Mark Whitroth

Describe what you saw or didn't see when you went to the convention. What hopes did you bring with you? Did you think the world could be changed by uniting into a single voice of protest? Did you have hopes in our democratic ideals?

To petition for redress of grievances, to make sure that the world, and esp. the US public would see and hear what we had to say, not just what the media said we were saying.

Where were you when the police "rioted"?

Running as soon as we could; one night, we were in a car that was caught in the middle of the crowd on Michigan Ave; we only got a chance to run when the cops got to us, and they shoved my ex with a nightstick to "encourage" us. I was too busy, and it happened too fast, to take pictures like the one in my memory of the pig (as distinguished from the regular cops, these were in baby blue riot gear) who knowcked someone down to the street, then swung his riot baton like an axe...I do, though, have some slides....

Do you remember the crowds shouting, "the world is watching" as they charged on the demonstraters? How did you feel at that moment?

Shouting, angry, and trying to not get killed. I was one of those chanting.

Were you ashamed to be an American? Apalled? Outraged?

Well, as a red diaper baby, who grew up in North Philly, I had never been exactly Proud to be an Amurkan (tm). This was more of "what did you expect?"

How did you react to the "police riot"? How close was the spirit of that time to open rebellion?

Open rebellion? It would have been more like Ghandi's, or maybe like South Africa, not any kind of military solution. Only the crazies thought that way. The attitude of many, in Chi and elsewhere, was to respond as they did was to make ourselves into our enemy.

Were you at any other antiwar rallies during the Vietnam era?

As I said, every one in Philly, in DC, I may have missed on in NY.

How did they compare to Chicago? Do any recollections come to your mind that you would like to share?

Depends. Some in NY & DC were bigger than Chi, but a lot of us that went to Chi expected trouble (just not a police riot). Actually, the organization that did the most to arrange transit, etc, to Chi (my mind blanks on the name at the moment), had its headquarters in Powelton, in Philly, and I wound up as a bus marshall on one of the three busses (we left from NY). Heh...lessee, at least my ex & I came prepared; as Marshall, I got to loan a couple of women some blankets, and, halfway through Indiana, I got three guys who'd been hitching to Chi for the demonstration onto the bus.

Yeah...I think it was in April of '67 that I got interviewed in Philly, as we were getting ready to leave for NY, because I had a scavanged football helmet, and the reporter looked surprised when I said I expected trouble. Fortunately, the nearest we had was a bunch of construction workers shouting, threatening, and throwing eggs at one corner in NY...funny, they quieted down real fast when the line I was in, maybe 25 or 50 strong, marched up to and past them, looking at them, chanting "We love you", alternating with "join us!".

Do I have memeories? Sure. At all of them, there was a warmth, a community spirit, of we were on the side of right, and that being on the right side, for once, did *not* involve kiling and dying, but rather trying to *stop* the killing.

The world's a lot colder, with most of the kids these days, and all their "grown-up" parents, who were mostly not at the demonstrations, anyway.

Then there was the time that some hawks (the DAR, or the VFW) had "resanctified" the Liberty Bell, after some demonstration. Well, I and a couple of friends came up with the idea of "cleansing it" a week or two later, and I got out leaflets, and then a friend convinced me that it was too soon, and we couldnt' get enough folks, so it sorta got de facto cancelled...without any notice. A reporter for the Drummer showed up, and saw a *whole* bunch of cop cars, vans, shuttling guns up and back, and *he* got picked up, as the only longhair in sight....He offered to help publicize the next time....

You don't want to forget the Panther's People's Constitutional Convention, I think there were two sessions, but the big one was in Philly. I may still have the position papers from about two-thirds of the dozen or so working groups.

I can babble on, and will, if incouraged.

I think it was an important rite of passage for our generation to come to terms with Vietnam. In many cases, it marked our first incursions into adulthood. I think an important aspect of the anthology is to indicate how each of us personally came to terms with a war that some of us claimed was grossly immoral, while others considered its support to be an expression of patriotism. I would like to learn more of your "existential journey" as you came to terms with Vietnam, or joined the antiwar movement.

You might also notice that the best and brightest of our generation, both those that volunteered, because they thought their country needed them, and giving for what they got was what they had grown up learning, and those of us that fought against the war, because we were informed citizens, whose rights and wishes were being violated, have, ever since, been spat upon, and offered the choice of being called a baby-killer, or a pinko-commie-dupe scum.

"Joined" the antiwar movement... I think that is a very strange term. We didn't have to enlist or enroll or anything. If the antiwar movement wasn't "joined" (as one joins an organized group) one merely "became" a part of (evolved with) it. Do you agree? How did it happen for you?

Yup.

When you first went to the antiwar moratoria, why did you go? Was it all to protest the war, or were there social considerations involved?

Mostly; I was just too young for most of the Civil Rights stuff, though my first picket line was at 16: my folks, who through lack of money, and laziness, were among the maybe 5% left of the whites in North Philly by the mid-sixties, went out one Saturday morning, and when I left, to go on my usual trip to book and record stores downtown, I saw them in the picket line that the neighborhood had set up around the new schools being built, for black kids, in a black neighborhood, with a lily-white construction crew. They called to me to join them, and I did (a virgin no more!).

I suppose you studied Thoreau and civil disobedience in high school. Did your studies influence your thinking in any way?

Yeah, some social, maybe meeting others, but mostly going with friends, or meeting new ones; it was the purpose of being there, (again, the petition for the redress of grievances was a popular phrase), and the community. The media split of "hippies" and politicals was pure invention on their part, and 75% - 85% pure shit; a way to split a genuine cultural movement into fragments that would not be viable independently. And I read Thoreau long after I'd started going to rallys. My dad was (as I mentioned) an unregenerate old Leftist, not an apologist for the Stalinists, and a lifelong union man. You might note that *some* of us, at least, were *not* "middle class".

I remember reading a lot of existentialist writers at the time -- people like Sartre and Kafka. Writers who portrayed a mad, upside-down society, where the only antidote for madness was for people to take control of the world and society and establish their own values of good and evil. The sixties seemed like a decade of madness to me. How did it look to you? If it got unstuck, when did it do so for you? Did society's madness influence your affiliation with the antiwar movement? Do you remember '68, with the Tet offensive, the assinations, the Chicago convention and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia?

Yes. 68 was the watershed. When LBJ announced he wouldn't run again, we... our society, had a chance. I have heard Clark Clifford claim that Nixon had agents talking to the Vietnamese negotiators in Paris, stalling them, to give them the idea they'd get a better deal from him if he won. If that's true, that son of a slime mold (dogs don't deserve that infamy) killed us more than we even knew. And the elder Daley gave him every help, by arranging the police riot. What we could have been, as a country, and done.... I swear, if I get to go to where that bastard's buried, I want to dance on his grave, and spit on it, and, if given the chance, I'd dig it up and put a stake through its (alleged) heart.

And, of course, if we had given Kruschev a way to save face, he was, I think, the reason for the Prague Spring, and were he still in power, I think the tanks would not have gone to Czecheslovakia.

And the demonstrations... did they seem more innocent and peaceful in the beginning? When did they get nastier? After Chicago in '68?

After 68, when those that came realized that this society could and would eat its children. When they saw that everything they'd learned in school was 90% bullshit, propoganda, about the democracy, and an informed citizenry, etc.

How they get nastier?

After Cambodia, and Kent State? What do you think?

How do you recall the proponents of the war behaving at antiwar rallies?

Trying to start fights, as usual.

Now I'm thinking about Abbie Hoffman's "second American revolution." I'm thinking about alienation of youth now. Did anyone ever harass you for being a hippie? A yippie? How did your parents feel about your antiwar sympathies?

Harass me? Is the bear Catholic? Does a Pope shit in the woods? Other than my folks, of course.

And the police -- drug searches and the like... did you feel alienated from the American culture?

Absolutely de rigeur.

When Agnew gave his famous speech about "effete intellectual snobs," how did his remarks make you feel?

Laughing at him, like most folks.

How did it make the"silent majority" react to your opposition to the war? Did their words affect your behavior at subsequent demonstrations?

Nope. It po's me, too, to old Bill Clinton's too much the consumate politician to do it, needs to say, "we were *wrong* in going into the Vietnam War, it *was* a war, those that ran it, and made the decisions owe an apology to those who fought against the War, and they owe an unexpungeable debt to those who went and fought it, and an unimaginable debt to those who died."

*Then* maybe this country will believe a politician, and *then* maybe both sides could forgive.

And, of course, how about fullfilling Johnson's peace offer?