The Cavalier daily :: Wednesday, September 23 :: University of Virginia Library

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - As summer
waned, harsh realities moved
ominously closer to the insulated
microcosm of Harvard Square. For
a time this summer, Cambridge had
been a total refuge from the deadly
statistics of 1970 the industrial
weight of a polity and economy
unmatched for complexity and incredibly
by any in the history of
the world, a d national government,
cities at tense standoffs
where each side grasped at guns and
clubs. In Cambridge the complexities
ensnared, the difficulties
shrank, the enemies seemed puny.

Fantasies of revolution, scenarios
of power grew here like giant
chicken hearts in Super Feast, April,
1969 had seen Harvard in a major
student strike; the next year had
seen a riot at which 3,000 people
fought 1200 police for five hours,
had seen Harvard again, MIT, Tufts,
Boston State, BU convulsed with
strikes.

And with summer had come the
influx. Thousands of high school
kids, runaways, dropouts, more
than ever before, flooded in and
looked for dope (Boston, Boston,
they had told themselves in the
East, was the city with dope) they
were here looking for dope, food,
love, and a place to stay. And with
them they brought the vanities of
power to minds predisposed to
thoughts of revolution.

Paranoid Caricature

In the sunlight of Harvard
Square, Easy Rider seemed, not
only a paranoid caricature, but a
laughably implausible one, for danger
was far away. Out of ten thousand
freaks in the streets, a cautious
city government, and good channels
of communication grew feelings of
invulnerability.

Feeling the vibrations of a Cambridge
street hegemony, old-style
leftists thought of the case and
theoretical order of a general worker-student
strike, accompanied by a
militant seizure of power led by a
fighting party armed with socialist
ideas.

Visions

Maoists conjured up a vision of a
new cultural revolution, New Leftists
and Panthers followers dreamed
of the Call sent out to every Middlesex
village and farm, an uprising
by strong black-leather jackets and
tough whites with long hair and
NFL flags. For a short time, It all
seemed easy.

Early in July, the Band played
at Harvard Stadium to nearly
15,000 freaks. The concert was part
of series designed to help make the
summer more pleasant for the city
- to help the street people let off
steam and to show that the Boston
community understood the freaks
and did not object. The feeling at
the concert - imagine, dear heart,
15,000 longhairs writhing free-form
across the slanted grandstands, running,
throwing Frisbees and skyrockets,
hurtling walls and wires to
be nearer the state, to dance on
grass - and not one..single... blue
uniform or gold button in sight. All
power, at that moment, was with
the people.

Half-World Tripping

It was heady brew, and many
drank it to seal themselves off
further from the realities that
brewed like mushroom-topped
storm clouds across the country
during the summer. "In revolution,
one species of man is replaced by
another," Frantz Fanon wrote, and
some felt that the replacement
could become a militant, humanistic,
excursion into the half-world of
historical drama: a sort of Wild in
the Streets as directed by Eisenstein
without the preceding reality.

But first attempts to define identities
as clean-limbed, ever-victorious
street fighters - generational
ubermenschen - thrashed toward
ignominy A leaflet summoning the
faithful to celebration of the Tenth
Anniversary of the Attack on the
Moncada Barracks drew 150: a flag
was burned, rocks were thrown,
fires set in trash cans.

No Goal

But through it all ran an uncertainty:
what were they doing there?
Brothers and sisters whom they
respected in counter-leaflets, had
begged them not to come , had
warned that such a pointless action
could only be the act of a political
infant, at best - at worst, the
cunning trap of a provocateur. The
rioters had no goal, and were reduced
to explaining their presence
by saying defiantly, I dig it.

So the boards went up on the
stores, and the store owners, frightened
after three riots since April,
came together in terror. One of
them, a friendly conscientious man,
told their decision.

Sorry, Children

"We're just going to have to say,
'Kids, if you don't have something
to do in Cambridge, then you just
better leave.' I don't like to have to
say it, but that's what it has to be."

Not a bad man, In fact, in many
ways, a good and gentle one, open
and tolerant, possessed of no great
hatreds or needs for them. But the
situation had reached a point where
some degree of shared humanity
receded, some unspoken trust he
had hurled at the world no longer
bounced back. "I used to call myself
a liberal, but now I don't think
I can do that any more," he said.

"Most people would rather see a
blue uniform than someone out of
his mind on drugs," he added glumly.

On the street his decision, with
all the repression that he and the
300-odd merchants in the Square
could cause, shed its ambiguities.
Memory came to the freaks in
Forbes Plaza of countless hassles
and minor confrontations, of nights
in jail, of havens built and destroyed
by madness in other
cities-madness amphetamines, and
the big, brown clubs of cops. The
merchants were bad, and it was
time to fight.

Neither side would accept responsibility.
The Square's eyeball to
eyeball cultural interface grew more
hateful as cops hassled
guitar-players, leather sellers, panhandlers,
underground newspaper
hawkers, and the freaks hassled
straights with hairy eyeballs and
mystic voodoo signs.

More attempts at rioting, met
this time by massive tear-gassing
and frenzied flight, the crowds suddenly,
astonishingly losing their
connections and becoming confused
individuals. Street freaks, radicals,
students, had grown apart in
fear and confusion and now inhabited
the Square in sullen silence,
like winos on the 7th Avenue IRT
at 4:30 a.m.

And in the silence, the news
from elsewhere could suddenly be
heard: policemen dead in Berkeley,
LA, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia;
bombings rampant; shootings
by police in Lawrence, Houston,
and the Los Angeles barrios; a judge
and three blacks riddled with bullets
in San Rafael.

And at the end of the summer,
the mother-blast of them all in
Madison; gasoline and fertilizer in a
panel truck perhaps igniting more
than any Army Math Research Center,
perhaps killing many more than
one. And behind it all, like the
whisperer in darkness, the
unfolding horror of the Manson
trial.

Small wonder then that many
fled from the slum Cambridge had
become. They realized that, long
before the window boards and heroin
and police had done their work
on the Square, Cambridge had become
far worse, a slum, a ghetto of
the mind, where insulation had
filled the mind with fuzz and the
harsh realities became incomprehensible.

Hard thought, rest, communion
with friends and trees, grapplings
with conscience and history would
help free the refugees from their
sleep of reason . The knowledge
that there are more things happening
in this frenzied nation than we
can imagine, that forces set in
motion proceed to some stop,
might fill their minds with a new
caution and a new despair.

No longer can words exist divorced
from their consequences, for
both sides have abandoned restraints,
Everything is done: assassinations,
kidnapping, and the murder
of hostages. The knowledge
brought an end to fantasies of
power and their attendant mythologies.
The faith that could replace
them was not yet born.