Woodstock – The Message of History’s Biggest Happening

The baffling history of mankind is full of obvious turning points and significant events: battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or deposed, and now, seemingly, planets conquered. Equally important are the great groundswells of popular movements that affect the minds and values of a generation or more, not all of which can be neatly tied to a time and place. Looking back upon the America of the ’60s, future historians may well search for the meaning of one such movement. It drew the public’s notice on the days and nights of Aug. 15 through 17, 1969, on the 600-acre farm of Max Yasgur in Bethel, N.Y.

What took place at Bethel, ostensibly, was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which was billed by its youthful Manhattan promoters as “An Aquarian Exposition” of music and peace. It was that and more—much more. The festival turned out to be history’s largest happening. As the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the ’60s openly displayed its strength, appeal and power, it may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.

By a conservative estimate, more than 400,000 people —the vast majority of them between the ages of 16 and 30 —showed up for the Woodstock festival. Thousands more would have come if police had not blocked off access roads, which had become ribbonlike parking lots choked with stalled cars. Had the festival lasted much longer, as many as one million youths might have made the pilgrimage to Bethel. The lure of the festival was an all-star cast of top rock artists, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane. But the good vibrations of good groups turned out to be the least of it. What the youth of America—and their observing elders—saw at Bethel was the potential power of a generation that in countless disturbing ways has rejected the traditional values and goals of the U.S. Thousands of young people, who had previously thought of themselves as part of an isolated minority, experienced the euphoric sense of discovering that they are, as the saying goes, what’s happening. Adults were made more aware than ever before that the children of the welfare state and the atom bomb do indeed march to the beat of a different drummer, as well as to the tune of an electric guitarist. The spontaneous community of youth that was created at Bethel was the stuff of which legends are made; the substance of the event contains both a revelation and a sobering lesson.

From a strictly rational viewpoint, which may be a dangerous and misleading way of looking at it, Bethel was a neatly symbolic choice for the festival—the Biblical town of that name was a center of idolatry denounced by the prophets Amos and Hosea. To many adults, the festival was a squalid freakout, a monstrous Dionysian revel, where a mob of crazies gathered to drop acid and groove to hours of amplified cacophony. In a classic example of its good gray mannerisms, the New York Times in an editorial compared the Bethel pilgrimage to a march of lemmings toward the sea and rhetorically asked: “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” But even the Times can change its tune. Next day, it ran a more sympathetic editorial that spoke kindly of the festival as “essentially a phenomenon of innocence.”

There were, of course, certain things to deplore about Bethel. Three people died—one from an overdose of drugs, and hundreds of youths were freaked out on bad trips caused by low-grade LSD, which was being openly peddled at $6 per capsule. On the other hand, there were no rapes, no assaults, no robberies and, as far as anyone can recall, not one single fight, which is more than can be said for most sporting events held in New York City.

The real significance of Woodstock can hardly be overestimated. Despite the piles of litter and garbage, the hopelessly inadequate sanitation, the lack of food and the two nights of rain that turned Yasgur’s farm into a sea of mud, the young people found it all “beautiful.” One long-haired teen-ager summed up the significance of Woodstock quite simply: “People,” he said, “are finally getting together.” The undeniable fact that “people”—meaning in this case the youth of America—got together has consequences that go well beyond the festival itself.

For one thing, the Bethel scene demonstrated more clearly than ever before the pervasiveness of a national subculture of drugs. At least 90% of those present at the festival were smoking marijuana. In addition, narcotics of any and all description, from hash to acid to speed to horse, were freely available. Perhaps out of fear of rousing the crowd to hostility, police made fewer than 100 arrests on narcotics charges. By and large, the U.S. has accepted the oversimplification that all narcotics are dangerous and thus should be outlawed. The all but universal acceptance of marijuana, at least among the young, raises the question of how long the nation’s present laws against its use can remain in force without seeming as absurd and hypocritical as Prohibition.

More important, Bethel demonstrated the unique sense of community that seems to exist among the young, their mystical feeling for themselves as a special group, an “us” in contrast to a “them.” The festival was widely advertised, but the unexpectedly large crowd it attracted suggests that the potential significance of the event was spread by a kind of underground network. “If you were part of this culture,” said one pilgrim back from Bethel, “you had to be there.” In spite of the grownup suspicions and fears about the event. Bethel produced a feeling of friendship, camaraderie and —an overused phrase—a sense of love among those present. This yearning for togetherness was demonstrated in countless major and minor ways: the agape-like sharing of food and shelter by total strangers: the lack of overt hostility despite conditions that were ripe for panic and chaos; the altruistic ministrations of the Hog Farm, a New Mexico hippie commune who took care of kids on bad trips. If Bethel was youth on a holiday, it was also a demonstration to the adult world that young people could create a kind of peace in a situation where none should have existed, and that they followed a mysterious inner code of law and order infinitely different from the kind envisioned by Chicago’s Mayor Daley. In the end, even the police were impressed. Said Sullivan County Sheriff Louis Ratner: “This was the nicest bunch of kids I’ve ever dealt with.”

Hippiedom Lives

Youth’s sense of community is an ad hoc thing: it is suspicious of institutions and wary of organization, prizing freedom above system. In this, as in many other ways, the youth of Bethel displayed adherence to the prevailing spirit of the hippie movement. It is true enough that the manifestation of flower power in Haight-Ashbury and the East Village became a bad scene of gang rapes, deaths from malnutrition and too much speed. It is equally true that most of those at Bethel were not hippies in the commonly accepted sense: a good half of them, at least, were high school or college students from middle-class homes. But at Bethel thev exhibited to the world many of the hippie values and life styles, from psychedelic clothing to spontaneous, unashamed nudity to open and casual sex. Youthful imaginations were captured, most obviously, by the hippie sound: the driving, deafening hard beat of rock, music that is not just a particular form of pop but the anthem of revolution. The Jefferson Airplane, one of the first and best of the San Francisco groups, sang out the message at Bethel in words of startling explicitness:

Look what’s happening out in the streets

Got a revolution, got to revolution

Hey, I’m dancing down the streets

Got a revolution, got to revolution.

In its energy, its lyrics, its advocacy of frustrated joys, rock is one long symphony of protest. Although many adults generally find it hard to believe, the revolution it preaches, implicitly or explicitly, is basically moral; it is the proclamation of a new set of values as much as it is the rejection of an old system. The values, moreover, are not merely confined to the pleasures of tumescence. The same kind of people who basked in the spirit of Bethel also stormed the deans’ offices at Harvard and Columbia and shed tears or blood at Chicago last summer—all in the name of a new morality.

To Historian Theodore Roszak, the militancy of the student New Left and the dropped-out pacifism of the turned-on types are two sides of what he calls a “counterculture” by which almost everyone under 30 has been affected. Like the poor urban black, this counter-culture is an alienated minority within the Affluent Society, even though it is made up primarily of the sons and daughters of the middle class. They have seen suburbia, found it wanting, and have uttered “the absolute refusal,” as New Left Guru Herbert Marcuse calls it, to modern urban technology and the civilization it has produced. With surpassing ease and a cool sense of authority, the children of plenty have voiced an intention to live by a different ethical standard than their parents accepted. The pleasure principle has been elevated over the Puritan ethic of work. To do one’s own thing is a greater duty than to be a useful citizen. Personal freedom in the midst of squalor is more liberating than social conformity with the trappings of wealth. Now that youth takes abundance for granted, it can afford to reject materialism.

It is easy enough for adults to reject the irrationality and hedonism of this ethic. But the young are quick to point out that the most rational and technically accomplished society known to man has led only to racism, repression and a meaningless war in the jungles of Southeast Asia. If that is oversimplification, it is the kind around which ringing slogans are made.

Youth has always been rebellious. What makes the generation of the ’60s different, is that it is largely inner-directed and uncontrolled by adult doyens. The rock festival, an art form and social structure unique to the time, is a good example. “They are not mimicking something done in its purest form by adults,” says one prominent U.S. sociologist. “They are doing their own thing. All this shows that there is a breakdown in the capacity of adult leaders to capture the young.” Some other observers agree that the youth movement is a politics without a statesman, a religion without a messiah. “We don’t need a leader,” insists Janis Joplin. “We have each other. All we need is to keep our heads straight and in ten years this country may be a decent place to live in.”

At least two national figures have been able briefly to capitalize politically on the idealism of the young. The knight-errant campaign of Eugene McCarthy was, his enemies said, something of a Children’s Crusade. Bobby Kennedy, like his brother Jack, was also able to speak to the Now Generation in language that it heard and heeded. Clearly, the passions of the Bethel people are there to be exploited, for good or ill. It is an open question whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today’s youth to build a politics of ecstasy.

The rock festival has become, in a way, the equivalent of a political forum for the young. The politics involved is not the expression of opinion or ideas but the spirit of community created—the good vibrations or the bad ones, the young in touch with themselves and aware. If Bethel is any proof, this kind of expressive happening will become even more important. “This was only the beginning,” warns Jimi Hendrix. “The only way for kids to make the older generation understand is through mass gatherings like Bethel. And the kids are not going to be in the mud all the time. From here they will start to build and change things. The whole world needs a big wash, a big scrub-down.”

The Hunger of Youth

Psychoanalyst Rollo May describes Bethel as “a symptomatic event of our time that showed the tremendous hunger, need and yearning for community on the part of youth.” He compares its friendly spirit favorably with the alcoholic mischief ever present at a Shriners’ convention but wonders how long the era of good feeling will last. Other observers wonder about future superfestivals, if they become tourist spectaculars for adult hangers-on. The Hashbury began to die when the bus-driven voyeurs came by and the hard-drug addicts took over.

It is beyond argument that the generation attuned to rock, pot and sex will drastically change the world it grew up in. The question is: How and to what purpose? Columbia Sociologist Amitai Etzioni applauds the idealism of the young but argues that “they need more time and energy for reflection” as well as more opportunities for authentic service. Ultimately, the great danger of the counter-culture is its self-proclaimed flight from reason, its exaltation of self over society, its Dionysian anarchism. Historian Roszak points out that the rock revolutionaries bear a certain resemblance to the early Christians, who, in a religious cause, rejected the glory that was Greece and the grandeur of Rome. Ultimately, they brought down a decaying pagan empire and built another in its place. But the Second Comings of history carry with them no guarantees of success, and a revolution based on unreason may just as easily bring a New Barbarism rather than the New Jerusalem. As Yeats so pointedly asked:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?