Journey into the Past – Return of the New Left

I was the outlier at the party. Back in the tumultuous ‘60s I was not ‘on the left’, nor was I an activist on the hot button issues of the day. Instead, I was just a plain vanilla liberal, a young academic, or, in the parlance of the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the ‘30s, what they called a ‘bourgeois professor’.

That’s not to say that I didn’t know a lot about Marxism – on the contrary, as a specialist on Russia and the USSR I in fact did.  I also knew a great deal about an icon of the left in the ‘60s – Trotsky, the Old Bolshevik – especially his role in the internal Soviet power struggles of the ‘20s. But I was neither a Marxist, nor did I take much interest in Trotsky after his political exile. Likewise the Trotskyist movement that emerged in the West and subsequently came to full flower after his brutal assassination at the hands of a Moscow agent was not really on my radar screen.

Until Khrushchev and his successors came along in the postwar ‘50s, the name of the game for professional students of the harsh Soviet system was Stalin, its ruthless autocrat. After Stalin’s death, what the American left was up to was of only peripheral interest to those studying and teaching Soviet politics. Change was afoot in the USSR – the other side in the Cold War dominating the planet – and as Soviet specialists we had our hands full tracking it.

Fast forward: It’s the summer of ’13, the Cold War has long been over, the mighty USSR is history, and I found myself on a journey into the past – literally back to Indiana University (IU) and the milieu of the New Left inhabited by my younger brother Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969). No stranger to the campus – I had taken a PhD there – I had left in ’62 before Jeff, an ex-Vietnam GI, had returned to IU to resume his academic education and along the way acquire a political education among the campus New Left.

Though Jeff and I sat in common classrooms and frequented popular hangouts like the Gables, Nick’s bar, and the Von Lee theater, town and gown ‘landmarks’ were quite different for each of us. For Jeff the New Left activist, IU’s Dunn Meadow and Showalter Fountain were familiar venues, as was Bloomington’s City Hall – all sites of many anti-Vietnam War protests; so was the official presidential residence where he’d led a demonstration in ’67; and Kirkwood Avenue, lined with small shops and eateries with which I was of course familiar, but where Jeff had been arrested leading a peaceful protest.

The IU New Left, a small group of students in the ‘60s and early ‘70s at a large conservative university, was holding a grand reunion back on campus. Some of them had gathered there a quarter of a century earlier, but that occasion had been more about the music and personal connections. This time, thanks to the Internet, it would be a larger and more diverse turnout with the express purpose of taking a full look back some 50 years at what had occurred, what was achieved, what fell short. Now entering what may be called the ‘age of nostalgia’ in their late 60s and early 70s, the veterans of that heady time in their lives were returning to IU.

They arrived in town from all corners of the country and Canada – from the East and West coasts; down from Alberta, Chicago, Indianapolis; up from Texas and all over the Midwest – and there were some who had stayed put, made their careers locally, or retired back to their old college town – Bloomington, the locale of Indiana University.

As Jeff’s older brother writing a memoir about his short but interesting life – despite being an outlier – I had been invited and warmly welcomed by his old friends, nearly 60 or more who made the journey. Many I knew by name – I had read the history of dissent at IU* – exchanged emails with quite a few, and had even spoken with some by phone. But there I was, walking amongst my brother’s fellow activists of long ago, listening avidly as they strolled down memory lane of their younger years at IU – a period that many said had been seminal in their lives.

They held a group conclave and retrospective panel discussions, but most reconnections among activist friends – the conversation writ large – were informal and took place in social settings and smaller groups. There was Robin Hunter, Marxist mentor to the campus New Left; Nell Levin, aka Bernella Satterfield back then, co-founder in ‘65 of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at IU; and Dan Kaplan, Jeff’s successor as SDS president in ‘67.

Robin Hunter at the Indiana New Left Reunion, Summer 2013

From further back there were Ralph Levitt, Tom Morgan, and the former Paulann Groninger (now Sheets) – brave souls who, along with a small band of brothers and sisters, marched across campus and through town at risk of life and limb in support of revolutionary Cuba during the Missile Crisis of ’62. Tom and Paulann had both known Jeff.

(L to R) The author, Paulann Sheets, Dan Kaplan, Bloomington IN, 2013**

Standing before me was Guy Loftman, with whom Jeff had worked closely in Guy’s successful election campaign as the first New Left President of the IU Student Government. Arriving a little later came Dwight Worker, veteran of the Dow Chemical sit-in of ’67, subsequently a legend in book and film, now a gentleman farmer who fondly remembered Jeff’s influence on him as a young activist.

Dwight Worker at his farm outside Bloomington, 2013

Whiling away a mid-summer evening listening to the great sounds of IU’s greying hippie folk/country musicians led by Roger Salloom, award-winning poet-singer-songwriter, I caught up with Cathy Rountree, a key reunion organizer and long-time nurse practitioner back from the Arizona desert where she had driven miles and miles along dusty, unpaved roads helping Navajo in need. Jim Retherford, who’d known Jeff well, joined me at the ‘jam’ – he had been the inaugural editor of The Spectator, the New Left’s alternative paper founded at IU in ’66.

Roger Salloom (center back), Richard Blaustein in the hat, Nell Levin, Michael August, Steve Coll, Bloomington, August 2013**

Most of the New Left alums had been SDS, but quite a number were former YSA or the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There’d been differences in strategy and ideology (or lack thereof in SDS’s case), and even in lifestyles between the two main campus New Left groups, but with their common  battlefield where they’d protested as one against the war in Vietnam long silent, old differences had faded, edges softened.

However, the one thing that struck me most about the group’s fascinating collective journey back to the past, was that nearly all of them at the reunion had retained a strong commitment to social justice in one form or another in the many years since the ‘60s. Whatever their individual takes on the historical scorecard of their earlier dreams of change, for most, their post-university life choices and trajectories continued to reflect core beliefs held in the days of youthful idealism.

Whether ‘red diaper’ babies, IU ‘faculty brats’, or originally from Indiana small town backgrounds, most of those who gathered back at the IU campus in the summer of ’13 had devoted and, in many instances, were still devoting their lives to the so-called ‘good-guy’ causes of society – anti-Apartheid, abortion rights, gay liberation.

Some had gravitated to college and high school teaching, serving as advocates for adding Black Studies and Women’s Studies to curricula. A woman reported teaching a course on Trotskyism at the high school level, while an academic teaches his college courses on politics from a Marxian perspective. Quite a number of the New Left alums became labor activists, labor organizers, and union officials in education, services, and transportation.

♫I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

alive as you and me

Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead"

"I never died," said he

"I never died," said he.† 

Others gave years of their lives to professional activism on the left –
working on behalf of Cuba, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and in the press arm of SWP, translating and publishing Soviet dissident samizdat – writings critical of the regime’s repressive ways barred by state censors. Most of these individuals were also veterans of civil rights struggles and industrial labor battles.

More recently, several activists mentioned their commitments to on-going issues – pushing implementation of Obamacare for those without coverage, assisting needy homeowners to avoid foreclosure, demonstrating for the hunger strikers held at Guantanamo, and reviving a popular ‘60s underground publication as a contemporary blog – in effect, pouring new wine in old bottles.

While many of the dreams of systemic change of the ‘60s – not just ending a war, but changing the ‘system’ – fell short, melancholy and despair were not in evidence at the New Left’s reunion at Indiana University. On the contrary, all had kept faith in the possibility of taking action and changing things in myriad ways for the better. Onward said they – an unforgettable occasion.

This is the first of several posts on the New Left Reunion at Indiana University which will appear in coming weeks and months.

Link to music video

†   http://www.youtube.com/watchv=f_yC4ffyGiw&list=RD02f_yC4ffyGiw

*M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (2002).

**Thanks to Carol Richert Hart, a participant in the IU reunion, for the use of her photo(s).

Right-On Music & Left Politics – Minstrels of the Midwest



[This is the 5^th post on the music of the ‘60s by Karen Grote Ferb, my collaborator on this blog. Karen was a student at Indiana University during the period described. We welcome memories of the time from readers who were there and, as always, any necessary corrections.] 

 

The early folk scene at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington began in the late ‘50s.  It included the ‘Phase Three’ and ‘Quiet Answer’ coffee houses, radio shows, and hootenannies.  The campus Folk Club (IUFC) was founded in 1962, the year I entered IU as a freshman; I also remember folk sings at Hillel House on 3^rd Street; one song I particularly remember is the hauntingly beautiful but sad Dona Dona, which singer/songwriter and activist Joan Baez, a major contributor to the folk music revival, had made popular on her debut album in 1960.

♫Calves are easily bound and slaughtered
Never knowing the reason why
But whoever treasures freedom
Like the swallow has learned to fly†

 

Professor Neil Rosenberg, then a graduate student in Folklore and a long-time performer of folk and bluegrass, tells us the  IUFC sponsored folk sings, lectures, symposia, films, concerts, and instructional workshops. IUFC also sponsored well-known performers such as the New Lost City Ramblers, Doc Watson and Dave Van Ronk.  A documentary film, Always Been a Rambler, chronicles the contributions of some of the performers. 

 

As the legendary Bob Dylan put it, “One of the things that the New Lost City Ramblers did was uncover great old songs that you could only find in those days in piles of 78s in somebody’s barn. They breathed new life into those songs, and their records stand the test of time, just like the originals.”

 

IUFC tried to book Joan Baez, but, due to university restrictions, could not bring her to campus even though she had agreed.  Later the university tried to book her, but she refused to come. In the early ‘60s Rosenberg was one of the ‘Pigeon Hill Ramblers’* along with Ann Rosenberg, Dan Scullin, and Jeff Sharlet’s very good friends and fellow activists Bernella and David Satterfield. The Satterfields had been involved with the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village along with the likes of Dylan, Baez, Paxton, Ochs, Van Ronk, the Weavers, and the New Lost City Ramblers.**   

 

Along with traditional folk music, the ‘Pigeon Hill Ramblers’ performed music of social protest, such as card-carrying Wobbly Utah Phillips’ song No More Reds In the Union at the ‘Owl’ – a New Left/hippie hangout –  and at demonstrations as well as in the Satterfields’ living room at 102 North Dunn Street, the center of  meetings of the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the scene of lively political discourse.

♫Each year we have a swell affair, there's no more reds in the union.
The bosses and their friends are there, there's no more reds in the union.
They give us food, they give us beer,
But one thing seems so very queer:
We eat that good but once a year, there's no more reds in the union!††

 

Since the postwar revival of folk music had been nurtured by the left (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, and others), it was no surprise that participants in the IUFC were likely to have a leftist point of view; some went so far as to say that folk singing in itself was an activist undertaking. 

 

This association eventually led to the decline of the club as political energy was drawn into the growing Vietnam antiwar movement.  Peter Aceves (he later changed his surname to Narváez) was one of those musician/activists drawn into SDS; he ran instructional workshops in jazz and folk under the group’s auspices.

 

Folklore grad student Aceves, a fine guitarist and songwriter, assembled a group to perform his compositions.  Members of the group included Neil Rosenberg, David Satterfield, Richard Blaustein, John Hyslop, Dave Brock, and Jim Barden.  They eventually released a now hard-to-find album, Homegas, in 1970. 

The Homegas musicians

The highly regarded album track Bulldozer Blues, written and sung by David Satterfield with Aceves on guitar, is about the house at 102 N. Dunn, which was bulldozed, 'tractored down' in the words of the song. An adjacent building on the corner of E. Kirkwood and N. Dunn had earlier housed a Black-owned business called the Black Market, which was razed soon after being firebombed the day after Christmas, '68, by Indiana Ku Klux Klansmen (KKK). The land the two buildings stood on eventually became known as People's Park and, true to its radical past, became the site of Bloomington's Occupy movement in 2011.

♫ …Well, I could hear that motor running

My mind was in a chill.

I went on down to my home place, Babe,

Down to the place I used to play.

But the house was tractored down,

Landlord said it would not pay…†††

 

In ‘65 a young singer/songwriter, Roger Salloom,* arrived in Bloomington and found his way into the musician-activist crowd.  He remembers Jeff Sharlet as vivacious, charismatic, and very politicized about the Vietnam War.  He said that when Jeff spoke, people listened because he spoke with the authority of a GI who’d been there and seen it all.  But Jeff was in the political world, while Roger was in the musical world. 

 

Roger would record with David Satterfield and front a band called ‘Salloom, Sinclair, and Mother Bear’. ‘Mother Bear’ was a group of working-class Indiana guys.Sinclair was Robin Sinclair; she came from an operatic background and had a powerful voice that was capable of “keeningly high notes” according to one listener.

 

 

 

           Salloom, Sinclair, and Mother Bear

 

Around this time locals involved in the folk revival discovered the music festivals held in the town of Bean Blossom in Brown County, about an hour’s drive from Bloomington.  Since 1941 it had been a local center for traditional culture, folklore, music, and arts and crafts. The legendary Bill Monroe, oft dubbed the father of bluegrass, bought property there in 1951 and called it his home away from home for over 40 years. He brought the first bluegrass festival to Bean Blossom in 1967, two years after the first ever in Roanoke VA.  The Bean Blossom festival is the oldest continuously running bluegrass festival in the country.  As the pre-eminent authority on folk and world music Alan Lomax put it, bluegrass was “folk music with overdrive,” and many IU performers wholeheartedly embraced it.

 

The IU musician-activists began to reach out to other performance venues, even ranging far afield to the likes of the ‘Saturday’s Child’ coffee house in the town of Porter up in the northwest corner of the state. But the’ Owl’ coffee house, located in the dimly candlelit basement of the old Wesley Foundation building at 4th and Lincoln in Bloomington, continued to be a popular venue. Several of the musician activists broadcast their music and more on a small local radio station.

 

David Satterfield broadcasting

Tables were in a semi-circle around a raised performance platform.  The tablecloths resembled Paul Klee's later art--simple line, form, and color. To get a waitress, you held up the candle in a straw-covered Chianti bottle.  It was crammed to the rafters with students wanting to listen to the music, so much so that some resorted to sneaking in through a cellar window.

 

A focal point for music in the mid-‘60s, the 'Owl' was open Friday evenings. It was organized by students led by David Hunter, who’d been chairman of the Progressive Reform Party, IU's Student Power party. The 'Owl' at first leaned heavily toward folk music, later toward rock and roll. It served as a staging ground for aspiring local performers with occasional out-of-town acts.

 

Some of the local performers at the 'Owl' – the Satterfields, Aceves/Narváez, and Salloom – were stars on campus and in the community.  The hip hippie crowd gathered there, folksong being the music of choice among the left-leaning activists who occasionally went to the mike in the front of the room to make political statements.

 

An SDS law student, Steve Schlosser, persuaded a bunch of SDSers and folkies to organize a political singing group called the ‘Subversion Singers’. Their material was mainly self-written, frequently satirical. Guy Loftman, an SDS leader and one-time president of the student body, parodied a pop song aimed at Robert Shaffer, Dean of Students, called Big Boy Bob, the Dean, after a particularly controversial campus banning of a student group and the arrest of two of its members.

♫Folks was standin’ in the Union

Up in the Activities Fair

When all of a sudden up pulled a Batmobile

And out stepped a Dean with grey hair,

Kiwanis rings on every finger

And a 1939 suit

He had a bottle of aspirin and a cigarette

And some tranquilizer pills to boot***

They performed a number of songs taken from the Fugs, Kill for Peace and Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side, on which Robin Hunter (no relation to David), another leading activist and go-to guru for budding leftists, sang lead and played tambourine.  The ‘Owl’ eventually put out a vinyl LP of its performances with many Roger Salloom songs.

What became of the Bloomington minstrels?

David Satterfield died more than a decade ago and Peter Narvaez more recently.

 

Neil Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus, Department of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland.  See his profile at http://www.mun.ca/folklore/people/Rosenberg.php

 

Bernella Satterfield, now known as Nell Levin, still fiddling and singing, is an accomplished Grammy-nominated musician, journalist, and political activist working on progressive causes in Tennessee. Her band is the award-winning  Shelby Bottom String Band:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL6WxsZ1G8o

 

Roger Salloom, “America’s best unknown songwriter,” won 6 awards, was on the 2006 Grammy ballot, and received rave reviews across the US. A documentary film, “So Glad I Made It,” has been made about his life and career.  See http://rogersalloom.com/

_______________________

* Pigeon City Ramblers output:   http://www.worldcat.org/title/united-states-indiana-bloomington-1965/oclc/19232004

 

** http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/heartland-radicals.html

 

***M A Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland (2002), 32ff

 

†Link to Dona Dona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqzGZ5AaeSs

 

††There’s no More Reds in the Union:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QN7-8BPp6Y

 

†††Bulldozer Blues:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnDbElxh5sU

 

Links to music of Salloom, Sinclair, and Mother Bear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDA81WDTxRM 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h74I5v38GxI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1JbQcoy7t4

 

Links to music of Aceves/Narvaez and Homegas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jDluXtyr3c&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du7O8pF5ddU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnDbElxh5sU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8aCTTOIfMs&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Dt19rGdiM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK52AUeBJUo&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAGcn_pZPK8&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJCVnwOTacA&feature=related