Thursday, January 02, 2020


DIARY

Panthers in Algiers







In​ 1951 I left the US for Europe. I was working as a translator and interpreter in the new postwar world of international organisations: UN agencies, trade-union bodies, student and youth associations. My plan was to visit France briefly, but I stayed nearly ten years. For anyone living in Paris, the Algerian war was inescapable. Where did your sympathies lie? Which side were you on? In 1960 at an international youth conference in Accra, I struck up a friendship with the two Algerian representatives: Frantz Fanon, a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, and Mohamed Sahnoun of the exiled Algerian student movement. After the conference, I flew to New York, where I met Abdelkader Chanderli, the head of the Algerian Office, as the unofficial Algerian mission at the UN was known. Chanderli invited me to join his team, lobbying UN member states to support Algerian independence.

In 1962, with independence declared, I went back to Algeria. Vacancies left by close to a million fleeing Europeans meant that jobs were on offer in every ministry and sector. Before long, I found myself working in President Ahmed Ben Bella’s press and information office, where I received foreign journalists, scheduled appointments and dished out information to the reporters from Europe and the US who were streaming in. I even learned to fake Ben Bella’s signature for his admirers.

I stayed on after the coup that brought Houari Boumediene to power in 1965. I had made a home in Algeria; I was happy with my life and my work in the national press. In 1969, events took an extraordinary turn. Late one night I received a call from Charles Chikerema, the representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, one of many African liberation movements with an office in the city. He told me that the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was in town and needed help.

It was June. I remember it very clearly. I can see myself walking down a side street between the Casbah and the European sector of Algiers towards the Victoria, a small, third-rate hotel. I climbed four flights of stairs and knocked. The door opened and there was Cleaver, and beyond him, flat out on the bed, his wife, Kathleen, eight months pregnant. The sense of awe I felt that day never left me. The shortcomings of the Black Panther Party are clear enough in retrospect, but they took the battle to the streets, demanded justice and were prepared to bear arms to protect their community. Their slogans – ‘The sky’s the limit’, ‘Power to the People’ – resounded through black ghettoes across the US. They denounced American imperialism as the war in Vietnam gathered pace.

Cleaver had arrived secretly in Algiers using Cuban travel documents. After ambushing a police car in Oakland, he had jumped bail and headed for Havana, where he spent six months as a clandestine guest before he was ‘discovered’ by a journalist. The Cubans had put him on a plane to Algiers without informing the Algerians. Cleaver felt his life hung in the balance. He had been assured in Havana that everything had been cleared with the Algerian government, that he’d be received with open arms and allowed to resume the political activities denied him in Cuba. But his handlers at the Cuban embassy in Algiers were now telling him the Algerians weren’t willing to offer him asylum.

I’d never known the authorities to refuse asylum seekers, whatever their nationality. Since I was the only American the local officials knew, I was often called on to interpret and explain, and to take responsibility for Americans who arrived without realising that hardly anyone in Algeria spoke English. Later that day I talked to the official in charge of liberation movements, Commandant Slimane Hoffman, a tank specialist who had deserted from the French army to join the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) and was close to Boumediene. I explained that Cleaver wished to remain in the country and to hold an international press conference. Hoffman agreed straightaway, but insisted that Cleaver’s presence be announced by the Algerian Press Service. ‘You saved my life,’ Cleaver told me repeatedly; he was convinced the Cubans had set him up.

The press conference went ahead, in a hall packed with students, members of the local and international press, diplomats and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from English into French. I did the same, into English, for the Cleavers. ‘We are an integral part of Africa’s history,’ Cleaver said at the conference. ‘White America teaches us that our history begins on the plantations, that we have no other past. We have to take back our culture!’

From then on, we were a team. Cleaver was tall – he seemed to me towering – and sexy, with a perfectly developed sense of humour and expressive green eyes. He and I had a rapport, no sex but much sharing of confidences. When the Cleavers arrived, I was working at the Ministry of Information organising the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, which was to bring together musicians, dancers, actors and intellectuals from every country in Africa and the black diaspora, including members of the Panthers from the US. For more than a week, the streets of Algiers overflowed, performances filled the day and carried on into the small hours. Among the performers were Archie Shepp, Miriam Makeba, Oscar Peterson, and Nina Simone, whose first performance we had to cancel after Miriam Makeba and I found her dead drunk in her hotel room. The local stagehands were shocked: they had never seen a drunk woman. The Panther delegation stayed at the Aletti, the best hotel in downtown Algiers, and were provided with a storefront – they called it the Afro-American Centre – on rue Didouche Mourad, one of the city’s two main commercial thoroughfares, where they distributed party literature and screened films late into the night. Cleaver and his companions – most of them also refugees from US justice – were quickly integrated into the cosmopolitan community of liberation movements. The Panthers may not have noticed, or perhaps didn’t care, that Algeria itself was a conservative, closed society, that women were not really free, that a form of anti-black racism existed among the population, and that the Algerian establishment’s generosity required certain codes of conduct and reciprocity on the part of their guests. The Panthers ignored whatever they didn’t want to deal with. After the festival, the delegation returned to California, while the exiles got down to business. I received invitations for Cleaver to meet the ambassadors of North Vietnam, China and North Korea, as well as representatives of the Palestinian liberation movement and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Vietcong). I accompanied him on these visits: he was dignified and lucid, performing like a seasoned diplomat, despite his past as a school dropout, rapist and convict. He could also close down, and retreat to an inaccessible place.

Shortly after Cleaver’s arrival, the ambassador of North Korea invited him to Pyongyang to attend an ‘international conference of journalists against American imperialism’. Cleaver was the star of the conference and stayed on for more than a month. One morning, shortly after his return, he showed up at the Ministry of Information, where I was part of a small team working on a political magazine for international distribution. He was wearing shades and slumped down on a chair next to my desk. Then, without any preamble he lowered his voice: ‘I killed Rahim last night.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow inmate, Byron Booth, in January 1969. They had hijacked a plane to Cuba and joined up with Cleaver. Not long after sending Cleaver off to Algiers, the Cubans packed off Rahim and Booth too.

Cleaver told me that Rahim had stolen the Panthers’ money and was planning to ‘split’. He and Booth, who witnessed the murder, had buried the body on a wooded hillside a little way out of town, near the sea. Once he’d finished telling me this he put on the cap he’d been playing with and strolled out of the office. I couldn’t get Rahim’s face out of my mind. I was angry with Cleaver for imagining I needed to know any of this. Did he think I could help him if the Algerian authorities got wind of the murder and decided to take action? Several days later a French friend told me that he had seen Rahim and Kathleen Cleaver ‘smooching’ in a cabaret when Cleaver was in North Korea. My friend didn’t know that Rahim had ‘disappeared’. When I next saw Cleaver he told me that the hastily buried remains had been discovered, and added that it must have been obvious from the afro and the tattoos that the victim was an African-American. By then Booth had left the country. A French friend of the Panthers was summoned to police headquarters to identify the body but no one from the Algerian authorities ever got in touch with the Panthers or with me, though I was sure the killing had gone on record.

The Panthers financed themselves thanks to donations from supporters and Cleaver’s advances on book projects. His royalties from Soul on Ice, the defiant confession that had made him famous, were blocked by the US government. Over lunch one day in the spring of 1970, Cleaver pleaded with me to find a way for what the Panthers were now calling the ‘International Section of the BPP’ to be recognised as a sponsored liberation movement, allowing it access to a range of privileges, and a monthly stipend. I turned the problem over to M’hamed Yazid, who’d been the Algerian provisional government’s first representative in New York. He spoke fluent English and was married to Olive LaGuardia, niece of the former mayor of New York City.

M’hamed invited us to lunch at his house outside Algiers, built in the Ottoman period. We sat at a table in the garden, the Cleavers, Don Cox – the former military leader of the BPP, known as ‘DC’ or ‘the field marshal’ – and myself. M’hamed charmed us with stories of his life in New York, all the while sizing up his guests. The interview went well and soon afterwards he called to say the Panthers had been assigned a villa formerly occupied by the Vietcong delegation in the El Biar sector of the city. They would be provided with telephone and telex connections and Algerian ID cards; they wouldn’t need entry or exit visas; and they would receive a monthly cash allocation.

Why did the authorities decide to support the Panthers more openly? Perhaps they would serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Washington over Algeria’s oil and gas reserves. There were ideological reasons too. It was obvious to everyone living there that Algeria was not neutral in the struggle between the superpowers. Ties with the Soviet Union dated back to the liberation war and the Eastern bloc’s generosity in providing weapons, training and education.

Cleaver was on top of the world after receiving formal recognition. In May, he shipped his pregnant wife off to give birth in North Korea. The wonders of the Korean health system, it was thought, were unsurpassed, and the decision would strengthen the BPP’s ties with Pyongyang. Meanwhile Cleaver had met a gorgeous young Algerian called Malika Ziri who was constantly at his side. Attaching herself publicly to a black American at least 15 years older than her in a society where discretion was the rule would have required immense self-confidence. The Panthers were stars in Algiers, but their flamboyance was also looked on critically. They helped themselves to scarce resources – basic entitlements in American eyes – that other liberation movements didn’t have access to: houses, cars, media coverage, visiting celebrities. They openly dated attractive women, both Algerian and foreign. I can still picture Sekou Odinga, an exile from the New York branch of the Panthers, swooping along the rue Didouche in a shiny red convertible with the top down, a lovely auburn-haired American at the wheel.

The official opening of the headquarters of the International Section took place on 13 September 1970. ‘This is the first time in the struggle of the black people in America that they have established representation abroad,’ Cleaver told the crowd at the ‘embassy’. A few weeks later Sanche de Gramont, a French-American journalist, published a cover story in the New York Times Magazine entitled ‘Our Other Man in Algiers’.

Soon after the opening of the embassy Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD (‘turn on, tune in, drop out’), and his wife arrived in town. Leary had been sprung from a US prison by the Weather Underground, who’d been paid $25,000 (some say $50,000) by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a California hippy group that manufactured and distributed high-grade marijuana and LSD. Nixon had called Leary ‘the most dangerous man in America’. Cleaver and I gave Slimane Hoffman a toned-down version of Leary’s story, emphasising his career as a Harvard professor. Cleaver assured Hoffman that he was capable of controlling Leary’s drug use and his bouts of nonsensical eloquence. The commandant wished us well.

My first impression was that the Learys were elderly hipsters. I don’t know what I expected: something crazier, more flamboyant and exciting. In the name of the revolution Cleaver decided that Leary had to denounce drugs, and Leary agreed to take part in a BPP film session aimed at US audiences. Cleaver opened the interview by saying that the idea that drugs were a way to liberation was an invention by ‘illusionary guys’: the real path was through organisations like the Weathermen and the BPP who were involved in direct action. Leary’s reply was cagey. ‘If taking any drug postpones for ten minutes the revolution, the liberation of our sisters and brothers, our comrades, then taking drugs must be postponed for ten minutes ... However, if one hundred FBI agents agreed to take LSD, thirty would certainly drop out.’

The Panthers decided Leary should join a delegation invited to the Levant by Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s party, then the dominant force in the PLO. Leary should break cover there, it was argued, not in Algeria. The group, headed by Don Cox, landed in Cairo in October without incident, then went on to Beirut, where they were put up in a hotel frequented by the Western press. Leary was spotted and the hotel was besieged. The delegation was followed everywhere and it became impossible for them to visit Fatah’s training camps in Jordan and Syria as planned. They returned instead to Cairo, where Leary, paranoid and hysterical, became ‘uncontrollable’, DC reported, scaling walls, hiding behind buildings, raising his arms and screaming in the streets. The Algerian ambassador put them on a plane back to Algiers.

From there, they hired a car and began spending time in Bou-Saada, an oasis in the Sahara where, at their ease on handloom carpets, they partied with LSD. Algeria is an immense country, four-fifths desert, but one is never quite alone. The Learys would smile blissfully and wave to the astonished shepherds who came across them. The Panthers didn’t approve of these escapades and in January 1971 ‘arrested’ the Learys, putting them under guard for several days. Cleaver filmed the prisoners and issued a press release that was distributed in the US: ‘Something’s wrong with Leary’s brain ... We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire ... To all those of you who looked to Dr Leary for inspiration and leadership, we want to say to you that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid.’

When he was freed, Leary complained to the Algerian authorities and we were summoned by Hoffman. The atmosphere was heavy until Cleaver and DC produced bags of drugs recovered from Leary and his visitors – enough for 20,000 hits. Hoffman’s jaw dropped. Tim was tired of us and wanted to move on. He no longer hid his dislike of DC and me; we felt the same way about him. Early in 1971, he left without saying goodbye.

There​ must have been thirty Panthers, men, women and children, in the International Section. They operated in military style with strict regulations, daily worksheets and activity reports. They maintained contact with support groups in Europe and other liberation organisations in Algiers. They ran training sessions in self-defence and weapons instruction. Just before the embassy opened Huey Newton, the legendary BPP leader who had spent almost three years in prison on a manslaughter charge for killing a policeman, was granted parole, awaiting a new trial. When he was released from jail ten thousand people turned out to greet him. But the man who took back the leadership of the BPP was not prepared for the transformation that had taken place in his absence. The party had become a powerhouse that the FBI was bent on destroying, waging war against its members, attacking chapter headquarters, letting loose an army of paid informers and circulating fake information. Newton’s reaction was to demand total control, dismissing groups and condemning individuals who failed to fall in line.

With the attempt at containment came self-aggrandisement. He was living in a penthouse, had taken over a nightclub and was walking with a swagger stick. At the start of 1971 he was due to appear on a morning TV show in San Francisco and asked Cleaver to join him to demonstrate their alliance and dissipate the rising tension. The International Section met and decided unanimously to use the occasion to confront Newton. When Cleaver appeared onscreen he demanded that Newton overturn his expulsion edicts and called for the removal of Newton’s lieutenant David Hilliard. Newton cut short the broadcast, then called Cleaver. ‘You’re a punk,’ he said and expelled him from the BPP. Chapters and members across the US took sides.

Cleaver had taped the broadcast and the phone call. He asked me to come and listen to the recording, worried about the Algerian reaction. I didn’t think they would get involved: ‘It’s not their problem, it’s yours, Eldridge.’ The Panthers took down the BPP plaque at the entrance to their embassy and started to call themselves the Revolutionary People’s Communications Network. They hoped to enable information exchange between left-wing groups around the world and to produce a newspaper for distribution in the US and Europe. To take the measure of the damage caused by the Newton/Cleaver split, and launch the network, Kathleen and I headed for the US in October 1971 on a month-long cross-country speaking tour. We soon realised that the party was collapsing.

The group in Algiers plodded on. There was no reaction from the Algerians, no sign that they were following events in the BPP, though Newton had sent a formal message to Boumediene denouncing Cleaver. Then, on 3 June 1972, I received a call from the head of the FLN telling me that a plane had been hijacked in Los Angeles and was heading for Algiers. The hijackers had demanded that Cleaver meet them at the airport. They were holding $500,000 in ransom money, which they’d obtained in exchange for letting the passengers go. We stood on the tarmac, Cleaver, DC, Pete O’Neal (the former head of the Kansas City Panthers) and myself, and watched Roger Holder, a young African-American, and his white companion, Cathy Kerkow, slowly come down the steps from the aircraft. All were in high spirits until we realised that the Algerians had taken the moneybags and were not about to put them into Cleaver’s eager hands. The money was returned to the US; Roger and Cathy were granted asylum and became part of the local community of US exiles.

On 1 August another hijacked plane arrived, this one from Detroit. The hijackers, black but again not Panthers, had been paid $1 million by Delta Airlines for releasing the plane’s passengers in Miami. This time the authorities in Algiers kept the Panthers at a distance, and once again sent the money back to the US. The Panthers were furious: they were ‘vibrating to the overtones of dollar bills’, Cleaver would later admit. They wrote an open letter to Boumediene: ‘Those who deprive us of this finance are depriving us of our freedom.’ DC told his comrades they were crazy and resigned from the organisation: ‘The government is not going to risk the future of their country for a handful of niggas and a million dollars. There’s gonna be trouble.’ He was right. Reproaching Algeria’s head of state in public showed a lack of respect. The police invaded the embassy, confiscated the Panthers’ weapons, cut the telephone and telex connections, and closed it down for 48 hours. When the guard was lifted, Cleaver was called in by a senior official and severely reprimanded. The atmosphere cleared within a few days: Algeria wasn’t ready to abandon them.

Cleaver and his colleagues knew little of the country that had taken them in. They never ventured beyond Algiers. They didn’t read the local press or listen to the radio. Except for women friends, they knew few Algerians and never visited Algerian homes. They knew little of Algeria’s colonial past, the ravages of the war, or the under-development the regime was attempting to tackle. They saw themselves as free agents, able to protest and use the media at will. Some of them even proposed organising a demonstration in front of Boumediene’s offices. Cleaver had to remind them that this was Algiers, not Harlem. They had no real understanding of their hosts, their politics or their reservations about their American guests, and they underestimated them.

The Algerians, for their part, weren’t sure how to deal with the Panthers. Algeria was a leading light in the Third World, active in the non-aligned group of nations. It was hosting and training liberation movements from Latin America, Africa and Asia. There was too much at stake for the FLN to let itself be pushed around by these American exiles. And it couldn’t allow international hijackers to make Algeria look like a nation that didn’t abide by international rules.

With a dying organisation in the US and international support fast slipping away, the Algiers Panthers were close to stateless. ‘The International Section,’ Cleaver later wrote, ‘had become a sinking ship.’ He left the embassy. Malika had been replaced by a series of Algerian women. One of them, to my astonishment, was a veiled neighbour of mine who never left our building unaccompanied. He had wooed her as she hung out the laundry on her balcony and had been meeting her in my apartment while Kathleen was in Europe, seeking asylum for the whole family.

‘To each his own’ was a formula Cleaver used on many occasions. When he used it now, he was signalling his withdrawal from the organised left. The community of exiles began to look to their individual survival. They started leaving Algeria towards the end of 1972. Some settled in sub-Saharan Africa, a few attempted an underground existence inside the US; others, Cleaver included, left for France on forged passports: within a few years he would be back in the US, a born-again Christian. No one was ejected from Algeria. The group of Detroit hijackers left in mid-1973; Roger and Cathy were the last to go in January 1974. Cox, the field marshal, returned to Algiers that year and lived and worked there for another four years. The arrival of the Panthers in Algeria had been more than an education or an experience for me. I believed in them, I loved them and shared their goals. I hated to see them go.

I had made the arrangements for Cleaver’s departure: I found the passport he would travel on, the passeurs who would see him safely across national frontiers, the hideout in southern France, and the apartments in Paris. Before long, he was taken up by influential people there. His French residency and legal immunity were sorted out by the minister of finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, shortly before he became president. Then I stopped hearing from him. To each his own, I reminded myself.



MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR


1 MAY 2019


19 JULY 2017



Letters


Vol. 39 No. 15 · 27 July 2017


I lived in Algeria at roughly the same time as Elaine Mokhtefi, and I remember vividly the various exiles – Chileans and Palestinians in particular – hosted by the government (LRB, 1 June). I also remember the troupes sent by fraternal countries, such as North Korea, to stage events designed to promote cultural and ideological exchange. Almost invariably cultural difference won out over ideological sympathy. The North and South Americans tended to behave, as Mokhtefi reports, as if they were still back home; the Koreans, with shorter exposure, displayed incredulity towards their host society.

The reciprocal respect expected by the exiles’ Algerian hosts was often not shown. There seemed to be little understanding of the physical and mental devastation caused by colonisation and war, or of the magnitude of the tasks the regime faced. Expatriate teachers and oil workers mocked the Algerians. There was constant partying and open sexual promiscuity in what was a poor, conservative country. Another issue was the effect of exile on the exiles themselves; there can be a ‘creep’ in mindset. In Tunisia, after 1982, the PLO and its supporters were gradually drawn into patterns of consumption and individualism that destroyed their unity and lost them their hosts’ sympathy.

Mokhtefi’s article also illustrates the effects of a half-century of Western historiography. Who now would believe that the North Korea health service was ‘unsurpassed’, or credit the support the USSR gave to the Algerian independence movement, ‘in providing weapons, training and education’. Half a century later many young Tunisians, exposed to the Western media, tell me it was the US that freed Algeria.

Anne Murray
Tunis
When students ruled the earth
D.A.N. Jones

Vol. 10 No. 6 · 17 March 1988

1968: A Student Generation in Revolt 
Chatto, 370 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 7011 2913 1
Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties 
Collins, 280 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 9780002177795
Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades 
Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 241 12174 4
Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report 
Unwin Hyman, 196 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 9780044401858

Twenty years is a long time in politics. To me, the flavour of the year 1968 is still ‘anti-Fascism’. The meanings of ‘Fascism’ and ‘National Socialism’ are quite well discussed in Roger Scruton’s cold-hearted Dictionary of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ‘Fascism’ was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you think England might go Fascist, Mr Jones? A quiet English sort of Fascism?’ ‘Abs’lument pas!’ I snapped (quoting from a favourite French film), ‘Abs’lument pas!’ – with a confidence I could not muster today. Then, a contemporary at a college reunion (a conservative chap, working for the Ministry of Defence) said to me sweetly: ‘I think you’re a Fascist.’ I billed: ‘Oh, you don’t!’ He cooed: ‘But I do!’

There was a reason why I should be challenged in these different ways. It must be confessed, without apology, that I was a noticeable Leftie in 1968: I was editing the Black Dwarf, a magazine I intended to promote socialist ideas for working-class readers. It was welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National Organiser for the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, extending our concerns to a campaign against the use of napalm. I had stood for the Greater London Council, in the Labour interest, and I was after a seat on Lambeth Council. I had worked for two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world.

In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American war in Vietnam: the same complaint was addressed to other Labourite statesmen, like Willy Brandt in Germany. At the same time, Wilson had to face covert attacks from right-wingers: it was alleged (and still is) that the British Secret Service was conspiring to remove this prime minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of 1968 came when Cecil Harmsworth King, a hereditary owner of newspapers, invited Earl Mountbatten to seize the governance of Britain.

Had the Earl been corruptible, or mad, we might have had a coup d’état of Latin American proportions. The essence of National Socialism is to exploit the weaknesses of both nationalists and socialists, people who are not very political but who have Tory or Labour prejudices to be worked up. Mountbatten was ‘left-wing’ enough to win the attention of people of my sort, the barrack-room lawyers, and he had a ‘right-wing’ appeal for the more regimental sort, Old Comrades, the British Legion, the cricket, golf and football club members. He exerted some authority even in the Royal Family and he had, surely, much more sex appeal than Hitler, say, or Peron. Altogether, the approach to Mountbatten was quite a shrewd move for the rich and foolish Cecil Harmsworth King.

Another facet of ‘Fascism’ is the organisation of race prejudice. In April 1968, Enoch Powell made his name: a body of deluded meat-porters and dock-workers marched to Westminster, supporting Powell’s campaign against black immigrants. In the same month, by neat coincidence, Martin Luther King was shot dead, during his successful campaign for Civil Rights for black American citizens. Other Hitler-like operations in 1968 included, in the military sphere, the hand-to-hand killing of four hundred-odd Vietnamese civilians by Lieutenant Calley’s men – well recorded in David Caute’s stony book – but we did not know about that at the time, for the attendant journalists were reticent. What we did know about was the war machine rolling steadily on, undiscouraged, offering secure employment to many workers. Napalm was manufactured by Dow Chemical, part of the United States military-industry complex: during our demonstration at Dow Chemical’s London office, I heard the workers coming out, sobbing that it wasn’t fair, they couldn’t help it, they were only doing their job. This could also be seen as ‘Fascist’, rather like Dr Waldheim’s war service.

We were in the 22nd year of the Thirty-Year War to subjugate the Vietnamese: it seemed to be getting worse, as our rulers threw more and more money at their problem. By ‘our rulers’ I mean the rulers of the United States and her allies, including us in Britain: there was a British show called US to remind us. It was filmed in 1968 as Tell me lies; the lyric-writer for US and the author of ‘Tell me lies about Vietnam’ was Adrian Mitchell, one of my colleagues on the Black Dwarf. He also brought out a book of poems in 1968 with a quotation from a news report about Vietnam stretched across the top of each page:


In front of us a curious figure was standing, a little crouched, legs straddled, arms outstretched from his sides. He had no eyes and his body, most of which was visible through tatters of burnt rags, was covered with a hard black crust speckled with yellow pus. The interpreter said: ‘He has to stand, cannot sit or lie.’ He had to stand because his body was no longer covered with a skin but with a crust like crackling which broke easily.

Our rulers explained that it was inevitable that such things should be done to the Vietnamese until they all promised to renounce Communism.

Twenty years on, in a different world, the leader-writers yawn: ‘What was all the fuss about? This bourgeois frolic!’ They were probably about fourteen in 1968, not old enough to understand our revulsion. The fuss was ‘all about’ Vietnam. A fair idea of our unsophisticated feelings may be gathered from Ronald Fraser’s useful book, largely the work of oral historians interviewing about a hundred and seventy people, from six nations, who were vigorously involved in the demonstrations and disruptions of 1968. ‘We’d been brought up to believe in our hearts that America fought on the side of justice,’ says a Californian. ‘There was a feeling of personal betrayal. I remember crying to myself late at night in my room, listening to the reports of the war.’ This is the voice of shamed patriotism. A German says: ‘What shocked me most was that a highly-developed country, the super-modern American army, should fall on these Vietnamese peasants. I always saw those bull-necked fat pigs – like Georg Grosz’s pictures – attacking the small, childlike Vietnamese.’ This was a sort of ‘anti-racist’ response. Another American says: ‘Ours was the sane response. One of total outrage. Not to be outraged was more insane than to be outraged and go bananas.’ This reckless willingness to go bananas, to break every rule, to screw ’em all, was quite common among protesters.

When people who felt like this recognised that there were many others with similar simple feelings, they naturally formed crowds and improvised measures to frustrate the United States war effort: there is not much need for the explanations of amateur psychologists or sociologists. One giddying factor, though, was our dissatisfaction with the leading Communist powers – since both China and the Soviet Union seemed to be giving too little assistance to Vietnam, the land of burning children: when the liberalised government of Czechoslovakia was suppressed by Soviet troops, many left-wingers in Western Europe felt as if they were caught in a sort of pincer movement, or double bind. This made the anger wilder – and many more people went bananas.

I was reminded of 1956, when those of us who were angered by Britain’s deceitful attack on Egypt suddenly had to react to the Soviet suppression of Hungary. Working on the Oxford Mail, I had noticed the students’ response. There were expressions of shamed patriotism and of anti-racist indignation – and of going bananas, especially among those who wanted to think well of the Soviet system and also to support Israel against its Arab enemies. Other students, however, put on their officer-cadet uniforms and paraded under the slogan, ‘Shoot the wogs.’ When challenged, these students barked: ‘Haven’t you got a sense of humour?’ Ronald Fraser notices the resemblance between 1956 and 1968, remarking that ‘the New Left originated out of the crisis of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Anglo-French invasion of Suez.’ The concept of ‘the New Left’ was prominent in the commentaries of observers in 1968. The Black Dwarf (and I myself) were frequently accused of being New Leftist.

The Black Dwarf is often mentioned and quoted in these books. In fact, I see my own words quoted, here and in other new ‘1968’ publications: sometimes they are wrongly attributed to my successor, Tariq Ali, and sometimes to Thomas Wooler, the founder of the original Black Dwarf in 1818. Another book about 1968, by Hans Koning, correctly quotes one of my Black Dwarf aphorisms of 1968: ‘We have a feeling that students are mostly well-to-do kids sowing their wild oats before becoming graduate trainees and junior executives.’ Probably this lack of optimism was one of the reasons I was sacked. Discussing the event in Street Fighting Years, Ali remarks: ‘Jones had meant well, but he did tend to be somewhat hostile to students.’

Tariq Ali still writes with the spirit of an optimistic student. But he has a slightly different map of the world in his head, taking in much of Asia and Latin America. He begins, sportily: ‘This book is a political memoir. It is not, be warned, an account of mini-skirts on the steps of the Sorbonne.’ In fact, he did not go to the Sorbonne, for the very good reason that, as a Pakistani, he might have been refused re-entry to Britain. The watchword for many governments in that Fascist-leaning year was ‘Pick on the foreigner.’ But he went to Hanoi and to Prague – and to Bolivia, in the steps of Che Guevara. He is strongly aware of the racist dimension in the activities of his opponents, he remembers half-forgotten Sixties atrocities (like Sukarno’s massacre of the Indonesian Communists) and he knows, from personal experience of Pakistan, the reality of top people’s coups – so commonplace in the Third World but scarcely imaginable in Britain, except by dreamers like Cecil Harmsworth King. He travelled boldly, sometimes seeming like a very superior kind of student, a President of the Oxford Union on a debating tour. He mingled with Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Sartre – and, most amusingly, with John Lennon, who rightly urged him ‘to get those left-wing students out, to talk to the workers. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel, a Marx, a Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers.’ I don’t think Tariq Ali has ever quite managed this difficult task. He belongs to the students’ world.

Students, when politically stimulated, often become bibliolaters, faithful to one great Book which will answer all questions, defining what is ‘the Revolutionary Situation’ and what is not: hence the bitter, competing sects and tendencies and gurus of the Left. Tariq Ali joined the International Marxist Group (affiliated to the Fourth International). This sounded quite formidable to right-wing opponents, but it consisted of a few chaps in Nottingham, about fifty of them, ‘much smaller than IS’ (the International Socialism movement, quite popular at the time). With their sophisticated political analysis, the IS addicts were able to shout at Tariq Ali: ‘Why don’t you go back to Pakistan?’ Their guru apologised, says Ali, explaining that ‘none of this would have happened if I had joined IS rather than the IMG, which was sweet of him.’ (The same suggestion did not sound so ‘racist’ when it came from Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Karachi: ‘There are only two ways to fight. Like me or then there is Che Guevara. Great man. Why don’t you go to the hills of Baluchistan like him and launch a bloody guerrilla war?’ Ali ‘refused to accept the dichotomy’. His description of other cliques suggests he did well to prefer the IMG, a tiny sect with a grand name to impress friend and foe, but not likely to interfere with his improvisations. Even the IMG, though, had a Great Book to read, the work of an American Communist turned Trotskyist, devoted to ‘the single-minded and relentless pursuit of an oppositional current within the same organisation until it was defeated, demoralised and expelled’.

Tariq Ali, Byronically, makes mock of the sects – and, perhaps, deserves to be mocked himself, for his student-power strategy: but I will resist the temptation, since it was natural and proper that the complaints against our rulers’ insupportable overseas policies should come from wide-reading people, unencumbered with workaday responsibilities. The thing to do was to compel the attention of working people, by linking the overseas atrocity with our domestic complaints. In America, the obvious domestic issue was the blacks’ campaign for Civil Rights, as Ronald Fraser observes. ‘What kind of America is it whose response to poverty and oppression in Vietnam is napalm and defoliation? Whose response to poverty and oppression in Mississippi is silence?’ That must be the least slick slogan in Fraser’s book, but the point was worth making: in 1968 I was myself obsessed with antagonism to ‘racism’ and held that our rulers seemed unable to see the black people of Mississippi and the yellow people of Vietnam as fully human. The shooting of Martin Luther King was relevant to the killings in Vietnam. (I don’t know whether, or how, the shooting of Robert Kennedy was relevant: it may have been done by the Mafia.)

In West Germany, that April, a student protester was shot, as a scapegoat: a dissident from East Germany, with Protestant Christian beliefs, Rudi Dutschke survived the attack for 11 years, half-paralysed and barred from Britain. The domestic issue which had stimulated his crowd was the persistence of Nazism, the guilt of the elders: the Springer Press had singled out Dutschke as the guilty ringleader of the anti-Nazi campaign. Dutschke’s assailant had derived his conception of the student as ‘Public Enemy Number One’ from the Springer Press. After this shooting, German students blockaded Springer’s buildings and policemen had to drive his newspaper vans. In London, we threatened to impede British newspaper production: the Springer office in London was housed in one of the buildings of the treasonous Cecil King.

Ronald Fraser remarks that ‘the hidden, subjective injuries of class ... and the existence of class parties’ led many European students ‘fairly directly into class politics. The same was not true of the United States’: so his American informants have told him. Race means more than class in American minds. ‘The white American movement had always been strongest when it linked the dominant contradiction of the epoch – Vietnam – with the major domestic contradiction – racism,’ says Fraser. A student told him that his comrades had ‘no strategy for reaching people who were different from us, who were either older or more ensconced in working-class or even middle-class jobs’. One country where students and workers co-operated effectively was Italy (mostly in 1969), and a more painful arena was provided by Northern Ireland: Fraser is the only one of these authors to pay attention to that mystery. The Ulster Leftists of 1968 were stimulated by the Czech radicals and also by the Civil Rights movement in America: they naturally compared the local discrimination against Catholics with the American discrimination against blacks.

Like the Americans, says Fraser, they were brutally attacked by the Police. ‘That did the trick here where television was still quite new,’ recalls Michael Farrell, one of the Leftists from Queen’s University, Belfast. The Leftists hoped to unite the Catholic and Protestant working classes, but church-centred sectarianism, very like racism, made it impossible for them to find ‘an inter-communal working-class base’.

Marching from Belfast to Derry, ambushed by cudgel-men, these ‘PDers’ (People’s Democracy) did not look to the IRA – which was, in 1968, wedded to non-violent politics – but to the British Labour Government. Fraser says: ‘Like the Civil Rights workers during the Mississippi Summer four years earlier, the marchers were hoping that the central government would intervene to take power out of the local state’s hands. In both cases they were disappointed, for neither the American federal government nor the British government took steps to protect the civil rights activists.’ A breakaway movement from the IRA, the Provisionals, seized the initiative in 1970 and are still pursuing their miserable policy.

Early in the PD campaign, it was noted that the Police must be given notice of all marches and that one person’s name must be given as the responsible organiser: when no one stood up to accept this scapegoat’s role, Bernadette Devlin said: ‘Mr Chairman, I am an orphan, I have nothing to lose. I will give my name.’ That was the way ‘ringleaders’ and ‘spokesmen’ emerged from the crowds in 1968: they were not so much leaders as banner-men, persons around whom the crowd might congregate, scapegoats for the press to vilify, people like Tariq Ali, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke. It was a year of crowd politics and Fraser’s calm way of using voices from the crowd, recollecting in comparative tranquillity, strengthens his well-constructed history.

David Caute covers much the same ground in a more saddening style: he writes ‘as an historian, a novelist and a playwright’, claims the blurb, justly, and he writes well, in a consistent mood of cold, despondent scorn. This is a tale of too many cities – too many for one book: here are accounts of rebellions in Japan, Yugoslavia and, most interestingly, Franco’s Spain, where students collaborated easily with ‘the militant sections of the working class’. In Spain, however, ‘Vietnam was secondary to the native issue – democracy.’ Another mark of the professional historian is his genuine professional interest in university administration and reform. As a novelist and playwright, he responds more feelingly than other dons to the world of ‘alternative culture’, such a feature of life in 1968: in mingled attraction and repulsion, he engages with sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll ’n’ Allen Ginsberg.

His special interest seems to be the events in France. Sitting in the Black Dwarf office, striving to keep up with the worldwide insurrections and improvisations, I was less captivated than my colleagues by the news of the French students. I could see the glamour of it all – the chic and the panache which captured the sentimental heart of Paul Johnson – but what was their local issue, the domestic link with the Vietnam campaign? Their President was opposed to the American action in Vietnam – more so than Harold Wilson or Willy Brandt. His riot police were notably brutal and his regime was conservative in a military, authoritarian style – which might reflect one aspect of ‘Fascism’, I suppose – but his most dangerous opponents were far to his right. I confess that I took a strong interest in the French students only when they drew in the working-class trade-unionists – and one of my colleagues said: ‘Just because they’ve roped in a bunch of bloody old Stalinists?’

Caute does well to record and interpret the reasoning and strategy of the French workers and students who brought out so many millions on strike and almost toppled de Gaulle’s government. He disconsolately concludes with an account of the triumphant right-wing demonstration in the Champs-Elysées – well-dressed people cheering the riot police and chanting, ‘France back to work! We are the majority! Cohn-Bendit to Dachau!’ while the cars hooted the old Algérie française rhythm. Caute quotes Stephen Spender’s description of this scene: ‘the triumphant bacchanal of the Social World of Conspicuous Consumption, shameless, crowing and more vulgar than any crowd I had seen on Broadway or in Chicago’.

If Tariq Ali represents ‘the optimism of the will’, David Caute provides ‘the pessimism of the intellect’. Such pessimism marks his account of ‘the decline of the New Left’ in several other nations. He notes that Vietnam became, for American students, a profoundly important issue in 1968 because it was the first year that they might have to go and fight there. Deferment for graduate students had just been dropped by Congress. Previously, 57 per cent of American young men had escaped Vietnam fighting through college deferment. Another bolt-hole for white students was the National Guard, which stayed at home: only 1 per cent of the National Guard was black. Few Harvard men, few senators’ sons fought in Vietnam, says Caute, for ‘the middle classes evaded the draft legally’: also, ‘the white middle classes knew how to fail their medicals.’ Their class privilege was endangered in 1968 – and Caute quotes a Harvard student who admits: ‘A peaceful campus, only marginally concerned with Vietnam, became desperate.’ That self-concerned desperation was imported all over the world, eloquently and efficiently. Such is the nature of ‘student power’, perhaps.




Letters


Vol. 10 No. 8 · 21 April 1988


SIR: My friend and former colleague D.A.N.Jones (LRB, 17 March) makes a natural mistake when he quotes the description of a napalm victim which I used as a running reminder on every page of my 1968 book of poems, Out Loud. It was not from a Vietnam War news report, but from a Korean War report by that fine journalist, the late René Cutforth. Part of the tragedy was that masters of the human race had read Cutforth’s horrific, compassionate description of the effects of napalm and went on using this Dow Chemical obscenity.

Adrian Mitchell
London NW3


Vol. 10 No. 9 · 5 May 1988


SIR: The article, ‘When students ruled the earth’ (LRB, 17 March), was presented as my review of four books about 1968. Not so. I was reviewing only three. I quoted very briefly from a fourth, Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report, by Hans Koning, and described it as a ‘book published in America, last year’. A British edition of this worthy book was published in London, by Unwin Hyman, on 28 April. The trouble with your presentation is that it suggests that I tried to review this book a month prior to its British publication date – and then found nothing to say about it.

D.A.N. Jones
London NW10

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Christopher Hitchens, 4 June 1998

BACK WHEN CHRIS HITCHENS WAS A 'FORMER' TROTSKYIST NOT HIS LATER INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO NEOLIBERALISM, THAT BASTARD CHILD OF ANTI STALINIST TROTSKYISM 


Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

1968: Marching in the Streets 
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1
The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 
Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9
The Love Germ 
Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2


I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his early twenties when, as a helicopter gunner in area, he learned of the murder of nearly 660 Vietnamese civilians. This was not some panicky ‘collateral damage’ fire-fight: the men of Charlie Company took a long time to dishonour and dismember the women, round up and despatch the children and make the rest of the villagers lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not Apocalypse Now, not Full Metal Jacket or Platoon – has dared to show anything remotely like the truth of this and many other similar episodes, more evocative of Poland or the Ukraine in 1941. And the thing of it was, as Ron pointed out, that it was ‘an act of policy, not an individual aberration. Above My Lai that day were helicopters filled with the entire command staff of the brigade, division and task force.’

A few weeks ago, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, the state finally got round to recognising the only physical hero of the story, a decent guy named Hugh Thompson who saw what was going on, landed his helicopter between Lieutenant Calley’s killing-squads and the remnant of the inhabitants, called for back-up and drew his sidearm. His citation had taken thirty years to come through. It was intended as part of the famous ‘healing process’ which never seems quite to achieve ‘closure’.

Ron wasn’t interested in any stupid healing process. He wanted justice to be done, and it never was. A single especially befouled culprit, the above-mentioned Calley, was eventually court-martialled and served a brief period of house-arrest before being exonerated by Nixon. The superiors, both immediate and remote, got clean away. A canny young military lawyer near the scene, Colin Powell by name, founded a lifelong reputation for promise and initiative by arranging to have the papers mixed up at the office of the Judge-Advocate General.

I once asked Ron Ridenhour what had led him to risk everything by compiling his own report on the extermination at My Lai and sending it to Congress. He told me that, poor white boy as he was (he left school at 14 and was drafted without protest), he had been in basic training when, in the hut one night, a group of good ol’ boys had decided to have some fun with the only black soldier in the detail. The scheme was to castrate him. Nobody was more astonished than Ron to hear his own voice coming across the darkened bunks. ‘“If you want to get to him, you’ve got to come through me.” I’d’ve been dead if I hadn’t been white and poor like them, but they gave up.’ Later, when his troopship called in at Hawaii en route for Saigon, he went ashore and bought a book about Vietnam by the late Bernard Fall. ‘Shit, this is what I’m getting into.’

A revolutionary moment requires both extraordinary times and extraordinary people, and Ron Ridenhour, despite his laconic attitude, was one of the latter. He wouldn’t have denied, however, that there was ‘something in the air’ in those days. It was getting to the point where you couldn’t shove black people around so easily, or invade any country that took your fancy. There were people who wouldn’t take it, and even people in the press and in the academy who were prepared to make an issue of that. (Though this can be overestimated: it took more than a year for the My Lai story to get into print – in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.) Nonetheless, the climacteric that was 1968 had been building for some time. What fused it into critical mass, and provided its most indelible slogans and imagery, was undoubtedly the correspondence between the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, both of them American and both of them therefore, in a time when ‘global village’ was a new cliché, universal in scope and appeal and reach.

Something has to be done to rescue that time from the obfuscations that have descended over it and to fend off the sneers and jeers that now attach so easily. Some people, of course, take a kind of pleasure in repudiating their own past. Some, whether they wish to or not, live long enough to become negations or caricatures. Or indeed partial confirmations: I am thinking of Lionel Jospin, now chief minister of France and in those days a member of an unusually dogmatic trotskiant group; a groupuscule, indeed, and perhaps an excellent school for the inflexible later canons of neo-liberalism. Robert Lowell once said that he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age. I see the point: the fact remains that in midlife and in 1968 he acted eloquently and well, as a citizen of the republic of Emerson and Whitman should when the state is intoxicated with injustice and war. ‘Retrospectives’ which emphasise flowers, beads, dope and simplistic anarchism tend to leave him out, as they also omit the Ron Ridenhours.

I didn’t really lift a finger to stop the colonial bloodbath in Vietnam which was, let it never be forgotten, prosecuted by liberal Democrats and robotically supported by an Old Labour Government. I did give some blood for the Vietcong, at a Blackfriars monastery which had been swept into enthusiasm by the mood of the time. (‘Brother, your blood group is a rare AB. Do you think you might possibly make it two pints?’ ‘No.’) I invited Eduardo Mondlane, the soon-to-be assassinated leader of the rebels in Mozambique, to my rooms, and helped organise a public meeting where he hailed the Vietnamese revolution for presaging the defeat of Salazarism in both Africa and Portugal, which indeed it did. I undertook a little work in helping American draft resisters in Oxford, thereby earning my first but not last file held by creepy people nobody had voted for. I went out with the brush and the poster-paint. And I took part in a good-sized punch-up outside the American Embassy in London, thus disproving (as a pamphlet of the time pointed out) Lady Bracknell’s piercing words in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.’

The My Lai massacre had taken place the day before: we weren’t to know that but it did seem very important to us that, half a world away, the Vietnamese might get to hear about this riot and somehow, I don’t know, take heart. Mike Rosen, who was arrested and roughed up along with one or two other people who might be embarrassed if I printed their names today, wrote a rather fine agitprop poem making this simple point. It was a beautiful spring day and as one looked up from the big, heaving, horse-battered, clod-throwing tussle around the Roosevelt memorial one could see the reflection of binoculars and spyglasses as various members of the ruling class, foregathered on the roofs of North Audley Street, strove to catch the mood of the nation’s supposedly insurgent youth. The editor of the Daily Telegraph the next morning published some sort of ‘I was there’ piece in which he got all the slogans wrong, perhaps from listening through an ear-trumpet. One of the fun things that year was to monitor the hopeless efforts of a rattled establishment to ‘keep up’. At Oxford the authorities had a solemn discussion about covering the medieval cobbles with tarmac, lest there be a nuit des barricades, and in the PPE examination papers an anxious and ‘with-it’ question asked for elucidation of the sage ‘Herbert Maracuse’. That was good for a chuckle. But it wasn’t all doddering and quavering: Home Secretary Callaghan, that red-faced beadle, knew his stern duty. All the Fleet Street rags, the day after Grosvenor Square, printed a leering pic of a girl demonstrator in the grip of several stout bobbies, her skirt round her waist while one especially beefy constable administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)

Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed Parsee Marxist named Jairus Banaji, who was forever getting picked up and smacked around by the forces of law and order just for the sake of appearances, as you might say. But then, 1968 was also the year when, also to the gloat and awe and wonder of the Tory press, London dockers marched to Westminster in support of Enoch Powell. Seeing the Kenyan High Commissioner entering the precincts of Parliament, they bellowed ‘Go back to Jamaica’ and were much admired in the suburbs for their John Bull spirit. The Communist Party, which was strong on the docks in those times and had the famous Jack Dash as its hate-figure, took the day off and later tried to organise a conciliatory East End meeting addressed by the concerned priesthood. But this is to get ahead of the story somewhat.

Like most such ‘years’, 1968 began a few months early. Premonitory rumbles, in my memory, include the American-inspired military coup in Greece on 21 April 1967, which seemed to challenge the endlessly reiterated notion of reliable ideological ‘convergence’ between Western European political forces (and also allowed us a second look at the ‘defensive posture’ of Nato). One would have to add the hunting down, by CIA men and the agents of a brutal dictatorship, of Che Guevara in Bolivia in October 1967, in which the local Communist Party also played a complaisant part. And, in quite another key, I recall the death at about that time of Isaac Deutscher, who had done so much in the early years of the teach-in movement to remind the young that ‘the end of ideology’ was itself an ideological construct, and that there still existed factors such as class and power. (When he spoke at the main event in Berkeley, the Communists tried to keep his appearance until last and then cut off the microphone.)

There’s a kaleidoscopic feel to the pages of the Ali-Watkins volume. Turn the pages in a hurry and you go from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the strikes in Poland to the murder of Dr King and the ghetto insurrection, getting no time to take breath for les évènements in France and the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Then comes the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the drama in the streets at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the butchery at the Mexico Olympics and the brave (now seemingly almost quixotic) We Shall Overcome moments of the first citizens’ movement in Ulster. Some of these produced imperishable vignettes: microcosmic glimpses that were better recollected in tranquillity. I remember Terry Barrett, a Tilbury docker, giving a brilliant rasping reply to the racists from a May Day platform, and the workers at the Berliet plant outside Paris rearranging the letters of their company logo to read Liberté, and Mayor Daley being lip-read by the cameras as he shouted across the Convention floor at the composed, dignified figure of Senator Abraham Ribicoff: ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch. Fuck you. Go home.’ I also remember Dr Frantisek Kriegel, the only member of the Czechoslovak leadership who refused to sign the humiliating post-invasion document. He was a veteran of the International Brigades, the Chinese revolution and the wartime resistance, and is often left out of the record (including, though not for this reason, of the Ali-Watkins book) because he put the signers to shame and also because he was attempting to save the honour of socialism.

Not entirely with hindsight, one can now identify the significance of 1968 as being perhaps the critical year in that Death of Communism that is now such a commonplace. Some of my best friends in those days, as well as some of my worst enemies, were members of the Communist Party. It was very striking to be able to observe, in both cases, to what a huge extent a year of crisis and opportunity exposed them to awkwardness, put them on the defensive, found them stammering and unprepared. Their international fraternity of parties had become so contorted and congested by past lies and compromises and reversals that they yearned mainly for a quiet life. Thus: the spring developments in Prague could not be accepted in their entirety even by the reform supporters, because they contained a frontal challenge to ‘the leading role of the Party’. But the prospect of a Warsaw Pact fraternal intervention would compromise at one stroke the careful edifice of peace campaigns and ‘broad fronts’ through which the Party had ingratiatingly tried, with some success, to keep in with the Labour Left and the trade-union apparat. I used to read the Morning Star (which had changed its name from the Daily Worker to become, as one comrade put it, a version of the Daily Employee) attentively. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was denounced, because the Soviet Union ostensibly put its faith in the good offices of U Thant. Enoch Powell was to be challenged by a bureaucratic fiat: prosecution under the incitement clause of the Race Relations Act. The Jew-baiting of the Polish authorities in the ‘anti-Zionist’ purge in Warsaw in March 1968 was to be discussed only in a whisper. Most revealing of all, the stony and mediocre nomenklatura of the French Communist Party (those ‘crapules Staliniennes’, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit invigoratingly termed them) exerted their entire negative weight in order to abort the anti-Gaullist upheaval in France. We know now what we knew then: the Soviet Union had given the PCF a direct instruction to become ‘the party of order’. In a recent edition of the Paris magazine L’Événement du Jeudi, one can read the testimony of Yuri Dobrynin, former fixer at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, who recalls in round terms: ‘La ligne dictée par Moscou était précise: pas toucher à de Gaulle.’ Thus, when the General returned in mid-rebellion from a fraternal visit to Ceausescu’s Romania, and disappeared to Germany to consult with his military caste and agreed to release the Algerian war-criminals, Raoul Salan and Jacques Soustelle as part of the deal, he had a porte-parole from the Kremlin in his pocket. The Fifth Republic with its cynical and fluctuating anti-Americanism didn’t have long to run in fact, but George Marchais and Jacques Duclos and the others weren’t to know that, any more than they did when they became the ‘party of order’ once more and supported the ‘normalisation’ of Czechoslovakia a few months later. Somewhere between those two moments, the remaining breath fled the body of monolithic Communism, which continued to decompose steadily in ways that some soixante-huitards found relatively easy to follow. (I was to have arguments with truly believing Communists only once more, among certain American pro-Sandinistas in the late Eighties, but by then it was like dealing with the squeaks emitted long ago from a dead planet. The real laugh came when dealing with the neo-conservatives who needed the illusion of an unsleeping and keenly ideological foe.)

Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn’s book The Beginning of the End, which I read when it first came out, is more interesting now than it was then. It’s rather sporting of the current Nairn to allow it to be reprinted. At the time, it seemed to those of us in the old International Socialists – who dismissed it scornfully as ‘a long poem’ – to be the sentimentalisation of a romantic moment; an almost hedonistic celebration of youth culture and spontaneity. (At the expense, naturally, of the sterner and more demanding task of educating and equipping the working classes to see through the illusions of Stalinism and social democracy, which I must say I still jolly well wish they had done.) There is an interesting change in the text, however. I am certain, without checking, that the original paperback had on its title page one of those mini-feuilletons which Robert Escarpit used to contribute, box-sized, on the front page of Le Monde. On this exciting occasion, slightly borrowing from the imagery of the old spectre and the old mole, he had imagined the think-tank and dividend-drawing classes discussing the new and virulent infection; inquiring above all whether it might spread.

The book would obviously be more stale and depressing if this spirited but ephemeral contemporaneous thought had been left in. As it is, one winces to scan the Nairn-Quattrocchi ‘Afterword’, the last two paragraphs of which read:


Paradoxically, real inevitability has emerged only after the material century of its triumph, in the final product of its machines: the new society alive within it, invisible yesterday, visible everywhere today, the young negation of its nature.

The anarchism of 1871 looked backwards to a pre-capitalist past, doomed to defeat; the anarchism of 1968 looks forward to the future society almost within our grasp, certain of success.

Well no, actually, I don’t think so. Although it is true that a certain esprit de soixante-huit survived the year of its birth, and had its final – and not least honourable – moments during the May days in Lisbon after the fall of fascism in 1974, there is no red thread of Ariadne, to paraphrase Clara Zetkin on Rosa Luxemburg, to be followed between the Sorbonne commune and the digital and cybernetic age. We are left to contemplate mainly the ironies of history – Deutscher’s preferred trope – and the subtle, ironic, even surreptitious influences of language. Jill Neville’s rough little diamond of a novel is a case in point. (It’s as bitter to think of her early death as it is of Ron Ridenhour’s.) As the mistress of the above Angelo Quattrocchi in the Latin Quarter in 1968, this tough and beautiful and brave woman was well-placed to record the festival of the oppressed, with all its accompaniment of erotic and imaginative charge. She was also in a good/bad position to observe the way that male militants treated the girls’ auxiliary, and thus to prefigure the imminent revival of feminism, which essentially began that year for those reasons. By an amazing chance, she chose the metaphor of sexually-transmitted disease as the bonding element in a narrative of interpenetration. Her book reads more strongly now than that of her ex-lover, precisely because it subliminally knows that there may be a price to be paid for hedonism and narcissism. Jill did not for an instant echo those sadistic authorities of the restored moral order, who said (and say) that Aids was God’s verdict. But she knew that there was more to politics, and to love, than doing your own thing.

So, in a very different way, did W.H. Auden who, a few days after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, wrote a short poem entitled ‘August 1968’:


The Ogre does what ogres can
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

The term ‘Velvet Revolution’, used to describe the humbling of secular power in Prague in 1989, may sound as vague and feel-good as the mantra of any ‘human be-in’ from the Bay Area rag-tags of the Summer of Love. But it conceals, within its irritating geniality and inclusiveness, the signal and salient fact that satirists and poets and subversive wordsmiths had simply, bloodlessly worn down the monster of what Ernst Fischer called Panzercommunismus. Auden was more audaciously prescient than he’d realised. The dank, gruesome regime of the langue de bois, of peace-loving forces and progressive elements and internal affairs, gave way before wit and music and understatement – just as if Allen Ginsberg had fulfilled his dream of levitating the Pentagon. To the extent that 68 metamorphosed into 89, then, it carried its point. But no date will ever mark history’s high tide.

In a work-camp of enthusiasts which I attended in Cuba that summer, where the ideological level was not as low as some of you may think, there was a sort of dress-rehearsal when the Warsaw Pact went grinding into Czechoslovakia. All the conventional arguments, about great-power tyranny and the ‘socialist camp’, or about self-determination v. ‘giving ammunition to the enemy’, were gone over as a matter of course. Somewhere in there, but waiting for an idiom in which to be unambivalently uttered, was an expression, or affirmation, of human and civil rights as a good thing in themselves. Easy enough, you say, and of course I’m with you all the way, but neither side in the Cold War had proved, or ever proved, capable of stating such a principle in practice. ‘Double standards’ can waste an awful lot of time. Anyway, I found the exact phrase for it when I met Adam Michnik, one of the Polish sixty-eighters, a few years later. ‘After all, like socialism, the words freedom and democracy have been discredited by governments and parties. But we do not abandon them for this reason. The real struggle, for us, is for citizens to cease being the property of the state.’

Good man, I thought at the time, having then no idea that Michnik would easily outlive Stalinism and go on to be the leading Polish critic of clerical fascism, brute nationalism and all the other mental rubbish of post-1989. Now let’s see if we can’t stop citizens being anybody’s property, or anyone’s disposable resource, or nuclear statistic. In order for that to occur, as William Morris put it in The Dream of John Ball, people will have to cogitate how it comes that they so often fight for something and lose, or think they have won, only to get another thing, and leave to others the task of fighting for the same thing under another name.

George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon LRB

Tremendous in His Wrath
Eric Foner

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January, 978 0 8139 4184 4

One of the few​ facts of American history of which Donald Trump appears to be aware is that George Washington owned slaves. Trump mentioned this in 2017 as one reason for his opposition to the removal of the monuments to Confederate generals that dot the southern landscape. In Trump’s view owning slaves probably enhances Washington’s reputation: like him, the first president knew how to make a buck. Not everyone agrees. In June this year, the San Francisco school board voted to cover over a series of New Deal-era murals at George Washington High School that depicted the great man’s career: some students found their depictions of a dead Native American and of slaves working in Washington’s fields upsetting. Lost in the debate was the fact that the artist, Victor Arnautoff, a communist, had used the murals to challenge the prevailing narrative of Washington’s life and, indeed, American history more broadly. His murals were intended to show that the country’s economic growth and territorial expansion – Washington took part in both – rested on the exploitation of slave labour and the violent seizure of Native American land.

Among historians, Washington’s connection to slavery has inspired far less examination, and agonising, than Thomas Jefferson’s. Partly this is because of the patent contradiction between Jefferson’s affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and his ownership of more than a hundred slaves. Prurient interest also plays a part. Thanks to DNA evidence, it’s now clear that Jefferson, a widower, fathered several children with his slave Sally Hemings. There is no equivalent in Washington’s life, though some of his male relatives, including his wife’s father-in-law in her first marriage, did have such offspring. An official at Mount Vernon, Washington’s plantation on the Potomac River, once told me that he wished similar information would come to light about Washington, since Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, had experienced a substantial increase in visitor numbers after the historian Annette Gordon-Reed established beyond doubt the Hemings connection. In the apparent belief that visitors’ imaginations need to be stirred even further, a room at Monticello next to Jefferson’s bedroom is now identified as Hemings’s living quarters, although the evidence that she actually slept there is slight.

Actually, Mount Vernon doesn’t need any more visitors. Today, it attracts around a million a year, outstripping Monticello and even Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley. What tourists find there has changed dramatically in recent years. Slavery used to be pretty much ignored (if guides mentioned slaves at all, they referred to them as ‘servants’), but today the historical presentations deal candidly with the institution and Washington’s relation to it. Visitors have the option to join an Enslaved People of Mount Vernon tour.

Washington grew up in a world centred on slavery. He inherited slaves from his father and his older half-brother. His wife, Martha, possessed dozens of ‘dower slaves’ who had been owned by her first husband and legally remained under her control until her death, when they returned to his estate. During much of his life Washington bought and sold slaves. They were property, and he frequently referred to them as such, listing them in letters in the same sentence as horses, or saying he needed to sell cattle, sheep, furniture, tools and slaves to pay his creditors. At the time of his death in 1799 the slave population of Mount Vernon exceeded three hundred.

Washington’s sprawling estate consisted of eight thousand acres. There were five separate farms where tobacco and grain were the main crops, each worked by slaves directed by a white manager. There were also woodlands teeming with game, experimental gardens, stables, shops for carpenters, blacksmiths and other craftsmen, and a mansion, where Washington and his wife lived, attended by slaves dressed in red and white livery. Mary Thompson’s book is the most detailed examination yet published of slavery at Mount Vernon. Thompson has worked for many years as a research historian at the estate and has a perhaps excessive admiration for Washington, whom she calls ‘one of the greatest – but still not perfect – men who ever lived’. But she knows the sources better than anyone. When Washington died, his wife burned their forty-year correspondence. But documentation of other kinds is abundant. Washington kept a diary and detailed accounts of income and expenditure. A stickler for detail, he insisted on receiving weekly reports from his farm managers, which include revealing descriptions of slave labour. Periodically compiled lists of slaves by age, skill and marital status offer insights into the structure of the slave community. Innumerable visitors, including relatives, friends and perfect strangers, turned up at Mount Vernon expecting and receiving the Washingtons’ hospitality, and in letters and memoirs many described the plantation’s management and the condition of its slaves.

To be sure, virtually all the information Thompson draws on comes from whites; as she ruefully notes, ‘only occasionally can the voice of one of the slaves be heard.’ Nonetheless, her command of the sources makes possible an almost encyclopedic description of the conditions of slave life. What did slaves eat? At Mount Vernon, cornmeal, buttermilk, fish and, at harvest time, meat, supplemented by food grown in their own gardens or stolen from the big house. What clothing did Washington provide? Aside from the livery for domestic slaves, male slaves each year received a wool jacket and two pairs of trousers, two coarse linen shirts and a pair of shoes; females got a jacket, a skirt, a pair of stockings and two linen shifts.

What about their living quarters? Apart from a brick House for Families near the mansion, most slave dwellings were poorly constructed log cabins that leaked in the rain, and because of their small windows were dark most of the day. The slaves grew crops in their gardens either to eat or to sell at a weekly market in the nearby town of Alexandria. With the proceeds, many managed to acquire household goods. Archaeological research has uncovered evidence of ceramics, glassware, silverware, furniture and cooking implements in some of the slave quarters. On the much debated question of whether African elements survived in slave culture, Thompson acknowledges that the evidence is scanty but cautiously suggests that some naming practices, religious beliefs and methods of food preparation reflect an African inheritance.

Labour, of course, was the raison d’être of slavery, and Thompson devotes much attention to Washington’s efforts to create a disciplined workforce and to the ways slaves resisted his demands. He was ‘by no means an easy man to work for’. He insisted that slaves and hired workers adhere to his own highly demanding work ethic. ‘I expect my people,’ he wrote to one overseer, ‘will work from daybreaking until it is dusk,’ a regimen which in summer, as Thompson points out, meant a very long work day indeed. Every morning Washington went into the fields. He noticed when slaves were not at work and reprimanded them and the farm managers. Extremely concerned with his public reputation, he took pride in his own self-control. Those who knew him, however, were aware that he had a fierce temper. He was ‘tremendous in his wrath’, Jefferson recalled after Washington’s death, and slaves learned to steer clear when he was provoked.

Like other owners, Washington relied on a combination of incentives and punishments. When slaves worked on a holiday (such as the period around Christmas or Easter), he compensated them with small cash payments. Those who, he believed, were shirking their duties would be whipped, though unlike most planters, Washington set up a kind of appeals process to review physical punishments. Most of the whipping was done by overseers, but Washington himself sometimes applied the lash. Some historians have claimed that Martha Washington treated slaves more severely than her husband did, at least in terms of verbal abuse.

Thompson makes clear that Washington never succeeded in creating the work environment he desired. The most common forms of what historians call ‘day-to-day resistance’ were doing poor work and feigning illness to avoid labour. Both Washingtons frequently criticised slaves’ work habits and complained of their ‘tricks’ to avoid labour and their lack of gratitude for all that had supposedly been done for them. As on most plantations, theft was commonplace at Mount Vernon, and there were constant complaints that wine, meat and other items had disappeared, either consumed by slaves or sold at the Alexandria market. Oddly, Thompson suggests that these forms of resistance ‘may have backfired’ by leading whites to consider black men and women ‘lazy and clumsy workers ... a stereotype that continues to this day’. Washington certainly believed that blacks were indolent by nature. But this was an integral part of the ideological justification for slavery, echoed throughout the world by colonisers and employers dissatisfied with workers of every race and nationality. As Alexander Hamilton noted, ‘the contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience.’

A more daring and dangerous form of resistance was escape. Between 1760 and 1799 at least 47 of Washington’s slaves ran away. A group of 17, including three women, escaped during the War of Independence to seek refuge with the British army, which promised freedom to slaves. When Washington met the British commander Sir Guy Carleton in 1783 to implement the British withdrawal from New York, he asked Carleton to keep a lookout for ‘some of my own slaves’ who had run off. He expressed surprise when Carleton replied that to deprive slaves of the freedom they had been promised would be a ‘dishonourable violation of the public faith’.

Thompson believes that Washington showed some consideration for his slaves’ feelings – for example by refusing to break up families when slaves were sold. She points out, however, that while most adult slaves at Mount Vernon were married, a majority lived on different farms from their spouses. Marital closeness took second place to work. She also claims that ‘affectionate ties’ developed between the Washingtons and some of their slaves. Yet the story of Ona (or Oney) Judge, the subject of a prize-winning book by Erica Armstrong Dunbar, illustrates the limits of paternalism at Mount Vernon.* From the age of ten, Judge worked as a personal maid and seamstress for Martha Washington. When she ran away in 1796, while living with the Washingtons in Philadelphia, the new nation’s temporary capital, Martha was ‘extremely upset’. Judge managed to reach New Hampshire, and George Washington made several attempts to recover her. Judge sent word that she would return if promised freedom on their deaths. Washington rejected her offer – ‘It would be neither politic or just to reward unfaithfulness,’ he replied. Why had Judge, certainly a privileged slave, run away? She learned that Martha Washington had promised her to her granddaughter as a wedding present. The Washingtons frequently referred to slaves as part of their family. But one does not typically give away a family member as a gift.

Visitors to Mount Vernon often ask whether Washington was a ‘good slave owner’. This language ought to be retired. Slaves themselves recognised that treatment varied considerably from owner to owner, but that was really irrelevant. During a visit to Richmond soon after the end of the Civil War, the Scottish minister David Macrae met a slave who complained of past mistreatment while acknowledging that he had never been whipped. ‘How were you cruelly treated then?’ Macrae asked. ‘I was cruelly treated,’ the freedman answered, ‘because I was held in slavery.’

Thompson ends with an account of the evolution of Washington’s attitudes on slavery. Before the American Revolution, he seems to have had no qualms about the institution. Thompson believes that the revolutionary experience changed him. He came to recognise what the historian Edmund S. Morgan called ‘the American paradox’ – the contradiction between the language of liberty invoked by the patriots and the reality of slaveholding. While Washington at first did not allow black men to enrol in the revolutionary army, by the end of the conflict several thousand had served. (The army he commanded was more racially integrated than any American fighting force until the Korean War.) He emerged from the war with his views on slavery ‘radically altered’. ‘There is not a man living,’ he wrote in 1786, who wished to see a plan for abolition adopted ‘more than I do’. In the interim he decided to stop buying and selling slaves.

Yet he did nothing to promote the end of slavery and rejected any suggestion that he publicly call for Virginia or the country generally to adopt a plan for abolition. In Philadelphia, as president, he practised what Thompson calls outright ‘duplicity’, moving slaves back and forth between Mount Vernon and the city, ‘under pretext’, he wrote, ‘that may deceive both them and the public’. His purpose was to circumvent Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition law of 1780, which provided that any slave brought into the state who remained there for six months could claim freedom. Washington signed the first national law for the rendition of fugitive slaves and his administration pressed Britain to abide by the Treaty of Paris, which ended the War of Independence and required the return of property, including slaves, seized from Americans.

Thompson offers various explanations for Washington’s refusal to speak or act publicly against slavery. She points out that freeing his slaves would have meant financial disaster for his family. Like other Virginia planters, Washington was chronically in debt, largely because of a taste for luxury goods imported from Britain. Indeed, in 1789 he had to borrow money to pay for his journey to New York where his inauguration as the first president was to take place. She speculates that, having presided over the Constitutional Convention and witnessed bitter debates inspired by slavery, he feared that airing the question of abolition would destroy the new country. However, Benjamin Franklin also took part in the convention, and that didn’t prevent him from adding his name to an abolition petition presented to Congress in 1790.

Washington seems to have had a number of private conversations in the last twenty years of his life about ending slavery. Nothing came of them, but when he died in 1799, leaving his estate to his wife, he directed his executors to free all the slaves (156 men, women and children) who belonged to him on her death. Slave children were to be bound out to white employers until they were in their twenties, receiving an education and training in a craft. The will did not deal with Martha Washington’s 153 dower slaves, in whom her husband had no property interest. Living among men and women anxiously awaiting the freedom that would come with her death, and fearing one of them might feel motivated to help that day arrive sooner, Martha freed her husband’s slaves in 1801. When she died the following year, the dower slaves, many of whom were married to the former slaves owned by her late husband, reverted to the control of the Custis family and were divided among her four grandchildren. Thus the slave community that had existed for decades at Mount Vernon was destroyed.

Addressing current controversies about the historical reputation of men like Washington, Thompson warns against ‘judging a person from another time and culture’ by today’s moral standards. Yet anti-slavery ideas were hardly unknown during Washington’s lifetime, and he himself expressed them privately. What about expecting an individual to live up to his own professed convictions? Washington deserves full credit for emancipating his slaves. Some Virginia planters, inspired by revolutionary ideals and religious convictions, did the same; many more did not. Yet manumission (freeing individual slaves) is not the same thing as abolishing the institution. Alongside the humane provisions of his will should be placed Washington’s public silence when it came to slavery. Jefferson’s will freed only five slaves, all relatives of Hemings’s, but he did write the proposed Land Ordinance of 1784, which would have barred slavery from the country’s western territories, and which narrowly failed to receive congressional approval. Washington was willing to place his life and property on the line to fight for American independence. He was by far the most esteemed statesman in the early republic. Imagine if he had used his reputation to promote a plan for abolition. When it came to taking action to end slavery, he, like most of the revolutionary generation, must be found wanting.


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Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic LRB

The Unpredictable Cactus
Emily Witt

Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic
by Mike Jay.
Yale, 297 pp., £18.99, May, 978 0 300 23107 6

The​ San Pedro cactus evolved thirty or forty million years ago in the deserts of South America. Today its native habitat is the barren cliffs of the high Andes, two thousand metres above sea level. In spring, the distinctive green columns produce a large white and yellow blossom, which blooms at night and is pollinated by hummingbirds and bats. Like many plants, the San Pedro cactus converts amino acids into compounds known as alkaloids. The evolutionary purpose of San Pedro’s most famous alkaloid, the psychoactive compound mescaline, is unknown, but humans have been aware of its effects for thousands of years. When boiled down into a brew and ingested, it activates an alternative experience of consciousness.

‘No mind-altering substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline. Its use in the Americas dates back thousands of years. It was the first psychedelic analysed by Western scientists, and in the early decades of the 20th century the only substance of its kind available to psychologists, writers, artists and philosophers eager to experience chemically induced hallucinations. The word ‘psychedelic’ was coined in 1953, by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (in correspondence with Aldous Huxley), in part to describe the experience of taking mescaline. The full spectrum of its effects includes ‘dizziness, fullness in the head, nausea, time distortion, a rainbow sheen of visual trails, hyperventilation, an uncanny sense of double consciousness, physical prostration, auditory hallucinations, ineffable cosmic insights, a lazy euphoria, a pounding heart, scintillating patterns exploding across closed eyelids and the immanent presence of the sacred’.

Jay begins his history in the Chavín de Huántar, a temple in the High Andes of Peru rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s. A carved figure in an inner sanctum, ‘snake-haired, sprouting fangs and claws’ and wielding a San Pedro cactus like an upraised baguette, has been dated to 1200 bce at the latest. Archaeologists believe the temple was a gathering place for the ritual ingestion of psychoactive plants at large ceremonies. The motifs and objects suggest that participants ingested not only San Pedro but snuffs containing N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), another naturally occurring psychedelic, and the alcoholic brew known as chicha, and that they may have countered the nausea that often accompanies San Pedro with movement and song. ‘The architecture of the complex seems to have been designed to frame and create a spectacle in which the senses were manipulated by sound, light and spatial disorientation as well as consciousness-altering plant preparations,’ Jay writes. ‘Rushing mountain streams were rerouted to create an artificial watercourse that echoed through the tunnels; conch trumpet shells have been found, and fragments of anthracite mirror that may have bounced light through the galleries along with sound.’

On the other side of the equator, in the high deserts of northern Mexico, the human relationship with peyote, the other cactus family high in mescaline, dates back to the time of Chavín and earlier. In botanical terms peyote is ‘about as different from the San Pedro as a cactus can be’, Jay writes. Its ‘creased, leathery, spineless heads’ grow close to the ground and have the appearance of ‘stones or deer droppings’. Dried peyote cactus buttons found in the Shumla caves of southern Texas have been carbon-dated to 4000 bce.

In the Nahuatl languages the cactus was known as peyotl and was one of many medicinal plants that the Spanish invaders encountered in 16th-century Mexico. The Nahua people (whom the Spanish and, despite recent correction, most English speakers still call the Aztecs) also consumed morning glory seeds, psilocybin mushrooms, preparations of Datura and Brugmansia shrubs, and alcohol. The Spanish took home with them the new world’s ‘sober intoxicants’ – chocolate and tobacco – but didn’t know what to make of the more psychoactive plants. The Nahua ingested peyote and other medicinal plants in private sessions administered by a healer, and to the Spanish the ritual bore a suspicious and confusing resemblance to the Christian Eucharist. According to what survived of the pre-conquest written record, the Nahua believed peyote came from the ‘House of the Sun’, a place the psychoactive plants made it possible to visit.

‘It was a bright world of radiant colour,’ Jay writes, drawing from the lyrics of incantations known as ‘flower songs’: ‘The home of flowers, glittering gemstones, opalescent seashells, perfumes and incenses, and particularly the vibrant, iridescent feathers of birds such as the quetzal, the macaw and the hummingbird.’ The Spanish superimposed their idea of heaven on this place, but unlike heaven the Nahua flower world could be visited while alive. The Spanish also observed that the Nahua attributed clairvoyant properties to peyote, receiving from it guidance about the weather and assistance in finding lost or stolen objects.

Eventually, the Spanish reached a consensus that peyote was the devil’s work. The Mexican Inquisition prohibited it in 1620 and actively prosecuted its use. ‘Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyotl? Do you suck the blood of others?’ a 17th-century catechism read. But its use survived where the cactus grew in northern Mexico and where semi-nomadic groups evaded conquest. In 1890, the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz recorded it among the Tarahumara people of the northern Sierra Madre (who called it hikuli) and, further south, among the Huichol people, for whom deer, maize and peyote formed an ‘elemental trinity’. Although the San Pedro cactus continued to be consumed in the Peruvian Andes, it was peyote that would first transcend the boundaries of its geographical origins, adopted by the plains Indians to the north and then, in the late 19th century, starting to attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies and chemists.

The trade in peyote beyond its natural habitat is probably as ancient as its use by humans. The buttons were dried in the desert sun and easily transported. The Apache adopted the use of horses in 1680, which allowed them to conduct raids into Mexico, and they seem to have been the progenitors of the peyote religion that spread north into the United States in the 19th century. Its songs have been linked to the Lipan Apache, who in the early 19th century lived at the northern edge of peyote’s natural habitat, near Laredo, Texas, and who may have been the earliest distributors of peyote among the plains tribes. ‘The many Comanche, Apache and Kiowa tales of the discovery of peyote all place it in the distant south,’ Jay says.

By the middle of the 19th century, Laredo had become a hub of the barter-based peyote trade. As the US government forced tribes from their homelands and deported them to reservations, peyote gatherings became a pan-tribal assertion of spiritual resistance. ‘Rooted in ritual practices older by millennia than the United States,’ Jay writes, they ‘opened a path to the survival of Indian identity’. In 1890 James Mooney, a Smithsonian Institution ethnographer who was the first white man to document a peyote meeting, noted the attendance of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache people. Peyote’s greatest advocate at the time was the Comanche leader Quanah Parker, who codified some of the religion’s rites and served as the ‘roadman’, or facilitator of ceremonies, in peyote meetings with the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Pawnee, Osage and Ponca. Both Parker and Mooney believed in peyote’s potential to, as Jay puts it, ‘square the circle of tradition and assimilation’. They shared a strategy for presenting it to white audiences ‘as a medicine and a sacrament rather than an intoxicant, and a companion rather than a rival to the Christian faith in which privately neither of them believed.’ Quanah gave Mooney a fifty-pound bag of dried peyote buttons, which, when distributed, enabled the first scientific trials and early personal experiments, in the US and Europe.

Peyote reached the attention of the pharmaceutical industry in 1887, after a doctor in Texas bought some from a Mexican supplier and published an article in a medical journal about its stimulating effects. Parke, Davis, the US’s leading supplier of cocaine (which it marketed as ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age’), was looking for alternative ‘vegetable drugs’ because cocaine’s habit-forming potential was beginning to gain attention. They began marketing a tincture extract of peyote in 1893, recommending its use as a ‘depressant, respiratory stimulant and cardiac tonic’. The first scientific trial was conducted two years later, on a 27-year-old chemist. After eating three peyote buttons, he described ‘a train of delightful visions such as no human ever enjoyed under normal conditions’. But as more people tried peyote, it became clear how unpredictable its effects were. Not everyone experienced ‘visions’, and for some the primary sensation was prolonged nausea. William James, eager to have a mystical experience, instead had a day of vomiting and diarrhoea. The insights into altered states of consciousness he describes in On the Varieties of Religious Experience came from nitrous oxide (laughing gas).

Westerners interpreted the peyote experience very differently from the practitioners of the peyote religion, where the focus was ‘ritual, song and prayer, and to dissect one’s private sensations was to miss the point’. Writers such as Havelock Ellis, who published an essay on his peyote experiences in the Lancet in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. Ellis described ‘the brilliance, delicacy and variety of the colours’ and ‘their lovely and various textures’. Peyote reached Europe in tandem with the X-ray, cinema and electric lights, Jay notes, and ‘nothing delighted the eye of the mescal eater so much as the new electrical sublime.’

The psychoactive ingredient in peyote was identified that same year, 1897, by the German chemist Arthur Heffter. He extracted five distinct alkaloids from the dried cactus and ingested them one by one, monitoring their effects. The most abundant, the compound he named ‘mescaline’, produced effects like those he had experienced after eating peyote buttons. The root word ‘mescal’ was applied in the 19th century to the agave spirit we now call ‘mezcal’, to the red ‘mescal bean’ (Sophora secundiflora, a seed that was ingested by some Mexican groups as a medicine) and to the peyote cactus. It was used, Jay says, as ‘a portmanteau term for all local plant intoxicants’ in northern Mexico and the American Southwest.

In the early 20th century, peyote and mescaline were embraced by mystics, who saw them as a way to stave off the alienation of modernity and what Jay calls ‘the loss of the sacred’ and ‘the tyranny of reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the peyote religion, which had grown since the 1890s and was now attracting opposition. After a bill to prohibit peyote was narrowly voted down in the Senate, representatives of the Cheyenne, Oto, Ponca, Comanche, Kiowa and Apache tribes gathered to sign the charter of incorporation of the Native American Church in 1918, which they hoped would give the peyote religion First Amendment protections. Despite repeated attempts at state and federal prosecution in the decades that followed, the church successfully defended itself until a Supreme Court case in the 1990s rescinded its rights. A backlash to the court’s decision resulted in the 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects the church’s right to peyote in federal law, though attempts at local bans have continued.

In 1919, the chemist Ernst Späth carried out the first laboratory synthesis of mescaline and determined that its chemical formula was 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenylethylamine, a derivative of phenethylamine, a molecule with many derivatives that are psychoactive in humans. Now mescaline could be produced in a lab and administered in precise, injectable doses. It still had no clear medical or psychological application, and continued to produce wildly unpredictable responses in research subjects, regardless of the dose. But there were some patterns. Heinrich Klüver, a German psychologist living in Chicago, published his monograph Mescal in 1928 (it was reprinted in 1966 and far outsold the original edition). Not everyone hallucinated on mescaline, but Klüver determined that most mescaline hallucinations followed a sequence of visual stages and featured groups of repeating motifs: a latticework or filigree that Jay calls ‘the reticulated two-dimensional plane’; the tunnel; the spiral; the cobweb. Many subjects described a phenomenon called polyopia, where hallucinated objects repeated themselves in rows. These visual qualities, Jay writes, ‘seemed to be hardwired into the structure of the hallucinations’ and should be understood as a physiological response to the chemical.

In the interwar period many artists, writers and philosophers began experimenting with mescaline, often with the assistance of their psychiatrist friends. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish painter, painted his visions and published a drug memoir called Narcotics: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine and Ether (1932). Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antonin Artaud all gave it a try. In her memoirs Simone de Beauvoir described Sartre being haunted by visions of scuttling crabs for days after his experiment, but Jay writes that Sartre admitted to having first seen the crabs years before trying mescaline. It is doubtful that the drug causes flashbacks, though Artaud’s experiments with peyote did coincide with a psychotic break that eventually put him in an institution.

Jay’s book is as much a literature review as a history, and reading it I was reminded how much I love trip reports, especially when they are written by the big thinkers of their day and not by orthographically challenged teenagers on internet forums (though I like those too). Benjamin did not have a great time on mescaline. It made him irritable. He kept expressing anxiety about the damage Nietzsche’s antisemitic sister would inflict on the philosopher’s legacy and returning to the children’s book Struwwelpeter, announcing, according to his psychiatrist, that he had discovered its ‘secret’. This turned out to be that ‘a child must get presents, or else he will die or break into pieces or fly away.’ Afterwards, Benjamin was ambivalent about the experience. As Jay observes, ‘in Berlin in 1934 there were good grounds for being suspicious of the surrender to the irrational.’

The most famous account of mescaline remains Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the first book to evangelise about the possibilities of psychedelics to mainstream audiences, especially in the US. Huxley took mescaline in May 1953, at his home in the Hollywood Hills; he was approaching his fiftieth birthday and at a low point in his life. It seemed to lift him out of a depression and he wrote The Doors of Perception with an epiphanic zeal that today reads as both naive and not (our culture holds two ideas of psychedelics at once, that they can be both serious and life-changing, or something you do on a Friday night to get goofy with your friends). Huxley’s famous description of the folds of his grey flannel trousers was an embellishment, Jay informs us (he was actually wearing jeans), and his hope that mescaline would be a cure for schizophrenia turned out to be misplaced. But Huxley did help to normalise the psychedelic experience. He was, Jay writes, ‘an adept of spiritual self-discovery, but also a stand-in for a sober general public to whom, until the arrival of mescaline, all mind-altering drugs had been “dope”, of interest only to bohemians, foreigners and criminals’ – the Michael Pollan of his time.*

In the aftermath of The Doors of Perception, the cactus experience appeared in the emerging literature of the Beats and the pages of the New Yorker. Peyote buttons were circulating in Greenwich Village and among anthropology students at major American universities. Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1970), an adventure about the author’s inquiry into ‘mescalito’ at the knee of an elderly Mexican shaman, sold millions of copies (and later turned out to be fiction mixed with borrowed anthropological accounts). Castaneda ‘wrote for a generation that was discovering psychedelics for itself,’ Jay remarks, ‘and offered them a charter stitched from a variety of indigenous traditions that, precisely because it had no actual real-life referent, could be freely appropriated.’

Jay contends that the most consequential mescaline trip of the 1960s was taken not by Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg or Carlos Castaneda, but by the biochemist Alexander Shulgin. Administered by a psychologist friend in 1960, it ‘unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life’, Shulgin wrote. He went on to rediscover MDMA (Merck had patented the chemical in 1912 but didn’t distribute it) and synthesised more than two hundred psychoactive phenethylamines. I was disappointed that Jay didn’t quote from the mescaline trip report by Shulgin’s wife, Ann, who described taking it in the aftermath of a miscarriage in their co-written memoir-cum-chemistry textbook PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (the title stands for ‘Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved’). I missed it not only because it’s a moving account but because of the almost total absence of female experiences in Jay’s book. The significance of peyote to its contemporary Native American users is also unvoiced, though Jay did interview members of the Native American Church. By way of explanation, he writes that subjective descriptions of the experience of peyote by members of the church are rare, and that ‘non-Western subjects are typically reluctant to share what is considered a private and often highly emotional experience’.

In 1943, Albert Hofmann had discovered the psychoactive properties of LSD, which he first synthesised in 1938. Mescaline and peyote were soon eclipsed, for both scientists and hobbyists, by acid and psilocybin, which delivered more consistent results with fewer physical side effects. By 1971 all three substances had been banned in the US and under the United Nations Convention on Psychotroptic Substances. Synthetic mescaline isn’t a drug people talk about much today, either at parties or at the academic conferences convened as part of the scientific revival of psychedelics. Jay has seen it for sale on the dark web but it seems to be of little interest even to connoisseurs. He sees its inheritance in MDMA, which ‘turned what scientists and psychonauts alike had considered to be mescaline’s undesirable side effects into a delicious “body high” of rushes, waves and tingles’, and came to shape a new kind of ceremony in the form of rave culture. Mescaline remains widely ingested in plant form, however, not only through the peyote meetings of the Native American Church but in ayahuasca-adjacent neo-shamanistic scenes, where San Pedro is sometimes advertised as the ‘grandfather’ to ayahuasca’s ‘grandmother’.

Recounting​ his own experiences on San Pedro and at a peyote meeting, Jay writes simply and straightforwardly, without any caveats about ‘responsible’ drug use. He had tried San Pedro before with little effect, but on a visit to Peru finally broke through. ‘With the cactus you get the hangover first,’ he writes. Once the physical discomfort passed, ‘honeycombs of green and violet threaded across my vision.’

My own experience with peyote was inconclusive. I now know, having read Jay’s book, that a confusing occasion I got involved in by accident in 2013 was in fact a Native American Church meeting. A friend had invited me to what I thought was a birthday party that would also somehow involve the consumption of peyote. I said yes without inquiring much about the specifics. After stopping at a thrift store to buy a long skirt (I was told I had to wear one) we drove to a farm somewhere in Pennsylvania, outside of which a large tepee had been erected in a muddy field. It was, in fact, someone’s birthday, but it wasn’t a party at all. We waited in a farmhouse until well after dark, then proceeded into the tepee, the women in our long skirts. A fire burned at its centre, and an altar had been set up. The meeting was led by a roadman and was attended by a group of congregants, some of them Native American and some of them appearing not to be, all of them seeming to have more familiarity with the setting and the ceremony than my friend and I had. Many of the participants laid out sacred fans and objects that they carried in lacquered boxes, a tradition that I now understand, from reading Mescaline, traces back to the Comanche leader Quanah Parker. After performing certain rites, the roadman passed around a bowl filled with peyote buttons – fresh ones, not dried. They tasted very bitter, like the world’s worst cucumber, but crunchier. This was followed by a small vessel containing a dried and powdered version of the same thing, served with a spoon. I think I ate three or four buttons, but the psychoactive effects eluded me. Now I see that it may not have been the dose or the potency of the peyote, but my own reaction to the unpredictable cactus. According to Jay, to separate the peyote from the ritual is to miss the point. What I remember, and what may in fact have been a response to the chemical, was getting deeply, profoundly depressed. I felt sympathy reading about Benjamin’s deep irritation during his mescaline trip. I had intruded on a meaningful ceremony that I knew nothing about. I had the estrangement of the non-believer among believers, not that there was any doctrine to adhere to. The night was long. We passed around the drum and the rattle and those who felt moved to sang songs. The peyote went around a second time. In the morning we drove home, smelling like damp ashes.

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