Old Fashioned Commie-Nazi Brawl

15.

Perhaps because WAM was “my” organization, I felt an extra twinge of excitement as I joined the picket line at the school board meeting that chill evening of early January, 1974. I found most such demonstrations exhilarating, but this time we were protesting the presence of Nazis – uniformed members of the American Nazi Party – at the meeting. It was nice to be attacking an enemy that was universally dispised for a change, and the party and its base were out in force, perhaps a hundred strong.

After five years, my teaching career had achieved a modicum of stability. I still didn’t have a permanent contract, but I had a year-long temporary assignment as a math resource teacher at Visitacion Valley Elementary School in the southeast corner of the city. I had full pay and full benefits. I spent much time developing a math resource center and working with manageably small groups of students. I didn’t have to take work home with me. My work life was as happy as it had ever been.

As the meeting was about to start, I marched with the WAM picket line into the large auditorium. Seated in a neat row at the center were 14 men dressed in full Nazi regalia.

Led by Yvonne Golden at the microphone, a black teacher whom we identified rightly or wrongly with our arch rival, the Communist Party USA, the crowd chanted “Throw the Nazis out! Throw the Nazis out!”

The Nazis were there to for the second week in a row – the previous week there had been only four – to protest an attempt use bussing to integrate the San Francisco schools.

The chanting went on for at least 20 minutes, without the board even trying to call itself to order. Then, quite suddenly, to my – and everyone else’s – surprise, a group of about a dozen people, men and women I recognized as PLP members rose up behind the Nazis and began physically to carry out the chant. I realized right away to my simultaneous delight and dismay, that my comrades were implementing a secret plan. Fists were flying, people were screaming, chaos reigned.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I join in the melee or just let my comrades do all the work? Then I saw right in front of me a man in a beige sport coat and tie clubbing people – my comrades -- with a short baton. I assumed he was some kind of plain clothes Nazi. On sheer impulse, I grabbed his arm.

His club came down hard on my face, and the salty taste blood filled my mouth. I hit the floor. Seconds later, I was in hand-cuffs, still bleeding from the lip. As I now looked around, I saw the room swarming with uniformed police in riot gear – this move was clearly planned as well. In another five minutes, I was hauled out of the building and thrown into the back of paddy wagon along with a number of my comrades, Ellen, Steve, Bill, and others whose names I no longer remember.

My mouth hurt. I was confused. I was a little scared, though reassured by the presence of my comrades. I guessed I had done the right thing. The fact that the plan had been secret bothered me some, yet I could see that it was done partly to protect me from this very situation, to keep me from being associated with the attack and thereby protect my position with the school district.

We were taken downtown. I was booked on felony assault on a police officer. What? He was a police? I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Nazi. Maybe he was both. Assault? I was trying to stop him from assaulting others. Gradually my doubts about my role were replaced by a sense of righteous victimization. I was a cause.

About 7 of us were arrested, 5 men and 2 women, including Yvonne Golden, who had nothing to do with the attack. The 5 men spent the night in the felony tank at the city jail among the dope dealers and armed robbers, all of whom simply ignored us, as if we were from an alternate universe.

Sasha met me the next morning. She had had to put up the house to pay my $2500 bail. She took me to the dentist, my regular dentist, who stitched up my lip and to his credit, hardly mentioned my notoriety: Our “old fashioned Commie-Nazi brawl” was all over the papers – it even made national news – complete with names of the arrested.

The principal of my school, a well-known racist head of the Teamster’s Union chapter for principals, tried to get me dismissed. Once again I had to meet with the district's Personnel Director, Bob Seymour, a guy who had tried to be fair to me over the years, who kept me around finding me temporary assignments. I had the sense of him trying to be living disproof of my ideology that characterized the school system as fascistically undemocratic. This time he told me that the state would be looking into revoking my credential. I told him that I innocently grabbed the guy’s club, not knowing he was a cop, that I had no connection to WAM, an assertion he clearly didn’t believe.

Sasha was sympathetic, but scared, especially after the Nazis started calling our house. “Tell your commie husband he better be careful,” they said.

“I’m taking the kids to my mother’s in Palo Alto, Henry,” she told me.

“These chickenshit clowns are not going to do anything,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I can’t take that chance.”

I hugged her and I hugged Benjie and Zena, now 8 months old. I watched her drive away with a sinking feeling. Wasn’t I the victim here? Didn’t I need her support? It never occurred to me that her reaction might have had something to do with the fact that she was Jewish. She didn’t deserve it, and on some level I knew that, but I did feel a sense of profound betrayal, an excuse I may have been looking for to give up on the marriage.

I briefly enjoyed a certain celebrity. There were fundraisers to support the “Anti-Nazi Seven” as we’d come to be called. I spoke about how the police had interrupted my freedom of speech, since I had a bandage on my mouth from where I’d been hit. Sasha came to one of these events and spoke thus: “I don’t support Henry’s politics, but I support him. He didn’t do anything wrong.” This was not the kind of thing the party leaders liked to hear from party spouses, and I wanted to crawl through the floor.

Led by Ellen, a feisty blond parent organizer, at the arraignment we all declared that we would defend ourselves in pro per, a tactic the party sometimes used, with mixed success, to attempt to embarrass the judicial system. This time though the party leadership didn’t want to waste resources on a major trial, so when we were offered a plea bargain that reduced the charges to misdemeanor “disrupting a public meeting” with a sentence of 3 weekends in jail, the party jumped at it.

With some support from the union, I was reinstated by the district to my job at Vis Valley. They transferred the principal instead. I doubt whether the principal transfer had anything to do with me, but it did make things easier.

That spring, we served our sentences in the city jail, 3 weekends, Friday night to Monday morning. Despite the fact that Steve, Bill, and I were in jail together, despite our attempts to amuse ourselves by playing hockey with crumpled balls of paper, despite our stimulating cellmates, an interesting crew of Iranian gas siphoners, despite being allowed to bring in all kinds of books including Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” – the experience was excruciatingly boring, perhaps enough so for me to avoid going to jail again for the rest of my life.

Uncle John's Legacy

14.

My Uncle John died that summer and left me almost $40,000, a fair amount of money in those days. I didn’t go to the funeral. He was an embarrassment to the family: it’s hard to know which of his characteristics was the worst. He was enormously fat. He was blatantly homosexual. He was a serious alcoholic, and in fact died of cirrhosis. He was an insurance salesman. And he was a flagrant anti-Semite and racist. Still, perhaps because he was such a mess, by the time I was in college, I managed to conjure some sympathy for him. He had a huge belly, a florid German face. His oily brown hair was swept back over his head. He looked a bit like J. Edgar Hoover, who happened to be my 3rd cousin, but on my father’s side.

I remember having lunch with him when I was in my early twenties, in his dark Eastside Milwaukee flat, in a neighborhood that was becoming increasingly black at the time. His apartment was full of clashing oriental rugs and smelled of some cloying floral aftershave mixed with mothballs. He introduced me to his downstairs tenant, who was clearly his sometime lover, an obsequious houseboy of a man. He showed me his .38 revolver, a male bonding ritual. “You can’t be too careful in this neighborhood,” he said. He avoided the “n” word, a gesture I appreciated, as by that post-FSM time, my politics were well known in the family.

He was drinking straight vodka out of a jar as he cooked. He was renowned in the family as a great cook, an attribute which went a fair distance in mitigating his other flaws. That afternoon, he cooked t-bone steaks and tuna stuffed tomatoes, the latter a delicacy that has become a part of my own limited culinary repertoire.

I don’t recall what we might have talked about. I imagine I told him of my interest in becoming a writer, with psychiatry as a fall-back. He probably told me how much his carpets were worth.

As I left the flat, he called down to me from the top of the stairs: “Be a man, Henry. Don’t be one of those Beatle types. Be a man!” I thought that was hilarious coming from him – so not a man himself. Yet, I felt something significant for him, a softening of that knot of coldness in my chest which enabled me to dismiss so many people.

Once I received the inheritance from him, I tried to do the right thing as an emerging Communist. I gave half the money to my wife. And I gave half of my share to the PLP.

The party was launching a new front group at the time and had scheduled a founding convention. Hari, the new city leader, a wiry man of East Indian heritage who came into prominence as a leader of the Third World Liberation Front during the San Francisco State Strike, met with me to see if he could get me to give even more money. “What do you need it for?” he asked. I carried around a hefty suitcase full of guilt, so I gave an extra $2500 to support the convention, which was held in the social hall of the Congregational Church at Geary and Franklin.

Hari had wanted an organization that would reach broadly to unite leftist forces in the unions with a name like Labor Action Alliance or something, but once someone suggested “Worker’s Action Movement,” a chant swept through the hall filled mostly with PLPers and friends: “WAM the bosses! WAM the bosses” – naming the group by consensus.

I noticed once again that there were two competing ideas of how to build the party: build broad united fronts (Hari’s view) with other leftists or come off as the most militant force and attract rank and file workers (the prevailing view). I didn’t have the political confidence yet to have an opinion of my own.

But I did have an ironic sense of WAM being “my” organization: thanks to my Uncle John, I had bought and paid for it.

The Life of the Party

13.

I loved being in the party at first. I loved the powerful sense of identity it gave me, something I never had before. I loved the sense of purpose, of being part of something larger than myself. I even loved what most people hated about the PLP, it’s dogged (and dogmatic) certainty that it, and no other entity, was right.
Our party club in the San Francisco schools had a dynamic leader in Kathy O’hara. Big boned, a little dumpy, stringy hair, she exuded a confidence that I could only marvel at. She had charisma. The club met weekly. We usually discussed some theory, out of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution,” or, increasingly, out of PL magazine. It had been about 2 years since “The “Road to Revolution III” had come out, a seminal screed that severed the party’s relationship with China and attacked the nationalism of every other “revisionist” so called “communist” party in the world. We (and our miniscule allied parties in Mexico, Canada, and Great Britain) alone were the keepers of the flame.

Yet we attracted some incredibly smart people, including I learned by the grapevine a guy I knew at Exeter who won all the smarts awards and got involved at Harvard (probably never joined the party). Despite the persistence of sectarianism and dogmatism, which most of us squirmed at from time to time, the party had two things going for it. One was it’s insistence on organizing the working class. The party chairman, Milt Rosen, had written a pamphlet called “Build a Base in the Working Class.” It wisely counseled comrades to make enduring friendships with working class people. The second thing was its commitment to “smashing” racism. The party understood that racism was the primary obstacle to the working class unity that would have to develop if a revolutionary movement were to succeed. While masses of blacks did not flock to the party – our teacher’s club was all white – the party as a whole was reasonably well integrated for that time when Black Nationalism – which the party both courageously and foolishly attacked – was on the rise.

As a new party member, my job was to organize a march to Sacramento with the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT). I managed to destroy the group. I was the one proposing the march, under the auspices of the Committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We got the California Teachers Association to sponsor 3 busses, but were barely able to fill one. We had about 30 people. Wilson Riles, the black, progressive Superintendent of Public Instruction was going to speak. My friend Barbara, an ex-PLPer, was to answer him. I got to be the last speaker, a position I have always favored.

Riles made a good speech, decrying the lack of funding for public schools, ironic now, considering how far the support for public schools has fallen in California since 1971. Barbara attacked the speech, essentially arguing that it was Riles fault for not fighting hard enough for more funding. Riles returned to the mike as said “If you think Wilson Riles is the enemy, you are seriously deluded.”

Then I made my speech. I had “vetted” it to one of the “center forces” on the bus, a woman leader of OUT. She said it sounded like an ego trip to her. “Okay,” I said, “but do you object to my giving it?”

“No,” she said.

My speech went something like: “My name is Henry Hitz, and I’m a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist Party. We believe that there will be sufficient jobs for teachers and that schools will only start to improve once we have have a working class revolution!”

The speech was greeted by groans, and the founder of OUT, a nice enough middle class fellow, turned off the microphone on me.

I thought that’s what party members did, called for revolution at every opportunity. Indeed, there was a section of the party that believed this, but not the West Coast leadership. The OUT leadership attacked me, and the PLP leadership attacked me. This was the first time I noticed that here were simmering disagreements about how PLP worked in “united front” organizations, disagreements, which, years later, would erupt into a full-blown split in the party. As for OUT, even though I apologized profusely at the post-mortem meeting regarding the march, it never met again.

I had better luck organizing the Substitute Caucus, which along with the Teachers Action Caucus, worked in the local AFT chapter to overthrow the “sell-out” union leadership. This effort was fairly sophisticated: there was even a club of “underground” party members who because they weren’t publicly identified with the party, were able to reach out more effectively to the center. In the union elections, I was set to run for substitute representative when I got a call from a party muckymuck in New York asking me to instead make sure the vote count was honest. I was disappointed, but I carried out my assignment dutifully. My comrade Lena, a dark-haired beauty I had my eye on, ran instead. Astonishingly, the combined caucuses won 4 seats on the 12 member executive board of the union.

Meanwhile, life on the home front grew increasingly contentious. The word I coined at the time do describe my life was “hecticism.” I felt like I was trying to serve two masters, the party and my wife. The party required of me at least 3 meetings a week: a club meeting, a caucus meeting, a union meeting. And, I needed to spend at least one weekend morning standing in front of this or that supermarket hawking my quota of 20 Challenges, The Communist Paper. Ten cents. Written in this pseudo working class argot that I found alternately annoying and endearing: “The bosses quaked in their boots as 25 members of the PLP picketed U. S. Steel demanding 30 hours work for 40 hours pay…”

For every meeting I went to, Sasha required that I serve an evening of child care. Plus I had to do half the cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping. All this so Sasha could write. She had quit her job to write full time, a decision I both respected and resented. I wished I had the same luxury, as I had never given up my desire to write, and yet I secretly regarded this ambition in both her and me as “bourgeois.” Wasn’t there a revolution to fight?

Our new daughter Zena, born in May 1973, enabled us to paper over our differences. She came into our unwieldy alliance, and seemed to realize right away that if she was going to keep the family together, she had to be perfect. She was a perfect baby, sleeping through the night after the first month, infinitely cute as she took her first baby steps and babbled her first words. I didn’t understand then as I do now how much of “cuteness” is a survival strategy. With her dark Frida Kahlo eyebrows, she looked more like Sasha than Sasha herself, one of Sasha’s friends used to joke. Zena did a yeoman’s job of keeping the family together in the tumultuous first year of her life. More than that, no one could have done.

Winter in the Desert

12.

After my experience at Raphael Weill, I was delighted to substitute day-to-day. I let go my dream of ever having my own classroom, and enjoyed the stresslessness of going to a different school every day. I also was able to spend time being a father to my new son, Benjamin Cisco.

I had a brief bout of post-partem depression just after he was born – yes, men get it too – in the midst of the stress of Raphael Weill as well, and the feeling was of being trapped. Benjy, as we called him, had a touch of colic, and was sometimes inconsolable at bedtime. Many was the time I snatched him up nervously in his crying fit, took him out to the car, strapped him in his car seat, and drove him around the block until he fell asleep. I had yet to learn the crying was a baby’s job.

I borrowed a little money from my father, and we bought a three bedroom Victorian house in Noe Valley for $29, 500. Sasha and I reached a certain equilibrium, a sweet peace together that I remember exemplified by a scene when we were visiting my parents in Wisconsin. We brought peace to that family as well with the first grandchild. My father stopped getting into edgy arguments with Sasha over the role of women, arguments unsubtly laced with hints of anti-Semitism. One evening, we walked down the hill toward the lake, each of us holding one of Benjy’s hands, chanting as he bounced along proto-walking, “Bookie-na-na…bookie-na-na…” Benjy’s idiosyncratic word for his bottle.

I spent my free time working on a short story originally titled “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” later changed because of the PLP’s shift away from Maoism to “Fighting Back is Winning.” The story was based on the true story of a striking oil worker who was run over and killed by a scab truck. The story was replete with sectarian references to the PLP and SDS, but I felt like I had created a real working class woman character in the guy’s wife, and that I was onto something in my description of how he was feeling as he died, a recurrent theme in my stories and novels.

In the fall of 1971, I stumbled upon an organization called the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT) that had managed to attract the press. I began working in the organization as a Communist. We, a former PLP member and I, formed a committee of the organization called the committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We called a meeting, got the press to announce it, much to my surprise, and 70 people showed up.
Sasha and I renewed our conflicts around the amount of time I was spending at meetings. We would negotiate legalistic contracts involving hours of meetings traded for hours of child care, and I felt myself running out of hours. By the Thanksgiving, I was ready to call it quits with her. My political work too convinced me that I needed to be all the way in the party. I decided to join the party, and in making that decision, I fully understood that it would cost me my marriage. I didn’t tell either Sasha or the party my decision. I waited until we went on vacation over the Christmas holidays.

The car trip to Baja was unreal. It was as if we were traveling in jello, my secret congealing the air between us. Unable to separate my long-term and short-term goals, I imagined that we would get to the Mexican beach, I would tell her of my plans to join the party, and we would have poignant, good-bye sex as we made our separation plans.

The Baja desert with its prickly pears and mesquite reflected the desolation that had come between us. The beach at Ensenada was cold, dirty, not much a beach at all. The motel was painted a garish yellow even inside, and smelled of urine.
“I want to join the party, Sasha,” I finally blurted on first night in the motel as soon as Benjy had fallen asleep, and we were cuddling together, me filled with these misguided fantasies of break-up sex.

Surprisingly – though only to me – Sasha went off. “You brought me all the way here to tell me you were breaking up with me? With me and our one-year-old child? And you were expecting to have SEX with me after that? Get away from me!”

I sheepishly crawled over the other bed, thinking coldly that I should have waited until after we had sex to tell her. I could feel that hard black knot of coldness in my belly again, that strange voracious singularity like a tiny black hole that sucked up my every human emotion and left me numb.

Cutting our vacation short, we left for home the next day, deep in a cloud of gloomy silence, silent gloom, racing through the desert which had come between us like poison gas, killing every sign of life.

By the time we approached the border, Sasha surprised me again. She started crying. “Henry, I’m not that strong. I know you think I’m strong, but I’m not. Go ahead. Join the fucking party if you want to, if that’s the only thing that makes you feel alive. I can’t stop you. I know I’ve always said it would be a deal breaker, but I guess it isn’t. I’ll live with it some way.”

She was right that I did see her as strong – stubborn even – and that it never occurred to me that she would acquiesce in my decision, that I would have my chance to realize my dreams as a real party member, maybe even a leader some day, and I could keep her and keep our family intact.

I was flummoxed. How could she change the rules like this? I was supposed to be free once I told her I was joining the party. I was overcome with disappointment. And yet, a large part of me was relieved as well. I loved my son, and I didn’t want him to have to suffer from a separation and divorce.

Then she surprised me again. She explained to me that it was okay if I had feelings about needing to leave the marriage – that just having the feelings didn’t mean I actually needed to leave. As we rolled down the highway in her red Plymouth Valiant convertible back into our life, this insight hit me like a revelation: there was a serious difference between having feelings and acting on them. I think from the years of the impulsive sixties, I regarded my impulses as sacred. Here was the first time I really got it that maybe my feelings weren’t all that reliable.

On the one hand this insight started me on the way to a long-term healing process, one that suffered many ups and downs over the next decades. On the other hand, I felt trapped. Here I had come all the way to Mexico to end my marriage and reclaim my freedom, and I couldn’t do it.

Still, I was able to find my love for Sasha again in her very acquiescence to the cause, and I was delighted to be able to finally get inside the party. I called the local leader, Freddy Jerome, when we got back to San Francisco. I asked him if I could join and he said it would be good if I joined. He asked me to make a list of all the people I knew who might have money to give the party, a list I never made. I gave him a manifesto I had written concerning the role of sexism. Sasha had convinced me that the party had a serious problem with women, rarely elevating them to leadership, mostly relegating them to typing and making coffee and sandwiches. My manifesto argued that we would hasten the revolution if we were able to tap the revolutionary fervor of the women’s movement. Freddy took the document in stride. I don’t know if he ever read it.

Another Fall

11.

Even though I seemed to have mastered teaching as a substitute, if I had to stay in a classroom for more than a week, I generally lost control, or at least felt like I did. In the fall of 1970, I was given a long-term assignment in one of the more challenging all black schools, Raphael Weill, in the Western Addition, otherwise known as the Fillmore. The good thing about this school was that every classroom had a teacher’s aide in addition to a teacher. Some of these aides were excellent teachers themselves without the credentials. Also, there were two of them, very powerful black women, Joyce and Edna, who were friendly with the Progressive Labor Party. The school was in the neighborhood of a co-op housing development built by the Longshoreman’s Union, where a number of PLP leaders lived. The school was an informal focus of party work.

The school was also the “victim” of some wrong-headed liberal reforms, such as the use of Sullivan Readers mentioned above, and the regrouping of classes for reading, so that I had one reading period consisting of 18 boys and no girls, and after I’d exhausted my bag of tricks, they were too much for me. One of the boys was named Michael Marshall, and liked to climb out the window of the 3rd floor classroom and hang out on the ledge outside. His mother was sympathetic, but didn’t know what to do with him either. Through a series of circumstances unrelated to this teaching assignment, I ended up marrying his aunt, Earlean Marshall, some five years later, but Michael was my first exposure to the Marshall family. He straightened out some over the next few years, but sadly, as an adolescent, he fell into the black hole of adolescent schizophrenia, from which he has yet to recover.

So, I was stuck again in my pattern being so overwhelmed by fear that I couldn’t think. At one point, I took one of the boys up on his offer of a fist fight. That afternoon, his father came up to the school while I was on yard duty and confronted me while the whole school looked on. The principal, a black man without much control over the children himself, came to my rescue.

At the same time (this was mid-November), my friend Jeremiah from McKinley hadn’t been given a Teacher Corps assignment yet. So, on another self-destructive impulse, I invited him to join me in my class.

The next day, the principal called me in the office and told me that I couldn’t control the classroom well enough to keep my job.

Our friends Joyce and Edna called a parent meeting on my behalf. To add a bit of drama, Sasha started having contractions that afternoon, so we rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be labor, so we arrived at the meeting late, with my friends once again standing up for me, this time persuading the principal to let me stay.

So, I slogged it out until the end of January, secretly wishing I hadn’t won the battle. It was hard. I felt bad every day because even after the parents had stuck up for me, I still had very tenuous control of the classroom. And I still couldn’t think. I got confused about giving children freedom, and one time, much to Jeremiah’s amazed dismay, I just let the students do whatever, giving them no instructions. To their credit, they didn’t act up all that much, but they didn’t spontaneously pick up books and start reading either. I did manage to pull off some fairly creative activities with the mixed group, including reading circles reading “Where the Wild Things Are,” and another activity where I had transcribed the lyrics to the Jackson 5 songs currently popular (“ABC” and “I’ll Be There”) and had the students read along while listening to the songs on headphones. Then I managed to pull off some really stupid stunts like bringing in a refrigerator carton for students to… what did I expect? They went looping, jumping all over it, sliding on it, doing those exuberant kid things I wanted to encourage but which hardly lent itself to maintaining the disciplined atmosphere I needed in order to keep my job, to say nothing of my sanity.

I had an aide, Rodney, in the class who couldn’t stand me, who strongly believed that the students needed a black teacher. Black nationalism was all the rage, so to speak, in 1970. The man was angry, and perhaps justifiably, his anger was directed at me. When I brought in the refrigerator carton, he was filled with exasperation and simply removed it. I tried to reach out to him. I let him do some teaching, so he gave the students a spelling test, using random words.

After my son Benjamin was born, I asked my home room class to write to him and tell him what he needed to know. Rodney attacked me: “What makes you think these black kids give a damn about your white baby?”

I tried to get him removed from the class, but the administration refused and instead told me to look inside myself to see why I was having such a hard time with the students – essentially agreeing with Rodney that my racism was interfering with my teaching. And, of course they were right. I was afraid of the students even as I cared about them. Most of all, of course, I was afraid of my own racism. When the semester ended and the regular teacher returned, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

My Summer Vacation

10.

That June, Derrick recruited Sasha and I to go to the infamous 1969 Students for a Democratic Society – SDS – convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum. We hadn’t been active in SDS, but that didn’t seem to matter. The PLP was organizing everyone they could to go to the convention to be ready for a confrontation between its own Worker Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus and the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement, a loose coalition of rivals themselves. Thanks largely to the influence of the PLP, both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist.

It might be hard from today’s perspective to understand why so many young people were attracted to such a rigid and in some ways moribund ideology. At the time, it didn’t seem moribund at all: the Marxist-Leninist movements around the word seemed to be winning. Consider the year 1968:

• Tet Offensive, Vietnam, pushed US and South Vietnamese forces into defeat after defeat.

• The Cultural Revolution in China seemed to be challenging bureaucracy and establishing genuine equality (we didn’t hear of the excesses until later)

• A student-worker General Strike in France

• Student strikes at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and many other schools

• Kent State, Jackson State, in the US, students protesting the war were being killed.

• Several hundred students killed in protests in Mexico City (leading up to the Olympics)

• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, and the cities erupt in rebellion, with many black people killed.

These were heady times indeed, and we might be forgiven if we really thought revolution was just around the corner.

The PLP was the more experienced of the groupings in SDS. The party was formed when a group of people split from the Communist Party USA to side with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The PLP practiced orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which means that it operated on the basis of democratic centralism. In theory, democratic centralism meant that there would be a thorough discussion of all policies throughout all levels of the party. Then a decision would be made by the National Committee, which would be binding on all members, whether they agreed or not. While the democracy aspect of this process was largely ignored (as it was in most such organizations), the process was effective in organizing people. So, by the time the convention opened with 2000 delegates, it was clear that the WSA caucus had the majority of votes.

As the first vote on direction of the organization came closer, a proposal from the WSA to make fighting racism a key strategy in SDS, the RYM faction, led by Berandi ne Dorhn and others, led a walkout. The RYM faction convened in a neighboring conference room. Because we were unknown in SDS, Sasha and I were asked by Derrick and other PLP leaders to go next door and spy on our rivals. We were aggressively frisked as we entered the room. Given that our politics weren’t ostensibly all that different from the others in the room, it seemed odd that we felt that we were in enemy territory, and the situation was frightening. The RYM faction placed a high value on security, and the room was surrounded by dour looking cadre with armbands identifying them as part of the security force.

From the stage, speaker after speaker attacked PLP. The most effective attack came from a Black Panther leader who called the PLP racist for criticizing the Panther’s for “nationalism.”

The PLP had recently and somewhat simplistically concluded that Lenin’s two-stage revolution strategy, where the party first fights for national liberation and democracy and then for socialism, was the reason that the Soviet Union and now even China were abandoning the international struggle in favor of their own national interests. The PLP was even critical of the North Vietnamese for negotiating with the US. Some of us questioned this party line, but were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Given that no other communists in the world held this view other than some tiny PLP offshoots in Canada, Great Britain, and Mexico, it was an arrogant and sectarian position. At the same time, taking such a position took a certain courage and gave PLP a certain purity and independence which, arguably, strengthened it for a time, especially as its rivals spun off into the even more sectarian Weathermen and other grouplets.

As the RYM announced that they were about to take a vote on the expulsion of the PLP and WSA from SDS, someone from the podium announced that the room was being sealed. Sasha and I rushed for the exit, and managed to talk one of the security types to let us out to rejoin our friends in the infinitely calmer WSA caucus. A group of friends of ours from Berkeley were acting out a hilarious skit about how some people could wrap themselves in red flags, brandish Mao’s Little Red Book, and do nothing to actually build the movement among ordinary U. S. workers.

Soon, the RYM faction returned to the main hall, surrounding the WSA caucus. Bernardine Dohrn in combat boots and flak jacket commandeered the stage and announced that the PLP had been expelled from SDS. The reaction of the group was a spontaneous outbreak of derisive laughter, hardly the desired effect. Dohrn then led the RYM out of the door, leaving the “expelled majority” to continue the work of SDS.

There were other ramifications from this split. RYM produced not only the Weathermen, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) as well, but our – Sasha and my – work was done and as we returned to San Francisco, I was proud to have played a role in this “victory” for PLP and became more committed to the struggle.

It’s surprising to me that as I write about these arcane struggles in SDS, I find myself continuing the polemics as if one faction was “right” and the other was “wrong.” There are things in the PLP position that continue to motivate me today, namely the fight against racism and the role of the working class. Yet all of these groupings were hopelessly ultraleft in terms of ever winning over a large section of the U. S. population.

The people with a genuine strategy for change worked in the Eugene McCarthy campaign and the McGovern campaign trying to express the electoral consensus against the war. The PLP did work “secretly” in the McGovern campaign and managed to call a demonstration against him at his own headquarters during the convention, which probably didn’t help.

But, hindsight is 20/20, bla bla, and it makes no sense to fault ourselves for what we didn’t understand.

I met some of the main leaders of the RYM faction – Mike Klonsky, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayrers -- in Chicago some 35 years later, and was pleasantly surprised to find them working on developing the small school movement in the Chicago school system, precisely the reform I was working on at the time in Oakland. We had all evolved substantially in our politics, yet we were still committed to the same ideals of developing an egalitarian society. (No, I never served on a board with Bill Ayers or went to his house, or did anything other than shake his hand!).

As part of an effort by the Party to keep its teachers close to the working class, I got a job in the warehouse at Wilson-Jones envelope company for the rest of the summer. I had a good time getting the job, creating a persona of a hayseed fresh off the farm, deliberately misspelling words on the application. It was refreshing to have a job where the only stress came from the school boy games the workers played with each other, throwing staples (Swingline Staplers was part of Wilson-Jones) at each other when the boss wasn’t looking. I made a good connection with one of the workers there, and even got the nerve to talk socialist politics to him before I quit to return to teaching.

Substituting

9.

My first assignment as a substitute teacher was to an all black 5th grade class which met on the auditorium stage of a school in the Bayview district. Right away, I noticed something was different. My voice came from a place of confidence deep in my viscera, not nervously from my upper chest. At the first sign of trouble, I wrote down the names of the defiant children, brought them to the office at the first recess, and called their parents. I had no more trouble from the class.

The principal complimented me on how I handled the children. I still hadn’t developed good judgment with regards to authority and still had a self-destructive streak, so I told her all about the racist principal that had fired me from McKinley. I never heard from her or got assigned to that school again.

I developed a bag of tricks that were infallible for the first day or so of an assignment. I would stand in front of the class without saying a word and write on the board : “He Hitz small children.”

Then I would in my mind divide the class into teams. Ideally, there would be two teams, but three or four by rows also worked. Still without saying a word, I would make a grid using roman numerals and give out points to the teams that were sitting with their hands folded waiting for instructions. At the end of the day I would give out packs of M&Ms to the winning teams. I would give points for right answers, as well as good behavior. I would also cheat as much as needed to keep the teams tied. The best days were those in which everyone won.

Usually I ignored the teacher’s lesson plan – if there was one (there often wasn’t). My favorite and most effective initial lesson would go like this: I’d take out a checkerboard and a few pennies. “Who here would like to make some money?” I would ask. Of course everyone’s hand shot up. “Okay. Suppose you put one penny on the first square of the checkerboard.” I’d demonstrate. “Then suppose you doubled that penny on the next square and kept doubling the number of pennies all the way to the 64th square. How much money would you have on the last square of the checkerboard? Take a guess. If you guess right, you can have all the money.” Then I would go around the classroom writing the students’ names on the board and their guess. This way, no one would try to fool me by giving a fake name, or mixing up the names the way classes loved to do when they had substitutes. Of course, most students would guess $1.28. Some of the smarter ones might get up to $256 or even $512 which is the highest guess I ever got. Once I’d recorded all their guesses, I passed out paper and had the class calculate the number. I reviewed how they could either add the numbers together or multiply by 2. “The student who gets the closest will get some of the money.” The students went to work, and my morning was covered. The correct answer is of course 2 to the 64th power, divided by 100. Or $184,467,440,737,095,516.16 or 184 quadrillion dollars. No student ever came close, either guessing or calculating. By lunch time, I would give them the answer and give the person with the highest guess and the highest calculation each a dime, “some of the money.”

I also carried with me some movies I had stolen from the district’s film library. One was a Disney educational moving called “It’s About Time,” an hour long feature that explained relativity and anything else you wanted to know about time, a subject of continuing fascination to me.

The other movie was also an hour long Disney feature called “The Sea” which I would show if I had a multiple day assignment and had a chance to present my unit on water. I would introduce this unit by asking the class to name everything they knew about water, giving a point to whichever team for each answer. I would write the answers on the board. When we finally got to the fact that water is used to put out fires, I showed them my experiment, one I remembered from my basement laboratory at Pine Lake. With great drama, I fetched a glass of water, drank a sip to prove it was water, and then poured it on a mound of sodium peroxide, an innocuous-looking cream colored crystalline powder that burst into flame. It also filled the room with some fairly noxious fumes, but I had made my exciting point about how preconceptions can be deceiving.

I had one more trick which served me well in most schools, and that was to play a Folkways record made by Langston Hughes in 1955 called “The Glory of Negro History.” The format was a dramatized history, a pageant, and black students in 1969 were especially riveted. When possible, I would scour the school for headsets and hook them together so that each student could listen on his/her own headphones.
One time I played this record for a 3rd grade at one of the rare assignments I received to a predominantly white school in the avenues, and had them write their thoughts about it. The principal observed the lesson and called me into the office afterward, questioning whether such an activity was appropriate for young children. As proof of her point, she pointed out one of the students’ written response: “I think I would like to be a slave,” the student had written.

“You can see, she didn’t understand the lesson,” the principal said.

I didn’t know what to say, but I understood the child perfectly, because I had at times felt the same way myself. There is a purity of innocence in the slave experience, a righteousness of victimhood that guilt-ridden whites can only dream about. It was being part of a cause which was incontrovertibly just. And, given that this was 1969, it was about having the power of the civil rights movement at your back.

Nowadays, you sometimes hear people, black people in particular, wax nostalgic for their schools before they were integrated. It is no doubt generally true in the south that the segregated black schools with their committed black teachers served black students better than the “integrated” schools that replaced them. Many whites left those schools and most of the black teachers were simply fired, at least in the early days. But the segregated schools in San Francisco in 1969 were something else.

Going to Hunter’s Point in those days was like entering a war zone, complete with the smell of burning flesh from the meat processing plants in the neighborhood. There were few black teachers. Some of these were both sympathetic to the students and able to control their classrooms sufficiently that real learning occurred. About two thirds of teachers were in control of their classes, but this was a task most of them accomplished by giving students busy work: easy dittos that required little more from the students than coloring skills. Meanwhile, students roamed the halls and left the school grounds regularly. Little effort was made to contact the parents.

Some of the “liberal” reforms that were gaining popularity at the time – open classrooms, individualized learning, learning stations – backfired disastrously when implemented in the “ghetto” schools, as they were known. A classic example was the Sullivan Readers, a self-paced phonics instruction program. Each student worked in their own book. Most of the exercises were fill-in-the-blanks. In order that students would get immediate feedback on their work, the answers were right on the page, concealed by a “slider” which the student controlled. Students became experts at manipulating that slider so that they could find the answer without actually reading the question or revealing to anyone watching that they were peeking at the answers.

At one school near Candlestick Park, my reputation preceded me. While a group of teachers were sitting around the lunchroom, the vice-principal, a shrill Filipina, pointed me out. “Watch out for that one,” she said. “He goes to the parents,” as if it were a crime equivalent to child molesting.

Meanwhile, that spring, Sasha got pregnant. I was excited about becoming a father, and built the baby a rather elegant cradle out of redwood, even though I am not the handiest carpenter on the planet. I enjoyed the LaMaze classes, and to this day use the relaxation chant we learned there to put myself to sleep: “Loose feet, loose ankles, loose calves, loose thighs…” etc. up each vertebrate of the spine, through the cerebrum and back down to the jaw.