possibility of some of that unification. And so I think that oftentimes that term identity politics confuses the who really is at the helm here and really how the politics emerged. And I think that identity politics did, I mean, if we are going to use that phrase that it became pretty conservative, but that a lot of the conservatism of it was not about the identity politics or the particular politics, but really had to do with the way that then they were re splintered by the Reagan period, by the Bush administrations that really were, and even Clinton, I mean, Clinton was pretty bad on a lot of these issues. SM (01:05:53): See, when you had the Three-Mile Island situation, there was a perfect example over the environmental movement in the women's world should be united because it was affecting children and their futures. The same thing on the tragedy down in the Gulf right now. I see that directly as a women's issue. Why are you saying the women's issues? Because that is, we are talking about food, we are talking about reproduction, we are talking about a lot of issues here. I mean, the environment in the women's movement to me, seem like a great mix in so many different areas because it is about the future of the human race. ZE (01:06:26): Well, I mean, in Africa, most of the leaders of the environmental movement are women and women's activists. SM (01:06:35): It is interesting that one of the questions I have asked everyone is the blame game that is often that I got to be unbiased here and saying it, but that when Newt Gingrich, I asked him to be interviewed. And, of course, I have asked him twice to the interview and he said, "No." But in (19)94, when he came into power, he along with other Republicans or conservatives, make comments that [inaudible 01:07:00] another one in many of his books, that a lot of the problems we have in the world today and in society today goes right back to that (19)60s and that (19)60s generation, that is a term they do not call them the boomers, the (19)60s, generation, (19)70s, that the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the breakup of the family, the divorce rate, the lack of respect for authority, the beginning of the isms, it is all about me, me, me, me, and not about we, we, we. And then Dr. King was always talking about, we-we. He always preached we, but they are very critical of everybody that was involved in that timeframe. And how do you respond when you hear, even Mike Huckabee has this TV show, I will not even watch it. There is a constant little jabs in there. I do not dislike him as a human being, but I do not like the jabs. And certainly even John McCain, when he was running for president or when Hillary was running before she had to drop out, he made comments about her too, being within that generation, even though he was a close friend of her. Those little snide remarks. And we knew what he was saying. How do you respond to people like McCain, Huckabee, Gingrich, who is a boomer, and George Will, and people like that. I know they probably sue me if I put them in. So that is part of the question. And so. ZE (01:08:34): You mean about their... SM (01:08:34): How do you respond when they say that the reasons why we have problems in our society, the breakup of the family, which could be a women's issue, lack of respect for authority, the marriage does not mean that much. A lot of them do not believe in same sex marriage either the man and a woman, either it is like Beck, the Beck Show or O'Reilly or Hannity and Home Hannity, that group. They are powerful influences on the conservative side, Rush Limbaugh being another. And when people listen to them, oftentimes they believe itis fact what they are saying. They have that much of an influence over people's thinking. ZE (01:09:20): Well, their depictions, I think are just totally faulty. They are historically inaccurate and they are politically pretty naive. I do not see the so much of what it is that they are saying as valid. And again, the whole issue of the me generation and the self-centeredness, of course, people said that about feminism from the start. It was the idea that women were selfish about their own needs and not concerned enough about family needs and children. SM (01:10:15): If you were asked, and this is again a very general question, but you have known a lot of boomers in your life. You have probably taught boomers and you have had friends who are boomers. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Can you generalize? We are talking about a generation now that might be different than the World War II generation that is certainly different than millennials of today that are on college campuses. And certainly that Generation X group, which really despising boomers, we had programs on them. Were those born from (19)65 to about (19)80. They did not like boomers. ZE (01:10:56): Well, again, I mean, for me, given what we have kind of covered today, to me, the boomer generation is really, it was one of the last periods of successful and multiple political movements in this country. I think the richness of anyone living in this particular boomer generation is that they have been nurtured by the sense of possibility that can exist through collective action. And I think that in the post boomer period, that has not existed in the same way. The anti-Iraq war stuff, it never got mobilized at the level of the Vietnam War. Now there are real reasons for that. There was a draft, it was a whole different economy. The way that we were at war with people so disconnected from that war at this moment. But to me, the roots that I have in the movements I was a part of have enriched me exponentially. SM (01:12:34): Who are some of the people that, you mentioned [inaudible], but who are some of the people that your parents or your brothers or your sisters and brothers and you actually worked with or met during the time of your activism prior to getting your PhD? ZE (01:12:53): Well, when I was little, [inaudible] was a friend of my father's, and then there were just lots of people in, I was really such a kid. I mean, I do not know all the names of... Many of them were famous people at the time when I was really young. Our house was always filled with activists. I mean the people like Martin Luther King, that whole generation, I do not know who, I mean Julian, I think it was Julian Bond actually, who was the lawyer for my parents when they tried to take us away from my parents because of the time when Gia and Julian were in detention. They were challenged in the courts for being... It does not make sense. I would need to be more careful about people's names for... SM (01:14:10): Well, I know Julian, so I interviewed him early on in my project. ZE (01:14:17): I am pretty sure he was the lawyer who, and then people in Atlanta, like Asa Yancey, and they were part of the Civil rights movement. Of course, in terms of my own life, Angela Davis, Jeanette Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Barbara Smith. I mean, these are all people, again, very well known in certain arenas. SM (01:14:49): Do you remember also some of the specific protests you were at? Some people were in 1967 at the Pentagon when they levitated the Pentagon or some people were at People's Park Berkeley in (19)69. ZE (01:15:06): The first one I remember is 1971, and it was the first all-women’s March against the Pentagon for the Vietnam War. And actually in my house, I have framed one of the incredible posters, I carried it then. But that I remember as kind of really a first kind of autonomously, meaning as myself, as opposed to just my parents, my sisters, stuff like that. SM (01:15:41): See how we are doing here, we still good. One of the questions I have been asking two things. The issue of trust and the issue of healing. We took a group of students, I have said this, that I have asked this question to every single person we have interviewed, 170. But it was partially because the students came up with a question. In 1995, we took a group of students to Washington to meet Senator Edmond Musky, and that was part of our leadership on the road programs. And he had just gotten out of the hospital. I did not know that when he arrived, but he had been ill. And the question was this, due to all the divisions that took part in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, divisions between black and white, male and female, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who did not at all, with all the assassinations that took place during that timeframe in (19)68 and the riots and the cities and the burnings and all these things that the current generation of students that I was bringing had only read about the history books. Do you think this was the beginning of another civil war? Did we come close to another civil war where the divisions, and secondly, do you feel that this generation, this boomer generation, is going to go to its grave comparable to the Civil War generation not truly healing from the war and all the divisions that took place? It was a broad question. It is about healing. I will tell you what Senator Musky said after you respond. But do you think, and then this is why I am going to be meeting with Robert J Lifton because I want to get his thoughts on the psyche and his thoughts on not just those who were in the war and protested the war, but the whole generation. Do you think there is an issue of healing here that even the divisions that you have had as you have gotten older, something really still stirs you when you are going to go to your grave really upset with like Susan Brown Miller, she was upset with, she had the division between her and Betty Friedan. I do not know. I do not know. I will soon find out what that song, but I read about it. So I heard it was pretty intense. ZE (01:18:06): Well, I do not know. I think that that question is maybe works better for people who had an identity and a political life during the Vietnam War and do not feel like they do anymore. I mean, for me, you heal and you re heal and you are scarred again and you heal again. And so, I mean, I have been through the stuff with the Bosnian war, particularly with women. I have been very involved with the Afghan and Iraq wars. So Vietnam was very significant at one moment in my life. But that is in the past. And I live in the present. And I think we have to remake our present all the time. So I do not know, life is, I have had a lot of pain in my life that has nothing to do with politics. I have lost my sisters to cancer when they were very young. I have struggled myself with cancer. I have a fabulous daughter who I [inaudible] the world that she is entering. So I mean to me, I do not get to not heal. I have had to heal. SM (01:19:40): That is brilliant what you just said because Senator Musky, I think the students are hoping that he would talk about 1968 because of the convention and all. He did not even mention it. It was to me, the whole question we were asking was about that. He said that we have not healed as a nation in the issue of race. And then he went, as we saw back in when he said he could not run for president, where he might show a tear in his eye. Well, he did show it. We had this on tape. He did not answer for about a minute. The students are looking at each other. What did we just do here? And we saw the tear. He said, "I have just spent the time in the hospital. I have been very sick." And he died sick within six months after this. And he said that, "I just saw the Ken Burns series and touched my life. 430,000 men died in that war. The south almost lost an entire generation. Now that is hard to heal from." And so he said, "The issue of race." And then he went on explain Why? ZE (01:20:55): Yeah, but I mean for me, what is going on in Rwanda, the way that people have had to repair themselves, the incredible atrocities in the Congo right now, I mean as a woman on this earth. But the point here is that you just do, I mean, do not know. SM (01:21:29): The other, just a good question of trust because a lot of the things that I have read state that this generation as a whole did not really trust a lot of people. And of course I can remember that experience as a college student where not trust. A lot of the people in this generation and particularly in the new left, did not trust anyone who was in a position of authority or responsibility, whether it be a university president, a United States Congressman or President, even a rabbi or a minister or a corporate leader. Anyone, you just cannot trust your leaders. And a lot of it was because they had witnessed political leaders lying, whether it be the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, other experiences. Do you see this as an issue within, even in the women's movement, the issue of trust that eventually, I remember what a professor said in my Psych 101 at Binghamton University once. He said, "If you cannot trust other people, you are never going to be a success in life." So there comes a point when you have got to trust others. And I do not know what your thought on thoughts are on the issue of trust, if that is an issue within the generation. ZE (01:22:47): Well, again, it is a made-up issue. I mean, do not trust anyone over 30. I mean clearly, all of that. For me, given my own childhood, just generational stuff, just has not really been much of an issue. And the question of I believe in people. I believe deeply in people. And if that means trust, I mean, fine. But I just think that the greatest challenge is as that the burdens that are created in this world that if you have no other choice but to believe that you can make an imprint and a difference. And that also my own, again, in my own life, people have always been there to help me through. And in my most recent book that is, it is about the Obama election. I mean... SM (01:24:18): When's that coming out? ZE (01:24:20): It is just out. It is called, The Audacity of Races and Genders. And then the subtitle is, A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Election. But there is one, it is made of 25 frames just, and it kind of goes all over the map, all over the globe, all over personal. And I actually, I was diagnosed with a rare and difficult form of cancer. And I had had surgery and then was coming through chemotherapy. And the election was, I mean this was during the primaries and there was this real tension that was developing between Obama and Clinton. And it was the issue here of he was a black man. She was a woman. He was black. She was a woman. And once again, in a lot of circles, the discussion was that feminism was going to get pitted against race. So several people who were working in the Obama campaign and friends of mine from who knew them etcetera, said, "Will you write something on this?" And I wrote this piece, which is in the book, it is called Hillary is White. And with the internet the way it is, it just went viral and it was translated into a gazillion languages, went throughout Africa. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And it was that into the campaign into, but I was really up. (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. Zillah Eisenstein Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Eisenstein, Zillah R. ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Scholars; Political activists--United States; College teachers; Eisenstein, Zillah R.--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Zillah Eisenstein is a scholar, political activist and Emerita Professor of Political Science at Ithaca College. Her work focuses primarily on political struggles for social justice. She was able to document issues such as the rise of neoliberalism (both within the U.S. and across the globe), the growth of imperial and militarist globalization, injustices of racial laws, diseases and affirmative action in the U.S. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-05-26 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.10.2016.47 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. 86:35 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/746e0e4ea16151fd8be36b3b636141aa.jpg a9b52159bca4537d09179dff56cdcc8d https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/c0024555d5db98fb83571e496f22849e.mp3 9844b63db1f037b916adf6373b9e352a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview ND Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Lee Edwards, 1932- Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Lee Edwards is an author, educator and a leading historian of American Conservatism. He is a professor at the Catholic University and Chairman of a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington foundation. He has appeared on many television broadcast and his books have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and many more. Dr. Edwards has a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate inPolitical Science from Catholic University. He also holds a doctor of humane letters degree from Grove City College and attended the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:8401665,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10,&quot;26&quot;:400}">Dr. Lee Edwards is an author, educator and a leading historian of American Conservatism. He is a professor at the Catholic University and Chairman of a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington foundation. He has appeared on many television broadcasts and his books have been reviewed in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, the <em>Boston Globe</em> and many more. Dr. Edwards has a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in Political Science from Catholic University. He also holds a doctor of humane letters degree from Grove City College and attended the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Counterculture; Tom Hayden; Woodstock; Jerry Rubin; Young Americans for Freedom; Civil Rights Movement; Baby Boomers; Feminism; Activism; Richard Nixon; Jimmy Carter; Lyndon B. Johnson; Eugene McCarthy; Hubert Humphrey; John F. Kennedy; Gerald Ford; Black Panther; Muhammed Ali; Daniel Ellsberg; George Wallace; Robert McNamara; The Beatles; Janis Joplin; SDS&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:3,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13689059}}">Counterculture; Tom Hayden; Woodstock; Jerry Rubin; Young Americans for Freedom; Civil Rights Movement; Baby Boomers; Feminism; Activism; Richard Nixon; Jimmy Carter; Lyndon B. Johnson; Eugene McCarthy; Hubert Humphrey; John F. Kennedy; Gerald Ford; Black Panther; Muhammed Ali; Daniel Ellsberg; George Wallace; Robert McNamara; The Beatles; Janis Joplin; SDS</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 112:41 Subject LCSH Authors; College teachers; Historians; Edwards, Lee, 1932--Interviews Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Lee Edwards Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: Benjamin Mehdi So Date of interview: 7 August 2003 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) 00:11 SM: This is working properly, and I know it is. When you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s? And what-what is the first thing that comes to your mind? When you think of that era? 00:20 LE: Well, for me, it would be the rise of the right. And I have to warn you that I am going to be giving a class I am teaching a class at Catholic University starting in three weeks, on the politics of the (19)60s, really happy to say that it is oversubscribed, and I had to put a cap on it. And what I am going to be doing with these with these students, their politics majors is the Department of Politics. They are Catholic, and I am an adjunct professor, and have been for 16 years now. They are Catholic, is to present both sides of the picture. I mean, normally, they hear about John Kennedy, they hear about SDS, they hear about the Port Huron state, but they hear about Dr. King, they hear about the civil rights, movement, revolution, and so forth, all of which is certainly very much important in history. But what I am going to give them is the other side, not only rise to the left, but the rise of the right, and that is Barry Goldwater, Young Americans for freedom to share instinct, Ronald Reagan being elected governor, and so forth. So to me, that is the great untold story. But most historians political story, as is the rise of the right during the 1960s. 01:39 SM: So, when you think of the (19)60s, what do you think of? Yeah, that was thinking, you know, and since you raise a very good point, because there is a book that has come out in the last two or three years, to actually paperback, it is the Young Americans for freedom and your involvement in the antiwar movement, and they were real big antiwar. So that is great that you are doing that, when in the boomer generation is really defined as a group born between 1946 and 1964. Oftentimes, you find that a lot of the people that were the leaders of some of the protests were actually two, three and four years older, born in the early (19)40s, or (19)42. Around that time, when you look at the boomer generation, just your thoughts on some of the criticisms, the middle level they have over the years, by the likes of George Will, Newt Gingrich, that basically a lot of the things that are wrong in America today are because of what the boomers did during the (19)60s and early (19)70s. Particularly the drugs, the issues of sex, a counterculture? You know, I just liked your thoughts on- 02:46 LE: Well, I think it is, I think it is a little bit I think it is true, up to-to a point we would talk about, for example, the design of the counterculture and a turning away from the-the philosophical and moral moorings, which-which existed before that there was a narcissism, there was a radical emphasis on-on I, on me, the so called me generation, and so called, feels good, do it. So, I think that is, it is valid, that that that many in the boomer generation were, were guilty of an excessive self-centeredness, and narcissism and willingness to-to experiment in all kinds of ways, without perhaps, giving too much thought to-to the consequences. At the same time, I do remember one thing incident this, participate in 1968. I was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. And we were there my wife and I, because we just read the book called you can make the difference and we were promoting the book and as a conservative how to do it political action. And everybody was-was-was in a good humor. I mean, the cops the Chicago cops were in a good humor or and the people that we met in the streets were in good humor, and even the young people when we met and we were there and talking with them on the streets and so forth. They could humor what was what happened was that a certain group of leaders, radical leaders, radicalized the, the young people there, deliberately provoked the cops into using excessive force, and brought about the chaos of the Democratic Convention and we will just never forget was his extraordinary difference between the mood before the convention And then what happened during the convention by what I think were professional revolutionaries, whether you are talking about what was his name, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman Tom Hayden. And Tom Hayden certainly was very much a, a professional, political revolutionary for any Davis landed and really knew what he was doing. And that was to try to radicalize these young people. And they succeeded. So, I do not want to I do not want to put all of the blame. Simply on-on-on the baby boomers themselves, I think they were used and manipulated by-by certain people, at times, at times. And certainly, I can attest to that in my own personal experience in (19)68. 05:46 SM: When you look at the boomer generation, at the time of (19)68, when boomers are obviously in their youth, late teens, early 20s, and how you reflect on today, in the year 2003, what were your thoughts in that (19)68, about that generation? And what are your thoughts today has changed or is pretty consistent? 06:03 LE: I think, probably (19)68, we were my wife, and I were probably a little bit in despair when they know what was going to happen to America with these young people. Whether it was Woodstock, or was the counterculture whether it was what we thought was being so unpatriotic by their opposition to the war. And so many other ways, and but I am always something of an optimist. And so I was hopeful, prayerful that maybe they would mature in time. And I think that was what has happened. I mean, we know the examples of Jerry Rubin becoming a stockbroker and other leaders of the so called the Chicago seven, who became less radical, with the exception of Tom Hayden. as they got older, as they got married, as they began raising children, they were saying to their kids are having second thoughts who want to do drugs, forgetting very convincingly that they have been doing drugs and doing sex in the (19)60s, so-so time and maturity, and experience has as changed, I think they have changed the boomer, large parts of the boomer generation. 07:27 SM: The boomers, some again, I was young at that time, I can remember conversations and all they were all over the country and read them in newspapers. And that is that boomer generation thought they were going to be the change agents for the betterment of society that they were going to be, they were going to end racism, sexism, homophobia, that there is the most unique generation in American history. Just wait, because you will see what the good things, we are going to do your thoughts on that kind of an attitude that they had at that time? And whether they have done it? 07:58 LE: Well, you know, young people, left or right, are always idealistic. They always think they can change the world. And I think it is good that they have that, that those feelings, but otherwise the world would not get changed. I think certainly we on the right. And I was a little bit older than some of the people you are talking about on the right. But certainly, we did change the world through the-the-the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, which led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1966, as governor of California, which led to his election as president in 1980. So I think that you can it can be argued that Young Americans for freedom did set out to change the country, and it did. Now, the baby boomers did do some good things. I think that their part in the civil rights revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement was an epic victory. For-for-for America, not just for blacks, but for all-all Americans black or white, or brown or a red or what have you. And I think they deserve full and adequate, a full-full credit for that. And some of the other areas. Not so, so happy about their-their impact on our politics. You know, the so called Vietnam syndrome, which affected our foreign policy for a number of years. The counterculture which we are still struggling with, what is the right balance? I think also that the baby boomers deserve credit for the initial women's movement because women were not being treated fairly and even handedly. My wife, who was a conservative was also a feminist. He was a conservative feminist in the (19)60s because she said that she was not getting equal pay for, for the same for the job that she was doing, that men were getting more or getting more for. Then, of course it got became radicalized in succeeding years. But I think in those two areas, the feminist movement and the civil rights movement, that the movers did make salutary contributions to American society. 10:34 SM: Do you feel that the term I was talking about full Miranda, and an activist, as I as I define an activist, a person who believes that he or she can make a difference in this world, he did not even throw the politics out here. You can just say, activists or just liberals or conservatives or whatever. Now the concept of activism was I was see something was very strong within the boomer generation. As a person was raised children, what are your thoughts on the activism of the boomers have they passed it on to their kids? Number one. And number two, is the whole concept of empowerment. The lot of the boomers are involved in activist protests or whatever that were head of, that we were not up to create violence, but we are really sincere and moral in their efforts, believe they can change things. And just your thoughts on that. 11:32 LE: Well, obviously, I for political activism, I was a political activist myself in the 1960s. So, I think that the boomers? Well, as I said, I think it is important, I will keep saying it over and over again, we are not only all liberal, there were many-many conservative boomers. Right. And I think that is a very important point we have to keep making here that the boomers were not all at one particular philosophical hue. There were conservative boomers, as well as liberal voters. And they were active in American freedom as well as SDS that is making in my class, they became activists, because their fathers and mothers were-were not they-they-they came out of having won World War II. But we had some experience, even in the Great Depression, they were concerned about, you know, making a living, starting a family, having a building a house, buying a house. But you know, the good life, the American life American dream. The Boomers came along and had the luxury of political activism because it meant to worry where the bread was coming from and have to worry about a job. So they took advantage of that. And as I say, we were able to do good as well as not such good things for our, for our country, have they passed that along to their children. In any generation, any one generation are only going to have five or 10 percent of the of that generation, they are going to be active as politically activist, it was a higher percentage in the (19)60s, with the boomers because of the Vietnam War, primarily. And then also, a second one, second contributing factor was the civil rights. So those two things combined to increase the level of participation, from probably 10 percent to I have seen some figures in low 20s 20 to 25 percent. On the campus. 13:55 SM: I know that term that is often used numbers is 15 percent of the students are involved in some sort of activity now students, young people, college students, were involved in some sort of an activism. And some of the critics say only 15 percent of 70 million people were really involved in in any corner of activism. That is a lot of people still, you know, consider most time. Quick question here. And this is just a general question of concern. I have not gone to reach them that folder is are you concerned as an educator about the-the inability of our young people to vote? And the fact is, do you feel this is in any direct way, a feeling of a sense of lack of empowerment that their voice does not count? So why do it. and it is and-and having the parents who were the people who were supposedly activists and talked about the importance of their voice being heard, not passing this on again to their children? 14:55 LE: Well, again, I we have never had high as high percentage of political involvement as the as the utopians want. And, and if, if the figures, you know, we have all seen these figures were 50, or 60 percent, or something like that, and turnout for elections and so forth. That was at a time when we did not have as many people as we have today, when we did not have the kind of situation where we have a lot of Hispanics who do not vote, or we have a lot of African Americans who do not vote and a variety of reasons for that. So, I do not I do not think I mean, if you were to look at the number, probably of the children of the boomers as separate, apart from the various people who come in through immigration, I think you will find that the percentages are about the same. I may, I maybe I am being too wrong about this. But I that is, that is my impression, and there are a lot of political activists, but to to-to-to engender political activism, you must have causes, you must have issues, which will activate people. And we just simply do not have those same kind of overriding issues that we did. Back in the (19)60s, for example, those people who had the most people, the mobilization people against the war in Vietnam, following the not so much 911. But that poll period, they are leading up through Afghanistan, and then Iraq, you did have a number of people demonstrating against those of conflicts and, and are getting involved in, but the numbers are much smaller. And why was that? Well, one obvious reason was the no one was going to be drafted from Harvard, or Yale or Wisconsin to go fight in Afghanistan or Iraq, because we do not have the draft anymore. We have a volunteer army. And that was one of the major factors in motivating young people to get active in the 1960s. They did not want to go to fight and perhaps die in Vietnam, which was a very real possibility, through the draft. 17:28 SM: One of the important issues of that particular period, obviously, with the anniversary of Watergate, which are going through right now, is supposedly lack of trust that a lot of the boomers had in anyone in position of leadership, I can remember, again, on a college campus, they would even listen to a minister, if anyone was in a position of authority to not be the university president of the United States or United States senator or congressman, it could be the head of a corporation, anybody who was quote, labeled a leader, including ministers. And in the trust factor, I, I worry about this as a person, I am going to start with that folder, because I have worked with college students that I think need to trust people. I can remember psychologists telling me in a class once that people who cannot trust me not be successful in life, you have got to have some people in trust. Do you feel that boomers, you know, you cannot define an entire 70 million people but that in some respects, the things that happened in the in their youth, the negative effect that it had on them, whether it be Watergate, or the Vietnam War, or a lot of other things? They just did not trust anyone in leadership has been passed on to their kids. And so that was we have an ongoing problem on the issue of trust in America. 18:45 LE: I think it is a very valid question. And the way I the way I put this I have written a little bit on this is that I think that Americans, generally and baby boomers specifically were traumatized by the period from about 1963 through about 1978, (19)79, starting with John Kennedy's assassination, then the Vietnam War, then the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Then Watergate and Richard Nixon aligned to the American people and using illegally unconstitutional the powers of his office to cover up his unlawful actions. And then finally, Jimmy Carter's inept handling of the presidency in the late in the late (19)70s. Culminating in his trying to blame the American people for what was going wrong going on rather than themselves. It was the public the public's melees that was to blame not his own being taking the-the letting the economy spiral into his Your unemployment rates and interest rates and all the rest of it. So, I think that was what I call a, a psychological depression through which Americans and particularly baby boomers suffered and endured during those 15 years or so. And that it was only with the election of Ronald Reagan that we began to come out of that, through his optimism, his vitality his repeating to the best of people of using some of the same techniques of his favorite President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to lift up the spirits and, and to rephrase the only thing to fear but fear itself and-and Reagan's idea that the best days are yet to come, I think resonates with the old FDR rhetoric. So that that has been a problem which we have had to deal with. Yes, I think that has been inevitable that the baby boomers have passed that on to their children. 21:05 SM: When you look at the Vietnam War, and the ending of that war, what do you think were the one or two most important reasons why the war ended? Was it because of the antiwar movement, like many people believe on college campuses that by constantly protesting and maybe Americans aware? Or was it when bodies start coming home in middle America start protesting against the war? 21:28 LE: Well, I think initially, it was the-the protests, which-which forced the issue onto the, into the front pages, and maybe people pay attention to it. But we have to remember that. Up until January of 1968, most of the polls showed a solid majority of American people handling and supporting rather the-the Vietnam War was with the Tet Offensive, which was the real shocker, and which just stunned not only American people, but also members of Congress, and also the median voter pride cake, made his famous trip to Vietnam, came back and said, look, we really ought to get out of Vietnam. And LBJ is alleged to have said, well, you know, if we have lost bought a private kite, and we have lost the war, or words to that effect, we have lost the man in the street. So that on top of that, you have the ever increasing numbers of Americans being drafted you then you had the number increasing numbers of deaths, we had the realization that he had been lied to as to who was winning the war. And so all of these things came together. And people said, in effect that is enough. 22:53 SM: When you get into the war itself, the whole concept of healing to as a nation. Your thoughts on the impact of the Vietnam Memorial was- had, obviously it has had impact on Vietnam veterans and their families, and the warriors who fought and died in that war. But what effect has it had on the nation as a whole? And secondly, do you think that a lot of members of the boomer generation are having second thoughts about that serving? Or having second thoughts about? It is like, all I can say is, it is like a child or young children with their parents at the wall and the parent and the child looks up to the dad and says, “Dad, what did you do during the war dad?” It is, just it is a thought that is that do you think there is some, do you think there is a problem with healing within the nation with respect to this particular war and what it did to our nation at tour nation apart? So within the psyche of the boomer generation, and also in the body politic of the country? 23:59 LE: Well, I think first of all, that the Vietnam Memorial has-has-has helped the healing, no question about it. That is one of the most popular memorials here in Washington, DC. It is very touching to see, particularly veterans and their families and the survivors that come there, and the names, touch the wall and so forth. So, I think it has been tremendously important in the healing process. But I do think, though, that the-the scars of that war are still there with the baby with the baby boomers who oppose it at the time. Some of them probably have just said, oh, well, let us let us move on. I think some still think it was an unjust war. They still think it was the wrong war. They still think that we should not have been involved and I think that will always be there. So, I think, at least certain leaders that I have that I have heard or the interviews that they have given, they certainly have not regretted their opposition-based database for me to post to it. 25:22 SM: One of the one of the interesting scenarios during that period is the fact that Dr. King spoke up against the war as a civil rights leader took a lot of courage. Even that phone wreck, he mentioned it was a great interview, talked about the moral leadership of Dr. King, he was a moral man, he is problems like a lot of people have personally been more a leader. But I would like your thoughts as obviously personnel who is going to be teaching a course on what curries it takes for an African American leader of that magnitude to be against the war when he was criticized by his peers. And it was at that very same period of lack power mill was taking place and they were looking at people like King Ruston, Farmer young in the red Wilkins, is your time has passed. Just your thoughts on Dr. King's antiwar stand? 26:10 LE: Well, I think I have to divide that Dr. King's legacy. And the two parts number one, I think as the as the leader of the civil rights movement, and standing up to people like O'Connor and other bigots and racists like that. I think he showed extraordinary leadership. He was certainly somebody I looked up to, as a matter of fact, other line by conservative I was there at the March on Washington, in 1963. Here in Washington, DC, I wanted to be there and want to see what it was like feeling. And I was deeply touched to move by, particularly by his, by his speech by his dress. So, I think without his leadership, without his example, that we would not have had the-the advances that we did, we would have had the Civil Rights Act of 64 W. H Rights Act of 1965, and so forth. I am not so sure about his opposition to the Vietnam War. I do not know. I am not quite sure why he did it. Was it out of moral conviction? Or was it an attempt on his part, to sort of show more radical young blacks that he could take a-a strong position on a more current issue? I did not, I do not, my recollection is he did not seem to be as comfortable and as convincing in that role, as he was in his earlier role as a civil rights leader, well, maybe that is unfair to him. And-and I do not want to in any way, denigrate him, or diminish his try to diminish his-his extraordinary contributions in the first part of that decade. 28:23 SM: When I read some of the reasons, I believe there is, I think, two speeches that he gave two major speeches on Vietnam, one of the Riverside Church in New York City, I have copies of them. And some of the people sent me that he actually gave a third speech, Vietnam, Rabbi Heschel, I believe was a very important person persuading him to-to go against the war. And I am trying I do not know if anybody has written biographies on Rabbi Heschel, but I am looking for the-the impact and I might have to go to the Jewish center to find that out because he had a tremendous influence on Dr. King. I do not know that story on Vietnam. I am going to go into some names of the period here and just your comments and reactions to them and I am going to come back and have two or three final questions. Your thoughts on Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. 29:11 LE: Oh, golly, golly coffee Well, I you know, I just think Jane Fonda cause such extraordinary pain and anguish and, and real harm to our, to our fighting men. And also, to the POWs if you read some of what John McCain said about devout Jane Fonda it was- she refused to, to be honest about what she saw in the POW camps in the north, and I never have been able to forgive Jane Fonda for what was as close to an act of treason as I think you can get. Tom Hayden, I think it was a professional, agitator, radical and always with-with a definite cause in mind, whether whatever he said or whatever he did and that I am I am very pleased that he failed because I think he would have taken America in the wrong direction. 30:17 SM: The yippies, the two people, you all think of are Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. 30:22 LE: Yeah. Right. Well, I think they were entertainers. I think that they were engaged in shock tactics. I do not know that they ever took the revolution that seriously, but Hayden did. Lanny Davis do they were serious revolutions. 30:53 SM: I am going to interject a story here. I am going to change the tape. Just a couple of names here, Lyndon Johnson. 31:08 LE: Well, Lyndon Johnson was, was a man of obsessions is obsessed with the idea 1964 of winning by the largest margin ever in presidential politics and besting his mentor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's margin over Outland, in 1936. And that was why he said and did the really reprehensible things that he did say about Barry Goldwater, accusing him of somebody caring about nuclear Armageddon, and then destroy Social Security and all the other things that he said that he allowed his people to say about very cool water. He was also obsessed with the idea that he had to he had to win, quote, the Vietnam War, but he had to do it his way. And therefore, he kept trying to manage it. Not a military man. And all he did was to bring about the deaths of 10s of 1000s of Americans. He was also obsessed with the idea that he could, he could not be, he would not be corrupted by political power. But in point of fact, he-he was and was someone who used everybody around him, whether it was men or women or aide or mistresses, or all the rest of it, for his own personal satisfaction. aggrandizement has been one of the one of the most personally reprehensible men we have ever had in public office, certainly in the White House. He Did one. One good thing. And that was the-the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or whatever x-x 1965. Great Society again, it was an obsession and this idea that he could make over and make a great society, just through spending money and his idea of management from the top. It was just this obsession is this grandiose utopian dream, it is. 33:39 SM: Bobby Kennedy. 33:44 LE: I think a man caught-caught by his name, caught by his family caught by his reputation, forced to probably to run for president and probably did not want to force to pursue that. That goal in the name of his brother in his family. I do not, I do not know what would have happened to him if he had gotten the-the nomination in in 1968. Just how, what kind of a campaign he would have run because he was beginning to show some appreciation for the private sector and some of his speeches. So, he was not as liberal as some people made him out to be or hoped that he would be a very dramatic person. I think. 34:38 SM: Eugene McCarthy. 34:42 LE: A brilliant iconoclastic again fiercely independent. A poet as well as a politician somebody who I think is not very easily put into a particular catalogue, or category rather, party or philosophy certainly made a difference in, in American politics through almost defeating Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire. Without that Richard Nixon were not elected president in 1968. 35:32 SM: The bitterness between McCarthy and candidate Bobby Kennedy is very strong. 35:38 LE: Yeah. Well, Eugene was-was told by Bobby I am told that, you know, if you go, I will not. And then, after McCarthy almost spun to Hampshire, Kennedy, realizing just how vulnerable Johnson was got into it, and never forgave him for that to Catholics, by the way. 36:00 SM: George McGovern. 36:04 LE: Well, George McGovern, a, an ideologue who saw the error of his ways he certainly in his later years was not the same kind of pacifist and an anti-capitalist that he was running in 1972. 36:31 SM: Hubert Humphrey. 36:33 LE: The happy warrior, love to love politics, love to talk about politics, love to practice politics. Came out of the nonpartisan tradition of Minnesota, and got chewed up by the much superior, well-oiled political machine of the Kennedys and West Virginia, and then was humiliated by a by Lyndon Baines Johnson, as vice president, deserved better than he got. 37:06 SM: You think that if he if curiosity, if he had spoken up against Johnson against the policy that he might have won the election in (19)68 because he was coming on toward the very end in history books say that it said go on another week, he would have been an excellent, he was really- 37:25 LE: He might have the AFL CIO did a brilliant, magnificent job of almost winning the election in 1968. And it really turned out really turned to that neighbor coming on strong. And so it was Humphrey. Yes, that is, that is possible. Humphrey, who I think probably was-was worried about, you know, backlash among-among some Democrats. And maybe he could see that he was coming on strong, I thought he could pull it out without risking that possible division in the party. 38:05 SM: John Kennedy. 38:10 LE: Well, you know, it is so hard to think rationally about him. But we have learned so much about him. Since I, I know this in the (19)60s, and I had a chance to see him up close because I was a press secretary to the United States senator in the late (19)50s. And early (19)60s, and I saw Kennedy in action on the Senate floor. Close was closed some this is where you are and where I am. And he was he was charismatic. He was charming. He was, I thought, extremely intelligent. Dynamic. Just captivating loved us used to love watching him in the press conferences and enjoying him with those presidential press conferences. But a very flawed man, I am not talking about the sexual peccadilloes. But it was a certain, I think, weakness or a certain uncertainty there at the core, which showed in his non reaction to going up with a sense of direction of the Berlin Wall in his withdrawing CIA support of the Bay of Pigs operation and his ambivalence about the war in Vietnam. At the same time, he did show some true grit with the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I think hard to sum him up. Do not know what he would have turned out to be if he had run for the election? Whether you would have won one way you know that in October of 16 Free. Time Magazine did a poll of Goldwater versus Kennedy. And it was a near tie. Really? Yes. 40:11 SM: What do you think of John Kennedy? The critics that drew I just had to review debt to Jim Hilde. He is a professor at Temple University. He is a liberal professor. And he was mentioning that in the revisionists are all really hurt the Kennedy image. And then except- 40:30 LE: For people, right, except that the people I mean, whenever there is a public popular poll name, your favorite president, John Kennedy always winds up in the top three or four, someone just came out a month or so ago. 40:44 SM: But when you ask him, one of the terms that I always remember hearing about President Kennedy when he was a pragmatic politician, yes. So that, for example, when Harris Wofford or whoever Bobby Kennedy made the call, or Mrs. King made the call to get Dr. King out of jail. John Kennedy did it Bobby told was the right thing to do. And Harris was involved in it. But the question is, there was always the thought of the impact that would have on the southern politicians, but any even the how he responded to the March on Washington 63, when he worried about or maybe riot or something in the streets. And the effect that supporting the March on Washington would have been the effect on the south, the Democrats This is the question I am asked basically trying to get to is, did John Kennedy truly care about the black man. truly care? Or was this a pragmatic, just a pragmatic power? 41:42 LE: Yeah, I think I think it was strictly pragmatic politics. I do not think he truly cared about it. I think in that sense that Bobby Kennedy, later in that decade, showed more true caring and empathy with the with the plight of the African American. I think you are right; I think Kennedy was ruled by the by his brain, not by his heart. But I think Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy is coming more, or as rules very often by his heart is. 42:12 SM: Very-very good. I want you to talk about Barry Goldwater. He is the next version. 42:19 LE: Well, a very unlikely revolutionary. But he was, I mean, he was a college dropout, wrote a book. So 3.5 million copies, it was a son of a millionaire who liked to hang around and jeans and go unshaven and go down the Columbia River up in the Grand Canyon. A salesman but also global elite and fiercely in the idea of individual freedom and unlimited government. A guy with from knees and eyes who yet first his life flying airplanes during World War II. And somebody who just was determined that he was going to offer a choice not an echo in 1964 which is why he went to-to Tennessee and seven we have got to do something about this TVA sellable sell part of it often went out to South Dakota, great big plowing the contest and said we are doing the farm subsidies and went down to Florida and said we got to privatize at least part of social security. I mean, these are not, you know, pragmatic. 43:40 SM: Right. 43:44 LE: This was a man who said this is going to be a campaign of principles, not a personalities and just stuck to it. And as a result of that, although he lost badly, the-the election to Lyndon Johnson still provided a-an inspiration for all sorts of people to get into politics, including it folder, and add crane both who got into politics as a result of Barry Goldwater and who provided Ronald Reagan with the opportunity to make a TV address, which made him for the first time in this life, a national political star and- 44:27 SM: I was I saw my home on TV. 44:31 LE: California, if it had not been for Barry Goldwater being the nominee, Ronald Reagan would not have made that speech and would never have become the, I think the governor of- 44:42 SM: Richard Nixon. 44:44 LE: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brilliant man, filled with insecurities filled with seething with animosities towards his enemies, resentful at the same time understanding you can trust a communist and only to be a communist. Somebody who loved his children and was fiercely loyal to his friends, but-but hated his enemies, test all kinds of combinations I think Jacqueline. 45:23 SM: Spiro Agnew. 45:27 LE: Oh man who was caught up in and sort of carried along by events. He was always sort of the, fortunately for him the right time to first become governor and then to become vice president. Again, personally and morally flawed individual who did not see anything wrong. And sitting there in his office in the White House, which is where the Vice President has office in those days and receiving a payoff in a brown paper bag from a Maryland lobbyist. I mean, it is just makes you want to shrink him in repugnance. 46:13 SM: Gerald Ford. 46:16 LE: Good man, honest man decent man did the right thing by pardoning Nixon a minor figure in American politics but did that one major thing which was the right thing to do. 46:31 SM: Some of the African American leaders, you already made reference to Dr. King with any other thoughts on Dr. King. 46:46 LE: I think truly one of the most inspiring Americans of the 20th century. 46:56 SM: How about Malcolm X. 47:01 LE: A reflection of the of the anger and resentment well justified of African Americans, somebody who seemed to be changing toward the very end of his life. And maybe might have made some very interesting contributions to better relations between-between whites and blacks in America tragically cut down. 47:35 SM: The Black Panther Party was a Huey Newton’s and the Bobby Seales of the world. 47:40 LE: Well, I am I am I am influenced by-by Horwitz Collier on that destructive generation so forth. I think these cynical power-seeking hedonistic opportunists who were using people did not really give a damn about-about African Americans. Just their own power, sexual and personal recommendations. 48:06 SM: How about the women's movement, the leaders Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem leader. 48:12 LE: I think any of them I think, the beginning of the movement, I think, as I said earlier, I think some of them have the right idea that women had were not being treated fairly and accurately in the marketplace. But I think it slipped away from I think a certain maybe a certain arrogance set in and then then all of a sudden they allowed the real radicals to take it over. I think alienated a lot of a lot of conservative if you vote conservative feminists and that is not an oxymoron, like my wife. 48:49 SM: How about Muhammad Ali? 48:52 LE: Cassius Clay, but yeah, yeah. Oh, I a sweet-sweet fighter. Somebody that you just need all of his with his grace and, and power and endurance to for that matter. 49:15 SM: Throughout the antiwar stand things. Yeah, a conscientious objector, seemed to be sincere in that. 49:21 LE: I think you are right to take that position. 49:24 SM: So, I am in Columbus side bid. He came and he was dethroned. And I was working at Ohio University at the time, came down to see him at a theater they paid him $3,500 to come and speak. And at the very beginning of the trailers for protesters outside against on a rally and he gave the $3,500 back to the local community that needed it for four in the city. He did not need the money. He gave three the cash back. 49:53 LE: I am not surprised. I have always thought he was very sincere. Somebody, man of conviction. I really, I was always my impression. 50:05 SM: Timothy Leary. 50:10 LE: Well, I think he probably deserved the hand that he got. I think that he misled so many people think the arrogance was pretty, pretty evident from the very beginning. And I think it is, it is, it is appropriate. He is really a minor figure in this whole story. We are talking. 50:40 SM: Daniel Ellsberg. 50:46 LE: Well, there-there is somebody who after signing a document, by violated it by stealing the documents, and then turning them over to the to the New York Times and The Washington Post and others in direct violation of his word. So, it is hard for me to feel much sympathy for a perjurer. He is an imposter. 51:23 SM: How about George Wallace? 51:27 LE: George Wallace was a at best, a cynical opportunity to opportunist and at worst, a bigot and a segregationist. He was-was a was a demagogue the way that he would appeal to the-the baser emotions into people. And I think he has been given more attention than he deserves as a major political figure of the time. 51:59 SM: Robert McNamara. 52:08 LE: Well, what can you say about somebody who said publicly that we are winning the war in Vietnam, and then at Georgetown party said that we were losing it? And then it has never been able to satisfactorily explain the dichotomy between these two positions should have a decent thing by this resigning the Secretary of Defense. 52:34 SM: John Dean. 52:41 LE: I vote pass on Dean. 52:44 SM: The music of the year, because the music of that period was so influential in the antiwar movement, whether it be the Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as well I think if I Dylan's. 52:56 LE: Yeah, I think you have got to differentiate between the different kinds of whatever you are talking about, you know, hard rock and electronic rock or rock and you know, Joplin and Hendrix. 53:06 SM: Richie Havens. 53:09 LE: Those guys right now, I watched I went to so Woodstock at the movie. I did not go to Woodstock in person. And one sense it was fascinating. But to me it was also so it was it was not only chaotic, but it was an archaic and in a sense that he would say it was sort of the-the combination of the of the counterculture ethic and so three days of drinking and drugging and unprotected sex with people behaving more like animals than that human beings as opposed to that, I think that music would have to include you know, the-the Beatles would have to the Beach Boys would have to vote even-even-even Elvis. And then that kind of music is far different. 54:17 SM: Then I am pretty much done here. It is a couple questions at the very end, just your gut level reaction to these terms from the period SDS. 54:32 LE: Faux revolutionaries, F A U X. 54:37 SM: Counterculture. 54:43 LE: Hedonistic destructive self-destructive, destructive and self-destructive. 54:53 SM: Pentagon Papers. 55:12 LE: A chapter in American journalism. Which is not as-as salutary as many journalists think. 55:27 SM: Woodstock, I think we are covering may come off of the Beatles, John Lennon. 55:39 LE: I mean, I sort of liked the Beatles. I mean, I did not listen to him a lot by sort of like the Beatles. And then again, I did not know that those see in the Sky with Diamonds was, was a plug for LSD, which shows you how naive I am. 55:51 SM: But you know, when John Lennon died in 1980, and voila, Beatles he was the one that was the big anti-war. That is the one that Nixon did not like, and all the other kinds of things. You just some general individuals that were over in Vietnam, we in Westmoreland president to general Kochi, and Maxwell Taylor, certainly great names of people that ran the war in Vietnam. Well, I am going to change the tape here before we. Go, if you look at the Vietnam War, I think that is the question we were talking about we looking at the Vietnam War. What is the main reason that that war ended? 56:41 LE: I think the young played a very important role as they always do. If you want political and social change, you know you young are the place where it happens. And there is very little current anyone else can do to speed things up as the young want to be passive or just alienated. You know, there is no other source of truth unless you have a tense labor situation. And that would be the other example. Right now we have a situation in which people are afraid even to go out on strike, is there going to be replaced? We have people who are afraid to complain about their work conditions, because they will be downsized. The real thing about students is they not only have time on their side aside, but there are very few threats you can make against them. They are not, they are not in the system yet, in that sort of way. Now why did it take them that long? I do not know how many it was it was I mean, guys sign of the veritable obstinacy of the system, which is demonstrating itself again. These days, I- 58:11 SM: I want to go over again, talking about how important you say the students, the ministers are in a movement, because you were talking about that on the tape. And- 58:18 LE: I think ministers are very important, and they are paid to be moral. There. They make it possible for other people to do things. In other words, if you are in a congregation, and you may feel a certain way, but you do not feel like you have sort of a moral authority to do it. I mean, a lot of people do not. Whereas if the minister helps to bring some people out of their out of their shell in that regard. I have seen situations in which kind of nations on the other hand, I have been very restrictive on the ministers. 59:11 SM: Okay, one of the issues, again, is the issue of healing. I have had an opportunity to go to the Vietnam Memorial for the last couple of years that Veterans Day and Memorial Day ceremonies. And I like your thoughts on the importance that the wall has done for America, not only for Vietnam veterans, but for America itself. And on top of that, do you feel that there has been healing between not only within the Vietnam veteran generation but amongst those who were for and against the war? 59:45 LE: Ah, I suspect that the-the memorial has been the has had the strongest effect on those who were directly involved in the war or who had people friends, relatives who were, I have a friend whose name is about the 39th up there on the wall. However, I think what is sometimes called Healing is really amnesia and a simple time you know, there will be come a time when there will be nobody with any direct contact with Vietnam, at which point people will have a harder time relating to that wall. Versus they do-do a civil war monument in Gettysburg. And that is in the nature. However, as monuments go, it has, it has been an extraordinary one. I take people around town visitors around town, it is one of the places I always want to take them especially I want to take them at night because I think, as a special quality at nighttime. You enter it in the dark. 1:00:57 SM: Has there been healing between those who were for and against the war? The divisions were so- 1:01:04 LE: I do not think they even talk about it do they? I mean, it is not it is like, again, it is almost it is more a matter of it is no longer important. That is what is so absurd about war, in the first place is that you can kill 50,000 People of your own people and what was it 2 million of others? And then you-you know, a few years later, it no longer makes a difference. I am not sure I use the word healing. I mean, it is not a word that comes to mind. It certainly has lost its place in the semiosis fear no longer has the symbolic power at once did. And I cannot explain to my own sons what it was like what the fuss was about. And I suppose I lose have the same problem. I recall trying to understand how to how hard it was to relate in any meaningful way to my fact that my parents both lost brothers in the First World War. But that was a war that I had no connection with. On the other hand, I had a lot of connection with the Second World War in the sense that as a child in Georgetown, we did have blackouts and we had I stood on the roof and look for German planes and, and relatives would bring German insignias back from the war and my father was working for the government. So all those things added to it. And then after the war I went to went to France in the still in then in the (19)50s You know, maybe 10 years after the war. And there was still plenty of places which were shell marked. They were all over Europe and 10 years later, there were cranes I think the French word is grew these great big because literally they looked like cranes and Europe was rebuilding itself but at the same time you could see buildings that were still had all the marks of having bombarded and when you were in Paris, I remember this the number that what struck me was the number of men in wheelchairs so then I went back maybe 10 or 15 Later years later and there was nobody in wheelchairs in Paris and that is what happens if you do not have those experiences and it just cannot mean the same thing. 1:04:51 SM: Let Me- start again. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. 1:04:56 LE: Yeah I always like Abbie Hoffman better than Jerry Rubin for two reasons. I guess first of all that Abbie Hoffman had a real sense of humor, which I related to and Jerry Rubin eventually sold out. Hartman was a bizarre and he was a, he was a- it was a truly eccentric character, and I guess maybe a little bit sad character in many ways. But he was he was sort of the sort of the spirit of the (19)60s. And I found out the other day that when I was at Harvard, I had been director, news director of the radio station at the time that that Fidel Castro came to America. And it was a, I was responsible for getting the-the broadcasts of Fidel Castro out from Memorial Stadium and went all the way down to Cuba and to Latin America. It was very exciting. And Fidel Castro went to the faculty club for dinner, and came out with his lieutenants and all the students were there clapping room that and then I interviewed one of his lieutenants at Hays big for telling you about all of these out in the mountains. Well, it turns out that Abby Huffman was at that Memorial Stadium speech that same night, which I think sort of- 1:06:25 SM: how do you feel about the suicide note that, that Abbie Hoffman left when he died in Bucks County several years back and supposedly said the note, no one is listening anymore. And I guess he only had about $2,000 in the bank, but you have given a lot of his money away and kind of civils involved and causes. But when I heard that, I thought, is that symbolic of a boomer, especially those that still care about the issues of that time that no one is listening anymore? He is just a symbol that. 1:06:57 LE: Yeah, well, you see, that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. If you are an existentialist, you do not expect anybody to be listening. I mean, it is you are engaging in and like Sisyphus, you are rolling a rock up the hill is going to roll back, but you still have no choice. You know, what is it the plague in which [inaudible] as the doctor who was taking care of people, even though that, you know, the plague, so far, as anybody knows, is incurable. That is a that would be the, I think the different from way I sort of approach it in a way that that someone like Abbie Hoffman might have approached it. And I do not know what that comes, what sort of experiences that comes out of, you know, where you help people end up having a different approach like that. And some people might say, hearing me speak, you know, wow, terribly depressing. What you have just said is, but in fact, I think it is tremendously optimistic because of sustaining I mean, if you, if you realize that it is not your is not within your power to determine the outcome of what you do, is only within your power to make the choice to do it. And, and so that you do not control history. You, you, you it is not, it is not within your privilege, to be born at the right moment. And I was talking to somebody the other day about how if, you know, was it better to have been in our 20s in the (19)60s, and have to live through all this shit afterwards? Or the other way around? You know, would we be happier if we had, you know, come into the (19)60s When we were 16? Now, the answer is probably no, because we would probably be like our parents and would not have liked it very much. We probably did the right thing, and we are now paying the right price for it. But in any case, it is it is nothing we can do anything about. So, Camus said somewhere that the-the-the only sin we are we are not permitted is despair. And I think that there were an awful lot of people who set up too large a fantasy. And I do not think it is wrong to have myths and hopes and dreams, but I think that they have to be within the context of knowing that it may not work out. And that way you-you continue to have the strength to keep trying let success come as a surprise rather than as a necessary standard by which you judge what you are going to do. 1:09:46 SM: Let me let you get that. Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. 1:09:52 LE: Oh, I never paid that much attention to. I was never very much involved in all that. You know, I mean, that was not my (19)60s. I mean, I was, certainly was aware of it, but it was not it was not central to anything I did. 1:10:06 SM: How about Muhammad Ali? 1:10:11 LE: I was sort of I was sort of interested in because in the early (19)60s I had been in the when I was in the Coast Guard had been in Louisville and I was visiting Hugh Haney was a cartoonist there. And it was in the lobby of the Louisville courier journal. And here comes his young black guy doing all this crazy stuff. I said, Who else? And he said, well, that is a new fighter name, Cassius Clay. And so I met him. I did not meet him, but I saw him before he was famous. So, I do not remember what my reaction is whatever I would say would not be honest. Because I do not remember. But he was against the Vietnam. Yeah, I do not I cannot tell you what, what I thought of that. But I approved, but I did not leave a strong impression. 1:10:54 SM: How about some of the older individuals Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Berrigan brothers? 1:11:00 LE: I Like them. I-I-I in my local work, you see, the truth of the matter is because being in Washington, you got to see how things were organized, you know, the big demonstrations and, and the truth of the matter is, a lot of these things would not have gotten off the ground a lot without a lot of old leftists both locally and nationally. It was the old leftists some of them, I presume, were communists, who really put things together. They knew how to do it. And it is part of the story of the (19)60s that has not been told, because it was assumed that there were all these brilliant young people who staged these marches. Well, there were a lot of people who were, and you know, who went back all the way back to the (19)30s. You know, and had a lot of experience in this sort of stuff. There were lawyers say in town, like, like David Ryan, who was an old (19)30s National Lawyers Guild lawyer, people like a balloon folks like that. Now I like for a for a Seventh Day agnostic I have a I have a certain fondness for ministers. I do not like I do not like t-shirt very much, but I like ministers when they are good. And, and I think that the Bergen brothers, you know, sort of lent a good moral cast to the to the show, as the Duck Fuck. 1:12:40 SM: Some of the politicians of the era starting with John Kennedy and then his brother Robert Kennedy. 1:12:49 LE: Yeah. I covered the covered the hearings of the investigation into the teamsters union as a young radio reporter. And her is something I wrote recently about that. My radio days. Among those seated at the long panel table was young John F. Kennedy, Democrat from Massachusetts. His brother Robert served as a counsel for the committee. At one point a prostitute witness made some off color comment that bought brought guffaws from the audience and Bobby's own giggles were amplified by his mic. The humorless Chair John McClellan wrapped his gavel and told Kennedy. This is not a joking matter. It would be the only time I ever saw Kennedy look chastened. I was not particularly impressed by the Kennedys. They struck me as lightweights hardly in the same class with Humphrey and Dirksen. I wrote in a September 5, 1959, letter, quote, the Kennedy brothers like to remark about the Quakers came to Washington to do good and did very well. Jimmy Hoffa, who was a student of corrupt told me once in the midst of the racket’s hearings, Bobby Kennedy is trying to make headlines for his brothers so he can get into the White House, but he cannot find his way out of this room and quote, now that the labor reform bill is passed, one big source of Kennedy headlines has disappeared. Let us hope the Kennedys do likewise. That was what I wrote. 1:14:20 SM: Oh, wow. Well, that was (19)59. What are your What are your thoughts on Kennedy from 15? John Kennedy from (19)59, to (19)63. And Bobby certainly through 1968. 1:14:31 LE: Well, the best thing that Jack Kennedy did was to bring my wife from Wisconsin to Washington where I could meet her merrier. I mean, she was part of that generation that was, and by today's standard, it was an extraordinary group of people. She came to work for Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. And it was, it was a very-very exciting time, it was a time in which passion and commitment was not only favored, but you could get bills passed based on it. And so, Kennedy himself, I think, was not the myth that he was made out to be. Started, I think the tradition of what I call mob politics. And I think he paid a heavy price for it. You know, he won the election from all appearances by the assistance of the mob, and in Illinois, far too close to the really deeply corrupt side of politics, and I think started a precedent, which, like I say, may have resulted in his own death and certainly set a pattern for, for future politics. In my book, I have a chart of what I call mob politics or history of mob politics. And it starts with Jack Kennedy, in Illinois. And it my thesis is that for 30 years, our politics had been repeatedly interrupted by a variety of crooks. Freelancers out of controls, crooks and-and others that have distorted our-our political system, then so I do I do. You know, I blame him for that. Bobby Kennedy, I believe was-was a quite a repugnant character in his early days when he was working for McCarthy. But I think he was it would be in a category of very, very small category of politicians who actually improve with age. I have seen that very, very rarely. And I would have to say, even though I was a supporter of Jean McCarthy, by the time that that Kennedy was running for office, I you know, and I was I could live with that. I would find something here. 1:17:20 SM: Okay, we are into the area of civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. 1:17:26 LE: Okay, Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the truly important people in my life and for a little bit eccentric reason is that I read stride towards freedom. While I was in college, and I was very-very moved by it, it was, it was perhaps the most important book I read while I was in college, even though it was not on any reading list. And what particularly moved me was that I was a product of a Quaker school, German ham friends in Philadelphia, and I had never really gotten to all the pacifism. stuff, it always seemed to me a lot of what the Quakers did seem very mushy, and I, and what Martin Luther King did for me, which was sort of unique was that, well, where I sort of connected with him was not just on the Civil Rights thing, but even more so on his description of his own struggles with pacifism and, and how he resolved them. And so that I came to know, King not as a civil rights leader, so much as but as a person who helped me think through some of my own problems, you know, which is an interesting experience in itself. Now, I would later learn things about the reality of King which, you know, as with everybody is not always what it appears, I mean, for example, everyone is very reluctant to get involved in Montgomery Bus Boycott initially. And in fact, it was a guy named Ed Nixon who was a member of the Sleeping Car Porters union called him up finally and said, you know, and I said, we want to use your-your church for meeting place, so Monday and King said, well, let me think about it. And a few couple days later, he called back and said, I made up your mind he was in King says, well, yeah, I think that will be okay says good because we have got 200 People coming. So, I mean, just that, you know, that sort of contrasts with the, with the popular image of and yet it also was a story. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a very common story of, of greatness inside. It does not-not just come, you know, burst out for I want to hear king with a girlfriend of mine at Howard University and I think 1960, who was speaking at Chapel. It was the first time I had ever done anything of a political protest, or I was a radio reporter here, I had covered the site covered sit ins, I had covered the sit ins and protests of that medical park. I had, you know, my girlfriend said, you know, I want to go here. And so we went and we, we got there a little bit late, and we had to sit outside, maybe there was a chapel was overflowing, and we sat outside and this beautiful day, listen to follow them quite closely, and I admired greatly. Malcolm X, I did not have that much consciousness. So frankly, I think Malcolm X has grown much larger and his depth and he was in his life. You are not meant to say that. But I think that is really true. I do not I do not recall, for example, being particularly conscious of Malcolm X as a factor in local civil rights. Things here in DC and this person, so biggest, most black city in the country Now may have been quite different in Chicago and New York, but- 1:21:56 SM: Would you, would you rate him I am sure, okay. Would you rate him like Bobby Kennedy in terms of one of those few individuals who kind of redeemed himself as he, as he got older because the last two years of his life, he no longer was going out and espousing the white man is a devil. He had been to Mecca and came back and Salva? 1:22:18 LE: I think there is that there is that element about it. And the other thing about Malcolm X was awkward relate to him is that he lived in Massachusetts, not far from Boston. And he was a musician. So I mean, I felt a feel sort of a companionship within there because I had that same period, I was at Harvard and a musician also. By but in terms of my own life, Malcolm X did not have hardly any influence. 1:22:50 SM: Could you comment on the Black Power advocates of that period? I always remember the scene of Dr. King was arms folded and Stokely Mark- Stokely Carmichael is speaking, saying that a new generation of black leaders is coming forth Black Power, Black Power, not the concept of Dr. King was all about, if you talk about the Stokely Carmichael's the H wraparounds. The Eldridge, cleavers, the Bobby seals, the Huey Newton's Angela Davis. The list goes on and on about the Black Power advocate like- 1:23:24 LE: It is like, it is like any politics. No. People spend a lot of time talking about a lot of interesting characters there are in politics that that are sort of interesting, but they are not necessarily over the long run, that they may just be sort of big players. Stokely Carmichael was clearly more than that. And as was Angela Davis. And the Panthers certainly had a big influence. On my feeling was that it was very often more anger than direction that the anger was-was-was well phrased, but the next steps were not, were not clear. And as I think I said in that article that you have got that I was, I was quite supportive of the Black Power movement made sense to me. I mean, I was an anthropology major, I understood what-what it was about. It did not it did not strike me as threatening or strange. And it did not, particularly it bothered me. What bothered me was not that that. STOKELY CARMICHAEL said the whites could no longer be in the civil rights movement. But that out of that post, riot period in this town, there was such a divide that came down between blacks and whites, which in many ways we have not recovered from. And, you know, there were I lost black friends just overnight. seemed like it was just because there was a whole different whole different paradigm moved into town. And there was nothing that one could-could do about that. And I do not know, you can say that it was wrong because it was not. I mean, the Black Power movement was right in its in its essence, but it like everything like that it has all sorts of spin off effects. The best civil rights leaders I ever knew, was a local one and never got a national attention guy named Julius Hopson Jr. Right there. And he was the head of the DC statehood party. He was he was a Marxist. Louise Hobson was a march within the status station. So he took a little bit different view of that he could always see the class element. And it was not just race. He did something extraordinary here in town, he went and he sued the DC school system for not spending equally in the various schools. And he pointed out as part of his argument, and while is maybe most dramatically illustrated in the comparison between black schools and white schools, you could also demonstrate it by comparing the middle-class black schools with the more black schools and was one his case. And we became, I believe, the only place in the country which dealt with all question of public schools and integration by saying that it was a, it was a money problem. And we did not live with not a busing was not done by busing. The only busing that occurred in in Washington DC occurred as a voluntary program at the suggestion of the of the school board. And in Montgomery County, and after a short experiment, the school board the black school board decided it was demeaning and stopped. Julia said had quite a different take on this thing. And he was strong enough though, to deal with Stokely Carmichael. He was a powerful, powerful guy, and-and-and was respected even though his particular form of civil rights activity was quite different. He, he said that this solution, for example, to the fact that nothing was being done about the rats in Northeast Washington was that he was going to collect the rats and trap them in and let them loose in Georgetown. And in fact, he only he only had a Volkswagen with one rack in a cage on top of it, but he sure got on the front page of papers for that. 1:28:33 SM: [Inaudible] Because there is any books been written on him? 1:28:36 LE: Well, no books, I wrote a book about Washington called captive capital back in 1974. And I have a few interesting pages on that. Tell that story. I tell the story about local department store which he was trying to integrate. And they, they said they, they, they could not really find any qualified negros. But as Julius Hopson could bring some qualified people with you, they would be glad to consider them. And he said he was not running any goddamn personnel program. But if they did not have some blacks hired in the next two weeks, he was going to boycott the store. And he was very well, I mean, he-he talked up but he was actually extremely well educated. And that was why he was able to pull something out like this school suit because he could do this. He could out data, his opponents and then one of my favorite stories, maybe I do not know what I still got the book here. Here this is Julius Hobson on the nature of the struggle and the struggle is and whether you like a Nigger-Nigger likes a cracker or white he is a pig or any of that stuff I have called people Why do you and pig in the FBI never said a word. All I have to do is put on a dashiki get a wig go out there on 14th Street and yell Whitey is a pig and I am going to take care of them, and the FBI will stand there and laugh at me. But the moment I start to discuss the way goods and services are distributed I start talking about the nature of the political system and I show that. It is a core area of the of the economic system. That is when the FBI comes in for a cat- for harassment. Can Black people ever win the fight for freedom, so long as they accept America's exploitive capitalism as the economic system within, so they must wage the battle? Black people have not confronted this question whether from a lack of understanding or of our economic and political systems or from an unwillingness to challenge them, their silence is a betrayal of the trust of the black people they purport to lead. This will tell you I mean, I mean, this was this was now in the 1960s and (19)70s. This was a black man who was standing up and saying these things and needs on a local black minister. I was asked to speak at his church one Sunday, I went over there. And when I went there, I looked over the congregation, I would say, the average person in their head, I own a pair of Tom McCann shoes that their suits cost an average of $35, a piece that their shirts were from hex basements. And they were very poor and very illiterate, almost illiterate, people who were emotionally shocked, just came to the church to let out this screen. The Minister took up a love offering, he took up a minister's travel offering. And then he took up a regular he took up five or six offerings. So when he got to me to speak, I got up and said, God dammit, this is Christianity. I want no part of it. And I said, this son of a bitch is stealing from you. And the thing is, he is not just stealing your money. He is stealing your minds. And I refuse to be part of this. And I walked off. 1:31:38 SM: What a character. Well, thank you very much. 1:31:39 LE: Some of the chapters are the chapter on race and on, you got a technique and the history on neighborhoods, we will give you a little feeling. 1:31:49 SM: We are going to have you sign this to definitely before you leave. Thank you very much. A couple of politicians. I know you would probably like to talk about Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. 1:31:58 LE: Okay, Lyndon Johnson was a crook who became a good guy who ended up as a tragedy. And he was, you know, if you read the early life of Lyndon Johnson, that you see very little that is admirable about it. But for a brief moment, in the 19(19)60s, he was an extraordinary president. Whatever happened afterwards, whatever happened before, you cannot deny that. Joseph Conrad says somewhere that the difference between a hero and a coward is paper, thin heroes and cowards are people who, for one brief moment, do something out of the ordinary. And what Lyndon Johnson did in the 1960s, along with Adam Clayton Powell, who was an equally false flawed man was extraordinary. Richard Nixon, I grew up hating. I mean, it was, it was early, it was his race against felon [Helen] Gahagan Douglas, my parents were talking about what a terrible man Richard Nixon was. And so that long before there was the 1960s, I knew that Richard Nixon was somebody to watch out for. In the last few years, I have learned that it could be worth grin, I will have to say, again, notwithstanding Vietnam, notwithstanding, Watergate, that Richard Nixon was our last liberal president, the last president to believe in the social welfare system around I mean, it took me a long, long time to understand that and the only way sometimes you learn these things is to see what happens later. But the fact of the matter is that Bill Clinton is incredibly to the right of Richard Nixon. And this flies in the face of what I always believed in what I was raised to believe, but all you have to do is think that Richard Nixon favored a negative income tax. And that was shut down by liberals like George Wiley who complained that it was not big enough. But if Nixon had succeeded, we might never be having the welfare dispute we were having today. Because we would have had structured it on an entirely different basis. We have there was a long list of things which slipped my mind at the present but there-there was a long list of issues. I do not want to say them because I will get some of them wrong. Have issues that people just do not even connect with, with the Nixon administration, which essentially- 1:35:06 SM: how do you feel the ca- so called enemies lists affected the psyche of the boomer generation? Because he had those lists, anybody who was protesting around college campuses, they were taking pictures on ovals. Anybody who was involved? 1:35:24 LE: I do not know. I mean, I, I guess I have had the honor of standing a chance to be on to enemies list because I might have been on Nixon, I guess it was not, I have never asked for my FBI file, I, you know, I, I feel I either would be disappointed if it was too thin, or angry if it was too thick. So, I would rather sort of leave that as a as an unknown. But I also am reasonably confident that I may be on Bill Clinton's enemies list. And I would say, this is no defense of Nixon. But but-but, you know, it is very hard to get people to look at these things realistically, you know, to step outside of your own ideology and look at the facts, the facts of the matter, that Chuck Colson went to jail, in part for looking at I think it was three FBI files, on people. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, they have had access to 900, at the least, at the least. And there is right now, you know, at least a reasonable journalistic supposition that I have seen that, that this whole White House Office database, when far beyond that, that it may have been directly tied into the FBI. Not that that, you know, you could just put your push a button and pull up somebody's FBI file, but you could automatically make a request to the FBI and a low level figure would make a decision and could send the file over. And it seems to be working. So now we have moved from-from-from paranoia, distrust and Machiavellian politics, to automated distrust paranoia, and Machiavellian politics. Now, that does not make Nixon a saint, it makes him, but it is something that you have to deal with. You have to deal with the fact that Bill Clinton is more conservative and Richard Nixon on domestic issues. There is just absolutely no doubt about it. And that on civil liberties is probably worse. I mean, it is a race, but he is probably worse. Bill-Bill Clinton has not he has yet to find a civil liberties worth standing up for. And he has played a key role in in the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. He has a content he has an underlying he basically has a soul of a southern share when it comes to civil liberties issues. 1:37:55 SM: How about Senator Eugene McCarthy and Senator George McGovern? 1:38:00 LE: Okay, well, I was a McCarthy. supporter, I was a, I ran on a, we had an interesting thing. We had a combined Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, slate for democratic Central Committee and for convention delegates here, because the problem was, we decided that if we did not get together, Humphries would beat his boat. So I think this was a rare case of a fusion slate in American politics. And I was on as McCarthy, candidate for the Democratic Central Committee. And we won, and we had a wonderful Central Committee, and it was a wonderful, very, very progressive group, including the National committeeman was, there was the, there was the perspective, Phillip Pinkett support Hannity. But Channing Phillips, who was the first black person ever been nominated for president was the runner of our slate, the National Committee. So I was very pro McCarthy. Years later, I would come to know him and become quite good friends with years later. And I think that we just happen to share a lot of, of interest and love of politics, of humor, of irony of the importance of viral and in the world. And it has been a very pleasant experience. Governor McGovern, I certainly supported I was never one of his really great supporters. I was actually sort of pissed off at him very early because he had sent very strong signals that he was ready to endorse DC statehood. So, but what apart Ryan, John Hechinger to local members of the McGovern committee, were opposed to statehood and they got government back off. And it is funny, you know, when you are in politics, and you are around somebody and you see something like that happen, it really soured you because you, you draw a conclusion if you see it once, it is going to happen again. And so I never after that could be quite. I mean, there certainly was no data. There is support McGovern over Nixon. But in terms of my personal respect for the man, I just never could get it up to 55 again. 1:40:41 SM: How about some of the women leaders of the time Betty-Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm, women that stood out in- 1:40:51 LE: Shirley Chisholm I liked in a big way. Better Friedan, I did not. She was not that strong on my scope. The glorious time was the other person. Bella Abzug. Yeah, she was she I enjoyed her, I thought she was saying that. But I also got later on got to know a few people who worked for her and she apparently was an absolute tyrant to work for. It was interesting, because of course, one of the things that-that is the real talent for those of us who are in our- grew up in the (19)50s is that we spend our entire lives adapting to one thing or another. Maybe one reason why we have never produced the president, although I think that in a way that we might produce a very good president, because we are a generation that has-has serially seen what this country is made up geographically. In other words, we grew up in Republican America. And we were sort of serially introduced to other parts of America and make our peace in our way. And then. And so my own generational bias, is that, that we would be actually quite good leaders. If-if-if it were not for the hubris of those who came before us and after us was not so strong, that we got squeezed because, see, the thing is that we cannot have any hubris because we have been beaten about the head too much. So, we, you know, we had the insert traditional arrogance of our parents, and then the-the, you know, the-the self-assurance of the, of the boomers on either side of this and we get squeezed out. And the woman's movement was part of that. I- my perspective on that was, again, a little bit strange, because I had grown up with four sisters. And one of whom went to Red Cliff. My father was not in any way supportive of them going even going to college. And I think he was quite negative and that so that I was aware of those-those tensions quite early. And having one of the things about the Quakers I think I can say this without exaggeration, certainly a German have French school is that I never heard, while I was there any feeling on the part of the of my women classmates that they were treated in a second class fashion, I think that has, that has been pretty generally true of the Quakers it just, it just was not part of their-their-their-their view. And I mean, in writing my own memoirs, you know, in writing about trying to remember 11th grade English class, I refer to an English teacher, who was seen far more interested in the, in the girls in the class, who were more sophisticated, you know, as women of that age often are, and are then someone like myself, you know, I always I found myself sort of, you know, not quite as clever as they were. And so that and then when I got to Harvard, I had a couple interesting experiences in this regard. The thing is you get to a place like Harvard, you suddenly you run into people going to boy’s prep schools. And it is, a, it is a tremendously different paradigm. Enormous and you can see why you have trouble when these folks get to be CEOs. It is But I was not aggressive about it was not a big deal for me, it just seemed like it serves stupid or natural. So I occasionally got myself involved in things like I was on the Harvard sailing team. And one time I did not have a crew, I could not find a crew. So, I called up a friend of mine at Radcliffe. And I said, you know, your name is Alice. And you know, nobody's going to notice that it is not a be either male or female have it proven for me. Well, when we reached in this race, Medford Lake, I will never forget it. The problem was that I won the race gave me undue attention, and it was discovered that I had a, a woman crew, and I was literally hauled to a disciplinary meeting of the of the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Association. Was I look back on that, you know, I mean, look at that and go that was dumb. I am sure. You know, I mean, my reaction was not, it was not anger, it was not a cause. It just sort of seemed to me sort of stupid and sort of funny, you know, I mean, it was. And then later on, I also was involved in trying to get women at the radio stage, and unsuccessfully, but they did come a few years later, so. But I am not trying to suggest that I was any great. You know, it just was I had a different perspective on it. And then that worked against me, I think of a way a bit in a woman's movement, because when the women's movement did not come along, because it was assumed that my attitude was different sometimes. And because I was not prepared to sort of make all the advances, you know, that I might I, so that, that sometimes I did not know how to handle the issue very well, because it was not something that that had ever been a particular issue. And my growing up, and, and I believe I believe I handled it the way that I think is the smartest way to do which is you give people power. People do not have power, and they deserve it, and you give them and so that there are a number of from my, when I had a staff, they were putting out the DC Gazette. There were a number of women who wrote for that, who did very well in what is now president of the of the pen Faulkner Foundation. And I had a whole bunch of critics and eventually kicked them all out, because they were taking up too much space. And I did not know how to edit critics. But they- that was in (19)76. And we and it became a-a art paper called The Washington review. But there, which still exist today. But the point is that there were all those shifts going on there were all these little things little instance, you know, that you remember, like, when-when I first started putting out the paper, Kathy, my wife, Kathy, who was-was listed on the masthead as the editors wife, which I thought sort of adequately described her-her real role, you know, sort of ambiguous and-and as I said, in that piece I gave you know, so I had a Turneresque quality she is, you know, sort of threatening quality. And she actually had a column called editor's wife. Well, we are long when-when all these you know, new women movement. 1:48:19 SM: I cannot you imagine. Why aren't you the husband? 1:48:23 LE: Yeah, right. So I found my ass in the sling over that. And the curse the irony of it was that then they got Kathy me talking about the whole deal, we decided that maybe it was better to stay married than to have her working. So-so it was it was an interesting-interesting time that you-you had the sort of waves of change washing up you. 1:48:51 SM: Few final names here and then we have a final question. That is a few sentences for like Hubert Humphrey. 1:48:58 LE: Hubert Humphrey was my childhood hero. Hubert Humphrey came to my parents’ house in Philadelphia and gave a speech. My father was one of the organizers of ADA and Hubert Humphrey gave a speech and the thing I remember about the evening was a Joe Rao was there. I wish I met Joe Rao, Joe rouse doted on one of my mother's antique chairs and gave us money raising pitch, and I was very much you know, Huberdeau Humphrey was God. But I, Joe rousing even on a higher plane, because, you know, the idea of someone just standing up on one of my mother's chairs in their living room. And I looked at my mother, and she seemed absolutely super hungry, would say pleases, punch, right. And I sit down, there was a guy with real power. I told that story to Joe Ross shortly before he died and he laughed. He said, he no, he said, I remember that evening. Well, he said, went in there and I saw all these older people, it was an older crowd and said, I wonder what Hubert is going to say. And Hubert started right out talking about Woodrow Wilson. And but the thing I remember about that evening was then driving from my house to the airport with my father and Hubert Humphrey and he and Hubert Humphrey engaging in a 45-minute monologue in hallway. Wow. 1:50:26 SM: The musicians of the year, the (19)60s, boomers have always identified with the music. The Bob-Bob Dylan's and, and I just your overall thoughts. Even though you are not a boomer of the music of that era of the Bob Dylan's Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, the list goes on and on Janis Joplin. 1:50:49 LE: Well, again, I have to, you know, from where I have come from, and I was a, I was a jazz musician. I had my own DJ show jam with Sam on the college radio station. I am still today a piano player. I was drums then. But now I do the piano and vocals. But my world was the world of Miles Davis. And you know, Count Basie and the closest I got ever got to rock was I used to play I once played Earl Bostic on my show, who was a rhythm and blues saxophone player. And I was bawled out by the jazz director at the radio station because he was not jazz. Actually, just so basically, Dylan I never understood I to this day, I do not understand why anybody gets excited about Bob Dylan. Joan Baez has a beautiful voice. And it was not, it was, it was but for the most part, it was not part of my experience in a big way. I mean, it was not that I was negative towards it just was part of the background noise of the period. And but for my own tastes, I was into jazz and, and, and symbolically just as just as important for people who were boomers. You know, they have all these-these feelings, they relate to the music. To me, I relate to the alienation of modern jazz and to the sort of democratic spirit of mainstream jazz. Um, that is, it is just part of me in a way that rock is part of people who are into that. 1:52:38 SM: Do here is [audio cuts] (End of Interview) Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Description 2 Microcassettes Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Lee Edwards Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Edwards, Lee, 1932- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Authors; College teachers; Historians; Edwards, Lee, 1932--Interviews Description An account of the resource Lee Edwards is an author, educator and a leading historian of American Conservatism. He is a professor at the Catholic University and Chairman of a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington foundation. He has appeared on many television broadcast and his books have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and many more. Dr. Edwards has a bachelor's degree in English from Duke University and a doctorate in Political Science from Catholic University. He also holds a doctor of humane letters degree from Grove City College and attended the Sorbonne in Paris for graduate work. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource ND Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.46a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.46b 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. 112:41 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/85a2e332ce2c49576b950b114a7eb46c.jpg fa712d46ece6d368ae60c16bec4559fa https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/9b382a7f1e7b21148a47f943cb63898d.mp3 7275b8ce9da1ee7814ddc96ac860a024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Audio interviews Title A name given to the resource McKiernan Interviews Description An account of the resource Stephen McKiernan's collection of interviews includes more than two hundred interviews with prominent figures of the 1960s, which were collected between the mid-1990s to 2023 The collection provides narratives of people who were actively involved in or witnessed events in the 1960s, an era which spurred profound cultural and political transformation in the twentieth century. Interviewees include politicians, artists, scholars, musicians, authors, and veterans who delve into the decade’s most prominent issues and events, including the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, women’s rights, gay rights, segregation, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Hippies, Yippies, and individualism.<br /><br /> <h3>The McKiernan 22</h3> <div>Stephen McKiernan interviewed legends of the 1960s. When asked in 2021 where one should start when sifting through his vast collection, he provided the following list:</div> <ul> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/854">Julian Bond</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1866">Bobby Muller</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1175">Craig McNamara</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/910">Dr. Arthur Levine</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/837">Diane Carlson Evans</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/942">Dr. Ellen Schrecker</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/876">Dr. Lee Edwards</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/841">Peter Coyote</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1233">Dr. Roosevelt Johnson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/899">Rennie Davis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1222">Kim Phuc</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/917">George McGovern</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/833">Frank Schaeffer</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/840">Rev. Dr. Frank Forrester Church </a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1240">Dr. Marilyn Young</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/842">James Fallows</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/835">Joseph Lee Galloway</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/911">John Lewis</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/839">Paul Critchlow</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/888">Steve Gunderson</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1159">Charles Kaiser</a></li> <li><a href="https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/2407">Joseph Lewis</a></li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Stephen McKiernan Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright. Template: Simple Audio Player with Transcription This template displays an audio player by Amplitude.js with a scrollable transcription which is loaded from the "Transcription" metadata field. This template displays an audio player with the first attached image file as the 'cover image'. For its audio source, the template looks for the first attached audio file. If additional audio files exist, they should be combined using audio editing software, or a separate Omeka item should be made for each part. Date of Interview 2010-06-21 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Alice Echols Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Alice Echols is a professor of History and Gender Studies at University of Southern California. She authored four books and several articles. Dr. Echols has a Bachelor's degree in History from Macalester College and a Master's degree and Ph.D. from University of Michigan.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Alice Echols is a professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She authored four books and several articles. Dr. Echols has a Bachelor's degree in History from Macalester College and a Master's degree and 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 MicroCassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;SDS; Racism; Weathermen; Affirmative Action; Women's Studies; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Graduate Employees Organization; Activism; Feminism; Women's Movement; Racial Discrimination; 1960s; 1970s; Environmental Movement; Anti-War Movement; Soul Music; Funk Music; Disco Era; Identity Politics; Sexual Revolution; Janis Joplin; Roe v. Wade; Sexism; Anti-War Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Abortion Rights; Demobilization; John F. Kennedy Assassination; Drug Culture&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:515,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13689059},&quot;12&quot;:0}">SDS; Racism; Weathermen; Affirmative Action; Women's Studies; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Graduate Employees Organization; Activism; Feminism; Women's Movement; Racial Discrimination; 1960s; 1970s; Environmental Movement; Anti-War Movement; Soul Music; Funk Music; Disco Era; Identity Politics; Sexual Revolution; Janis Joplin; Roe v. Wade; Sexism; Anti-War Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Abortion Rights; Demobilization; John F. Kennedy Assassination; Drug Culture</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 145:52 Subject LCSH College teachers; Echols, Alice--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound, or alternative text from a visual medium McKiernan Interviews Interview with: Alice Echols Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan Transcriber: REV Date of interview: 21 June 2010 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Start of Interview) SM (00:00:04): Alice Echols. AE (00:00:08): Okay. SM (00:00:09): My first question is, when you were in college during the late (19)60s and early (19)70s as an undergrad and then in graduate school in the late (19)70s through the mid (19)80s, what did you see both socially and culturally? What stood out? I know that you have written in Disco about the music and the movements that were taking place in America in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, and some of the influences that were happening too, and not only African Americans, but women and gay and lesbian Americans. Just your thoughts on your college years and what you saw. AE (00:00:51): Do you mean on campus? I mean- SM (00:00:54): Yes, on campus. AE (00:00:55): Okay. Okay. Well, I went to, as an undergraduate, I attended Carleton College, which is in Northfield, Minnesota. It is sort of surrounded by cornfields. And yeah, there were not a lot of attractions beyond the campus. There were a few, but there were not very many. In fact, I left Carleton and did my senior, so my last, pretty much last year and a half, I guess I would say, at Macalester College, which was in Saint Paul. I did that for a number of reasons, but certainly, one of the reasons I transferred... Because I had a lot of friends at Carleton and we stayed friends, and they were a big piece of my story. I am still Close to some of them. But I went to Macalester because it was a more politically active campus. As I said, it was in the city. It had, I think, the greatest proportion, the highest proportion, I believe, of EEOC students of any college campus. And it also had, and this is kind of remarkable, it had... The student council or student government had been able to hire an organizer to organize students, and he was a Saul Alinsky trained organizer. And so, how many college campuses could that be set up? Probably none other. Highly unusual. Very much greater population of minorities, especially African Americans at that campus when I was there. And to make it even stranger, this was pretty much underwritten by DeWitt Wallace money, which is to say Reader's Digest money. At a certain point in time, you cannot trust me on this because it is a sort of more hearsay than anything I have actually read, but I think he pulled a good deal of his money from Macalester. But in any case, it was a very different kind of experience. At Carleton, we smoked a lot of dope, and people within my friendship network certainly dropped a good deal of acid. I did not do much of that myself because I never had as well a time, but it was a... Carleton was a college campus, which was pretty intense by virtue of being in the northern frozen tundra. So, there was not a lot of activism happening. We were one of the colleges to go on strike as a result of the invasion of Cambodia. And I have this very, very dear memory, and I may be completely wrong about this, but Kai Bird's name started to cross my radar some years ago. I think that Kai Bird may have also been a student at Carleton. But the long and the short of it was that it was not as politically active a campus as Macalester, which is, again, one of the major reasons that I switched. For me, I mean, college was... I had gone to Sidwell Friends in DC, so I had gone to a prep school. I was fairly well-prepared, I would say, academically. Culturally, socially, well, there was a lot of sex. Not very much of it, for me, very meaningful. And I do think that many of us felt as though men... I should say that among the women with whom I was friends, I certainly think that there were friends of mine who were having more fun sexually than I was probably, but I still think that there was a way in which there was some pressure to be heterosexually active. There was really no overt feminist consciousness at Carleton when I was there. I remember my roommate who became a Wall Street banker turned organic farmer, a wonderful woman. And this is much, much later, obviously, in her life. I remember her showing up with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and it was like, "Wow." SM (00:06:05): Wow. Yeah. AE (00:06:08): This was highly... Feminism was not part of the fabric of that school yet. Although I do remember, I think it was after I had already moved to Macalester, Gloria Steinem and Margaret Sloan, who was her sidekick then, African American woman who was very important. They came to campus and there was a huge turnout. SM (00:06:29): Wow. AE (00:06:30): And they were great. I mean, they were just wonderful. That probably would have been, I would imagine (19)73, I suspect, (19)72 or (19)73. But feminism was not a very lively presence. There were rumors. I remember the first transgender person I ever met was at Carleton, but was, again, not somebody who I at least understood as having any kind of feminist... This was SM. And it was rumored that when this person had... Well, I mean, let us just say that I was not really aware of any openly lesbian or gay people on that campus. Now, when I went to Macalester, I was living off campus. It was much less intense. It was much more of a commuter campus. Carleton was not. Everybody who was a student there lived on campus pretty much. And it was not even possible to have a car. I mean, when I was at Carleton, I had one of the few cars that you had to park it off campus and pretend that you did not own it. So, it was a kind of hot house. And I do not mean necessarily altogether intellectually so. It was sort of claustrophobic. We often tended to... It was easy to get involved with your best friend's boyfriend and stuff like that would happen. So, there was a lot of that kind of drama around. Macalester was different. As I said, it was a commuter college. There certainly was the beginnings of a feminist and lesbian feminist community there in Saint Paul. And I got introduced to it a little bit when I was a student there, but it did not... I was still rather nervous about all of that and what that meant. It really did feel like jumping off the cliff sort of to even get involved with any group. Not that I am particularly aware of there being any on-campus groups. I think I left there probably about (19)70... This is when it gets tricky. Probably, I think it was the summer of (19)74, and that is when I moved to Santa Fe. So, just to try to answer your question a little bit better, my sense was... I had been politically active, you have to understand, before I went to college. And I write about that in the introduction to Shaky Ground. I had been involved in a strange, little group outside of DC where I had grown up that was supposed to be fighting racism in the suburbs, and more specifically at University of Maryland stuff. I had done a good deal of... I had read a good deal of stuff that summer of (19)69 of some of the people who we met, because we hung out at the SDS house in DC, and we supported breaking furniture workers and did various things. Taxicab drivers went on strike that summer and we supported them at Union Station. But we were allied with this SDS office in DC that I think was viewed by the national office as rather dysfunctional. I do not know if it was. I do remember Bill Ayers coming here and being there one evening when he told us... He was very provocative, and he told us that we really had to pick up the gun if we were serious about fighting racism and stopping the war. SM (00:10:26): Is that when they were going to the Weatherman? AE (00:10:30): Yeah. This was when Weatherman was developing. Trying to remember when the War Council was in Flint, Michigan. It may have been... I think it was right around that time. You'd have to check, but there was Weather people around that factor. And I remember one of them trying to recruit me to go to David's grave, and it just did not make sense to me, actually. And I cannot really tell you why, except that I think I was probably nervous, made uncomfortable by the violence and also the elitism, I think. But again, this could very much be retrospective because certainly, I have been pretty critical of Weatherman in my hourly work. And let me just say, I was not impressed by Bill Ayers. I thought he was a real prick. So, when I came to Carleton, I thought that there was going to be more political activism. And what I found was some people who indeed had a political consciousness, but it was a pretty... Really, the life at the campus was really organized. I mean, at least among my friends, it was really about partying and keggers, and smoking dope, and the occasional dropping of acid, and having a lot of sex. It was not that... And I am not saying that that does not have a political dimension, but this was not a very strong political campus. Although that said, I did take a class with Paul Wellstone when he was- SM (00:12:26): Oh, yeah, the former senator who died in the plane crash. AE (00:12:29): And he was really incredible. I remember taking the class with him on civil disobedience. And there were indeed some political people there who influenced me. So, I do not know. I was one of those people who I suppose could have gone in the direction of further political activism of that sort. Organized, in other words, some sort of variety of left activism. And what happened to me was I ended up after college... Or again, on both campuses. Although at Macalester, there was less [inaudible]. And oddly enough, even though it was a more political campus, I do not remember being that much more politically involved. But be that as it may, I ended up moving with a bunch [inaudible] to Santa Fe, New Mexico, because I just fell in love with it when I came and visited. And one of my friends had grown up here and had been as an architect in Santa Fe and was just somebody who knew Pen La Farge. I think he was the half-brother of Peter La Farge, a folk singer in The Village and was the son of Oliver La Farge, the writer who was the author of Laughing Boy. And so, we stayed in this wonderful house that had belonged to Oliver La Farge. It was still in the La Farge family while Pen was at graduate school in Boston. We lived there for a year. And during that time, I heard about this interesting program in women's studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And I started to go to their meetings. Again, this is something that I write about again in the introduction to Shaky Ground, but that experience was really pretty life changing because this was not... Even though it was ostensibly meant to be an academic program, this is a pretty wild and wooly one. I mean, this one- SM (00:14:55): It was certainly new. AE (00:15:01): It was new. It was definitely new, and one had the feeling that there was very little out there, actually. And one was really making the curriculum. But it was unusual in the sense that community people like myself, because I had not gotten my BA. But I got my BA from Macalester, not from UNM. I was not doing anything there but working as actually a gardener trainee too eventually. But community people were able, like myself, were able to speak in the program for a period of time, which was really probably not a great thing. But looking back on it, I do not think I had the expertise. I do not think I had the skills to teach effectively. I do not think I knew enough. But nonetheless, being part of that group of mostly graduate students, because there was, I believe, only one faculty member who was married, I think, to someone in the philosophy department, and I think taught as an adjunct at the university. I think she was the only faculty member. Again, very, very telling, working as an adjunct. That would change over time, but when I was involved, which probably would have been about, I think it was probably (19)74, (19)75. Again, my dates here are fairly shaky, but it was a really impressive group. I mean, impressive, yes, a lot of smart women in that group, and it was a group only of women. A lot of political tensions between socialist feminists and those who were more mainstream and those who were lesbian feminists. This was my first real introduction to lesbians, and they both inspired me and terrified me. But I would say that there was probably more in the way of admiration than terror. But they were so super articulate. They were so articulate. They were so sure of themselves. They did not seem like the kind of miserable, dysfunctional losers that they were meant to be. And that really did completely blow my mind. And so, I began to tentatively... I eventually moved to Albuquerque. I started to go to the lesbian bar. And indeed, my first visit there was terrifying because none of those women were there, but it really was life changing. Two of the women who were part of that Women's Studies Collective, as we were called, had ties to Olivia Records. And that was the all-women's record company that recorded only women, people like Cris Williamson, and not Holly Near, but Meg Christian and several others. I mean, it was a pretty accomplished group of women, Lucia Valeska, who would then go on to be one of the heads of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. This is not to romanticize it. I would say that... This was what? Probably, as I said, (19)74, (19)75, and they were all... There was a kind of dogmatism there that I did not like. I have never been a big fan of dogmatism. So, even then, that is certainly in play. I had a kind of uneasy relationship, I think, at first to that group because I was perceived very much and indeed did identify first as bisexual. And that was not a good thing to be in those days. You were not seen as farther along. You might think that lesbian feminists would think, "Oh, well, there is a bisexual. So, at least, she's more open than her heterosexual sisters." But no, it's not that way at all. It was much more the case of people, those folks, regarding you as really lacking conviction. You were seen as wishy-washy. You were seen as being the epitome of the liberal. And as you know in the (19)60s, in the long (19)60s, there was really nothing worse than being a liberal. People would rather deal with, in some sense, at least this was the rhetoric, would rather deal with somebody who was overtly inimical to their aims than somebody who they felt was dodgy in the way that they felt liberals were. So, I think bisexual women were really seen as dodgy characters, sketchy characters. And so, yeah, like many bisexual women, I did come out. And indeed, I suspect that even probably some of the women who were, I am quite sure this is true, who were the most vociferous, fiercest lesbian feminists have since gone back to men. But I did not really. I did not. But I would say that those were both wonderful years and scary years. Being involved, not so much in that collective, but in that first community and going to the bar, going to the lesbian bar, it was a very scary thing to do. It was not in a good neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination. There was sometimes men who would prowl the parking lot in order to beat up guys. That never happened to me. But I remember evening or nights when men were chased away. There were fights inside the bar for sure. There were tensions between Chicanos and Anglos, between working class women and middle-class women, between town and gown. I would not say antagonism but mistrust or distrust. So, it was a pretty... It was also a wonderful place in many ways, although it was a complete [inaudible]. But I would say you really did feel like you were leaving your life behind. And I started to see much less of my friends in Santa Fe when I moved down there, and I came out. Relations with my family became much tenser. They had been a little tense because I had been involved in these political groups. And I can remember calling my mother up to tell her that I was coming out, and she was just so actually relieved that I was not calling to say that I was joining some terrorist group. That actually, her reaction, I would not say that it was great, but it could have been a lot worse. There was definitely, I think, an element of relief. SM (00:23:16): So, your generation gap between your parents was over this issue? AE (00:23:21): Well, I would say my father was a pretty interesting character because he had been a new neoliberal and he subscribed to I. F. Stone weekly, at a point in time when actually it could have hurt him because he ended up, he worked at the Veteran's Administration, and he became the head of the mortgage loan guarantee division. And that was a job, it was a position that required congressional approval, as I understand it. And they could subpoena anything, everything, anything, including what he was subscribing to. So, that was pretty nervy of him. But over time, I will say that he became, and this was a source of a lot of conflict between us, he became a Reagan nut. He ended up moving to the right. For all I know, he voted for Nixon. I am just not sure. But he ended up moving to the right. And we did have fights about racism and about affirmative action, and about the ERA, and abortion. Yeah, we definitely did. Not so much as my mother. My mother was not as politically invested as my father was because he worked at a government agency. I do not doubt that he saw a good deal of abuse and fraud, especially in his workings with HUD because he had [inaudible]. SM (00:25:08): Do you think the McCarthy hearings had anything to do with his fear of what could happen to him if he was a liberal and... AE (00:25:23): Well, no, because he was subscribing to I. F. Stone. And I. F. Stone, as you know, was- SM (00:25:24): Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. AE (00:25:31): Certainly, was judged a dangerous lefty by some people in the administration. And I think by the time that my father... This would have been during Nixon's years when he was going up. So, I do not know. I do not really think so. I think he had every reason to be fearful given Nixon and given that administration about what might happen to his appointment. And it ended up not happening. He ended up being fine, but he was an odd person in that, as I understand it... Again, I have not checked this independently, but as I understand it, he was the first person at the VA in his division to hire an African American. And indeed, I had lunch with my father and this man a number of times. And he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a man that could be characterized as an Uncle Tom. He really was not. So, my father was odd. I would say he was an interesting mix, who over time, I think mostly goes to the right, turns to the right because of the riots in DC. I think what happened there were friends of his were attacked by Black people in the street, including people who he knew to be very honorable liberals. That really changed him, and it was very hard to see that happen. It was hard to experience that. But we did continue to... So, he goes to the right. And for years, he would send a weekly letter, both of them, both of the parents would. And he would include a page usually, which would deal with current events and his sort of sense. He was forever making disparaging comments about gays and lesbians and feminists, and you name it. And finally, towards the latter part of his life, my mother, finally, because we had a big, serious falling out at some point, I think it was in the (19)90s, and my mother persuaded me to ratchet that down, ratchet that rhetoric down. And in fact, before my mother died, she really became quite wonderful. Now, because father has died, she became much more open to- SM (00:28:22): Did you pick the University of Michigan for your master's and PhD because you wanted to be real competent in your knowledge of the subject matter that you were talking about earlier? AE (00:28:34): I had applied to a number of schools including UCLA, I think Yale, which I did not get into. But I think UCLA was definitely one of them and I did get in there, and Michigan and Yale. I think there was another school that I did not get into, and there was another one that I did, maybe Wisconsin. I ended up going to Michigan because it was meant to be very good in women's history. And Robin Jacoby was then a young and tenured faculty member there and Louise Billie was in European history. And so, it was very strong in social history. And as you know, women's history really grows out of social history. And there was a young urban historian there by the name of Elizabeth Pleck, whose husband Joe Pleck has done a lot of work on sex-role, as they were called, through sex- role socialization as it was involved in at that point in time. So, I really went there because of its reputation as a very strong department, but one that was especially strong, I hope, in women's history. That turned out not to be true. It turned out to be a very conservative department that I was getting into. For instance, Liz Pleck was denied tenure pretty early into my- [inaudible]. Pretty early into my time there, Robin Jacoby did not go up for tenure, knowing she would not get it. And they did not make any replacement. There was no real woman's historian hired there in the US side, which was what I was supposed to be in, until Phil Carlson was hired, which was, I think the year that I was... the year that I was defending or the year before I was defending my decision. So I effectively had the decision. I remember very clearly going and had... I had nobody to work with. I will get back to that interesting problem in a minute. But I went to Michigan also because it was Ann Arbor, it had this whole aura of, and history of radicalism, right? SM (00:30:59): Yes. AE (00:31:00): And so I was very eager to be there. And I knew that women's studies there were meant to be really interesting and it was really interesting. It was so terrific. This is where Gal Rubin was a graduate student and Kathleen Stewart or Katie Stewart was a graduate student there, and there were other people and it was just the most amazing collection of people. Believe me, it was a wonderful, wonderful experience to be part of that program. And that is really where my intellectual life was, it was not in history. History was still very conservative and that changes. Indeed, it is changing by the time I am finishing up, but really much too late to help me. But I was also part of the so called women's community there, which is to say really, basically the lesbian community and the collectives that ran the women's Bookstore in town. And then there were various struggles there, three of the VA nurses who again, we argued wrongly accused of killing people. This was legalized prostitution. Ann Arbor was the home of legalized marijuana and we thought legalized prostitution. So we were sort of the leading edge of the, I would say, the protest front before the sex board actually emerged. And some of it actually was because of the fact that a number of the women who were the most active women in the lesbian family community there also worked as bus drivers at the Unionized Trust company in Ann Arbor and also moonlighted as prostitutes. They worked, they were sex workers at a brothel that were city corner from where I [inaudible] later in the [inaudible]. So politically I was involved in the Graduate Employers Organization too, but that was not really where my heart was as much as it was in the women's community over time as against, over time as those organizations there were fewer of these mobilizations and I became more involved ultimately in writing the dissertation. So I became less politically active, but I was pretty politically active at first in my first years in Ann Arbor. But the person, the people who really saved me back to faculty members, and it was Barbara Fields, the Columbia historian, Barbara [inaudible], who I had done coursework with and had been on my world. And she and I ran into it. But there were a grocery store and she offered to co-chair my committee. And Louis Hilly, who was the Europeanist, was the other co-chair. But it is quite telling that in the dissertation it was really about radical feminism in the recent past. I had no one to work with others in, and they were Louis me. I am not complaining in the sense that they were wonderful to work with, but it was not their field. This was not their field. It was still mean. The history department there, as I said, was still fairly backwards. SM (00:34:32): I got a lot of questions here that are looking at the era. Can you discuss, I just had an interview last week with Susan Brown Miller and some of these questions I asked her too, and though she had some individual questions about her background, but please discuss the movements that evolved in the late (19)60s and (19)70s. And I am talking about the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, but civil rights movement was already taking place. But please discuss the movements that evolved in the late (19)60s and (19)70s and why they seem to have declined once the Reagan era began in the (19)80s. And a lot of people blame Reagan because of the administration, but the movements were, a lot of them were shoot offs from the civil rights and anti-war movement for a variety of reasons. I got questions down the road for that, but your thoughts on why they do not seem to be as visible today that is my perception and they really have not been as visible since the (19)80s. AE (00:35:50): Well, I do think that the (19)70s is a period in which there is a good deal activist biology, and so I do think the (19)70s, the business character, I do think by the time he gets the (19)80s, absolutely, I think it is true. And there was a cultural shift of course, that put him into office as well was inimical to the kind of political organizing that had characterized the (19)60s and into the 1970s. So I think that that was the fast. But I also think that it is very, very hard to maintain movements. Movements by their very nature or some, maybe not seminal, but they are limited. they do not just go on forever. And there shifts and they change and they rarely are, and they usually go through foul periods. Now, I do not know who is to say that there is not going to be some sort of resurgence of feminism tomorrow. Certainly people have thought that that was going to happen any number of times since the (19)70s, but I guess in the (19)80s, I have just been reading this wonderful book by 15 sample called The Feminist [inaudible], which is a history of, for the first and the second place. And one of the things that she points out, and I think this is really key, is that in part because of Reaganism and the tone that Reaganism took on feminist fear. Because faith that you felt if you were a feminist, and I would say if you were a member of a sexual or racial minority as well, or somebody who was elected, it was not one of the things that keeps movement going is a sense that you are gaining, you are actually gaining ground. We have had the experience of losing ground and having to fight and fight and fight, continuing to fight for abortion, for instance, that was getting acquittal away, continuing to fight for the era that was a losing battle. We thought that she had managed to diminish the possibilities of foreign adventures, right? Involvement in the affairs of foreign government, well, no, as Iran. So there were a number of ways in which I think people who were associated with those movements, the challenges to affirmative action, certainly there were a number of programs that had been instituted, especially during the LBJ and even during the Nixon years that were dismantled during the raging years. And I think there was this sensation that many of us had of a total fatigue. And then they are having to gear up around the pornography battle and faith in the first, within the sum movement, but it was also an internally divide movement. So one of the things that Christ stamp points out in her very really brilliant book is that when we are looking at feminism, it is not case that the movement end, which is, I would have to say that I would now revise my argument in daring to be bad. I think that radical feminism does sort of peter out. But feminism as a whole, I think that I was far too harsh on liberal feminism. I think that then becomes the ancient, I mean, as I say in my book, even the radical feminist engine cuts out and it was less liberal feminist. I do not feel as now as gloomy about that. I think an awful lot was accomplished. And I think as a result of what I was going to say that Chris in her book is that as a result of Reaganism, you find American feminists working globally and having great success in working globally. Which is not to say that global feminism has been unproblematic because there has been a tendency, as she points out in her book, to flatten women's experience out and not be yearly as attentive as one should do the sort of local conditions and traditions. But nonetheless, I think that made a huge difference. And so I would not say that feminism totally heated out. And I think there are still conversations that are happening. There are still, I would not say that there is a movement in the way in which there was in the (19)70s, but there is still happening. And I think it is even significant when you have people like Lady Gaga saying quite forthrightly on the Larry King show, that yes, she is a feminist and that she wants to change the way that girls and women think about themselves. SM (00:41:51): You wrote a book on radical feminism, and of course a lot of people I have interviewed are proud to be feminist, but they do not say they are radical feminists. How do you define the difference between a radical feminist and just a feminist or a mainstream feminist, or what is the difference? AE (00:42:08): Well, I think that really defies easy descriptions. I, again I would have to say, I really tried very diligently in that book to give a definition of radical feminism that would be broad enough to include even radical feminists who did not agree with each other. SM (00:42:39): Hold on one second. I have to turn my, okay. AE (00:42:47): But I mean, Susan Brown Miller, I do not know how she identified herself to you in her interview, but for instance, she was involved in a group called New York Radical Feminist. And I would say still that what characterized radical feminism, and this is where I would be more critical of my book now, is that I think that this began to characterize liberal feminists as well over time because it was a very powerful idea. Which is the idea that personal is political, which means this is an idea by the way that I think has been understood, has been used in ways that have not always been productive. But be that as it may, I think that the personal is political was originally an idea that was really put forward by Seawright Neural the radical sociologist, and then popularized somewhat by Hayden and then further picked up on by the woman who begin to form these little groups that become the basis of the Women's liberation Movement. And what the personal is political really means is that there is that personal life, this area of our existence that we usually assume is purely personal, actually has the political dimensions. And so it actually says something about the culture in which we live that, for instance, heterosexual sex at that point in time often was a three-minute affair that did very often was more centered around male pleasure than female. It was significant and said something about the culture that there were certain people who were changing the diapers and cooking the meals and cleaning up, et cetera, et cetera. That was what it was really, I think originally supposed to mean. Not that if you lived with a man or if your hair was long, or if you wore high heels and you were not a feminist, which is very often the way that it was construed, I think. But so a radical feminist was somebody who really felt that the real focus of our political activism needed to be around the personal and needed to be around the psychological. Not to the total dismissal of dealing with and working on employment discrimination or rape laws or violence against women more generally. But that the real meat of this, the real meat of the struggle was psychological and it was relational. And so for me, radical feminism was really about an immense challenge to personal life and to the sort of social organization of private life. And again, in some cases it led to things that I think were unfortunate. The personal political was one of the arguments that was used to by some feminists to supports the impeachment of Clinton. And I myself, could not have cared less. I should not say I could not have cared less, but I did not think that that should be the basis of impeachment. But I do think that the attention to personal life, whereas liberal had been much more tuned to sort of more conventionally understood political realm of employment discrimination laws, legislation. But here is the thing, over time, inevitably the radical feminist's agenda, the sort of focus on the personal, it be very visible and so now begins to organize CR groups now takes up the struggle more effectively than radical feminists does. Abortion rights and rape laws and on and on and on. So the liberal feminist, the liberal feminist, played an incredibly important role, and they were themselves changed and transformed by radical feminists. I would say radical feminism played a role in the women's business, not unlike the role that, for instance, Nixon rights. It pushed the issue it went deeper and sometimes in somewhat wacky ways, but it was still liberal feminism would never have developed as it did without that kind of push for radical feminists. Does that help too? SM (00:47:53): Yes. I have some names here. Would you put Gloria Steinem and Betty Fordam and Sherry Height? Would you put them in the liberal feminist where you have, but you would have Bella Abzug, Robin Morgan, Andrew Derkin, Susan Johnson, Jermaine Greer would be more in the radical. AE (00:48:16): Well, I think one of the things that I really feel at this point in time is that I am very uninterested in making those kinds of distinctions, in part because very often those distinctions were much more meaningful in the very early years of the women's movement. And over time I think became less so. Certainly somebody like Dudy Friedan had no use for radical feminism. On the other hand, she herself, her thinking was to some extent transformed by what was going on within the radical feminist sphere. But I am not comfortable making those kinds of judge, I just do not think it is, it gets us anywhere. Let us just say that at its best, at its most optimal radical feminism and liberal feminism when they worked together, were able to really accomplish a lot, sometimes in a kind of good cop, bad cop way. SM (00:49:24): The (19)60s and early (19)70s are often defined as the era that defined the color culture that includes long hair, unique dress, drugs, rock music, the sexual revolution. And a lot of people say that the (19)60s included goes right up to 1973 and that the real (19)70s began in the mid (19)70s, but the (19)70s were also important. So basically what I am saying is, and I have heard this from other people, that a lot of the things that define the (19)60s, many of them really defined the (19)70s and were more important in the (19)70s. AE (00:50:08): Well, yeah, that is maybe argument that I make in the disco book. I think this notion of the me decade, it was a great essay from Will, but think we have outlived, I think there was an awful lot of, if you want to talk about narcissism, there was an awful lot of narcissism in the (19)60s too. And I think, but to get at the question of the (19)70s, I think that what is distinctive about the (19)70s is that over time, one does have the feelings as a result of the loss of Vietnam, which different parts of the population experience differently right? As a result of that, as a result of the energy crisis, as a result of the shuttering of factories as a result of the recession and stagflation, it is a different kind of consciousness mean you do not have the sense of nearly the same sense, which was very important for the underwriting of protests. This sense of, hey, this is let the good times roll. This is just not going to end. We are going to continue to be able to live for $30 a month in a beautiful, somewhat rundown Victorian in the middle of a city. So that sense of optimism and hopefulness, I think begins to take a beating. And I think, again, more systematic research has to be done on this. And when that sort of sense of pessimism sets in, and I think also the political assassinations take their toll. I think in black communities, certainly the sense that you are able to elect mayors is important, but it is also becomes increasingly undeniable that these are cities that are in pretty bad shape. So I think, again, I think that the periodization is probably going to vary somewhat depending upon the group that one's talking about. But I think if you think about the (19)60s as being a time that did involve actually both collective action and assigned an ethos of individualism, if you think about it at the time, which was pretty hedonistic and pleasure oriented. This goes through, this runs through the threads that run through the (19)70s, and the kind of hedonism that you might have seen at the full auto auditorium becomes much more available to more people in disco culture. And in fact, one of the things that is quite striking about disco culture is that it is not, I do not want to oversell it, I do not want to romanticize it because there was racial discrimination in discos, but it is a much more integrated nightlife than what you found at Hip Ballroom where black people tended to be not typical. Something of a rarity. SM (00:53:59): Hold on. Somebody is calling. I will let it go. My cell phone. I will just let it ring. Yeah, it is interesting because as a student at Ohio State in the early (19)70s, this is before disco, African American students had their own dances and white students had their own dances, and there was this black power thing and there was a lot of intimidation going on. And then disco came about later in the (19)70s itself. Would you say, as some people have told me that some people think that the (19)70s were more about the sexual revolution and drugs was more a (19)70s thing than a (19)60s thing? AE (00:54:42): Well, I think drugs become, drugs had been part of various, if you think about it, if you think about pharmaceuticals, the (19)50s were a drug era. You think about just the very casual use of speed in the 1950s. There was a reason that so many beatniks were so many of the beats were using feed. It was that it was pretty much the drugs that a lot of people were using. And it was easy to get at Carlton, they would hand it out at examination time. And that was way into the (19)60s. So I think it depends on the kinds of drugs that you are talking about. And I certainly would not make the argument that a lot of people do that the (19)60s were good drugs and the (19)70s were bad drugs. I think that is very simplistic. But I do think that drugs in some sense become more available. I think that the sexual revolution affects more people in the 1970s. I think certainly gay liberation really changes the landscape for Williams Samaritans. So I think that it is absolutely true that there is more sexual expressiveness. There is probably, again, do not quote me, but there is certainly a lot of drug use. I think it does permeate the population more fully. And I think some of the biggest protest marches actually happened in the 1970s. I think all of that is true. SM (00:56:38): One of the things I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, and I know David Horowitz, who you are aware of, a liberal who became very conservative and has attacked the (19)60s generation in many ways. You teach women's studies and well, another areas, how do you respond to the criticism of colleges today that the troublemakers of yesterday now run today's colleges and oversee departments like women's studies, gay studies, Asian studies, and black studies. It is a criticism that some more conservative people make toward the universities today. AE (00:57:21): Well- SM (00:57:22): And it is not only been since 2000. It was all through the (19)90s too, and probably the latter part of the (19)80s. AE (00:57:31): Well, I think that it would be fair to say that the university tend to be places where faculty members tend towards the liberal. I do not think that that is the preserve only of women's studies department. There tend not be, there are departments called things like lesbian and gay, bisexual, transgender studies. I do not know. I am associated, I have taught in many places in women's studies, gender studies, LGBT, I have encountered some dogmatism. But anybody who has read my work knows that I am really not dogmatic. I am not a defender of weatherman. I am not a defender of, I have been known to be critical of the last, I have been known to be critical of other strands of feminism. I am not really a very [inaudible] person. And in fact, that whole term, politically correct or PC was a term that was created that came about within the feminists and sort of larger progressive movement as a way of poking fun at that kind of the more ideologically oriented amongst us. And so I tend to think that actually in the programs that I have been involved with, that there has been a good deal of debate. And these are not places that are characterized by semi-Nazism as some people have alleged. I think I am somebody, and I know I am not alone in this, who when she teaches feminism, will often teach well, I always teach people who are critical of the movement as well. I will teach Camille Pollia, I will teach people who... AE (01:00:03): ... I have taught Phyllis Schlafly. I think it is really important for students to be exposed to something other than simply a certain strand of feminism, a certain kind of let us say, gay and lesbian history writing. So, I have always encouraged people in my classes, and I have seen this a lot among other faculty, encouraged people to question orthodoxies no matter what the orthodoxy, even if it's a political tendency that is represented in the program that I am teaching in. I do think that feminists have been really extraordinarily self-critical, perhaps not in ways that Schlafly and Harwood would agree with, but I think we have certainly taken on board very seriously the criticisms that, for instance, women of color have made of these women's studies programs. So I would say I am very well aware of those criticisms, of course, but somebody like myself, who I really do think of as in many ways, really a free thinker. I have not felt constrained, shall we say, by my involvement in these [inaudible 01:01:47]. SM (01:01:48): You are a cultural historian, and of course the boomers have been alive since 1946. The oldest Boomers are 63 going on 64, and the youngest Boomers are 47 going on 48. So they have all been around a while. So I break it down here, and I have been asking this to all of my interviewees, at least the second half of my interviewees, is, in your words, define the culture of these particular periods. I will do one at a time here, define the culture of the late (19)40s and (19)50s and how the (19)40s shaped the (19)50s and the (19)50s shaped the (19)60s. It does not have to be anything in length, but just general, what it was like to be a kid growing up in America, or a young parent like the Boomers parents or World War II generation raising kids in this era. Just define the culture of the late (19)40s and (19)50s, and then how the (19)40s shaped the (19)50s, and how the (19)50s shaped the (19)60s. AE (01:02:54): Well, I suspect that it goes farther back. I mean, I suspect that certainly the (19)30s did a lot of shaping of the (19)60s in the sense that initially a lot of the people who were (19)60s activists, and by that, I mean people who were involved, not in Young Americans for Freedom, I am talking about the people who were involved in FBS and other left-leaning groups, the liberal groups, what they knew about the (19)30s and the left through the (19)50s was very sobering. So I think that to a great extent, there was a caution about dogmatism and about relying upon a predetermined or any kind of dogma, any kind of Marxist-Leninist thought. There was a real uneasiness about that, which of course was an uneasiness that was encouraged and to a great extent by some of the liberals who were mentoring people like Hayden and others. So I think that, you have to go even further back. When it comes to my own childhood, I think the way that I make sense of it, and I write about this a bit in the Janice book, is that Lord knows Port Arthur was not Chevy Chase, Maryland by a long shot, and her parents were not my parents. But I do think that many of us grew up feeling as though our parents were just completely unreasonably invested in a kind of safe and secure existence. They wanted stability, they wanted safety, they wanted stability, and they did not want excitement. This is what I believe in the Janice book I talk about, I think I quote Peter Coyote about the adventure shortage. SM (01:05:21): I am interviewing him in three weeks. AE (01:05:23): Yes, check it out. I am pretty sure that he's the one who talked about the adventure shortage, and I did not interview him. I could not get to him so more power to you. But I think that that is true. I think many of us growing up did feel as though there was an adventure shortage. I think there was also a sense that a number of the people that I interviewed for the Janice book talked about, which was this sense of potential oblivion. I mean, I had nightmares myself about Soviet troops marching down the street. I mean, those of us who lived through the Cuban missiles crisis and were aware of and worried about the arms buildup, I think did grow up feeling fearful. I suspect that all of that, the sort of enthusiasm that our parents had for stability and for a lack of excitement and the kind of adventure shortage that that resulted in, and these sorts of fears about nuclear destruction, probably made us take risks. It did not make us better, it did not make us more noble. It did not make us the best generation or a better generation. It made us different. I think, again, each of us dealt with us differently, and some people took no risks at all, but a lot of us did take risks, whether it was deciding to come out as a lesbian as I did, which believe me, was not a great career move, although you would not know it now, but for a long time, I did not have a tenured position, and this had to do with the kind of risks that I took in my work and it had to do also with the fact that I was not at all closeted. It was pretty easy to tell from my acknowledgements that I was not exclusively heterosexual. So a lot of us took risks, I think as a result of that, as a result of feeling this kind of claustrophobia. A lot of us grew up in suburbs that did not have a lot happening in them also. So I think in particular, many of us were drawn to African American culture and African American music. Eventually, certainly for me, and I am sure this is true for some others too, from listening to soul music, you started to read Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, and there was for sure some pretty problematical stuff in Eldridge Cleaver. But nonetheless, this stuff changed the way that you understood power and the way that you understood America. So I guess that is what I would say. SM (01:09:05): Yeah. You do not have to go in, because I got quite a few questions here, and your explanation was beautiful there. You have talked about some of these things, but if you could define how the culture of the (19)60s shaped the (19)70s and how the culture of the (19)70s shaped the (19)80s. AE (01:09:24): I do not know if I can really do that. I mean, I think- SM (01:09:33): From a Boomer's perspective. AE (01:09:35): I think that the (19)60s got its best, and there was a worse to the (19)60s, too. I mean, I am not a romantic, I am not somebody who thinks that everything about the (19)60s was just hunky-dory. I do not. I think that there were some real mistakes. I teach the (19)60s, and so some of my favorite books are things like... Oh, what's the name of this? The TC Boyle book about the commune, which is so funny. It is just really a devastating critique. "Drop City," devastating. But at its best, I mean, the (19)60s gave people, and I know this is an overused word, but it gave some people a sense of empowerment. At the same time, it made others feel, who had been used to taking certain privileges for granted, it made them feel angry about the loss of that. But certainly for people like myself, it was an incredibly empowering experience. You really did feel as though the world could be changed, a war was stopped. I am just looking outside because we are having a hailstorm, and I am trying to think if I should call you back in a minute and move my car. SM (01:11:23): You are having a bad storm. AE (01:11:27): Yeah, we are having a hail storm, so I am just looking outside. I think it is okay. SM (01:11:32): Let me know, and then I could call you back in 10 minutes if you want me to. AE (01:11:36): I tell you, why do not you call me back in five? SM (01:11:41): Okay. AE (01:11:41): Okay? SM (01:11:41): Yep. Bye. AE (01:11:41): Okay, great. Okay, bye. SM (01:11:46): You were talking about the (19)60s. I think you were finishing up on the culture of the (19)60s and the influence on the (19)70s, and then the culture of the (19)70s. Basically, what I am really asking here is because we are talking about when Boomers have been alive and the feelings that Boomers have. It is 74 million people so they have experienced all these. So what the (19)70s, the (19)80s, and the (19)90s, and the (20)10s mean to them, just from your perspective. AE (01:12:16): Well, I think that probably the fact that I was involved in the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian movement, these were movements that did have real momentum through a large part of the (19)70s. So I think that for me, and again, this is taking into account the fact that obviously, as I said, look at what's happening as regards to global feminism, had I made that move, then I am sure my feelings would be very different. But the feelings that I had, I would say in the (19)70s, I think that I still had a sense of momentum. I think in the (19)80s, the (19)80s definitely felt like a real break on change. I think that is when I felt, and I am not sure, again, this is hard to know, it is not clear to me to what extent I felt this and to what extent this was what I was reading in at the time. But it did feel as though there was more of a backlash in that decade against feminism. Then of course, there was, in this period, this was when I was teaching, it was the beginning of AIDS, so that really reverberated. So I think there was this sense of, that I was probably not explaining very well, but I think that there was frequently this sense in the (19)80s of not only not momentum, but of having to defend the victories that you had won much, much earlier. It led to a kind of wariness, at least on my part, a kind of fatigue. I was quite pleased when Clinton won. If you were to go beyond that, obviously from the standpoint of 2010, I am almost 60, the way that the culture has changed, it takes your breath away. It's difficult sometimes to comprehend how much it has changed. In the sense of being able to be, at least in my world, pretty openly gay, being able to not have nearly the kinds of impediments that I would have had and that I did have when I first was studying history because I am female. There is just so much that is changed. On the other hand, we have this incredible poverty and we have this environmental disaster and on and on and on. So I do not know quite what else to say. I mean, I think I would say this about the (19)60s though, to go back just for a moment, that my predominant experience of the (19)60s, well into the (19)70s, was this sense of really being able to have agency and feeling a real sense of empowerment and seeing it in other people, and just really how beautiful that was. It is kind of amazing, if you consider how, for instance, the university has changed, now we can look at the fact that the university has changed in all kinds of ways that are agreeable to me, whereas other parts of society a bit more resistant to change or have actually changed in ways that have contributed to greater inequality. You think about banking, you think about the lack of regulation. But if I think about the university, I think one of the reasons that that place has been so transformed is that so many of us from the (19)60s did have the sense of we can really do this. Right? That was such a strong ethos. SM (01:17:33): Yeah, you make a good point here about the fact that in the (19)80s there was this feeling of the gains that had been made, now there was greater challenge, and it is like you are fighting the battle all over again because that is when affirmative action was challenged. So the African Americans, I know about Latinas, Caesar Chavez working with them, of course, the labor unions were set back in those times, the women's movement. I know a lot of attacks on the environmental movement took place then. Certainly, I think just about every movement we have discussed, the anti-war movement was almost nonexistent. There was a small group of anti-war, but then we saw it all over again in the early (19)90s in the Gulf War. So my next question, I am getting into some of the disco questions, which I am kind of excited about. This is Steve McKiernan now. When I think of disco, I think of Barry White, Isaac Hayes, the Bee Gees, Tavares, Thelma Houston, Donna Summer, Sylvester, Chaka Khan, Andy Gibb, Gloria Gainer, and I forget the, again, oh, Love Unlimited Orchestra. However, in this same period, these groups were very popular. And I do not know, I think Mothers and Fathers and Sisters and Brothers would be on that other side. But I think of Earth, Wind and Fire, Cool and the Gang, Eddie Kendricks, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, the Isley Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack, and Patty LaBelle. Now, I do not know if you categorize them in the same as you would the disco performers. They are all around the same time, though. AE (01:19:30): They are all around the same time, and you will doubtless remember that one of the early big disco hits before a lot of people were really very aware of disco, was Lady Marmalade, which was done by the group Trio LaBelle, and which Patti LaBelle was a member, and certainly Earth Winds and Fire was great. Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway back together again. I used to play them all the time in [inaudible] where I DJ'ed. Again, I tend not to be particularly driven by the urge to categorize in that way. In the book, one of the arguments that I make very early on, and I am pretty attached to this idea, is that when it comes to rock music, nobody says about heavy metal, "Well, that is heavy metal. That is not really rock." Or nobody says about punk, "Well, that is punk. That is not really rock." Other words, we understand rock as being almost infinitely malleable. It's a big category that can kind of attach all category. It can contain a lot of different kind of phonics, a lot of different kinds of sounds. But that is not been true of disco. And so there will be people who say, "Oh, well, Michael Jackson was not really a disco artist." "Oh, the Philadelphia International Group, like the OJs, they were not really disco." It just goes on and on and on. SM (01:21:14): Yeah, the Stylistics were another group of that period. And the Delfonics, I mean, there was group after group and they were all great. AE (01:21:22): They were great, and many of them were produced by Tom Bell. So I would argue a couple of things. I would say, first of all, that those distinctions between artists do not mean that much to me. That when I think about disco and when I try to define disco, what my definition of it is, the music that certainly took as its template soul music, but which transformed it in ways that made it much more lush, much more symphonic, was characterized very often by as you know, the four-four thump. But it was music that included anything that really worked on a disco dance floor. That could be Betty Hendrick, and often was, it could be Parliament Funkadelics, One Nation Under A Groove. It could be Patti LaBelle. I mean, to me, it's whatever worked. I think because disco has been so stigmatized, people have been very eager to define disco very narrowly, as really referring to only the most classic disco records in, again, a very narrow and circumscribed period. Now, that said, I do think that there are some differences between funk and disco, although I would say that there is an awful lot of disco dance floors featured funk. And the Isley Brothers, for instance, did a song called "Fight the Power," that was a great song and a very political song just as The Temptations did a song "Papa was a Rolling Stone," that also was a very socially conscious song. These were songs that played in early disco. "Papa was a Rolling Stone," I think was three years before "Fight the Power," but nonetheless, this kind of music, music by Black musicians who sometimes define themselves as more oriented towards funk, sometimes more towards disco, sometimes more towards R and B, sometimes more towards rock, like Chaka Khan or LaBelle, they were all being played for a period of time on disco dance floor until disco became Disco with a capital D and then the sound narrowed somewhat. But phonically funk tended to be more about getting into a groove and finding that groove and digging deep into that groove. Whereas disco phonically, orally, it sounded more obviously constructed because it was. It was music that was remixed an remixed in ways that emphasized its dance ability. It was music whose musical movements often had a kind of arbitrary feel to it. Why do the horns come in there? Why suddenly does the vocal end here? So I think that made it phonically somewhat different from funk. But on a dance floor, I always found that most people were quite eager to dance to the full spectrum of what was danceable. I do not know if I answered your question. SM (01:25:08): A lot of rock musicians, so were really into rock in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, and jazz musicians too, could not stand disco because from what... Hold on. Okay, here we go. A lot of musicians did not like it because of the fact that it took jobs away from people because they were com- AE (01:25:39): Oh, yeah. That is true. I think that there was a whole segment of the rock community that hated disco because of the fact that a lot of rock venues, rock clubs went disco and understandable. But of course, there were a lot of other criticisms made of it too, and that it was boring and predictable. SM (01:26:07): Well, some of the things that I heard around the years when I was at Ohio State, and then of course my years as an administrator at Ohio University through (19)76, is that when you think of disco, well, the (19)60s is over because the (19)60s was about activism, the (19)60s music was messages. The folk musicians, the rock musicians, they had a lot of messages in their music. This was just pure dance. That is one of the criticisms. Another one is that the (19)70s began when disco began, because a lot of people of the (19)60s think that up to 1973, that is still the (19)60s because of the way that is. And that the (19)70s really began around (19)74 and (19)75, and you had "Saturday Night Fever," the movie, and that is when it really began the Disco era. Just your thoughts on all that hodgepodge that I just mentioned. AE (01:27:15): Well, again, I think most music of the (19)60s was not political music. It was music that very often yearned to be meaningful. I would say it very often tried to be meaningful, but I do not think very much of it actually was political. I mean, if you really look at it, if you really look at the most popular. If you look at the very earliest music that was popular on disco dance floors, what's interesting is that a lot of that music actually was not utterly apolitical the way that it has been represented. Again, a song like "Fight the Power," most people would say, "Oh, well that was funk," but it was being played in discos. So I would say that there is a shift over time in disco to a less overtly political register. Now, I think that one of the groups that is most interesting in this respect is Chic, the Bernard Edwards- Nile Rodgers group, because Nile Rodgers had been a member of the Black Panthers. Chaka Khan had been involved with Black Panthers as well. I would say that both of those musicians, both Nile Rodgers and Chaka Khan, and I would say this is true of LaBelle as well, who were popular in the early years of disco, these are musicians who wanted their music to be empowering. So "I am Every Woman," now not everybody will think of that as a political song, but I think Chaka Khan did actually. Not everybody will necessarily think of "We Are Family," as a political song, this is the Chic song, but Nelson Mandela has said that when he was in prison, this was a song when it would come on the radios that the guards were listening to, it kept him going. It was a song that Nile Rodgers claimed to have written at Woodstock. Certainly the vocal Trio LaBelle did a number of songs, which were really pretty overtly political. But I think that what is interesting about disco is that to a great extent, it is music that is not overtly political. It is satisfy- AE (01:30:03): ... political. It is satisfied with getting people dancing. And to the extent that there is a political message in any of it, it is usually rather hidden and obscured. For instance in the song, Good Times by Chic, many people thought that, that was the song that is completely out of touch with America. It seemed, for many people, to be a song celebrating the good life in the midst of a terrible recession, but it was tongue-in-cheek. It is just that nobody expected a disco group to be smart enough to do a song that was tongue-in-cheek. As Nile Rogers said, "If this had been Bob Dylan, everybody would have said, "Check out Bob. Pretty cool."" But because it was a disco group, people took it at face value. So I think that, I do think that disco tended to make its meaning obscure, it tended not to favor the politically explicit. And I think that is really interesting that, that is true. I think to some extent, because disco was really about, to a great extent, about escapism and it was much more about taking evasive action. Again, as I point out in my book, there are songs that do make political points. But this was not really, there was not very much finger pointing music, to use Bob Dylan's expression, in disco. But again, I think partly that the meaning was made on the dance floor. I mean, the meanings were made in the kinds of contacts that happened between people. The ways in which, at its best, racial boundaries were crossed, gender boundaries, sexual boundaries were crossed. So I think that, more often than not, was where the meanings were. SM (01:32:22): I will tell you one thing, going to a disco in downtown Columbus in 1975 was a lot different than going into the Ohio Union in 1972, where there was total separation. AE (01:32:36): Mm-hmm. SM (01:32:37): One of the questions here is disco, you bring this up in your book, was basically performed by Black performers. It is often scorned as a terrible period for music between rock and roll and the Motown sound of the (19)60s and mid-(19)70s that, we already just went over that, to the new wave music in the (19)80s. Does this scorn or attack have anything to do with racism, prejudice, or the lessening of the value of something because it does not come from the majority? AE (01:33:07): Well, I think unfortunately, by the time we get to the attacks on disco, it comes to be understood within the community, within communities of rock, was that rock music is a largely white genre, with the exception of Jimi Hendrix. If you were to tune into classic rock stations in 1977, and I mentioned an article by Bill Marcus who talks about a Bay Area station that does a history of rock that includes precisely one Black artist, and that is Jimi Hendrix. So there is this sense, by the time we get to the mid to late (19)70s, that rock is really... that Black people do not belong in rock music. Which is, of course, such an irony given the fact that you would never have had the rock music without Black musicians, because R&B is the essential backbone to rock. So yeah, I mean, I think there is a sense in which you have to understand the backlash against disco as certainly involving a certain kind of racism. And if you look at the two DJs in Detroit that tried to organize an anti-disco army, they called themselves the Disco Ducks Klan, I think it is. And they hatch this plot to go on stage wearing white robes. I mean, that cannot be accidental, the use of Klan, the use of... The decision is later aborted, but of course it is. I think it has to be understood, within the context of a situation, a moment in which some white heterosexual men feel under attack. They feel as though their music is being shoved off the airways. They feel like they are being shoved out of certain jobs because of affirmative action, because [inaudible]. And so, I do think that disco comes to, it is a lightning rod of sorts for a lot of discontent about racial minorities, and about feminism, and about gay men. Because certainly, even though a lot of people were unaware of the fact that gay men were the, really, disco's early adopters, a lot were not. And a lot of people did know that there were significant numbers of gay men who were among disco's poor constituencies. So I think that, the backlash against disco is inseparable from homophobia and racism, and probably as well from a kind of uneasiness about feminism. I also think, and I argue this in the book, that for some rock and rollers, it was also the case that they felt as though their style, their way of being [inaudible], their masculinity, was threatened by this new style. Which today, we would sort of characterize as metrosexual. This sort fastidiousness, personal fastidiousness, attention to clothing, attention to grooming, attention to looking good, a buff body, and a willingness to dance. And these are all sorts of characteristics that women like in this. And they like their boyfriends and husbands to look good, dress up. To, basically, look like gay men. And the biggest affront to a lot of the disco folks who were white was that, the men who were sort of responsible for these new norms were gay men who had no use for women. So, you know. SM (01:37:20): Wait, you write beautifully... Barry White is one of my favorite artists of all the time. And again, I worked for the university, and most, I know there were some gay and lesbian students at Ohio University in these dances, but obviously, they were not out. But I think when you describe the difference between Barry White and James Brown, it is beautiful. Because you talk about vulnerable masculinity, Barry White pleasuring the ladies. And I have got my notes here, from being a sex machine, James Brown, to a more loving style that was Barry White, and what a difference. And so, I never thought of it that way. But obviously, when you listen to Barry White, there is a respect for women there. And there is a respect, whereas with James Brown, it was all about sex. AE (01:38:23): Yeah. Well, with James Brown, it was all about what he wanted sexually. And I mean, listen, I am a great lover of both of their music, but I think it is really true that Barry White was much more woman friendly. And so I think that, that kind of shift, it is hard. I mean, that is something that becomes more obvious later, as you look back at the era. I think it was harder to see at the time. But I also think that, one of the reasons that rap developed the way that it did was as a backlash against that kind of love man style that was characteristic of White. SM (01:39:10): Yeah. (01:39:11): I have a quote here from your book, and this is, I think, in your introduction. "Throughout Hot Stuff, I placed disco within the discourse of feminism, de-industrialization, globalism, ongoing struggles for racial justice and greater sexual preferences." And you have already gone over most of this in your commentary, but does that really put it in a nutshell? AE (01:39:35): Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think it is just that disco, I mean, I think it is a great paradox for many. I mean, it is a paradox of sorts because disco was primarily music about getting down, which is not to say that sometimes it was not about something else. But it was, in its essence, about getting down whether on the dance floor or in the bedroom. And much of this music did not strive to be more meaningful. And yet, it nonetheless both expressed and aided and abetted a number of changes that were absolutely central to American culture, in that period. And it is just paradoxical because the music itself did not, for the most part, strain to be meaningful the way that (19)60s music did. And yet, it had such an impact. But it is an impact that, I think, some people, especially boomers, resist learning about. I mean, there was... I opened the book with a great article by Andy Costumes who was the journalist who wrote at the Nation in The Village Voice, and he published this article about disco. And he talked about the contempt that so many of his (19)60s friends had for it. And yet, both of us had a very similar experience. I mean, there were a lot of my friends who were (19)60s people who hated disco because it seemed synthetic, it seemed unnatural, it seemed sleazy. It seemed like a real regression back to the sort of universe of bubblegum. And yet, there was a lot. Because they did not go to disco, they really did not know all the work, all the cultural work, that music was doing. Because Costumes was gay and because I am gay, that gave us a different perspective because we were part of those clubs. And we could see the way that the music was actually being used. And one of the things that I wanted to do in that book was that, I have been very influenced by the work of musicologists and scholars of music, like Susan McClary and Simon Firth. I mean, many of others have been. And they talk about how music is too often seen as a reflection of the culture, and not often enough seen as actually doing cultural work itself. It is not understood as changing us, making us, changing us, socializing us. And one of the things I really came to believe as I wrote this book, it was not something that I understood at all well as I began it. But I came to understand that as I was working on it, was that disco... Everybody always looks at punk and says, "Ah, punk." This was a really transformative moment, you know? And yet, I see... Actually, I do not want to get into a hierarchy here. But, I see a whole lot of change happening in the way that people understand their bodies and the way that they understand their gender, and their sexuality in these years through disco. And so, that was something I really wanted to make manifestly clear in the book. SM (01:43:13): Well, something that really struck me was one of the criticisms of all the movements today, or the issues, was identity politics. You hear that from the more right-side that... they criticized identified politics. And of course, the (19)60s was about that. But you say the (19)70s was a time when numbers of gay men, excuse me, African Americans, women, ditched predictable social scripts. Disco played a central role in the process, which broadened the contours of Blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality. I often wonder where Native Americans and Latinos fall in there. But what I want to comment here before you respond, as a person who has worked 30 plus years with college students, the most important thing we want to see when they walk into university to when they graduate, besides a sense of knowledge about why they were there, is a sense of self-esteem, a feeling of comfortableness with who they are and a sense of belonging. And it seems like everything you talk about, about disco, and particularly in terms of the gay and lesbian community, and women, and African American as a whole, that this helped in that feeling, in our society as a whole. And I know from seeing students dance in the (19)70s that the criticisms that we are seeing today, and actually we have seen since that time, the students that I have worked with, they loved it, so. AE (01:44:54): Well, yeah. I mean, I think that disco did enable, especially gay men and women across the board, who generally like dance better than men. I mean, again, it is a generalization and there're exceptions, but it tends to be true. And I think African Americans as well, it did afford them real kinds of opportunities for changing themselves. And I do think that, you do find people in all those categories, all those identity categories, who do ditch social scripts. I mean, I would say, and this is a kind of thread throughout the book, I do think though that, that was scary just as it was in the (19)60s. I mean, change is scary. And for instance, and it is not... there are losses too. And so when we are talking about disco, and we are talking about women, we are talking about sexual expressiveness, I mean, I think it is significant that Donna Summer and some of the other disco divas end up renouncing that world because on some level it makes them uncomfortable. And I do think that the sexual revolution of (19)70s made a lot of women uncomfortable. I think that, for instance, when you are talking about African Americans, there was a way in which what had been so exciting about disco to so many Black musicians and producers, which was that it allowed them to occupy the kind of sonic territory that had been more the preserve of white musicians, right? Sophisticated, symphonic arrangements, very kind of sweet music, music that was not necessarily gritty and was not recognizably Black. That was all very liberating. But it came to feel, to some African Americans, like a selling out of Black music. And when we come to male homosexuals, I think that the move away from effeminacy to gay macho also meant that certain categories of men who were effeminate really felt sidelined. So one of the things that I tried to express in the book is that, as liberating as all this stuff could feel to these three groups, there were certainly dissenters. There were certainly people who did not buy it or people who came to feel disillusioned. So I think both of those things are true. Change is like that, isn't it? I mean, you know? SM (01:47:47): Yeah. AE (01:47:47): It is obviously, it is dialectical. And so, it makes a lot of sense that you would then have this kind of ambivalence. SM (01:47:55): Yeah. I think that what you are talking about here, when you listen to Barry White and his music from (19)75, Let the Music Play, and then when you hear Marvin Gaye, What's Going On, his album in 1971 is the difference of night and day. One is just really about, I will not say having fun, but just getting out on the dance floor and being free. And Marvin Gaye, that is a very important thing, it's a sensitivity and sensitizing people to the issues that we must all care about. But that there is a difference there, one may be more macho than the other, so to speak. AE (01:48:33): Yeah. And the thing about Marvin Gaye that is interesting is that, then he goes totally into bedroom music himself. I mean, and I think that is a really, really interesting phenomenon and it is one that I write about in the book. And I cannot say that I have cracked the nut here, that I totally understand it. I think it's fascinating that you find R&B going through this shit where there is this period, and I think it really begins early. I mean, it begins as early, I think, as (19)71. And I think it goes through, it sort of peaks in about (19)74. And I think Fight the Power is one of the last instances, I think of (19)75, but do not quote me on it, is this really fascinating period of social commentary. And much of it is not about racial uplift, it is about confusion, it is about feeling sold out, it is about disappointments. And yet, it is like then you have R&B turning on a dime and becoming... You see it with Papa Was a Rollin' Stone from the happy people. I mean, that is a really interesting shift. And I do not know exactly just what to attribute it. I mean, I think it could be that, that kind of music of reflection and social commentary and disappointment got to be almost a cliché. I mean, I think that, that is quite possible that it was just so flooding the airways. And it could be that there was this sense of, enough already. But in any case, it is a very interesting shift that it does turn, and it turns so emphatically towards something else. SM (01:50:31): You mentioned in there that you think that Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, their song was the first disco song? AE (01:50:40): Well, I say that a lot of people think that it is, The Love I Lost. SM (01:50:45): Yes. AE (01:50:45): I am reluctant to actually name one. I mean, I think there's that, I think, Girl You Need a Change of Mind. I mean, I think there are some contenders out there. I mean, there are certain elements that are beginning to cohere. But I think, yeah, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. I think, The Love I Lost is a key moment. Yeah. SM (01:51:18): But you have got to admit one thing, that Saturday Night Fever really awakened this nation to disco with John Travolta dancing. And here's a guy that is not a gay male, he is a macho male, but he is out on the dance floor wearing those clothes and feeling comfortable wearing those clothes and really into dancing. And they had the Bee Gees music in the background, and you had Tavares. Would not you say that, that is a historic moment when that movie came out? AE (01:51:48): Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would not argue against that, no. SM (01:51:56): You wrote a great book that I read a long time ago, I did not reread it, but Janis Joplin. And the question I want to ask you about her, is her life and death an example of the counterculture gone wrong, because drugs killed her? AE (01:52:14): Well, I think, yes. I mean, in some ways, drugs killed Janis, but I think [inaudible] killed Janis. I mean, I think that the disappointments in life, I think, I mean, she could never hold on [inaudible], right? And I mean, who knows? Had she lived in the age of Prozac, I am sure she would have been medicated. And probably her music would, I do not know what her music would be like. People have written about this a lot now. I mean, but we have the kind of works of art that fed off in programmed misery and unhappiness if the writers were medicated people. So I do not know, but I do not think she was... I think that the counterculture... And many of us of the boomer generation were attracted to risks and were reckless. I think that was one of the, it was part of what made it so exciting, and also so dangerous that people played with that. Janis knew what she was doing. Janis knew that she was taking a risk every time. I mean, after all, she was no stranger to ODing. So she knew what she was doing. And I think in her case, I guess I would say that, there is both this element of recklessness that is generational. And in her case, I think also very much driven by the fact that there is a lot of person unhappiness there. SM (01:54:03): Yeah. I interviewed a person who loved Janis, knew her. But she committed a sin in the drug community, she brought alcohol. AE (01:54:13): Yeah-yeah. So she- SM (01:54:14): And she was never forgiven for that by some purists who did not drink, but they were into every other drug you can imagine. AE (01:54:24): Yes, exactly. Yeah, no, it is absolutely true that there were people who really thought that Janis' love of alcohol was just completely, made her kind of beyond the pale. SM (01:54:40): This is a question I ask, because I know... this is Roe v. Wade. And I asked Susan Brownmiller this question last week, and I went to her apartment in New York and it was three hour interview. It was a great... she is a very nice person. AE (01:54:54): Yes, she is a very nice person. SM (01:54:55): Yes. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the most important legal decision since the end of World War II, during the time that boomer women had been alive, so we are talking about the (19)63 years. Is there any other legal decisions that are more important than that one? AE (01:55:12): Well, I think that there was a lot of... I think there were some decisions around equal employment. SM (01:55:27): Brown v. Board of Education. AE (01:55:29): Oh, well, I mean. I think, yeah. Again, I mean, I would say it is very hard to... I would advise against those making any kind of hierarchy. I think that there are some legal decisions that have been very important, that would include Brown and Roe v. Wade. I think some of the stuff that has not been studied very much, but is interesting, are some of the rulings around equal employment, especially their applicability to gender. And so, I think those were important as well. And these happened in the (19)70s. So I think, again, Roe v. Wade was very important. Would I say that it was the most important? I probably would not say it was the most important, but it is important. But of course, it's flawed, and that enabled it to be picked away at. SM (01:56:27): One of the things that is historically documented is the excessive sexism in the other movements at the end of the (19)60s, during the (19)60s and before the (19)70s began. And that would be in the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. I talked to people in every movement, and they said it was in the gay and lesbian movement, it was in the Chicano Movement, it was in the Native American movement, and it was in all the movements. And the question I am asking here is, sexism in the movements of the late (19)60s and early (19)70s played a very important role in stimulating the onset of the second wave. Is that true? And secondly, without the sexism, would the movement have gone in a different direction, because it was so dominated by white men? AE (01:57:16): Well, I mean, I think white men... SM (01:57:22): And Black men, because of the civil rights movement. AE (01:57:24): Well, I think that all men... I mean, in the case of white men, you had men who were accustomed to feeling entitled. They were accustomed to a certain kind of entitlement based upon their skin color and their gender. I think when you are talking about men of color, because of the way in which they were constructed by the dominant white cultures, they often did not necessarily feel that sense of entitlement. But that did not mean that they were any better, at all. I mean, it meant that very often they were, as Fran Beal put it in writing about some Black male activists, I mean, it was like they were trying to... I mean, their idea of what their women should be like was derived from the pages of, might as well have been from Ladies' Home Journal. And they had a very macho kind of aspect as a result of being disempowered. So yeah, I mean, it had a terrible... I mean, it's paradoxical. Because it was for the feminists who... For people like Susan Brownmiller and Ellen Willis, and all of the others who played such an important role, Fran Beal, Margaret Sloan, Marco Jefferson. I mean, all of them. It was crushing to feel how little feminism mattered and how disparaged it often was. It was really terrible. But on the other hand, it did, of course, enable the development of the second wave. I mean, it was so strange that women did begin to organize autonomously. I mean, I guess I would say that, I think I am probably... I guess, the only other thing I would say is that, I think that one of the things, one of many reasons that I have written critically about Weathermen is that- AE (02:00:03): ...that I have written critically about Weatherman is that I think both Weather and ... I think there is certain elements of the Black freedom movement, as well in the sort of fetishizing of revolution, the kind of vanguardism that they assessed, really ensured that women would have to go their own way, and that it would be a painful break. Yeah, I think it could have been different. I mean, I think if people had remained committed to participatory democracy, if people had really listened to one another and been respectful, then yeah, it could have turned out differently, but it did not. SM (02:00:57): What are the major accomplishments of the women's movements in the second wave, and what are the greatest disappointments? AE (02:01:06): Well, I mean, I would say probably the greatest would be the expansion of ... Well, I guess many things, but I mean, at the level of policy, basically, we live in a culture in which discrimination against women, gender discrimination in education and employment is ... it happened, for sure, but it is not, for the most part, seen as a good thing, right? SM (02:01:42): Mm-hmm. AE (02:01:42): So I think it is widely ... Discrimination against women is just ... I am trying to think of a way to say this that sort of takes in the complexity of it. To a great extent, it is no longer tolerated. I think that is the biggest thing. I mean, violence against women, which was just assumed to not exist or exist on the margins and not be very important, and very often was understood as [inaudible] being a woman's fault has been completely reinterpreted. That is an enormous shift. It is not to say that there's not violence against women that happens in this world, and there are not people who turn a blind eye, but it is really significant, a very significant change. Significant change in the understanding of the importance of sexual freedom for women. I mean, again, coming back to the ... too often [inaudible] in a way that none the less seems to ... for some women to have been understood as nothing more than pleasing men, but I still think that there has been significant ... I think we are talking about employment. We are talking about education. We're talking about violence against women. We are talking about right to sexual pleasure. All of those things. Abortion rights, all of those things. There have been major achievements in women's athletics. Again, more can be done, more needs to be done, but there has been considerable achievement. SM (02:03:38): This is just a general question. I have asked this to everybody. Again, we have talked about the (19)60s. When, in your opinion, did the (19)60s begin, and when did it end? And what was the watershed moment in the (19)60s? I ask the same question again. When did the (19)70s begin and end, and what was the watershed moment in the (19)70s? AE (02:04:00): Well, I do not really know. I mean, I am not trying to cop out on this. I think that this is something that is constantly ... that is changing and shifting. I mean, obviously, it just depends on what one's looking at. I mean, the (19)60s do not really begin, in some sense ... I mean, what we know as the (19)60s, a kind of period of protest. They do not really begin, for instance, gay and lesbians, until really late in the game. But if we are looking at African Americans, you can argue that in some sense the (19)60s begin in (19)55. You could go back even further. I mean, you could go back to the demobilization after World War II and the fact that so many Black soldiers had different experiences in other parts of the world and that emboldened them in certain ways. It created a shift in consciousness. It really, I think, depends upon the group in question, so that is why I am sort of reluctant to say. But clearly, you could make the argument that the (19)60s really begin back in the (19)50s. You could put it at (19)54, (19)55. You could similarly make the argument that there was an awful lot, if you're looking at college campuses, that was the same in 1964. That not very much change had actually happened, and you do not begin to really feel those shifts until probably (19)65, (19)66. Still, they really remain the land of ... many of them, many college campuses, the land of the beehive and the crew cut until well into the (19)60s. So I think I am just not ... I am sort of uneasy making those kinds of generalizations, but clearly, shifts do happen and shifts in consciousness over a long period. SM (02:06:16): Do you remember, I know you do, but I have been asking this, when you heard John Kennedy was assassinated? AE (02:06:23): Yeah, I do very, very well because I was in a Quaker meeting. I forget the day of the week, but we were having a Quaker meeting at Sidwell Friends, where I was, I think in the ... Would I have been in the seventh grade? No, no, no. Anyway, I was at Sidwell Friends. Bobby Kennedy's two boys ... two of Robert Kennedy's sons were students there. I am sure everybody at that Quaker meeting remembers it because we did not know what had happened. None of us knew. But what we did know was that in the middle of this meeting, they were ushered out. So, again, we did not know. I did not know. I remember taking the bus home, public transportation, city bus back home. It really was not until I walked into the house that I knew what had ... I knew for sure what had happened. Yeah. SM (02:07:28): Yeah. Were you another one of those that watched four straight days of TV? AE (02:07:32): Watched a lot of it. Yeah. SM (02:07:36): Yep. One of the questions that ... When Newt Gingrich came into power ... I do not want to always refer Newt, but in 1994, and when George Will writes a lot of his articles, and more recently, Huckabee on his TV show and others, they like to take shots at the (19)60s generation as to the reason why we have so many problems in today's society is because it goes right back to that time in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. They are talking about the drug culture, the sexual freedom, the lack of respect for any sort of authority, the challenging that took place, the beginning of all the isms, all these things. They blame some of the problems we have in our society today and the unwillingness to talk to each other on that period. Your thoughts on those individuals who continue to attack the (19)60s generation, which is basically attacking the Boomers. The way they lived. The way they acted. It's not all of them, now, because there is 74 million and only about 10 percent, or maybe even 5 percent, were involved in activism, but blaming them for where we are today. That includes the divorce rate. AE (02:09:06): Well, I think it is a very easy deflection for conservative politicians, many of whom have had their own marital problems, have not they, to continue to bash the-the (19)60s. I mean, when in point of fact it is hardly a problem that ... I do not know how you get from (19)60s protestors to Newt Gingrich having an affair with another woman when his wife is dying of... I do not know how you- SM (02:09:41): Yeah. AE (02:09:43): I mean, I just think it is a kind of scapegoating that these folks have engaged in all along. I think that it is true that the right wing actually... I mean, I think what I would say is more significant is... because I think that marriages are difficult things to make work. Especially when you are in denial, and especially when you are ... I often wonder if those people who are most apt to be pro-family in their rhetoric, and to bash the (19)60s, and gays and lesbians and feminists, I mean, do not really do it in order to be deflective. I mean, not just with their public, but personally deflective. You know? SM (02:10:34): Mm-hmm. AE (02:10:34): I mean, because they cannot really cope with their own indiscretions and transgressions. Because certainly, I mean, there has been such a parade of right-wing politicians who have screwed up. I mean, it is hardly the case that this is ... that the marital woes and the ... What is the word I am looking for when you have relationships outside of marriage? SM (02:11:06): Adultery? AE (02:11:08): Yeah, adultery, but there is another word. Begins with a T and I cannot remember it. But anyway, that liberals and leftists have any kind of monopoly upon whatsoever. I just think it is a kind of case loop that they just constantly run. What I would say is that that lack of ... I mean, it is true that the (19)60s was about challenging authority, and this was a message that I think was picked up on by conservatives. You look at, for instance, the anti-busing protestors in Boston and other places, and they directly borrowed the tactics of (19)60s activists. You look at the anti-abortion movement, and you see the same thing. There is a real borrowing of [inaudible]... that kind of commerce. I mean, there was a real circulation of attitudes and stances and ideas, actually, between the right and the ... I hesitate to say the left because I do not even know if we have a left in this [inaudible], but there has been significant amounts of circulation there. The thing that strikes me is that I am just consistently struck by, if you want to talk about incivility and rudeness, by the extent of which this has been so absorbed and modeled by the right wing. I think that they have become models of incivility in a way that most of us on the left or within liberalism just have not. SM (02:13:03): Well, one of the qualities that is been defined within the generation as a whole is their inability to trust. Obviously, they experienced leaders that lied to them as they were growing up. In the Vietnam War, we all know about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and certainly Watergate with Richard Nixon. If you were really in tune as a young boomer, you knew that Eisenhower lied about U-2. You see constant... McNamara and the lies about the numbers of people that were being killed over there. The number scheme. So many things. It is a quality that has somehow been aligned with the generation. Of course, we all know about Jerry Rubin and do not trust anyone over 30, and then they switched it to over 40 when they were getting close to it. But also, there is a conflict here too. It is the fact that if you are a political science major, one of the best qualities one can have as a citizen is to not trust your leaders because that shows that democracy is alive and well. So that is a normal thing. But then psychologists will oftentimes say that if you cannot trust someone else, then ... You have got to be able to trust somebody. That is not a good quality either. Would you say, first off, that they ... I think we can say about the generation. Was this a trusting or ... Is this a quality that you see within the generation, they do not trust, and is it a negative or positive? AE (02:14:42): Well, I think that ... I mean, I would say this about the generation as a whole, that, if anything, people trusted too much. I mean, they assumed that America was the country that it said it was. Many of us, we grew up with this Cold War rhetoric. I think many of us assumed it to be true. So I think it was our faith in America being different, and being democratic, and being the beacon of liberty that then caused ... that it helps to explain the philosophy of the anti-war movement and end of some of the other movements. It is that you grew up thinking that you were living in this country, which was a citadel of freedom, and then you discovered that, hold it, it was more complicated. I think as a consequence, people ... I mean, I tend not to be a conspiracy theorist. I think that most of the important left-wing thinkers are not, but are we skeptical? Yeah, probably. I do not think that skepticism is a bad thing. I think conspiracy theories, that can be disabling in its own way, because then it's sort of like, "Well, why bother, if this whole thing is sewn up?" Of course it cannot be sewn up because you would never have really had the (19)60s, and you would never have really ... you would never have had the changes that have taken place. You know? SM (02:16:37): Mm-hmm. AE (02:16:37): That is what I would say. SM (02:16:39): I only got four more questions here, so we are almost- AE (02:16:42): But Steven, you know what? I am going to have to get off in just a few minutes. SM (02:16:48): Okay, yeah. I am going to ask... Let us just cut this down to two questions here then. AE (02:16:52): Okay. SM (02:16:52): This is a big one, because this is the issue of healing. I took a group of students to Washington, D.C. in 1995. Actually, the students that came with me, 14 of them ... It was our Leadership on the Road programs. We met Senator Edmund Muskie before he passed away. The students came up with this question because they saw the films. They were not alive. They saw what happened in Chicago in 1968, of all the divisions. The whole world is watching what happened there. Of course, he was the democratic vice presidential candidate. They thought he would respond to this question based on that experience. The question was basically, "Due to all the divisions that were happening in America in 1968, do you feel we were close to a second civil war? Number one. But most importantly, do you think that the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war and those who were against the war, those who supported the troops or against the troops as a generation, are going to go to their grave, like the Civil War generation, not healing from the divisions that took place in their lives?" So it was a generational question, because they'd cite the Civil War, and some things had come up with those gatherings in Gettysburg. It was very obvious that no healing had taken place when so many people went to their graves in the Civil War. Muskie answered in a certain way. How would you answer that question? Do we have a problem with healing in the nation? Is it an issue? AE (02:18:31): Do we have a problem with healing in the nation? I do not know. I mean, I tend to think that a lot of ... that the (19)60s are used politically to great effect, and they continue to be. I mean, there was an article recently about this in the New York Times. I cannot recall what it was about, except that... I cannot remember the issue that the author was exploring. But I think it's become a political... People make political hay with it. But honestly, am I able to have conversations with neighbors who I know feel very differently about certain things? Yes. Am I able to have conversations with colleagues who I know think differently about a variety of issues that were hot issues in the (19)60s? Yeah. I mean, I do not know. For me, personally, no, I do not see it as being ... I do not see it as being quite like that. I mean, I guess with the Civil War, though, I mean, eventually you do have a kind of reconciliation that happens between North and South. That is through reconstruction and the denial of rights to Blacks. And this increasing move in the north away from an ideology of equality towards one that stresses separatism indifference. Eventually, that point is reached through unfortunate ways. This would be late in the lives of that generation, for sure. But for our own, no, I guess I do not. You know? SM (02:20:27): Yeah, Senator Muskie responded. He did not even respond to 1968. He made no comment to them. He gave a melodramatic pause for about a minute. It looked like he had a tear in his eye. We have it on videotape. Basically said, "We have not healed since the Civil War due to the issue of race." Because he just saw the Ken Burns series and it had really touched his life, and he said, "When you lose 430,000 men, and you almost lose an entire generation, that is another issue in itself." AE (02:21:00): Yeah. I think he is right about that. I mean, I think that... SM (02:21:08): Others have said to me that ... In response, he said, "You ought to be a little more specific on this question because if you simply say those who fought the war, the three million plus who went to Vietnam, and those who protested the war, you might have some issues there." AE (02:21:24): Yeah. I think that that is possible. Although, I will tell you, I mean, one of the things about my background is, by virtue of going to a prep school, I was in school with Robert McNamara's son. SM (02:21:39): Oh. AE (02:21:39): There were other people who were sons and daughters of policy makers and government leaders who were in that school. SM (02:21:48): The name of the school? AE (02:21:51): Sidwell Friends. SM (02:21:52): Okay. Yep. Yep. AE (02:21:54): It's where the Obama daughters are. It is where many, many presidents put their kids, right? SM (02:21:58): Right. AE (02:21:59): It would seem. So, I mean, I did not know that many people who actually went to Vietnam. I really did not. of course, that was not unusual in the Vietnam War. I mean, there were a lot of people who went to college, especially elite colleges, who did not know anybody who went to war. I have subsequently had contact with people who were military people who went to fight. What struck me, actually ... Maybe this is because I am in Santa Fe part of the year, and that I am in university communities to some extent, but what struck me is the extent of which so many of the people who I met and have met, who did serve in Vietnam, really shared many of the views that I had about that war. That is been quite striking to me. SM (02:23:03): You have been to the wall on Washington, do you think the ... Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal A Nation, do you think that wall has helped heal the nation in any way? AE (02:23:13): I do not know. SM (02:23:14): Beyond the veterans. AE (02:23:15): I do not know. I just do not. I mean, I could not say. SM (02:23:21): My last question, very last one, and thank you for going over the time, I truly appreciate it, is that when we're talking about boomers now, who were born in 1946 and beyond, we're talking about a lot of different presidents from Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson. Of course, we had Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton, George Bush the first, George Bush the second, and President Obama. I do not think I have missed anybody in there. Jimmy Carter, of course. What presidents, when you look at them and you look at your life's work, not only with gay and lesbian issues, but with women's issues, which ones are the ones you most admire in terms of those two issues? AE (02:24:27): Well, I think it is too early to say about Obama. I mean, I have been disappointed, as many have, with a lot of what he has not done. So it's too early to say. There was a lot that I admired about Clinton, but I did not admire the Welfare Reform Bill. But this does not ... I mean, a lot of my criticisms about Clinton go to other things beyond the issue of gender and sex discrimination. I have to say that in many respects, I have admired Clinton. It's too early to tell about Obama. I would say that. SM (02:25:29): Are there any questions I did not ask you thought I was going to ask? AE (02:25:32): Oh, well, yeah, I mean, there would be any number of questions that you could have asked. It is not as though I have been sitting here thinking, "Gee, why has not he asked me this?" SM (02:25:43): Right. Okay. AE (02:25:44): I have not. No. I have not. SM (02:25:45): Okay. AE (02:25:47): Now, when is your book coming out? SM (02:25:49): Let me turn this off. One second. (End of Interview) Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Alice Echols Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Echols, Alice ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource College teachers; Echols, Alice--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Alice Echols is a professor of History and Gender Studies at University of Southern California. She authored four books and several articles. Dr. Echols has a bachelor's degree in History from Macalester College and master's and Ph.D. from University of Michagan. 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 2010-06-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In copyright Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.44a ; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.44b 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. 145:52 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/e09602564888cb535a1cf72f2e6818e1.jpg 11e30afd5821d4df4fe3e34767957fb8 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/98996c55002c71552f2c66be354d826d.mp3 720ae450852f012890775aa9958cbbf9 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 2010-03-11 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Morris Dickstein Language English Biographical Text <span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Dr. Morris Dickstein is a scholar, historian, academic, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. Dr. Dickstein is a Professor Emeritus of English and Theater at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and he is the author for several books. He graduated from Columbia with a Bachelor's degree and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:15105,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,0],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:10}">Dr. Morris Dickstein is a scholar, historian, academic, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. Dr. Dickstein is a Professor Emeritus of English and Theater at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and he is the author is several books. He graduated from Columbia with a Bachelor's degree and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.</span> Digital Publisher Binghamton University Libraries Digital Format audio/mp4 Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data 1 Microcassette Material Type Sound Interview Format Video or Audio Audio Keywords Literary critic; American, Culture; 1960s; Writers, Poets; Politics; Brooklyn College; Beat writers; Counterculture; Dropouts; Columbia; Woodstock; Vietnam; Baby Boomers; Activism; Social protest; the Communist party; Immigrants; Poverty; Black nationalists; Separatist; Freedom Summer; Drugs; Veterans; Black Panther Party; Women's studies; Gay studies; Political correctness; Kent State; Separatism; Hippies; Yippies Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 93:50 Subject LCSH Scholars; Historians; College teachers; Dickstein, Morris--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Dr. Morris Dickstein Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Dickstein, Morris ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Scholars; Historians; College teachers; Dickstein, Morris--Interviews Description An account of the resource Dr. Morris Dickstein is a scholar, historian, academic, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. PDr. Dickstein is a Professor Emeritus of English and Theater at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, and he is the author of several books. He graduated from Columbia with a B.A. and earned his PhD from Yale University. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-03-11 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.10.2016.43 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. 93:50 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/2d5d5d1acd340ee7e11f95270b9db9c8.jpg dc7b81eee20f7051c4c7e6cccea9ae34 https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/files/original/599cc92d10398b3c283450517bb3efb0.mp3 f4fd3d4f02c80656886f78cda14f058a 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 2011-04-06 Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Stephen McKiernan Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Belva Davis, 1932- Language English Biographical Text Belva Davis is an award winning journalist who has covered politics for over forty years. She has anchored three major network affiliates CBS, NBC and PBS. This includes a political affairs program on KQED-San Francisco that is one the most watched public stations in America. In 2008, Belva Davis was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. She has received eight regional Emmys for reporting on a variety of topics including the AIDS Epidemic, Castro's Cuba, Bready Cancer and Learning Disabilities. She was the first African American woman on the West Coast and was profiled in the NEWSEUM, the world's first interactive museum of news. Davis is the author of the book <em>Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman's Life in Journalism</em>. 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="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;African American Women; Prejudice; Civil Rights; Women's Movement; Black Panthers; Second Class Citizens; Journalism; Affirmative Action&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:2,&quot;4&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:13689059}}">African American Women; Prejudice; Civil Rights; Women's Movement; Black Panthers; Second Class Citizens; Journalism; Affirmative Action</span> Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 186:31 Subject LCSH Women television journalists--United States; Radio journalists--United States; Davis, Belva, 1932--Interviews Accessibility Copy/Paste below: Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Binghamton University Libraries is working very hard to create transcriptions of all audio/visual media present on this site. If you require a specific transcription for accessibility purposes, you may contact us at <a href="mailto:orb@binghamton.edu">orb@binghamton.edu</a>. Rights Statement Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Belva Davis Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Davis, Belva, 1932- ; McKiernan, Stephen Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/wav Subject The topic of the resource Women television journalists--United States; Radio journalists--United States; Davis, Belva, 1932--Interviews Description An account of the resource Belva Davis is a television and radio journalist. Davis has won eight Emmy Awards, and she has been recognized for her hard work by major groups such as the American Women in Radio and Television and the National Association of Black Journalists. Belva Davis is an award winning journalist who has covered politics for over forty years. She has anchored three major network affiliates CBS, NBC and PBS. This includes a political affairs program on KQED-San Francisco that is one the most watched public stations in America. In 2008, Belva Davis was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. She has received eight regional Emmys for reporting on a variety of topics including the AIDS Epidemic, Castro's Cuba, Bready Cancer and Learning Disabilities. She was the first African American woman on the West Coast and was profiled in the NEWSEUM, the world's first interactive museum of news. Davis is the author of the book <em>Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman's Life in Journalism</em>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Binghamton University Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-04-06 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.10.2016.42a; McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.42b 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. 186:31