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ANTHONY RUSSO
SUMMERS OF LOVE & WAR
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
“You cannot have change without the young The young
have the creativity, they have the energy, they have the
impatience. You need the youth to dissent. ’’
-ABBIE HOFFMAN
All sorts of people in prime middleage are reminiscing
about the summer of 1967, which they call the Summer of Love,
a drug-induced hallucination in which several thousand (mostly)
pampered middle and upper class white (flower) children briefly
abandoned social strictures and sang, danced and fornicated
like most of us imagine our wild and unfettered ancestors to
have done in the primeval veldt before civilization and Christ
ianity dampened our freewheeling pagan spirits.
Mecca that legendary summer thirty-five years ago
was San Francisco, ‘Baghdad by the Bay’, historic incubator
and refuge for many radical and eccentric mythologies. For an
ephemeral moment in a nation torn apart by an unpopular war
and racial strife a quicksilver of fun and peace rippled through
the stoned young masses who had swarmed into the city from
all over the country with heads swaddled in blossoms (a song
that summer urged westward bound émigrés, "If you go to
San Francisco wear a flower in your hair"). An adhoc socialist
republic boomed and bust as rapidly as an old goldrush town.
Everything seemed free for the asking — food, lodging, medical
care, sex and wine, even the psychedelic drugs that fueled the
dreamlike vision of a world of harmony, peace and love.
It all went badly quickly, of course. Before the summer
was over evil spirits had merged with the blithe frolicking throngs
of nirvana seekers, stealing, assaulting and raping, selling toxic
drugs and generally creating an infection of bad vibrations.
The rhapsodies of nostalgia about that long ago and faraway
summer seem to ease over the ruthless struggles of that period
That same summer of 1967 American cities burned with racial
hatred and insurrection (also despair). More than 200 other
young Americans were dying in Vietnam every week, and
God/Buddha alone knows how many thousands of Vietnamese
were killed between each Sunday and Saturday. The dream
world itself soon darkened into nightmare: two summers later
the counterculture that grew from the Summer of Love produced
its most famous citizen, Charles Manson.
The 1960s are set apart from other decades. They are
different not so much for their intensity (the World War 2 years
were far more intense), or because they were flamboyant and
colorful (the 'Jazz Age’ of the 1920s had more splash), or for
that matter because they were fueled by division and insurrect
ion — the 1770s and 1860s make better claims.The significance
of the 1960s is the example provided by the nation’s indulgence
in its youth. Or perhaps more aptly, with a single immensely
large generation of young people who responded by paradox
ically souring on the nation at a time of unparalleled prosperity.
The 1960s were a tumultuous period. The civil rights
movement of primarily southern blacks gave rise to a white civil
rights movement of primarily disaffected youth who protested an
unpopular and ill-conceived warthat forced young males to fight
and possibly be crippled or die. For the most part the children of
the working classes went quietly into induction and the war, and
most of the nearly 60,000 dead and several hundred thousand
wounded came from their homes. Primary opposition to the
Vietnam War came from the nation’s middle class youth; as
usual upper class whites were protected and could avoid service
in the war, although many went into service (typically as officers)
or were engaged in antiwar protest.
Rampant ideologies and social solutions were conceived
and died in the turbulent years of that decade. Revolution was a
serious and futile flirtation, a malevolent and adolescent reaction
against a paternal system that refused reform or criticism.Young
Americans turned to animistic socialism (a 'New Left' replaced
the Old Left) and developed a political philosophy that loosely
resembled gypsy law. They thought they could bind state social
ism and social control with a tribal sense of individual freedom.
The police and military showed the young resisters to authority
that social change takes hard work and great pain, which few
were inclined to exert. Reality, which means that all dreams
take time for fruition and are modified by reality, disillusioned
the young once more. The Now Generation found some other
nows to be Now about. A frustrated few tried to push against
history but were mostly killed or hunted into jail. Accidental
explosion of homemade bombs literally wasted some of the
best and brightest.
“This idealistic youth is the same youth already
serving in the Peace Corps abroad and the poverty
program at home. They are the seed corn of a better
future. They embody the strain of idealism which in every
generation has written the best chapters in our American
history They are the spiritual heirs of the Jeffersonians
and the abolitionists. ”
-/. F. STONE (1968)
“The student radical is never heard talking about
a rise in the phce of milk, new taxes, real wages or doctor
bills. The student radical creates his own society in which
money is not an overhding problem and because it isn't,
the student radical thinks revolution is all about love
because he has time to think about love Everybody
else is talking about survival."
If the 1967 Summer of Love & Flower Power was a
Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale for the young babyboomers,
1968 was surely a tale by the Brothers Grimm. It was a torrid
year of assassinations, vainglorious battles in the overseas war
and increasingly violent antiwar demonstrations, generally set
off by police and national guards armed with clubs, guns and
gas.The presidential campaign failed to change anything: the
new Republican administration that was elected despised the
young protesters and attacked them more viciously than ever,
two years later culminating in the shooting deaths of four white
students at Kent State in Ohio and at least two blacks (both
women) at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The govern
ment also staged a number of show trials of antiwar activists
in the late 1960s and early 1970s but juries acquitted them all.
In 1969 antiwar radicals responded to police murders of Black
Panthers and arrests of activists by forming a violent vanguard
that proclaimed the beginning of revolution: the Weathermen
(later Weatherpeople) whose rhetoric was always considerably
more revolutionary than their acts and whose homemade bombs
blew up in their faces.
But 1968 was also a year when an international youth
movement might have linked. Not since 1848 had Europe been
so united behind barricades; France, West Germany, Czechos-
lavakia (the 'Prague Spring'), and in Mexico at the 1968 Olympic
Games and Chicago USA on our side of the world. Revolution
ary politics are saturated with hoped-for might-have-beens: no
connection was made other than sympathetic though often
inflamed oratory.
In 1968 the war in Vietnam reached its most dramatic
and painful peak, the winter Tet offensive by North Vietnamese
armies and Viet Cong guerrillas, which included the long and
bloody siege at Khe Sanh, reminiscent of Dien Bien Phu four
teen years earlier. 1968 was the moral low-water mark of the
war: the devastation of the ancient imperial city of Hue and the
slaughter of civilians by American soldiers at My Lai.
President Lyndon Johnson surrendered his presidency
to the war in 1968 and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sacrificed his
life organizing poor blacks and whites against the economic
system that impoverished them. Robert Kennedy, brother of
the assassinated president John Kennedy, campaigned for the
presidency on a promise to end the war and provide justice
to the poor, and was murdered moments after victory in the
California primary in June. In August 1968 a peak was also
reached in the antiwar movement at the violent spectacle of the
Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. The whole
world was watching.
Although culturalists claim the 1960s got into swing
around 1968, the theme of the decade was set at its start with
the black civil rights movement. Not only did the violent and
passionate search for racial justice inspire the later antiwar
revolutionary New Left, earliest leaders of the movement were
-JULIUS LESTER (1968)
“You are a bunch of incompetent dreamers. You
promised a revolution and where the hell is it? Because
you are too lazy or incapable of being real revolutionaries
I am being forced to pay off my student loan. "
-MICHAEL MARSH (1971)
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