The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America

By Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz

Bud and Ruth Schultz's vivid oral history presents the extraordinary testimony of people who experienced government repression and persecution firsthand. Drawn from three of the most significant social movements of our time--the labor, Black freedom, and antiwar movements--these engrossing interviews bring to life the experiences of Americans who acted upon their beliefs despite the price they paid for their dissent. In doing so, they--and the movements they were part of--helped shape the political and social landscape of the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.

The majority of the voices in this book belong to everyday people--workers, priests, teachers, students--but more well-known figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Abbie Hoffman, and Daniel Ellsberg are also included. There are firsthand accounts by leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, active early in the century; Southern Tenant Farmers Union of the 1930s; Women's Strike for Peace, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and the Hormel meatpackers' Local P-9 in the 1980s. Lively introductions by the authors contextualize these personal statements.

Those who tell their stories in The Price of Dissent, and others like them, faced surveillance and disruption from police agencies, such as the FBI; brutalization by local police; local ordinances and court injunctions limiting protest; inquisitions into beliefs and associations by congressional committees; prosecution under laws that curbed dissent; denaturalization and deportation; and purges under government loyalty programs. Agree with them or not, by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so, they insisted on exercising the precious American right of free expression and preserved it for a new century's dissenters.

Excerpt

It did drag out from 1972 until 1975, for the final peace treaty to take place. There was vast relief that the bombing was over, that the carpet bombing of Vietnam was stopped. When the final treaty was signed, we organized the War Is Over rally. Cora Weiss from Women Strike for Peace got Joan Baez and Phil Ochs and a number of entertainers, and we had this big celebration in Central Park. But there was no overwhelming joy. I think that on an intellectual level I felt some satisfaction - you know, recognizing that our movement had some historical impact. But I wasn't happy. The carnage had been so vast. The death toll of Vietnamese was staggering. The loss of our men for nothing. Fodder. Fifty-eight thousand dead, thousands crippled. It was not the kind of situation that gave one joy.

Phil Ochs Covers: Squirrel Bait - Tape From California

Phil Ochs Covers: Gordon Lightfoot - Changes

Bob Dylan and Selections from the Newport Folk Festival - July 28, 1963

On this date on Porch 2 at the Newport Folk Festival, Pete Seeger hosted "Topical Songs and New Songwriters," which featured Jim Garland, Peter La Farge, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, The Freedom Singers, Mississippi John Hurt, Mike Settle, and Bob Dylan.

Audio/Video from Newport 1963:

Phil Ochs' set included "Too Many Martyrs" and "Talking Birmingham Jam."

Later, Mississippi John Hurt took the stage with "Candy Man Blues":


Bob Dylan's set included a performance of "Who Killed Davey Moore":


To close the set, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger performed "Playboys and Playgirls":


Other songs performed that day:

Jim Garland - "I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister":


Tom Paxton - "Ramblin' Boy":


Pete Seeger - "Tom Dooley":


Bob Dylan - "Masters of War":


The complete set list from July 28, 1963 on Porch 2 is as follows:

1. Pete Seeger - (intro regarding topical songs and new songwriters)
2. Jim Garland - I'm Crazy 'Bout You, Baby
3. Jim Garland - I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister
4. Peter La Farge - Ira Hayes
5. Peter La Farge - Custer
6. Peter La Farge - Coyote, My Little Brother
7. Tom Paxton - The Willing Conscript
8. Tom Paxton - Ramblin' Boy
9. Pete Seeger - Intoxicated Rat
10. Pete Seeger - Weave Room Blues
11. Phil Ochs - Too Many Martyrs
12. Phil Ochs - Talking Birmingham Jam
13. Phil Ochs - Talking Cuban Crisis
14. Pete Seeger - Tom Dooley
15. The Freedom Singers - Fighting For My Rights
16. The Freedom Singers - I Love Your Dog, I Love My Dog
17. The Freedom Singers - Calypso Freedom
18. Mississippi John Hurt - Candy Man Blues
19. Mississippi John Hurt - Stagolee
20. Mississippi John Hurt - Trouble, I've Had It All My Days
21. Mike Settle - Little Boy
22. Mike Settle - Sing Hallelujah
23. Tom Paxton with Pete Seeger - A Little Brand New Baby
24. Tom Paxton with Pete Seeger - Hope You Have a Mighty Nice Life
25. Bob Dylan - Who Killed Davey Moore
26. Bob Dylan - Masters of War
27. Bob Dylan with Pete Seeger - Playboys and Playgirls

Phil Ochs Covers: The Limeliters - Power and the Glory

The Portable Sixties Reader

Edited with an Introduction by Ann Charters

From civil rights to free love, JFK to LSD, Woodstock to the Moonwalk, the Sixties was a time of change, political unrest, and radical experiments in the arts, sexuality, and personal identity. In this anthology of essays, poetry, and fiction by some of America's most gifted writers, renowned Sixties authority Ann Charters sketches the unfolding of this most turbulent decade. Organized by thematically linked chapters chronicling important social, political, and cultural movements, The Portable Sixties Reader features such luminaries as Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Susan Sontag, Denise Levertov, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Ishmael Reed, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Rachel Carson, and Gary Snyder. The concluding chapter, "Elegies for the Sixties," offers tributes to ten figures whose lives - and deaths - captured the spirit of the decade.

Excerpt

In the section of 1968 titled "Yeats in the Gas," Sanders described his response to a comment by his friend, the folksinger Phil Ochs, after they had experienced the brutal treatment of the Chicago police during the Democratic Convention.

YEATS IN THE GAS

Phil Ochs later mentioned how
in the horror of the gas and the clubs
he thought of Yeats

"I was in the worst police brutality," he said, "right when they charged up by the Hilton. I was between the charging cops and the crowd and I raced into a doorway in the nick of time. . . . While racing away from the tear gas, I just had a sensation of Yeats. I thought of Yeats (laughs) for some reason."

I wondered about that for years
till it dawned that he might
have been thinking of Yeats' poem
"Easter 1916"

and its repeated line
A terrible beauty is born

That is, those crazy youth and not-so-youth
their hasty signs, their hasty props, their hasty yells
were transformed in the Chicago injustice so that
A terrible beauty was born

"Chicago has no government," said Allen Ginsberg a few weeks later. "It's just anarchy maintained by pistol. Inside the convention hall it was rigged like an old Mussolini strong-arm scene - police and party hacks everywhere illegally, delegates shoved around and kidnapped, telephone lines cut."

Phil Ochs Covers: Chad Mitchell Trio - Draft Dodger Rag