Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune

Notes

M 207 N NOTES N 1. ORIGINS (1968) 5. affluent society: See Galbraith, The Affluent Society. Another informative view of the role of the 1950s in the development of the 1960s is Payne, “Roll Over, Norman Rockwell.” See also Jezer, The Dark Ages. 5. a great shock to professor Kerr: Clark Kerr, an economist and professor of industrial relations, was the first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley (1952–1957), and later president of the entire UC system (1958–1967). His handling of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in the mid-1960s brought him criticism from all sides of the institution he is widely credited with building. As a result, he became the iconic representative of the large-scale, impersonal education strongly disliked by the radical youth of the time. 6. The late years of the decade: For an overview of the entire period, see Gitlin, The Sixties. 6. Kerner Report: Kerner, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. 8. Liberation News Service: In addition to Mungo’s Famous Long Ago, a more recent treatment of LNS and its significance in the underground press movement, including a number of observations relevant to the later farm story, is McMillian , Smoking Typewriters. 8. the conventional student press network: In the months leading up to the founding of LNS, Mungo and Bloom had been preparing to lead the United States Student Press Association, a national organization of student newspaper editors, located in Washington, DC. 9. the movement: This word, so central to the ethos of the time, is sometimes capitalized in writing on the 1960s. 208 N NOTES 12. While it didn’t always prove to be: For more on the author’s views on such matters see Fels, Farm Friends. 13. The move was complete: See Lerner, “The Liberation of the Liberation News Service.” 2. EARLY DAYS (1968–1969) 15–16. chaos and disorganization . . . we had to suffer the fickleness of random energy: Diamond , What the Trees Said, 38. 16. Yippie-run In-hog-uration: This satirical un-celebration of the Nixon inauguration , featuring a live pig, was advertised to run from January 18–20, 1969. For a detailed and fascinating report on this event, see “Rights in Concord: The Response to the Counter-Inaugural Protest Activities in Washington, D.C., January 18–20, 1969,” prepared by the Task Force on Law and Law Enforcement for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, available at www.archive.org. The In-hog-uration is covered on pp. 80–81 and 93–94. 17. to regain the meager comforts: From the opening of Bierce’s short story “The Boarded Window.” 20. With books like. . . : Popular works included Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968); Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963); and Hermann Hesse’s Demian, Steppenwolf, and Siddhartha (all first published between 1919 and 1927 but newly popular in translation throughout the 1960s). For the even more mystically inclined there was Mikhail Bulgakov ’s The Master and Margarita (first available in English in 1967). 3. FARM LIFE (1969–1973) 26. “The New Peasantry”: Rodale, “Young People—Are They America’s New Peasantry?” 27. an offshoot of the farm: On Irv’s farming experiment in Willet, New York, see Plimpton, 1975 Farm Journal. 28. Venceremos Brigade: This organization is still active. As noted on its website (www.venceremosbrigade.net/), “In 1969, a coalition of young people formed the Venceremos (‘We Shall Overcome’) Brigade, as a means of showing solidarity with the Cuban Revolution by working side by side with Cuban workers and challenging U.S. policies towards Cuba.” 29. he completed work on a book: Wasserman, Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States. 30. The shock of Marshall’s death: At the time, Bloom’s suicide was noted and commented upon widely. More than three years later, in the spring of 1973, a young David Eisenhower, who had known Bloom briefly at Amherst College, was still using him as a foil to discuss, in a national op-ed piece titled “In Memory of Campus Activism,” what he saw as the final demise of the era of student revolt. M 209 NOTES The strong published responses of several of Bloom’s colleagues from that time suggest that Eisenhower’s assessment was incorrect; see Nathan and Blum, “Some Other Memories of Marshall Bloom,” and Coburn, “Why Marshall Bloom Died.” For further...