The 1960s were a very turbulent time period in our nation’s history. Racial tensions that had been building since the end of WWII, a growing feminism movement, demands for social justice and welfare, and then opposition to the Vietnam War and its misguided and misunderstood objectives were coerced into a social and political symbiosis that resulted in rebellion, violence, riots and deployment of federal troops to major urban areas under siege. Previously, in the 1950s, building racial incidents and tensions mainly in the South, like the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the attempt by the Arkansas Governor to block the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, as well as “the registration of James Meredith at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi in 1962 surrounded by U.S. Marshals and 23,000 federalized National Guard troops,”1 belied the social and cultural quiescence of the 1950s presided over by President Eisenhower. As the 1960s began, several violent events collided that propelled racial confrontations, student activism, and political revolt that was a result of social and political forces that were imploding in several ways. As normally happens, technology and generational gap development fostered the growth of social and cultural movements and phenomena that both built on and clashed with the previous generation. In some ways, these movements helped to validate the values and thinking of the World War II generation, but in many other ways the success and growth of the United States into a world- leading position pushed new expanded thinking and questioning and new found independence onto a whole new generation. The drive for civil rights and social justice not only coincided with the push for greater equality and social welfare, but also compelled political and public movements and actions by leaders. Students, activists, militants and young people not only identified with these movements, but also felt compelled to press for action and change that would affect both the lives and livelihood of their generation and the rest of the country. In this paper I will explore the Woodstock phenomenon to determine if it was an event that grew from a desire to promote and cause more social and cultural changes, or if it arose from a rebellion movement against the war, authority, police and the rule of reason. While the Woodstock Festival in August 1969 was a sponsored and planned event, the spontaneous nature of what actually occurred overwhelmed all planning and became a movement event of its own. This movement both reflected and represented the social, political and artistic forces that nurtured the Woodstock embryo, but in what ways did the event help to define and represent the protests, the occupations, the violence and burning, and the civil rights demands.
The integration efforts of the 1960s quickly turned into disintegration of the national fabric. The country’s relationship with the black community cooled noticeably. Some part of the disaffection was owing to the unpopular war involving a land inhabited by people of color, but it also grew out of the alienation of its black people from a generally prosperous white society, and out of a natural evolution of the civil rights movement from a call for integration to a demand for "black power." High unemployment and run-down schools notably marked the neighborhoods of tenements and slums occupied by poor blacks in the North. Even as the presidential campaign had gotten under way in 1964, a riot in New York erupted and lasted five days.
In the next few years the nation experienced "long, hot summers"—riots and the threats of riots in major cities. The Watts district of Los Angeles burst into flames in 1965, and black communities exploded in Cleveland in 1966, in Newark and Detroit in 1967, and in Washington, DC, in 1968. Anxiety over possible race war gripped many cities as the words "Burn, baby, burn" were reported to be the cry of the rioters. The nation was reaping a whirlwind resulting from its long neglect and indifference to the needs of the black poor. As the destruction, including looting and attacks on white policemen, firemen, and National Guardsmen, rent the air, it was easy to find a scapegoat and blame President Johnson and his war in Vietnam. Both he and the struggle in Asia became more unpopular than ever.
Despite his attempts to unify the country after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 and to put in place the Great Society with legislation that created “Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting rights Act”2 by 1965, the war in Vietnam was becoming LBJ’s albatross. In what should have been a tremendous improvement in the social and economic relationships of “the people” there was much despair and disappointment. The election of 1964 had been a total landslide. Johnson had won “43 million votes, carrying 44 states and losing only Arizona and 5 states of the Deep South,”3 the home of the Dixiecrats, the conservative southern Democrats who opposed his liberal programs. “In the House of Representatives the Republicans lost 37 seats, giving the Democrats 295 places to 140 for the Republicans. The 2 seats the Democrats picked up in the Senate enlarged the margin of the Democrats, making it 68 to 32.”3 Johnson was the first president elected from the South since Zachary Taylor in 1848, and he now had a veto-proof majority of both houses. He should have been able to enact and pacify many of the liberal programs and causes that he espoused and were being demanded. His pesky problem with the Vietnam War, however, hindered and ultimately perhaps, denied him the ability to make these happen.
Besides the Vietnam War there were continuing crises that confronted the nation: “the Birmingham riots of 1963 in which the first use in modern history of federal troops was planned and executed”4 to at least preparatory stages; the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and the murder of four black girls in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In 1965, a coup in the Dominican Republic forced LBJ to deploy 20,000 U.S. troops to intervene, Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City, and “the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) staged the first large demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C with over 20,000 participants.”5 SDS and SNCC (Student non-violent Coordinating Committee) formed to continue the confrontation of discrimination with the concept of mass civil disobedience that had begun. People like Stokely Carmichael, Tom Hayden, Malcolm X, Mario Savio, Carl Davidson, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin soon replaced many of the early leaders, such as James Lawson, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Marion Barry, and numerous others. These leaders would not be content to challenge the government with nonviolent actions.
Other movements, such as the Free Speech Movement, the New Left, the National Organization of Women (NOW), and the Black Panther Party, were also superseding the NAACP, CORE, SCLC and the more accommodating and nonviolent groups that were led by traditional political representatives. These groups were determined to undermine and topple the prejudiced and racist organizations and people who were perpetuating the same discriminatory policies and practices from the government, society and institutions. They organized protests, planned large demonstrations, and plotted the takeover of agencies, institutional offices and organizations, including even self-defense, especially in the ghettos of the North. As the war progressed and LBJ continued the increase of troops and equipment, the organizations congealed and found more ground for coordinated and combined resources and protestors. In fact, in Freedom Summer in 1964, whites outnumbered blacks in SNCC’s voter registration projects in Mississippi.”6 This did not sit well with Carmichael and other black leaders, who felt that “depending on sympathetic whites for political cover was, in itself, a concession to racism.”7
With Tom Hayden as the new SDS leader and SNCC’s Carmichael becoming an ever more belligerent radical and ideologue adopting Black Power as a separatist movement, differences with the alliances with women, students, and other radicals grew more divisive. But along with Carmichael, they began to identify with radical and revolutionary movements in the Third World. “Mobs of angry protestors jeered and stoned Dr. King during his Chicago “Open Housing’ campaign in 1966,”8 and when women in SNCC were degraded publicly by Carmichael, the SNCC movement and the NOW and SDS organizations began to part and seek separate objectives. But they still opposed the war.
As black and whites and men and women in the movement went their own ways, they were still bound together in common opposition to the war in Vietnam. Just how best to oppose the war was, however, often a divisive issue…. In the New Left and the campus antiwar movement, in contrast, media-oriented confrontation increasingly took the place of the long-term strategy and commitment displayed by the civil rights organizers.9
In the shadow of the 1968 presidential election, these protests, demonstrations, mass rallies, campus sit-ins, occupations and confrontations took place. And in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, as was Robert Kennedy in June 1968 by a psychotic Palestinian nationalist. These violent insanities created riots and demonstrations in over 125 cities, including Washington, DC, where the rioting and looting came within two blocks of the White House until stopped by police and US Army troops. “Governors across the country called out over 34,000 of the National Guard,”10 but they were little prepared to handle the numbers of people involved and the kinds of protesting and looting occurring. “In Detroit, the nervous Michigan National Guard fired 155,576 rounds of ammunition to the regular army’s 202.”11 Prior to these riots, on April 23rd after MLK’s assassination, a biracial group of black radicals and SDS whites began a sit-in in Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York. The protest expanded to four more buildings, including the university president’s office where they “smoked his cigars, drank his sherry, and rifled through his files for politically incriminating documents.”12 After eight days of occupation, the police moved in and arrested almost 600 students, but this had been the most prolonged protest at a major university, and the first at an Ivy League school.
Following these events, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in August became the focus of several groups. The Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, SDS, and others planned to disrupt and confront the “party of death” as they then termed the Democratic Party. While mostly in opposition to the war, there were also many who sympathized with them due to the tide of domestic troubles—inflation, a price-wage squeeze, and mounting strikes by blue-collar and middle class people. Yet the problems could not be managed unless the war ended. Besides, Johnson, having widened the war without calling for public sacrifice, continued to act as if the country could have "both guns and butter." The situation called for a cutback in domestic spending or an increase in taxes, but Johnson was unwilling to break up his immense majority in Congress by asking for either (President Profiles). The riots that ensued did not draw the protestors that were anticipated, and on any one of the four days, no more than 10,000 were estimated to participate. Probably mostly due to the immense arsenal of 7500 army troops, 6000 National Guard and 12,000 police that were assembled by Mayor Richard Daley with his old friend LBJ to deal with the demonstrators.
After the election, Nixon continued the war efforts, and protests continued, but on a much smaller scale for most of 1969. A large new organization formed, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee that coordinated a large nationwide protest October 15, and began to take the place of the SDS and violent groups for a period of time. Generally it seemed, many were willing to see if Nixon could deliver on his intention to end the war with dignity and diplomacy.
Against this backdrop of social upheaval, economic turmoil, and political divisiveness there were groups who were trying to deal with all of the dissention and discord in different ways. Increased exposure to the Asian culture and the attack on authority of almost any kind seemed to foster a newly felt independence as well as opposition to traditional spirituality as well as religion. “Between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, over a third of all Americans left the denomination in which they’d been raised.”13 Music was changing from the big bands and rock and roll to folk and rock music that echoed the dissent, the war protest, and the challenge to conventional thought and moral standards. Increased international trade had led to increased immigration and increased representation of religious groups like Zen, Hindu, Islam, and others. Standards for moral, religious, sexual, and personal behavior and thought were being questioned and influenced by a wide variety of forces. As a result, young people were being influenced to not just accept the parental and conventional ways of thinking and behaving at face value. It is in this context that the Woodstock festival occurred in August 1969 in Bethel, New York, approximately one hundred miles northwest of Manhattan.
Given the continuing series of protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, the lack of progress in jobs and affirmative action for blacks and minorities, the creeping inflation that the war spending was causing, and the identification that many students and young adults were experiencing with the blacks and civil rights protestors, it was not surprising that they took up arms with them and joined their cause. With folk music that sang of nuclear destruction, “there’s a man with a gun over there,” “I can’t get no satisfaction,” “Love is all you need,” and “I want to take you higher,” it was easy to conclude, from the parental view, that the youth movements and protests were indeed mostly about “sex, drugs and rock and roll.” Despite the fact that music had moved on from just rock and roll and was approaching vast new areas of folk ballads, political protest, and love and drug infused lyrics; not all music, by any means, but much of it.
The political and social, if not cultural, divide that was then forming in the two generations was taking shape in several ways, and the rock and folk festivals that were beginning to occur in the 1966-1967 timeframe were becoming a dividing line for the youth and parental adult factions. As the opportunities for gathering where the music, drugs and solidarity of these groups could be sensed and shared, the interest and appeal of these large gatherings began to rise. For Woodstock, one of the attendees recalled, “Everyone came to listen to the music. Nobody knew everybody was going to be up there and feel all together and have that feeling.”15
Woodstock’s origins were very quickly overwhelmed. Despite the fact that many of the young people were coming to listen to the music, do some drugs maybe (mostly marijuana), and to escape the parental cocoon for a while, the location and environment of Bethel, New York, was a logistical and safety – but bucolic – nightmare. Tens of thousands of concertgoers were caught in traffic jams on narrow country roads several miles from the rural festival site and could not reach the concert grounds. For those who did arrive, food, water, and sanitation were totally inadequate. “Widespread drug use was resulting in overdoses and bad ‘trips, and heavy rains were turning the festival grounds into a muddy quagmire.”16 Fortunately there was a stream and large pond, Mallory Pond, on the site, and bathing facilities were available from a natural supply. In the summer heat of New York, it could have been a tinderbox.
In many ways, Woodstock could have become a very dangerous event. The crowd swelled to close to 500,000 people by many estimates, and the ability to sell or take tickets was abandoned the first day. Max Yasgur, who owned the 600-acre farm on which it was held, had been a quick-reaction second choice when the promoters were rebuffed by their first choice, Woodstock, NY. Drug overdoses were often enough that besides normal first aid requirements, unprofessional help was required from volunteers to avoid possible deaths. Many participants did not get close enough to even hear any of the music, and many never actually got into the main area of the festival. The police were pretty tolerant of all the drugs, nudity, public sex, and illegal activities, or things could have gotten quite unpleasant. Just four months later in Altamont near San Francisco, the Hells Angels killed a man while providing security for a Rolling Stones concert. “The festival was so marred with violence and bad feelings that the Grateful Dead, one of the concert's biggest backers and main attractions, declined to play.”17
The overall impression that most people had of Woodstock had been drastically influenced by the press coverage of the event in 1969. While much of it had been overcome and superseded by the lack of violence and lack of trouble that occurred at the festival, it was nevertheless, widely derided for many years as a dangerous, drug-laden, scandalous event of dirty, slovenly, druggies who “occupied” the area for four days. As documented by William Murchison:
…from a cultural perspective, it represented a transcendental moment, a coming of age, for the young generation of Americans in the late 1960s. Woodstock is one of the defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending. It was three days of peace and music…a holiday of naiveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. The festival gave virtually everyone involved-ticketholders, gate crashers, musicians, doctors, the police-a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one another, which was only sensible.18
So while Woodstock appeared to be a huge gathering of rebels and protestors who were just forming another large demonstration and disregarding and disrespecting the area they were “occupying” and attempting to devastate, the press initially and for some time represented what was happening in exactly that manner.
Beyond coverage of drug use, the Woodstock news reports noted to a lesser extent the public nudity and the casual sex occurring at the festival. This further reflected points of tension between the generations and what older Americans might have perceived at the time as additional threats to the social order.19
The suspicion and discord between the generations was confirmed by much of the press coverage of the Woodstock event, and initially many Americans viewed this as a disruptive and unpatriotic event by the young protestors. However, as history has shown and as the festival itself has proven, it was very much a concert without much of a political statement attached. People were not ripping off or haranguing others as at so many other similar events. There were people selling water to them for a dollar, and there were people who charged plenty for any necessities, but they were not usually the participants. Despite traveling for many miles, many of them never got near enough to here Joplin, Hendrix, Baez or any of the other classic artists of the era. And as one father who attended Woodstock said, "I say, please, Boomers," the writer implored, "let it go…Woodstock was a concert, nothing more. It was peaceful. It was fun."20
As previously referenced, In August of 1969, the Woodstock experience literally defined a generation, but by December of that same year, in a matter of four short months, the harmony and love that came to personify Woodstock imploded into the horrific tragedy of the Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont Speedway, just one hour east of San Francisco. This event single-handedly signaled the end of the dream. Its tragic demise had been foretold two years earlier by The Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury street-theater troupe that staged a 1967 parade called The Death of Hippie to point out that the concept of "hippie" was nothing more than a media fabrication. At this point the cultural revolution that was so well imaged by Woodstock without any clear design to accomplish that was becoming a national icon that could not be degraded. For many it continues to represent the most positive creative and political energies of the 1960s counterculture that united briefly in a spectacle of peace, love and music.
The month after the festival, Rolling Stone gave extensive coverage to Woodstock, as would be expected from a publication focusing on the counterculture and rock music and produced by members of the Woodstock generation. It featured a black-and-white photograph of a nude man with long hair wading in a pond and holding the hand of a young child that symbolized how Woodstock was, in a sense, the story of generations in transition. The generation gap of the 1960s was causing the social tension that likely influenced the news media's coverage of the festival was a theme. It also discussed how Woodstock represented the personal freedom to do things that would ordinarily be considered rebellious:
Selling and using all kinds of dope, balling here, there and everywhere, swimming, canoeing or running around naked, and staying up all night—one could do all of these things simply because they were fun to do.21
Rolling Stone’s coverage of the festival in this timeframe was probably the most positive and reflective of the nonpolitical and nonfractious nature of the festival. Consequently, the basis was laid for a much different evaluation of the event as time passed.
Between 1967 and the mid-Seventies, outdoor fests became a mainstay of rock life. The weather was often rainy or too hot or cold, and mud was a constant fact of life. The organizers and sponsors often provided minimal facilities and maximized profits, so comfort and convenience for the crowds were not their primary objectives. As they continued to survive and grow, incidents like the Altamont violence continued to plague them. Pop festivals in Atlanta and New York were cancelled due to mob factors and various performers were heckled and harassed in other areas.
In 1973 one final show in Watkins Glen, New York, was scheduled for one day and so many people showed up that they estimate more people came than Woodstock for three bands that then played for two days.22
Often a young crowd would come to witness an unprecedented rock music extravaganza, and the unexpected turnout would overwhelm the preparations, which could result in incidents of violence or overreaction. However, in my research, I have not read of a specific attempt to provide political fall out or aggressive political opposition to government policy or programs at any of these festivals, and especially not Woodstock. Woodstock was not an event of the New Left, and the festival's focus was music, not politics. The festival did occur at a critical time when opposition to the Vietnam War was boiling in the 1968 election, and civil rights and racial tensions were widespread. Because many of the same kinds of youth who attended Woodstock also were involved in protests, demonstrations, and often-violent protests and sit-ins where fires were started and offices and buildings were burned, they were easily targeted with providing protest forums for the festivals. It also posed a threat to the ruling and local elites who were protecting their turf and justifying their positions by stifling these events. Attempts to picture them as drug addicts, safety hazards, and wasteful and destructive people reinforced their social attitudes and mindsets. This allowed them to marginalize this faction of youth and maintain their own political standing with the people. The people who viewed them as a threat to their towns, or local establishments, or to the country viewed anything these local leaders or national officials did to suppress these events and the numbers of youth gathering at them as patriotic and defending the rights and responsibilities of them and their towns. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-justifying rationale that for many years gave Woodstock a theme of protest and rebellion that just wasn’t there. The people who came to it were many of the same people who protested, demonstrated, and conducted sit-ins. They looked a lot like reactionary youth, but they didn’t come to Woodstock to riot and start fires.