Rolling in late, comes this 1960s movement memoir.
Late because we are deep into the 21st Century now and embedded into someone's World Order in a way that can feel not much more than. . .hopeless.
This memoir could be a joyous read had the movement it is about not been a total failure.
The 1960’s Anti-war and black liberation movements could not build the class solidarity of the temporarily successful labor movement of the early 20th century. That type of massive solidarity was what was necessary to bring change when the power system was vulnerable after the 1929 economic collapse. The 60s movement never had that solidarity or collapse. It was a time of general prosperity, and no matter how nostalgically some of us feel about the youthful exuberance of the “revolution is just around the corner” things are far far worse today than they were in 1970. The movement for economic justice is a failure.
The book is an example of this collapse of common cause solidarity since much of it is really an old comrade saying that she was there and part of it but being a woman was kept on the margins. I have no doubt that this was true and Judy Gumbo has every right to toot her horn and ask for acknowledgement. OK, but now what? And what happened after? She mentions being a very good fundraiser in later life but we hear no more about that. The story kind of ends with the 60s events and the VietNam war. Being a successful fundraiser for Planned Parenthood might be a more heroic story to leave behind than memories of a flashy youthful failure of a movement.
But then I probably wouldn’t have read Fundraiser Woman so the circle is complete I guess and sensation sells.
She comes into the yippie movement directly out of the old movement. She is a Canadian Red Diaper Baby, her father a lifelong career Communiest Party type who built a successful livelihood out of it as a promoter of Soviet Union concert performers in Canada.
This transition from Red Diaper Baby to yippsterville is not really explained. She wasn’t particularly a hippy or acid head, she was a divorcee who dumped her hubby really quickly when she discovered him in bed with another woman. (No hippie Free Love for Gumbo. Later in the story, polyamory was considered and rejected for monogamy.) It seems that she became a Yippee because she became the girlfriend of one of the three main OG yippies, Stew Albert.
From this origin information one could conclude that she went from old school commie daddy to cutting edge for-the-hell-of-it Yippie daddy. But telling it that way kind of derails the neo-feminist train and so it’’s best to not look at it that way. We all have to do what we have to do and times are different than walking a mile in anyone else's one toe loop authentic Indian sandals.
Why does she repeatedly mention the infidelity of her first husband? It seems a sore point even now 60 years, or whatever, later.
I don’t know, for decades it all seemed so recent and immediate, but now just very remote, far away. That movement now seems like an echo of an after shock, of the big somewhat successful movement before it. But we all will remember the hit, rather than the spin off with the kids in charge every week jumping the shark to get attention while sinking to the bottom of the what matters chain in the neo-liberal world that dominates and gained power in the last 60 or so years. The hit movement being the early 20th century movement that brought us SS, The kids movement, the Yippies 30 years later making a splash then passing on while I still have the benefit from the earlier movement. Monthly Social Security.
The movement that pushed the government into Social Security was a great movement.
Its gains have been attacked by those always opposed and now they are winning. Finally destroying what was left in the New Deal era, the legitimately helpful Big Government. Meanwhile the corporate welfare and military goverment is growing and giving out even more power to those already in control.
So yeah, we boomers can look back at the glory days of the Chicago 8 show or whatever but we failed to even protect The New Deal.
Most of us have been well placed enough to ride out whatever insanity the USA comes up with. We survived Reagan, the Bushes.
No problem, we are still here if we can set our tolerance for the unacceptable ever higher. We have to tolerate the USA for 20 years tearing apart Afghanistan for really no good reason at all and now leaving them starving. We have to tolerate that voting rights are being taken away in favor of Republicanism. We have to tolerate the loss of abortion rights.
We have to tolerate the trickle down of death from the military-industral-news/entertainment complex that is in control of most of the national money, power, and consciousness.
We have to tolerate this or else die in our isolated social distant despair.
So we tolerate it. We are physically comfortable enough to not let it all get to us too much, plus that is that interesting new cutting edge series we are all streaming. And weed is sort of legal here and there. All is more or less well for the aging white baby-boomers.
Maybe there were a million deaths in our name in the past 20 years but it doesn’t affect us enough to really do something about it.
I’m really complaining about our time through looking back at what we may have wanted it to be. There is nothing wrong with the book. It just hits me at a particular moment of hopelessness about The Revolution.
Stew Albert, the eventual spouse and babydaddy, was close to Jerry Rubin so there is more of the Jerry angle of things than the Abbie Hoffman side. They were often at odds and took their personal followers with them. Albert was also friends with Elldridge Cleaver, Black Panther leader. The stories about him are perhaps the most interesting in the book.
Back then I was a Abbie Hoffman Yippie, or identified as such. I even met him for a moment at a big MayDay rally on New Haven Green 1970.
I was brought into the movement, as much as I ended up participating, which wasn’t a lot, by seeing Abbie Hoffman in the mass media when I was still in high school (Merv!) and wanted to be a hippy, now Yippee! But we still had hair length rules in high school, Bummer. Abbie was always very funny. He organized me. Brought me into the movement still as a kind in Ohio.
Later, after high school, I took LSD as soon as I was offered and loved it. I still love it and use it occasionally. In the book Judy Gumbo says she tripped only three times and the last years ago. Time for a booster granny!
The book has one very sad story about insane Phil Ochs who at the end of his life visited them for a day, part of the time as his evil alter ego John Train. But nothing about Phil in his prime of any of the other movement performance people reviewed. Phil Ochs was particularly dear to me in my youth, he was a suicide at 35 and I kept on singing his songs for years. So, yes, a sad story in the book.
Phil and Abbie much later, both suicides.
Fine addition to some ancient history herein, although not really searching or personally deep and revealing.
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