The Seventies is must reading for anyone who wants to revisit that glam decade and the contributions it made to our culture. The contributors take you on a fascinating journey that looks at the Black Panthers, Jonestown, glam rock, black action films and gay male subcultures as well as including queer rereadings of cultural phenomena, examinations of clothing and seventies bodies, and an essay on the meaning of sound in the seventies.
The Seventies is must reading for anyone who wants to revisit that glam decade and the contributions it made to our culture. The contributors take you on a fascinating journey that looks at the Black Panthers, Jonestown, glam rock, black action films and gay male subcultures as well as including queer rereadings of cultural phenomena, examinations of clothing and seventies bodies, and an essay on the meaning of sound in the seventies.
The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture
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The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture
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Overview
The Seventies is must reading for anyone who wants to revisit that glam decade and the contributions it made to our culture. The contributors take you on a fascinating journey that looks at the Black Panthers, Jonestown, glam rock, black action films and gay male subcultures as well as including queer rereadings of cultural phenomena, examinations of clothing and seventies bodies, and an essay on the meaning of sound in the seventies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781136690686 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 11/26/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 326 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Shelton Waldrep is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is co-author of Insidethe Mouse (1995).
Read an Excerpt
The Seventies
The Age of Glitter in Popular CultureBy Shelton Waldrep
Routledge
Copyright © 1999 Shelton WaldrepAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0415925355
Chapter One
Setting up the Seventies
Black Panthers, New Journalism,
and the Rewriting of the Sixties
MICHAEL E. STAUB
In the August 13, 1995, edition of the Sunday New York Times, the "Week in Review" section ran as its lead story an article that mobilized memories of the sixties for the purpose of ridiculing and neutralizing political activism in the nineties. In itself, this rhetorical maneuver might be considered noteworthy only because of its typicality. For as Meta Mendel-Reyes has recently summarized it, "What is at stake in the American struggle over who owns the sixties is ownership of the nineties."
But there was more to this particular news story showily decorated with neopsychedelic pop art (fig. 1.1). Written by respected veteran Times journalist Francis X. Clines, the article, "The Case That Brought Back Radical Chic," began like this:
The hard fact that criminal justice is grossly relative is never clearer than when a felon gifted with articulateness approaches the gallows, rallying celebrities to his side. Tongue-tied peers—3,009 and growing at last count of America's burgeoning death rows—can only wonder in silence, perchance grunting of their own innocence, but well ignored. So it goes with the condemned among us lately as a throng from the arts, academic and entertainment worlds singles out the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a finely expressive, dramatically dreadlocked, suddenly celebrated ... convicted cop-killer.
Taking advantage of an opening provided by the last-minute stay of execution granted former Black Panther Abu-Jamal a few days earlier, Clines aired his views on black militants who write books, and on "the championing of an underclass cause by an overclass gathering." Clines reminded readers of Tom Wolfe's "hilariously" rendered send-up of "radical chic" adoration for the Black Panthers in 1970 and cited Wolfe as his star witness. Indeed, it was a Wolfe quote about Abu-Jamal—that "literary sensitivity seems to expunge moral failings"—that supplied the Clines piece with its organizing thesis. What does it mean that, in commenting on progressive nineties advocates of a militant African American, Francis X. Clines and the New York Times could hark back with such comedic "commonsense" knowingness (and authority) to a moment a quarter of a century earlier? And how is it that, in pretending to express sympathy for the "grunting" individuals sentenced to die (even as he insulted them), Clines could shift away from the racial politics and flawed legal processes that put such a disproportionate number of blacks on death row (the real way that justice is "grossly relative") and toward a satiric invocation of radical chic culture? What Clines's revival of radical chic managed .was an adroit double displacement. In this view, elites in the United States do not hold political power (which can be used against blacks) but merely set trendy cultural standards so that they might derive self-gratification from them; and matters of life and death are, in this view, only matters of style.
The conjunction of Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers, and radical chic introduces the subject of this essay: the mainstream media response to the Black Panthers in 1969-70, and, more particularly, the role played by the New Journalism. As Fredric Jameson has commented, the sixties did not end in an instant but extended until "around 1972-74." And, crucially—contemporary neoconservative punditry notwithstanding—the sixties were hardly simply a utopian era when the Left flowered and flourished. This was also a moment when sophisticated anti-Left strategies were already being tested and refined, and these trends intensified at the turn to the seventies. The memory of the sixties (both as historical event and as metaphorical reference point) was, in short, being fought over almost immediately; history was getting rewritten practically as it was happening. This in itself is no great surprise to students of this era. It may be more surprising to discover how the 1970 media spasm surrounding the Black Panther Party, and particularly the crucial role of the New Journalism within it, contributed to the elaboration of an anti-Left agenda. The seventies began with the defining and denigrating of the sixties.
THE NEW JOURNALISM
The New Journalism—that genre-blurred mélange of ethnography, investigative reportage, and fiction—is widely and rightly considered to be the characteristic genre of the sixties. For a time, and certainly by mid-decade, it looked as if the surest means for a novelist to build a reputation—or rebuild it, as the case may be—was to write a nonfiction report on a historical event, but write it as if it were a novel. Whether the subject was a cold-blooded serial killing (Truman Capote), the hippie counterculture (Joan Didion), or a march on the Pentagon (Norman Mailer), writers who had first written successful fictions found themselves turning to "the rising authority of nonfiction" to help make sense of the "fast-paced ... apocalyptic" times they were living in. Likewise, a new generation of younger writers—for instance, Wolfe, Michael Herr, Gail Sheehy, and Hunter S. Thompson—developed through the New Journalism a freedom of approach and range of style (along with an enormously receptive reading public) that even just several years earlier would probably not have been possible. Self-identified fiction, as none other than The Harper American Literature matter-of-factly informs students, temporarily lost its charms, as precisely the destabilizing hecticity of the era made life seem more interesting than art. Or, as activist-scholar Todd Gitlin put it more evocatively, utilizing the highly metaphoric tense-switching language of the New Journalism itself, the "years 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970 were a cyclone in a wind tunnel ... when history comes off the leash, when reality appears illusory and illusions take on lives of their own, [and] when the novelist loses the platform on which imagination builds its plausible appearances."
The New Journalism styled itself as providing an alternative to more standard media renderings of social reality, promising to deliver a "more real" reality, the truer story of the many social crises splitting American society in the 1960s. For it was not only a loss of interest in fiction that engendered the search for a new style. It was, probably even more significantly, precisely the atmosphere of social crisis that had begun to make the traditional media seem so suspect, and that had called attention to the way the media's claim to be "objective" was frequently a smokescreen for bias. Media coverage of Vietnam provided some of the most appalling examples, and some of the decade's best New Journalism brought readers a different version of the Vietnam War (Herr) and of antiwar protest (Mailer). But the more general intensification of domestic turmoil also contributed to the impression that many standard journalistic conventions ought to be scrapped—or at least radically modified—since, as journalist and scholar Nicolaus Mills has noted, a "who, what, where, when, why style of reporting could not begin to capture the anger of a black power movement or the euphoria of a Woodstock.... For an audience either deeply concerned or directly involved in the changes going on in America, it was necessary to report events from the inside out, and this is what the new journalism attempted to do." Furthermore, as one practitioner, Nat Hentoff, argued already in 1968, the New Journalism offered its audience an opportunity to read news reportage by journalists who could express that they really cared about their subjects. Only through a dramatic "novelistic" method, he proposed, could reporters openly communicate (rather than mask) their own direct engagement with and active participation in the experiences they reported and thereby "help break the glass between the reader and the world he lives in." Similarly, as Michael Schudson observed in his excellent survey of the development of the journalistic profession, in an era as conflicted as the sixties when "'objectivity' became a term of abuse," a media-savvy audience eagerly sought out "voices of an adversary culture," and the openly subjective approach of the New Journalism was extraordinarily welcome. In short, it was only by allowing imagination into journalism that journalism could speak to the imagination of the times. Indeed, according to Gay Talese, another pioneer of the genre, it was only by using fictional techniques that the media could produce news "as reliable as the most reliable reporting." This was precisely because the New Journalist "seeks a larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts."
Yet, although this is not so well remembered now, the New Journalism and the incorporation of subjectivity into reportage were not always associated with the counterculture. The publishing history of the New Journalism cannot be separated from the history of two magazines during the mid- to late sixties and early seventies: Esquire, whose literary editor was Clay Felker, and New York (initially the Sunday supplement to the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune), which Felker edited when he left Esquire. Under Felker's guidance, Esquire and New York published a good many writers who were closely associated with the genre: Capote, Herr, Sheehy, Talese—as well as James Breslin, Robert Christgau, Terry Southern—and (most of all) Wolfe. These writers represented a spectrum of opinions on a range of issues. It is my point, however, that New York's historic role as journalistic gadfly placed it in the unusual cultural position of appearing adversarial in content (or politics) even while it was truly adversarial only in style—and I emphasize that I mean unusual at that time, since several other magazines (Rolling Stone and Esquire come immediately to mind) ultimately came also to fit into this category, although only New York self-consciously inhabited this split identity and thrived on being understood as simultaneously hip and sold out by contemporaneous media watchers. Felker's New York, at least for a while, knew its media niche as the place to go to read "the story behind the story"; or to hear about the latest trend or celebrity gossip; or to find out what the mainstream press was too cautious to report, or too invested in keeping from view. All this was related through the New Journalistic fact-based storytelling technique the standard press loved to hate—or perhaps just hated to love.
This essay focuses on two New Journalistic efforts, both written for New York in 1970, and both (although in very different ways) purporting to provide a truer narrative than available elsewhere about the phenomenon of the Black Panther Party and its white supporters. One is Gaff Sheehy's two-part "Panthermania," ostensibly mainly a report on the impact of the Panthers on the black community. The other is the Tom Wolfe piece Francis X. Clines found so funny—"Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's"—an article whose main purpose was to skewer the white supporters. Both pieces appeared in book form as well in late 1970 and early 1971. Although Sheehy's writing on the Panthers has long been largely forgotten (even while Sheehy herself has once again been in the news as she serves up another installment of Passages), her essay bears reexamination today, for its representations of racial identities and relations, its main tropes and obsessions, will appear quite (and I hope distressingly) familiar to nineties readers. Wolfe's tale, meanwhile, is of course infinitely more infamous, although, as I will show, it too is worth another rereading. Its title entered the language, while its content arguably shaped the historical memory of the Panthers and their white supporters—and indeed the memory of the sixties more generally—more than any other single journalistic piece from the era.
BLACK PANTHERS IN THE NEWS
In order to make sense of the timing, and much of the content, of Sheehy's and Wolfe's narratives, it is important to take an excursion into the coverage of the Panthers in the more standard news media. Something like what British cultural studies scholars have called a "moral panic" occurred in the media in response to the Panthers, putting the Panthers into the role of what British sociologist Stan Cohen has memorably termed "folk devils." The Panthers were definitely cast in the folk devil role in the mainstream media, portrayed as a motley crew of unstable, paranoid black juvenile delinquents. Crucially, however, the panic did not set in either at the moment or in the manner one might expect.
While it is widely known how Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover—who singled out the Black Panther Party (BPP) already in the summer of 1969 as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country"—turned his considerable covert counterintelligence resources against the BPP, it is rather less noted that such standard media venues as the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report hesitated several more months before they too aggressively began to register the group in folk devil language. Indeed, for more than three years, or from the inception of the party in 1966 until the winter of 1969, mainstream media representations of the Panthers had been neither particularly hostile nor especially sympathetic. Even when, in May 1967, several dozen armed Panthers marched into California's state assembly to protest against gun control legislation, the incident earned only one sentence in Newsweek and no mention in Time. In short, reportage about Panther activity was inconsistent, and what there was acknowledged—especially in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination in spring 1968—that black Americans might legitimately turn even to so-called extremist means in response to the crisis in American race relations. Likewise, when white support for the Panthers was mentioned during this time (in one instance, for example, Marion Brando's support was reported), the media handled it in an evenhanded manner. It was only as the decade wound to a close, from December 1969 onward, that the panic over the Black Panthers set in, and quite dramatically, escalating steadily through the first half of 1970. And yet this particular panic followed an unusual course that would ultimately shift away from demonizing rhetoric to trivializations and would finally present the Black Panther member more as oversexed media sweetheart than violence-prone social menace. And it is that trivialization that has left the most lasting legacy.
My research suggests that the combination of two key events catalyzed the onset of the moral panic. One was the December 4, 1969, FBI-instigated police killing of twenty-one-year-old Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, in his home, along with the ensuing rhetorical battle over whether the U.S. government was indeed targeting a group of its own citizens for assassination. The deaths of Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark clearly catalyzed a crisis of objectivity for the mainstream media. It was a crisis sparked largely by Charles Garry, chief counsel for the Panthers, who dramatically charged on the day following Hampton's and Clark's deaths that these were "the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth Panthers murdered by the police" since January 1968. Strikingly, although Edward J. Epstein would a year later authoritatively refute Garry's charge point by point in the respected pages of the New Yorker, the number of twenty-eight murdered Panthers is today presented in history books essentially as fact. Most of the media handled the matter differently from the New Yorker, however. In the immediate wake of the Chicago killings, most of the mainstream media, in a peculiar double maneuver, simultaneously allowed Garry's statement to stand as a provocative possibility (as well as reporting doubts about the police version of events based on their own investigations) and—as I will describe in what follows—launched a full-scale rhetorical campaign against the Panthers.
The second key event contributing to the escalation of a moral panic involved the spectacle/specter of wealthy white liberal support for black militancy, a phenomenon that first splashed into the news as a "problem" on January 15, 1970. That day, Charlotte Curtis, fashion editor of the New York Times, reported with tongue-in-cheek humor on the January 14 fundraiser at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's Park Avenue apartment (the gathering Wolfe would later immortalize) for the defense of twenty-one Black Panther Party members on trial in New York for plotting to kill policemen and blow up department stores. Describing the way the mostly white (along with a few black) socialites and the Panthers "from the ghetto" had begun the evening by chatting amiably and at times incoherently during "what may or may not have been the social hour" in the midst of the Bernsteins' sumptuous furnishings, Curtis also recorded snatches of conversation from the ensuing "meeting" where the plight of the imprisoned Panthers was discussed and (considerable) donations were accepted. Curtis recounted, for example, how "tall, handsome" Panther Don Cox earnestly attempted "to assure a white woman that she would not be killed even if she is a rich member of the middle class with a self-avowed capitalist for a husband." Rather than passing over the event with no futher notice, the Times the next day editorialized in harsh tones about how disturbing it was that the Panthers had emerged "as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set" because "the Beautiful People" were addicted to "elegant slumming." A week after that, the Times published a letter to the editor that worried, "We shall soon witness the birth of local Rent-a-Panther organizations" for those wishing to engage in "an evening of anti-Establishment vituperations" in order "to bring out the mea culpa in all."
Although the Bernsteins' gesture was hardly as misguided as the ensuing brouhaha suggested, since the Panthers were indeed subsequently acquitted on all charges, the history of the event did not end there. If it had, the Bernstein bash might not have become the most notorious political fundraiser in American history (not to mention an occasion of almost Baudrillardian hyperreality, in which the proliferating welter of mutually referential representations became the real event). As if in a round of "Can You Top This?" Time magazine on January 26 offered the first self-reflexive media item on the initial reporting, opening up a more open-ended second (and third) round of reflections. Under the title "Upper East Side Story," Time quoted and analyzed the Curtis piece, which had captured "some ludicrous exchanges—which Bernstein denies—between the field marshall of the pig-baiters and the aesthetic doge of the Upper East Side." Two weeks after that, William F. Buckley, Jr., again quoting the initial Curtis piece, weighed in with a column called "Have a Panther to Lunch," which reminisced about angering Eldridge Cleaver when Buckley told the Panther leader "that the Black Panther Party exists primarily for the satisfaction of white people, rather than black people. The white people like to strut their toleration, and strip themselves of their turtleneck sweaters to reveal their shame."
It was in the wake of Hampton's and Clark's deaths, Garry's charge, and the abrupt explosion of interest in interracial, cross-class bonding that the Panthers were suddenly turned into folk devils. From this point on, media representations amplified and distorted the Panthers' dealings far more than they had before. But while most scholarship on the moral panic scenario has assumed that folk devils are caricatured and demonized in a fairly straightforward, uniform fashion, an examination of the media coverage of the Panthers reveals a discordant jumble of representations, a set of metaphoric images and associations that were both vigorously fear-mongering and sniggeringly derisive.
It was, for instance, widely reported that outraged Panther sympathizers—Garry first among them—were speaking of "a national scheme" to "commit genocide upon" the Black Panther Party and that Reverend Dr. Ralph Abernathy had (at Hampton's funeral) described government intentions vis-à-vis the Panthers as "a calculated design of genocide" as "brutal as Nazi Germany." At the same time and in the same media sources, it was only after this historical moment (for it had not occurred previously) that the Panthers themselves would be indicted as—to quote the New York Times from its anti-Bernstein editorial on January 16—a "so-called party" that promoted a "confusion of Mao-Marxist ideology and Fascist para-militarism." Thereafter, once the Times broke the taboo on the Nazi analogy—itself seemingly adapted from the words of Garry and Abernathy in a sensational rhetorical reversal presumably designed to neutralize the power of their charges—other respectable forums followed suit. In May 1970, for example, the Atlantic linked the Panthers with "Hitler's Brown Shirts." Mixing the time-honored technique of infantilizing blacks (which goes back to slavery days) with an elaboration of its Nazi reference, The Atlantic described the Panthers as "boy scouts" with guns, "little kids" both "awed and securely warmed" by the party's "quasimilitary discipline." In August 1970 (while also taking jabs at the white liberal "patsies" who supported the BPP), Harper's compared Panther Bobby Seale to none other than Adolf Hitler:
Both are anti-rational. Hitler's injunction to "think with your blood" is echoed by Bobby's appeal to the impulses of Black Soul. Both proclaim a new morality, rising above the restraints of Christianity.... Both try to dehumanize their enemies by classifying them as "pigs"—the Nazi term was "Saujuden" (Jewish swine)—because it is easier to kill if you believe your victim is really a beast.... To Seale, even more than to Hitler, the gun is a mystic symbol of defiance and virility.
The tone in much of the coverage was, in short, alarmist. To Newsweek, for example, reaching for an Afrocentric metaphor—although the "party's Illinois chieftain" (that is, Hampton) had been found "sprawled on his blood-drenched mattress, his copies of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon and a three-volume life of Lenin scattered around him"—there was the fresh anxiety that Hampton's death "may in fact have saved the Panthers' Chicago chapter" by revitalizing a group "grown suspicious to the point of paranoia." And Time magazine, perhaps trumping them all, issued the warning that the Panthers' "inflammatory rhetoric" could well result in generalized race warfare: "To most whites, violence is not justifiable; to an increasing number of blacks, it is."
But other countervailing images jostled with these. For example, already in December 1969, in the immediate wake of Hampton's death, Time announced that among the Panthers there was "more tough talk than provable action," and U.S. News and World Report reported that the Panthers, "in spite of their tough talk," were "in fact ... losing ground" and "steadily losing members." Later, for the Atlantic, the Panthers were such a self-destructive lot, rushing "as joyously as cavorting lemmings toward judicial suicide," that one need only step aside while they did themselves in. Newsweek was even more stinging, declaring that the Panthers were hardly the "Bad Niggers of white America's nightmares" they pretended to be. According to Newsweek, the Panthers yearned to "be men," and "white student radicals" were "entranced by Panther machismo." But really, they were not the threat Hoover had imagined. Instead, "They are guerrilla theater masterfully done," just a few "irresistibly photogenic" youths, "Media Age revolutionaries," "Crazy Cats" whose "gift for getting shot considerably exceeds their gift for shooting." And finally, Esquire recapitulated the humor in the whole media spasm when (in the autumn of 1970) it offered up, in a classic faux-documentary photo essay, a complete consumer guide for those fearful that they might not be able immediately to "tell the difference between real Panthers, black Party sympathizers, and police infiltrators." Esquire thus posed the single most burning question on every concerned American citizen's lips—"Is It Too Late for You to Be Pals with a Black Panther?"—just as the moral panic over these particular folk devils appeared to have run its course.
The year 1970, then, marked the moment when, all at once, the activities of the Black Panther Party appeared to pose the gravest danger to civic stability, were announced to be passé, and came to decorate journalistic parodies of white anxiety, liberal guilt, or both. Simultaneously, the Panthers were portrayed as a profound threat, much as Hoover had intended them to be, and a "crisis" that was already over at the very moment it was being first reported. What emerges, in sum, is a constantly contradictory, ambivalent, and at times even highly ironic and self-conscious take on the hyperventilated significance of the Black Panthers.
Already in June 1970, New Journalist Hunter Thompson highlighted and spoofed the mass media hype surrounding the BPP when he opened his brilliant and loopy "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" with a brief exchange he claims to have had with an average Derby fan from Houston calling himself "Jimbo." When Thompson told "Jimbo" that he was in Louisville as a photographer for Playboy, the Texan laughed: "Well goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of—nekkid horses?" Since it was May 1970, Thompson could solemnly deadpan that this was no joke; his assignment, he said, was "to take pictures of the riot ... At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.... Don't you read the newspapers?" The Texan, gesticulating crazily "as if to ward off the words he was hearing," could not contain his outrage: "Why? Why here? Don't they respect anything?" Although Thompson was most definitely playing a con game—no riot was planned, no Panthers were in sight, and he didn't even really work for Playboy—what he managed to elicit from his interlocutor was of course exactly the sense of irrational alarm that the mere mention of the Panthers could produce at that historical moment.
The other two, much more substantial, New Journalistic contributions to the debate about the Black Panthers, Sheehy's and Wolfe's, had far more serious designs. (Because of the more lasting influence of Wolfe's piece, I will discuss Sheehy's essay first, even though it did not appear in New York until November; then I will conclude with Wolfe's June 1970 contribution.) What enabled Sheehy and Wolfe to do the damage they did was precisely their New Journalistic appropriations of fictional techniques: the development of dramatic story lines; the elaborate descriptions of settings particularly through the accumulation of what Wolfe called the "details of status life" of the characters; the invitation for readers to identify with the characters and/or the narrator; the reconstruction of "realistic" dialogue and the imaginative construction of characters' interior monologues; the playing with multiple points of view; and, finally, the liberty to speculate on the most intimate (and ultimately sexual) aspects of the characters' lives.
PANTHERMANIA
The first weekend in May 1970, while Hunter Thompson was conning the unsuspecting Derby fan in Louisville, Gail Sheehy was in New Haven, Connecticut, on assignment for New York to cover a support rally for the Panthers at Yale University. At the beginning of Panthermania, the book version of the New York essay, it is intimated that it was indeed the double crisis induced by, first, Fred Hampton's death (and Garry's ensuing charge of systematic genocide) and, second, the phenomenon of white support for the Panthers, which motivated Sheehy as she wrote. She opens Panthermania with the dismissive statement that "without verification, Garry's body count passed like gospel throughout the white media" while "the beautiful people created a new social cachet known as the Panther defense fund party." Meanwhile, Sheehy also announced that she found her assignment to be an especially tough one, because in the midst of the enormous social pressures on liberal whites to think "with one propagandized mind," she was one of the "lonely" few courageous enough to "ask questions" and "pursue the facts."
On the most overt level, Sheehy's original two-part story for New York was a study of the anguished response of New Haven's middle-class black community to the New Haven trial of twelve Panthers for murdering one of their own. Her major message was that the Panthers were bad news for blacks themselves. She centered her essay on the stories of three black men from "good families" who were drawn into Panther life: two come to sad ends (John Huggins was murdered by rival black militants, and Warren Kimbro was sent to prison for participation in the New Haven murder); the third, a teenager with the fictional name Junius Jones, seemed, she implied, despite the best efforts of his father, William, also to be headed toward tragedy.
Yet, like the more standard news venues, Sheehy incorporated contradictory perspectives into her narrative. Black Panthers were, according to her, an ominous and growing threat that desperately required immediate intervention (and that therefore of course also justified her own journalistic intervention)—a "pathology," a "deadly virus" felling the best and brightest of the black community, an ugly cult with "a certain psycho-political hold ... on black children burning like a billion wooden matches." And they were already "passé"—"A pretty small group of leftovers now. Mostly misfits—angry, unhappy, low-IQ kids." Panthers were both fascist-like — Ericka Huggins, for example, is described as "a black Ilse Koch ... you know, the Nazi"—and "naive," "political infants" engaged in "Amateur Night." They were also—in a double move pioneered, incidentally, by Joan Didion—both like a force of nature ("an unquenchable brushfire" fueled by the "hot ... Santa Ana ... wind") and like preprogrammed automatons, "a party [that] has no room for individual convictions," whose supporters' "propagandist wisdom" had to be "committed to memory like a page from Dick and Jane."
Indeed, not only Sheehy's "naturalization" of the Panthers, along with her strategic contrasting of "authentic" versus "performative" selves, but also her particular infantilization of them, are best understood as simply poachings from the work of Joan Didion. It was Didion, for example, who had first concluded that the 1965 Watts Rebellion was just another natural hazard of southern California life, much like "the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana ... wind"; both caused fires, and both reflected Los Angeles's "weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse." Furthermore, already in the title piece of her widely acclaimed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion had deemed the existence of a sexually profligate and dysfunctional white hippie counterculture "proof that things fall apart." In an idealized invocation of a more wholesome past, she suggested that precisely because the hippies lacked "the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values," they were incapable of independent thinking and would thus "feed back exactly what is given them." In a similar vein, in the Saturday Evening Post—long before the panic about the Panthers hit the rest of the media—Didion had both called Black Panther Huey Newton "a bright child with a good memory" and lamented his automaton qualities, describing him as "one of those educational fun-fair machines where pressing a button elicits great thoughts on selected subjects." Sheehy clearly had read Didion closely.
Finally, for Sheehy, the Panthers really were all about style, not substance. Bobby Seale, for example, was "Mr. Publicity." What the Panthers offered was "pure theater," "political theater." And it was the "delivery of his testimony" that got one "actor"/defendant in the murder trial in New Haven (that "Broadway-tryout town") the lowest possible sentence from his "audience"/jury. As Cornel West has pointed out, there is a long-standing association between blackness and performance: "Owing to both a particular African heritage and specific forms of Euro-American oppression, black American cultural production has focused primarily on performance and pageantry, style and spectacle." While West's purpose was to explore the creativity and oppositional potential in this linkage, Sheehy's aim was trivialization.
Meanwhile, white supporters of Black Panthers could be best understood as people "frantically and selfishly seeking [their] personal psychological release"—their "release from Whitemiddleclass paralysis." But they were also utterly fickle, "summer radical[s]" flocking to New Haven for a political "Woodstock." The cooperation between black militants and white supporters was treated seriously (if that is the right word) through recurrent disdainful asides about the Panthers' rejection of black separatism and willingness to work with whites. And the combination was mocked. For, as Sheehy said in her opening volley, for "the urban guerrilla"—who was, in any event, addicted to the "desperate habitual rhythm of hustling"—the appeal of Pantherdom would indeed be hard to resist:
Consider also the lure of mobility. Revolutionaries travel—planes, cabs, Chicago, Detroit, California, Cuba, Hanoi, Algiers, moving with the spontaneity of the jet set and the mystery of the Mafia, all financed by adoring white liberals and dignified by a noble cause.
But the most overwhelming feature of Sheehy's essay is the way it constituted a compendium of every ugly cliché about blacks one could imagine. According to Sheehy, not only were urban blacks addicted to hustling, they also were prone to failing to finish high school and to "chipping a little heroin under the skin of [the] knee" (where it doesn't show), were overly sexual, had low IQs, and were too concerned with cool headgear and fancy cars. Sheehy even mobilized the motif of the emasculated black man "desperate to claim his manhood," fixated entirely on "ego and sex." Indeed, she had one of her sources announce: "If it weren't for the toughness of black women, black men would all be like buffaloes. Extinct."
Meanwhile, she implied that the Panther Party was really run by women: "There are no Panthers in Connecticut except Ericka" was a repeated refrain. And Panther women were the most dangerous Panthers of all. Sheehy underscored this point by contrasting Panther women Elaine Brown and Ericka Huggins with respectable liberal middle-class black Betty Kimbro Osborne. And again the contradictions proliferated. Panther women were both "uncontrollably aggressive ... man-haters" and into "Pussy Power," defined as "the concept that a woman's function is to use her body to entice men into the Panther Party." Ericka, left a single mother by the murder of her husband, Panther John Huggins, refused to "forget the Panthers and raise John's baby safe." Instead, she spent her time seducing other women's husbands. Betty, by contrast, "patrolled the house tucking in children and making lists from Julia Child's cookbook."
Sheehy's biggest strategy, in short, was to put down black people. But she got away with this largely by writing from "within" a (as it turns out, constantly shifting) black perspective. It was by befriending members of the New Haven black middle class, for example, that Sheehy could hide behind their disdain for "the Negro downtrodden ... laying about with their hands out," and the "pregnant girls and mental midgets" of the Panther rank and file. Indeed, the major trajectory of Sheehy's narrative invited identification with New Haven's respectable black middle class even as that narrative reflected undisguised nostalgia for the days when black men had to work "four jobs at once" to get out of the ghetto into the modest black suburbs, and when deliberately acting stupid around powerful whites—in one of those servile jobs—was the best way to keep informed about city politics. But never one to have a unitary message, Sheehy also implicitly mocked the black middle-class respectability she idealized, capturing for her readers—this time from "within" a poor or militant black's perspective—the "docile," "housefolk," and "Tom" mentality of the "button-down, party-dip" black suburbanites who had "taken their manners" and their cues "from the least mobile white population—that careful, myopic, mildly-spoken core of liner-uppers and Sunday-besters." At one point, indeed, she referred to "the New Haven Negro" as "not black." And it was in this context that Sheehy could even make allusions to the uptight "old-biddy" sexlessness of the black middle class that was rumored to be the price of respectability in a white-ruled world.
What enabled Sheehy to incorporate all these shifting and unquestionably suspect perspectives was the New Journalistic methodology itself, for it permitted her to cross the imagined boundaries of race and move her narrative into a "black" consciousness—indeed, inside numerous "black" points of view—and then illustrate how each spoke ill of all the others. Not incidentally, it was also from "within" a black perspective that Sheehy was able to remind her readers of the popular association of Jews with capitalism (of the "shrewd speculators" variety) when she referred, without quotation marks, to black factory workers' views on "Hymie the owner." Crucially, Sheehy legitimated her entire venture by announcing early on that in her perambulations around New Haven she was constantly accompanied by "black photographer David Parks," even though in the course of her tale she barely granted him a speaking role. Sheehy's various narrative techniques, in sum, enabled her to outdo the more standard news media's folk devil portrait of the Panthers. These techniques came in especially handy in the hatchet job she did on Ericka Huggins. In Sheehy's portrait, Huggins's activity in oppositional politics, her coercive sexuality, and her irresponsible (and potentially abusive) parenting style were all linked by an intrinsic logic, a disturbingly familiar chain of associations to anyone attentive to how poor black teenage mothers are maligned in our contemporary race-coded political arena.
RADICAL CHIC
In contrast to Sheehy's literarily more forgettable (yet nonetheless politically prescient) efforts, Tom Wolfe's punishing job on Leonard Bernstein, in his stylistic tour de force "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," has long been notorious. Wolfe, like Sheehy, utilized the narrative freedom of the New Journalism in order to move subtly and cleverly from perspective to perspective—none of them completely his own nor identifiably anyone else's—as well as to circle repetitively (and disorientingly) through his story line in imitation of the circularity of individual consciousness. Instead of inviting (though then also blocking) identification with the narrative's characters, as Sheehy did, Wolfe invited identification with, if anyone, his supercilious omniscient narrator. Wolfe toured the Bernsteins' apartment and introduced the celebrity guests with suave malice. He mocked the need of rich liberal whites (particularly in view of the evening's occasion) to find nonblack servants. He digressed into an extended analysis of the history of what he called nostalgie de la boue—nostalgia for the mud—the slumming he astutely observed was often part of the way the very upwardly mobile certified their arrival within the social aristocracy. He took a long detour through a prior "radical chic" party on behalf of California's striking grape workers. He also repeatedly stressed the "funky"-ness and militancy of the Panthers ("These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big"), and he exploited for humorous effect the historic phenomenon of close affinities and profound tensions between blacks and Jews while also working to fuel those hostilities. And finally, Wolfe ended his narrative with a long disquisition resummarizing the ways in which the Bernstein event had been circulated and recirculated through the media. In the midst of all this, he documented and commented upon some of the main exchanges between the Panthers, the other guests, and the hosts about Panther politics. And through it all, by playing with tense and tone, he managed to make the sixties themselves seem like they were part of some previous century.
Cultural critic (and Random House editor) Jason Epstein, and scholars Alan Trachtenberg and Morris Dickstein, among others, have all in various venues weighed in on Wolfe's tale; Epstein, for instance, accused Wolfe of being "cruel and shallow" and of being moved, above all, by his own "resentment and envy of the rich and talented," desperate to be noted and fêted himself. Trachtenberg too saw in Wolfe a pandering to "both a hatred and an envy of intellectuals." In Wolfe's work, he announced, "the mechanisms of a middlebrow mass culture are transparent"; furthermore, "Far from revolutionary it is a conformist writing." And Dickstein has opined (the harshest cut) that "Radical Chic" is simply "monotonous." In addition, he has noted that Wolfe is guilty of a complete "misreading of the sixties," and that "Wolfe himself is nothing if not a creature of fashion.... [The] snobbishness and triviality [of his characters] mirror his own interests." But all these criticisms, I want to propose, miss what is in many ways the essay's most pernicious subtext.
On the surface, Wolfe's message was simple: "Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions." There was Leonard Bernstein, the host, against whom Wolfe mobilized an always popular resentment against class privilege, noting how convenient it must be to live a "right-wing life style" while one clings to a "left-wing outlook." And then there were the guests. At one point, for example, Wolfe mobilized yet another ever-popular perspective, a common "explanation" for black-white political cooperation: Wolfe fantasized "a beautiful ash-blond girl with the most perfect Miss Porter's face" telling one Panther that she would like "to do something, but what can we do? Is there some kind of committee, or some kind of ... I don't know ...," the black man's (unspoken) response implying the "taboo" of miscegenation: "Well baby, if you really—."
It was not, however, the composer's or his guests' politics that most preoccupied Wolfe, except as this ostensible subject allowed the New Journalist to investigate Bernstein's mannerisms, his flamboyant personal style, and the iconography of his Upper East Side apartment. Throughout, Wolfe found Bernstein too fastidious and too Jewish (always reminding people that his name was "-stein not -steen"), too fussy and too pretentious (especially when it came to his "million-dollar chatchka flotilla of family photographs")—or, in short, simply too ambiguous in general.
Wolfe's narrative is structured around mysteries and secrets, beginning with the opening page, when he recounts a dream Bernstein had in which he stood on a stage and told the audience, "I love," while "a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like 'The audience is curiously embarassed.'" Wolfe never solves this mystery for his readers—he never explains the meaning of the dream—but he refers to it constantly throughout his narrative, repeatedly foreshadowing the way the "Negro at the piano" would be the signal of Bernstein's ultimate humiliation. Furthermore, Wolfe appears throughout inordinately preoccupied with what people "know" about Leonard Bernstein, remarking not only about "what a flood of taboo thoughts runs through one's head at these ... events ... it's delicious," but also speculating at one point, for example, that "Leon Quat [a Panther attorney] must be the only man in the room who does not know about Lenny" and referring at another point to what "more than one person in this room knows" about Bernstein.
What is it that people "know" about Bernstein? Although Wolfe situates his remarks on knowledge in the context of commentary on Bernstein's well-known insomnia and love of conversation, the way these remarks are positioned in the narrative suggests another reading as well. As numerous queer theorists have pointed out, there is above all one "love that is famous for daring not speak its name," and that is gay love, "the 'open secret,' widely known but never spoken"—the one thing that must not, but also need not, be named explicitly. And indeed, in the midst of completely unconnected remarks, Wolfe embeds references to "Bayard Rustin" (the black civil rights leader who, although again Wolfe does not say this, was also known to be gay); "the mint fairy" (that allowed those "puffed," "fragile," "melt-crazed" after-dinner mints suddenly to materialize in elegant silver bowls), and a particular "flaming revelation" of Bernstein's. At another point in the piece Wolfe suggests that while the Panthers are "real men," Bernstein himself apparently does not have enough virility, for "the very idea of them, these real revolutionaries ... runs through Lenny's duplex like a rogue hormone." Similarly, in yet another instance, when asked about Panther predilection for violence, Panther spokesman Don Cox had insisted that Panther violence would be in self-defense only. In an obvious effort to help his wealthy white listeners identify with his point, he declared, "I don't think there's anybody in here who wouldn't defend themselves if somebody came in and attacked them or their families." Then Wolfe's narrative voice abruptly interjected, "—and every woman in the room thinks of her husband ... with his cocoa-butter jowls and Dior Men's Boutique pajamas ... ducking into the bathroom and locking the door and turning the shower on, so he can say later that he didn't hear a thing—."
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has observed in her study of the special connections between "knowledge" and (homo)sexuality, "to crack a code and enjoy the reassuring exhilarations of knowingness is to buy into the specific formula 'We Know What That Means.'" The interesting thing about Wolfe's piece is that there are countless coded references to Jews as well: the strategic deployment of obviously Jewish names, references to gas chambers, to famously exploitative ghetto merchants, to Occupation Zone commandants, and so on. But these veiled references are juxtaposed with extensive analytic passages explicitly elaborating on the complexities of anti-Semitism and the ways it might induce wealthy Jews to partake of radical chic. In short, the introduction of overt discussions of Jewishness in the midst of coded allusions to it leave the gay aspect of Bernstein's character the one truly unnamed, unspoken element. However well known Bernstein's gayness was at the time (and Wolfe's maneuvers would not have been so effective unless it was well known), this was also a moment when Bernstein was trying to be in the closet. And it is exactly at this moment that Tom Wolfe was busy deriding Bernstein's left-leaning sympathies through a very particular associative chain. This chain not only illustrated, in gay critic Wayne Koestenbaum's words, "how frequently the flaming are made scapegoats." Nor did it simply advance the notion that radical-leaning white men are not real men. Most importantly, like Sheehy with her racist mythologies about black women and black men, Wolfe was using derogatory representations of sexual matters to cast aspersions on the political seriousness of progressive projects.
Many of the stories told about the sixties now are uncannily close to the stories told by Sheehy and Wolfe. They have entered the cultural "common sense," have come to seem, in Stuart Hall's words, "absolutely basic ... bedrock wisdom" whose "very taken-for-grantedness" renders their own premises and presuppositions invisible. One need only think of the current bipartisan consensus (always implicitly race-coded) about welfare and teen pregnancy, drugs and violence, to recognize the staying power of Sheehy's notions. And one need only consider the enormous popularity of Forrest Gump (1994), with its scathing portrait of the unmanliness and misogyny of white leftist men attending a party thrown by the Black Panthers, its success in portraying left activism as out of touch with the good common sense of ordinary folks, and its more general leering at what the sixties are said to have stood for, to recognize the powerful hold of Wolfe's views on the national imagination. To note that these summaries, and dismissals, of much of what was important in the sixties were produced already in 1970 should give us pause. How is it that the ideas of these two erstwhile self-styled revisionists have come to seem so persuasive to so many? That, as Fredric Jameson once put it in a different but not unrelated context, "is a question we must leave open."
Continues...
Excerpted from The Seventies by Shelton Waldrep Copyright © 1999 by Shelton Waldrep. Excerpted by permission.
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