More Sixties Turbulence
1965–1968

De Colores, de colores se visten los campos en la primavera
De Colores, son los pajaritos que vienen de afuera
De Colores, de colores es el arco que vemos lucir

CHORUS:

Y por eso los grandes amores de mucho colores
me gustan a mi.
Y por eso los grandes amores de mucho colores
me gustan a mi.

“De Colores” (traditional — a favorite sung at rallies of United Farm Workers Union)

TO EXPEDITE THE WRITING OF THESE MEMOIRS, every year henceforth will feature two major events affecting my life plus briefer items on others. In 1965, the two most momentous happenings were the merger of the production facilities of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, with the closing down of the afternoon News-Call-Bulletin, and the start of the historic Delano grape strike and the founding of the United Farm Workers Union.

We were all surprised in the Chronicle composing room when our general foreman Ed Griesmeier who was doing a decent job and was strongly pro-union was let go by top management in the spring of 1965 and was replaced by Win White, the unpopular general foreman at the SF Examiner. One of the conditions of work in ITU shops was that the foreman had to be a union member. But he was to only manage and not touch the type. White was an old-timer who had once worked for Hearst’s Herald-Examiner in Los Angeles. He was something of a nuisance hassle over the printers but a bit smarter than the late unlamented Ron Spindler who had only lasted seven weeks at the Chron and never went over the edge. Next, Hearst’s SF Examiner bought it’s afternoon circulation rival the Scripps-Howard chain’s SF News-Call-Bulletin. What was happening? We soon found out!

One day that summer it was announced that the Ex had shut down the News-Call and was merging its production facilities with those of our SF Chronicle. All production was to be moved to the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission and besides the mechanical trades there would only be a single circulation and advertising department. However, according to the Federal Sherman Anti-Trust Law, the editorial newsrooms of both papers would be legally separate, with the Chronicle editorial occupying the north side of the second floor, and the Examiner, on the south side with the composing room in the middle to serve both editorial functions. Outside of the newspapers, with the Chronicle continuing as the morning paper and the Examiner the afternoon, the new corporate entity would be called San Francisco Newspaper Printing Company, later changed to San Francisco Newspaper Agency. All this was done in secret from the Unions affected with hush hush negotiations between the newspapers and with the Justice Department and with Rep. Phillip Burton, the liberal Democratic Congressman from San Francisco’s Fifth District. Eight hundred newspaper workers all told lost their jobs in this shocker!

So early one morning printers from all three newspapers converged into our old Chronicle composing room for the day shift. Leon Olson was appointed the super chairperson for the whole new combined chapel with Art Stagliano his assistant. All chapel chairs from all three previous chapels became shift chairs as needed. So around 800 printers swarmed initially into the single composing room on three shifts! Priority lists from all three previous chapels were dovetailed into one sailboard in order of the members’ seniority. It was total pandemonium! But somehow we made do although we were all angry over the secret conspiratorial tactics of management in this whole deal.

With so many printers in every department it was hard to find enough work to do at a given time. In the ad alley the ad bank over-scale printers who doled out the type set on the linotypes to us display ad comes really couldn’t get up the galleys for that many of us to assemble that quickly. So we all hung around waiting for type galleys to work on. Much of this time was spent smoking and drinking coffee in the union’s chapel room, bitching about the merger mess and accusing both management and the union of not doing anything about it.

I did get to meet the people from the Ex and News-Call chapels who came aboard. Examiner adman William H. (Bill) Campbell became a close personal friend, one of the most brilliant guys I’ve ever known. A New Yorker who had briefly been a Stalinist YCLer in his teens, he was extremely well-read in numerous subjects and well-steeped in the arts and literature. Visiting Bill and his erudite wife Nikki in their flat in Bernal Heights one would be exposed to classical music for hours on their player while engaging in continually animated discussions from politics to sports and philosophy. Bill was a true universal Renaissance man in many ways besides being an outspoken union militant. Nick Oren came from the News-Call and was an activist in chapel matters, eventually becoming its secretary and Chapel Chair, and finally served as Secretary-Treasurer of Local 21 before retirement.

The reason the papers decided to merge was to save production costs to increase their bottom line markedly. So they needed to get rid of hundreds of the printer situation holders, now crowded into a single composing room. In agreement with the Union this didn’t provide for layoffs. We also had a large sub-board which was used by regulars who wanted to take time off the job providing work for extras. So management made an offer to situation holders for voluntary buyouts. A sum of $40,000 in cash was offered to situation holders with health benefits limited to 90 days that followed quitting. Quite a few took the bait especially with lower priority. Those nearing their retirement years didn’t. As I remember those nearing the age 62 early retirement age to collect Social Security were also included in the special cash buyout. I elected to stay as I was only 39 and feared trying to face the open job market outside of the trade with so much economic uncertainty ahead. Forty grand would disappear fast. Quite a few took travellers out of Local 21 and others slipped up as subs within other shops within the Local. Others slipped up the next day after quitting as subs at our new combined chapel at the bottom of the priority list. Some younger quits returned to school or to try their luck at other jobs outside of printing or even going into business. Norman Gilbert who had learned his trade in England did the latter and opened a print shop with another printer as a partner, became a proprietor ITU member, and operated a Union Label shop in the City. He was moderately successful for a number of years before his premature death.

Technology changes and increased anti-union pressures by employers to weaken working conditions resulted in work losses throughout our industry and led the smaller ITU Locals in Northern California to seek mergers with our large, stronger metropolitan Local 21 until all of them came under our jurisdictional banner by the early 1970s. These were Local #577 of Santa Rosa, #389 of Vallejo, #521 of Palo Alto, #231 of San Jose, #36 of Oakland, #595 of Mount Diablo, and #600 of Petaluma.

Many printers were critical of the Union’s giving in on a number of shop practices in this merger after-match. A new contract proposal had to do deal with management’s insistence of doing away with our ages-old practice and union law of the right of members to contest discharges of members, making the appellate process handled in-house by the union in all its stages. This management demand were fighting words to many of us. To me, chapel and union meetings on discharges would do away with an institution that was the closest thing to worker control that I knew of in American industry, which did the concept of anarcho-syndicalism proud. Its loss meant the surrender of rank and file member control which would not leave the discharge issue something to be decided by management and union bureaucracies behind the scenes away from the shop floor and eventually involve arbitrators. It was no secret that President Russ Wagle appeared favorable to such change as the union appellate process was somewhat cumbersome and time consuming particularly when the issue was frequently over drunkenness. I once said to Russ, who I liked as a simpatico and able administrator, that the process we had involved the principle of the members’ right to judge their peers and we’d be giving up a precious democratic right, to which argument he scoffed. There were other items where management wanted to increase its prerogatives in any future contract to which many of us objected. The employer’s solution was to offer money in exchange for compromising our working practices. We also wanted to fight for initiatives which would enhance our job security in the future. In contract negotiations our general demand had been for a reduced four-day work week with no loss in pay, which in contract talks was a throw away issue for the union when the nitty-gritty point was reached. I had been a loyal “Prog” to that point but was losing my faith in the local Progressive Party’s militance.

So a number of us formed a “rank-and-file-committee” outside of the union’s political party structures to pressure for a stronger contract to meet our needs. We issued a nine-point program in a flyer to go beyond the conventional which we circulated around the Union, becoming known as “The Nine-Point Committee” around the Union. A number of us were rank and file Progs, several unaffiliated supporters, plus one Independent, John King, a former SF Examiner activist hailing from Boston and a stout fighter for union rights.

A vacancy appeared in our delegation to the San Francisco Labor Council. Since the post would be filled by special election at a union meeting vote since no general elections were due for some time, the Progressive Club nominated me for the post. At this point I was losing my faith in the party machine politics but since I felt I could make a contribution to the work of the Labor Council, I welcomed the nomination and at this point was still editor of the Golden Gate Progressive. The Independents nominated Richard, one of their few younger active members, to run for the post whose last name I’ve forgotten but who I’ll call “Brown.”. At that point the Indie Party’s editor attacked our Nine-Point Committee in their newspaper, questioning who we were and smearing us as some kind of “subversive” element out to disrupt the Union. Much to everyone’s surprise, “Brown” sent out a flyer blasting the Indie editor for his aspersions on our rank and file group’s loyalty suggesting us as sincere printers out to fight for the best possible contract. What made this defense of us even more surprising was that Richard was the son-in-law of Sterling Rounds, the last Indie President of Local 21. While Richard remained on the ballot as a candidate he did no further active campaigning. So I was overwhelmingly voted to the Council at the next meeting although Richard became a hero in the Local because of his principled stand and the Indie editor ended up eating humble pie.

At this point, the Progressive negotiators didn’t consider our Nine-Point Committee a threat but welcomed us as a rank-and-file members’ pressure group that would strengthening them in the fight for an acceptable contract. But little did they realize we were no patsies or appendage to the Prog machine but ended up in increasing numbers opposing the contract it finally recommended. But more on that later.

DELANO GRAPE STRIKE 1965–1970

One of the most exciting developments of 1965 was the birth of a promising union organizing effort of California farm workers in the grape growing industry that electrified the nation with the Delano Grape Strike and consumer boycott. Numerous efforts to organize agricultural workers in this state earlier had fizzled out. In the early 1930s some early organizing traction seemed promising with the Communist Party playing a leading part,. including a young Dorothy Healey of Los Angeles who later became a national figure in CP politics. But strong grower resistance proved too much to overcome then. On September 8, predominantly Filipino members of the AFL-CIO’s fledgling Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee led by Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gaines, and Pete Velasco struck the Delano table grape industry with demands to increase their pay to equal the Federal minimum wage. A week later community-based Mexican-American National Farm Workers Association workers led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Richard Chavez walked off the job in support of AWOC. In August, 1970 NFA and AWOC merged into the United Farm Workers Union, and expanded the Delano Grape Strike int a national boycott movement of table grapes that led to eventual victory in 1970. The operation on the ground in the struck area was conducted on nonviolent Gandhian principles which were part of Cesar Chavez’s Roman Catholic Christian ethic.

The boycott movement caught on in the Bay Area and early on members of our Typo Union were involved in support work in the grape strike. I remember picketing in front of a San Francisco market which was joined by Cesar and his wife Helen Chavez. One Saturday at work we took a collection in the Newspaper Chapel that netted about $300. Right after work that day, Eugene Jack, a fellow comp, and I jumped into Gene’s car and headed for Delano to deliver this support and see what was happening. We were directed to a shed late that night where a younger Dolores Huerta and some of the strikers were maintaining a vigil over the possibility of scabs from the vineyards loading grapes into a freight car in a nearby siding. We had a great welcoming discussion. I recall seeing IWW stalwart Eugene Nelson standing nearby scanning the great Wobbly “Little Red Songbook.” Cesar had commissioned Gene to write the first book about the grape strike, Huelga, which had to be in print within 30 days, and created a publishing sensation. Late that night, all fired, up, Gene and I barrelled back into the Bay Area eager to engage in the struggle. Last year, 2015, I attended a memorial for Don Watson, an ILWU stalwart and a great champion of the grape struggle at the Longshore Clerks Union Hall in San Francisco. Dolores Huerta, now in her 80s and a labor and women’s movement icon, gave a eulogy to Don and our eyes met afterward. “Hey, I remember you,” she told me, “you were in the first union delegation ever to bring a money donation to us in Delano back in 1965 one night.” I felt honored by her recollection as we reminisced.

LOCAL 21’s FARM WORKER ASSISTANCE

Our Chronicle chapel immediately became a major supporter of the Delano Grape Strike and many of us contributed many hours in local boycott activity at San Francisco supermarkets for the next several years. We started a voluntary buck-a-month collection in the Chapel to be sent to Delano on an ongoing basis. The San Francisco labor movement began a long term project of monthly car caravans to Delano bringing food, clothing, money, and other needed supplies to our striking sisters and brothers and their families. This became a regular monthly trip for me and many of us for several years, carpooling in this great mission to organize the agricultural workers of California. So many of our Local 21 members joined in powerfully in this support campaign.

John King, a middle-aged lino operator who came from the Examiner Chapel, was one of our most militant volunteers in these campaigns. Originally from Boston, John was a recovering alcoholic who was a regular attender and volunteer at AA meetings although he had been off the sauce for many years. He was something of an anomaly as an Independent Party member as he spent more time with us ITU radicals than with the much more conservative Indies. Later in the Delano effort John joined in the great March to Sacramento by the UFW that helped enormously to win the strike. He put on a sub for several weeks so he could be part of the march. Jack Olsen once said that John reminded him of an old-time Wobbly in his untiring dedicated rank and file militancy. Linda and Ken Stevenson, quite new to our combined Chapel, also joined as dedicated stalwarts. Ken had been a long-time travelling ITU printer, while Linda came to us from the Oakland Tribune where she had gotten her union card as a teletypesetter operator, a new transitional form of typesetting toward complete computerization of the trade. We had a considerable influx of younger women into the trade and union in this period as TTS operators, like Linda. Somewhere in this process she and Ken were married. Linda, particularly, almost immediately joined in Delano support work. She and John King collaborated in creating a program to deliver fresh milk to the children and families of the Delano strikers, to be delivered daily through a dairy in that area to UFW Headquarters at Filipino Hall in that town to the strike kitchen for dispersal to the community. Our monthly buck-a-month donations would now be focussed on the Milk Fund. One Christmas period Linda organized a toy collection campaign in the Union to be sent to the children of Delano. This was a tremendous success in the response of our members. Even our dour composing room foreman Win White donated a couple of dolls. Although many unions contributed generously to the cause of the grape strikers, these efforts by our Local 21 printers did not go unnoticed in Delano. I greatly valued my friendship with Linda, John and Ken, and though the two men have left our midst long ago. as well as Linda’s later printer husband, Pierre Lanneret, who came to us from France, I still keep in touch with Linda (now Kerth), who lives in retirement at senior housing in Stillwater, Oklahoma, as a favorite friend.

Before I leave the Farm Worker issue for now I wish to pay tribute to the late Anne Draper (1917–1973) and Don Watson (1929–2015) who contributed so much to the struggles of the grape strike in those days. Comrade Draper, as Union Label Director of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in San Francisco, was a major public spokesperson in the labor movement to Huelga and was a leader of the monthly support caravans from the Bay Area to Delano and was much loved by the farm workers. Don Watson, of the ILWU Local 34 Clerks Union was an early activist supporter and researcher who devoted much time to the effort. Don and I rode to Delano together frequently during the caravans and we were activists in a lot of the Bay Area boycott efforts. Don passed away in late 2015.

HERMAN BENSON — UNION DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

About the most valuable group to develop in the early fighting for union democracy was founded by Herman Benson, who had come to the SP when the ISL disbanded, was Union Democracy in Action which supported the democratic rights of labor activists who often paid the price of taking on union bureaucracy from ruling labor hierarchs. In 1972, it was renamed Association for Union Democracy which took on legal battles of union dissidents under the only decent provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. After the firing of Stan Weir and the ILWU B-Men by the Bridges Administration for demanding more democratic rights in the Union, the UDA took up the case. SP members joined in the fight and I became an early UDA member. The B-Men eventually lost a 17-year court battle on the issue. Stan later conceded it really hadn’t been worth it all but only drained the energies of the union dissidents in a lost battle. Stan went on to teach labor studies classes at the University of Illinois and moved with his family to San Pedro later where he founded Singlejack Books which published numerous small booklets of and by union militants about their working lives. A most valuable booklet Singlejack Books produced was “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer,” in collaboration with union rights attorney Staughton Lynd, an icon of the American libertarian left. I circulated numerous copies of this handbook over the years.

Meantime, Comrade Benson was covering other cases of labor racketeering and democratic reform movements by union dissidents in his valuable newsletter Union Democracy in Action. Same as in Benson’s New York there was gross corruption in the Bay Area’s Painters’ Union Locals and District Councils. A colorful labor rebel, an ex-seaman named Dow Wilson had organized a powerful movement of rank and file painters which took power over the crooks to become Secretary of San Francisco Painters Local #4. (As a young merchant seaman he had sailed from East Coast ports with Emmet McGuire, a Local 21 union printer at our newspapers.) In his Union Democracy In Action, Herman featured interviews with Wilson about his reform and democratizing efforts in the Bay Area painters’ union locals. Then on the night of April 5, 1966, Wilson (then 40) was riddled to death with shotgun blasts on San Francisco’s 16th Street just outside the Labor Temple by anonymous gunmen. On May 8, Lloyd Green, Secretary of Hayward Painters’ Local #1178, an ally of Dow Wilson, died similarly from a shotgun attack through the window of his union office while he was inside. It didn’t take too long to apprehend the assassins of these men, racketeering gangster officials of the Painters in Northern California, who Wilson and Green staked their lives on ridding the labor movement of their foul ilk. As a member of the SF Labor Council I recall attending the huge memorial service for Wilson at the Labor Temple auditorium a few short weeks later. As a volunteer for the AUD, I visited Dow Wilson’s successor as secretary of Painters’ Local 4, Morris Evenson, to pick up extra copies of UDA condemning the murders of these union militants to circulate to the labor public. Evenson was a decent guy who continued to Administer Local 4 in the Dow Wilson tradition. Herm Benson continued his AUD mission in support of honest union democracy for decades after. and at this writing, is still alive at 100, living in NYC. His book “Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers — How Reformers Transformed the Labor Movement.” AUD 2004, should be in the library of every labor activist fighting for union democracy. Unfortunately, corruption is still rife in within business union bureaucracies, a battle that will never end. Herman came out of the Shachtmanite experience but his lifelong mission is a lot different than that of the founder of that political current whose later life was as a servile devotee of the George Meany, Lane Kirkland-style AFL-CIO top hierarchy which was no friend of rank and file union dissidents.

BETTINA F. APTHEKER — FSM STUDENT LEADER

The student rebellion at UC-Berkeley Campus and elsewhere was touched upon generally in Memoir #21. No doubt the outstanding luminary of the Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus was the brilliant, charismatic Mario Savio. There were many others as the Students for a Democratic Society was mushrooming across the country portending a new kind of radicalism on the American scene which transcended the Old Left with innovative ideas, essentially calling for “all power to the imagination.” Here I want to focus on the best known Communist Party member in the FSM leadership, Bettina F. Aptheker, who moved beyond the rigid orthodoxy of her “Red Diaper” origins as the daughter of prominent CP parents in New York, Marxist scholar Dr. Herbert Aptheker and his wife Fay, retaining what was of value in that experience, but opening up to the excitement of the new wave with her New Left peers. Bettina was close to Savio and other FSM spokespersons, becoming a highly articulate and effective member of the movement.

She was part and parcel of everything FSM was all about. She was on the scene around the car in which Jack Weinberg was trapped, the mass actions around Sproul Hall and Plaza in which she was beaten up and arrested and spent time in Santa Rita jail. She had been in the Mel’s Drive-in protests earlier to break discrimination in hiring, Sheraton Palace sit-ins and at San Francisco’s Auto Row. She was militantly involved in the growing Vietnam war protests and was beaten up and busted in the later struggle to keep the counter-culture People’s Park an open public space in Berkeley to frustrate the University’s plan to build a parking lot to occupy the plot. She developed into a leading outspoken feminist which became a lifetime mission as she grew to become the head of women’s studies in her professional career at UC Santa Cruz. Bettina was totally fearless, overcoming a shyness and lack of self-worth, partially due to early and later exposure to sexual molestation which had led to suicide attempts. Her excellent memoir: “Intimate Politics — How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel” — Seal Press, 2006, is must reading for every radical and progressive about a young woman’s journey of growth and development within the politics of her time.

Having gone from a doctrinaire CP lefty in my own earlier college years of 1948–50, I just want to cite a couple of examples of Bettina’s own metamorphosis from being a Red Diaper baby who grew up in the restrictive authoritarian political culture of the CP to a free-spirited critically thinking radical feminism and lesbianism, sparked by her involvement in the FSM environment at Cal. According to her memoir when as a Party member she condemned the Moscow-engendered military attack on Czechoslovakia in 1968 by her vote on the CP’s National Committee as opposed to her father’s assent, Gus Hall, the doctrinaire Stalinist party secretary told her: “I should always listen to my Pop,” as a sign of his patronizing arrogance. At the same occasion she overheard Hall’s remark to a another Party male sexist about CPer Dorothy Healey’s similar dissent as Bettina’s on the travesty of Czechoslovakia, “What she needs is a good lay.” Although Bettina stuck around the CP for somewhat longer, her criticism of her male CP comrades’ “male chauvinism” was only further reinforced. Later, as Aptheker was in the process of writing a book of her own, Hall said she should give it to the National Committee to review prior to publication. Which she adamantly declined to do, as an attempt to control her expression of free speech. “Party line,” be damned!

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

I attended Bettina’s reading of “Intimate Politics” at Pegasus Books in Berkeley soon after its publication and found her a warm and engaging personality and totally open and honest in her remarks, letting it all hang out. Her book is an excellent history of her times with a personalized stamp which is a joy to read.

RISE AND FALL OF SDS

A burgeoning New Left student movement called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in 1960 under the aegis of the social democratic League for Industrial Democracy whose own Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) had become defunct. To increase its appeal beyond “industry” to a much broader radicalism encompassing the massive civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, it dropped the term “industrial.” In 1962, at its annual convention in Port Huron, Michigan, SDS adopted a statement of principles entitled “The Port Huron Statement “ initially authored by New Left radical activist Tom Hayden. It didn’t call explicitly for socialism, but proposed a vision of left-wing populism that stirred up to a hundred thousand American youth into activism at its height in the 1960s. SDS initially had the support of democratic socialists like Mike Harrington and Irving Howe, but when it voted to eliminate an exclusionary clause that barred Communist Party lefties from joining, it alarmed Mike so that he switched the locks to the SDS office at LID headquarters. The old SP-USA fear of being tagged “communist” from the McCarthy years, in its public statements always emphasized its objections to Stalinism as alien to democratic socialism. As a burnt-out case from my CP college years, as an SP Third Camper opposed to imperialism in all its forms I was quite sensitive to being tagged with the “authoritarian left” myself at the time. But joining in with the massive anti-war marches this became irrelevant to activism which included participants from all tendencies of the Left so that most of the youth movement became “anti-Anti-Communist.” Rightist Realignment partisan National Secretary Joan Suall was not happy about our San Francisco SP Local participation in the giant peace marches where some carried Viet Cong flags and shouted: “Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to Win!” She said that we should at least pass out leaflets at the marches disassociating ourselves from these elements, which would have seen us being thrown out on our asses. It was US imperialism which was the chief villain in Vietnam who joined with the corrupt and dictatorial South Vietnamese rulers to pick up the cudgels where French imperialism had given up the ghost at Dien Phien Phu. Although quite a few left wing SP youth joined SDS as well, Realignment SPers broke off any association with SDS declaring its street and campus radicalism as immature, irresponsible, and pro-totalitarian. All efforts should be focussed on Democratic Party politics. Later Mike Harrington said he regretted the changing of the locks at the LID office as he had become alienated from important vital currents of the growing New Left. But as is common with growing mass movements, factional in-fighting developed in SDS, with a Maoist Progressive Labor Party entryist faction arrayed against a growing Weatherman current which eventually degenerated into a violent underground terrorist group associated with bombings. So by 1974 what had started out as promising youth movement rarely seen in America was history.

1966 SP CONVENTION WIN FOR ITS LEFT

The 1966 Socialist Party National Convention in New York City was full of unexpected surprises. The Third Camp Marxist-Leninists around Hal and Anne Draper had left the SP and founded the Independent Socialist Committee, later International Socialists, seeing the SP umbrella as it saw it becoming too compromised with its Realignment policy’s involvement with the Democratic Party and it’s equivocal stance on the Vietnam War which ranged from a weak Negotiations Now! proposal to an incipient neo-con-style support of Lyndon Johnson’s war policies by the Shachtmanite Right. So at Convention time this left us on the non-Leninist anti-war Left in a seemingly weak position in delegate strength. But there had been a quiet recruitment for the latter in Chicago and a strong left growth in the Indianapolis Local led by attorney Don Anderson and his spouse Carly. Actually, the Indianapolis Local dabbled in major party politics although it was strong with its anti-war and racial justice politics. A strong new Left spokesperson was history professor Bill Allen from the University of Missouri, and we were joined by elements of the Shachtman left who agreed with the traditional SP left rather than the IS or Shachtman-Harrington “Realos.” We still had something of a pacifist component, as well. So surprise, surprise, came the elections for the National Committee, and our Left bloc took the majority of the NC seats! The “Realos” were dumbfounded since New York City was their strongest base. They thought they would take the majority in a breeze. A hip young comrade from Local Indianapolis, George Woywod became the new National Secretary for a two-year term at the New York National Office. Carl Dahlgren of the left-wing Local Philadelphia replaced “Realo” editor Paul Feldman on “New America,” the SP national monthly newspaper. The change on NA content was immediate. For instance Carl ran a great article about the socialist New Democratic Party of Canada which Feldman had ignored, only concentrating on who to support in Democratic Party politics. It was like a breath of fresh air to have socialist content in our Party press once more.

1967 — SAN FRANCISCO’S ‘SUMMER OF LOVE’

 If you’re going to San Francisco
 Be sure you’ll wear some flowers in your hair
 If you’re going to San Francisco
 You’re going to meet some gentle people there

 For those who come to San Francisco
 Summertime will be a love-in there
 In the streets of San Francisco
 Gentle people with flowers in their hair

That summer perhaps a hundred thousand young kids flooded the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District and Golden Gate Park immersing themselves in a counter-culture awash in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This was the explosion of the mass anarchic hippie revolution that saw communes, head shops, rock bands, and Haight Street was an inchoate crowd scene, with both young women and men sporting around in tie-dyed shirts and cast-off cargo pants and Ho Chi Minh sandals cut and hewed from old tire threads. There were monster rock concerts continually in Golden Gate Park, psychedelic art and clothing everywhere in old storefront dives. Walk the paths of Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park and one could get stoned from the contact highs from Hippie Hill which was a huge, crowded be-in of bodies immersed in marijuana haze almost 24–7. Tiny book and music stores pop up everywhere selling beads, psychedelic posters and art paraphernalia. Coffee shops and cafes catering to the counter-culture sprung up everywhere. Nobody had any money to speak of so Emmett Grogan’s socially anarchistic Diggers served free food in Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle daily to thousands of hungry mouths. Those who worked made mostly the scene of low wage temp and part-time jobs to squeak by on. Others picked up on the illicit marijuana and harder addictive drug trade and some became powerful and successful narco-capitalists. Janis Joplin, a young refugee from the oil town of Port Arthur, Texas, became a huge successful celebrity as a husky-voiced rock and blues singer with Big Brother and the Holding Company, immersed in alcohol, hard narcotics and wild sex with whatever gender, a drug overdose ending her life at age 27. During that summer I was living close to the Haight on Fell Street near Divisadero, within easy walking distance from the scene, and would frequently walk around its neighborhoods in the evenings when off work to take in the experience. A housemate who was a psychology grad student at SF State introduced me to marijuana for the first time, so I added the weed to alcohol as a lifestyle, although I never used anything stronger than hashish during my four years or so on the pot scene. The so-called gentle summer of love with flowers in the hair didn’t last more than two years in the Haight. Soon heavy-duty drug dealers, street gangsters, and pimps came to dominate the district with robbery and gunplay to drive much of the pacifistic, gentle counter-culture to disperse elsewhere in The City or into the growing rural commune scene in Mendocino, Sonoma, and Humboldt Counties.

1968 — REVOLTS IN PARIS, PRAGUE

1968 was a remarkable year in many ways. Following campus revolts in Berkeley, which spread to other universities in the US, a student uprising in Paris joined by factory workers almost brought about an overthrow of the French government. A massive citizens movement against stifling Soviet-style Stalinism arose in Czechoslovakia, with dissident Communist premier Alexander Dubchek calling for “socialism with a human face,” before being crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks. The Vietnam War intensified as President Johnson hugely reinforced American military presence in that beleaguered country brought on intensified resistence against the invasion by the communist National Liberation Front with considerable success. A worldwide antiwar movement arose in protest against US imperialism, no less than among our own troops with their passive resistance and draft age American youth successfully seeking sanctuary in sympathetic Canada and Sweden. Open revolt broke out in Chicago streets at the Democratic Party convention, brutally crushed by cops. An opposition left wing Peace and Freedom Party gained ballot status in California. The right wing Richard Nixon defeated lack-luster machine Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey for the Presidency.

1968 SOCIALIST PARTY CONVENTION

Against this dramatic international scenario, the 1968 Socialist Party Convention in Chicago seemed like small potatoes. A couple of years before, with a dwindling SP presence in San Francisco, our local was dissolved with the active encouragement of the East Bay Local under a new Realignment leadership of James T. Burnett, a former YSL youth in Los Angeles, who during his tenure as YPSL National Secretary in New York, had become an ardent supporter of Max Shachtman’s increasingly rightist politics. Yet I and some of the old San Francisco Local plus some new recruits reapplied for a new charter from the National Office. Then Realignment National Secretary Joan Suall (Irwin Suall’s sister-in-law) wasn’t that happy about our presence as a Local again since we wouldn’t be in the Realo camp, but our credentials were in order and the National Action Committee granted our charter. So I represented our Local at the Chicago Convention.

The war scene intensified our partisan differences on the convention floor. The Realos supported whatever Democratic Party candidate who would be nominated, which was Humphrey who had kept his mouth shut to LBJ’s war policies as President. Comrade Bill Allen from Missouri disdainfully referred to him as “Hubert Horatio Humperdink.” Our Left was seeking an independent antiwar candidate to support since the SP wouldn’t have its own. We knew there were differences in the Realo Caucus on the war as Mike Harrington and his supporters were in sympathy with mainstreamers in the antiwar movement. but wouldn’t break caucus discipline over the issue of Realignment with the Dem Party. As I wrote later in the Party’s internal discussion bulletin “Hammer and Tongs”, the Realignment Caucus operated “with Bolshevik discipline and a right wing social democratic politics.” Despite differences, with Harringtonites favoring more liberal-minded Democrats over the hard line Shachtmanite advocacy of ringers like Humphrey or the belligerently pro-war Sen. Henry Jackson, of Washington. Mike wouldn’t break publicly with the right on this, while anonymously taking part in anti-war marches in New York City as an individual. Anyway, the Realos were well organized at this convention and their hard muscle politics were able to oust our loose left alliance from the National Committee majority and take control of the NC again. Our George Woywod was dumped as National Secretary and Carl Dahlgren as New America editor. Mike Harrington was elected National Chair and Realo machine guy Penn Kemble, national secretary. Paul Feldman returned as NA editor.

But our Left grouping was not about to vanish vanquished into the night. As the Convention was concluded and the ritual “Internationale” was sung, we convened in a hotel meeting room and formed a national Debs Caucus to take the Party back. “Ex’s” who had walked away in disgust earlier from the Party, said “why bother?” We thought the SP was our legacy and we should fight for it. In this initial meeting were comrades of the old SP Left, Libs like Virgil J. Vogel and Peyer Meyer of Chicago and Shachtmanites who had broken with their old Master but didn’t want to retreat into another Leninist sect. Among these was Saul Mendelsohn of Chicago, who later became part of the yet unformed Democratic Socialists of America, We Debsians hurriedly made plans to put ourselves on the map. We decided to issue our own party newspaper, which on my recommendation was called “The Socialist Tribune,” after the left wing Tribune of the British Labor Party. It was published at first in Los Angeles for some months and I contributed many articles for it. Pro-Debs Caucus support existed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Long Island, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Seattle, Denver, and Cleveland. A summer conference of the Debs Caucus was proposed for Indianapolis. The fact that we were now in existence and active was a morale booster for the SP left.

FINAL BATTLE OF NORMAN THOMAS

A resolution on the Vietnam War at the 1968 Convention passed by the Realo Majority was put to a referendum vote of the general membership strongly influenced by Shachtman’s younger cadre Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz as well as Bayard Rustin who had strayed from his WWII stance as a pacifist C.O. which brought him prison time, to the George Meany pro-war politics of Der Max. Our Debs Caucus attacked this proposal in Hammer & Tongs in favor of unilateral withdrawal. Another Realo majority resolution supported the election of Hubert Humphrey as Democratic Party candidate for President which the Debs Caucus also argued against in its referendum ballot argument in favor of a viable Third Party Left candidate. According to Debs Caucus supporter and pacifist Eugene Suter, Mike Harrington visited Comrade Thomas in his hospital sickbed urging the aged party leader to support the majority proposal although he himself was now also in favor of unilateral withdrawal now personally as well as supporting a politics of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party rather than that of Meany’s AFL-CIO hard line. Again, Mike followed the “democratic centralism” of the Realo Caucus in subordinating his personal exceptions. Yet Mike was a persuasive politician and got Thomas to vote for the proposals. They passed, but while the referendum voting was on, Thomas had further studied the Debs Caucus arguments against the referendum issues and changed his mind about his own vote. He reared up from his sickbed, and outraged, demanded the National Office do a revote of the referendum as he felt he’d been sold a bill of goods on both counts by Cde. Harrington. It showed the profound moral impact of the old icon on his deathbed that he was able to get the National Office to back down for another vote which the Realos won but by a reduced margin. Still angry, Cde. Thomas informed the party that if any members wanted to write in the name “Norman Thomas” in the 1968 Presidential race they had his approval to do so, compared to Humphrey’s compromised role as part of the LBJ war machine in Vietnam.

So the old and sick SP hero went out as the fiery battler for peace and justice he had been during his earlier Presidential campaigns in the Depression Era. I had seen a final glimpse of this indomitable spirit during May of 1965, when Thomas had been the most convincing and passionate speaker to tens of thousands at the Vietnam Day teach-ins at the University of California campus in Berkeley. This mass teach-in was the last time I saw this great leader in action. I did to get to talk with him personally after that day’s rally at a private reception for Norman of Berkeley’s Socialist House at Dwight Way and Telegraph, soon to be vacated by Bogdan and Betsy Denitch as Bogdan would go to New York for graduate study. The only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for that day’s happening, was the putdown of Norman Thomas’s oratory by a local right wing Shactmanite cynic who said the old Socialist campaigner had sounded like the tirades of some back-country Southern stump preacher. To me he was the equal of Martin Luther King Jr. in eloquence and passion that day! The venerable Socialist warrior passed away on December 19, 1968 at age 84.

HELL’S ANGELS ATTACK OAKLAND PEACE MARCH

As the bloodbath in Vietnam intensified, 15,000 demonstrators marched from the Berkeley campus on October 16, 1968 along Telegraph Avenue with the Oakland Army base its intended destination. They were stopped at the Oakland border by 400 heavily-armed Oakland cops massed in wedge formation ready for battle led by police chief Toothman. Suddenly, the police line opened up to allow a gang from the notorious motorcycle club Hells’ Angels to come through to beat up the leaders of the antiwar contingent. They attacked the marchers, tore up their signs and banners and smashed their communication equipment before being subdued by Berkeley police. This pre-arranged strategy between the Oakland police and the semi-outlaw Angels created a huge public uproar. Even some of the Hell’s Angels rued colluding with their old enemy, the cops, though they had no love for the sandal and bead-wearing effete middle class liberals from the University whom they saw as a bunch of un-American commies. The anti-war movement had an ally in non-conventional writer Ken Kesey who would do dope with Hell’s Angels leader Sonny Barger and his boys at his house in the coastal hills at La Honda. So, of course, the anti-war movement was not going to be intimidated from having another march through Oakland the following month, but they needed Kesey as the key contact person in negotiations with the scruffy, lumpen proletarian Angels to dissuade them from attacking the marchers again. The traditional animosity between the cops and the motorcycle gang was a key factor to exploit. The poet Allen Ginsberg, Beat personality Neal Cassady and Kesey’s Merry Pranksters joined the negotiations at Sonny Barger’s Oakland house, laced with copious dropping of righteous acid, according to Angels biographer gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s account. The presence of the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the mix confounded the Angels. Said one Angel, Terry, per Thompson: “That god-damned Ginsberg is going to fuck us all up. For a guy that ain’t straight, he’s about the straightest son-of-bitch I’ve ever seen. Man, you should have been there when he told Sonny he loved him. Sonny didn’t know what the hell to say.” Somewhere in the acid-fumed palaver, a deal was struck. Hells’ Angels wouldn’t try to stop future marches.

In mid-November, fellow Typo Union brother Gene Jack joined me in the follow-up March to Oakland in a contingent of thousands of protestors. As we crossed the Oakland line, its heavily armed police ranks hemmed us in on both sides, glaring with hatred in their eyes as they watched us passing through. I felt like I was in Nazi Germany. The demo moved along uneventfully and terminated at De Fremery Park in Oakland, often called Li’l Bobby Hutton Park in the community in the memory of a young Black Panther who had been murdered in a shoot-out with the self-same Oakland cops. But we had proved our point with this follow-up demonstration of strength: “The antiwar movement is not going be intimidated until the troops are brought home from Vietnam and the war is over.”

1968 SAN FRANCISCO NEWSPAPER STRIKE

During 1968 the San Francisco Metro newspapers, Chronicle and Examiner went on a 52-Day newspaper strike that shut down the whole plant with the employer not trying to run scabs the entire time. The basic motivation was a union-busting strike by the Hearst chain at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the only union metro daily in that city. Seeing the implications of the L.A. threat saw a spontaneous picket line that same day before the second shift at our plant which no one crossed in support of our beleaguered brothers and sisters down South. There was only one of the thirteen unions at the ChronEx with an open contract in dispute, but it gave us all a legal pretext to shut the whole plant down. Unfortunately, no other Hearst paper in the country followed our example which spelled curtains for the Herald-Ex in L.A. Some had contracts in effect they didn’t dare breach in solidarity with the Southland unions that were shut out, and others with open contracts quickly settled with favorable agreements offered for their workers to keep them off Hearst’s back about L.A. No one followed our San Francisco example of solidarity. All this time I was in almost daily contact with my L.A. Typo SP comrade Charlie Curtiss, a Herald-Ex printer, who got me into the ITU in 1957, about was happening thereabouts.

Actually, the San Francisco business community was in more sympathy with our unions rather than management as it had been screwed royally by the newspapers here ever since the 1965 merger of the production facilities. Talk about monopoly press. The SF newspapers doubled the advertising rates for SF businesses forcing them to put ads in both papers whether they wanted to or not. So San Francisco restaurants and hotels poured food contributions to our SF strike headquarters when solicited by our community support strike committees. We never ate so good with so many gourmet goodies sent us. Even the real estate people were highly pissed at the double-priced advertising policies of the papers, as one realtor told me. One day the ancient fabled San Francisco madame Sally Stanford came to strike headquarters in a chauffeured limousine to bring us some fancy goodies from her plush Valhalla restaurant in Sausalito! To get us off their backs so they could smash LA at their leisure, the SF paper gave us reasonably favorable terms to settle for the most part. So we were all given contract incentives to get us back to work, but there was some takeaways for us printers. I recall it may have been then when we lost our hallowed clause in our ITU General Laws that allowed rank and file members to vote on discharges of their composing room brethren. The new contract brought a common expiration date for all unions in the plant bringing about a Council of Newspaper Unions to supposedly strengthen us. Our new ITU President John Pilch came to our strike settlement mass meeting at the San Francisco Labor Temple and persuaded us to go agree and go back to work. Herald-Ex striker Charlie Curtiss came and sat quietly in the audience as a conscience for the newspaper workers on the streets in L.A. Those of our rank and file nine-point committee spoke out critically about some of the issues of the settlement but lost out as the contract was approved by a sizeable majority. We made some material gains but L.A. went down the drain.

 PEACE AND FREEDOM PARTY FOUNDED

Considerable anger about Lyndon Johnson’s role in magnifying the horror of the Vietnam erased the perceptions about his domestic Great Society programs and now more clearly saw the Democratic Party as an integral component of US capitalist imperialism and led to another attempt to found an independent political party of the left. This came about with the formation of the Peace and Freedom Party in California and some other states despite the increasingly restrictive election laws on ballot access for new minority parties. So the Peace and Freedom Party of California was founded at a convention in Richmond in 1968. With the growing unpopularity of the Democrats as a war party it wasn’t difficult for to organize petition gatherers to gain it ballot status for the 1968 Presidential election. although I wasn’t active in its organizational milieu but was supportive, and attended several sessions of its founding convention at the Richmond Municipal Auditorium. The Draperite secessionists from the SP were part and parcel of it as they organized their Independent Socialist Club to be one of its many tendencies. Ann Draper glowed with optimism at the P&F being the beginnings off a new electoral political movement outside of the two twin corporate parties of capital. Radicals from many currents joined in, including Maoists, Black Panthers, our LA SPers and Debs Caucus folks. My union sister Linda Stevenson, who had joined the Draper group, registered me as a P&F voter. Ex-convict Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver who had sought redemption with a critically acclaimed book “Soul on Ice” about his life became an instant celebrity and leading candidate for President for the new party and a cult hero for many of the New Left. On the East Coast, popular black comedian Dick Gregory was another Presidential candidate. Radicals, both old and young joined this new antiwar social justice party. Standing aloof from it was the Realignment sector of the SP, including from the Bay Area, as well as the Communist Party, which after its detour with the Progressive Party in 1948, was hostile to P&F, and operated in the Democratic Party, although in reduced circumstances after large defections from its ranks due to the Khrushchev revelations, Hungary, and now Czechoslovakia. In the shakeout for the Presidential nomination Cleaver was on the ballot in some states and Gregory in others. I guess I must have voted a write-in for Dick Gregory in November, 1968, as I saw Cleaver as something of a demagogue. After considerable early success as a third party, since 1968 P&F has declined to be a minor party on the California struggling to retain its ballot status and running occasional candidates for various public offices with little success. I stay registered P&F as it declares itself as a feminist and socialist anti-war party although I’m not involved much in electoral politics in my advanced years.

This concludes my round-up of events during most of the latter 1960s as observed from a personal perspective. Memoir #23 should take me through the early 1970s.

End of Installment 22