Robert Pardun's SDS Memoir, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties

Veteran activists from the 1960s are a lot like Harvard graduates. They're usually decent, honorable people, often enough you like them, but deep down, in your heart of hearts, you know that they are simply never going to get over it. Typically, the impulse is to just let them reminisce, politely punctuating their tired stories of bygone glory days with the occasional "Oh?" or "Uh-huh," and?in rare instances, if it's someone you really care about?"Gee, I wish I could have been there for that."

But every once in a while you encounter a retired New Left politico who approaches the decade with more thoughtfulness than braggadocio, who earnestly tries to communicate not only the frothy exuberance and pitched moral drama of the 1960s, but also the frustrations, difficulties and disappointments of antiwar activism. Their stories unfold naturally and with the best of intentions; soon enough you realize that they're eager to share their lives with you, not in return for hurrahs and hosannas, but because they have to.

This is the sense one gathers from Robert Pardun's SDS memoir, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties (Shire Press, 376 pages, $15). Pardun was born in Kansas, grew up in Colorado and studied mathematics as a grad student at the University of Texas (UT)?an unlikely pedigree for someone who also served as a national officer in SDS at the height of the antiwar movement, and emerged as a key target of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. But his experience in Austin-SDS meant that, unlike youth activists on the coasts, he simply saw no distinction between the cultural and political rebellion of the 1960s. By far the South's largest activist outpost, Austin was like a world unto its own, a place where the New Left's strategic agenda and its freak subculture seemed melded together.

Although not untouched by the gauzy idealism of the Port Huron generation, Pardun always identified with the "prairie power" faction in SDS: a group that was louder, more irreverent, more pleasure-loving and (here the inevitable sobriquet) more anarchistic than the well-heeled progressives who founded the organization. No Todd Gitlins among them, this crowd aspired less to sophistication and urbanity than to a freewheeling joie de vivre, and when Pardun and his peers arrived on the SDS scene in summer 1965 with jeans and workshirts, outlandish mustaches and no small amount of grass, they injected a heartland ethos into the movement that forever changed its character.

Pardun came to the decade unceremoniously enough, arriving by bus in "hot and sticky" Austin in fall 1963. "A one-year commitment to graduate school" at UT, he reasoned, seemed indisputably easier "than a four-year enlistment in the Air Force."

Although the civil rights movement was by this point in full blossom, Pardun supported it only "intellectually" and from a distance (which is to say, not really at all). But it wasn't long after his arrival at UT that he encountered segregation firsthand and signed himself onto Mississippi's storied Freedom Summer project in 1964, which promoted voter registration and education in the South's most venomous state. By the summer's end, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner had been buried in a mud dam, many other black bodies had been dredged out of local swamps without much fanfare and the Democratic Party's support for civil rights was revealed to be, as one activist put it, "puddle deep."

Meanwhile, Pardun began paying attention to America's nascent involvement in Vietnam, assuming at first that the conflict there owed its origins to "the basic American values of freedom, democracy, and the right to national independence"?values that he, too, believed in, and that had long been championed in history textbooks as the unassailable rationale for the American Revolution. Only everything was fucked up the other way around. "The United States was playing the part of the British while Ho Chi Minh was playing George Washington... The United States was on the wrong side!"

Finally, just as his political awakening was unfolding, Pardun started experimenting with peyote buttons. His first trip his stomach churned until he finally vomited, after which his legs gave way and he crawled to a couch, only to find "thousands of miniature multicolored characters, like cartoon figures, [crawling] from behind the molding along the top of the wall and...chasing each other around the ceiling."

Soon enough, Pardun was a New Left activist of the highest order, organizing locally against the war and counseling against the draft, but he was also helping to launch countercultural celebrations like "Gentle Thursday," an Austin innovation that spread like magic to college towns across the country.

Predictably, as Pardun's activism increased, so, too, did the FBI's attempts to destroy the antiwar movement. In language redolent of his increasing paranoia, Hoover branded the New Left as "a new style of conspiracy...reflected by questionable moods and attitudes, unrestrained individualism, by non-conformism in dress and speech, even by obscene language, rather than by formal membership in specific organizations." From this, Hoover extrapolated that the movement couldn't be intimidated by traditional FBI smear tactics held over from the Red Scare, when political dissidents were called "druggies, commies and perverts." (Calling 1960s youth activists "druggies, commies and perverts" was a little too close to the truth to really injure their dignity; this would be a little like trying to discredit bankers by calling them "greedy manipulators of money.") So Hoover pioneered new tactics: FBI agents instigated personal feuds within the movement, set loyal activists up to look like informants, sabotaged their property and posted ominous letters to their parents, neighbors, employers and university officials. Most unsettling, by 1968 Pardun earned a spot on the FBI's "Rabble Rouser Index," a select list of activists who, it was said, would need to be "neutralized" if the antiwar movement were to be disabled. Predictably, the precise meaning of this creepy term was left undefined.

I suppose it's by now something of a cliche for New Left veterans to contrast the utopian promise of the early 1960s with their alienation in the movement's later years. But sometimes the cliche fits, and with the destruction of SDS, the National Guard killings at Kent State, the townhouse explosion at 18 W. 11th St. and the police murders of the Panthers, Pardun had had enough. Retreating to commune life wasn't easy for him (in fact he makes it sounds like a lot of work), but the "back to the land" movement wasn't entirely apolitical, either. Pardun simply "didn't want to be complicit in what America had become.

"The fabric of America had been torn in a way that can only be matched by looking at the Civil War," Pardun writes. "The people responsible for mass murder in Vietnam, who destroyed the people's trust in the government by wrapping themselves in the flag as they shredded the Bill of Rights, were still in power. These people lied to congress, the press, and the American people about a war in which millions of Vietnamese died...and half the population of South Vietnam fled to the cities to escape Napalm, poison gas, and bombing [from] the US military. The war took away much of the funding for domestic programs and poor people all over America suffered because of it. In the face of this moral tragedy, the government tried to shift the blame onto those of us who protested what they were doing by saying that we were the ones who had destroyed the moral fabric of America with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and disrespect for authority."

Sixties scholars might have a few quarrels with Pardun's failure to recognize the pervasive sexism and homophobia in SDS; indeed, in an impressive feat of acrobatics, Pardun suggests that SDS should be credited with providing a platform for the emergence of early feminism, when in fact the women's liberation movement practically got its start because so many men in SDS treated women terribly. As scholar/activist Jesse Lemisch has observed, this notion "is a little like saying the Democratic Party should be credited for giving birth to the anti-war movement of the sixties...(or that Catholicism should be praised for having given birth to Protestantism)."

Others might wish the memoir were more self-critical and reflective; Pardun capably tells his own story, and he was witness to some of the key events in the movement's history. But he has less to say about the cultural forces that animated the youth revolt. What were the common behaviors, manners and memories that allowed the New Left, a fledgling activist campaign in the early 1960s, to blossom into the largest grassroots movement for social change that the United States has ever seen? Or, to spin it differently, how did so many young people manage to inflate their democratic expectations to such disastrous proportions?

These scholarly quibbles aside, Prairie Radical is an admirable endeavor, and I hope people read it. Pardun capably balances the well-placed idealism that animated the New Left with the unfolding trauma of the Vietnam War, and with the treasonous conduct of the federal government, which (it is shown) spared no cost, and overlooked no opportunity, in its efforts to suppress legitimate dissent. America didn't lose its innocence in the 1960s, if only because it didn't have a great deal of innocence to lose. But so many Americans were bruised by the 1960s. This was the decade when they opted out, finally and forever, from America's ever-present self-celebration. Pardun was among them. The book's last sentence reads like a defiant confession: "I am proud of what I did in the sixties and look forward to continuing to work for a better world with people of all generations."