#john strausbaugh

Half a century before Occupy Wall Street, young protesters occupied Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park. Like OWS, they ended up clashing with the police. Unlike OWS so far, their protest produced a small but practical and lasting change.

In the spring of 1961, the Washington Square Association, a community group of homeowners around the square, appealed to New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation to do something about the hundreds of "roving troubadours and their followers" playing music around the square's turned-off fountain on Sunday afternoons. They were mostly college kids, playing guitars and banjos and singing folk songs. The practice had started in the post-war years, when Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger planted the seeds of the folk musical revival in the Village. By 1961 it had grown enough that both the police and the neighbors found the "troubadours" and the tourists they attracted a nuisance. In his posthumously-published memoir, Dave Van Ronk recalls that there were various cliques in the park: a Zionist group singing and dancing "Hava Nagila," Stalinists, bluegrass fans, folk traditionalists. Black journalist John A. Williams reported that the locals' complaints were not really musical but social: "In the ensuing meetings with city officials, it became apparent that what was opposed was not so much folk singing as the increasing presence of mixed couples in the area, mostly Negro men and white women." In the late 1950s the parks commission began issuing permits to limit the number of musicians, allowing them to "sing and play from two until five as long as they had no drums," Van Ronk writes. This "kept out the bongo players. The Village had bongo players up the wazoo... and we hated them. So that was some consolation." He doesn't mention that those bongo-players were very often black. This racial aspect had an old historical precedent in Greenwich Village. In 1819, white residents of the area complained "of being much annoyed by certain persons of color practising as Musician with Drums and other instruments through the Village."

In 1961 the parks commissioner responded to the complaints by refusing to issue any permits at all. Izzy Young of the Folklore Center and others organized a peaceful protest demonstration. On Sunday, April 9, 1961, a few hundred young people gathered, attracting a few hundred more spectators. Among the latter was eighteen-year-old Dan Drasin, a mild-mannered kid who liked to hang out in the park. He brought one of the big, boxy film cameras of the era and documented the afternoon in a short black-and-white film, Sunday. The film shows clean-cut college and high school kids, many of the girls in Jackie O hairdos and heels, many of the boys looking like the young Allen Ginsbergs with serious, sensitive, owlish faces behind heavy black-framed glasses. They carry hand-written placards and cardboard guitars and argue with the dozens of beefy, florid-faced cops who've shown up. Izzy Young, also bespectacled and in jacket and tie, lectures the cops about the constitutional right to make music as the kids sit in a circle in the dry fountain and sing "This Land Is Your Land" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." As protests go it all looks low-key and polite. Then paddy wagons arrive and the cops haul off one nebbishy young man cradling an autoharp, pushing him into a prowl car. According to Drasin, most of the singers and musicians had left the park, leaving the few hundred spectators loitering around the fountain, when the cops' tempers finally boiled over. They wade into the crowd, shoving boys and girls to the ground, mauling them, dragging a handful into the paddy wagons. Reportedly they knocked some heads with their clubs, although it's not shown in the film. The whole event, Drasin says, lasted maybe two hours.

The next day, the New York Daily Mirror, the conservative Hearst tabloid, ran a giant war-is-over front page headline, "3000 BEATNIKS RIOT IN VILLAGE." Other local papers followed suit. That week's Voice scoffed at the Mirror's "hysterical" coverage, wondering if there were three thousand beatniks in the entire country that Sunday, let alone in Washington Square Park. By May, the outrage caused by the cops' overreaction forced the city to back down and issue permits, a practice that continues to this day.

Among the protesters hauled off that day was the Village character H. L. "Doc" Humes, identified in the Mirror as a "scofflaw" and the "mob leader." Humes was a gregarious polymath, a novelist and raconteur, co-founder of The Paris Review, designer of cheap housing made from old newspapers, director of a lost film updating the Don Quixote story as Don Peyote, LSD pioneer with Timothy Leary, later helper to Norman Mailer when he ran for mayor in 1969, later still a paranoid drug casualty who believed UFOs, CIA and the Pope in Rome were out to get him. He would not have been a stranger to the cops in the park that day. Just a few months earlier, he'd had a very public spat with Police Commissioner Stephen Kennedy.

It started in October 1960, when cops shut down a performance by Lord Buckley at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village. Lord Buckley was a stately man with sleek gray hair and a pointy Daliesque mustache, who often performed in a tux and orated in a plummy, faux-British voice, seeming every bit the vaudeville and burlesque master of ceremonies he once was. But what came out of his mouth was pure hepcat jive he'd learned from the jazz musicians and pot-smokers with whom he'd associated since the 1930s. In the 1950s he started to recast biblical stories, historical texts like the Gettysburg Address, and Shakespeare in White Negro proto-rap: "Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin' daddies, knock me your lobes. I came here to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him." It sounds like novelty schtick today, but in Eisenhower's America there was something inherently subversive about a man who looked like the maitre d' at a fancy restaurant jiving like a viper. "His Royal Hipness" had a lot of fans and friends downtown, where he performed and hung out whenever he was in New York.

The cops halted Buckley's gig because of a problem with his cabaret card. Since 1941, anyone who worked in a New York City nightclub, from performers to the hat check girl and the busboys, had to get fingerprinted and carry a picture ID card. If you had any police record, you couldn't have a card, which meant you couldn't work. It was intended to weed the Mob out of the nightclub business, but it could be disastrous for performers. Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker all had their cards yanked for drug violations; Lenny Bruce lost his because of an obscenity conviction; exotic dancer Sally Rand, refused a card in 1947 because the cops thought her fan dance too risqué, took the NYPD to court over it and won. Buckley lost his because he'd failed to report a pot bust that went back to the 1940s. Without the card, he couldn't perform in New York City, including a scheduled appearance on his old friend Ed Sullivan's tv show (they'd toured together with the USO during the war).

Despondent, Buckley called his pal Humes. Humes talked his Paris Review friend George Plimpton into letting Buckley give a little performance at a party in his Upper East Side apartment, with the idea that Plimpton's influential crowd might help him get Buckley's card reinstated. With Village jazzman David Amram at the piano, Buckley went into his schtick. The response was cool. Plimpton's literary swells had come to sip cocktails and talk about themselves, not listen to Village-y jazzbo jive. Buckley the old vaudevillian worked hard to win them over, pulling out bit after bit, overstaying his unwelcome. As the crowd grew increasingly bored and angry, Norman Mailer started heckling. Amram remembers that Buckley finally gave up, then "came over to the piano and whispered in my ear, 'Let's split and get out of here, man.'"

It turned out to be Lord Buckley's farewell performance. He died of a stroke shortly afterwards, at the age of fifty-four. Art D'Lugoff offered the use of the Village Gate for a memorial service, at which Ornette Coleman and Dizzy Gillespie played for a large crowd of Buckley's friends and admirers. He was laid to out at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side, New York's funeral home to the stars. (Rudolph Valentino, John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Nikola Tesla, James Cagney, Igor Stravinsky, Norman Mailer, Heath Ledger, Judy Garland and Candy Darling were all laid out there.)

Humes, Mailer, Amram and others then started a public campaign to end the cabaret card system. Humes charged that police harassment had killed Buckley, and claimed that if Buckley had only slipped the right cop a hundred bucks the whole thing would have been settled under the table. That enraged Commissioner Kennedy, who retaliated by tossing Humes in jail for unpaid parking tickets and ordering up the biggest crackdown on cabarets and nightclubs in years, sending cops to more than 1200 venues looking for non-card-carrying workers. But this protest worked as well. Kennedy was sacked for his overreaction, and though it took another seven years, the cabaret card system was eventually abolished.

William Riley Burnett isn't quite as well known as other crime writers like Hammett and Chandler, but the titles of several W. R. Burnett novels and films everybody knows. His career and his influence stretched from gangster novels and movies, which he went a long way to defining, through noir to blaxploitation and beyond.

According to Burnett, a good place to begin his story is in a fleabag in Chicago, when he was a twenty-seven-year-old hayseed from Ohio who in six years had written some one hundred stories and five novels, not one of them published. On his first night in the big city, sleeping in that cheap hotel, he was jolted out of bed by a series of explosions across the street. Rival gangsters had been arguing over the rake in the parking garage across the street. Things got heated and they started throwing hand grenades -- "pineapples," folks called them then. That was Chicago in 1928. "Capone was King," Burnett later wrote. "Corruption was rampant... Gangsters were shooting each other all over town; in fact, I 'heard' one killing over the radio. It happened in a cafe while a dance-band broadcast was in progress. Two shots came over distinctly, the music slurred to an abrupt stop, then the air went dead."

Intrigued, Burnett started hanging out with cops and hoods, taking notes, and ended up writing a gangster novel he originally titled The Furies. The first New York publisher he sent it to rejected it. He gave it a new title and sent it off again. In 1929 it was published as Little Caesar.

Along with Hammett, whose Red Harvest had come out six months earlier, Burnett was fashioning a new class of crime novel as literate pulp, just as the syndicates were emerging and the Depression was about to redraw the entire social landscape. The writing is very spare in a Hemingwayish way, yet vividly descriptive when it needs to be. His characters have names like Scabby and Limpy John and Killer Pepi, and they speak a Chicago gangster patois he'd heard on the streets, full of hard guys pumping lead out of gats and rods, new to most readers at the time but soon universally recognized. They're vain to the point of girlishness, constantly fussing with their hair and fawn-colored spats and diamond stick pins. They're cocky and quick to take offense because they're so insecure. They're far more tender, sympathetic and loving with each other than they are with their dames. "I would not shoot Rico if he shot me first," one says. "Rico is my friend and I love him with a great love." Rico ends up forfeiting his life because he can't bring himself to shoot an old pal. As opposed to:

Olga Stassoff was just putting the finishing touches to her make-up. Joe came in softly and stood watching her. She began to sing.  

"If you're singing for me," said Joe, "you can stop any time."  

Olga turned around.  

"Well, what are you doing here? Broke?"  

"Shut up," said Joe.  

Then he turned and walked out of the room.

Scholars have made much of the homoerotic subtext in all this, but then scholars can see homoerotic subtext in a stick of gum. Probably what Burnett was really picking up on was the peculiarities of Mediterranean masculinity as expressed in the largely Italian milieu of the late-1920s Chicago gangster. Film historian Thomas Doherty points out that "foreign" gangsters -- Italians, Jews -- were still pretty mysterious to a lot of Americans; through the 1920s they'd heard more about all-American outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The rise of organized crime syndicates -- whom Burnett much later called "just businessmen who don’t abide by the rules" -- was also news to many Americans at the time.

Little Caesar was an instant hit. So of course was the film adaptation. The movie was a huge box office success at a time when the Depression was cutting attendance figures by half, and it made Edward G. Robinson a star. It's not nearly as tough or brisk as the book, though Robinson is great in it. Both the book and the movie had their share of critics who expressed outrage that Burnett seemed to be sympathizing with and "humanizing" his hoodlum characters.

Hollywood called and Burnett answered. For the next forty years he'd be there, writing both novels and films, many of them successful, a few of them classics.

There was The Beast of the City in 1932, with Walter Huston as an unscrupulously tough crime-busting cop who'd later be seen as a pre-echo of Dirty Harry. Howard Hughes called on Burnett to make some sense of more than a dozen draft screenplays for Scarface, based on the Armitage Trail novel published around the same time as Little Caesar. Burnett compiled the best scenes into a master draft, then Ben Hecht applied the polish. The result was the last of the great pre-Code gangster films, a movie much harder and more raw than Little Caesar.

Butnett's oddball 1935 comedy The Whole Town's Talking is a kind of meta-crime story, with Edward G. Robinson brilliantly playing two roles, sometimes in split-screen, as a meek bank clerk who's identical to a vicious killer. Jean Arthur's great in her snappy role too, but then isn't she always. Burnett's prizefighter novel Iron Man was made into three films, Iron Man in 1931, Some Blondes Are Dangerous in 1937, and Iron Man again in 1951. His novella Dr. Socrates, about the clash of a small-town doctor and a hoodlum on the lam, was first serialized in Collier's, then made into the 1935 film of the same name. It starred the great Paul Muni and Ann Dvorak, who'd been paired a few years earlier as the possibly incestuous Tony and Cesca Camonte in Scarface. It was remade in 1939 as the Bogart vehicle King of the Underworld.  

By his 1940 novel High Sierra, both Burnett's writing and his tough guys had fully matured. His style is more relaxed, still handsomely descriptive but with more psychological depth. Roy Earle in the book is more broken and melancholy than the Dillinger-inspired outlaw Bogart plays in the film, more jittery and uncomfortable in the world after years in stir. He's not thoroughly a bad man, more of a bad-luck stray like the dog Pard. He's weary and lonesome and sick, showing his age in his inability to control either his flashes of snarling violence or his fits of nostalgic longing. The newspapers call him Mad Dog but Old Dog would be more fitting. His affair with Marie, the only other character as tough and savvy as he is, would be totally mysterious to the hard guys in Little Caesar.

The film adaptation came out in 1941, directed by Raoul Walsh, with a screenplay by Burnett and John Huston that's pretty faithful to the book, though they made the necessary Hollywood concessions. In the novel, Velma's not the innocent little hick she is in the film -- she's damaged goods in more ways than the clubfoot -- and it's explicit that Marie starts out "just a lay," as Roy tells her, then worms her way into his heart just like Pard does. Burnett and Huston tacked on the movie's big melodramatic climax as well. In the book Roy makes sure Marie and Pard are well out of harm's way, then dies alone up in the mountains, shot by a gunman he never sees, taking his bullet quietly, almost wistfully. It probably wouldn't have made good cinema but it's a more fitting end for him. This movie would also get remade twice, as a Western in the 1949 Colorado Territory and then as the grimy 1955 I Died a Thousand Times, with Jack Palance as Earle and Shelley Winters doing the Ida Lupino role.

They're no longer the household names they once were. In fact their names were not really their names. But between them Harry and Albert Von Tilzer were two of the more successful and prolific songwriters and publishers on Tin Pan Alley, and many of their songs are familiar today as icons of the so-called Gay Nineties and early 1900s. One of them still gets played every day there's a baseball game.

Harry and his brothers were not born Von Tilzers. Harry was born Aaron Gumbinsky or Gummblinsky to Polish Jewish immigrants in Detroit in 1872. He grew up in Indianapolis, where the brothers were all born. The family shortened the name to Gumm, leading to the often-repeated misinformation that Frances Gumm, better known as Judy Garland, was Harry's niece. In fact, her father Frank Gumm was not one of the Gumbinsky/Gumm/Von Tilzer brothers, but a cracker from Tennessee (and predominantly homosexual, interesting when you consider Garland's complex personal and professional relationships with gay men later, not to mention Liza's).

At fourteen Harry Gumm ran away to join the Cole Brothers Circus. He played piano and wrote songs for a traveling theater troupe and changed his name on the road, taking his mother's maiden name and adding the Von for a touch of class. His brothers, all of whom went into the music business after him, followed suit. Making for more confusion, in 1929 a Helen Von Tilzer would marry one of the Marx Brothers -- Gummo, of course. Because of that preposterous-seeming coincidence she's often written up as Harry's sister, but in fact she was born Helen Theaman in New York. Von Tilzer was her first husband's name, and he seems to have been a real Von Tilzer, also not related to Harry and the fake Von Tilzer clan.

Harry worked in burlesque, with medicine shows and in vaudeville, specializing, naturally, in "Dutch" (German) routines. In 1892 he arrived in New York City by train as a groom for a carload of horses. He had one dollar and sixty-five cents in his pocket. For the next six years he struggled, playing saloon piano and writing songs that Tony Pastor and others bought from him at two bucks each.

According to David A. Jansen's Tin Pan Alley: An Encyclopedia of the Golden Age of American Song, Harry wrote his first hit under some duress. He and lyricist Andrew B. Sterling were sharing a furnished room on East Fifteenth Street in 1898 and were "three weeks behind on their rent. When a final bill was slipped under their door, they used the paper to write a chorus and then a verse of what turned out to be their first successful publication, 'My Old New Hampshire Home.'" It was classic barbershop quartet treacle. William Dunn of the Orphean Music publishing company paid them fifteen dollars for it -- a week's rent on the room -- and proceeded to sell more than a million copies in sheet music.

Then Dunn was bought out by Louis Bernstein and Maurice Shapiro, founders of one of Tin Pan Alley's longest-lived hit factories -- it still exists as Shapiro Bernstein & Co., with a catalogue that includes "Ring of Fire," "Yes! We Have No Bananas," "Walk on the Wild Side" (the original, not Lou Reed's song) and the immortal "Wolverton Mountain." They paid Von Tilzer four thousand dollars, a considerable sum in those days, to join them as a partner in the firm. A few years later he would leave them and start his own publishing company.

In 1900 he was relaxing in a whorehouse (or just at a party, depending on the source), noodling on the piano to some lyrics handed him by the British lyricist Arthur Lamb. When Harry saw the girls around him crying, he figured he'd noodled up a smash hit. It was. "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" sold more than two million copies of sheet music, and was one of the most popular weepers of the age, a song we still associate more than maybe any other with late Victorian mawkishness. This time Harry earned far more than fifteen bucks.

He and Lamb collaborated on two more tearjerkers in 1902, "The Banquet in Misery Hall" and the equally lugubrious "The Mansion of Aching Hearts," which a few singers made into hit recordings. That same year a scrawny Jewish kid from the Lower East Side went busking in the saloons on the Bowery, belting out "Mansion" in a raspy tenor to the pie-eyed sailors and hookers who tossed pennies at him. That kid, Izzy Baline, went up to Tin Pan Alley on Twenty-Eighth Street to meet Von Tilzer, who hired him as a song plugger and "boomer." A boomer was a plant in the audience at the music hall or vaudeville house whose job was to cheer and shout "Encore!" when the publisher's new song was performed. Von Tilzer, who was an expert plugger and boomer himself, showed Izzy the ropes. Izzy, who would invent his own German-sounding professional name, Irving Berlin, went on to eclipse his mentor's fame.

But Von Tilzer was no slouch. "Wait 'Til the Sun Shines, Nellie," "I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad)," "In the Sweet Bye and Bye" and "I Love My Wife, But Oh You Kid!" were all major hits, and he wrote thousands more. That was not unusual. In the crowded Tin Pan Alley milieu, where publishing companies were stacked four and five stories high door-to-door, the competition was brutal, the pace ferocious and the ruling business model crudely simple: Throw as many songs at the public as you can possibly churn out, and hope one sticks once in a while. The lists of songs published on Tin Pan Alley in its glory years, roughly the 1880s through the 1920s, are stupefyingly long -- tens of thousands of songs, hurled at the public in live performances, as sheet music and piano rolls, on recorded wax cylinders, in early versions of coin-operated jukeboxes, on phonograph discs after the introduction of the affordable Victrola in 1906, and eventually on radio. Almost all of those tens of thousands of songs are forgotten now. In fact the vast majority barely made an impression when they were new. You just kept cranking them out, praying for a hit now and again.

Von Tilzer was out there pitching with the best of them. Like all serious Tin Pan Alley composers he jumped on every band wagon that rolled down Twenty-Eighth Street. He wrote Irish and "Dutch" numbers when they were fads, beer-drinking songs when they came into fashion (including one called "Under the Anheuser Busch"), schmaltzy kiddie songs, and songs capitalizing on every new dance craze, from the bunny hug to the turkey trot to the hesitation waltz. He threw three of them together in one song, "You Can Tango You Can Trot Dear but Be Sure and Hesitate." He wrote novelty songs like "The Ragtime Goblin Man" and topical ones like "Old King Tut," a hit for Sophie Tucker the year after Tut's tomb was discovered in 1922.

He also wrote several hit coon songs. Coon songs spun off from minstrel shows in the 1880s. In the 1890s and 1900s hundreds and hundreds of songs with "coon" in the title were published, usually sung to ragtime tunes. They often replaced the Old Plantation nostalgia of the traditional minstrel song with ruder, more overtly racist stereotypes. They were hugely popular, and Von Tilzer wrote his share, songs like "Alexander" (familiar to audiences then as a hifalutin' name for a blackface minstrel character), "Mammy's Kinky-Headed Coon," "My Lady Hottentot" and "Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown." Performers of old-timey music still record that one, though it may be best known for the 1970 funk version by the great Rufus ("Do the Funky Chicken") Thomas. In 1911, Berlin would upstage Von Tilzer's "Alexander" with his own ragtime-y coon song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Any similarity to his mentor's hit was purely intentional.

By the middle of the 1920s Von Tilzer had composed something like two thousand published songs, including a dozen million-sellers and as many as a hundred that sold half a million. His output slowed down in the later 1920s and 1930s, but he still credibly claimed to have written some eight thousand tunes. Like many Tin Pan Alley greats, including Berlin, he did it without ever learning to read or write a note of music.

Time and tastes moved on. Harry quietly lived out his last years in the Hotel Woodward, a Broadway establishment favored by show folk, and died there in 1946.

Meanwhile, Harry had brought Albert and the other brothers to New York. Jules worked for Harry. Will started a song publishing company, and Albert and Jack partnered in another. Albert was also a songwriter. He and vaudevillian Jack Norworth collaborated on the giant "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" in 1908; according to an unconfirmed but persistent legend, Albert never actually saw a ball game until the late 1920s. Some of Albert's other hits include "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey," "I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time," the minstrel song "Down Where the Swanee River Flows" (a hit for Al Jolson in blackface), the Prohibition lament "The Alcoholic Blues" ("No more beer my heart to cheer/ Goodbye whiskey, you used to make me frisky/ So long highball, so long gin/ Oh, tell me when you comin' back agin"), the Hawaiian-themed ragtime hit "Oh, How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo," and another novelty hit, the zany bum-diddy-bum jungle number "Oh By Jingo!" with lyrics by Lew Brown. ("We will build for you a hut/ You will be our favorite nut/ We will have a lot of Oh By Gollies/ And we'll put them in the Follies.") Born Louis Brownstein in Odessa, Brown had fled the pogroms with his family and settled in the Bronx. In a long career he collaborated with many Tin Pan Alley and Broadway composers on classics like "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," "You're the Cream in My Coffee," "Sunny Side Up" and "That Old Feeling." It was guys like Brown, the Von Tilzers and Berlin whom the rabid anti-Semite Henry Ford had in mind when he ranted, "The people are fed from day to day on the moron suggestiveness that flows in a slimy flood out of 'Tin Pan Alley,' the head factory of filth in New York which is populated by the 'Abies,' the 'Izzies,' and the 'Moes'..." Ignoring him, lots of people recorded the moron suggestiveness of "Oh By Jingo!" -- Danny Kaye, Spike Jones, Stephane Grappelli and Chet Atkins among them.

Following the addition of sound to commercial movies, the studios lured more and more of the music business out to Hollywood in the 1930s. After all, the first hit talkie, The Jazz Singer, was really a singie. Albert went too. He worked in film and tv, mostly contributing to soundtracks of now obscure pictures. He died in L.A. in 1956. By that point much of the Von Tilzer catalogue, especially the older and mushier songs, had faded away, except at ball games. Then in 1958 Lawrence Welk, than whom no one loved old-fashioned schmaltz more, bought the catalogue and engineered a Von Tilzer revival. When the Songwriters Hall of Fame began in 1969, Harry and Albert were among the first voted in.

West Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is one of the "nicest" blocks in Greenwich Village, a leafy street lined with handsome Greek Revival townhouses and stately apartment buildings. One house stands out, literally: 18 West Eleventh, which became an unlikely nexus of privileged status and radical politics during the Vietnam War era.

Born in 1945, Cathy Wilkerson grew up in haute bourgeois comfort in Connecticut. When her parents divorced she stayed with her mother; her father, an executive at the ad agency Young & Rubicam, remarried and in 1963 bought 18 West Eleventh. That year Cathy, a sophomore at Swarthmore, was arrested while picketing outside a dangerously decrepit and overcrowded black school in Chester, Connecticut. A few years later she was at SDS headquarters in Chicago editing New Left Notes, SDS's newsletter. When the Students for a Democratic Society began in 1962 it was mainly involved in civil rights issues, but from the mid-1960s on it grew increasingly active in the antiwar movement. In 1969, SDS claimed a hundred thousand members on college campuses nationwide. Wilkerson attended the national convention in Chicago that June, when SDS burst apart at the seams. Fed up with the organization's policy of nonviolent protest, which seemed to be having little effect, a faction calling themselves Weatherman from the line in Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" essentially hijacked and later dismantled SDS. Among its leaders were Mark Rudd, who as chairman of the SDS chapter at Columbia had led a 1968 student uprising there, and Bernadine Dohrn. Wilkerson went along with them. Weatherman styled themselves as a cadre of the world armed revolt against U.S. imperialism and as a corollary to the Black Panther Party. They adopted Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Panthers killed in a police raid, as role models and patron saints. Never more than a thousand committed members nationwide, Weatherman set themselves the goals of radicalizing the nation's working class, disrupting government and corporate operations, and bringing about the revolution in America by any means necessary. Attempts to organize the working class and to align with the Panthers would fail miserably: Workers beat them up and the Panthers rejected them as "scatterbrains." Meanwhile their violence alienated the rest of the antiwar movement.

Weatherman's first public action was a demonstration in Chicago that fall that came to be known as Days of Rage. They'd expected tens of thousands of protesters, but only a few hundred showed up. From its starting point in a park the march flowed out into the streets and soon got out of hand, with protesters breaking car and shop windows. Cops chased them through the streets, shooting a few, bludgeoning and arresting others, including Wilkerson. She was out on bail two weeks later. Having proven to themselves the futility of public demonstrations, Weatherman now turned to direct action. "We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare," one of them orated. Looking back on this moment forty years later in her memoir Flying Close to the Sun, Wilkerson writes, "Now it seems fantastic that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy" by going along. Breaking up into small cells in secret locations around the country, they went into an intense period of self-indoctrination, hoping to transform themselves from middle-class college kids into "more effective tools for humanity's benefit," Wilkerson writes. Through grueling, humiliating group interrogations they attempted to purge themselves of personality and individualism to create a faultlessly doctrinaire and obedient collective that was as much cult as Communist, the Borg of the revolution. Because traditional relationships might weaken members' bonds with the collective, they were supposed to have sex only with randomly assigned partners or in cheerless-sounding group orgies.

In the winter of 1970 Wilkerson was attached to the cell in New York City. Because the cell needed a safe place to hide and work, she went to visit her father at 18 West Eleventh Street. She hadn't seen much of her Nixon-voting father in recent years, but was able to convince him to let her stay in the townhouse while he and her stepmother were on a Caribbean vacation -- she told him she had the flu and had nowhere else in the city to stay. She and a handful of other revolutionaries moved in as soon as her father left. It was plush digs for a gang of Marxist terrorists, one of four spacious townhouses Henry Brevoort Jr. built in the 1840s for his children. Later, Charles Merrill, founding partner of Merrill Lynch, lived there; his son James, the poet, was born into wealth there in 1926. The Merrills moved when he was five. Cathy's father had handsomely furnished the house, and the pantry was well stocked.

One member of the New York cell, Kathy Boudin, was a Village native with family roots in the Village's left-intellectual history. Her father Leonard Boudin was a well-known civil liberties lawyer. He represented Daniel Ellsberg when he was tried under the Espionage Act for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Leonard's uncle Louis Boudin, a Russian Jewish émigré, was a labor lawyer and Marxist writer. An aunt of Kathy's was married to the liberal investigative journalist I. F. Stone. Kathy went to Bryn Mawr with another member of the cell, Diana Oughton, daughter of a wealthy Illinois Republican.

Weatherman collectives around the country had set off a number of firebombs by this time, targeting military recruitment centers, campus ROTC centers, courthouses and the offices of corporations doing business with the military. The devices they used were basically Molotov cocktails and had not done much damage, when they went off at all. Wilkerson's group decided, despite a nearly perfect lack of demolitions knowledge, to step up to pipe bombs filled with dynamite and nails, detonated with blasting caps on electronic timer fuses. They set to work constructing them in the townhouse's unfinished sub-basement. They chose Fort Dix in New Jersey for their target. They didn't want to harm regular soldiers, who might well be draftees from lower-income communities, so they decided to detonate the bombs during a dance in the officers club.

Just before noon on March 6, 1970, Wilkerson was ironing sheets in the kitchen when a series of explosions burst up from the sub-basement and shattered the kitchen floor. Smoke, splinters of wooden beams and shards of brick roared up from the crater where the floor had been, followed by a rush of flames. The explosions blew out a two-story section of the front wall of the house, shooting glass, bricks and tongues of flame across the street. The shock wave rocked the entire block and broke windows up to the sixth floor in the apartment house across the way. Down in the sub-basement, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Oughton had made some fatal error in hooking up the blasting caps and timers to their pipe bombs, and were literally blown to pieces when the exploding bombs set off three cases of extra dynamite. Wilkerson and Boudin, who'd been taking a shower upstairs, stumbled outside, blinded by smoke, through the gaping hole in the front wall. Boudin was miraculously unharmed, Wilkerson was bleeding from numerous small cuts, her clothes in shreds. Behind them, the entire interior of the house collapsed into the crater, where a huge fire roared and belched black smoke through the blown-out windows.

Neighbors gathered instantly, thinking it had been a gas main explosion. Television news footage shows Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door at 16 with his wife and kids, in the crowd. He was a movie star by then -- The Graduate had come out in 1967, Midnight Cowboy in 1969 -- but New Yorkers were famously blasé about celebrities living among them. Theater critic Mel Gussow also lived at 16; he and his wife were in the crowd as well. None of them ever slept another night in the structurally compromised 16. A neighbor let Wilkerson and Boudin use her shower and gave them some of her clothes to wear. As cops and fire trucks arrived, Wilkerson and Boudin slipped out of the neighbor's house, walked away from the crowd, and went down into the nearest subway station. They and other Weatherman members went into hiding, becoming the Weather Underground. The FBI placed them on its most wanted list.

On April 30, President Nixon went on national tv to announce that he had sent troops into Cambodia, Vietnam's neighbor. The purpose was to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes through the country. Nixon had been saying since his election in 1968 that he would wind down U.S. participation in the war; the Paris peace talks had begun in 1969, followed by the very gradual withdrawal of some U.S. troops. On April 20 Nixon had announced that one hundred and fifty thousand American troops would be pulled out in the coming year. Now, just ten days later, he suddenly seemed to be expanding the war again. In the following days, protests erupted at hundreds of colleges around the country, while Nixon groused about "bums blowing up campuses." Protest rallies were practically everyday occurrences by the spring of 1970 -- the giant march on Washington in 1969 had drawn an estimated quarter of a million protesters -- but this time things turned deadly. On May 4, national guardsmen opened fire at Kent State in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others. Reacting to this "massacre," students went on strike around the country, and there was another huge march on Washington. A few thousand college and high school students gathered outside Federal Hall on Wall Street for a rally on May 8. Cops and a few hundred construction workers, organized by local union bosses, attacked the kids, chasing them through the streets of the financial district in what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot. For the Old Left it was a terrible vision, the workers rising up to attack kids. Audre Lorde wrote a poem about it, with the lines:

Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students.

It's Sunday, April 30, 1939. The New York World's Fair is opening today at Flushing Meadows in Queens. Mayor La Guardia is there to give a speech, and Albert Einstein, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt's speech is televised, making him the first president ever seen on tv. A single NBC camera shoots him for an estimated audience of 1,000 viewers in a 50-mile radius.

The fair's organizers, a consortium of businessmen and political operatives who conceived the fair back in 1936 when the Depression was still grinding on, predicted a crowd of one million. But it's a blustery, rainy day, and the wet crowd is at best half that – some say no more than 200,000. The damp speakers crackle as Einstein gives his speech in the evening. When he pulls a switch the whole fairground is supposed to be lit up. Instead, the generators overload and throw the whole fair into a blackout.

As James Mauro noted in Twilight at the World of Tomorrow, it's hard not to see this as a bad omen. The 1939 World's Fair, with its wonderful Perisphere and Trylon and all its soaring streamline pavilions, celebrated the World of Tomorrow, just as the world of today was falling apart all around it.

Of the 60 nations that originally signed up to participate in the fair, three were missing when it opened. Two had recently disappeared as independent states: Hitler had annexed Austria in March of 1938, then, just six weeks before the fair opened, invaded and conquered Czechoslovakia. Germany itself had originally signed up for the fair, but withdrew, at least partly because of harsh and relentless criticism from Mayor La Guardia, who from early on had railed against Hitler as a "perverted maniac" and "brown-shirted fanatic."

On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Poland closed its pavilion and draped it in black cloth. The English poet W. H. Auden, who had moved to New York the previous January, marked the event with a bleak poem. Simply titled “September 1, 1939,” it begins:

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade

On September 3, two other fair participants, England and France, declared war on Germany, and World War II began. Two weeks later Soviet troops also entered Poland.

The Soviet Union had been the first country to sign up for the fair, and had erected one of the most impressive, popular, and eventually controversial pavilions at the fair. The main building was a mammoth horseshoe shape. Spiking up from the middle of it was a 188-foot tower, and posed on top of that was a 79-foot sculpture of a heroic worker, holding aloft a huge, illuminated red star. The press called him Joe the Worker.

Despite some protests that it was Communist propaganda on a grand scale, the pavilion was one of the most visited in the summer of 1939. But now that the Soviets were in league with Hitler and had joined in carving up Poland, the USSR’s reputation among Americans plummeted. The Soviets would quietly dismantle their pavilion over the coming winter and haul it away.

When the fair shut down in October, the peaceful, orderly future it had so boldly and beautifully envisioned now looked less like a forecast than a forlorn hope. The following April, 1940, a month before the fair was scheduled to reopen for a second season, the Nazi blitzkrieg began devouring western Europe. Ten nations — half of the original European contingent — did not reopen their pavilions in 1940, most because they were now in Nazi hands. (Finland, overrun by the Soviets that winter, was among them.) That July, the Luftwaffe began making bombing runs over England to soften it up for invasion. That same month,

on the 4th of July, a satchel filled with dynamite found in the fair's British pavilion detonated, killing two bomb squad detectives and severely injuring five others. Many German nationals in New York City were rounded up and grilled, but no one was ever charged.

At the end of October, 1940, the fair that had opened predicting a world of peace and prosperity limped to a demoralized close in a world at war. The Parachute Jump and some other amusements went to Coney Island. Most of the rest was immediately torn down, until only the New York City pavilion remained, to be converted to an ice rink.

After the war, the abandoned fairground would become a world focal point again. In 1946, while the new United Nations was debating where to build its permanent headquarters, it desperately needed an appropriate venue for the General Assembly to begin work. Robert Moses lured them to Flushing Meadows by quickly reconverting the New York City pavilion from an ice rink to a handsome meeting hall. He hoped the UN would decide to build its permanent home there, but a Trumpian developer named William Zeckendorf (who had previously dreamed of converting the west side of Manhattan into a giant elevated airport) sold the organization on Manhattan's Turtle Bay neighborhood instead.

Moses would get his consolation prize when the second New York World's Fair opened at Flushing Meadows in 1964. The New York City pavilion was reconverted yet again. Not only the last building left from the 1939 fair but certainly the most useful, it has been the home of the Queens Museum since the 1970s.

by John Strausbaugh

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