If you lived through them, you probably have your own private '60s. Bobby Seale and Paul McCartney have theirs, and so does George W. Bush. They would certainly all write different accounts of the rebellious decade. And if they put together an anthology of writings, they would surely offer very different selections.
And so it is with myself and Ann Charters. She was a college professor in the '60s and a much respected scholar of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac. She attended four antiwar demonstrations but was not really an activist, and certainly not an organizer or leader. The center of her life was literature. I, on the other hand, was a full-time activist, a founder of an underground newspaper and an original Yippie. I was arrested 14 times and once ran for sheriff of Alameda County. The center of my life was revolution.
Like Charters, I, along with my wife, Judy Gumbo Albert, edited an anthology of '60s writings, titled "The Sixties Papers," which was published in 1984 and is still used as a college text. So it's fascinating for me to see how someone with a different background approaches the subject. Mostly, I want to see if her comments and choices resonate in my memory, intellect and emotions. The answer is mixed and occasionally frustrating.
Take her selection -- and placement -- of Hunter S. Thompson's piece on the Hell's Angels' 1965 attack on the Vietnam Day Committee. This bit of writing oddly finds itself in the "Free Speech Movement and Beyond" section, but the only thing this conflict had to do with the Free Speech Movement was that it took place in Berkeley. Now, almost anything that Thompson writes is insightful, but his angle of vision here is from the seat of a Hell's Angel motorcycle. Not that he romanticizes these outlaws, he calls them fascists, but his journalism has little to do with the committee or its intentions.
The Angels had attacked peace marchers at the Berkeley-Oakland line and were threatening to do it again in a scheduled second march. But they backed off, and Thompson is at a loss to explain why.
Well, I used to set up the Vietnam Day Committee's table on the Berkeley campus and occasionally give speeches at noon rallies. Let me suggest that the radicals who would turn out 10,000 marchers were well prepared the second time around. Not all pacifists by a long shot, they far outnumbered the Angels and included in their ranks some ex-boxers, wrestlers and football players. The Angels would be overwhelmed. In addition, this time around, the VDC had a permit from the city of Oakland, and it was unlikely that the Oakland police would be looking the other way. No wonder the Angels took their complaints elsewhere. Charters could have greatly enriched the telling of this tale if she had included in her anthology writings by VDCers that appeared in the Berkeley Barb. (The sad ending of the Vietnam Day Committee ought to be mentioned. Person or persons unknown planted dynamite under its office and blew the building to smithereens. The police called it attempted murder, and the crime remains unsolved.)
Berkeley, the great melting pot of '60s radicalism, is given short shrift in Charters' anthology with hardly a mention of People's Park -- one of the great highlights of the '60s. It was created in Berkeley circa 1969 by thousands of students, street people and citizens. Originally an abandoned piece of university-owned land, it was seized and turned into a park. The park builders rolled out sod, planted flowers, constructed swings and planted a vegetable patch. When the regents of the University of California tried to evict them and erected a fence around the park, violence ensued. Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan called in the police, the National Guard and the Alameda County Sheriff's Department. When it was all over, one person was left blind and another dead.
I was hoping that Charters would come up with some obscure masterpiece about the rise and fall of People's Park. There was excellent writing about the park in radical magazines and newspapers; reprinting a portion from Mario Savio's magnificent speech "Seizing the Means of Leisure" would have been perfect. But aside from a passing -- and incorrect -- reference to James Reston being killed in the battle for the park, we learn very little. As a participant in that protest, I can state that Reston was nowhere near the park. It was James Rector who was killed.
The further I read into Charters' anthology the more frustrated I became, but then I read a selection from Norman Mailer's award-winning "Armies of the Night," an account of his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon and the sit-in that took place around that scary building.
