1968 - Mark Kurlansky [55]
Most of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement had participated in the Freedom Summer. They took Bob Dylan’s stirring civil rights song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and made it their own. Joan Baez sang it for them at one of their pivotal demonstrations, and overnight Dylan’s song for the civil rights movement became the anthem of 1960s student movements.
But the Free Speech Movement, like most sixties movements, claimed to be too democratic to have leaders. Savio always denied being the singular leader. It was because of him, though, more than any other single figure, that students entering college in the mid-1960s thought of demonstrating as a natural act. Savio made the connection from the civil rights movement to the student movement. From Warsaw to Berlin, to Paris, to New York, to Chicago, to Mexico City, students were stirred by the tactics and oratory of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. The names, the sit-ins, the arrests, the headlines, the fact that they won their demands for on-campus activism—all this became legend to students entering a university in the mid-1960s. Unfortunately, what was forgotten was the grace and civility of a rebel who walked in his socks on a police car in order not to scratch it.
Mario Savio and Tom Hayden were not particularly interested in the fashion of the times. In 1968, when Tom Hayden organized demonstrations at the Chicago convention, he still dressed very much like the journalist from the Michigan Daily. But if Hayden gave 1968 its statement of principles and Savio its spirit—its style was best expressed by an over-thirty man from Worcester, Massachusetts. In his entire lifetime, perhaps in all of history, there was no year that was better suited for Abbie Hoffman than 1968. It must have seemed extraordinary to him that year that the world had come around to his way of doing things. He used to say that he had been born with the decade, in 1960, and that was probably how it felt to him.
Abbie Hoffman was one of the first Americans to fully appreciate the possibilities and the importance of living in what was becoming a media age. He was the New Left’s clown, not because he was clownish, but because in a very calculated way he understood that the New Left was in need of a clown, that a clown could publicize their issues, that a clown was not ignored. Above all, Abbie Hoffman did not want to be ignored. And like all good clowns, he was very funny. He was a master of the put-on, and those who understood put-ons laughed while the others joined the television cameras waiting when he promised to spin and levitate the Pentagon, not understanding why he was not in the least bit embarrassed, or the slightest bit disappointed, when he failed to do so.
In 1960, the year he said he was “born,” he was twenty-four years old, having actually been born in 1936. He was the same age as Black Panther Bobby Seale, a junior at Brandeis when Tom Hayden first traveled fifty miles to the University of Michigan, six years older than Mario Savio, and a decade or more older than undergraduate college students in 1968. Hoffman had a sense that he was running late. He had never gone to a political demonstration until 1960, when as a graduate student at Berkeley he participated in a huge outcry against capital punishment led by Marlon Brando and other celebrities after Caryl Chessman, who had kidnapped two women and forced them to perform oral sex, was sentenced to death for his crime. But on May 2, after Hoffman’s first taste of political activism failed, the state of California killed Chessman.
That same year, Hoffman married and had two children and spent the next few years trying unsuccessfully to master fatherhood and a conventional life. In 1964, to his great frustration, he watched Freedom Summer on television. The following summer, the last time that large numbers of white volunteers went south, Hoffman was among them. He returned to the South the next two years, when few others went, working for SNCC. Hoffman had not only missed Freedom Summer,