Voices at a Revolution
By David Swanson
"We didn't want to be seen as a left-wing newspaper particularly," said Village Voice founder Ed Fancher, in the introduction to Tricia Romano's The Freaks Came Out to Write. "The idea of the Voice was independent journalism. And that idea is either lost or forgotten."
To anyone who read the paper over its six-decade run as the house-organ of the American counterculture, Fancher's initial goal sounds foolish. "The Village Voice was a community newspaper then, with a distinct community to cover," said Andy Warhol. "And the liberals all over age world were interested in the Village as if it were a second home." Give its time and place, it would have been near impossible for the Voice to remain apolitical. The paper's mission shifted with the times, and within a decade of its launch in 1955, it was covering a revolution: the Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, Gay Rights, identity politics, civil liberties.
Of course, as the progressive left made its collective voice heard in the sixties and seventies, there was a countervailing reaction from the right, and the Voice there too as one of the first publications to sound the alarm: on book-banning crusades and burgeoning bigotry; on the creeping cynicism of the conservative press, and the takeover of the GOP by its Christian nationalist wing; on the rise of malignant figures like Rudy Giuliani, Clarence Thomas, Bill Barr, and the paper's supreme bête noir, Donald Trump. Romano's book documents these parallel revolutions—progressivism on the left; reactionism on the right—and it's a bracing reminder of just how ahead of the curve the Voice really was.
In Sunday's culture column I wrote about my own experience as an editor at the paper, and provided a sampling of the Voice's ground-breaking arts criticism (pre-internet). The architecture of the Voice remained consistent over the years: the front of the paper was devoted to politics and hard news; the back was for arts coverage and criticism. This Janus-like identity encouraged a creative friction within the paper, as the two halves rubbed up against and played off of each other. So, if Sunday's column offered a pocket history of the back-of-the-book, today's tackles the front. If nothing else, I hope these stories help illustrate the stakes of our current political situation, and why we voices like the Voice's more now than ever.
Malcolm X: The Complexity Of a Man in the Jungle
By Marlene Nadle
February 25, 1965
Unwinding himself from a hand microphone, without any formal introduction, he comes before his class at the Audubon Ballroom. He chats and kids with them for a while and then gets on with the lessons.
He shows them films of Africa he took on his trip last summer. He tells them, “We have got to get over the brainwashing we had. No matter how much of an Africanist we are, it is hard for us to think of Africa as anything but a place for Tarzan. Look at these films and get out of your mind what the Man put in it.”
Narrating from a chair in the first row, he points out the beaches and skyscraping cities and says, “They told us there was nothing but jungle over there. Why, the only jungle I ever saw was right here in New York City.”
Marching to Montgomery: The Cradle Did Rock
By Jack Newfield
April 1, 1965
It was the Ecumenical Council, a hootenanny, a happening, and a revolution all rolled into one. And it happened in Montgomery, “Cradle of the Confederacy.”
A broken-down hipster, the Realist sticking out of his dungarees, marched alongside an Episcopal bishop clutching the Holy Bible. There were the kamikazes of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee—SNCC—in their blue-denim overalls, mud-caked boots, and rash helmets, next to middle-class housewives who won’t ride the subways after dark. There were nuns in flowing black habits arm in arm with jowly labor leaders who discriminate in their unions.
There were rabbis, junkies, schoolboys, actors, sharecroppers, intellectuals, maids, novelists, folk-singers, and politicians—40,000 motives and 40,0000 people marching to Montgomery behind James Forman who hates the oppressor and Martin Luther King who loves the oppressed.
The Grand Central Riot: Yippies Meet the Man
By Don McNeill
March 28, 1968
Another formation of cops charged toward the stairs where I was standing, and I made for the street again, rounded the corner, and returned to the 42nd Street entrance, which was now entirely filled with police. I pinned on my press credentials and began to move through the police line. My credentials were checked twice, and I was allowed to pass. At that point, I was stopped a third time by two uniformed cops. They looked at my credentials, cursed the Voice, grabbed my arms behind my back, and, joined by two others, rushed me back toward the street, deliberately ramming my head into the closed glass doors, which cracked with the impact. They dropped me in the street and disappeared. My face, and my press card, were covered with blood. I went to the hospital to get five stitches in my forehead.
RFK, Two Minutes to Midnight: The Very Last Hurrah
By Pete Hamill
June 13, 1968
I saw him turn to his left and shake the hand of a small Mexican cook. We could still hear the chants of “We want Bobby!” from the Embassy Room. The cook was smiling and pleased.
Then a pimply messenger arrived from the secret filthy heart of America. He was curly haired, wearing a pale blue sweatshirt and bluejeans, and he was planted with his right foot forward and his right arm straight out and he was firing a gun.
The scene assumed a kind of insane fury, all jump cuts, screams, noise, hurtling bodies, blood. The shots went pap-pap-pap-pap-pap, small sharp noises like a distant firefight or the sound of firecrackers in a backyard. Rosey Grier of the Los Angeles Rams came from nowhere and slammed his great bulk into the gunman, crunching him against a serving table. George Plimpton grabbed the guy’s arm, and Rafer Johnson moved to him, right behind Bill Barry, Kennedy’s friend and security chief, and they were all making deep animal sounds and still the bullets came.
Chicago 1968: A Riot by the Cops
By Steve Lerner
September 5, 1968
Sitting in a cluster near the main circle, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and Terry Southern were taking in the scene. Ginsberg was in his element. As during all moments of tension during the week, he was chanting OM in a hoarse whisper, occasionally punctuating the ritual with a tinkle from his finger cymbals. Burroughs, wearing a felt hat, stared vacantly at the cross, his thin lips twitching in a half smile. Genet, small, stocky, bald-headed, with the mug of a saintly convict, rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his leather jacket. I asked him if he was afraid. “No. I know what this is,” he replied. But doesn’t knowing make you more afraid, I asked. He shook his head and started to speak when the sky fell on us.
When an Abortionist Dies
By Susan Brownmiller
January 30, 1969
Spencer went into my telephone book, under “A” for abortionist. I am poor at remembering telephone numbers, but Spencer’s old number is still in my memory. It was Ashland 404... Spencer meant deliverance, it was as simple as that. Going to Spencer meant taking an alternative that the culture was doing its damnedest to hide or distort. The public image of an abortionist, through books, plays, movies, articles, or whatever, was of an evil, leering, drunken, perverted butcher at worst, and a cold, mysterious, money-hungry Park Avenue price-gouger at best. And then there was Spencer with his clinic on the main street of a small American town, who charged $50, who believed in abortions, and who was kind. Knowing about Spencer in Ashland was one irrefutable piece in the logic which led one to the conclusion that the culture was capable of the big lie.
Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square
By Lucian Truscott
July 3, 1969
Allen Ginsberg expressed a desire to visit the Stonewall—“You know, I’ve never been in there”—and ambled on down the street, flashing peace signs and helloing the TPF. It was a relief and a kind of joy to see him on the street. He lent an extra umbrella of serenity of the scene with his laughter and quiet commentary on consciousness, “gay power” as a new movement, and the various implications of what had happened. I followed him into the Stonewall, where rock music blared from speakers all around a room that might have come right from a Hollywood set of a gay bar. He was immediately bouncing and dancing wherever he moved...
We reached Cooper Square, and as Ginsberg turned to head toward home, he waved and yelled, “Defend the fairies!” and bounced on across the square. He enjoyed the prospect of “gay power” and is probably working on a manifesto for the movement right now. Watch out. The liberation is under way.
Women’s Liberation: The Next Great Moment in History Is Theirs
By Vivian Gornick
November 27, 1969
Over and over again, in educated thinking circles, one meets with a bizarre, almost determined ignorance of a fact of unrest that is growing daily, and that exists in formally organized bodies in nearly every major city and on dozens of campuses across America. The women of this country are gathering themselves into a sweat of civil revolt, and the general population seems totally unaware of what is happening; or, indeed, that anything is happening; or that there is a legitimate need behind what is happening. How is this possible? Why is it true? What relation is there between the peculiarly unalarmed, amused dismissal of the women’s rights movement and the movement itself? Is this relation only coincidental, only the generally apathetic response of a society already benumbed by civil rights and student anarchy and unable to rise to yet one more protest movement, or is it more to the point in the case of women’s rights, is it not, in fact, precisely the key to the entire issue?
Abbie Hoffman: God-fool of Conscience
By Allen Ginsberg
October 11, 1973
We are now in midst of national scandal of Government misbehavior called Watergate. High politicians preaching law and order were themselves habitually breaking Bill-of-Rights laws in the interests of the creation of some sort of police state. Patriotism was as usual the refuge of these scoundrels, who wrapped themselves in the language of the flag, in order to trash the Constitution. This is an age-old pattern. Unauthorized wiretapping, spying, use of agents-provocateurs and double agents, spooks, burglaries, police set-ups, official perjury, in-government conspiracy to deprive citizens of protection against excess government snooping and illegal infra-war activity, domestic surveillance of political enemies—this pattern of Watergate crooked-heartedness was precisely the government pattern denounced prophetically by Abbie Hoffman.
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Prison Memoirs: The New York Women’s House of Detention
By Angela Davis
October 10, 1974
The red brick wall surrounding this tall archaic structure looked very familiar, but it took me a few moments to locate in my memory. Of course; it was the mysterious place I had seen so often during the years I attended Elisabeth Irwin High School, not too far from there. It was the New York Women’s House of Detention, which stood there at the main intersection in the Village, at Greenwich and Sixth avenues.
While the car was rolling into the prisoners’ entrance, a flock of memories fought for my attention. Walking to the subway station after school, I used to look up at this building almost every day, trying not to listen to the terrible noises spilling from the windows. They were coming from the women locked behind bars, looking down on the people passing in the streets, and screaming incomprehensible words.
Holy War in West Virginia: A Fight Over America’s Future
By Paul Cowan
December 4, 1974
The turbulent textbook controversy that has crippled schools here is more than a simple fight over the adoption of 325 first through 12th grade supplementary English textbooks. For the 229,000 people who live in the coal and petrochemical-rich Kanawha Valley it is not an isolated battle, not some rustic re-run of the Scopes trial, but a microcosm of a basic conflict in our culture. It is nothing less than a fight over America’s future.
This fight has taken place in many different localities, over many different issues. Its themes are the same as those that were echoed in New York City’s fight over community-controlled schools, in Boston’s battle over busing, in the black militant attempt to establish a New Africa in Mississippi, and in the Chicanos’ attempt to drive most Anglos from administrative jobs in Crystal City, Texas. Can America’s mainstream culture, made pervasive by the electronic media, absorb all the diverse groups that live here, that are passionate about maintaining their identity?
You Really Didn’t Know How Great I Was
By Ishmael Reed
October 16, 1978
The punishment and cruelty visited upon [Muhammad] Ali during those three years for refusing to step forward at the induction center have become part of the Ali legend. It seemed that the whole nation wanted to spit in his face, or skin The Grand Flesh. Not only, to them, was he a draft-dodger but he was also a member of a misunderstood religion which the media had hyped into a monstrous black conspiracy. The Muslims were different from many of the other black organizations of the time. They had rhetoric but they also accomplished things. They had built a multi-million-dollar business from their Mom and Pop stores and newspaper sales. They were “The Bad Nigger, The Smart Nigger, The Hard Nigger, and The Uppity Nigger” epitomized by one organization. Ali had to pay a heavy price for his religion and for his politics.
The Family: Love It or Leave It
By Ellen Willis
September 17, 1979
When I talk about my family, I mean the one I grew up in. I have been married, lived with men, and participated in various communal and semi communal arrangements, but for most of the past six years—nearly all of my thirties—I have lived alone. This is neither an accident nor a deliberate choice, but the result of an accretion of large and small choices, many of which I had no idea I was making at the time. Conscious or not, these choices have been profoundly influenced by the cultural and political radicalism of the ’60s, especially radical feminism. The sense of possibility, of hope for great changes, that pervaded those years affected all my aspirations; compromises that might once have seemed reasonable, or simply to be expected, felt stifling. A rebellious community of peers supported me in wanting something other than conventional family life; feminist consciousness clarified and deepened my ambivalence toward men, my skepticism about marriage. Single women were still marginal, but their position was dignified in a way it had never been before: it was possible to conceive of being alone as a choice rather than a failure.
The Avengers: Journalists of the Right Rejoice
By Alexander Cockburn
December 31, 1981
Every age gets the journalism it demands and the journalism it deserves. Right now, ankle-deep in the Reagan era, the situation looks pretty grim.The proposals quoted at the start of this article stem from William Safire, Norman Podhoretz, Patrick Buchanan, James Reston, and (the one about History) George Will. These propagandists and their colleagues on publications from The Wall Street Journal to The New Republic—a shorter distance than you might suppose—are the paramount cantsmen of our time, our ranking opinion molders, hegemonic, as poor old Gramsci used to say.
Once in a while newspapers and news magazines take an interest in facts and encourage reporters to go out and discover them. Probably the last time this occurred was in the “investigative era” of Watergate. Facts everywhere you looked back in 1974, and the readers couldn’t get enough of them. Investigative journalism was the dominant idiom. But it all dragged to a halt in the late ’70s and our friends the cantsmen took over as the dominant force.
How Ed Koch Handed Over City Hall
By Wayne Barrett, William Bastone and Tom Robbins
February 4, 1986
Ambitious people often become the thing they hate. History is full of young idealists obsessing about some entrenched evil and then replicating that evil when they come to power. The Ayatollah has become the Shah. George Bush spent the 1970s fighting right-wing extremists and now he wraps himself in extremist icons like William Loeb, Jerry Falwell, and Ferdinand Marcos. And Ed Koch, who first achieved fame by conquering Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio in the early 1960s, has become Carmine DeSapio.
Not the DeSapio who later went to prison, but the DeSapio of the early 1960s and late ’50s, who Koch opposed as the personification of patronage, conflicts of interest, and cynical abuse of the public trust...This city is now witnessing the start of the largest municipal scandal since the revelation of police corruption in the early 1970s.
Sanctifying the Evangelical Vote
By James Ridgeway
June 17, 1986
Behind the politics of the Christian right lies the powerful engine of Armageddon theology, which lends an emotional intensity to the movement. Numerous fundamentalist leaders—Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to name but two—preach the doctrine of “premillennialism,” which holds that the world is entering a period of indescribable devastation and suffering. Its climax will be the battle of Armageddon and the return of Christ.
Premillennialists have been wrong in prophesying Armageddon at various points in history. Under President Reagan such prophecies have gained new currency. The president himself speculated on the subject in a 1981 interview with People magazine: “Never, in the time between the ancient prophecies up until now has there been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together. There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never like this.”
Stop the G.O.P.!
By Paul Berman
January 20, 1987
I’ve been watching the house I’ve been watching the House Foreign Affairs hearings on television and am struck with the much remarked Yogi Berra sense of “déja vu all over again.” For it’s not just that current happenings bring to mind the televised Watergate spectaculars. Dimly I recall from earlier eons, as an infant sprawled at my mother’s feet, watching yet other congressional hearings illumined on the screen. Senators were putting questions to their colleague, Joseph R. McCarthy. And the thought occurs that in each of the Age of Television’s three great contests over the Constitution, the rogues’ gallery has never really changed. Those are proud and patriotic Republicans sitting over there.
Gerald Holton tells the following story. Sir Peter Medawar, the British scientist, applied for a visa to America, went to the consul, and was asked if he intended to overthrow the Constitution. Sir Peter replied: “I would certainly not overthrow it on purpose, and I can only hope I wouldn’t do so by mistake.” The best that can be said of modern Republicanism is that three times in a generation it has nearly done so by mistake.
The Tin Man Who Would Be Mayor
By Nat Hentoff
October 24, 1989
Giuliani's hope... is that he can capitalize on the pervasive fear of crime by giving the impression that somehow, if he were elected, there would be—even if Mario Cuomo keeps blocking capital punishment everywhere else in the state—an electric chair in the basement of City Hall.
And unlike many advocates of murder by the state, Giuliani, I expect, would be willing to pull the switch himself. After all, this is a man who approves of the Supreme Court’s ruling that it is constitutional to execute 16- and 17-year-olds.
This is some cold piece of metal. The perfect client for Roger Ailes.
AIDS: A Decade of Death
By Gary Indiana
January 2, 1990
It began, someone said, with a hissing sound, like Enzensberger’s famous iceberg-thumbnail scraping across the Titanic’s hull: garish rumors, talk of impossibly grotesque pathology, and, as always in the face of the unknown, jokes, recounted with a modicum of nervousness, as if the efficacy of jokes in keeping things at tong’s length could not be assumed in this case, but only wished for, with fervor…It was said to be some phenomenon of the nether fringe, a molecular revolt bubbling up from damp “Third World” environments, an exhaustion of the flesh by postmodern forms of mortification. The first descriptions of wounds, lesions refusing to heal, pedestrian ailments mushrooming into lethal afflictions, resembled the shocking litany of saints’ impalements, dismemberments, self-infection with leprosy.
The Crack-Up
By Barry Michael Cooper
January 2, 1990
It was Morning in America and we woke up to find that our nightmares were real: it became the Decade of the Quick and the Dead. Spike Lee opened Do the Right Thing with a morning call to Wake Up! and crack-cocaine obliterated the night. Crackheads and Wall Street junk bond traders lay on their cardboard boxes and futons, staring at the ceiling and grinding their teeth, trying to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, the lucky ones counted dead presidents. Reagan and his posse, the Reaganites, reinvented the game of Monopoly, and the rich played it with Crazy Money. Ivan Boesky, Mike Milken, Tom Wolfe, Oliver Stone, and Michael Douglas proved it could be won with style. Douglas’s Gordon Gekko gear (the Alan Flusser and Ermengildo Zegna suits) and slicked-back slimecoif became the fashion rage in the pages of GQ and Vanity Fair.
Arguing With the Homeboys
By Bell Hooks
September 17, 1991
Given that black folks make art and market it within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, none of us can ignore the reality that any black person who wants to create a product with mass crossover appeal must do some serious soul-searching. It’s all too easy to sell out, to be co-opted, seduced into a conservative artistic practice that allows one to pretend that somehow it’s all right to produce reactionary, right-wing representations of black life that neither threaten nor challenge the status quo—if one is well-paid. Black folks, and all other critical thinkers who are concerned about the fate of black people, who want to see an end to racist domination, are justifiably concerned about the impact of race and representation.
Thomas v. Hill: Of Human Bondage
By Laurie Stone
November 19, 1991
The Hill/Thomas hearings were a blast of clarity for the women’s movement—all those male Democrats cozying up to Clarence Thomas, seducing Anita Hill into testifying and then, repelled by any association with a women’s cause, abandoning her. Another sorry revelation: a majority of women told pollsters they doubted Hill. We need those women to elect feminists to public office, to storm Washington before Roe v. Wade is overturned. We’ve got to acknowledge what attracts them to the status quo.
Hill passed a lie detector test. She had nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying. She spoke credibly, weaving a story about Thomas he then proceeded to act out. Hill described a man who was crude, inept, driven. He asked for a date but couldn’t take no for an answer. He hammered away, wanting to know why he was being turned down. He used his authority to feel big at the expense of making a woman feel small.
Donald Trump’s Tower of Trouble
By Wayne Barrett
December 17, 1991
When Trump Tower opened in 1983, its golden entrance, 80-foot waterfall, and rose-peach-and-orange-colored marble atrium quickly established themselves as the most photogenic symbols of Trump glamour... In a masterstroke of media deception, he even floated the rumor that Prince Charles was thinking of moving in at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. But the clientele never did get that exclusive...
Your Trump Tower neighbors are as likely to be Medicaid cheats, coke dealers, mobsters, or those who may have gotten a touch too friendly with mobsters. Take, for example, Verina Hixon, a strikingly beautiful Austrian divorcee with no visible income (or alimony), who, in 1982, bought six apartments on the tower’s 64th and 65th floors for about $10 million. (Trump Tower is really 58 stories high, but Donald had juggled the floor numbers, skipping 10 flights and renumbering it as if it were a 68-story structure.)
Attorney General William Barr is the Best Reason to Elect Clinton
By Frank Snepp
October 27, 1992
A federal judge accuses the Justice Department of trying to “shape” a case involving illegal loans to Iraq. The House Judiciary Committee blasts federal attorneys for compromising their reputation for impartiality in the investigation of a computer-software theft. CIA officials charge a deputy attorney general with advocating the suppression of evidence in a sensitive sentencing hearing.
To even the most avid scandalmonger, these may sound like the ravings of a fevered Orwellian imagination. But in fact they are all part of a litany of wrongdoing leveled at George Bush’s Justice Department in the past two months alone. And at the center of the criticism is the chief articulator of Bush’s imperial presidency, the man who wrote the legal rationale for the Gulf War, the Panama invasion, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of, foreign nationals abroad—Attorney General William P. Barr.
So fast has Barr’s star dimmed in recent months that even conservative pundits like The New York Times’s William Safire have taken to calling him the “Cover-Up General.”
Republican Nation
By Robert Fritch, James Ridgeway, Ann Powers, J. Hoberman, Richard Goldstein
January 10, 1995
Make no mistake. The goal of the Republican Revolution is to dismantle government as we know it.
They aim to eliminate at least six cabinet-level departments, can smaller agencies, and combine others into much smaller units. In addition, the Republican right will move promptly to end farm subsidies, speed up executions, bundle up all social-welfare programs in block grants and send them back to the States, and move forward with privatization of the social security system.
This new right sees itself as a wrecking crew for the state governors, who will wield all power in the new America. If they are successful in dismantling government as we now know it, the crew will abolish their own full-time jobs and turn Congress into a part-time institution.
