My Weekend Working for Peace at Woodstock
When I want to position myself in the world I need only one fact: I went to Woodstock. Almost 55 years later, listeners respond with envy. Sometimes I add that I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965. I have won over countless community college classes because hearing this fact makes my students think I’m just so damn cool. Even as a teenager, I knew that someday I’d want to write, and I always wanted to go places where history was happening so I could write about it later.
In 1967 at sixteen I took a bus to the first anti-war rally in DC and destroyed my lungs for life from tear gas, snatching a toddler from the Pentagon lawn while painfully young National Guardsmen pointed their bayonets at him. You could see kids napalmed on the evening news, and I had to do whatever I could to stop it.
My students ask, “Were you a hippie, Dr. Brett?” Usually, I say yes because nuance would not be understood. I tell them that soon there will be no more former hippies (can you be an ex-hippie?) in academia, and the openness we bring to our pedagogy will soon be a thing of the past.
But the nuanced answer is that I wasn’t a hippie. I was a movement person, and we saw ourselves differently. The stereotype of the hippie with headband, floral accessories and clothes, tie-dyed t-shirts, fingers held up in a V in the classic peace gesture with necklaces to match wasn’t a stereotype. Hippie chicks were under pressure to be mild-mannered, in service of their boyfriends, dropouts from the corporate culture–and the entire ethos “borrowed,” sometimes dubiously, from Eastern and Native cultures.
Movement women were not mild-mannered. We were on a mission to end the War in Vietnam. Period. We wore black leotards with our jeans and worked hard. We didn’t get to lead as many rallies as we should have, mimeographed too many pages, and fetched too many cups of coffee, it’s true. But we stood up in meetings and challenged our men. We raised our fists. We did draft counseling. We plotted political actions, and we got arrested.
Linda Eastman was a hippie chick. Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis were movement people, working in several movements — civil rights and women’s liberation. We were feminist anti-war activists and had Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and Harriet Tubman as heroes.
I became a movement person in 1966, at fifteen, when an Antioch dropout held meetings where he educated us about the movement — the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the facts of the Vietnam War. He started a local SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter, and I was one of the first to sign up.
I’d been radicalized by our ninth-grade English teacher who was, unusually, allowed to be political in 1965. Our eighth-grade American history teacher was determined to fashion us all as hawks. He had only one rallying cry: Remember the Sudentenland. He found a way to say this every class. He’d fought in World War II like our fathers and hadn’t changed his sensibility. His repeated cry was code: Chamberlain was wrong to appease Hitler, the growing threat of communism in Southeast Asia was real, and the domino theory was correct. Countries would fall to Communism, like tiles in a game of dominos, and only the war in Vietnam could stop it.
Our English teacher was appalled at his propaganda. She organized a debate and chose students to argue positions. I got assigned “undecided.” That day classes were suspended for this discussion, and by the end of school day, I was a dedicated dove.
So when I went to Woodstock, I was decidedly a movement person. My boyfriend of the moment was as political as I, and although the festival was set to start Friday night, we set up tent in the fields on Tuesday. We had a printing press. Our job was to publish an edition of The Rat newspaper, filled with articles about the war and the movement, sold to raise money for anti-war activities.
If you ask me what I remember most about Woodstock, it is the mud. We pitched our tent in mud, sludged through mud to get anywhere, and felt mildewed the entire time there. We slept and made our newspaper in the same tent, until my boyfriend got bored of me and wandered into a different tent. He left his football jersey, full of holes, for me to wear. He towered over me, and the jersey came down to my knees.
I wanted to hear the acts, but I’d heard most of them already. I was too restless to sit on a blanket listening to music. It was more a background soundtrack for me for the important work I thought I was doing.
When Ritchie Havens began the concert, I got to work selling our product. I was like a fishmonger in an Irish ballad shouting, “Anyone wanna buy a Rat?” in a very provocative manner. I’ll say this for hippies: they gave money.
What did we do with the money we amassed? Every night at 11:00 pm the famous absurdist activist Abbie Hoffman showed up to collect the proceeds. The promoters of the concert decided that the festival should be apolitical, possibly I guess because of how stoned many people were. Abbie was removed from the stage when he tried to turn it into his personal pulpit. There were no demonstrations or counterdemonstrations. People were there to hear music, do drugs, and get laid—and it all worked. There was only one toilet per 600 people, and the food was hard to come by, but when people tell you that all was peaceful, it’s true, except for Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to rabble rouse. I was in sympathy with his sense of urgency. People were dying. The guys in the crowd would begin to share Hoffman’s intensity in three months with the inauguration of the draft lottery in December of 1969. Then their asses would be on the line. But on those wet August days, Abbie Hoffman was not popular.
He did not live up to his own ideals in his interactions with us peons who were doing all the work on his newspaper. He was happy to handle the profits, but he had no time to chat with us. I didn’t get to know Abbie Hoffman, and he didn’t make note of my name. Perhaps even more egregious was that I was living in mud while he was staying at Grossingers.
As idyllic as we wanted Woodstock to be, the same dominance hierarchies prevailed as they did in the world outside the festival. I ran across David Peel, a guy who was going to perform his big hit, “Have a Marijuana,” who propositioned me in the most entitled way, making it clear that I was completely disposable. That’s where my activist training served me well. I turned him down flat.
I will cut to the chase. I didn’t hear Jimi Hendrix. I didn’t hear anyone on Sunday. It was my bad luck to start my period that Saturday, and with so few bathrooms available, it felt prudent to get home. I had enough money to get a bus. I’d only have to hitch to the bus station. Or I suppose my boyfriend would have gotten me to the depot. But I didn’t want to return with my tail between my legs.
The first ride I snagged was with three guys from Vermont. It took us four hours to go four miles; that’s how much traffic there was. These guys were not pleased with the festival. They rolled down their windows shouting, “Three days of filth and garbage,” for the entire four miles. What an ordeal!
I got other rides. Men took pity on this tiny girl standing by the side of the road in just a football jersey. I didn’t pay for transportation until I got to Manhattan where I went to Penn Station and took the Long Island Railroad home and then a taxi from the station. I had nowhere to go for the summer but my parents’ house.
I had only good experiences, but that was sheer luck. Sometime later I met a guy whose sister had done the same thing on the same day and had been murdered. He hadn’t recovered. That was the dark side of it all.
I had been in a protective bubble. I had nothing bad to say about the gathering, which I considered a political statement. In September, when I returned to school, one of our professors, who taught us History and Structure of the English Language, told me, “It’s great for me living through this great visionary period. I don’t know if it’s great for you kids growing up in one.”
I still haven’t been able to answer his question.
Laurel Brett is a writer and English professor who wrote a sci/fi, mystery novel about the Sixties that explores the metaverse: The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020.)
