Leaders from the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism

By David DeLeon

The radicals and liberals of the 1960s expressed ideas that continue to both attract and repel people decades later. Nostalgia books relive the Woodstock festival and the protests; past Presidents Bush and Reagan remember the era with unease; and scholars skirmish over the meaning of the period. DeLeon is the first to provide information on activists of the period and their continued activities into the 1990s. With major sections on Racial Democracy, Peace and Freedom, Sexuality and Gender, the Environment, Radical Culture, and Visions of Alternative Societies, the book includes entries on a wide selection of nationally prominent personalities of the 1960s. In addition to those who dominated those years, the volume includes earlier activists who came into prominence in the 1960s and those who have come into the limelight since the 1960s. Each entry provides a biographical sketch, but the focus is on the person's basic concepts or the essence of his or her work or persona and the reponse to these. The volume also includes extensive bibliographies on the individuals and the period.

Excerpt

When Phil was a teenager, the Ochs family moved to Columbus, Ohio. Phil spent his last two years of high school at Staunton (Military) Academy in Virginia, where he played in the band and quickly became, in the words of his buddies, "Mr. Universe." In 1958 he enrolled at Ohio State University, wearing a red jacket similar to that worn by James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. That spring he dropped out of the university, telling his mother he was wasting her money and his time. He headed to Florida in search of singing jobs, worked washing dishes and selling shoes, spent fifteen days in jail (vagrancy), and took the Greyhound bus home. The following fall he returned to Ohio State intent on a journalism major. There he met Jim Glover, who was also interested in music. Glover introduced Ochs to the work of the Weavers, Pete Seeger, and the Legendary Woody Guthrie. Glover's father was a Marxist, and the friendship reinforced the music of Guthrie, the Weavers, and Seeger to turn Ochs's thoughts to the plight of exploited workers and the evils of capitalism. Glover and Ochs became a folk duet, the Sundowners, singing traditional folk songs and topical songs Ochs composed himself. Although Phil was writing extensively for the Ohio State newspaper, The Lantern (columns and musical reviews), he grew quickly dissatisfied with its studied neutrality on hard political and social issues, and founded his own paper, The Word. He also published letters to the editor in commercial newspapers, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When The Lantern decided he was too controversial to make a good editor, he left Ohio State, one semester short of graduation, for New York City.

In New York he gravitated naturally to Greenwich Village, to Gerde's Folk City with its Monday talent night. In March 1963 Ochs opened at Gerde's for John Hammond, who also introduced him to Broadside magazine, for which he began to write as he had written for The Word: prolifically and with spirit. "There was no question that Phil was major, from the very outset," Dave Van Ronk recalled. The Bleecker Street apartment of Phil and Alice Ochs became a meeting place visited regularly by virtually every significant Village musician and most visitors to the Village. When folk music achieved national popularity in 1963, Ochs expected - and was expected by others in the Village - to ride its popularity to national fame. But when the popular ABC television program "Hootenanny" passed over Peter Seeger and the Weavers because they "wanted better folk singers," first Joan Baez refused to appear on the program, and then Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton (against the advice of Seeger, who understood better than they the politics of the possible) organized a formal boycott of the program. "Hootenanny" was ultimately cancelled by ABC, thereby aborting the folk flowering on national television and cutting Ochs, and others, off network TV.

Phil Ochs Covers: Joe & Eddie - That's the Way It's Gonna Be

Joe Hill

By Gibbs M. Smith

The definitive study of Joe Hill, American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and song writer.

"Joe Hill became symbolic of the kind of individual sacrifice that would make a revolutionary new society possible. Thus labor radicals, communists, and novelists and playwrights such as John Dos Passos, Wallace Stegner, and Barrie Stavis used the circumstances of Hill's convictions and manner of his death to create a legend that transformed 'just another forgotten migrant worker' into 'The Man Who Never Died,' as the song which Paul Robeson enthralled audiences in the 1930s and 1940s had it ... Gibbs Smith has served us well by recapturing the memory of a man whose songs, to quote another wobbly, evoked the spirit of radicals who were the 'very epitome of guts and gallantry,' a handful of homeless heroes touched by true romance. Men and women whose spirits were stirred far above their belly-need; men and women inspired by visions of heaven on earth. Now, as then, society needs such men and women."
-Melvyn Dubofsky, The New York Times Book Review

Excerpt

"Joe Hill," a poem by Woody Guthrie, was published in 1961, and a ballad about Hill (twenty-two verses and music) by Phil Ochs appeared in Broadside in November 1966.

Cops of the World

Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange and U.S.-Vietnam Relations

Brief History of Post-War U.S.-Vietnam Relations and the Agent Orange Issue

Phil Ochs Covers: Pinhead Gunpowder - Song Of My Returning

The Historical Dictionary of the 1960s

Edited by James S. Olson

Few eras in U.S. history have begun with more optimistic promise and ended in more pessimistic despair than the 1960s. When J.F.K. became president in 1960, the U.S. was the hope of the world. Ten years later American power abroad seemed wasted in the jungles of Indochina, and critics at home wondered whether the U.S. was really the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This book takes an encyclopedic look at the decade--at the individuals who shaped the era, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the youth rebellion. It covers the political, military, social, cultural, religious, economic, and diplomatic topics that made the 1960s a unique decade in U.S. history.

Excerpt

OCHS, PHIL. Phil Ochs was born in El Paso, Texas, December 19, 1940. He was raised in Queens, New York, and attended military school in Virginia. He went to Ohio State University to study journalism, but in Columbus, Ochs became interested in folk music. He moved to New York in 1961. There, in Greenwich Village, he became involved in the folk protest movement with Bob Dylan. A critic of the Vietnam War, Ochs had hits in 1965 with "I Ain't a'Marchin' " and "Draft Dodger Rag." Because of his antiwar posture, Ochs was banned from radio and television in the United States. After the release of his Pleasures of the Harbor album in 1967, Ochs moved to California, where he became interested in rock and roll. His 1968 album Tape from California contained antiwar folk tunes like "War Is Over." By that time Ochs had become a genuine folk hero to the antiwar counterculture, even though he was suffering badly from depression. He committed suicide in 1976.
REFERENCE: Michael Schumacher, There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs, 1996.

Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World

By Rex Weyler

In the summer of 1968, Cummings and McLeod were arrested and charged with criminal libel for awarding a Pontius Pilate Certificate to Judge Lawrence Eckhardt, who had convicted poet and "provisional mayor" Stan Persky on charges of loitering in a public park. The arrest made Cummings a local hero. Allen Ginsberg and folksinger Phil Ochs visited Vancouver to stage a benefit for Persky, McLeod, Cummings, and The Georgia Straight, which faced obscenity and libel charges. Radio host Jack Webster grilled Ginsberg about his support for the radicals. Ginsberg insisted the issues were "free speech, freedom to assemble, and freedom of the press." Webster cut him off. "I don't want to get bogged down in technicalities," he said. Ginsberg laughed. "Into the technicalities of sitting in the park and publishing a newspaper? It's not very technical, Jack."

[...]

Folksinger and stalwart anti-war activist Phil Ochs had agreed to perform at the Amchitka benefit concert as well. The local concert producer added popular British Columbia band Chilliwack to the show and booked the Vancouver Coliseum, a hockey arena. The impending concert sent a buzz through the Shire, The George Straight published a concert poster in a foldout, and thousands went up on lampposts and refrigerators. Hunter and Metcalfe announced the event in the mainstream media, billed as "Joni Mitchell, Chilliwack, Phil Ochs, 'GreenPeace' benefit concert. Presented by the Don't Make A Wave Committee." There was no public advance notice of the mystery guest, James Taylor. At school, Barbara Stowe found herself the centre of attention because she could verify rumours and feed the buzz. A boy she fancied, who had ignored her all year, now hit on her for the latest news. Greenpeace was cool.

The concert was a sellout, the biggest counterculture event of the year. Phil Ochs, the senior pacifist artist at 31, opened the show and spoke most directly to the raison d'etre of the evening with his "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore."