Making History Making Blintzes by Mickey Flacks Dick Flacks

Author:Mickey Flacks, Dick Flacks [Mickey Flacks, Dick Flacks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Political, Social Science, Sociology, Social Theory, Jewish Studies
ISBN: 9780813589244
Google: zv-9DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2018-10-31T01:07:43+00:00

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD?

DICK:

In 1967 some of us old guard SDS types had decided to try an initiative to create a new formation that would sustain the New Left project and provide a political home for those of us who had moved in life beyond studenthood. And when we first started to talk, there was some hope that we could help create a new organization.

In any event, our group in Chicago took the initiative to call for a conference to take place in the venerable Circle Pines Co-op Camp in Michigan in June 1967. The conference was called “Back to the Drawing Board.” We reached out to as many people as we could identify across the country who were our age and older to come talk about organization and potentials for the Left. Our intent was not to compete with SDS on its own ground, but to create a home for people who could not find it in SDS because of their age and station. We certainly felt, however, that the SDS leadership—Greg Calvert, Carl Davidson, and others who were setting the SDS direction—needed to support or at least accept what we were doing if it was to be legitimate. Their view, expressed forcefully, was that they would not support an event that would be laying the groundwork for a new organization. They seemed to accept the idea that people like us needed to sort out our political direction and perhaps initiate new projects, but they ruled out anything that would be designed to create a new organization. Their argument, which was compelling, was that if a full-fledged New Left national organization were initiated, its leadership should be with black and working-class activists, not with white middle-class, primarily academic, folks.

Accepting that argument, we went ahead with the conference with a more modest sense of what it might accomplish. Somehow Mickey and I were given responsibility for the logistical details of the event. Several hundred people indicated their interest in coming (outstripping initial expectations), and it was a remarkably diverse group of folks in their twenties, thirties, and beyond who finally gathered. The conference opened on a Friday night in a pouring rain with a keynote speech by Tom Hayden. In the middle of his speech, the doors burst open and in marched a strange, colorful group of men who called themselves “the Diggers from San Francisco.” One of them declared himself to be Emmett Grogan, who had become a legendary figure in the Haight-Ashbury scene. They demanded, first of all, that if anyone in the room was a lawyer, he or she should go with them, because they had been stopped by the police and some of their members were being held. Somebody volunteered to go with Grogan, leaving behind Peter Berg, another well-known Digger figure and one or two others. They then proceeded to disrupt the planned agenda by staging a kind of guerrilla theater confrontation. Berg denounced SDS as a middle-class white organization with no potential for real effect on history.

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