E Mail To Morris Edelson: On Madison, Wisconsin Counterculture, September, 12, 2008 - Bernard PyronMorris Edelson was editor of Quixote Magazine during the years of the counterculure and anti-war movement of about 1966 to 1975 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Quixote was a little literary magazine which published mostly poems, short stories and other kinds of creative writing by those of literary bent. Quixote published Bob Watt's book of poems, called Watt's Happening, before Watt became well known as the Beat Poet of Milwaukee.. In 1967 Quixote published my article The Night of the Great Salt, about firing salt kilns at night in Whitewater, Wisconsin with Clayton Bailey.So you returned to Texas and to East Texas.
I became a member of the Lone Star Diaspora when I left Austin in 1956
for Madison. But I get interested in Texas
and search Google for things Texas. I was looking for an online
recording of talks by J. Frank Dobie in his typical South Texas Brush
Country accent, which I had when I first arrived in Madison. I still
have a residual of it. But I never did find an audio online by Dobie.
On my main blog, JournalHome, I have at least two articles on Texas,
Coyote Hunters of the Quesenberry (Southwest Bexar county) and Aunt
Annie, Clay McGonagill and the Cattlemen and Trail Drivers of Old
Sweet Home (Lavaca county).
Even though I was glad to be out of Madison in 1978, out of the
Children's Zoo, Psycho City, Fool's Paradise, Mind Swamp, etc., I find
I am interested in it but mostly in the Madison counterculture of the
period of about 1967 to 1975.
Recently I corresponded by E Mail with Michael William Doyle, who
wrote Free Radicals and is co-editor of Imagine
Nation, essays on the counterculture.
Doyle says "The trick to writing about the Sixties counterculture, I
think, is in how you define this "movement" in way that is coherent
and plausibly differentiates it from the other, more conventional
social movements with which it is inextricably intertwined."
He might say the sex lib movement in Madison in the sixties
was such a conventional social movement intertwined with the
counterculture. In the period of about 1961-64 there was some "free
sex" going on among undergraduates at UW, but this wasn't the
counterculture.
Then, in the later sixties from about 1967 on, many more young people
in the University and others in the community were interested in sex
and engaged in it, who did not take any form of drugs. There was a great deal
of social life among university people from about 1967 to the late seventies,
if not before. Someone might write a history of the Blue
Bus. In the sixties the Blue Bus was an old bus painted blue, whch housed
a few medical students, a doctor to write prescriptions, and volunteers who
dealt with sexually transmitted diseases, some years before AIDS. In the early
seventies the Blue Bus was in an old building not far from Mifflin Street.
Even though the sexual liberation movement was not limited to the
counterculture, like the counterculture it attacked Christian morality and
the family. It led to instability of relationships and to divorce somewhat later.
Another movement that was intertwined with the later counterculture in
the early seventies was the New Age Occult movement. It had roots in
the late 19th century English Occult Revival, in Helena Blatatsky and
Alice Bailey, but was popularized within the counterculure and spread
with the counterculture.
I see Paul Soglin's history of the Mifflin Street Co-op on the
Internet. The Mifflin Street Co-op was a grocery store which sold
some bulk foods and produce and was run by members of the local
counterculture commmunity.
They sold membership in the co-op for a few dollars and you had to have a card
to buy there. Someone might write on the Whole Earth Co-op on East
Johnson. It came a little later and was more linked to the back to the
earth movement, whose name Whole Earth comes from the Whole Earth
Catalog. Paul Soglin was a leader of the anti-war movement at the University
of Wisconsin in the sixties and early seventies who had become a member of the
Madison City Council and soon the mayor of Madison, Later, as mayor he was
instrumental in ending the Monona Terrace Wars and finally getting the city
and state to build the Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace Project. When it
was finally under construction in the late nineties, Wright had been dead since 1959.
Doyle says in his first E Mail "As for archival sources, the Wisconsin
Historical Society can help, as can the UW-Madison Memorial Library
archives and special collections dept."
I knew the name of the person in charge of that special collections
unit at one time. No doubt Quixote is there.
This got me to thinking of you and I looked you up on Google. Have you
written on the Madison counterculture, not the anti-war movement which
is also interesting. I generally don't read books but maybe you have
something on the Internet.
When did you get out of Madison?
In October of 2007 I did an interview which was supposedly on my book
The Great Rebellion. It was on one of those Internet radio shows, but
the host led us all over the place. He was interested in the
Frankfurt School, Theodore W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Rogers,
etc.
The audio is at:
There is a download button at the bottom left of the little screen.
My book The Great Rebellion (1985) looks at the contribution of self
psychology, the drug movement, the hippies, feminists and the art
bohemians to four strands of rebellion, which are an increase in
selfishness, revolt against Christian morality. the lowering of man to
his desires, feelings and conditioning, and the denial of objective
reality. I use the findings of Herbert Hendin in The Age of
Sensation, Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Daniel
Yankelovich's, New Rules. The book does not deal with the
counterculture in Madison, Wisconsin or elsewhere.
Anecdotal Material in the Great
Rebellion. Several times I talk about a sculptor friend of mine from
the sixties, but do not give his name. He is Clayton Bailey, who
started out as a potter. I was also a potter then. He and I and two or
three others made up the Wisconsin Art Bohemian group I knew. Back in
the period of 1960 to 1962 in Madison we met regularly, usually in our
house, to hold "sessions" of improvised music, based on renaissance,
Japanese and folk music. I got to know Clayton Bailey in 1960 in
pottery classes at the University of Wisconsin. He was a regular in our
improvisation group, though he only played the Jew's Harp and
mouth-bow. Dennis Murphy was the chief musician, along with Raleigh
Williams and sometimes others, such as another potter, Monona Rossol,
who was a classical singer and into the theater.
Clayton Bailey and I taught together
for a year in the art department at Whitewater State College in
Wisconsin. We were into surrealism and dada, or at least what we knew
of those art movements. I put Bailey in a major art journal, Artforum,
in California in 1964 and had helped him get his position as Artist in
Residence at Whitewater. He was making ceramic sculpture then and
experimenting with inflated rubber sculpture. He did some interesting
ceramic sculpture satire on "Mad Dentists" and "Mad Doctors." When he
got to California he started making ceramic "finds," or bones of
fantastic critters his "other self" Dr George Gladstone was supposed to
have found. Later in California he taught himself to make metal
sculpture. He became a "shock artist." And he became fairly well known
on the West Coast. He grew a huge moustache, several feet long.
However, by about 1990 or so he was making occult sculpture and devil
sculptures. I broke with him over that.
Bailey has some image
on the West Coast as a weird sculptor. I thought that many who were
into the art bohemian movement in the sixties and seventies had by
1999 become involved in what is called political correctness. They
thought they were still art bohemians but their movement had fizzled
out and was absorbed into the more political movements, especially
political correctness. The surrealist shock artist of 1969 had become
tenured professor and chairman of his art department.
Since I was in social and personality psychology at Wisconsin I was
aware of the important book by Theodore W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality.
I was also aware that it was among the most referenced books in the
shrink journals and books during the fifties and sixties. Adorno
claimed that
Christianity and the family create the authoritarian
personality, which causes fascism.
But when I wrote the Great Rebellion I did not realize that the
counterculture, to some extent, grew out of the influence of the
Frankfurt School. I did not even know then that the LSD drug movement
was promoted in part by Aldous Huxley through Gregory Bateson at the
Palo Alto VA Hospital and through Tim Leary and Richard Alpert at
Harvard. I knew of Ken Kesey, Alpert and Leary but not of Huxley and
Bateson's role in the drug movement.
There is some evidence that the British elite promoted the New
Age Occult movement in the United
States during the 20th century. They also promoted the use of LSD, and
the drug movement after 1962, and the rock music that was a vital part
of the counterculture. For example, Marilynn Ferguson is said to have
been a protogee of Willis Harmon of the Stanford Research Institute of
Stanford University. Marilynn Ferguson was a New Age Occult leader who
wrote The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980). Willis Harmon was influenced by
the Tavistock Institute of England, which was part of the British
elite, to introduce a counterculture in the U.S. that would weaken
Christianity and the American family.
On Marilyn Ferguson under influence from Stanford Research Institute's Willis
Harman see:
Aldous Huxley - of the British
Elite - was important in creating the LSD or drug
movement in both California and in the Boston area through his
protogees Gregory Bateson, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert.
Huxley promoted his LSD project in California by making use of
Alan Watts and Gregory Bateson.
Watts was the
"guru" of a Zen Buddhist cult. Bateson, who had been with the
OSS, became
the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo
Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Bateson was one of the first
to experiment with giving LSD to mental patients and others. The OSS
to which Bateson had belonged, was the Office of Strategic Services, the
American intelligence agency during World War II which was the
forerunner of the CIA.
For Gregory Bateson's promotion of LSD in California see:
During the fall of 1960, Huxley became visiting professor at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. While in the
Boston area Huxley recruited Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert
to help him promote the use of LSD. Leary and Alpert were assistant
professors in the Harvard psychology department.
(Tim Leary bought large amounts of LSD and began experimenting with it.)
In California Bateson continued his LSD operation in the Palo Alto
Veterans Hospital. Among his Palo Alto recruits was the writer
Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson
administered the first dose of "LSD to Ken Kesey.
Kesey soon organized a group of of LSD users called "The
Merry Pranksters." They toured the country in a bus
giving out LSD
and helping to develop the then very small counterculture.
The English elite Tavistock Institute also helped set up the rock and
roll, drug and hippie movements.
According to the web site
"What exactly is the Tavistock
Institute? The purpose of Tavistock is "Is to weaken the moral fiber of
the nation and to demoralize workers in the labor class by creating
mass unemployment. As dwindle due to the post industrial zero growth
policies introduced by the Club of Rome, the report envisages
demoralized and discouraged workers resorting to alcohol and drugs. The
youth of the land will be encouraged by means of rock music and drugs
to rebel against the status quo, thus undermining and eventually
destroying the family unit. In this regard, the Committee commissioned
Tavistock Institute to prepare a blueprint as to how this could be
achieved. Tavistock directed Stanford Research to under take the work
under the direction of Professor Willis Harmon. This work later became
known as the ´Aquarian Conspiracy´" The "Committee" is the Committe of
300, an organization of
the ruling elite.
The site goes on to say "The
Tavistock Institute headquarters are located in London, England.
Sigmund Freud became the prophet of Tavistock when he moved to England,
settling in Maresfield Gardens. He was given a mansion by Princess
Bonaparte. Tavistock´s pioneer work in behavioral science along with
Freudian lines of "controlling" humans established it as the world
center of foundation ideology. Its network now extends from the
University of Sussex to the United States through the Stanford Research
Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center
of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State
Department personnel are trained."
The Frankfurt School also played a role in the creation of the American counterculture.
Remember that Theodore W. Adorno in the 1950 book, The Authoritarian Personality,
said that Christianity and the family cause the authoritarian personality which leads
to fascism. Therefore, the Frankfurt School tried to manipulate the Gentile Culture
from their positions as American
university professors. They sought to weaken the cohesiveness of the
Gentile Culture by creating radical movements, i. e., the
counterculture. The members of the Frankfurt School had come from Nazi
Germany in the thirties and became highly influential professors in
American universities. In addition to Theodore W. Adorno, other members
of the Frankfurt
School included Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.
Keven MacDonald wrote The Frankfurt School of Social Research
and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances
He says "The
Authoritarian Personality attempts to show that gentile group
affiliations, and particularly membership in Christian religious
sects, gentile nationalism, and close family relationships, are an
indication of psychiatric disorder...The opposition of Jewish intellectuals
to cohesive gentile groups and
a homogeneous gentile culture has perhaps not been sufficiently
emphasized...another way of conceptualizing the Jewish advocacy of
radical political movements...
is that these political movements may be understood as simultaneously
undermining gentile intrasocietal group affiliations, such as
Christianity and nationalism, at the same time allowing for the
continuation of Jewish identification."
The counterculure of the sixties was a radical cultural movement
with several different cultural strands, all undermining Christianity
and the American family.
The link to Keven MacDonald's work on the Frankfurt School is:
Wickipedia says "Kevin B. MacDonald,
(born January 24, 1944) is a professor of psychology at California
State University, Long Beach."
Some researchers who are not cultural Marxists have argued that
Cultural Marxists and the Frankfurt School helped spark the
counterculture social movements of the 1960s.
In the period of about 1950 to the early sixties,
the teachings of Theodore W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse
and others of the Frankfurt School were transmitted by
university professors to their students at Berkeley, Brandeis, etc who
spread them. This helped produce the counterculture.
So, following Adorno, the counterculture turned out to be
focused on an anti-Christian and anti-family approach.
I don't agree with Doyle on the importance of the political
movements, the New Left and Feminism, to the original counterculture.
I still think the core movements of the
counterculture were the drug movement after 1962 and the hippie movement.
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Monday, August 27, 2018
E Mail To Morris Edelson: On Madison, Wisconsin Counterculture, September, 12, 2008 -
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