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By Root 1757 0

bus was crossing America. The bus was painted in clashing colors no one had ever seen outside a carnival. Plastered over the paint were labels—“Caution: Weird Load,” “A Vote for Barry is a Vote for Fun,” and, above the windshield, “Furthur.” Just before entering Mississippi, these “Merry Pranksters” had been thrown off a beach at Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain for playing loud music. Now they were heading deeper across the South. No southerner turning to stare would have been shocked to learn that the jocular men on board had taken LSD. No one outside the bus, no one south of Millbrook, New York, where Timothy Leary would soon greet the Pranksters, had any idea what LSD was.

A new Magnavox color TV with a “23-inch rectangular tube” sold for an average month’s wages. Gasoline was 30 cents a gallon, but “price wars” sometimes dropped the price a nickel. A pound of steak sold for 79 cents, and a pound of chicken cost a quarter. A decent used car could be picked up for $300. The cigarettes that, despite the recent surgeon general’s warning, sent smoke curling through every restaurant and meeting room sold for a quarter a pack. Yet there was no price on certain intangibles. No price on the marriages that, made in the hasty matchups that followed the war, were now held together by threads that would soon break and double the divorce rate. No price on the bonds between parent and child that, within a few years, would widen into a “generation gap.” No price on the bedrock faith in America as Lincoln’s “last best hope,” a faith that would be shot down in Vietnam and dragged through the streets of Watts, Newark, and Detroit.

Leery of change and unaware of its coming juggernaut, most Americans had never had it so good. The median family income had risen 53 percent since 1950, inflation was at 1.2 percent, and the gross national product was at an all-time high. With more than ever to buy and more to buy it with, few adults wanted to “crap on the middle class.” A poll showed that two-thirds of Americans opposed the summer project in Mississippi. “It’s too much like taking the law in their own hands,” a Detroit machinist said. The American press, while not as insulting as Mississippi newspapers, was scarcely sympathetic to Freedom Summer:

The denial of voting rights to most Negroes in Mississippi is shameful and indefensible but it is highly doubtful that Northern college students are the best equipped persons to remedy this wrong.

—Chicago Tribune

The President should now use the force of his office to attack the cause of the trouble in Mississippi. That trouble is the unjustified, uncalled for invasion of that sovereign state by a bunch of Northern students schooled in advance in causing trouble under the guise of bringing “freedom” to Mississippi Negroes.

—Dallas Morning News

Without condoning racist attitudes, we think it understandable that the people of Mississippi should resent such an invasion. The outsiders are said to regard themselves as some sort of heroic freedom fighters but in truth, they are asking for trouble.

—Wall Street Journal

Syndicated columnists toed a fine line, praising volunteers’ idealism while casting doubts on the summer project itself. “It is a dreadful thing to say, but it needs saying,” wrote Joseph Alsop. “The organizers who sent these young people into Mississippi must have wanted, even hoped for, martyrs.” William F. Buckley asked whether Mississippi blacks were ready to vote. “Unlike the democratic absolutists,” Buckley wrote, “I am perfectly capable of rejoicing at the number of people who do not exercise their technical right to vote.” Lacking talk radio as a forum, Americans debated Mississippi in letters to editors. An Oklahoma woman was “outraged and disgusted that members of our U.S. Navy are used for the purpose of trying to locate three no-good rabblerousers in the South.” A Louisiana woman asked, “By what stretch of the imagination does anyone consider that these kids have any right in Mississippi in the first place? The whole situation is disgusting.”