Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

pacifism - book - 1966 - Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History

Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History
Staughton Lynd (ed)
Bobbs-Merrill
1966
530 pages

Nonviolence in America is a large anthology of texts that all share the advocacy of non-violent resistance as a means of effecting social change. The book is edited by Staughton Lynd, an American dissident and historian who, over the course of his life as an activist, has taken on a variety of social causes and deployed an equally diverse number of strategies to raise awareness of them. Nonviolence in America is one of the first publications in a fairly lengthy and impressive bibliography that has continued up until 2011.

Lynd’s anthology of writings by American authors espousing techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience was published in the mid-1960s and it was likely compiled, in part, as an inspiration to the burgeoning anti-war movement and the new left, to show a long history of such forms of activism in American society. The earliest writings include late 18th century texts written by Quaker abolitionists, and proceeds from there to the contemporary-to-publication Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States.  The anthology is great for including items such as Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay Civil Disobedience in their entirety rather than reducing such an important piece to excerpts or key passages.  Furthermore, the book also includes pieces from seemingly unlikely sources such as anarchists like Voltairine De Cleyre and labour leaders describing auto-worker sit-down strikes during the most dramatic period of organized labour history in America.

The anthology never waivers from its focus and demonstrates a strong history of effective non-violent direct action activism in a society that appears obsessed with violence. It is a testament to the historical repetition of the enormous moral power of enduring violence without returning it. The book was published in the year before the Black Panthers formed their first chapter in Oakland and fingered the trigger of revolutionary violence in 1960s America. The emergence of the BPP produced an already forming schism in the American Civil Rights movement and inspired other groups such as the SDS splinter group, The Weathermen, to pursue violent action. Lynd’s anthology was published again in 1995, when the anti-globalization movement was building, and the debates of the merits of violent vs non-violent protest tactics were renewed and continue today.

black power - book - 2006 - Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph
Henry Holt & Company
2006
399 pages

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States.  The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers.  Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion.  His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.

Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc).  There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism.  There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle.  One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements.  Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers.  Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.

medgar evers, civil rights movement - book - 1994 - Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers

Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers
Adam Nossiter
Addisson-Welsey Publishing Company
1994
303 pages

Medgar Evars was the outspoken Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP during the early phase of the American civil rights movement.  Evers was one of the first nationally known leaders of that movement, gaining recognition over his fight to desegregate public schools in the American south, one of the many struggles to end racial injustice that Evers waged.  As an outspoken leader for black rights in Mississippi, Evers faced constant threats of violence.  In June, 1963, Evers was murdered by a Jackson MS. salesman and White Citizens Council member named Byron de la Beckwith, who shot the civil rights leader to death in front of his home.  De La Beckwith’s murder trial resulted in a hung jury and he was permitted to walk free, often making not-so-subtle references to his crime in public conversation.  

Of Long Memory is a book about the long term cultural effects of the Evers murder on Jackson, and American, society.  The book’s author, Adam Nossiter, is a journalist with the New York Times, whose work often deals with racial politics in the American context.  In this book, Nossiter discusses the cultural trauma of the Evers’ murder, as in the year of this book’s publication, De La Beckwith was finally tried and convicted for the crime.  Nossiter investigates the social temperature before the trial, where many of the region’s whites were of the opinion that the 1994 De La beckwith trial was a waste of time after all those years.  Nossiter portrayed a society where Jackson’s white society was still willing to let a killer go free for the murder of a black man, only the rhetoric changed.  For area black’s, however, Evers murder was an open wound that couldn’t heal until Beckwith, who would frequently refer to the murder to show his willingness to use violence, was punished.

Nossiter begins his book with a journalistic look at Jackson’s contemporary racial climate. Early in his text, a meeting between the author and Byron De La Beckwith himself went awry (having devolved into anti-Semitic ravings).  Following this meeting, Nossiter’s text becomes a series of biographical sketches of the stakeholders in the Evers’ murder, then and now, with the lives of Evers himself, Evers brother Charles, original prosecuting attorney Bill Waller, and 1994 prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter profiled by the author.  With the exception of Medgar, each of these subjects were living at the time of Nossiter’s writing, and Nossiter had personal encounters (for better or worse) with all of them.  Nossiter discusses the lives of these individuals as they were after the murder - Waller and Charles Evers entered politics - and the assassin, Byron De La Beckwith became a prominent member of the white power movement.

Nossiter’s profile of Medgar Evars, of course, details his political life and the dangerous fight he was waging in Mississippi during the 1960s.  Evers’ story ends with his death, which shined a spotlight on the political power structure of white supremacy that reigned in the American southern states during that period.  The courts were a major instrument in maintaining white supremacy as a way of life, by allowing murderers of southern blacks to walk free.  Byron’s freedom, for decades, was symbolic of this power structure, of a society that permitted vigilantes to repress black leaders with extreme violence if required.  Nossiter discusses De La Beckwith’s final trial, resulting in his conviction, as a needed event in healing Jackson society.

social radicalism - book - 1980 - A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Revised and Updated Edition
Howard Zinn
HarperPerennial
1980 (this edition: 1995)


This will be a short profile of a book that has been discussed heavily in other forums since its publication.  A People’s History of the United States is a major work of history, focusing on political oppression in the United States and the radical social movements that emerged to respond to such oppression.  The book’s author, Howard Zinn, was a social activist, in addition to an academic, and he spent much of his career working at Boston University.  Zinn had been involved with the American Civil Rights movement (and one of his best known books is about the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, an influential Civil Rights organizations which has been discussed previously on this blog in relation to John Lewis’ memoir), and later in the anti-war movement during the 1960s, and other social justice movements throughout his life.  

A People’s History, first published in 1980, was a response to all of the books of American history that focus on the European explorers, founding fathers, and industrialists who made the United States, bit by bit, into a superpower.  Zinn’s book looks at the social consequences of those historical stories that have made up the mythology of the United States, and examines how, historically, common people have been effected by the actions of America’s elites.  Zinn’s story is not just a narrative of social victims, however, as he heavily emphasizes the radical movements that emerged to fight political oppression, and each chapter seems to take a different aspect of this as its focus.  In Chapter 9, for example, Zinn discusses the institution of slavery in the America, but also the abolition movements that fought against slavery, and even discussed the details of several specific slave rebellions.  Labor Unions and Anti-War organizing are also persistent themes.  This book demonstrates that this alternative to the dominant telling of American history has its own heroes.

Some of the movements discussed by Zinn are virtually lost in most tellings of American history.  Chapter 10 is about the vestigial colonial mode of land ownership and management in the north during the 19th century and the Anti-Rent movement that erupted among agricultural workers who basically fought a war against land owners in New York state.  Zinn’s book also details the history of the anti-war movement during the Second World War, which is virtually unheard of in most histories of the period, which generally take up the line that WWII was the good war.  Finally, Zinn’s final chapter in this 1995 edition is about the first half of the Clinton years, with a critical analysis of the then current president’s commitment to progressive values.  Zinn published updates and revisions to this book quite often, and the final edition, published in 2005, contains a more complete chapter on the 1990s (including discussions of the Militia Movement, and Mumia Abu Jamal) as well as an analysis of the early Bush II years.

civil rights movement - book - 2010 - At the Dark end of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Danielle L. McGuire
Alfred A. Knopf
2010
324 pages


The basic foundation for the Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in the American South, according to At the Dark End of the Street author Danielle L. McGuire (and a number of her sources), is a fear of sex.  In particular the driving fear was of the races mixing, of the pure white blood becoming polluted by impurities from inferiors.  This fear was the surging undercurrent to those laws that organized southern society into a racially tiered hierarchy.  Riding that current was the fear of the supersexualized black stereotype, the the black man of the white imagination who is driven by a violent lust for white women and the insatiable black woman with little concern for public morality - such representations of the other served as sufficient grounds for maintaining racial segregation and oppression in the American south.  

The History of Sexuality, a three volume text by French philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Foucault, describes how sexuality has been historically constituted as a domain and a director of social power.  Much of Foucault’s text is focused upon how thinkers of the Classical world discussed sex and its proper conduct with regards to a good life.  Foucault’s analysis described examples of how numerous writers of the past constituted the sexual life of the subject as productive of a good citizen and good societies.  In other words, sexuality and a socially imposed sexual conduct can be the means by which a population is organized, which is, in a sense, what was at play in the American south under Jim Crow.  Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street, describes a weaponized sexuality, where the protection of the chastity of white women became the pretense by which black men were brutalized by whites and the rape of black women by white men was a means of repression against the black population.  I’m not sure if sexuality really was the basis for segregation but McGuire’s text has convinced me that it was a means for the establishment and maintenance of power in southern society.

McGuire’s text approaches the history of the Civil Rights Movement from an angle that was previously unexplored in the civil rights literature.  At the Dark End of the Street contains numerous accounts of black rape, murder and oppression and the hands of southern whites, and the frequent repetition of the crimes (in a sense) as law officials and the courts let white criminals walk free.  Furthermore, the book also contains numerous accounts of black men sentenced to death for crimes against white women when there was often minimal evidence that a crime even occurred.  Rosa Parks, frequently portrayed as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, and is often remembered as a tired woman on a bus who just couldn’t bear to move all the way to the back, was actually an investigator sent to Abbeville, AL. by the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP to shed light on the matter of the rape of Recy Taylor.  Taylor was kidnapped and raped by four white men and while she could identify her assailants to police, they lived unpunished for their crime.  McGuire asserted the frequency of such occurrences in the south, with rapists often being released after insisting that their victim was a prostitute.  Agents of the freedom movement sought to oppose these crimes in court, but before they could proceed they needed an impeccable example of black womanhood, because black women were assumed to be guilty of immorality, of enticing white men in some way.

While rape was a weapon in the arsenal of white repression against black populations, so was the city transportation system.  Black bus riders in Montgomery and other southern cities were often forced to stand, even if seats were empty, according to the rules of conduct.  Bus drivers were often cruel and verbally abusive to the riders, many of whom were the black women who worked as domestic help in affluent white households, who were forced to pay at the front but board at the middle door.  Drivers would sometimes force black passengers to pay at the front, then quickly close the door and drive off before the patron could board.  Furthermore, passengers who did not comply were arrested, detained, and frequently subject to sexual abuse administered by the police.  The author thus describes a network of oppressive forces made up of the transportation system, white employers, law enforcement, and the courts, all of which are driven by sexual fears whites had of the racialized other.  

Rosa Parks became the mother of the freedom movement because she was already an experienced civil rights activist (she was involved in the movement since the 1940s) and her reputation was beyond reproach, not simply because she chose to resist unfair rules of bus ridership.  She was far from the first woman to disobey the orders of a bus driver, many others entered that realm ahead of her and it was their testimony of the cruel treatment they received by transportation officials and then police and the courts that prompted her to follow.  It was her activist-honed bravery and her impeccable character that made her an icon for a movement that was already gaining in strength.  With the momentum gained by Park’s action (supported by countless southern women who were vocal about their experiences) the Civil Rights Movement entered its best known phase, beginning at the end of 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  

At the Dark End of the Street is not just about Rosa Parks path from the investigation of unpunished rapes of black women by white men to her arrest on a Montgomery bus, although one of the book’s strengths is that it returns the depth to a woman who has largely been reduced in the popular consciousness to an image and a short anecdote.  The book adds these dimensions to Parks by contextualizing her work as an investigator, and by contextualizing those cases in a society that is steeped in the politics of sadistic and racialized sexuality.  McGuire’s text also recalls how other black activists formed organizations like the Sojourners for Truth and Justice to protect “black womanhood”, and it contains practical reversals of racial stereotypes, describing incident after incident where white men behaved as violent sexual predators of vulnerable black women.  

Ultimately, the text describes the movement as a site where individual women could find pride in their race and gender, and attain a sense of personhood in a society that was structured to deny such status.  Endesha Ida May Holland, for example, went from working as a prostitute to becoming an SNCC activist, stating that “the movement said I was somebody; I was somebody, they said.”  McGuire uses court decisions as markers of progress, as a chapter is devoted to the first trial where white men were given life sentences in the south for the rape of Betty Jean Owens, and the book’s final chapter is about the trial of Joan Little, a woman of poor repute who killed jailer Clarence Alligood in self defense after he threatened her with rape during her detainment.  Little was acquitted at trial and McGuire’s book includes a political cartoon at the end of the chapter that features and illustration of Joan Little standing over a knocked-out allegorical figure of ‘Dixie Racism’ in a boxing ring.

At the Dark end of the Street has received a number of accolades since its publication.  It has won the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries.  The book contains a detailed index, detailed endnotes, and a bibliography that is subdivided into publication types.  The book also contains many black and white images of the people whose stories populate the text (many of these images also appear on the book website.)

john lewis, civil rights movement - book - 1998 - Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement

Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
John Lewis with Michael D’Orso
Simon and Schuster
1998
496 pages


    Walking With the Wind is a memoir, by progressive US Congressman John Lewis, of a life perpetually engaged in political struggle.  D'Orso and Lewis' book was named one of the "50 Books of our Times" by Newsweek magazine in 2009, and it won the Robert F Kennedy book award in 1999.  Lewis is currently the elected member of the US house of Congress for the State of Georgia’s 5th district, which covers most of the city of Atlanta.  As a young man Lewis was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement, he worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and attained the position of Chairman to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the major organizations involved in propelling that movement forward.  After the movement dissipated, Lewis entered mainstream politics, first working on the Robert Kennedy campaign for the Democratic Party primaries in 1968, and in 1977 a failed bid at a congressional seat.  In 1987 Lewis won the election for the congressional seat that he currently holds.  

Here is an example of the contemporary John Lewis.

    Lewis’ memoir recalls his impoverished youth (he was the child of sharecroppers) and his early development of a social consciousness that compelled him to eventually struggle for civil rights.  The first few chapters of the memoir begin with Lewis discussing a recent visit to a southern city, and then proceeding into his memories of the movement that pertain to that locale.  This structure does not hold through the entirety of the book, but it sufficiently anchors the voice of the author in the contemporary period, in case the reader forgets.  Lewis is looking back on his participation in a political movement that sucessfully changed society to the extent that he, a black man, could now hold a position of political power in the American South.  

    Lewis’ recalls all of the major events of the Civil Rights movement; the freedom rides, the sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, the violence, the indifference of law enforcement to the suffering of marchers at the hands of white mobs, the 1963 March on Washington DC, the tensions between black and white activists, the tensions between adherents to nonviolence and activists who advocated the use of violence and King's assassination.  Lewis also recalls many of the little struggles, those that took place within the movement for individual power or for the purpose of advancing a particular shift in ideology or strategy.  What makes Lewis’ book relevant to the literature on the civil rights movement is that it comes from the voice of a participant, and in particular a participant who used the momentum he gained from his participation in the movement to achieve mainstream political power in order to continue his struggle and to be a symbol of the movement’s success.

    Walking with the Wind is replete with his unique thoughts on the movement events.  He describes first hand the experiences of being physically attacked and then arrested by police.  He discusses the  speech he had prepared for that 1963 March on Washington D.C., the event at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” address.  While Martin Luther King strongly uttering that one line has become appropriated as an iconic image of human (or perhaps merely ‘American’) potential, John Lewis delivered his own speech earlier in the day. Lewis recalls that King was among a group of men who pressured Lewis to soften his rhetoric.  Such anecdotes from a high profile insider of the movement add inflection to the historical events that are commonly known as a series of images.  Lewis was very critical of state power in their indifference (if not assistance) to the suffering of the American south’s black population, and furthermore he was a strict adherent to nonviolent activism (despite his frequent arrests and injuries).   This strength of character pervades his memoir and colours his remembrances of interactions with individuals such as Malcolm X and his successor as SNCC chairman, Stokely Charmichael.  Furthermore, Lewis’ memoir is relevant for inserting the names of forgotten activists back into the discourse of civil rights movement history.

    To the extent that Lewis’ record speaks for itself, the reader of Walking With the Wind does not have to wonder whether or not the activist was, in 1998, altering his memories or his past attitudes to serve his present political career.  Lewis is currently a fearless progressive politician who has fought for issues such as the prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation, and a bill supporting the right for conscientious objectors to be exempt from paying taxes towards military support. 
 Walking with the Wind ends with a description of Lewis’ career in mainstream politics and a list of issues that continue to plague African-American communities.  An interesting aspect to this final section of Lewis’ text is that he continues to use the langauge of radical politics as a United States congressman.  He makes the call to ‘agitate, agitate, agitate!’ when discussing solutions to the unresolved problems of the poor communities he serves.  Lewis and D'orso's book represents the life of a man who continues to fight for the same moral good he has always struggled for, and with the same force of language and character regardless of the status he holds.

abbie hoffman - book - 1998 - Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America

Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America
Larry Sloman
Doubleday
1998
437 pages


Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America is an oral biography of 1960s radical leader, Abbie Hoffman.  The book’s author, Larry Sloman, was an active agent of the 1960s counterculture in some capacity, and statements by himself appear in this text to reflect his own familiarity with Hoffman.  Like any oral biography, Steal This Dream is composed recorded words of hundreds of Sloman’s interview subjects.  This book is one of several biographies about Abbie Hoffman, including Marty Jezer’s Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman by Jonah Raskin, Run Run Run: The Lives of Abbie Hoffman by Abbie’s brother, Jack Hoffman, and finally Abbie’s autobiography, Soon to be a Major Motion Picture.  All of these biographies were written by people who knew Hoffman personally, and perhaps with the exception of Abbie’s brother, all were by individuals who were directly involved in the counterculture that Abbie helped to develop.  Steal This Dream’s is unique among the Hoffman literature in that it is an oral biography.

    Author Larry Sloman is probably best known as a collaborator of Howard Stern, with whom Sloman authored Private Parts and Miss America.  Sloman has also written a number of biographies of figures such as Bob Dylan, Anthony Keidas, and most recently, Harry Houdini.  Sloman also authored a book about the social history of marijuana titled, Refer Madness: A History of Marijuana.  He holds a masters degree in Deviance and Criminology, which appears to carry into his work as an author and journalist, as much of his work focuses on figures who play in the margins of culture and society.  While a number of Sloman’s books play on issues of nonconformism and deviance, Steal This Dream, in its lack of criticality of its subjects, appears to be a culmination of a wave of nostalgia for the radical 1960s that carried through the late 1980s and 1990s.

Sloman is frequently the invisible hand whose name appears smaller than the celebrity he collaborates with even though it is often his labour that makes it appear as though a rock star has actually sat down and written a book.  Steal This Dream is unique among his own ouevre, and among the Abbie Hoffman books, as it is an oral biography, meaning that Sloman interviewed scores of people who knew the man, and structured their resultant statements into an account of his life from this myriad of perspectives.  The printed statements, often many appear to a single page, may be supplemented by statements made by Hoffman himself from interviews he gave during the 1960s and by images of him or events related to the events being discussed.  This is the basic structure of the book, and the structure of almost any oral biography.  

The text of this book exists in two time periods.  The statements of people, speaking from the 1990s but looking back on the event that was Abbie Hoffman, and excerpted statements given by Hoffman from various points in his life.  This approach highlights an issue with the oral biography regarding the aspect of distance.  Hoffman (deceased since 1989) can only speak through his media appearances from the times being discussed by all of the other textual sources.  As is noted by many of his friends in Steal This Dream, Hoffman was a master media figure, and was always attempting to present an image of himself that balanced an appearance of mischievous playfulness as well as radical seriousness.  This representation is manifest in the quotations by Hoffman selected by Sloman, and such quotes were primarily used to fill out the details of a particular event under discussion.  Abbie's included statements are already conditioned by his approach to media appearance.  Meanwhile everyone else is looking back on events that occured 20 to 40 years ago from a situation where The Sixties have been apotheosized as a new golden age for radical political activity and alternative living (the age which inspired Theodore Roszak to coin the term ‘counterculture’).  Sloman’s subjects are speaking from a sense of their own historical relevance - and are discussing Abbie Hoffman in a nostalgic manner - often to demonstrate their own appearance and importance in that history.  Additionally they are looking back upon a completed life.  We now know that Hoffman suffered from bipolar disorder and the people who knew him may now give enlightened comments on that component of his personality.  Steal This Dream is not a source for finding how his friends and associates understood his bipolar-related behavior at the time.  

Steal This Dream covers all of the important events of Hoffman’s life, as told by his friends and enemies (including some of the law enforcement personnel he had encounters with).  His childhood, his unhappy first marriage, his Freedom Ride experience, his anti-war activism and related pranks, Chicago 68’ and the subsequent trial, his cocaine bust and flight underground, his resurfacing, his environmental activism, his career as a campus speaker and his death are discussed.  With oral biographies there is a lack of critical distance, as the people in the subject’s life tend to rosily wax nostalgic or vent their anger, often over minor details and irrelevant anecdotes, (Abbie’s brother Jack, for example, appears fixated on the radical prankster’s sexual life).  The book is most interesting when Abbie’s self-mythologizing is challenged, for example, when Bob Zellner (an SNCC activist) stated that Hoffman exaggerated his involvement in the civil rights movement.  I believe that for a figure who wrote so much about himself, such commentary is fair and welcome to a researcher, but primarily much of what is critical of Hoffman is focused on minor details rather than on deconstruction of his acts or statements.

This book’s value to a researcher may be primarily in its sources and their quotations.  The statements of many notable figures of the 1960s appear in this book, and while much of what they say is about Hoffman, many statements are also just ruminations on the events of the decade.  Additionally, insights into rivalries between groups, such as the tension between the Diggers and the Yippies, for example, can be found in Sloman’s text, and may help give depth to some of the attitudes different radical factions held towards one another at the time.  

An unfortunate dimension to the experience of reading Steal This Dream is that the connection an interview subject has to Abbie can easily be forgotten.  The text has an appendix that lists all of the interviewees and their status as of the time of publication, but a similar appendix that lists their role in the 1960s or in Hoffman’s life would have been extremely helpful in making the book searchable.  Interviewee names may disappear and then reappear later, and it is easy for the reader (i.e., me) to forget who they were if they are not a well known ex-radical.  Sloman’s subtitle for his text suggests that this book is a history of the American counterculture, from its civil rights movement beginnings through to the 1980s environmental movement.  The book would be useful as a historical text if it contained some means by which a reader may search it quickly.

Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in 1989.  There’s a quote, given by New York City poetry maverick John Giorno towards the end of the book, where he quoted  William Burroughs as saying, “He really let us down.”  Many of the final statements of Sloman’s book were in response to Burrough’s shorthand eulogy.  Mike Rossman (I’ve lost track of his connection to Hoffman) said “If anything, Burroughs’ is a reiteration of the attitude which, introjected, helped to kill Abbie.  This demand that the man’s life should not be his own... it appears to me to be an inhuman demand.”  It may have been an inhuman demand, but Sloman’s biography describes a man who loved life as a media figure, and entered the media in order to make similar demands of others.