They Marched to a Different Drum and Put Flowers in Rifle Barrels

  

The most enduring image of the Pentagon March--young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15 rifles.  

Note—It is instructive to note the Johnson administration’s massive deployment in defense of the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon and the feeble protection of the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 siege and attempted insurrection.

There were other big marches in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Starting in 1965 they had practically become semi-annual events.  There would be more—and larger—ones later.  But the March to Confront the War Makers on October 21, 1967 was different.  It signaled a new phase in the anti-war movement that incorporated the rising youth counter culture on a large scale for the first time and willingness for more aggressive confrontation of authority.  It also introduced onto a national stage some figures who would become household names within a year.

The march was organized, as were previous ones, by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—universally referred to simply as the Mobe—a shaky coalition of more than 150 organizations including traditional pacifists, Ban the Bomb groups, liberals, the Old Left, the New Left, Viet Cong sympathizers, a sliver of the Civil Rights Movement, student groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war veteran groups.  It was united only in opposition to the war.

 

A Mobe flyer promoting the march had a distinctly traditional, Old Left look.  With the infusion of the youth culture into the previously mostly middle class anti-war movement, such calls would soon look far different.

The organization was so shaky that after the tumultuous events of this demonstration it fell apart.  It was re-assembled, minus its less militant components as the New Mobe the following year in time to organize protests at the Democratic National Convention.

The Mobe was led by veteran radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, the fifty-something editor of Liberation magazine.  In order to reach out to more young people—earlier marches, in retrospect seem like the sedate affairs of the middle class—Dellinger recruited California activist Jerry Rubin to be project coordinator for the march.  It was Rubin’s idea to add a March on the Pentagon after the main rally on the National Mall broke up.

 

Three central figures of the Chicago Democratic Convention protests of 1968, Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger, and Jerry Rubin, first came together for the Marches on Washington Washington and the Pentagon. 

The rally and March were just part of a series of actions in and around Washington.  A day earlier a march of hundreds on the Justice Department organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other anti-draft groups presented more than 1,000 returned Draft Cards to a reluctant Assistant Attorney General.  Other small demonstrations and picketing were organized by various component groups in the Mobe around Washington.

Among those who came to Washington, many in rented school buses, was a carload organized by Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck

A highlight of the Rally on the Mall was to be the arrival of the Peace Torch, first lit in Hiroshima on August 6.  It was carried across country from San Francisco in a highly publicized relay reminiscent of the journeys of the Olympic Torch.

Although several Blacks spoke from the podium of the Mall Rally—mostly long time members of Old Left parties—most African Americans boycotted the main demonstration where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sure to come under attack.  Many were grateful for his steadfast support of major Civil Rights legislation.  A related rally was held at Howard University where opposition to the war was largely separated from opposition to the President.  The most important Black leader to come out strongly against the war, Rev. Martin Luther King, was absent from both events. 

The huge rally was typical of others of its type—a parade of speakers representing the component organizations interspersed with brief entertainment.  Dellinger hinted at a shift in anti-war strategy by saying that it was time to “to go from protest to resistance.”  Norman Mailer, then the most celebrated novelist in America, famously spoke.  His role in the Rally and later events was celebrated in his book Armies of the Night, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

 

Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, poet Robert Lowell, Old Left leader Sydney Lens, Dagmar Wilson, and Dr. Benjamin Spock link arms with other luminaries and speakers as they set off from the main rally on the National Mall to head to the Pentagon.

The main speaker was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby care book was the Bible by which most of the young members of the crowd had been raised.  Spock supported Johnson in 1964 and felt betrayed by his escalation of the war.  The kindly Spock was one of the last nods at getting the parents of Baby Boomers on board the anti-war movement.  But the days when he and organizations like Another Mother for Peace could be the face of the movement were ending.

When the main Rally broke up, a large portion of the crowd began the two and a half mile march to the Pentagon.  By some estimates as many at 50,000 began the long walk, which took them across the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and up a long service road to the Defense Department headquarters.  Many did not finish the trip.  The line strung out so that it took well over an hour for everyone to get into the site.

When marchers got there they were confronted with a building encircled by 2,500 Federal troops and 200 U.S. Marshals.  A rope line was set up in advance of the security forces and authorities announced that anyone crossing the line would be arrested.

Marchers also encountered a smaller group already at the Pentagon.  Organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, festooned in an American flag shirt and Uncle Sam hat, the newly formed Youth International Party—the Yippies, an organization that hardly existed except in flyers circulated on college campuses and in big city youth culture enclaves, were there to supposedly levitate the Pentagon.

Many of those first on the scene peacefully approached the defense line.  Images of young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15s became iconic.  But soon more militant demonstrators were challenging the line.  Arrests began.  Small groups managed to get partially up the steps of the building.  Others found an unguarded access ramp and charged in.  They were met with rifle butts and particularly by the aggressive batons of Federal Marshals who busted several heads. Tear gas was used on the crowd and there was some chaos and panic.

  

 White helmeted U.S. Marshals with heavy batons were particularly aggressive against demonstrators and inflicted several cracked skulls.

But the majority of the demonstrators continued to stand by.  Many sang America the Beautiful and other patriotic and anti-war songs as the battle raged.  By 7 pm things had settled down.  Authorizes announced that the permit for the demonstration had expired.  Most of the remaining demonstrators drifted away, but about 7,000 chose to stay.  No move was made to dislodge them, but as overnight temperatures dropped, many more left.

At dawn a few hundred left to march to the White House to “wake up LBJ.”  There were more arrests there, including those charged with picking flowers in Lafayette Park.  A few hundred others stayed behind to keep a vigil at the Pentagon.  At midnight the remaining 200 were rousted or arrested.

In all 681, including Hoffman and Mailer, were arrested over the two days.  Many demonstrators were bloodied or overcome by tear gas.  Over 100 demonstrators were documented to have been treated for injuries.  Many more were undoubtedly hurt.  In addition, some soldiers, marshals, and police sustained minor injuries, mostly from objects thrown at them during the confrontation at the Pentagon or scuffles during arrests.

The events in Washington that weekend set the stage for even more tumultuous and confrontational protests around the country in the next few years.

 

                                         Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck with Abbie Hoffman.

In Chicago the Seed offices became the unofficial headquarters for the Yippie’s next big project, the counter cultural Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic Convention.  But Abe Peck had a warning for flower-power hippies who expected bands and dope shrouded festivities in the park—“If you come, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.”
 

 

  

  

 

When Flower Power Took the Stage—Frisco’s Human Be-in

 

                                    A poster promoting the Human Be-in at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

It has been dubbed it birth of the Hippie Era.  It was more like a coming out party for a counterculture that had been developing in the Bay Area for more than a decade.  

The Human Be-In held on January 14, 1967 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park attracted as many as 20,000 people and got the attention of the national media as nothing else before it.  That night’s network television news shows featured film of the event that beamed into perplexed homes across the country.  That semi-official reflection of American culture, Life magazine affirmed its significance with a photo spread.

Soon Scott McKenzie’s Are You Coming to San Francisco? would hit the air waves and kids from across the continent would head to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love.  By spring similar events were popping up around the country. 

Chicago’s first Be-In was held at The Point near the 57th Street Beach by Hyde Park in April.  But the one on May 14 in Lincoln Park and promoted by the Seed turned into a regular event every Sunday that year and again the following summer right up to when the park was taken over for the Democratic Convention protests in August.

                                        The Human Be-In was the inspiration of artist and San Francico Oracle founder Michael Bowen.

The San Francisco Be-In was the brainchild of 30 year old Michael Bowen, an artist and sculptor who had connections to the well established Beat culture and who dabbled in mysticism.  According to poet Andrew Cohen who co-founded the pioneering counter culture paper the San Francisco Oracle with him, Bowen hopped to unite different cultural elements in the Bay Area—the Beats with their interest in mysticism, Berkley radicals who were powering the growing Anti-war movement, and the relatively apolitical Hippie culture in San Francisco with its fascination with hallucinogens and rock and roll.  He hoped for an event with would meld and synthesize these sometimes contradictory currents.

The catalyst for the event was a new California law which went into effect in October 1966 which made the possession and use of LSD a crime for the first time.  Brown envisioned an event where the law would be challenged by massive, open defiance.  He created the term Human Be-In as a synthesis of Humanism and the civil disobedience of Civil Rights Movement lunch counter sit-ins.

                                    Bowen's classic cover creation for the Oracle.

The event was promoted heavily in the Oracle as A Gathering of the Tribes and featured on the cover of its fifth edition printed in an eye-catching purple ink.  Flyers and posters distributed at music venues like the Fillmore, Beat coffee houses and bookstores, and on the streets generated excitement.

The program was impressive.  Beat mainstays Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were on hand to lend support and lead meditations.  Former Harvard professor Dr. Timothy Leary, already famous for his advocacy of LSD, made his first West Coast appearance and for the first time urged his audience to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” With him was his associate Richard Alpert, who would soon emerge as the guru Ram Das.

                          Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Freewheelin’ Frank, and Marcetta lead chanting at the Human Be-In.

Radical political figures including the comedian/Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory and student organizer Jerry Rubin spoke.  The only woman on the program, Lenore Kandel, read erotic poetry from The Love Book, her four poem pamphlet that was at the center of a celebrated censorship case.

Although the catch phrase had not yet been coined the Human Be-In was all about sex, drugs, and rock & roll plus a dash of mysticism and of revolution.

The program was energized by performances by some of the top bands of the emerging psychedelic rock scene—Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Grateful Dead.

Hell’s Angels were on hand to provide “security” and even conducted an operation to reunite lost children with their parents.  Hugh Romney and the Hog Farm were there to provide food—brown rice and veggies.  All of the classic elements of the counter culture were gathered together for the first time in one event.

                                    A rare photo of underground chemist Owsley who brought thousands of hits of pure and potent acid to the Be-In.

Most critically, the guerrilla chemist Owsley Stanley brought thousands of doses of powerful White Lighting Acid which he had manufactured just for the occasion and which was distributed freely to the crowd.

Inspired by the Be-In and Scott McKenzie’s song more than 100,000 kids descended on the overwhelmed Haight.  Despite the best efforts of locals to accommodate them, most ended up on the street and many were prey for sexual exploitation, violence, and hard drugs like heroin.  By Fall the organizers of the Be-In were eager to send a new message—don’t come to San Francisco.  Instead they wanted to young people to stay in their own towns and create community and social movements there.

Less than ten months after the Human Be-In the community staged a Death of the Hippy mock funeral to discourage the hoards of young people who had descended on the Haight during the Summer of Love.

So on October 6, 1967 The Death of the Hippie was staged as a mock funeral in the Haight.

By that time, however, pop culture had appropriated  Hippie and characters were popping up on television shows and in movies.  Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In premiered in January 1968.

In the boonies, kids still wanted to be Hippies.  They grew their hair long, smoked dope, dropped acid, and listened endlessly to rock and roll.  At the same time the escalating Viet Nam War and police repression of protests were radicalizing many.  In early ’68 Rubin and Abbie Hoffman would create the Yippies out of thin air to politicize the counter culture as never before.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Different Drummers Put Flowers in Rifle Barrels—Marching to a at the Pentagon

 

The most enduring image of the Pentagon march--young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15 rifles.

Note—It is instructive to note the Johnson administration’s massive deployment in defense of the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon and the feeble protection of the Capitol during the January 6, 2021 siege and attempted insurrection.

There were other big marches in Washington in opposition to the Vietnam War.  Starting in 1965 they had practically become semi-annual events.  There would be more—and larger—ones later.  But the March to Confront the War Makers on October 21, 1967 was different.  It signaled a new phase in the anti-war movement that incorporated the rising youth counter   culture on a large scale for the first time and willingness for more aggressive confrontation of authority.  It also introduced onto the national stage some figures who would become household names within a year.

The march was organized, as were previous ones, by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—universally referred to simply as the Mobe—a shaky coalition of more than 150 organizations including traditional pacifists, Ban the Bomb groups, liberals, the Old Left, the New Left, Viet Cong sympathizers, a sliver of the Civil Rights Movement, student groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and anti-war veteran groups.  It was united only in opposition to the war.

 

A Mobe flyer promoting the march had a distinctly traditional, Old Left look.  With the infusion of the youth culture into the previously mostly middle class anti-war movement, such calls would soon look far different.

The organization was so shaky that after the tumultuous events of this demonstration it fell apart.  It was re-assembled, minus its less militant components as the New Mobe the following year in time to organize protests at the Democratic National Convention.

The Mobe was led by veteran radical pacifist Dave Dellinger, the fifty-something editor of Liberation magazine.  In order to reach out to more young people—earlier marches, in retrospect seem like the sedate affairs of the middle class—Dellinger recruited California activist Jerry Rubin to be project coordinator for the march.  It was Rubin’s idea to add a March on the Pentagon after the main rally on the National Mall broke up.

Three central figures of the Chicago Democratic Convention protests of 1968, Abbie Hoffman, Dave Dellinger, and Jerry Rubin, first came together for the Marches on Washington Washington and the Pentagon. 

The rally and March were just part of a series of actions in and around Washington.  A day earlier a march of hundreds on the Justice Department organized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and other anti-draft groups presented more than 1,000 returned Draft Cards to a reluctant Assistant Attorney General.  Other small demonstrations and picketing were organized by various component groups in the Mobe around Washington.

Among those who came to Washington, many in rented school buses, was a carload organized by Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck.

A highlight of the Rally on the Mall was to be the arrival of the Peace Torch, lit in Hiroshima on August 6.  It was carried across country from San Francisco in a highly publicized relay reminiscent of the journeys of the Olympic Torch.

Although several Blacks spoke from the podium of the Mall Rally—mostly long time members of Old Left parties—most African Americans boycotted the main demonstration where President Lyndon B. Johnson was sure to come under attack.  Many were grateful for his steadfast support of major Civil Rights legislation.  A separate rally was held at Howard University where opposition to the war was largely separated from opposition to the President.  The most important Black leader to come out strongly against the war, Rev. Martin Luther King, was absent from both events. 

The huge rally was typical of others of its type—a parade of speakers representing the component organizations interspersed with brief entertainment.  Dellinger hinted at a shift in anti-war strategy by saying that it was time to “to go from protest to resistance.”  Norman Mailer, then the most celebrated novelist in America, famously spoke.  His role in the Rally and later events was celebrated in his book Armies of the Night, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 

Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, poet Robert Lowell, Old Left leader Sydney Lens, Dagmar Wilson, and Dr. Benjamin Spock link arms with other luminaries and speakers as they set off from the main rally on the National Mall to head to the Pentagon. 

The main speaker was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose baby care book was the Bible by which most of the young members of the crowd had been raised.  Spock had supported Johnson in 1964 and felt betrayed by his escalation of the war.  The kindly Spock was one of the last nods at getting the parents of Baby Boomers on board the anti-war movement.  But the days when he and organizations like Another Mother for Peace could be the face of the movement were ending.

When the main Rally broke up, a large portion of the crowd began the two and a half mile march to the Pentagon.  By some estimates as many as 50,000 began the long walk, which took them across the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and up a long service road to the Defense Department headquarters.  Many did not finish the trip.  The line strung out so that it took well over an hour for everyone to get into the site.

When marchers got there they were confronted with a building encircled by 2,500 Federal troops and 200 U.S. Marshals.  A rope line was set up in advance of the security forces and authorities announced that anyone crossing the line would be arrested.

Marchers also encountered a smaller group already at the Pentagon.  Organized by Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, festooned in an American flag shirt and Uncle Sam hat, the newly formed Youth International Party—the Yippies, an organization that hardly existed except in flyers circulated on college campuses and in big city youth culture enclaves, were there to supposedly levitate the Pentagon.

Many of those first on the scene peacefully approached the defense line.  Images of young people putting flowers in the barrels of Army M-15s became iconic.  But soon more militant demonstrators were challenging the line.  Arrests began.  Small groups managed to get partially up the steps of the building.  Others found an unguarded access ramp and charged in.  They were met with rifle butts and particularly by the aggressive batons of Federal Marshals who busted several heads. Tear gas was used on the crowd and there was some chaos and panic.

White helmeted U.S. Marshals with heavy batons were particularly aggressive against demonstrators and inflicted several cracked skulls.

But the majority of the demonstrators continued to stand by.  Many sang America the Beautiful and other patriotic and anti-war songs as the battle raged.  By 7 pm things had settled down.  Authorizes announced that the permit for the demonstration had expired.  Most of the remaining demonstrators drifted away, but about 7,000 chose to stay.  No move was made to dislodge them, but as overnight temperatures dropped, many more left.

At dawn a few hundred left to march to the White House to “wake up LBJ.”  There were more arrests there, including those charged with picking flowers in Lafayette Park.  A few hundred others stayed behind to keep a vigil at the Pentagon.  At midnight the remaining 200 were rousted or arrested.

In all 681, including Hoffman and Mailer, were arrested over the two days.  Many demonstrators were bloodied or overcome by tear gas.  Over 100 demonstrators were documented to have been treated for injuries.  Many more were undoubtedly hurt.  In addition some soldiers, marshals, and police sustained minor injuries, mostly from objects thrown at them during the confrontation at the Pentagon or scuffles during arrests.

The events in Washington that weekend set the stage for even more tumultuous and confrontational protests around the country in the next few years.

                            Chicago Seed editor Abe Peck with Abbie Hoffman.

In Chicago the Seed offices became the unofficial headquarters for the Yippie’s next big project, the counter cultural Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic Convention.  But Abe Peck had a warning for flower-power hippies who expected bands and dope shrouded festivities in the park—“If you come, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.”