123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
> Carrol, can you recommend any good books on the period?
There are good books on this or that aspect of it, but I don't think there is any book that measures up to the perod as a whole.
There was abook published earlier this year on how the FBI planned the murder of Fred Hampton. I suspect this might be a good introduction to the period:. The FBI understood the imporrtance of the Panthers in a way that too few leftists today do.
I think though you have to browse in the books available and be cautious in assuming their completeness or accuracy. It was a confusing period to those of us who lived it and it hasn't really gotten much clearer since.
Eric was correct in ncluding beatniks and hippies in his list of elements. The distinctness of the period, I think, was the way the whole gave importance to elements that in themsevles were dstrivial or even contemptible.
A suspicio I can't give evidence for but I'll toss it out. One of the pressures on the governing elites was that the hullabalooo was freaking out their own supporters, whose reactions were merely adding to the general threat to order. The Joint Committee on Campus violence that subpoened me is an instance. They were idiots, and the list of people they called to testify was really wild. They had planned to follow up the hfearings in Springfield with hearings held on each individual campus, and when I refused to talk to them on the grounds that I had not had time to secure an attorney;, they called me various names and said they'd get me when they came to ISU. But apparently someone in Springfield recognized that the Committee was only fucking up the works and it was quietly suppressed. Local elites around the nation were, I suggest, probably getting sick and tired of the disturbance of the smooth course of activity, whether it came from radicals or over-reaction from reactionaries. And it didn't take much to disturb public officials who had never had any audience. In 1965, for reasons I can't remember, I sat in a local courtroom for an hour or so -- and it made the judge, a young one, extremely nervous to have anyone there for "no particular reason." About three times he leaned forward to ask me if there was something I wanted. That sort of nervousness disappeared in a year or two, but so did the intensityof the provocations.,
And so far as I know, no one has written an account of the year demonstrations disappeared. (I forget what year it was, 1971 probably.) Only they didn't. There were more local demos and even building occupations that year than the year before: but the media stopped reporting on them. That's an important part of the story of power-elite respnse to the '60s. It will be hard to write a really good history of the '60s because it will be hard to dig up and measure the importance of all sorts of stuff that, viewed in isolation, would seem trivial. Such as my disturbing the ordinary course of events for that judge just by sitting quietly in the back of the courtroom. It did really bother him. It probably bothered him as much then as, four years later, it bothered the Bloomington City Council to have black students blockade the doors of the council meeting room and say no one was leaving until the Council guranteed that a woman's house would not be condemnded.
Or try this. I've been reading a very silly speech given in 1970 by Peter Camejo. Here is one passage:
**** The independent mass action concept does not just mean demonstrations against the war. It's a general strategy[of the SWP, that is] with many aspects to it.
One aspect is to build a mass independent black political party.
*****
This is indescribably absurd. The SWP was, it seems, going to establish and _independent_ black party. Misunderstanding of the period goes back to the period itself, and we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it.
We can't, for example, name the Independent Black Political Party that already existed but could not be reccognized as a Party at all. Let me give a crude hyphenated name for that Party.
The Some trends in NASCP-SCLC-SNCC-Republic of New Africa-DRUM-Black Panthers for Self Defense Party.
I am not joking. I claim that a real Independent Black Party did exist over the last years of the '60s, though no one, even those "in" the Party, recognized that it did. And there were cerrtainly huge quarrels inside it (as there are in any real party). But it was, to use the term I've been using on this list for lack of a better one, a COHERENT Black Left (or Black Political Party).
That "Party" -- no -- That Party could not have been theorized in advance; it never even got properly theorized during its period of existence or since. And of course I have not named all of its 'branches' by any means. Now the good book on the '60s you ask for would recognize the existence of that Party, trace its rise and gradual disappearance. It would analyze the ways in which it interacted with Latinos and with white leftists, and how that interaction was a part, the major part but still only a part, of what was a Coherent Left for a few years in the 1960s.