Radical Chic and more
It is a slim volume, the front a psychedelic orange yellow incorporating a photograph of two people, a white woman and black man, sitting together in an elegant cane chair, both giving a radical Black Power one-arm salute (and she appears to be wearing a boxing glove). It’s designed to be vivid, almost offensive, sufficiently so to make you wonder if you should have this book on show, so people know you’ve read it, or hidden, to allow you to convince yourself you do follow some dictates in good visual taste. The back cover is a black-and-white photograph of the author, wearing a black felt fedora at a rakish angle, and a three-piece suit that appears to be pale in colour, with a check pattern. There’s a sticker saying ‘30p’. This is the 1971 Bantam edition of Tom Wolfe’s classic two pieces of journalism: ‘Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers’ [I’ll call it Radical Chic from now on]. Radical Chic takes up the first 100 pages of the book, Mau-Mauing the remaining 67.
Radical Chic is an example of what was called the New Journalism at the time, an approach developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It doesn’t seem either distinctive or innovative now, but back then the approach was regarded as wildly unconventional. This was reporting with a subjective perspective. At times it was hard to be certain this really was non-fiction. Tom Wolfe was the paradigmatic example of the approach, where the writer (reporter?) used images and illustrations, often as asides to the topic under discussion, used a subjective language style, and where the author was explicitly embedded in the story being told.
Tom Wolfe had started writing in this style back in the 1960s, but it was the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968 that put him, and his work, on the radar. That book is an account of the adventures of Ken Kesey. Kesey had become famous following the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1960. The next stage in his career was his attempt to create a new religion, based on tripping out with drugs, combining this with his own charismatic approach to preaching. Kesey’s group was known as the ‘Merry Pranksters’ and ‘Acid Tests’ were LSD parties held at his house in California, which were accompanied by psychedelic lights and noise to enhance the experience (of course!).
As Wolfe documents, the Pranksters soon began to get out and about, travelling across the country in a bus called Furthur (!). The Merry Pranksters were to become known as the exponents of a topic of growing interest, the ‘counterculture’. Wolfe’s book is a wonderful account of all this happening. Eventually Kesey becomes a pop culture icon, appearing on television and radio shows, while being pursued by the FBI. By the time Wolfe was writing Kesey had been sentenced for using drugs, and he had begun serving his gaol time in the forests of California. The whole story’s a wild ride, and it’s documented in a wild book.
The style of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an exemplification of this ‘New Journalism’. While it offers a fairly faithful account of Kesey and his adventures (as far as I can tell), it reads more like a novel than a piece of standard (and boring?) journalism. Indeed, it almost comes across as an exercise in persuasion: this is what these people are like, and Tom is there to explain it to you. Moreover, even if he appears to be deeply embedded in Kesey’s life and the antics of the Merry Pranksters, his observer’s perspective remains clear.
Some later commentators reviewing the book have suggested Tom Wolfe offers a sober, dry-eyed description of the key characters’ experiences, convincingly explaining the paranoia and the acid trips in which they indulged. After the book was published, however, there were challenges over his style, and questions as to his accounts was true. In response, Wolfe argued he was nearly invisible throughout the series of events, offering an ‘uninhibited account’ of the events he witnessed, (as reported by Scura in conversations with Tom Wolfe). He claimed his method of writing transformed the ‘distanced’ description of the subjects of newspapers and articles into people with whom audiences could relate and sympathize.
Over the years, discussions of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as journalism have gone to two extremes. Some see it as a great book, an ‘essential’ introduction to hippies and the spread of the counterculture in the in 1960s. To balance against that perspective, others have seen it as overblown and almost idolatry. One review, written by Jay Kantor, who became a well-known writer in the 1980s, especially for his study of Che Guevara, challenged Wolfe’s depiction of Kesey, concluding “In the end the Christ-like robes Wolfe fashioned for Kesey are much too large. We are left with another acidhead and a bunch of kooky kids who did a few krazy things.” Like some others, he was concerned over the glorification of the drug culture of the time, asserting that “LSD is no respecter of persons, of individuality” in a review in the Harvard Crimson in 1968. However, such critiques were in the minority.
If Tom Wolfe cut his writing teeth on The Electric Kool Acid Test and similar, shorter pieces, Radical Chic was a far more focussed and devastating contribution. What he managed to do was to both describe people espousing a radical cause, while at the same time making it clear that this was a matter of fashionability: Radical Chic is a wonderful exercise in satire, much to the discomfort of those he describes. Originally published as an article in The New Yorker, under the title Radical Chic: The Party at Lenny’s, the account ridicules the composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their ‘absurdity’ in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers. Absurd indeed, as the Black Panthers were as far away from the rich New York set comprising Bernstein’s friends in almost any way you could imagine. However, it was an outstanding way for Wolfe to be noticed as an exemplar of the New Journalism.
Who were these Black Panthers? They were a political party, operating from 1966 to 1982, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Followers of Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965, they came together in October 1966 to create the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense: ‘Freedom by any means necessary’ was their slogan. Seale described the Panthers as “an organization that represents black people and many white radicals relate to this and understand that the Black Panther Party is a righteous revolutionary front against this racist decadent, capitalistic system.” Seale and Newton wrote What We Want Now! in order to explain “the practical, specific things we need and that should exist”, and What We Believe, outlining the philosophical principles of the Black Panther Party, intended to educate the rest of society and disseminate information about the specifics of the party’s platform.
Bobby Seale was one of the ‘Chicago Eight’ charged with inciting a riot following the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Remarkably, during the trial, the judge ordered Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom because of his outspoken objections to his personal lack of legal representation for several days of the trial. He was eventually separated from the other member of the Eight, tried, sentenced, but only served a short period in prison.
Under Huey Newton’s leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs. However, in 1967, Newton was involved in a shootout with a police officer. In 1968, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for a policeman’s death and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In May 1970, the charges were dropped. Newton learned to read using Plato’s Republic, which influenced his philosophy of activism. Bobby Seale is still living, but Huey Newton was murdered in Oakland, California in 1989.
The Black Panther Party was immediately persecuted. In 1969, J Edgar Hoover, the then Director of the FBI, said the Black Panther party was “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” If they wanted publicity, he ensured they got it! The FBI attempted to sabotage the party with an illegal covert counterintelligence program, but government persecution initially contributed to the party’s growth among African Americans and the more extreme left, given its determined stance against segregation, and for opposing the Vietnam draft. To say it was controversial is an understatement. Some saw it as the most influential black power organization of the late 1960s; others viewed it as more criminal than political, “defiant posturing over substance” (a quote from Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther).
Tom Wolfe saw the espousal of radical causes by members of wealthy society as an ideal target. As Michael Bracewell was to describe it many years later in Frieze Magazine, this was the bizarre situation of the wealthy and fashionable seeking both a vicarious form of glamour while also claiming a monopoly on virtue “through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, even diametrically opposed to the world of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintained their isolation”. Their relationship was wildly out of kilter from the start. … in his essay Molotov Cocktails, Bracewell suggested ‘Radical Chic’ documented a form of “highly developed decadence”; and in Wolfe’s description of its supporters, he made it clear their greatest fear was to be seen not as prejudiced or unaware, but as middle-class!
Talk about stirring the pot! That their behaviour was ‘fashionable’ had been disavowed by Bernstein’s wife, prior to the publication of Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, which had appeared in the June 8, 1970, issue of New York, 20 weeks after the actual fund raiser at the Bernstein’s residence. This ‘party’ had been organised with the explicit intention of raising money for ‘Panther 21’, a group of twenty-one Black Panther members who were arrested and accused of planned coordinated bombing and long-range rifle attacks on two police stations and an education office in New York. As it happens. they were all acquitted by a jury following revelations in their trial that police infiltrators had played key organising roles!
In fact, Wolfe wasn’t the first to report on the party. A commentary had appeared the day after the event in a New York Times piece by Charlotte Curtis, who wrote: “Leonard Bernstein and a Black Panther leader argued the merits of the Black Panther party’s philosophy before nearly 90 guests last night in the Bernsteins’ elegant Park Avenue duplex.” According to Wolfe in Radical Chic, the release of the story worldwide was followed by strong criticism of the event: “The English, particularly, milked the story for all it was worth and seemed to derive one of the great cackles of the year from it.”
The negative reaction prompted publication of an op-ed in the Times, False Note on Black Panthers, that was severely critical of the Black Panther Party and Bernstein:
“Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. … the group therapy plus fund-raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice”. (New York Times, January 16, 1970.)
Burstein’s partner, Felicia Montealegre both wrote and personally delivered a response to this op-ed contribution, asserting:
“As a civil libertarian, I asked a number of people to my house on Jan. 14 in order to hear the lawyer and others involved with the Panther 21 discuss the problem of civil liberties as applicable to the men now awaiting trial, and to help raise funds for their legal expenses. … It was for this deeply serious purpose that our meeting was called. The frivolous way in which it was reported as a ‘fashionable’ event is unworthy of the Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice.” (January 21, 1970, Letters to the Editor of The Times: Panthers’ Legal Aid)
What can I say? Fifty years later, Bernstein, his partner and his guests come over as confused, and possibly gullible. Perhaps I should rephrase that. They should be seen as a warning. Isn’t this exactly the kind of behaviour being shown by many supporters of extremists in the US today, jumping on bandwagons (some of which they create themselves), without carefully thinking through what they are supporting, criticising or publicising.
Perhaps you won’t be surprised to read that Rabbi Meir Kahane “blasted Lenny [Bernstein] publicly for joining ‘a trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers’ … We defend the rights of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group that hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.’” Has anything changed? It seems not. No wonder the US is so divided.
My discussion of all this history is to one side. The other side to the story is the sneaky, snaky way in which Tom Wolfe writes. He manages to tell a story with verve and drama. He does so with abundant colour and commentary. But best of all, he makes the reader laugh, with snappy asides and illuminating side stories. Even if you might have begun reading supporting whatever issue and perspective he was addressing, the lampooning wins. You’d hate to be Leonard Bernstein or Felicia Montealegre, or any of the other rich, snobbish New Yorkers who Tom Wolfe gets in his sights. I haven’t even got on to the second article in the book on foolish bureaucrats. Wolfe’s observations about how various groups ran rings around the administration are … let’s face it, hilarious. To read Chaser’s briefing of the Youth Coalition is to witness genius at work, as good, as Wolfe explains, as the US Air Force planning a bombing raid into North Vietnam, and if Chaser was brilliant, the San Francisco administration comes over as worse than dumb. Smart writing. Funny. Chastening, too.
It’s as if you are on a safari, with several exotic creatures lining up, willingly waiting to be shot. The New Journalism is simply Old Savagery, and when it’s done in style, it’s devastating. As my paperback edition of Radical Chic explains on the front cover, it is an outrageous new book about black rage and white guilt, skewering everyone in the process. The New York Times put it well: “He understands the human animal like no sociologist around. He tweaks his reader’s every buried thought and prejudice. He sees through everything. He is as original and outrageous as ever.” Yes, he is.
Tom Wole was the ideal commentator for the sixties and seventies, allowing us much later to look back not so much in anger but in bemused laughter. Did people really behave like that? Yes. Does Tom Wolfe exaggerate? Yes. Did he prick the balloons of self-righteous presentations? Yes. Have we learnt to recognise poseurs and silly extremism? Ah, now the answer is ‘No’. Even the smartest of snipers can’t do enough to address and puncture our continuing foibles and failures. Read Radical Chic and realise that, sadly, we never learn!
