Morris Edelson: Madison, Wisconsin Counterculture - 12:22 PM, 9/12/2008 |
Thursday, September 11, 2008 To Morris Edelson: Madison, Wisconsin Counterculture
Bernard Pyron
I tried the E Mail address for Morris Edelson on this link: Home page for Dr. Morris Edelson - HCC-Southeast Learning WebContact Me. Email: morris.edelson@hccs.edu. Phone: 713-718-7109. Office: Room 215 ... Created by morris.edelson Last modified 2006-02-17 09:22 ... learning.sec.hccs.edu/members/morris.edelson - 26k Cached - Similar pages - Note this But it bounced.
You must be the Morris Edelson who was editor of Quixote during the years of the counterculure and anti-war movement of about 1966 to 1975 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. (Note: Quixote was a little literary magazine which published mostly poems, short stories and other kinds of creative writing by people in Madison and in Wisconsin. In about 1967 Quixote published my article The Night of the Great Salt, about firing salt kilns at night in Whitewater, Wisconsin)
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:
http://herescope.blogspot.com/2005/10/willis-harman-and-marketplace-ministry.html
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:
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/aquarian.htm
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
http://www.apostle1.com/daily_news_2006/abouna_2_cents/awakeiv.htm
"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:
http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/frankfurt_resed.html
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.
Bernard Pyron in Ol Misery (Humid Missouri) bernardpyron@gmail.com |
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