books
BY SUZI STEFFEN
Coming Around Again
Echoes and resonance in SDS memoirs
FLYING CLOSE TO THE SUN, memoir by
Cathy Wilkerson. Seven Stories Press, 2007.
Hardcover, $26.95.
RAVENS IN THE STORM, memoir by Carl
Oglesby. Scribner, 2008. Hardcover, $25.
STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC
SOCIETY: A GRAPHIC HISTORY, memoir
by Harvey Pekar, Gary Dumm et al.; edited by
Paul Buhle. Hill and Wang, 2008. Hardcover,
$22.
O
ur national debt was up, … our
inner cities were up in fl ames, our
war strategists were up a tree,
our kids were up to their necks in killing
and getting killed in a lost
cause, our North Atlantic
allies were almost up in
arms against us. The war
had to come to an end.
Replace the “inner cities
up in fl ames” with “our
collective Ninth Ward was
still underwater,” and you
might have a fairly accurate
analysis of life today. But
the time described was the
late 1960s, and the writer,
Carl Oglesby, spent much
of that decade trying to
accomplish an end to the
Vietnam War.
Books about Students
for Democratic Society
(SDS), the New Left and
Weatherman
come
in
waves. Oglesby and Cathy
Wilkerson weigh in now
with lengthy, detailed
memoirs, and a broader
history arrives when Harvey
Pekar’s writing mixes with
the art of Gary Dumm and
editing of Paul Buhle in
Students for a Democratic
Society: A Graphic History.
The Buhle-Dumm-Pekar
book probably provides the
best starting point for those
who know little about SDS.
The authors and illustrators
provide an overview of
the group from the Port
Huron statement to the
1969 national convention,
where factions sundered
the organization, and the
March 1970 explosion in a
Greenwich Village townhouse where three
young Weathermen died. The rest of the book
presents the stories of various SDSers, from
tales of those who worked in Cleveland’s
Economic Research Action Project (ERAP)
to those who helped organize voting rights
drives in the South and those involved in
women’s rights, high school student protests,
cultural changes and more. These voices
are valuable if uneven; readers should look
further for information about the exciting,
turbulent times.
Cathy Wilkerson provides quite a lot
of context in her memoir. The townhouse
that blew up belonged to her father and
stepmother, who were on vacation and
allowing Wilkerson to stay there. In Flying
Close to the Sun, Wilkerson writes about
her political development as the 1960s
progressed. Though she delivers a too-
detailed report on every meeting, informal
discussion and project, Wilkerson sticks
to her main point: Using violence as a
solution hurt the movement. Her point,
stated with moralistic hindsight, sometimes
overshadows her stories. But those vivid tales
— of visiting Cambodia, of working at New
Left Notes, of trying to reconcile her desire
to work for civil rights with the intensity of
movement politics — carry
the book. Plus, it’s good
to have a woman’s voice
talking about the women’s
liberation
movement,
political education for
women, the Vietnam War and
racism. And her description
of the explosion is a telling
vignette: While the guys (Ted
Gold and Terry Robbins)
and one of the politically
experienced women (Diana
Oughton) worked on the
bomb, Wilkerson was
upstairs frantically ironing
sheets so her father’s house
would look perfect when he
returned.
Bet Carl Oglesby never
ironed a sheet during the
1960s. Oglesby, by all
accounts the most eloquent
of SDS presidents, tells
his story in Ravens in the
Storm. Though many early
SDSers came to the group
in the desire to help fi ght
racism and bring about
a more equal world, the
older Oglesby worked for
a defense contractor before
he began doing research
on the war for a local
Democratic congressman.
What he found in his
research transformed him
into a radical and won him
the SDS presidency during a
time of surging interest in the
student antiwar movement.
Though his book combines
an aw-shucks humble tone
with some arrogance about his point of
view (which was and is that SDS should
have focused on campuses and student
empowerment), it’s a revealing look into the
politics of “movement elite.”
But the stories of the 1960s have barely
begun to be told. Where’s a memoir by
Diane Nash, organizer of SNCC? Where’s
a “graphic history” of the voting rights
movement from John Lewis, Anne Moody
and Julius Lester? Like the SDS memoirs,
they could fi ll in more pieces of the complex
quilt that made up the ferment and change
of the time — and help the antiracist and
antiwar movements of today.
ew
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EUGENE WEEKLY MARCH 13, 2008 39