The newly campus-focused music was not only about politics and drugs, it was also about sex. Rock concerts, like political demonstrations, were often the foreplay of a sexual encounter. Some singers were more open than others about this. Jim Morrison, the velvet-voiced rocker of the Doors, in tight leather pants, called himself “an erotic politician.” In a 1969 Miami concert, he urged the audience to take off their clothes and then announced, “You want to see my cock, don’t you? That’s what you came for, isn’t it.” Janis Joplin, the scratchy-voiced balladeer, said, “My music isn’t supposed to make you riot, it’s supposed to make you fuck.”
Most articles about the new lifestyle alluded with varying degrees of candor to the impression that these young people were having a lot of sex. Sex was now called “free love,” because, with the pill, sex seemed free of consequences. It was not entirely free, as Mark Rudd learned his sophomore year at Columbia when he went on penicillin for the case of gonorrhea passed to him by a Barnard student who had gotten it from a married philosophy instructor. In fact, penicillin, discovered in the 1940s, had been the first pill to sexual freedom. The second, the oral contraceptive, was developed in 1957 and licensed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. As college physicians found, it rapidly overtook all other birth control methods and by 1968 had became commonplace on college campuses.
The popular slogan “Make Love Not War” made it clear that the two were interconnected—students could demonstrate against making war, and then, in the exhilaration of having stood with the thousands, survived the clubs and the tear gas, they would not uncommonly go off and make love. It was not only SNCC that was having fun. It was the SDS and other student organizations that had constant meetings about the next thing to do and then, when the next thing came and they didn’t know what to do, just acted spontaneously. But in between all these meetings there was a fair amount of sex. As a Detroit student told
Life
magazine, “We are not just eating and sleeping together, we’re protesting the war together!”
Ed Sanders, whose Fugs sang much about fugging, called the mid-sixties “the Golden Age of fucking,” which was as close as his plotless 1970 “novel of the Yippies,”
Shards of God,
set in 1968, came to a theme. Many couples were made and unmade in the course of the movement. Tom Hayden’s marriage to Casey Hayden, Mario Savio’s to fellow Free Speech Movement activist Suzanne Goldberg, and Mary King’s marriage to a fellow SNCC worker are just a few of the many marriages formed in the movements that did not last.
The attitude toward sex created an even deeper gap between generations. It was as though two completely different societies were cohabiting the same era. While Sanders was having his golden age in the East Village and Rudd was up at Columbia being saved by penicillin, City Councilman John J. Santucci, a Democrat, successfully pressured the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968 to remove from subway cars posters for the film
The Graduate,
because they showed Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in bed together.
The change in sexual mores was not just American. Young women in the Mexican student movement of 1968 shocked Mexican society by carrying signs saying “Virginity Causes Cancer.” The 1968 demonstrations in Paris began with a demand for coeducational dormitories. According to French myth, when President de Gaulle was told that the students at Nanterre wanted coeducational housing, the General, looking confused, turned to his aide and asked, “Why don’t they just meet in the cafés?”
In the United States, only a few progressive schools such as Oberlin had mixed dormitories. Many universities allowed more freedom for men than women. The Ivy League had separate universities for women with completely different rules. Columbia men certainly had far more privileges than Barnard women, who were not allowed to live anywhere other than the women’s dormitories for their first two years. It is strange to think of a nationwide controversy over an unknown coed’s living arrangements, but that is what unfolded for several weeks in 1968 when a
New York Times
journalist decided to report on the life of college women—just one of hundreds of articles on “the new lifestyle.” One sophomore bragged to the reporter, on condition that she not be identified by name, of how she had lied to the Barnard administration in order to be able to live off campus with her boyfriend.
Though the reporter respected her anonymity, Barnard, determined to weed out this public disgrace, followed the details and was able to identify the offender as a student named Linda LeClair and called for her expulsion. Students protested this treatment, many protesting that this could be happening only to a woman. But, strangely, the struggle of Linda LeClair—to cohabit or not cohabit—was not only covered on the front page of
The New York Times
for weeks, but it was also covered by
Time, Newsweek, Life,
and other national publications. Day after day the drama unfolded in the
Times—
how the Barnard School Council granted her a hearing, how hundreds went, how she argued for the rights of individuals, and finally how she was “wearing a bright orange shift and beaming brightly as she read the final verdict: no expulsion but banned from the school cafeteria.”
In the
Times
coverage, it was also mentioned that many of the students questioned “shook their heads in amusement.” To the outside press, this seemed an important story about a radically changing society. To the 1968 student, as to most of us today, it seemed hard to believe that such a petty affair would even make the newspapers.
Two days later, the
Times
was back with an article on LeClair’s parents headlined
FATHER DESPAIRS OF BARNARD DAUGHTER.
In Hudson, New Hampshire, Paul LeClair said, “We just don’t see eye to eye and just don’t know what can be done about it . . . what an individual does is one thing, but when she starts influencing hundreds of people, it’s wrong.”
The president of Barnard, Martha Peterson, was not content with the minor rebuke of the council and moved to expel LeClair despite the decision. Students staged a sit-in, blocking Peterson’s office. A petition, signed by 850 of Barnard’s 1,800 students, protested the expulsion. The office was awash in letters supporting or attacking the college sophomore, declaring that she had become the symbol of everything from civil liberties to the decline of the American family.
Martha Peterson said, “We learned also to our regret that public interest in sex on the college campus is insatiable.” But it was more than simply prying. The press was reflecting the common view that the “new generation” had a “new morality” and that for better or worse, the things youth were doing represented nothing less than a complete alteration in the values and mores of society with the far-reaching ramifications. Ed Sanders confidently wrote, “Forty years from now the Yippies and those who took part in the Peace-swarm of 1967–68 will be recognized for what they are, the most important cultural political force in the last 150 years of American civilization.” It was believed, at times with panic, at times with joy, that the fundamental nature of human society was changing.
Life
magazine wrote, “A sexual anthropologist of some future century analyzing the pill, the drive-in, the works of Harold Robbins, the Tween-Bra and all the other artifacts of the American Sexual Revolution, may consider the case of Linda LeClair and her boyfriend, Peter Behr, as a moment in which the morality of an era changed.” So with Hue under siege, marines dug in at Khe Sanh, the Biafran war growing harsher, the Middle East more volatile, the Senate investigating if the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was the pretext in August 1964 for the Vietnam War was a fraud, Rudi Dutschke and the German SDS on the streets of Berlin, Czechs and Poles defying Moscow—a Barnard student’s decision to live across the street in her boyfriend’s dorm room was front-page news.
Linda LeClair’s boyfriend, Peter Behr, seems to have almost never been consulted in the controversy. She dropped out of school and the two joined a commune. Behr, who did get his Columbia degree, went on to be a massage therapist. Barnard relaxed the rules, saying only parental permission was needed to live off campus. But in the fall of 1968, Barnard women rebelled against even this.
There was one thing Mark Rudd, growing up in an affluent New Jersey suburb on the edge of impoverished Newark, always wished his parents could make him understand. Why had they not done more to stop the Nazis when they first came to power? Surely there must have been something they could have tried to do. Despite this nagging notion, he had not been a politically active high school student. He lived in well-to-do Maplewood, where his parents had moved late in life when his father started to succeed in the real estate market. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves who had anglicized his Jewish-sounding last name to avoid anti-Semitism in the military.
Like many of his age, Mark Rudd had as his introduction to radical politics
Sing Out!
magazine, a journal of folk singing and protest songs that led him to the music of Ledbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. He loved to study, and many of the books he read came from his politically savvy girlfriend, the school intellectual. She even knew Herbert Marcuse’s stepson, Michael Neumann, who later became Rudd’s college roommate. Neumann’s older brother, Tommy, was a member of the affinity group the East Village Motherfuckers.
Rudd never played sports. Years later he liked to say that sex was his exercise—reading and sex with his girlfriend, who then went away to Sarah Lawrence. Rudd wanted to go to the University of Chicago, a school that had distinguished itself by canceling its sports program. In the end he chose Columbia so that he could be close to his girlfriend. But as often happens, once in college, both formed other attachments.
Aside from its Ivy League conservatism, Columbia was a reasonable choice for Rudd. In this institution that had originated the phrase
generation gap,
Rudd was not a good match with the administration, but he was with the students. Like Rudd, most Columbia students were not athletes. Rudd was told that Columbia had managed to run up a record twenty-year streak without winning a football game. The half-time band performed distinctive numbers, including one titled “Ode to the Diaphragm.” Fraternities barely existed. In the summer of 1968, Rudd and his friends rented a fraternity house on 114th Street for the summer, renaming it Sigma Delta Sigma—SDS.
In 1965, when Rudd first went to college, SDS was beginning to give up on its unsuccessful efforts to organize in the inner cities and recognize that college campuses offered the most fertile ground for recruitment. One night early in Rudd’s freshman year, a man named David Gilbert knocked on Rudd’s door and said, “We are having a meeting discussing things. Maybe you would like to come.”
That was all it took. “It was a social thing,” Rudd recalled. “People hang out. And the subculture is fun. There were drugs and girls. It was what was happening. Nobody thought about going to Wall Street in those days.”
Rudd’s life at Columbia was reshaped. He became an SDS campus radical, going to meetings and discussions, knocking on doors himself, and planning protests. There were many hours of meetings for every protest. “I liked talking about revolution—changing the world—make it a better place. Meetings were discussing important things, and it led to action. I must have gone to one thousand meetings in this five-year period. It was vastly different from my classes. The SDS people knew a lot. They knew a lot about Vietnam, about anticolonial revolutions, and nationalist movements.”
But what was always important to Rudd was that the talk translated into action. “I’ve always valued people who could read, think, discuss, and act. That is my idea of an intellectual,” Rudd recently said. He became known among radicals for his impatient taste for action—“the action faction,” was what the SDS started calling the Rudd contingent at Columbia. Rudd had returned from Cuba with a quote from José Martí that had been used by Che: “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen.”
He came back from Cuba in March, in his own words, “fired up with revolutionary fervor.” Square inch by square inch, his walls became covered with posters and pictures of Che—Che smoking, Che smiling, Che smoking and smiling, Che reflecting. In early spring Rudd had to go to a dentist, and confronted with the prospect of pain, he asked himself, What would Che do?
The business of the action faction at Columbia was deadly serious, though at times their pranks seemed more Yippie! than SDS. Or perhaps the activists, like most twenty-year-olds, were part adult and part teenager. Against the wishes of Rudd, the SDS voted in a meeting to confront the head of the Selective Service for New York City, an officer with the improbable name of Colonel Akst, who was to deliver a speech on campus. Rudd hated the idea of dignifying the Selective Service with probing questions. “What wimps,” he complained, resolving to find another course of action.
At that time the SDS had recently acquired a new chapter that fit well with Rudd’s action faction. The East Village Motherfuckers had joined the fast-growing SDS organization. The other necessary component for Rudd’s plan was someone who could approach the colonel without being recognized, since by early spring 1968 Rudd and his comrades had already become too well known. By blind luck, a self-proclaimed Berkeley radical fell into Rudd’s lap. He remembered hearing a friend complain of an irritating houseguest who talked a great deal about the revolution and violence and the importance of Berkeley as the revolutionary center of all that was happening. Rudd enlisted his help.
The colonel was to deliver his speech in Earl Hall, the religious center of the Columbia campus. “Red face shining beneath his proud cap,” was Rudd’s description of the colonel. Suddenly, from the back of the hall, the snare drums and fifes of “Yankee Doodle” were heard. While the audience turned to see the East Village Motherfuckers dressed as a hairy fife and drum corps, having given themselves the name “the Knickerboppers,” the unknown Berkeley revolutionary ran to the stage and perfectly planted a coconut cream pie on Colonel Akst’s red face. Rudd escaped down Broadway with the pie thrower, who, to Rudd’s dismay, had gotten carried away with the theatricality of the moment and pulled a bandanna over his face as a disguise. Rudd, for lack of a better idea, hid him in the closet of his girlfriend’s apartment.