"Leadership, Honesty and Trust," Knox Book Beat in The Berkeley Times, Oct. 20, 2022.
By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution by David Talbot
My rating:
4 of 5 stars David and Margaret Talbot’s
By the Light of Burning Dreams gives us portraits of fourteen or more specific heroes and the movements and crisis points focusing on “climactic events or turning points in (their) lives” “from this second American Revolution” of the 1960s and 70s where their Triumphs and Tragedies occurred. There’s a tremendous amount of overlap in scenes, events and characters among
Yippie Girl, The Activist's Media Handbook and
Burning Dreams, but each is chronological “non-fiction” from different perspectives, voices and styles.
Gumbo’s “tall, blond, native Californian” “serious revolutionary” friend Anne Weills, for example, shows up as the “paramour” of post-Chicago 7 “flawed leader” and 2917 Ashby Avenue “Red Family” (Gumbo never used that term) resident Tom Hayden in the first chapter, “The Purity of Protest and the Complexity of Politics.” “Radical insurgents who broke into political office in the 1970s” is his category, and the Talbots call his relationship and political partnership with Jane Fonda “one of the most effective political unions in the history of the American Left.” This reflects their interests in cultural changes that brought her to him as antiwar “Hanoi Jane” in 1972 who had just won an Oscar for her performance in the movie
Klute. The Talbots choose to follow heroes or heroic couples in each of their chosen liberation, “Second American Revolution” movements, but I like the way they connect the personal and political lives of their subjects during these periods, with a lot of emphasis on internationals, women and people of color who were vilified, ignored or degraded by the press, government and/or upper classes at the time.
How do the Talbots elucidate both the “Triumphs and Tragedies?” Even “name-dropping” people like Bella Abzug, James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, Bobby Seale and Harvey Milk in one paragraph, and many more throughout the book, gives a sense of the marvelous “cast of characters” and political, intellectual and highly charged creative activity swirling around and interconnecting in the period arching the 60s and 70s. But the “tragedies” were certainly there as well.
Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert visit her parents in Canada before they marry, but on their way home a flight attendant hands them a Toronto Globe with the headline “14,500 U. S. Soldiers Killed in Vietnam in 1968,” the year Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and riots rocked the country. Both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died in late 1970 as a kind of parenthesis, to say nothing of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Czrchoslovaks, Latin Americans and others in resistance movements and invasions all over the world.
“The civil rights movement – which won its greatest victories in the first half of the 1960s – ignited the second American Revolution,” they say. But like the Founding Fathers of the First Revolution, “the nation fell from the ideals of its hallowed founding documents,” caving in to the demands of traditional racism in “States rights” in the South and corrupt politicians in the north and west. Just as maintaining the African slaves was “The nation’s founding betrayal,” abandonment of the hopes of Native and women’s freedoms continued and followed as well.
The second chapter covers Bobby Seale “politically motivating the community” as an Oakland, CA Black Panther primarily, but goes deep into Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver’s contrasting militaristic views.
The shadows of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI chief and “secret police commissar” whose “autocratic powers extended throughout ten presidencies” and his “clandestine counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO)” hover over
all these persons and movements. “Field agents would be instructed to ‘thwart and disrupt’” parties, individuals and movements, “creating ‘factionalism’ and ‘suspicion’ within…ranks and fomenting ‘opposition’ from the (Black or other) community at large.” Indeed, Gumbo pulls clips from her own FBI files to locate times, places and people throughout
Yippie Girl, they are so offensive and diligent in their scrutiny and pursuit of her and Albert's personal and political lives.
The “Sisterhood is Blooming” chapter was a revelation to me (then in Milwaukee and Madison, WI) of the Chicago paramedic abortion services of the “Jane” collective, their dedication to “the rights of a woman to her own body, and also her ability to be economically self-sufficient” through abortion and birth control. Heather Booth learned “moral core” and
“There are sometimes unjust laws, and you need to stand up to the unjust laws and unjust authorities” in work protecting voters in Mississippi in Freedom Summer 1964, carrying courage back home through the arrest of “The Abortion 7,” being freed on bail and then released after Roe v. Wade federally guaranteed rights to abortion in the first trimester under “right to privacy” in January of 1973.
Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Fred Ross and other United Farm Worker and labor organizers are the subject of “The Martyr Complex,” outlining the organization of the grape and lettuce boycotts and Chavez’s fasts leading to his death of a heart attack in 1993. Huerta has continued “fighting the good fight,” “demonstrating for livable wage increases for home care workers” as recently as 2019, at the age of 89.
Craig Rodwell, originator of gay and lesbian bookstores Oscar Wilde and Christopher Street, moved to New York City in 1958 from Chicago. He moved in gay circles and had a long term love affair with Harvey Milk. After depression, a suicide attempt and then his inspirations of Freedom Summer and Antiwar protests, he began to organize with Philadelphia and other cities' activists to break out of their “deviant” status, wanting to be “out,” legally and openly, in bars controlled by gays rather than the Mafia. The Stonewall Raid June 28, 1969 did not go well for the New York City Vice Squad, and the Pride Parade to Central Park’s Sheep Meadow he helped organize the next year fulfilled his lifetime dream of liberation.
“We All Shine On,” the 1968 to 2020 chapter on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s activism combined with their lives as artists, musicians and lovers is the best short portrait of both I’ve ever read. Peace, love and rock and roll; constantly harassed by the FBI, racists, misogynists, psychic and drug-leeches and Beatles-lovers, they persisted. With deep stories of their contacts, inspirations and use of their money, celebrity, the media and amazing talent for good in the world, the Talbot’s depiction is stellar. John especially, had “wit, candor and self-deprecating humor about issues that bitterly divided the American people,” and Yoko, an “endless optimist,” balanced Lennon with an urge “to do our best to keep the world floating and not sinking.”
“The Great Escape” chronicles the American Indian Movement, Wounded Knee in 1890 and 1973, Dennis Banks, Russell Means and Madonna Thunder Hawk in their 72-day standoff with Nixon’s, the governor’s and tribal GOONS military barrage. Their triumphs and tragedies inspired not only Native peoples worldwide, but those “living to fight another day” who went to Standing Rock in 2016 with their words and example.
A
revolution is a rebellion that
replaces a system with a “sudden and momentous change” to another system in cyclical motion (American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition (2016). This was not a political rebellion against government persons and policies only, although the repressive, military-industrial imperialism of the Nixon and Reagan eras and assassinations of progressive change leaders certainly brought that on. The Talbots expand the political context to “the sweeping social and cultural transformation” that would, I would say, inexorably, if not "suddenly," “keep the unfinished work of US democracy alive” to this day. People can resist and rebel against oppressive regimes, policies, social and government injustices with many forms of action, protest and personal communication and commitment to change without always rebelling violently.
Written as a well-researched third-person narrative of “this volcanic period,” with many interviews and quotes from subjects, their writings and their friends, families and compatriots of the period;
By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution won a well-deserved Best General Non-Fiction (2021) Award at the Northern California Book Reviewers ceremony September 11th of 2022.
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