1964?

While the Bernie folks are not giving up -- and they shouldn't -- it's looking more and more like the presidential contest will come down to Hillary on the one side and Trump on the other. Who ya gonna choose, huh?

How sane is the American electorate?

We might even see another Daisy Ad that is never aired but everyone knows and talks about.



I wasn't old enough to vote in 1964, but I was very aware of the presidential campaign that year. You couldn't very well miss it. The nation had been on an emotional and political roller coaster since the assassination of President Kennedy in November of 1963; that singular but by no means unprecedented event had changed everything. The assassination was such a shattering event that it was almost as if the earth's spin axis had been reversed.

The elevation of Lyndon Johnson to the presidency was widely met with contempt and derision -- he was considered a bumpkin at best, a corrupt and dangerous  good ol' boy, and he was considered a stone racist not much better than the big-bellied sheriffs keeping the Negroes down throughout the South.

We forget from this distance how disliked Johnson was in those days, a dislike that crossed political party lines.

Came then, however, the Republican nominee for president, an Arizona senator, one Barry Goldwater, a dyed in the wool conservative-reactionary. My god in heaven.

Goldwater was far more polished than the Arizona senator who ran for president recently -- "Gramps" McCain. He was erudite, calm, with a well developed ideology that had elements of appeal even to some of the more rigid progressives and liberals of the era. His book, "Conscience of a Conservative", had sold millions of copies and was something of a bible to true believers. Goldwater was a known quantity. His intransigence in the Senate on behalf of the conservative-reactionary cause was legendary.

Johnson, too, was a known quantity, and while he might have been widely disliked, Goldwater was feared. Saber-ratting was only the half of it. Goldwater wanted to end the progressive-liberal era in American politics once and for all and restore what he and his partisans saw as the "correct" and constitutional relationship between government and the people. Which meant, then and now, a government that served the interests of the wealthy and powerful and ignored the interests of the people most of the time.


Goldwater -- like many conservative-reactionaries today -- called that "freedom" and "liberty." For whom, though? And to do what?

I've written previously and fairly extensively on how progressivism originated as the Republican response to Democratic populism which was sweeping the country in the late 1800s. While Republicans originated progressivism as a means to stop the spread of populism, the ideas of the Progressive Movement were widely adopted by Democrats by the mid-teens of the twentieth century. Progressivism became the standard governmental operating system under FDR, and there was no looking back.

Well, that is, until Reagan. But we're not there yet. We're still in 1964, and that means that progressivism was still the standard governmental operating system. And Barry Goldwater wanted to dismantle it and substitute... what? What went before? Cronyism? Benign neglect? Wild-west shootouts? What? It was never entirely clear what Goldwater wanted to do, but whatever it was, it would mean harm to many millions of Americans, who -- according to conservative-reactionary thinking -- could just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps the way Goldwater's people had done in the long-before.

By contrast, Johnson was a progressive with a strong Southern populist aura. He may have been considered a bumpkin, but he was a bumpkin in the mold of FDR, and that was familiar and comfortable to many Americans. They may not have liked him, but that didn't matter so much as a kind of continuity that Johnson represented, continuity that was deeply important following the trauma of the assassination.

Those were different times, of course. The present era is not much like it, but many of the same political dynamics are at work.

The continuity candidate is Hillary. Bernie is not likely to win the nomination, but if he did, he would be seen as a wild card to be "stopped." Trump, however, against Hillary is the wild card, darned near a mad man. The likeliest outcome in that contest is a landslide victory for Hillary -- not because anybody likes her, though some do. Not because they think she's the best of the best or what have you. Not even because she's a woman -- though that matters.

It's because she's not crazy and she has shown no inclination to overturn the entire governing apparatus to suit her proclivities the way Trump has.

So is this going to be a replay of 1964? In some ways, I think so, yes. It's not an exact parallel because times and conditions are so much different. President Hillary will not be likely to have a Democratic majority in either house of Congress (yes, I predict the Rs keep the senate, though their margin will be cut). LBJ had an overwhelming Democratic majority -- and so he was able to do practically anything he wanted.

Yet he was undone in the end. Two factors contributed to his undoing: the unending war in Vietnam -- which he expanded exponentially at the behest of his generals -- and the Civil Rights Act which
essentially split the Democratic Party irreparably leading to the eventual triumph of the conservative-reactionaries who hold the reins of power to this day.

Hillary won't mess with that power relation much, anymore than Obama would. Thus continuity.

But what will come of continuity may not be what anyone anticipates.

More Insight and Ironies From "Subversives"

For example, I knew that Clark Kerr (UC President during the Free Speech Movement demonstrations in 1964 and 65) was responsible for coming up with the California Higher Education Master Plan -- which is usually attributed to Governor "Pat" Brown -- but I didn't know that he was affiliated with the Quakers or that he had been elevated to the presidency of the University specifically because of his abilities and reputation as a negotiator.

My memories of Kerr are somewhat mixed but overall they are negative, largely because he was demonized during and after the FSM, by student protesters and later by Reagan and his ilk, as part of the ongoing problem at Berkeley and other campuses, not part of the solution. I recognized him as someone who was trying to maintain control and exercise authority in a situation in which control and authority were being exercised for their own sake, and under the circumstances, it was wrong. I see from Rosenfeld's examination of the documents, however, that Kerr was trying to do something else -- not necessarily what it looked like at all -- and that despite his somewhat ham-handedness and bumbling, he may have been doing more good than harm.

It would be some time before I more or less clearly understood the often tense relationship between the Regents of the University, the University administration, and the Legislature, as well as with the Governor's Office, alumni, donors, faculty, students, and the communities in which the University campuses were placed.

Rosenfeld is saying the situation was even more complex than I came to understand it to be, and the complexity of the relationships between all the moving parts of the University was part of what made it relatively easy for interests like the FBI or, as happened with the FSM, student "radicals" to exert so much control -- at least temporarily.

Rosenfeld has also laid bare J. Edgar Hoover's personal interest and the FBI's general interest in the University of California, dating back essentially prior to World War II. Hoover saw it as a hotbed of Communists and Communism from very early on, particularly the Berkeley campus, and he kept his personal eye on what was going on there, and ordered his agents to conduct covert and often lawless surveillance of faculty and administration, students and staff and provide the Director with reports of their findings as well as disrupting any sign of opposition to the Established Order.

I knew about the anti-Communists witch hunts and purges throughout California's public education system (my 5th grade teacher, for example, was accused) but I was not fully aware of how deeply the purges went nor how destructive they were in particular cases. This is something I probably should have been more aware of, but I wasn't.

After all, even though everyone knew that surveillance and anonymous accusation of "Commies" was routine, we weren't necessarily able to recognize the general effects: curbing or crushing dissent and enforcing conformity of thought and action. Conformity being the key -- I've written about it many times as the fundamental social/political factor of the era, far more enthusiastically embraced and enforced than any of the OUTRAGES!!!!!™ we are privy to and are expected to run around denouncing these days.

Given the technology of the era, Hoover and the FBI were as thoroughgoing in their surveillance and interference in the University as it was possible to be at the time, far more directly and disruptively than we realized, and some ways more so than the pervasive surveillance we are under today.

There's much more, of course, and I'm still in the early chapters, but the way the background of the story of the student uprising at Berkeley is being laid out and the underlying issues, personalities, and events are being detailed is actually quite revelatory  to me. I knew a lot of it, but not so many of the details. In many ways, it was worse than we thought.

Much worse. Which makes the story more depressing than I would have thought.

How The Past Trembles in the Hands of Historians

Union Traction Company service map, Indianapolis to Muncie, c. 1910. (Clickage will make the image larger)

He was my mother's father, her natural father. She knew that he had died in Indianapolis when she was very young, died "in a streetcar accident," but didn't know the details until much later. She found out some of it from her mother, but she would find out most of the story from a half-brother she learned about when she was an adult -- but whom didn't meet until I was about 7 or 8 years old and she was well into middle age.

She found her half-brother when we were living in Los Angeles. He was living not very far away in San Dimas and came to visit. I remember one visit quite clearly and he may have come by several other times that I don't remember as well. His name was Frank King; his father's name -- my mother's father, too -- was Frank Olive. He said he'd taken a different name partly because of what had happened in Indianapolis. It wasn't his step-father's name, it was a name he had chosen himself. How my mother had found him, I don't recall in any detail, but it had something to do with military records and I remember she had been calling anyone with the same name she found in those records for years.

Frank Olive was a streetcar conductor for the Indianapolis interurban transit company, and he was also a union organizer who had had an increasingly important role in all the strikes that had hit the system since the early 19-teens. He was well-known to the company as an agitator and a troublemaker. He died on the job, yes, but it wasn't an accident (and he didn't die in one of the riots). After one of the strikes was settled, I believe it was around 1915 though the date was always a bit hazy in my mind, so it may have been earlier or a bit later, he was told that there was something hanging off the front of his car, and to go get it before he began his run. When he got to the front of the car, another conductor or motorman started the car moving forward and it struck the car ahead, crushing Frank between them, killing him. Everyone knew what had happened. He had been murdered in a way that made it look like a careless accident. As were a number of strikers and strike leaders who went back on the job that year.

His funeral was huge, apparently, and at that funeral, Frank's widow, my mother's mother, found out about his other widow, Frank King's mother. Oh. Yes, Frank had two wives who lived at opposite ends of the interurban line, in this case, one household in Indianapolis and one in Marion. Apparently the discovery was quite the scandal at the time. One of Frank's close friends at the transit company took it upon himself to marry my mother's mother quite soon after Frank's demise, and thus make her an honest woman again. He had been fired from the transit company due to the most recent strike, and figured it was the perfect time to move out to California and start over, which they did. He ran Flying A filling stations and sold Dodge cars on the Central Coast, then retired around 1940 and bought a motor court up in Willits where my mother's mother died not long after, and he passed within a few months of her death (or maybe the sequence was the other way around... I wasn't there, and my mother was always pretty anguished about it).

Frank King's mother also remarried fairly soon after her Frank Olive's death, but they stayed in Marion. Frank King moved out to California on his own after WWII. My mother didn't know about them at all until she was well into her twenties, and she said she was shocked when she found out her natural father was a bigamist who had another household and family. When she learned about her father's union activities and the strikes and the violence that went with them, and how her father had actually died, she was horrified. She had no idea it was like that, she said. But she developed a greater (albeit grudging) respect for him. She said she got a much greater understanding of why she herself felt the need to stand up for the downtrodden, to fight for her own rights, and to try to change bad situations she or others found themselves in -- though that didn't always include her own relations.

I didn't realize until much later myself how pivotal the Indianapolis transit strikes had been -- I hadn't even heard of them at all before my mother's half-brother told the stories to us at our house in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Much of labor history in this country has been suppressed or forgotten, just as civil rights history has been. We may have romantic notions of what happened and believe in stories and myths of "heroic struggles," but have no idea at all of what really happened. The Indianapolis and other transit strikes were essentially disappeared from history, just as so much of civil rights history was disappeared.

An example was just last night on PBS. We were watching the "1964" program -- it was a pretty big year for both of Ms Ché and me, after all. That was the year Ms saw the Beatles at the Cow Palace, and one doesn't forget things like that, and I was mesmerized by the Civil Rights marches and Free Speech Movement in Berkeley -- and for the most part, it seemed the program was pretty good. It tried to show how events were linked together and not just discreet incidents, the way so much "history" is presented. The premise was essentially: "Everything changed on November 22, 1963, and the '60s as we remember them really began in 1964." True enough. I've been saying pretty much that for years and scholars have been making the same point though somewhat less stridently than people like me. But it was odd how much was missing -- and who was missing -- from this program. One huge absence really stuck out to me (for reasons I may get into another time). Stokely Carmichael was never mentioned. Huh? Whut the...?  He appeared in a picture or two of civil rights events, and SNCC was mentioned briefly, but his name was never breathed.  I could not believe it. You cannot have a history of the Civil Rights Movement, even in 1964, without Stokely Carmichael -- but apparently he's been disappeared, as if he were a Soviet dissident.

Todd Gitlin was all over the place last night being interviewed about this and that, his title changing depending on the topic, but what he was doing in 1964 and where he was was never mentioned; it was implied he was at Berkeley in 1964 and had some role in the the Free Speech Movement, but so far as I know he wasn't there. He was at Harvard (or maybe Columbia, he moved around a lot back east) -- and he was running the SDS (which also was never mentioned.)  There was some well-coifed and manicured woman  (wish I could remember her name [looked it up, it was Stephanie Coontz, listed as a "Berkeley student," which I guess she was in 1964]) describing FSM events accurately enough but with little seeming interest, though she claimed she was part of the struggle, and "stood up and walked out of" [Sproul Hall] (though the iconic name of the administration building at UC Berkeley was never used) rather than being dragged down the stairs as so many were, and I thought it would have been more interesting if they'd had Alice Waters yakking "spiritually" about it instead. She may not have complete memories, but they're both more fun and more personal.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that what we think we know about historical movements and events is definitely not the whole story, and in many cases, it's not even close to what was really going on. It's often a highly romanticized and cleansed version that leaves out many important aspects and people, and which declares "X" result, when the result was actually "Y". Or the result might have been something else altogether.

The Indianapolis and other transit strikes in the early 19-teens were pivotal in part because though they were declared to be settled in favor of the workers, they were failures, despite the huge number of people participating and supporting them. They literally brought the city and a good deal of transport in the region and the country to a halt, and though the official violence which was brought to bear against the strikers -- and the many murders that occurred as a result -- were widely condemned, the strikers did not win much of anything despite their enormous sacrifices. This was the pattern of the labor movement of the time. While discreet incidents may be recalled, and minor victories celebrated, the pattern of failures leading to tiny advances often isn't. I've read transcripts of the investigation into the conditions that led to the Indianapolis transit strikes, and it was horrible. It didn't get much better, despite the struggles, not until after World War I, and even then, victories were reversible. My grandfather lost his life in the struggle, but for what? A noble sacrifice? Maybe. But he was a flawed human being, and so, like the largely failed strikes themselves, largely forgotten.

1964 was a pivotal year for the American consciousness, but even as close as we are to it now, only fifty years on, it appears that key people and important events are being disappeared and whitewashed for some purpose, perhaps to enhance an official mythology, to simplify the record, to glorify certain aspects, diminish others -- on behalf of...? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Always the question. What are we being led to believe? On whose behalf? Or on behalf of what objective?