I knew of John Sinclair from John Lennon’s song about him on Some Time in New York City and had a vague idea that he was known for being busted for pot. In fact, I still associate my earliest awareness of the term political prisoner with John Sinclair. I didn’t really know what it meant back then, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to happen here.
Then I saw this book at a local head shop. It was the 70s in a college town, teenagers hanging out in head shops was normal. The book was revelatory for me. It not only contained Sinclair’s writings, which I admit I didn’t read thoroughly at first, but it is also full of radical illustrations, pictures of MC5 concerts and posters, protests, etc.
I pulled it off the shelf today and leafed through it for the first time in decades. The first page (text pictured) pretty much encapsulates perfectly the scene that I would aspire to, for better or worse, for much of my young life, propelling me across thousands of miles to hundreds of concerts and protests and smoke-ins and gatherings and friendships. Definitely for the better.
If you were a Left-leaning college student in the 1960s there is a good chance that you had a copy of Ramparts magazine on the coffee table. From 1964-1969, under the leadership of executive editor Warren Hinckle, Ramparts was arguably the most important anti-war, counter-culture, general circulation magazine in the United States. Closely associated with the New Left political movement the magazine reached an ultimate circulation of 250,000 in 1968. That was a large number in those days, especially for an ostensibly underground publication frequently denigrated by its competitors in the mainstream media. Ramparts was so good at its craft that it became the ire of the CIA, which tried to censor the magazine and then shut it down, failing on both counts, not to mention breaking the law and its own charter prohibiting it from domestic spying.
Why was the CIA so rattled?
In the April 1966 edition Ramparts exposed a program the CIA was running clandestinely out of Michigan State University as part of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group (MSUG). Though there were some positive outcomes from MSUG the article revealed that the Agency had infiltrated it early on and was using it as a front for covert operations, including training and arming police interrogators in South Vietnam to spy on and harass dissidents in Saigon. Though not explicit in the record there were almost certainly some classes on torture methods in the curriculum. What we do know is that Diem’s forces had gained considerable expertise in using such brutal practices during the time period in question. Ramparts asked: “what the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?” It was one of the early sparks in what would erupt into open confrontations between students and their universities over support for the Vietnam War, most famously at Berkeley, Michigan, Columbia, Wisconsin, Ohio State and Kent State, among many others. Ramparts won the 1966 George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for the article. The cover is a 60s classic (see below).
Then in March 1967 Ramparts created a national sensation by publishing an embarrassing expose of CIA secret funding of the National Student Association (NSA) which was the largest college student organization in America. A year earlier the New York Times ran a series of articles which began to uncover secret CIA funding of various fronts going back to the late 1940s, including arts organizations, political and cultural journals, radio stations, cultural foundations etc. That operation, known as the Congress For Cultural Freedom, aka the Mighty Wurlitzer within the CIA, was a primary weapon against Soviet influence in what is today known as the Cultural Cold War. But the Ramparts story went one step further by including the first acknowledgement of the program’s existence by a former CIA officer involved in the covert operations, Michael Wood, who had records, not just about the NSA, but other related fronts that the CIA had established. The upstart magazine had once again scooped the big players in the main stream media on one of the biggest stories of the time, pouring more gasoline on the fire on campuses nationwide.
A side note about the March 1967 issue: Hinckle wrote the cover story, “A Social History of the Hippies.” Editorial differences over that story led contributing editor Ralph J. Gleason to resign in protest. Gleason and former Ramparts staffer Jann Wenner, then founded a new magazine, Rolling Stone, later that year.
Below are photos of these two landmark issues of Ramparts, they are two of the more influential magazine editions of any kind from the time period, helping to lay the foundation for the student radicalism that was to follow.
Much about the country has changed since my youth. One of the things I miss is the 4th of July smoke-in. The Youth International Party (YIP) organized smoke-ins annually across the US through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The annual 4th of July smoke-in at Lafayette Park in DC became a counterculture tradition, as did the Ann Arbor Hash Bash. We all knew that the cops hated us but we outnumbered them so there wasn’t much they would do, although some did feature cop riots over the years, 1979 in DC comes to mind. The good news is that after all these years much of the country has finally come to its senses, legalizing marijuana to some degree, one of the few changes for the better since the coming of Reagan
The computer punch card, now a quaint artifact, was an important symbol of the times in 1964.
In 1964 the IBM Aerospace Headquarters building (pictured below) opened in Los Angeles. Originally built to house IBMs data processing facilities this seven-story office building with its “computer punch card” array of windows conducted the earliest versions of machine computing. It is considered an important part of industrial design history and a landmark of mid-century architecture.
That same year, in the fall of 1964, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement occurred, and the punch card was part of it. The confrontation evolved into a battle over academic freedom and the role of the university in society. Was it a factory designed to produce a managing class and “cogs in the machine”, or was it a marketplace of ideas designed to produce educated citizens?
The University of California used computer punch cards for class registration. FSM protestors turned them into a symbol of the “system” and as a symbol of alienation. The argument found its ultimate expression in the “Operation of the Machine” speech made by FSM leader Mario Savio. You can listen to the speech below. For a fascinating take on the cultural history of the punch card, including its role in the campus protests, read “Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate” included below.
Parallel Narratives 