Posts by others yesterday have made me take another look at
certain phenomena.
It is true that SANE and other organizations opposing
existing policy came into being in the late '50s. With three
exceptions, their style and membership confined them to the
polite and ineffectual existence best described by comparing them
to NGOs today. I was very conscious that, as phrased it then:
"There are three things going in America today: Martin Luther
King, KPFA, and the American Friends Service Committee."
The order was deliberate: King led a mass movement and a
people; KPFA was asserting freedom of speech in a McCarthyized
country; the AFSC High School Committee in Northern California
provided and education and cultural outlet for the best elements
of a new generation. I have long thought that its camp at Lake
Tahoe is where the San Francisco sound was born. Someone might
investigate that.
When a post referred to Mort Sahl, that was ipso facto a
reference to the San Francisco-Berkeley-Oakland-San Jose area, a
very, very different place, because there alone, in the entire
country, the New Deal alliance between labor, culture, and
intellectuals had not been smashed by Red-baiting, thanks above
all to the resistance of the Longshoremen's Union and its leaders
-- Bridges, Dave Jenkins -- hauled before the committees and, in
Bridges' case, the courts.
My post about white youth retreating, circa 1970, into
communes and making a buck, was not well phrased. Others'
comments about the purpose of people in joining communes were
well put. My point was that, as is generaly realized today and a
couple of us older heads did then, they were a blind alley. As to
making a buck, perhaps the best single footnote on that is that
one such person recently gave enough millions to UC Berkeley that
it agreed to put up the marvelous Free Speech Cafe, with
photo-murals, a computer with archival data, and changing
exhibits informing students visiting the main undergraduate
library of that history.
On the same subject, a month ago I attended the 40th
anniversary reunion of SLATE, the left-liberal UC Berkeley
student party. All those present, ranging from the current
attorney-general of the state of California through Bob Scheer
now of the L.A. Times, through people involved in every
imaginable type of social-issue organization, had remained
activists. This pertains to the matter of "generations" or,
better, age groups, among 60s people. The SLATE veterans are so
completely into lesser-evilism that a proposal to have a SLATE
contingent at the Democratic National Convention was about to be
passed when a Berkeley ex-student-of-that-generation objected
that there were those of us who don't think Clinton and Gore are
the way to go.
But among those just a little younger, who represented the
successive cohorts of the 60s generation, I'm not at all sure
that the stress some have placed upon that succession is
deserved. Certainly as someone old enough to be their father, but
involved with them day to day as a member of the FSM Executive
Committee, I did not see the difference between the youngest
FSMer, 18 in 1964, and the oldest, a dozen years his senior, that
some posts emphasize. Perhaps that was true in SDS nationally.
Much more important in Berkeley, and I personally suspect, in
other centers of activity, were the gender differences out of the
women's liberation movement was born. Because gays were in the
closet (I have in mind individuals who later came out as gay),
their activities were in no way different from those of
straights.
William Mandel
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