On the Sunday evening after the march on the Pentagon, I had also talked with Dave about the demonstration. He hadn’t appeared surprised that the U.S. government had been able to control the demonstrators, despite the mass bravery and militancy. During the next few days, however, news of the government’s brutality in relation to the people who had sat-in, and its harsh treatment of those it had arrested, began to filter through the jails and to the outside world. And a new spirit of militancy and resistance, generated by the Pentagon confrontation, impacted heavily on the New York SDS Regional Office. So Dave volunteered our apartment for an SDS regional meeting to plan a militant street demonstration, patterned after the Pentagon demonstration, in front of New York City’s Hilton Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.
The Pentagon confrontation had persuaded New York SDS Regional Office people like Jeff, Sutheim, Gottlieb, Halliwell and Marge Piercy that large numbers of people in New York City were ready for much more militant street activity in their street demonstrations against the Viet Nam War, comparable to the tactics used by European student groups such as German SDS. Mark and Ted also had been persuaded, by the apparent success of the Pentagon demonstration in radicalizing more people and “upping” the level of anti-war militancy, that Columbia SDS and the New York SDS Regional Office should try to organize an anti-war demo in Manhattan that embodied the new post-Pentagon confrontation spirit of resistance and militancy.
On November 14, 1967, LBJ’s Secretary of State—Dean Rusk—was scheduled to speak at the Hilton Hotel on W. 53rd St. and 6th Ave. at a meeting of the Foreign Policy Association, an elite group of ruling-class corporate-types. By November 1967, Rusk was seen by most anti-war people as a war criminal and a leading apologist for crimes against humanity in Viet Nam.
What the SDS Regional Office hoped to do was to mobilize thousands of anti-war people who had moved “from protest to resistance” in front of New York’s Hilton Hotel to confront Rusk and his Foreign Policy Association colleagues with militant opposition to their crimes and their right to rule over us.
Sutheim, Marge Piercy and some North American Congress on Latin America [NACLA] movement researchers had put together packets of revealing literature on Rusk and the Foreign Policy Association. A militant confrontation on November 14, 1967 would also provide a chance to spread this information to a wide audience and to raise anti-imperialist consciousness around New York City.
SDS chapters on all the New York City area college campuses were contacted by the NY SDS Regional Office and, on the last weekend in October 1967, one or two people from each chapter—plus about 9 people from Columbia SDS and New York SDS Regional Office circles—showed up at my W. 94th St. apartment to plan the November 1967 anti-Rusk demo. About 25 people attended this planning meeting.
Among the SDS activists attending this meeting was a 31-year-old woman who looked younger, although she was among the few women at the meeting who still used lipstick. Her name was Marge Piercy. Her novel, Vida, would later contain a fictionalized version of how Movement people planned this 1967 anti-Rusk demonstration.
Marge had attended the University of Michigan and a university in the Chicago metropolitan area in the 1950s; and she had also written Beat poetry during the same decade. And during most of the 1960s she was married to her second husband: a white middle-class man.
At the anti-Rusk demo planning meeting, Marge sat on the chair in the apartment that was right next to the telephone. She appeared content to just sit and listen during the whole meeting, without making any strategic suggestions of her own. Other activists at the meeting included Gottlieb, Naomi, Joe and Dave, from the SDS Regional Office and—from Columbia SDS—Mark, Ted and me. Gottlieb, Ted, Mark and Dave pretty much determined the political direction of the meeting. Various suggestions were made as to what the most effective and non-violently militant way to confront Secretary of State Rusk would be.
The meeting consensus was that we would try to move into the street in front of the Hilton Hotel as ruling-class limousines drove up to the Foreign Policy Association gathering, and then retreat onto the sidewalk whenever the police attempted to clear us from the streets. A few people were assigned to examine whether it would be possible to non-violently confront Rusk with demonstrators inside the Hilton Hotel. SDS people with bullhorns would be in the street outside the Hilton Hotel, encouraging the anti-Rusk demonstrators to use “mobile tactics” to block traffic in the streets around the hotel.
Over the next few weeks, SDS/MDS Regional Office people worked hard to mobilize people for the November 14, 1967 anti-Rusk demo. But, as the memory of the Pentagon confrontation receded, fewer anti-war people around the City appeared eager to attempt to non-violently charge the Hilton Hotel to confront Rusk and the Foreign Policy Association Establishment-types about war crimes in Viet Nam. The pacifist Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee was only willing to hold its usual innocuous, non-confrontational, legalistic, non-militant anti-war demonstration between police barricades, in a street across from the Hilton.
A few people, including me, made separate visits to the Hilton Hotel to check out how easy it might be to sneak inside with anti-war protesters. But after examining the Hilton’s layout, nobody thought it possible to get inside the hotel for any length of time, without first being stopped by hotel security guards. There were too few street entrances to the Hilton Hotel for anti-war demonstrators to be able to sneak into the place.
As news of what was being planned for the anti-Rusk demo spread among Columbia SDS activists and grad school theoretical “heavies,” people at Columbia started to feel lukewarm about what was being planned, and little mobilizing effort was made on Columbia’s campus to recruit large numbers of students for this off-campus demo. Al, a heavily cerebral Columbia grad student from Boston, was becoming increasingly influential with praxis-axis people on the Columbia SDS steering committee because of his ability to mask his anti-action, right-opportunist political line in Marxist jargon. He was among the Columbia SDS “heavies” who ridiculed the New York SDS Regional Office’s strategy for the anti-Rusk demo.
Because Mark remained enthusiastic about the proposed “wild in the streets” tactics—even after others started to feel lukewarm about how effective the whole demo would be—Mark continued to develop an image within Columbia SDS leadership circles of being “irresponsible,” a “wild man” and a “hippie anarchist.” As November 14th approached, Ted, like Mark, planned to carry a bullhorn on the streets outside the Hilton. But, unlike Mark, Ted had come to feel that the New York Regional Office’s anti-Rusk demo strategy was too adventuristic in its conception. And Ted expected the demonstration to make little impact in New York City.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xiv)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (73)
On October 21, 1967, the big anti-war event was the “Confront The Warmakers” march on the Pentagon. All the SDS heavies around New York City and at Columbia felt this march was ill-advised because it distracted people from the more politically sophisticated and promising New Left strategy of “local organizing.” Dave, for instance, felt so unenthusiastic about the “Confront The Warmakers” march on the Pentagon that he didn’t even bother to go down to D.C. on October 21, 1967.
Influenced by the Columbia and National SDS leadership, I also didn’t see much value in going down to D.C. once again. But as October 21, 1967 approached and the U.S. Establishment media and underground press started to publicize the possible confrontational aspects of the demonstration more, I began to feel that it made sense for me to go to D.C., despite my “local organizing” strategic emphasis. At the last minute, I arranged to go down to D.C. along with my sister, on one of the pacifist buses.
In D.C., it was a warm, sunny autumn day. Around 70,000 people gathered around the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial where we all impatiently waited for the speeches to end and the march to confront the Pentagon to begin. About 95 percent of the anti-war demonstrators were white. A few people carried National Liberation Front [NLF] of South Viet Nam or “Viet Cong” flags. There was a group in New York City led by Walter Teague which used to provoke endless debates within anti-war circles, by insisting that the correct political tactic at the time was to bring NLF flags to anti-war demonstrations, despite the reality that the NLF flags tended to alienate many pacifist activists, many anti-war demonstrators and many unconvinced people, at this time.
Most of the October 21, 1967 demonstrators, like me and my sister, had never been to the Pentagon before. People seemed eager to confront the men responsible for carrying out the war of mass murder in Viet Nam. Yet because we all knew that many U.S. troops had been mobilized to stop us from marching beyond the Pentagon parking lot, there was also a feeling of tension in the air. The main political division among the demonstrators was between those who were satisfied to just rally in the Pentagon parking lot and those who were going to move beyond the limits of the rally permit and try to get close to the Pentagon steps. By the time the anti-war march reached the parking lot, it was obvious that most of the predominantly young anti-war demonstrators were going to try to get to the Pentagon steps because they were not satisfied to just hold an ineffectual, non-confrontational rally.
On the march across the bridge into Arlington, Virginia, I noticed Teddy and Nancy and Ted and Trude. I can also recall suggesting to both Ted and Carl Davidson, while people were gathering in a dissatisfied way in the Pentagon parking lot but hadn’t yet figured out which path led to the Pentagon entrance, that perhaps SDS people should lead a spontaneous march and blockade at IDA headquarters, which was located only a few miles away in Arlington, and was probably not being guarded by the U.S. military with as many MPs and U.S. troops as were now guarding the Pentagon entrance. Both Ted and Davidson thought a march to the unguarded IDA headquarters might be a good idea. But, before any SDS people could spontaneously begin to organize such a march, anti-war people had found paths through the grass and bushes near the Pentagon and ways of breaking through or climbing over some of the fences and barriers that had been placed between us and the Pentagon entrance.
I felt excited as my sister and I followed the anti-war crowd as it moved closer to the Pentagon entrance later in the sunny afternoon, between 3 and 4 p.m. More and more people began to go as far as they could, until we were face to face with MPs at various points around the main Pentagon entrance.
“Peace Now! Peace Now! Peace Now!” was the chant of thousands of people, as we faced off with the MPs, who all looked quite unsympathetic to us.
It felt like resistance to the war had escalated. We actually were all facing the guns of the U.S. government directly. Were the troops going to try to push us away? Were the troops going to actually shoot at us?
Outside the plaza in front of the Pentagon entrance, I felt that I was in some kind of unreal movie. Clearly, we all had spontaneously escalated our resistance to the war machine. But they seemed to have so much more firepower. And after about 15 minutes of our anti-war chanting, the MPs put on their gas masks and would periodically fire some tear gas canisters at sections of the anti-war crowd, or start to prod people with their guns. Yet no Establishment media cameras were anywhere in sight.
On a few occasions, defiant young women demonstrators would sneak behind some of the MPs and be cheered by the crowd until they were pushed back into the anti-war ranks by the MPs. The MPs shoved women who had climbed onto the barriers and fences and walls. As the afternoon turned into darkness, people mostly watched and talked, in-between individual displays of anti-war pacifist bravado and tear gas bursts and prodding and shoving of people, as the MPs advanced or retreated.
More and more people started to move behind the MPs and towards the soldiers guarding the Pentagon, and the MPs were ordered to become less aggressive for awhile and not prevent demonstrators from sitting down behind their frontlines anymore. I can recall seeing Jeff waving enthusiastically to people in the crowd from the front of the Pentagon, behind the line of MPs, encouraging more people to walk past the MPs and get closer to the Pentagon entrance.
My sister and I both decided that sitting down near the Pentagon entrance to get arrested was purposeless, because we were both convinced at the time that local organizing was still a more effective method of war resistance than the moral witness activity and individual acts of defiance, heroism and bravado we saw around us. But I was still acting like a middle-class liberal who felt he had something to protect on October 21, 1967, although I rationalized my unwillingness to throw myself spontaneously into the Pentagon confrontation with strategic rhetoric about “local organizing.”
Near 6 p.m., my sister left me to join most of the other anti-war demonstrators on the chartered buses going back to New York City. But I was reluctant to go home while other anti-war people were possibly going to get beaten later in the evening. So I hung around the Pentagon outskirts until long after the chartered buses left for New York City.
The MPs and troops successfully separated the non-violent civil disobedience sit-in from the anti-war demonstrators who had remained, but who weren’t going to risk arrest. Around campfires near the Pentagon outskirts, groups of us waited to see when the mass Pentagon bust would come. Joints were shared and a few couples were making out and hugging each other, helping to keep each other warm, as the night began to get colder. But people mostly just walked around alone or with friends, in a stoned state. Many anti-war people appeared to be happy that they were able to hang out in an anti-war stoned communal atmosphere.
When it appeared that no mass Pentagon bust would come until the early morning hours, I started walking back to the D.C. Greyhound bus station. As I walked back towards D.C. at around 10 p.m., on the side of the deserted Virginia highway that took cars to and from the Pentagon by day, I was struck by how little evidence there was of the anti-war demonstration that had taken place along the same road, less than 12 hours before. I felt very alienated from everything in and around Washington, D.C., except for anti-war people who had been bused in and were still waiting to be arrested on the Pentagon steps.
As I reached the deserted streets of Washington, a block or two from the old Greyhound bus station, I noticed that the Sunday edition of one of the local newspapers was on the newsstands. As I expected, local coverage of the march on the Pentagon underestimated our numbers. I bought my bus ticket, hopped on the next scheduled bus to New York and drifted into a stoned sleep for most of the trip.
Ted and Trude had joined the sit-in at the Pentagon and were arrested after midnight Sunday, following a 30-hour sit-in, when U.S. Marshals finally waded into the mass sit-in of over 1,000 protesters in a brutal fashion--after most of the non-participant anti-war observers had gone home. During the next week, Ted responded to my explanation as to why I hadn’t joined in the civil disobedience sit-in by saying the following: “Sometimes spontaneous events happen that you have to take part in, even if it doesn’t fit directly into a local organizing strategy. Given the militancy that was being expressed by the sit-in, it was wrong of you not to have joined the sit-in. Being radical means being in the front-line when masses of people are in motion.”
“You have a good point there,” I replied. “I should have stayed to get arrested at the Pentagon,” I added sheepishly.
Within a week afterwards I had come to feel that those anti-war people who spontaneously decided to take an arrest at the Pentagon had been right. But on the Saturday night of the Pentagon demo, I hadn’t joined them.
Influenced by the Columbia and National SDS leadership, I also didn’t see much value in going down to D.C. once again. But as October 21, 1967 approached and the U.S. Establishment media and underground press started to publicize the possible confrontational aspects of the demonstration more, I began to feel that it made sense for me to go to D.C., despite my “local organizing” strategic emphasis. At the last minute, I arranged to go down to D.C. along with my sister, on one of the pacifist buses.
In D.C., it was a warm, sunny autumn day. Around 70,000 people gathered around the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial where we all impatiently waited for the speeches to end and the march to confront the Pentagon to begin. About 95 percent of the anti-war demonstrators were white. A few people carried National Liberation Front [NLF] of South Viet Nam or “Viet Cong” flags. There was a group in New York City led by Walter Teague which used to provoke endless debates within anti-war circles, by insisting that the correct political tactic at the time was to bring NLF flags to anti-war demonstrations, despite the reality that the NLF flags tended to alienate many pacifist activists, many anti-war demonstrators and many unconvinced people, at this time.
Most of the October 21, 1967 demonstrators, like me and my sister, had never been to the Pentagon before. People seemed eager to confront the men responsible for carrying out the war of mass murder in Viet Nam. Yet because we all knew that many U.S. troops had been mobilized to stop us from marching beyond the Pentagon parking lot, there was also a feeling of tension in the air. The main political division among the demonstrators was between those who were satisfied to just rally in the Pentagon parking lot and those who were going to move beyond the limits of the rally permit and try to get close to the Pentagon steps. By the time the anti-war march reached the parking lot, it was obvious that most of the predominantly young anti-war demonstrators were going to try to get to the Pentagon steps because they were not satisfied to just hold an ineffectual, non-confrontational rally.
On the march across the bridge into Arlington, Virginia, I noticed Teddy and Nancy and Ted and Trude. I can also recall suggesting to both Ted and Carl Davidson, while people were gathering in a dissatisfied way in the Pentagon parking lot but hadn’t yet figured out which path led to the Pentagon entrance, that perhaps SDS people should lead a spontaneous march and blockade at IDA headquarters, which was located only a few miles away in Arlington, and was probably not being guarded by the U.S. military with as many MPs and U.S. troops as were now guarding the Pentagon entrance. Both Ted and Davidson thought a march to the unguarded IDA headquarters might be a good idea. But, before any SDS people could spontaneously begin to organize such a march, anti-war people had found paths through the grass and bushes near the Pentagon and ways of breaking through or climbing over some of the fences and barriers that had been placed between us and the Pentagon entrance.
I felt excited as my sister and I followed the anti-war crowd as it moved closer to the Pentagon entrance later in the sunny afternoon, between 3 and 4 p.m. More and more people began to go as far as they could, until we were face to face with MPs at various points around the main Pentagon entrance.
“Peace Now! Peace Now! Peace Now!” was the chant of thousands of people, as we faced off with the MPs, who all looked quite unsympathetic to us.
It felt like resistance to the war had escalated. We actually were all facing the guns of the U.S. government directly. Were the troops going to try to push us away? Were the troops going to actually shoot at us?
Outside the plaza in front of the Pentagon entrance, I felt that I was in some kind of unreal movie. Clearly, we all had spontaneously escalated our resistance to the war machine. But they seemed to have so much more firepower. And after about 15 minutes of our anti-war chanting, the MPs put on their gas masks and would periodically fire some tear gas canisters at sections of the anti-war crowd, or start to prod people with their guns. Yet no Establishment media cameras were anywhere in sight.
On a few occasions, defiant young women demonstrators would sneak behind some of the MPs and be cheered by the crowd until they were pushed back into the anti-war ranks by the MPs. The MPs shoved women who had climbed onto the barriers and fences and walls. As the afternoon turned into darkness, people mostly watched and talked, in-between individual displays of anti-war pacifist bravado and tear gas bursts and prodding and shoving of people, as the MPs advanced or retreated.
More and more people started to move behind the MPs and towards the soldiers guarding the Pentagon, and the MPs were ordered to become less aggressive for awhile and not prevent demonstrators from sitting down behind their frontlines anymore. I can recall seeing Jeff waving enthusiastically to people in the crowd from the front of the Pentagon, behind the line of MPs, encouraging more people to walk past the MPs and get closer to the Pentagon entrance.
My sister and I both decided that sitting down near the Pentagon entrance to get arrested was purposeless, because we were both convinced at the time that local organizing was still a more effective method of war resistance than the moral witness activity and individual acts of defiance, heroism and bravado we saw around us. But I was still acting like a middle-class liberal who felt he had something to protect on October 21, 1967, although I rationalized my unwillingness to throw myself spontaneously into the Pentagon confrontation with strategic rhetoric about “local organizing.”
Near 6 p.m., my sister left me to join most of the other anti-war demonstrators on the chartered buses going back to New York City. But I was reluctant to go home while other anti-war people were possibly going to get beaten later in the evening. So I hung around the Pentagon outskirts until long after the chartered buses left for New York City.
The MPs and troops successfully separated the non-violent civil disobedience sit-in from the anti-war demonstrators who had remained, but who weren’t going to risk arrest. Around campfires near the Pentagon outskirts, groups of us waited to see when the mass Pentagon bust would come. Joints were shared and a few couples were making out and hugging each other, helping to keep each other warm, as the night began to get colder. But people mostly just walked around alone or with friends, in a stoned state. Many anti-war people appeared to be happy that they were able to hang out in an anti-war stoned communal atmosphere.
When it appeared that no mass Pentagon bust would come until the early morning hours, I started walking back to the D.C. Greyhound bus station. As I walked back towards D.C. at around 10 p.m., on the side of the deserted Virginia highway that took cars to and from the Pentagon by day, I was struck by how little evidence there was of the anti-war demonstration that had taken place along the same road, less than 12 hours before. I felt very alienated from everything in and around Washington, D.C., except for anti-war people who had been bused in and were still waiting to be arrested on the Pentagon steps.
As I reached the deserted streets of Washington, a block or two from the old Greyhound bus station, I noticed that the Sunday edition of one of the local newspapers was on the newsstands. As I expected, local coverage of the march on the Pentagon underestimated our numbers. I bought my bus ticket, hopped on the next scheduled bus to New York and drifted into a stoned sleep for most of the trip.
Ted and Trude had joined the sit-in at the Pentagon and were arrested after midnight Sunday, following a 30-hour sit-in, when U.S. Marshals finally waded into the mass sit-in of over 1,000 protesters in a brutal fashion--after most of the non-participant anti-war observers had gone home. During the next week, Ted responded to my explanation as to why I hadn’t joined in the civil disobedience sit-in by saying the following: “Sometimes spontaneous events happen that you have to take part in, even if it doesn’t fit directly into a local organizing strategy. Given the militancy that was being expressed by the sit-in, it was wrong of you not to have joined the sit-in. Being radical means being in the front-line when masses of people are in motion.”
“You have a good point there,” I replied. “I should have stayed to get arrested at the Pentagon,” I added sheepishly.
Within a week afterwards I had come to feel that those anti-war people who spontaneously decided to take an arrest at the Pentagon had been right. But on the Saturday night of the Pentagon demo, I hadn’t joined them.
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xiii)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (72)
Sunday afternoon was spent at a brief National SDS Council closing session and, since Ted wanted to stay an extra day in Madison while I had to get back to class and my Journal of Philosophy job the following day, I decided to take a spot in a car going east that was leaving late Sunday afternoon, which was being driven by John. Also in the car were JJ, Ben, Ben’s woman friend—who had been driven to Madison in a different car than Ben a few days before—and the Japanese student who had come to demonstrate the snake dancing techniques to SDS people. Ben’s woman friend was in her mid-to-late 20s, was dressed in blue jeans, had long brown hair, and didn’t seem as intellectual as most of the other SDS women who had attended the National Council meeting.
John was a good driver, but less cautious than either Ted or Brian had been while driving on the turnpike. He tended to overtake and pass more cars while driving on the highway, in a much more impatient way than Ted or Brian had.
John spent much of the time talking radical politics with JJ and me and recounting earlier Movement history and early 1960s Movement gossip. John, like Harvey and Josh, had found graduate school study at the University of Wisconsin to be worthless and less relevant than his work on organizing a Madison Draft Resistance Union. Unlike JJ, John felt SDS was making real progress organizing students around draft resistance in accordance with New Working-Class ideology, in opposition to the use of student deferments as an Establishment instrument of “channeling” and around the slogan “not with my life, you don’t,” which spoke to students’ sense of powerlessness. Around this time, John was considering giving up his 2-S deferment because he felt it undercut attempts to organize non-students in campus-based draft resistance organizations. John also was beginning to question whether SDS chapters should continue to try to prevent on-campus recruitment by the U.S. military or Dow Chemical—from a left position.
“You know, Dow Chemical actually does belong on the corporate university’s campus. The corporate university trains manpower for the corporations, and Dow Chemical being on the campus to recruit emphasizes the real nature and the real function of the corporate university. Why should we try to purify the corporate university, by acting as if recruitment by Dow Chemical on campus is some kind of an aberration and something extraordinarily different than what `business is usual’ at the corporate university is all about?” said John.
JJ pointed out the political limitations of this position: i.e., even though Dow Chemical or the military on campus represented the logical extension of the corporate university’s politics, students still should stop such recruitment, in order to resist the war on any terrain where students could materially hurt the U.S. military or U.S. war machine, concretely.
As John drove past the oil refineries around Cleveland’s outskirts, Ben, the Japanese student and Ben’s woman friend were fast asleep. John, JJ and I were still awake and discussing what North American society would look like after it radically changed. We all assumed this change would happen by the end of the 1970s.
“I think those oil refineries represent ugliness,” I commented.
“They’re only ugly because the workers don’t control them, Bob,” John replied. “We shouldn’t be like the Luddites, even though we want to de-emphasize mindless industrial production and reduce the time people have to spend at factory work.”
“To me, those refineries symbolize exploitation and immoral materialism,” I said.
“There’s another side. They also symbolize what workers have been able to build. To me, those refineries have a certain beauty,” John said.
Then we got into a discussion about what place technology should play in the ideal society and to what degree technology had led to the anti-humanistic monstrosity that U.S. society in the 1960s had become. JJ joined the discussion, but nothing was resolved before we began to talk about another topic.
In Western Pennsylvania, in the early morning hours, John became sleepy and JJ took over the wheel. John took my seat in the backseat in order to try to get more sleeping room for his legs. I sat in the front seat next to JJ and had to fight against falling asleep myself, while JJ drove next to me.
JJ was a good driver. He did not drive as fast or as impatiently as John. But in the hours before dawn JJ started to get sleepier, as he drove through central Pennsylvania. I recall having to shove the steering wheel back to the left once, after JJ started to fall asleep at the wheel, and the car started to swerve to the right and onto the shoulder of the Turnpike. JJ opened his eyes again and decided that we should pull over, wake up John, and let John take over the driving again.
We shifted people in the car again and, somehow, John ended up at the wheel, JJ ended up sprawled in the back seat asleep, next to the sleeping Japanese student and Ben; and Ben’s awakened woman friend ended up in the middle of the front seat leaning against me, as she tried to fall asleep again. By this time, even those of us who were awake were too tired to talk anymore. So John just turned on the car radio, and he started to drive as quickly as he could towards New York City.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Harrisburg, the sun was up. We drove off the Turnpike and stopped at a gas station, where John purchased a pack of cigarettes and some coffee from a local highway restaurant. Then he headed toward Route 22, which was a toll-free alternative route to New York City. About ten minutes later, as John drove at 80 mph, we heard a siren behind us.
“Shit!” John said as he looked in his rearview mirror and started to slow down.
A Pennsylvania state trooper then pulled up in his car, alongside John’s car, and told him to pull over to the side of the highway.
“Let me see your license and registration,” the trooper said, as he stood next to the car.
John fumbled around his wallet—and in the glove compartment for awhile—and then handed over his license and registration form to the state trooper. The state trooper looked over the documents and then wrote out a speeding ticket for John.
“Don’t let me find you speeding again like that further down the road. Our radar picked you up at 78 miles per hour,” the state trooper warned John, as he handed him the ticket.
“I’m sorry, sir,” John replied in a quiet, respectful, earnest tone of voice. Then the state trooper got back in his car and drove in front of us--at 80 mph for a few miles—before turning around to the other side of the highway.
As he continued driving, John laughed and said: “Shit. I was afraid the cop was going to look for dope in the trunk and notice all my bundles of SDS literature and draft resistance pamphlets. We were lucky.”
JJ had awakened during the stop and he and John joked about what might have happened if John’s SDS literature had been discovered. Then JJ went back to sleep again, as John continued to drive at a slower speed to New York City.
We finally arrived in midtown Manhattan in the late morning. Ben, Ben’s woman friend, the Japanese student, JJ and I all went our separate ways home on the subway, while John drove to the SDS Regional Office to drop off some of his SDS literature there.
John was a good driver, but less cautious than either Ted or Brian had been while driving on the turnpike. He tended to overtake and pass more cars while driving on the highway, in a much more impatient way than Ted or Brian had.
John spent much of the time talking radical politics with JJ and me and recounting earlier Movement history and early 1960s Movement gossip. John, like Harvey and Josh, had found graduate school study at the University of Wisconsin to be worthless and less relevant than his work on organizing a Madison Draft Resistance Union. Unlike JJ, John felt SDS was making real progress organizing students around draft resistance in accordance with New Working-Class ideology, in opposition to the use of student deferments as an Establishment instrument of “channeling” and around the slogan “not with my life, you don’t,” which spoke to students’ sense of powerlessness. Around this time, John was considering giving up his 2-S deferment because he felt it undercut attempts to organize non-students in campus-based draft resistance organizations. John also was beginning to question whether SDS chapters should continue to try to prevent on-campus recruitment by the U.S. military or Dow Chemical—from a left position.
“You know, Dow Chemical actually does belong on the corporate university’s campus. The corporate university trains manpower for the corporations, and Dow Chemical being on the campus to recruit emphasizes the real nature and the real function of the corporate university. Why should we try to purify the corporate university, by acting as if recruitment by Dow Chemical on campus is some kind of an aberration and something extraordinarily different than what `business is usual’ at the corporate university is all about?” said John.
JJ pointed out the political limitations of this position: i.e., even though Dow Chemical or the military on campus represented the logical extension of the corporate university’s politics, students still should stop such recruitment, in order to resist the war on any terrain where students could materially hurt the U.S. military or U.S. war machine, concretely.
As John drove past the oil refineries around Cleveland’s outskirts, Ben, the Japanese student and Ben’s woman friend were fast asleep. John, JJ and I were still awake and discussing what North American society would look like after it radically changed. We all assumed this change would happen by the end of the 1970s.
“I think those oil refineries represent ugliness,” I commented.
“They’re only ugly because the workers don’t control them, Bob,” John replied. “We shouldn’t be like the Luddites, even though we want to de-emphasize mindless industrial production and reduce the time people have to spend at factory work.”
“To me, those refineries symbolize exploitation and immoral materialism,” I said.
“There’s another side. They also symbolize what workers have been able to build. To me, those refineries have a certain beauty,” John said.
Then we got into a discussion about what place technology should play in the ideal society and to what degree technology had led to the anti-humanistic monstrosity that U.S. society in the 1960s had become. JJ joined the discussion, but nothing was resolved before we began to talk about another topic.
In Western Pennsylvania, in the early morning hours, John became sleepy and JJ took over the wheel. John took my seat in the backseat in order to try to get more sleeping room for his legs. I sat in the front seat next to JJ and had to fight against falling asleep myself, while JJ drove next to me.
JJ was a good driver. He did not drive as fast or as impatiently as John. But in the hours before dawn JJ started to get sleepier, as he drove through central Pennsylvania. I recall having to shove the steering wheel back to the left once, after JJ started to fall asleep at the wheel, and the car started to swerve to the right and onto the shoulder of the Turnpike. JJ opened his eyes again and decided that we should pull over, wake up John, and let John take over the driving again.
We shifted people in the car again and, somehow, John ended up at the wheel, JJ ended up sprawled in the back seat asleep, next to the sleeping Japanese student and Ben; and Ben’s awakened woman friend ended up in the middle of the front seat leaning against me, as she tried to fall asleep again. By this time, even those of us who were awake were too tired to talk anymore. So John just turned on the car radio, and he started to drive as quickly as he could towards New York City.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Harrisburg, the sun was up. We drove off the Turnpike and stopped at a gas station, where John purchased a pack of cigarettes and some coffee from a local highway restaurant. Then he headed toward Route 22, which was a toll-free alternative route to New York City. About ten minutes later, as John drove at 80 mph, we heard a siren behind us.
“Shit!” John said as he looked in his rearview mirror and started to slow down.
A Pennsylvania state trooper then pulled up in his car, alongside John’s car, and told him to pull over to the side of the highway.
“Let me see your license and registration,” the trooper said, as he stood next to the car.
John fumbled around his wallet—and in the glove compartment for awhile—and then handed over his license and registration form to the state trooper. The state trooper looked over the documents and then wrote out a speeding ticket for John.
“Don’t let me find you speeding again like that further down the road. Our radar picked you up at 78 miles per hour,” the state trooper warned John, as he handed him the ticket.
“I’m sorry, sir,” John replied in a quiet, respectful, earnest tone of voice. Then the state trooper got back in his car and drove in front of us--at 80 mph for a few miles—before turning around to the other side of the highway.
As he continued driving, John laughed and said: “Shit. I was afraid the cop was going to look for dope in the trunk and notice all my bundles of SDS literature and draft resistance pamphlets. We were lucky.”
JJ had awakened during the stop and he and John joked about what might have happened if John’s SDS literature had been discovered. Then JJ went back to sleep again, as John continued to drive at a slower speed to New York City.
We finally arrived in midtown Manhattan in the late morning. Ben, Ben’s woman friend, the Japanese student, JJ and I all went our separate ways home on the subway, while John drove to the SDS Regional Office to drop off some of his SDS literature there.
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xii)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (71)
Male chauvinism was still not treated as a really serious issue within National SDS. And National SDS leaders appeared to feel uneasy when National SDS women brought up the issue of male chauvinism. At this particular Madison meeting, a physically beautiful woman in her mid-twenties dressed herself up in baggy pants, a flannel shirt and a working-class cap before reading a collectively-written position paper which stressed the need to end male chauvinism within SDS at all levels. In-between reading paragraphs of her position paper, this SDS female “heavy” inhaled on a cigar.
Her speech reflected a hard-hitting radical feminist critique of SDS policy and practice in relationship to Movement women and was interrupted quite a few times by jeers from some of the SDS men at the meeting. After the speech was read, there was little debate or discussion of the issues raised, and the meeting soon adjourned for dinner, and for the Saturday night partying.
Despite the unenthusiastic reception National SDS men seemed to give to the speech on male chauvinism and sexism—because the speech argued that the New Left reflected the sexism of straight bourgeois society—I felt that SDS was still going to be an effective organizational vehicle in the future for establishing sexual equality and female liberation in the United States. Within white, anti-war circles on campus there was not yet much visible evidence of Movement women discontent with the New Left’s political practice in relation to women. Most women student radicals still seemed content to let male radicals play the dominant political roles, although there was growing pressure on white male radicals to start sharing the political shitwork roles with women activists. And many of the most vocal 1970s white middle-class feminist critics of the “Patriarchal New Left” were too deeply involved in their academic studies, middle-class careers or marriages to liberal Democratic Party-affiliated husbands, to be involved in New Left activism in 1967.
Gottlieb and Sutheim also spoke at this National Council meeting. And people like Dave, John, Harvey, Josh and JJ also were in attendance. Another guy named Machtinger was there, too. Ted, Brian and I ate dinner out with Machtinger at a local student hangout near the campus on Saturday night.
Machtinger had grown up on the East Coast, prior to attending Columbia. At Columbia, he had become quite friendly with Ted, before going out to the University of Chicago in Fall 1966 to attend graduate school. At the University of Chicago, Machtinger was a “heavy” in the SDS chapter and played a leadership role in a sit-in at the University of Chicago administration building which demanded an end to the university’s mailing of student class-ranking information to local draft boards.
In the student hang-out restaurant, Machtinger seemed like a pleasant, good-natured, jovial guy, who was more of a grad student and academic radical than an activist. He laughed a lot and was very friendly. After we had eaten dinner and had a few drinks with Machtinger, all of us got into the car of Ted’s father and Ted drove to where Harvey and Josh now lived.
My memories of the next few hours are somewhat hazy, because we all started to smoke a lot of potent pot together at the house in which Harvey and Josh lived, and where Linda was now staying with Josh again. But certain images remain vivid, and I do recall some of what we talked about.
Harvey was now involved with a different woman than the one with whom he had been involved with at Barnard. She listened in a stoned state along with Linda, as Ted informed Harvey and Josh about the state of the Columbia SDS chapter. She seemed both good-natured and quite devoted to Harvey. Linda looked much happier than she had looked in New York earlier in the fall, now that she was together again with Josh.
“Nancy has isolated Teddy from the rest of the chapter. And the chapter is suffering because I have to do most of the day-to-day political work and strategic thinking myself,” Ted complained to Harvey and Josh. “Nancy is more interested in her relationship with Teddy, than in building SDS. She discourages Teddy from doing any more than a minimal amount of political organizing work.”
Harvey, Josh and Linda all seemed to agree with Ted’s negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy and all felt that Nancy was too self-centered.
“Teddy has always had serious political weaknesses, Ted. That’s why I wasn’t sure he’d make a good chairman. And Nancy isolating him probably accentuates his political weaknesses,” Harvey added.
Personally, I didn’t share Ted, Harvey, Josh and Linda’s negative assessment of Nancy’s political influence on Teddy. But since they all had known Teddy far longer than I had, I didn’t feel qualified enough to openly challenge their negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy.
The rest of the night remains a blur, as the grass started to take effect and the rock music began to drown out our attempts to have a political discussion. Eventually, Ted, Brian, Machtinger and I staggered into the car of Ted’s father, Ted dropped off Machtinger at the house in which Machtinger was staying and then drove back to his childhood friend’s apartment. Ted, Brian and I then crashed down on the mattresses on the floor, and we all slept soundly until late Sunday morning.
Her speech reflected a hard-hitting radical feminist critique of SDS policy and practice in relationship to Movement women and was interrupted quite a few times by jeers from some of the SDS men at the meeting. After the speech was read, there was little debate or discussion of the issues raised, and the meeting soon adjourned for dinner, and for the Saturday night partying.
Despite the unenthusiastic reception National SDS men seemed to give to the speech on male chauvinism and sexism—because the speech argued that the New Left reflected the sexism of straight bourgeois society—I felt that SDS was still going to be an effective organizational vehicle in the future for establishing sexual equality and female liberation in the United States. Within white, anti-war circles on campus there was not yet much visible evidence of Movement women discontent with the New Left’s political practice in relation to women. Most women student radicals still seemed content to let male radicals play the dominant political roles, although there was growing pressure on white male radicals to start sharing the political shitwork roles with women activists. And many of the most vocal 1970s white middle-class feminist critics of the “Patriarchal New Left” were too deeply involved in their academic studies, middle-class careers or marriages to liberal Democratic Party-affiliated husbands, to be involved in New Left activism in 1967.
Gottlieb and Sutheim also spoke at this National Council meeting. And people like Dave, John, Harvey, Josh and JJ also were in attendance. Another guy named Machtinger was there, too. Ted, Brian and I ate dinner out with Machtinger at a local student hangout near the campus on Saturday night.
Machtinger had grown up on the East Coast, prior to attending Columbia. At Columbia, he had become quite friendly with Ted, before going out to the University of Chicago in Fall 1966 to attend graduate school. At the University of Chicago, Machtinger was a “heavy” in the SDS chapter and played a leadership role in a sit-in at the University of Chicago administration building which demanded an end to the university’s mailing of student class-ranking information to local draft boards.
In the student hang-out restaurant, Machtinger seemed like a pleasant, good-natured, jovial guy, who was more of a grad student and academic radical than an activist. He laughed a lot and was very friendly. After we had eaten dinner and had a few drinks with Machtinger, all of us got into the car of Ted’s father and Ted drove to where Harvey and Josh now lived.
My memories of the next few hours are somewhat hazy, because we all started to smoke a lot of potent pot together at the house in which Harvey and Josh lived, and where Linda was now staying with Josh again. But certain images remain vivid, and I do recall some of what we talked about.
Harvey was now involved with a different woman than the one with whom he had been involved with at Barnard. She listened in a stoned state along with Linda, as Ted informed Harvey and Josh about the state of the Columbia SDS chapter. She seemed both good-natured and quite devoted to Harvey. Linda looked much happier than she had looked in New York earlier in the fall, now that she was together again with Josh.
“Nancy has isolated Teddy from the rest of the chapter. And the chapter is suffering because I have to do most of the day-to-day political work and strategic thinking myself,” Ted complained to Harvey and Josh. “Nancy is more interested in her relationship with Teddy, than in building SDS. She discourages Teddy from doing any more than a minimal amount of political organizing work.”
Harvey, Josh and Linda all seemed to agree with Ted’s negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy and all felt that Nancy was too self-centered.
“Teddy has always had serious political weaknesses, Ted. That’s why I wasn’t sure he’d make a good chairman. And Nancy isolating him probably accentuates his political weaknesses,” Harvey added.
Personally, I didn’t share Ted, Harvey, Josh and Linda’s negative assessment of Nancy’s political influence on Teddy. But since they all had known Teddy far longer than I had, I didn’t feel qualified enough to openly challenge their negative assessment of Nancy’s influence on Teddy.
The rest of the night remains a blur, as the grass started to take effect and the rock music began to drown out our attempts to have a political discussion. Eventually, Ted, Brian, Machtinger and I staggered into the car of Ted’s father, Ted dropped off Machtinger at the house in which Machtinger was staying and then drove back to his childhood friend’s apartment. Ted, Brian and I then crashed down on the mattresses on the floor, and we all slept soundly until late Sunday morning.
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (xi)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (70)
I can’t recall much of what was debated at this particular National Council meeting, although the ideology of New Working-Class theory and student syndicalism/student power still dominated the politics of the SDS national leadership around this time. Like at all National SDS meetings, white male Movement “heavies” tended to dominate the heavily intellectual debate of strategy and theory. Personally, I found the debate interesting for the first hour or so. But after a few hours, the debate turned into a repetitive parliamentary wrangle between Progressive Labor Party heavies and New Left heavies, and people started to leave the meeting room and talk outside in the halls with each other, until the agenda called for discussion of some new topic.
This was the usual pattern of most SDS regional and national meetings between Fall 1967 and June 1969: interesting debates usually deteriorating into dull Marxist verbal battles between the personally straight, puritanical, sexually repressed PL bureaucratic heavies and their more bohemian, hedonistic, pot-smoking, sexually liberated New Left counterparts.
At this particular National Council meeting, a University of Wisconsin SDS heavy named Evan Stark—who was neither PL nor New Left bohemian, but more just a graduate student, academic, independent, traditional Marxist-type—was somewhat influential. The next week he apparently would courageously lead the anti-Dow Chemical Company recruitment demo that was busted up by the Madison police, at which Harvey was brutalized. Another influential person at this meeting was Carl Davidson, who was a national officer of SDS at this time.
Davidson was in his mid-twenties, but he seemed older. He wore the kind of Huck Finn cap that Bob Dylan wore around the time of his first album. Davidson was a quiet guy with a big mustache who was usually accompanied by a future editor of the now-defunct Guardian radical U.S. newsweekly named Karen Gellen. Gellen seemed content to let Davidson do most of the talking at political gatherings, and she seemed content to remain in Davidson’s shadow at this time. She was very sweet and less elitist than Davidson and had a tender-sounding voice. She called herself Karen Davidson at this time.
Davidson was one of National SDS’s leading theoreticians. He had dropped out of grad school after attending Penn State and the University of Nebraska in order to do full-time Movement work. Influenced by IWW theory, the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook and events at Berkeley, he had written a paper on student syndicalism that, in turn, influenced local SDS chapter activists around the nation. Davidson was one of the first activists who characterized student governments at U.S. universities as “Mickey Mouse” forms of student politics.
Although Davidson wasn’t as loquacious as most Columbia SDS leaders, he struck me from the start as being a decent, committed and great guy. National SDS seemed lucky to have him as a Movement leader. I felt confident that Davidson could help lead the New Left to victory and create a radical democracy within the United States. Both Davidson and Gellen seemed to care nothing for material wealth. Both seemed to have developed an alternative post-college New Left lifestyle, outside the elite bourgeois university—that combined love, dropping out, activism and social commitment—which appealed to me.
Local campus organizing against the war and “institutional resistance”—not national mobilizations in Washington, D.C.—were being stressed by Davidson and the other National SDS heavies around this time. “The war in Viet Nam cannot be ended because it is a logical result of the existing social system. What we have to do is focus on building a movement that changes the System that produces this war. And maybe prevent a `seventh Viet Nam War’ in the future. And the only way to do this is to organize locally, not build another national march,” was the way National SDS leaders argued around this time.
Thus, National SDS leadership, like Columbia SDS leadership, was lukewarm in relation to the scheduled October 21, 1967 “March On The Pentagon” to “confront the warmakers,” which proved to be a successful means of stimulating a mood of increased militancy and resistance among anti-war youths. At this National Council meeting in Madison, PL pushed SDS to sponsor its own competing mass anti-war national mobilization to focus, not on the Pentagon, but on the White House. Much time was wasted at the meeting arguing about this PL proposal, until it was finally voted down.
I can’t recall much else of what was talked about at this National Council meeting, except for images of Crazy Ben standing in the back of the hall ridiculing the “white collar radical” and “bourgeois student” tone of the debate, funny horseplay and verbal exchange during the national office’s appeal for SDS chapters to pledge donations to fund National SDS staff activity, speakers from SDS’s Radical Education Project [REP] and its off-campus organizing projects and a meeting session in which the question of women’s liberation and male chauvinism was discussed.
This was the usual pattern of most SDS regional and national meetings between Fall 1967 and June 1969: interesting debates usually deteriorating into dull Marxist verbal battles between the personally straight, puritanical, sexually repressed PL bureaucratic heavies and their more bohemian, hedonistic, pot-smoking, sexually liberated New Left counterparts.
At this particular National Council meeting, a University of Wisconsin SDS heavy named Evan Stark—who was neither PL nor New Left bohemian, but more just a graduate student, academic, independent, traditional Marxist-type—was somewhat influential. The next week he apparently would courageously lead the anti-Dow Chemical Company recruitment demo that was busted up by the Madison police, at which Harvey was brutalized. Another influential person at this meeting was Carl Davidson, who was a national officer of SDS at this time.
Davidson was in his mid-twenties, but he seemed older. He wore the kind of Huck Finn cap that Bob Dylan wore around the time of his first album. Davidson was a quiet guy with a big mustache who was usually accompanied by a future editor of the now-defunct Guardian radical U.S. newsweekly named Karen Gellen. Gellen seemed content to let Davidson do most of the talking at political gatherings, and she seemed content to remain in Davidson’s shadow at this time. She was very sweet and less elitist than Davidson and had a tender-sounding voice. She called herself Karen Davidson at this time.
Davidson was one of National SDS’s leading theoreticians. He had dropped out of grad school after attending Penn State and the University of Nebraska in order to do full-time Movement work. Influenced by IWW theory, the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook and events at Berkeley, he had written a paper on student syndicalism that, in turn, influenced local SDS chapter activists around the nation. Davidson was one of the first activists who characterized student governments at U.S. universities as “Mickey Mouse” forms of student politics.
Although Davidson wasn’t as loquacious as most Columbia SDS leaders, he struck me from the start as being a decent, committed and great guy. National SDS seemed lucky to have him as a Movement leader. I felt confident that Davidson could help lead the New Left to victory and create a radical democracy within the United States. Both Davidson and Gellen seemed to care nothing for material wealth. Both seemed to have developed an alternative post-college New Left lifestyle, outside the elite bourgeois university—that combined love, dropping out, activism and social commitment—which appealed to me.
Local campus organizing against the war and “institutional resistance”—not national mobilizations in Washington, D.C.—were being stressed by Davidson and the other National SDS heavies around this time. “The war in Viet Nam cannot be ended because it is a logical result of the existing social system. What we have to do is focus on building a movement that changes the System that produces this war. And maybe prevent a `seventh Viet Nam War’ in the future. And the only way to do this is to organize locally, not build another national march,” was the way National SDS leaders argued around this time.
Thus, National SDS leadership, like Columbia SDS leadership, was lukewarm in relation to the scheduled October 21, 1967 “March On The Pentagon” to “confront the warmakers,” which proved to be a successful means of stimulating a mood of increased militancy and resistance among anti-war youths. At this National Council meeting in Madison, PL pushed SDS to sponsor its own competing mass anti-war national mobilization to focus, not on the Pentagon, but on the White House. Much time was wasted at the meeting arguing about this PL proposal, until it was finally voted down.
I can’t recall much else of what was talked about at this National Council meeting, except for images of Crazy Ben standing in the back of the hall ridiculing the “white collar radical” and “bourgeois student” tone of the debate, funny horseplay and verbal exchange during the national office’s appeal for SDS chapters to pledge donations to fund National SDS staff activity, speakers from SDS’s Radical Education Project [REP] and its off-campus organizing projects and a meeting session in which the question of women’s liberation and male chauvinism was discussed.
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (x)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (69)
Ted drove his father’s car south down the New Jersey Turnpike, and then west towards the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Like nearly all the New Left men whose cars I rode in, Ted was a good, safe driver who did not take macho risks on the highway, but who could drive for long hours and at night without having to rest his legs, at highway speeds of about 70 mph. In western Pennsylvania, Ted stopped the car for some gas and some dinner at a Pennsylvania Turnpike rest area restaurant. At Ben’s urging, we just walked out of the restaurant without paying the bill after we had eaten our meal, and we giggled as we hit the turnpike again. It seemed easy to outfox the Howard Johnson restaurant chain, if you just ignored their capitalist money-game rules and took what was rightfully yours from the corporate monopolies.
From Pennsylvania, we crossed into Ohio just as Ted and Ben were getting into a discussion about how U.S. society was going to look in the 1970s and 1980s—after we had successfully overthrown the U.S. government and made a Revolution in the United States.
Sitting in the backseat, as Ted kept turning his head towards the backseat to reply to Ben’s arguments while he drove, I half-noticed a sign which seemed to indicate that the divided Ohio Turnpike, because of construction, was going to turn into a two-lane, no-passing, undivided road a few miles ahead, with one lane going west and one lane going east.
Ted, apparently, didn’t notice the sign because, as I half-noticed that on-coming traffic was beginning to come towards us on the lane to the left of us, Ted suddenly accelerated and started to pass the slow-moving trailer-truck ahead of us. Before I could say anything, Ted had driven the car into the left lane and was alongside the slow-moving truck to his right. Then, suddenly, Ted realized that about 400 yards directly ahead of us a big truck was rolling head-on towards us in the same left lane.
Instinctively, Ted took his foot off the gas, slammed on the brakes, swerved the car back and forth, skidded in a way that stopped the acceleration, and somehow managed to reposition the car back in the right lane behind the slow-moving truck, only a few seconds before the oncoming truck from the west passed us by at full speed.
For about a minute, Ted, Ben, Brian, the Japanese student and I all sat in hushed silence. Then Ted said with a laugh: “Since when did the turnpike become a two-way street?”
And Ben replied: “I thought for a few seconds there that we all weren’t going to live to see the Revolution.”
We all laughed. And then Ted decided to pull over to the side of the highway and let Brian take over the driving, after the turnpike had once again become a divided, 4-lane highway. Once Brian started to drive, Ted and Ben resumed their lively political discussion.
Neither Ted nor Brian were yet used to driving on highways stoned in Fall 1967. So even though Ben had brought a supply of grass with him, we all decided we wouldn’t turn on together during the drive out to Wisconsin.
Brian was also a good, safe driver who didn’t drive in a macho way and he was more satisfied than Ted to just drive at the 65 mph limit. Because both Ted and Brian could relieve each other at the wheel, there was no need to stop at any motel before arriving in Madison, early Saturday morning. We then checked in at the Student Union building to register as SDS National Council participants and dropped Ben and his Japanese student friend off on the campus, before driving to the off-campus house in which a childhood friend of Ted lived with a woman friend. Ted’s childhood friend was also a red diaper baby.
Madison reminded me somewhat of Bloomington or West Lafayette, Indiana, and I was curious about what it would be like to attend school so close to a lake. But I didn’t get a chance to do much independent exploring at Madison during this weekend because the debates were too lengthy, and by late Sunday afternoon it was already time to return to the highway back to New York.
Ted’s childhood friend rented the first floor of a run-down house in Madison’s student ghetto. He and his woman friend were both pleasant and anti-Establishment, but they seemed more interested in just living together and being alone with each other, than in getting involved in SDS politics. Ted’s friend showed us the big room in which there were extra mattresses on the floor on which we could crash later that night, and he gave Ted an extra set of keys for the house and first floor apartment. Then Ted, Brian and I said goodbye, left the house, got into the car of Ted’s father, and drove back to the student building to attend the National Council meeting.
From Pennsylvania, we crossed into Ohio just as Ted and Ben were getting into a discussion about how U.S. society was going to look in the 1970s and 1980s—after we had successfully overthrown the U.S. government and made a Revolution in the United States.
Sitting in the backseat, as Ted kept turning his head towards the backseat to reply to Ben’s arguments while he drove, I half-noticed a sign which seemed to indicate that the divided Ohio Turnpike, because of construction, was going to turn into a two-lane, no-passing, undivided road a few miles ahead, with one lane going west and one lane going east.
Ted, apparently, didn’t notice the sign because, as I half-noticed that on-coming traffic was beginning to come towards us on the lane to the left of us, Ted suddenly accelerated and started to pass the slow-moving trailer-truck ahead of us. Before I could say anything, Ted had driven the car into the left lane and was alongside the slow-moving truck to his right. Then, suddenly, Ted realized that about 400 yards directly ahead of us a big truck was rolling head-on towards us in the same left lane.
Instinctively, Ted took his foot off the gas, slammed on the brakes, swerved the car back and forth, skidded in a way that stopped the acceleration, and somehow managed to reposition the car back in the right lane behind the slow-moving truck, only a few seconds before the oncoming truck from the west passed us by at full speed.
For about a minute, Ted, Ben, Brian, the Japanese student and I all sat in hushed silence. Then Ted said with a laugh: “Since when did the turnpike become a two-way street?”
And Ben replied: “I thought for a few seconds there that we all weren’t going to live to see the Revolution.”
We all laughed. And then Ted decided to pull over to the side of the highway and let Brian take over the driving, after the turnpike had once again become a divided, 4-lane highway. Once Brian started to drive, Ted and Ben resumed their lively political discussion.
Neither Ted nor Brian were yet used to driving on highways stoned in Fall 1967. So even though Ben had brought a supply of grass with him, we all decided we wouldn’t turn on together during the drive out to Wisconsin.
Brian was also a good, safe driver who didn’t drive in a macho way and he was more satisfied than Ted to just drive at the 65 mph limit. Because both Ted and Brian could relieve each other at the wheel, there was no need to stop at any motel before arriving in Madison, early Saturday morning. We then checked in at the Student Union building to register as SDS National Council participants and dropped Ben and his Japanese student friend off on the campus, before driving to the off-campus house in which a childhood friend of Ted lived with a woman friend. Ted’s childhood friend was also a red diaper baby.
Madison reminded me somewhat of Bloomington or West Lafayette, Indiana, and I was curious about what it would be like to attend school so close to a lake. But I didn’t get a chance to do much independent exploring at Madison during this weekend because the debates were too lengthy, and by late Sunday afternoon it was already time to return to the highway back to New York.
Ted’s childhood friend rented the first floor of a run-down house in Madison’s student ghetto. He and his woman friend were both pleasant and anti-Establishment, but they seemed more interested in just living together and being alone with each other, than in getting involved in SDS politics. Ted’s friend showed us the big room in which there were extra mattresses on the floor on which we could crash later that night, and he gave Ted an extra set of keys for the house and first floor apartment. Then Ted, Brian and I said goodbye, left the house, got into the car of Ted’s father, and drove back to the student building to attend the National Council meeting.
Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (ix)-Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories (68)
A National Council of SDS meeting was going to be held in Madison, Wisconsin during a weekend in October 1967. When Ted suggested that I ride out there with him and Brian, I agreed to attend. I had never been to any kind of National SDS meeting before and had never been to Madison, Wisconsin, so the prospect of attending the meeting appeared interesting. Ted borrowed his father’s car and on Friday afternoon we left the W. 94th St. apartment, picked up Brian at his apartment near the campus and then drove downtown to pick up two other people who needed a ride to Wisconsin.
One of the people we picked up downtown was a Japanese student in a white shirt and tie who appeared to be in his mid-twenties and who spoke little English. The other person we picked up was a short, thin man who had a heavy beard and black long hair, and who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s. In the car, he described himself as a revolutionary artist from the Lower East Side. His name was Ben. And he was one of the leaders of SDS’s “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” chapter of hippie anarchists that Tom Neumann had also helped to build.
The trip began with Ted in the driver’s seat, Brian in the front passenger seat and the Japanese student, Ben and I in the back seat. After Ted had driven the car through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey, we all started to talk politics with each other. Most of the talking was done by Ben and Ted. And Ted would often turn his head for a second to the back seat while driving, to reply to a point made by Ben, during the times Ted became passionately involved in the discussion.
After I asked Ben why his Japanese student friend had decided to attend the SDS National Council meeting, Ben replied:
“He’s an expert in teaching the street demonstration tactics of snake dancing that they use in Japan. He thinks SDS should organize students to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations in Washington. If SDS learns how to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations, there’s no way the cops will be able to control demonstrations in Washington. And we’ll really be able to start an anti-war riot and get more of a revolution going.”
Ted started to laugh and I asked Ben: “What do you mean by `snake dancing’?”
Ben smiled and started to talk on and on about the need of the anti-war movement and SDS to start preparing for urban guerrilla warfare in the United States. Ted, Brian and I all seemed to feel that Ben was well-intentioned, but somewhat crazy and fanatical. However, his verbal style of getting out his revolutionary anarchist, “crazy” politics was quite entertaining; and the good-natured debate between Ted and Ben, as we drove out to the Midwest, made time pass by rapidly, as afternoon turned into night.
In the backseat at one point, Ben showed me a copy of the underground magazine he put out, which was called Black Mask. The issue contained some great revolutionary poetry and great revolutionary visual artwork, as well as instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. In Fall 1967, Ben and the other members of his “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” group—which was usually called “The Motherfuckers” by everyone in the City—openly argued that the time was ripe for New York City white radicals to just drop out of schools or quit their white-collar jobs and start heaving Molotov cocktails at cops, U.S. corporate offices, university buildings and U.S. military targets, whenever possible. Ben and the other Motherfuckers considered most student leftists as nothing more than bourgeois “white collar radicals,” and felt, like JJ, that 95 percent of all SDS national meeting debate was irrelevant, verbal bull-shit.
Although Ben struck me as both loveless and somewhat flipped-out politically (after I had heard him talk in the car for a few hours), I did share his contempt for what he called “bourgeois white honky culture.” But I also thought to myself that “if Ben were the revolution in the U.S., the revolution won’t be too humanistic or liberating;” because Ben seemed too macho, too hard, too authoritarian, too intolerant and too domineering in his personality structure. He didn’t seem to give off enough gentle vibes.
One of the people we picked up downtown was a Japanese student in a white shirt and tie who appeared to be in his mid-twenties and who spoke little English. The other person we picked up was a short, thin man who had a heavy beard and black long hair, and who appeared to be in his late 20s or early 30s. In the car, he described himself as a revolutionary artist from the Lower East Side. His name was Ben. And he was one of the leaders of SDS’s “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” chapter of hippie anarchists that Tom Neumann had also helped to build.
The trip began with Ted in the driver’s seat, Brian in the front passenger seat and the Japanese student, Ben and I in the back seat. After Ted had driven the car through the Lincoln Tunnel into New Jersey, we all started to talk politics with each other. Most of the talking was done by Ben and Ted. And Ted would often turn his head for a second to the back seat while driving, to reply to a point made by Ben, during the times Ted became passionately involved in the discussion.
After I asked Ben why his Japanese student friend had decided to attend the SDS National Council meeting, Ben replied:
“He’s an expert in teaching the street demonstration tactics of snake dancing that they use in Japan. He thinks SDS should organize students to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations in Washington. If SDS learns how to snake dance at anti-war demonstrations, there’s no way the cops will be able to control demonstrations in Washington. And we’ll really be able to start an anti-war riot and get more of a revolution going.”
Ted started to laugh and I asked Ben: “What do you mean by `snake dancing’?”
Ben smiled and started to talk on and on about the need of the anti-war movement and SDS to start preparing for urban guerrilla warfare in the United States. Ted, Brian and I all seemed to feel that Ben was well-intentioned, but somewhat crazy and fanatical. However, his verbal style of getting out his revolutionary anarchist, “crazy” politics was quite entertaining; and the good-natured debate between Ted and Ben, as we drove out to the Midwest, made time pass by rapidly, as afternoon turned into night.
In the backseat at one point, Ben showed me a copy of the underground magazine he put out, which was called Black Mask. The issue contained some great revolutionary poetry and great revolutionary visual artwork, as well as instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. In Fall 1967, Ben and the other members of his “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” group—which was usually called “The Motherfuckers” by everyone in the City—openly argued that the time was ripe for New York City white radicals to just drop out of schools or quit their white-collar jobs and start heaving Molotov cocktails at cops, U.S. corporate offices, university buildings and U.S. military targets, whenever possible. Ben and the other Motherfuckers considered most student leftists as nothing more than bourgeois “white collar radicals,” and felt, like JJ, that 95 percent of all SDS national meeting debate was irrelevant, verbal bull-shit.
Although Ben struck me as both loveless and somewhat flipped-out politically (after I had heard him talk in the car for a few hours), I did share his contempt for what he called “bourgeois white honky culture.” But I also thought to myself that “if Ben were the revolution in the U.S., the revolution won’t be too humanistic or liberating;” because Ben seemed too macho, too hard, too authoritarian, too intolerant and too domineering in his personality structure. He didn’t seem to give off enough gentle vibes.
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