In 1968, at the age of seventy, Marcuse taught at San Diego State, where he could be seen fussing over his rust-colored cat and enjoying the hippos at the zoo, an avuncular white-haired figure whose impact was felt across the globe. The students who forced the University of Rome to close in March of that year carried a banner with three Ms that stood for Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.
While more conventional thinkers insisted that technology would create more leisure time, Marcuse warned that it would instead imprison people in unoriginal lives devoid of creative thinking. He warned that though technology appeared to help the dissenter, it would actually be used to muffle protest. People were being anesthetized into a complacency that was mistaken for happiness. Goods and services were rendering mankind useless and incapable of real thought. There was an increase in media, but it espoused less and less variety of ideas. People in today’s world who “surf” through eighty or more television stations, only to find less there than when they had only four choices, might be beginning to grasp Marcuse’s vision for a technological age in which people think they have more choices but the choices lack significant differences. In an age of abundance, when technology has made individuals extraordinarily efficient, why do people spend even more time working, and why is so much work mindless instead of stimulating? One of the first Marxists to lose faith in the Soviet system, Marcuse saw the West as also in a state of “unfreedom” and often suggested that revolution may be the only path to true freedom.
Marcuse, the aging professor, seemed to warm to the role of guru to the student radicals. He frequently discussed their movements. He warned Abbie Hoffman on “flower power” that “flowers have no power” other than the force of the people who cultivate them—one of the few occasions on which Hoffman had no reply. But as Marcuse freely admitted, many of the young rebels who talked about his ideas had never read him. His work is written in the German dialectic tradition. Marcuse achieved popularity without ever developing an accessible writing style. Luis Gonzalez de Alba, one of the student leaders in Mexico, described finally settling down to read some Marcuse simply because President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz had accused the movement of being influenced by the philosopher.
I opened
One-Dimensional Man
and got as far as page five.
Eros and Civilization
had been a terrible bore. And now I had to read another of Marcuse’s books, all because Díaz Ordaz had happened to mention “the philosophers of destruction.”
A Martinique-born psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon became an international figure after he wrote a book in 1961 called
Les damnés de la terre.
Translated into twenty-five languages, the book was read by U.S. college students under the title
The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon had finished his French medical studies in Algeria in 1953, where he joined the Algerian National Front and became a leader in the fight for Algerian independence. This alone was credentials enough in the French youth movement that began in the late fifties by opposing French policy in Algeria. Independent Algeria, like Cuba, came to be regarded as a symbol of resistance to the established order of the world. Not a predictable anticolonialist tirade,
Wretched of the Earth
examines the psychology not only of colonialism, but of overthrowing colonialism and the kind of new man that is required to build a postcolonial society.
By explaining the complexity of the inner struggle to break with colonialism,
Wretched of the Earth
wielded an important influence in the United States on the American civil rights movement, where it helped make the connection between oppressed American blacks trying to rise up from white rule and oppressed African Muslims trying to free themselves from Europeans. This was the theme of the Black Muslim movement, especially under Malcolm X, who like Fanon was born in 1925, but in 1965 had been murdered, it appeared, by fellow Black Muslims, though this was never proven. Black Muslim boxer Muhammad Ali, as he defied the white establishment, was often seen as a standard-bearer for emerging poor nations. Eldridge Cleaver called Ali “the black Fidel Castro of boxing.”
Even Martin Luther King, Jr., identified the civil rights movement with the struggle of underdeveloped nations. In 1955 he said of the Montgomery boycott, “It is part of a world-wide movement. Look at just about any place in the world and the exploited people are rising against their exploiters. This seems to be the outstanding characteristic of our generation.”
Eldridge Cleaver became a sixties icon largely through his literary ability. Cleaver first went to prison at the age of eighteen for smoking marijuana. He later went back for rape. Released from prison in 1966, he joined the staff of the counterculture magazine
Ramparts—
famous for being charged with a crime for its 1968 cover of burning draft cards. The magazine staff encouraged him to publish the essays he had written while in prison, essays that expressed harsh self-criticism along with harsh criticism of the world that created him. Cleaver was virtually unknown until 1968, when his book of essays,
Soul on Ice,
was published and he was credited by critics, including in
The New York Times Book Review,
with a brash but articulate voice. His timing was perfect: In 1968, what was wrong with American society was a leading question in America. A June Gallup poll showed that white people by a ratio of three to two did not believe America was “sick,” but black people by a ratio of eight to seven did.
Soul on Ice
was published at almost the exact same moment as the Kerner Report on racial violence and, as
The New York Times
review pointed out, confirmed its findings. “Look into a mirror,” wrote Cleaver. “The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.”
Shortly before the publication of his book, Cleaver had brokered an important black-white alliance in California. The New Left there had formed a political party, the Peace and Freedom Party, which had gathered one hundred thousand signatures to put its candidates on the California ballot. Through Cleaver, the party was able to establish a coalition with the Black Panthers, by agreeing to the Panther platform of exempting blacks from the military, freeing all blacks from prison, and demanding that all future trials of blacks be held with an all-black jury. Cleaver was to be nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, with Jerry Rubin as his running mate. Cleaver’s new wife, Kathleen, a SNCC worker, was to be a state assembly candidate, as was Black Panther Bobby Seale. It was during Cleaver’s campaign that he called for “pussy power” at an event he labeled “Pre-erection Day” and an alliance with “Machine Gun Kellys”—that is, anyone with firearms who was willing to use them. In October he received loud applause from a packed theater with an overflowing crowd at Stanford University, when he said of the governor of California, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.”
1968 was the best year Eldridge Cleaver had. The following year, accused of involvement in a Black Panther shoot-out in Oakland, he fled to Cuba and then to Algeria. By the time he finally returned to the United States in 1975, he had no following left.
If the truth be told, which it rarely was except in private, most of the white Left found the Black Panthers a little bit scary. While most of the New Left whites were from the comfortable middle class, and most of the civil rights blacks such as Bob Moses and Martin Luther King were well educated, the Black Panthers were mostly street people from tough neighborhoods, often with prison records. Dressing in black with black berets and posing for photos with weapons, they intended to be scary. They preached violence and urged blacks to arm themselves for a coming violent revolution. They might have gotten little sympathy and few admirers except for two things. By 1968 it was becoming clear that the political establishment, especially in certain fiefdoms such as Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago and Governor Ronald Reagan’s California, was prepared to use armed warfare against unarmed demonstrators. In April Daley announced that he had given his police force orders to “shoot to kill” any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail and “shoot to maim” any looters, a license to open fire on any civil disturbance. Once Reagan became governor in 1967, along with cutting the state budget for medical care and education, he initiated a policy of brutalizing demonstrators. Following an October 16, 1967, attack on antiwar demonstrators in Oakland that was so barbarous it was dubbed “bloody Tuesday,” he commended the Oakland Police Department for “their exceptional ability and great professional skill.” Young, privileged white people were starting to be treated by police the way black people had been for a long time.
In January 1968, after an attack on seven hundred antiwar activists picketing Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech in San Francisco, one of the jailed victims, a Berkeley student, said of the attacking police, “They wanted to kill and would have if they could have gotten away with it. I know now that they were out to put Huey away, except Huey had the good sense to defend himself.”
The reference was to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers in California in 1966 and became the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district in 1968 while in prison awaiting trial in connection with the death of one and wounding of another Oakland policeman in a 1966 shoot-out. The first trial, in the summer of 1968, ended in a mistrial, as did two subsequent ones. Almost all of the major trials of Black Panthers ended in mistrials, acquittals, or convictions overturned on appeal, further fueling the suspicion that they were being persecuted by the police. In the course of the trials, plausible evidence of police brutality turned up, including in one case, allegedly murdering two suspects in their beds. The Black Panthers were increasingly being seen as victims of violence, martyrs who courageously stood up to the police.
It was a time of great strife within the black community, as former Negroes struggled to define the new black. By 1968 many of the greats of black culture were being regularly attacked by blacks. In
Soul on Ice,
Eldridge Cleaver savagely turned on James Baldwin, arguably the most respected black writer of the first half of the 1960s. After admitting how he thrilled to find a black writer of Baldwin’s skill, Cleaver concludes that Baldwin had “the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writing of any black American writer of note in our time.” Cleaver, who accused other blacks of hating blacks, managed in his one small book to denounce not only Baldwin, but Floyd Patterson, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Martin Luther King. Jazz star Louis Armstrong was an “Uncle Tom,” according to Cleaver, a black man who pandered to the white racist population with his big eyes and big teeth.
Basically, Cleaver saw blacks who succeeded as sellouts. Malcolm X, who had been murdered, Muhammad Ali, stripped of his boxing title, Paul Robeson, forced into exile—these were all authentic black heroes, whereas Martin Luther King was to be scorned for his Nobel Prize. Cleaver wrote, “The award of a Nobel Prize to Martin Luther King, and the inflation of his image to that of an international hero, bear witness to the historical fact that the only Negro Americans allowed to attain national or international fame have been the puppets and the lackeys of the power structure.” Once that is concluded, it is an easy step to the litmus test: If a black person achieves recognition, is he or she not thus proven to be a lackey?
Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, more popularly known as Stepin Fetchit, age seventy-six, struck back angrily in 1968 when a CBS television special entitled
Black History—Lost, Stolen, or Strayed,
narrated by black comedian Bill Cosby, presented Stepin Fetchit as an early racist stereotype. Stepin Fetchit, a friend of boxer Muhammad Ali, said, “It was not Martin Luther King that emancipated the modern Negro. It was Stepin Fetchit.” He contended that it was his imitators but not he who did the eye-rolling, foot-shuffling kind of performance. “I was the first Negro to stay in a hotel in the South,” he said angrily. “I was the first Negro to fly coast to coast on an airliner. I wiped away the image of rape from the Negro, made household work, somebody it was all right to associate with.” Then he attacked some of the new movies, such as
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter brings home to dinner her fiancé, played by Sidney Poitier, who is a handsome, wonderfully articulate, brilliant young doctor. The white dad, Tracy, struggles with the idea without ever expressing a racist thought and in the end gives in, apparently proving that intermarriage is okay if the black man is one of the leading citizens in America. Stepin Fetchit said that the film “did more to stop intermarriage than to help it,” asserting that at no point in the film did Poitier actually touch the woman playing his fiancée. The comedian said Poitier and other contemporary black stars “are tools. Like in a bank. You put one Negro up front, but you won’t find any other in the place.”
New black heroes were made and old ones dropped every day. By 1968 Muhammad Ali was one of the few black heroes who were unassailable from the Left. Youth and blacks had admired him when in 1967 he was stripped of his boxing license for refusing the draft. The play
The Great White Hope
starred James Earl Jones as the newly discovered black hero, the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Johnson had been unapologetic, or in 1968 terms a black champ, not a Negro, and the way he was driven from boxing seemed to parallel Muhammad Ali’s own story.
In these hard times for black heroes, not surprisingly, Martin Luther King was frequently criticized. Many civil rights activists, especially those in SNCC, used to jokingly refer to him as “de Lawd.” Beginning in 1966, King would occasionally be booed by SNCC activists while speaking or shouted down with cries of “Black Power!” King once responded, “Whenever Pharaoh wanted to keep the slaves in slavery, he kept them fighting among themselves.”