Post by voxpopuli on Jan 22, 2008 9:47:37 GMT
These were the days that shook the world
Riots swept the globe, assassinations rocked America, the Russians crushed the Prague Spring, the hippy dream turned sour, and women and black people fought for equal rights. It was a year of unparalleled ferment, and the remarkable events of 1968 shaped an entire generation. In a special issue of Review, we look at the political and cultural revolution that took place, starting here with the fascinating personal recollections of six key figures caught in the eye of the storm
Gallery: The year that changed history
Interviews by Tom Templeton and Kate Kellaway
Sunday January 20, 2008
The Observer
Tommie Smith
Olympic 200m gold medallist, then aged 24
Black people were, and still are, second-class citizens in America. I saw my family members treated terribly when we were share-croppers in Texas. Most of '68 I was training daily in San Jose, in anticipation of the Olympics. My first son, Kevin, was born in February and his birth made me feel responsible, both for him and for other young black men who had children and needed to get bread on the table. En route to Mexico City, the Black Athletic Committee met to discuss a proposed boycott. We decided we couldn't afford it, but that each athlete would represent themselves. I felt it was time for the young black American male to stand up for his cause. I asked my wife, Delois, to buy me some gloves. I didn't know what I was going to do but I knew it was going to be visual.
Article continues
I won the final in a world record time. As I walked to the podium I decided I would raise one gloved hand in the air and bow my head in prayer. It was a silent gesture heard around the world, and each individual had their own interpretation of what it meant.
When the national anthem ended the boos, hisses and fingers in the air started. I was kicked out of the Olympic village. When we got home there was no parade, no handshake, not even a ride home. Friends were afraid to come around to see me. I couldn't get work. I was kicked off my military studies programme for Un-American activities. I got death threats. No black athlete had ever stood up to the system and said 'explain this'.
So then I had to work extra hard, and I knew I had to get on with my education. I washed cars in the day, the only job I could get, and I went to night school. By December I was even more broke and less popular than I had been in January. I had been famous when I kept my mouth closed and now I was infamous because I had opened my mouth. But where I had thought in the past I was free, I was just running in the direction society wanted me to.
· Dr Tommie Smith became an athletics coach, professor of sociology and a motivational speaker. His autobiography Silent Gesture is published by Temple University Press
Malcolm McLaren
Then a 24-year-old student
I was a student at Croydon College of Art when a few articulate old fogeys in Paris - the Situationists - became the arbiters of the revolutionary game. So we conspired to take over the college in sympathy with what we had read about from Berlin and Paris. I knew we were ultimately going to lose, but it didn't matter, it was the attempt I cared about.
I remember one student meeting. This sculptor stood up and said, 'Why can't I make my works in gold?' After two hours the professor said, 'OK, I think we've finished for today', we stood up and said: 'The demonstration will never end.' Then we got orange juice, cupcakes and roll-up cigarettes brought in to fortify people. The teachers and caretakers left eventually, and we ended up camping out for days. The general public drifted in: hardcore Maoists, anarchists and romantic hobos just looking for places to camp out for a few days. Many people got pregnant - it was one massive orgy. Everyone was getting stoned and taking speed. People got scared, saying: 'If you don't sleep for 72 hours, then you die.' It became a scene.
We would take pews out of St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square and see police running up Whitehall, and by sheer adrenaline we'd break the back door of the South African embassy open and these very gallant characters with these elegant black leather gloves flicked Zippo lighters and threw these beautiful Molotov bottles in, and we were off to the next site. I remember being at Grosvenor Square with Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page. We rolled hundreds of marbles along the floor at the mounted police. Suddenly it looked like these horses were on an ice skating rink, and then, like Agincourt, we ducked down and people behind us had catapults and started firing gobstopper marbles at the windows of the American embassy, and that was how they got smashed.
At year's end we decided there would be 26 Father Christmases in Selfridges. So we all changed in the toilets and moved into the toy department and started to give away all of the toys to these kids. I'll never forget one little kid had tears flooding down his cheeks because he couldn't actually hold all of these toys and take them away.
· Malcolm McLaren managed the band that pioneered punk, the Sex Pistols. He now lives and works as a composer in Paris
Mary Quant
Fashion designer, then 33
The King's Road was like a swinging catwalk with American magazines and film crews shooting the street from both sides, often getting each other in camera. Our shop, Bazaar, was on the corner of Markham Square, and we opened another in Knightsbridge. Customers included John Osborne, Audrey Hepburn, Bridget Bardot, Julie Christie and Twiggy, all followed by photographers and film crew. The Beatles often came in, Lennon to buy his cap and Paul McCartney and George Harrison to buy for their girlfriends. Paul became tired of being mobbed so he took to going to our studio in Draycott Avenue. The first time he turned up one of our machinists fainted with shock.
My husband, Alexander, and I lived in our new studio flat in Draycott Avenue. It had parquet floors and long windows all down one side. At one end was a raised platform with a decorative stove; at the other a look-out conservatory decorated in PVC and silver. It was ideal for working on designs and showing collections.
I designed and developed 18 collections that year, including dresses and undies, tights, bed linen and make-up. I liked using black-and-white-stripe men's suitings or outrageous colours like Colman's mustard yellow, a pruney grape colour jersey and creamy natural calico with matching embroidery anglaise lace. And I was working on the idea of hotpants. Fashion for the first time was about young fashion. Before the Sixties young people dressed as though they were old. I remember saying, 'Good taste is death - vulgarity is life.' If you do something new, it's described as vulgar. But I love the new.
So much of the Sixties' revolutionary new ideas and talent came out that year. The Pill created freedom. Women today can look great while holding down the toughest careers and bringing up children. Women have always been good at saying: 'Come on boys, no more wars, lets get on with living.'
· Mary Quant is one of Britain's most influential designers, credited with inventing the mini-skirt and hotpants. She has been awarded the Minerva medal and an OBE
Kate Millett
Feminist author, then 33
I spent the year writing Sexual Politics in New York. It was a wonderful time. Crowds of women - a divine debating society - in serious study, asking questions. We had meetings every night. It was very hopeful. We thought we were going to change the world. And we did change it a bit: an inch or two.
I remember hearing the news about Bobby Kennedy's assassination, standing at home, ironing a shirt. My husband, the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, was there, the radio was on. We just could not believe it. When Martin King died, I called all my black friends. They were so angry. I thought I was upset, but it was hard for them to talk with me because I was white.
I did an underground sculpture in the basement of my house about Vietnam and capitalism: little figures who were tied up with money in front of them; women who had turned into urinals - to represent symbolically the US government brothels in Vietnam. It was an invigorating period creatively but it could be frustrating too. We had to go to hearings at City Hall investigating abortion, where we found the commission consisted entirely of men and two nuns. Men wanted to control reproduction: it was about social control, and it still is. When I wrote about Norman Mailer [she dared to put his work on the laboratory table in Sexual Politics], he responded with a whole book against me called The Prisoner of Sex - not one of his best.
At that time we had genuine revolutionary fervour, which was exciting and wonderful. Now, just when we thought we had tamed and changed attitudes, women once again have grave enemies in the world.
· Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics (published 1970) was one of the key texts of the feminist movement. She runs the Women's Arts Colony Farm in upstate New York
Jim Lovell
Apollo 8 command module pilot, then 40
We had two years left to make good on President Kennedy's pledge to get to the moon by the end of the decade, and we were under a lot of pressure.
Apollo 1 had burnt up on the launch pad the year before, killing three friends, and we had no idea how the rival Russian space programme was going. I was married with four children, and life was exceptionally busy, pretty focused and competitive, though I remember enjoying the song 'Aquarius' [from Hair]. I was largely immune from the demos and the protests. I read about it in the papers but I was involved in the space programme and we were pretty insulated.
I was back-up man for a mission to fly the lunar module in Earth orbit. Then Michael Collins had to drop out because of an old back injury; we were told the lunar module wasn't ready; and the CIA told us the Russians were aiming to circumnavigate the moon. So in a bold move we decided to speed the whole thing up by sending the service module up to orbit the Moon - and I was on the team. It was a seven-day mission and it went incredibly smoothly. In a piece of serendipity we got into lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. We did a TV broadcast on which we read the first chapters of 'Genesis'. The moon was grey, devoid of colour, looked like plaster of Paris. I still felt connected to humanity, although when we passed behind the far side of the moon we were out of radio contact, and totally cut off. When I went up to the window and put the Earth behind my thumb, it completely disappeared and I realised how insignificant we are down there. The Earth's a regular planet, circling a normal star, tucked away in the corner of an ordinary galaxy in this universe that we know of. And it's amazing how lucky we are to live on the green Earth.
We didn't know the impact of the flight on people of the world until we got back. I remember a very quick but very pertinent telegram we received on our return. It said: 'Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.' People felt that the space programme put human problems in perspective and that humanity would change as a result. But the mind forgets very easily, and not too long after that people got back to the way they lived before - wars and disruption and human cruelty. People don't realise what they have here until they leave, and only a few people have done that.
· Captain Jim Lovell flew four Nasa missions, and commanded the flight of the ill-fated Apollo 13, during which he uttered the immortal words: 'Houston, we have a problem.' He now owns a restaurant in Michigan and lectures at universities
Astrid Proll
Student, then 20
I was a child at the beginning of the year, and I didn't understand a lot of it. Early on I visited my elder brother, Thorwald, a student in West Berlin, and I was shocked: all these people with long hair, and all these demos. Then, one day, me and my father saw on TV that Thorwald had been arrested, along with his mates Baader and Ensslin, for burning some warehouses in Frankfurt. We were dumbfounded. So I drove over to Frankfurt in my VW Beetle.
Then I started a photography course in West Berlin amid a tidal wave of change. Students were living together in very big flats for the first time. Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst who advocated sexual freedom, was very popular. The communes were havens of sub-culture, new living practices and drugs. I saw a talk by the anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld. She had just slapped the Chancellor at a public meeting for his alleged Nazi crimes, and she was cheered. It left a big impression, a strong woman doing what she knew was right.
At the heart of it was a radical separation of the first postwar generation from a society that was very sticky. The establishment still had Nazis in some top positions, judges and politicians. That made it easier for us to step over lines, to ask for power and later to get into violence. The other big issue was Vietnam. When young Germans travelled abroad we were tarred with the Nazi brush, so any opportunity to join a worldwide youth movement was welcomed.
There was a big demo on 1 May. Because I had a car they sent me to East Berlin where communist party officials gave us loads of miner's helmets to protect us from the police batons. On the demo students dressed with Mao buttons and the Little Red Book in the style of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I remember this huge banner stating: 'The duty of the revolutionary is to do the revolution.' A very German attitude: every day you had to show how much more radical you were getting.
At the end of the year there was a famous demo called the Battle of Tegeler Weg where people began throwing cobblestones at the police. At Tegeler Weg we connected with the Rockers, criminals who knew how to hotwire cars and stuff. It was the first time there was real violence.
· Astrid Proll became a member of the Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof) and was jailed for five-and-a-half- years for her role in bank robberies and fraud. She has since worked as a picture editor
observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2243585,00.html
Riots swept the globe, assassinations rocked America, the Russians crushed the Prague Spring, the hippy dream turned sour, and women and black people fought for equal rights. It was a year of unparalleled ferment, and the remarkable events of 1968 shaped an entire generation. In a special issue of Review, we look at the political and cultural revolution that took place, starting here with the fascinating personal recollections of six key figures caught in the eye of the storm
Gallery: The year that changed history
Interviews by Tom Templeton and Kate Kellaway
Sunday January 20, 2008
The Observer
Tommie Smith
Olympic 200m gold medallist, then aged 24
Black people were, and still are, second-class citizens in America. I saw my family members treated terribly when we were share-croppers in Texas. Most of '68 I was training daily in San Jose, in anticipation of the Olympics. My first son, Kevin, was born in February and his birth made me feel responsible, both for him and for other young black men who had children and needed to get bread on the table. En route to Mexico City, the Black Athletic Committee met to discuss a proposed boycott. We decided we couldn't afford it, but that each athlete would represent themselves. I felt it was time for the young black American male to stand up for his cause. I asked my wife, Delois, to buy me some gloves. I didn't know what I was going to do but I knew it was going to be visual.
Article continues
I won the final in a world record time. As I walked to the podium I decided I would raise one gloved hand in the air and bow my head in prayer. It was a silent gesture heard around the world, and each individual had their own interpretation of what it meant.
When the national anthem ended the boos, hisses and fingers in the air started. I was kicked out of the Olympic village. When we got home there was no parade, no handshake, not even a ride home. Friends were afraid to come around to see me. I couldn't get work. I was kicked off my military studies programme for Un-American activities. I got death threats. No black athlete had ever stood up to the system and said 'explain this'.
So then I had to work extra hard, and I knew I had to get on with my education. I washed cars in the day, the only job I could get, and I went to night school. By December I was even more broke and less popular than I had been in January. I had been famous when I kept my mouth closed and now I was infamous because I had opened my mouth. But where I had thought in the past I was free, I was just running in the direction society wanted me to.
· Dr Tommie Smith became an athletics coach, professor of sociology and a motivational speaker. His autobiography Silent Gesture is published by Temple University Press
Malcolm McLaren
Then a 24-year-old student
I was a student at Croydon College of Art when a few articulate old fogeys in Paris - the Situationists - became the arbiters of the revolutionary game. So we conspired to take over the college in sympathy with what we had read about from Berlin and Paris. I knew we were ultimately going to lose, but it didn't matter, it was the attempt I cared about.
I remember one student meeting. This sculptor stood up and said, 'Why can't I make my works in gold?' After two hours the professor said, 'OK, I think we've finished for today', we stood up and said: 'The demonstration will never end.' Then we got orange juice, cupcakes and roll-up cigarettes brought in to fortify people. The teachers and caretakers left eventually, and we ended up camping out for days. The general public drifted in: hardcore Maoists, anarchists and romantic hobos just looking for places to camp out for a few days. Many people got pregnant - it was one massive orgy. Everyone was getting stoned and taking speed. People got scared, saying: 'If you don't sleep for 72 hours, then you die.' It became a scene.
We would take pews out of St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square and see police running up Whitehall, and by sheer adrenaline we'd break the back door of the South African embassy open and these very gallant characters with these elegant black leather gloves flicked Zippo lighters and threw these beautiful Molotov bottles in, and we were off to the next site. I remember being at Grosvenor Square with Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page. We rolled hundreds of marbles along the floor at the mounted police. Suddenly it looked like these horses were on an ice skating rink, and then, like Agincourt, we ducked down and people behind us had catapults and started firing gobstopper marbles at the windows of the American embassy, and that was how they got smashed.
At year's end we decided there would be 26 Father Christmases in Selfridges. So we all changed in the toilets and moved into the toy department and started to give away all of the toys to these kids. I'll never forget one little kid had tears flooding down his cheeks because he couldn't actually hold all of these toys and take them away.
· Malcolm McLaren managed the band that pioneered punk, the Sex Pistols. He now lives and works as a composer in Paris
Mary Quant
Fashion designer, then 33
The King's Road was like a swinging catwalk with American magazines and film crews shooting the street from both sides, often getting each other in camera. Our shop, Bazaar, was on the corner of Markham Square, and we opened another in Knightsbridge. Customers included John Osborne, Audrey Hepburn, Bridget Bardot, Julie Christie and Twiggy, all followed by photographers and film crew. The Beatles often came in, Lennon to buy his cap and Paul McCartney and George Harrison to buy for their girlfriends. Paul became tired of being mobbed so he took to going to our studio in Draycott Avenue. The first time he turned up one of our machinists fainted with shock.
My husband, Alexander, and I lived in our new studio flat in Draycott Avenue. It had parquet floors and long windows all down one side. At one end was a raised platform with a decorative stove; at the other a look-out conservatory decorated in PVC and silver. It was ideal for working on designs and showing collections.
I designed and developed 18 collections that year, including dresses and undies, tights, bed linen and make-up. I liked using black-and-white-stripe men's suitings or outrageous colours like Colman's mustard yellow, a pruney grape colour jersey and creamy natural calico with matching embroidery anglaise lace. And I was working on the idea of hotpants. Fashion for the first time was about young fashion. Before the Sixties young people dressed as though they were old. I remember saying, 'Good taste is death - vulgarity is life.' If you do something new, it's described as vulgar. But I love the new.
So much of the Sixties' revolutionary new ideas and talent came out that year. The Pill created freedom. Women today can look great while holding down the toughest careers and bringing up children. Women have always been good at saying: 'Come on boys, no more wars, lets get on with living.'
· Mary Quant is one of Britain's most influential designers, credited with inventing the mini-skirt and hotpants. She has been awarded the Minerva medal and an OBE
Kate Millett
Feminist author, then 33
I spent the year writing Sexual Politics in New York. It was a wonderful time. Crowds of women - a divine debating society - in serious study, asking questions. We had meetings every night. It was very hopeful. We thought we were going to change the world. And we did change it a bit: an inch or two.
I remember hearing the news about Bobby Kennedy's assassination, standing at home, ironing a shirt. My husband, the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura, was there, the radio was on. We just could not believe it. When Martin King died, I called all my black friends. They were so angry. I thought I was upset, but it was hard for them to talk with me because I was white.
I did an underground sculpture in the basement of my house about Vietnam and capitalism: little figures who were tied up with money in front of them; women who had turned into urinals - to represent symbolically the US government brothels in Vietnam. It was an invigorating period creatively but it could be frustrating too. We had to go to hearings at City Hall investigating abortion, where we found the commission consisted entirely of men and two nuns. Men wanted to control reproduction: it was about social control, and it still is. When I wrote about Norman Mailer [she dared to put his work on the laboratory table in Sexual Politics], he responded with a whole book against me called The Prisoner of Sex - not one of his best.
At that time we had genuine revolutionary fervour, which was exciting and wonderful. Now, just when we thought we had tamed and changed attitudes, women once again have grave enemies in the world.
· Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics (published 1970) was one of the key texts of the feminist movement. She runs the Women's Arts Colony Farm in upstate New York
Jim Lovell
Apollo 8 command module pilot, then 40
We had two years left to make good on President Kennedy's pledge to get to the moon by the end of the decade, and we were under a lot of pressure.
Apollo 1 had burnt up on the launch pad the year before, killing three friends, and we had no idea how the rival Russian space programme was going. I was married with four children, and life was exceptionally busy, pretty focused and competitive, though I remember enjoying the song 'Aquarius' [from Hair]. I was largely immune from the demos and the protests. I read about it in the papers but I was involved in the space programme and we were pretty insulated.
I was back-up man for a mission to fly the lunar module in Earth orbit. Then Michael Collins had to drop out because of an old back injury; we were told the lunar module wasn't ready; and the CIA told us the Russians were aiming to circumnavigate the moon. So in a bold move we decided to speed the whole thing up by sending the service module up to orbit the Moon - and I was on the team. It was a seven-day mission and it went incredibly smoothly. In a piece of serendipity we got into lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. We did a TV broadcast on which we read the first chapters of 'Genesis'. The moon was grey, devoid of colour, looked like plaster of Paris. I still felt connected to humanity, although when we passed behind the far side of the moon we were out of radio contact, and totally cut off. When I went up to the window and put the Earth behind my thumb, it completely disappeared and I realised how insignificant we are down there. The Earth's a regular planet, circling a normal star, tucked away in the corner of an ordinary galaxy in this universe that we know of. And it's amazing how lucky we are to live on the green Earth.
We didn't know the impact of the flight on people of the world until we got back. I remember a very quick but very pertinent telegram we received on our return. It said: 'Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.' People felt that the space programme put human problems in perspective and that humanity would change as a result. But the mind forgets very easily, and not too long after that people got back to the way they lived before - wars and disruption and human cruelty. People don't realise what they have here until they leave, and only a few people have done that.
· Captain Jim Lovell flew four Nasa missions, and commanded the flight of the ill-fated Apollo 13, during which he uttered the immortal words: 'Houston, we have a problem.' He now owns a restaurant in Michigan and lectures at universities
Astrid Proll
Student, then 20
I was a child at the beginning of the year, and I didn't understand a lot of it. Early on I visited my elder brother, Thorwald, a student in West Berlin, and I was shocked: all these people with long hair, and all these demos. Then, one day, me and my father saw on TV that Thorwald had been arrested, along with his mates Baader and Ensslin, for burning some warehouses in Frankfurt. We were dumbfounded. So I drove over to Frankfurt in my VW Beetle.
Then I started a photography course in West Berlin amid a tidal wave of change. Students were living together in very big flats for the first time. Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst who advocated sexual freedom, was very popular. The communes were havens of sub-culture, new living practices and drugs. I saw a talk by the anti-Nazi campaigner Beate Klarsfeld. She had just slapped the Chancellor at a public meeting for his alleged Nazi crimes, and she was cheered. It left a big impression, a strong woman doing what she knew was right.
At the heart of it was a radical separation of the first postwar generation from a society that was very sticky. The establishment still had Nazis in some top positions, judges and politicians. That made it easier for us to step over lines, to ask for power and later to get into violence. The other big issue was Vietnam. When young Germans travelled abroad we were tarred with the Nazi brush, so any opportunity to join a worldwide youth movement was welcomed.
There was a big demo on 1 May. Because I had a car they sent me to East Berlin where communist party officials gave us loads of miner's helmets to protect us from the police batons. On the demo students dressed with Mao buttons and the Little Red Book in the style of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I remember this huge banner stating: 'The duty of the revolutionary is to do the revolution.' A very German attitude: every day you had to show how much more radical you were getting.
At the end of the year there was a famous demo called the Battle of Tegeler Weg where people began throwing cobblestones at the police. At Tegeler Weg we connected with the Rockers, criminals who knew how to hotwire cars and stuff. It was the first time there was real violence.
· Astrid Proll became a member of the Red Army Faction (Baader Meinhof) and was jailed for five-and-a-half- years for her role in bank robberies and fraud. She has since worked as a picture editor
observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2243585,00.html