Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shelton Waldrep is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is co-author of Insidethe Mouse (1995).

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The Seventies

Routledge

Chapter One

Setting up the Seventies

Black Panthers, New Journalism,
and the Rewriting of the Sixties

MICHAEL E. STAUB

In the August 13, 1995, edition of the Sunday New York Times, the "Week inReview" section ran as its lead story an article that mobilized memories ofthe sixties for the purpose of ridiculing and neutralizing political activismin the nineties. In itself, this rhetorical maneuver might be considered noteworthyonly because of its typicality. For as Meta Mendel-Reyes has recentlysummarized it, "What is at stake in the American struggle over who ownsthe sixties is ownership of the nineties."

    But there was more to this particular news story showily decorated withneopsychedelic pop art (fig. 1.1). Written by respected veteran Times journalistFrancis X. Clines, the article, "The Case That Brought Back RadicalChic," began like this:

The hard fact that criminal justice is grossly relative is never clearer than when a felon gifted with articulateness approaches the gallows, rallying celebrities to his side. Tongue-tied peers?3,009 and growing at last count of America's burgeoning death rows?can only wonder in silence, perchance grunting of their own innocence, but well ignored. So it goes with the condemned among us lately as a throng from the arts, academic and entertainment worlds singles out the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a finely expressive, dramatically dreadlocked, suddenly celebrated ... convicted cop-killer.

Taking advantage of an opening provided by the last-minute stay of executiongranted former Black Panther Abu-Jamal a few days earlier, Clines airedhis views on black militants who write books, and on "the championing ofan underclass cause by an overclass gathering." Clines reminded readers ofTom Wolfe's "hilariously" rendered send-up of "radical chic" adoration forthe Black Panthers in 1970 and cited Wolfe as his star witness. Indeed, it wasa Wolfe quote about Abu-Jamal?that "literary sensitivity seems to expungemoral failings"?that supplied the Clines piece with its organizing thesis.What does it mean that, in commenting on progressive nineties advocatesof a militant African American, Francis X. Clines and the New York Times couldhark back with such comedic "commonsense" knowingness (and authority)to a moment a quarter of a century earlier? And how is it that, in pretendingto express sympathy for the "grunting" individuals sentenced to die(even as he insulted them), Clines could shift away from the racial politicsand flawed legal processes that put such a disproportionate number of blackson death row (the real way that justice is "grossly relative") and toward asatiric invocation of radical chic culture? What Clines's revival of radical chicmanaged .was an adroit double displacement. In this view, elites in the UnitedStates do not hold political power (which can be used against blacks) butmerely set trendy cultural standards so that they might derive self-gratificationfrom them; and matters of life and death are, in this view, onlymatters of style.

    The conjunction of Tom Wolfe, the Black Panthers, and radical chic introducesthe subject of this essay: the mainstream media response to the BlackPanthers in 1969-70, and, more particularly, the role played by the New Journalism.As Fredric Jameson has commented, the sixties did not end in aninstant but extended until "around 1972-74." And, crucially?contemporaryneoconservative punditry notwithstanding?the sixties were hardlysimply a utopian era when the Left flowered and flourished. This was also amoment when sophisticated anti-Left strategies were already being testedand refined, and these trends intensified at the turn to the seventies. Thememory of the sixties (both as historical event and as metaphorical referencepoint) was, in short, being fought over almost immediately; history wasgetting rewritten practically as it was happening. This in itself is no great surpriseto students of this era. It may be more surprising to discover how the1970 media spasm surrounding the Black Panther Party, and particularly thecrucial role of the New Journalism within it, contributed to the elaborationof an anti-Left agenda. The seventies began with the defining and denigratingof the sixties.

THE NEW JOURNALISM

The New Journalism?that genre-blurred mélange of ethnography, investigativereportage, and fiction?is widely and rightly considered to be thecharacteristic genre of the sixties. For a time, and certainly by mid-decade,it looked as if the surest means for a novelist to build a reputation?orrebuild it, as the case may be?was to write a nonfiction report on a historicalevent, but write it as if it were a novel. Whether the subject was a cold-bloodedserial killing (Truman Capote), the hippie counterculture (JoanDidion), or a march on the Pentagon (Norman Mailer), writers who had firstwritten successful fictions found themselves turning to "the rising authorityof nonfiction" to help make sense of the "fast-paced ... apocalyptic" timesthey were living in. Likewise, a new generation of younger writers?forinstance, Wolfe, Michael Herr, Gail Sheehy, and Hunter S. Thompson?developedthrough the New Journalism a freedom of approach and range ofstyle (along with an enormously receptive reading public) that even just severalyears earlier would probably not have been possible. Self-identified fiction,as none other than The Harper American Literature matter-of-factly informsstudents, temporarily lost its charms, as precisely the destabilizing hecticityof the era made life seem more interesting than art. Or, as activist-scholarTodd Gitlin put it more evocatively, utilizing the highly metaphoric tense-switchinglanguage of the New Journalism itself, the "years 1967, 1968, 1969,and 1970 were a cyclone in a wind tunnel ... when history comes off the leash,when reality appears illusory and illusions take on lives of their own, [and]when the novelist loses the platform on which imagination builds its plausibleappearances."

    The New Journalism styled itself as providing an alternative to more standardmedia renderings of social reality, promising to deliver a "more real"reality, the truer story of the many social crises splitting American societyin the 1960s. For it was not only a loss of interest in fiction that engenderedthe search for a new style. It was, probably even more significantly, preciselythe atmosphere of social crisis that had begun to make the traditional mediaseem so suspect, and that had called attention to the way the media's claimto be "objective" was frequently a smokescreen for bias. Media coverage ofVietnam provided some of the most appalling examples, and some of thedecade's best New Journalism brought readers a different version of the VietnamWar (Herr) and of antiwar protest (Mailer). But the more general intensificationof domestic turmoil also contributed to the impression that manystandard journalistic conventions ought to be scrapped?or at least radicallymodified?since, as journalist and scholar Nicolaus Mills has noted, a "who,what, where, when, why style of reporting could not...