'The Man' Can't Keep Up with a Hippie

At the Charles Street corner of the Boston Common, there were maybe 150 young people Sunday night-Monday morning at 12:30 a.m.--all of them breaking the law. The curfew on the Boston Common, set a month ago and liberalized a week ago, is midnight. On Saturday, 65 hippies had been arrested for defying the curfew, and Sunday looked like more of the same.

There was the usual air of informality--a woman breastfeeding her baby, a couple of small groups formed around guitars, some people standing, some sitting, some rolling around in lovelocked pairs, and some sleeping.

Then, at a little before 1 a.m., people started to gather in a crowd for a meeting. Maybe 50 people sitting, and another 25 standing in a circle around them. They began to talk about The Man--the police--coming to get them, and what to do about it. The consensus of the group seemed to be for a symbolic march to the local jail with a demand to be arrested, or if not that, simply sitting there and allowing the police to remove them.

Then a tall, slender man, with side-burns and a wide white hat, entered the discussion. Standing on the rim of the circle, he towered over most of the others. He was from New York, a member of the "Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers," a rather militant SDS chapter on the lower cast side of New York City.

He began to talk about mobile tactics, about moving one step faster than the police, about scattering and re-grouping, "because movement is life, man." When they come, take to the side streets. If it looks like one cop has someone caught, everyone else converge on The Man, and he'll let your comrade go. Keep loose, keep moving. The man can't run as fast as hippies.

In the circle, some people listened attentively to the tall speaker, occasionally chipping in an anti-cop line. Others buzzed in small subgroups of their own. A few crowded around a small Negro boy, perhaps 12 years old, who was explaining why he was there.

"Movement is life, man you gotta keep ahead of The Man," the New Yorker repeated. "The Man has his weapons, we've got to develop our own, and mobile tactics is our best weapon."

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the New Yorker was hypnotizing the crowd. He had the Conch, and he was not to release it. The side discussions broke up, and now everyone was listening to the mobile tactician. Some began asking concerned questions: "What happens when the cops catch us while we're running?"

"The Man won't catch us; he's fat. He eats too much starch. All day long, he eats starch, and then finds out he can't keep up with a hippie. He takes a good long look at himself in the mirror, and realizes that he can't keep up with a hippie."

"Which way do we scatter when they come?"

"We can't worry about specifies now. We first have to decide if this is the way we're gonna handle The Man."

The New Yorker began to relate tales from the Lower East Side, where mobile tactics had been used effectively. If the cops caught up with someone on a side street, he said, everyone nearby would converge screaming on that cop," and he'd let our boy go, let me tell you."

The circle, which 20 minutes earlier had been thinking primarily about peaceful protest, was now talking about military strategy for the policeman-enemy. There was still opposition, of course. One bearded man, Leonard Wolfe, who had supported the march to the jail, argued in a half-whisper with Mark Dyen, of Harvard SDS, who supported mobile tactics.

Dyen, who has short hair and dresses straight, looks like a political organizer, and distinctly unlike a hippie. Most of the real hippies, it seemed, were not even sitting in that circle--they were 50 yards away, just singing and playing the guitar. You could tell that they would go home peacefully when the cops came. They weren't into this thing of fighting cops.

But in the circle, mobile tactics was winning the day. Only once did it appear that the tail New Yorker's authority would be questioned--when a black man of the fringe of the circle called out "Where are you from?"

"Does it matter?" he answered slyly, reminding me of the way Bobby Kennedy used to handle the carpet-bagger question in his New York Senate race.

"Yeah. Where are you from?"

"I've lived all over. I'm from New York now. But I lived here in Boston for a couple of years, Berkeley too."

The black man dropped the subject and the tall New Yorker began to hate the cops out loud again.

By 2 a.m., the circle had broken up. It was fairly cold, so people started building fresh in trash cans. They stood around in small groups, talking. One long-haired youth got into a discussion with a middle-aged husband and his petite wife, who had been standing around watching the meeting. The woman kept insisting that she sympathized with the hippies, but why did they have to use such vile language, and why did they want to fight with the cops. The youth answered that they just wanted the right to sleep on the Common.

A black man announced that he was going to leapfrog two burning trashcans. "Clear the runway," everyone buzzed. After a false start, he came racing down the runway, leaped and landed in a crash of flames. He was not hurt. The cans were uprighted, and everyone went back to his small group.

At a distance, near the hippies who had been singing through the entire political circle discussion, sat Barney Frank, Harvard '62 and administrative aid to Boston's Mayor Kevin White. Frank sat with some other aides from the Mayor's office, and a couple of Boston reporters. He told us there would be a bust soon.

"Those middle-class spoiled brats, Frank lamented. "They're using up the mayor's political capital. Because he's not taking a harder line than he is against the hippies, White is making enemies in the city. It's a shame he has to waste so much of his time and political capital on these kids, when there's so much to be done in this city."

Frank claimed that these kids were not the hard-core hippies, whose only desire was to be able to spend the night in the open air. "Most of these kids here are SDS," Frank said. "They're trying to organize hippies. The real hippies are these people," he continued, pointing to the small circle which was still sitting there as it had been for hours, now singing "The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind." "And most of the real hippies," Frank said, "have gone elsewhere. They don't want to fight with the police."

Frank insisted the curfew was a necessity because residents around the Common complained about the noise. He said that since the hippies had moved in there, merchants on Charles Street were complaining that the street had become uninhabitable. "These older people have a right to live, too," he concluded.

Now, it was nothing but waiting. Frank and his aides waited on the grass. Press cars waited across the street. The hippie-radicals waited in small groups around fiery trash cans. Rumors began to circulate about a squadron of police cars over on the other side of the park. At 2:45, Frank said that he guessed he would take the next day off from work. At 2:50, the Record-American car went home, having missed the final deadline.

At 3:05 a.m., a couple of police cars came into view. One rode up on the Common grass and the driver bellowed through a loudspeaker, "The curfew is in effect. All persons will leave the Boston Common immediately, or be subject to arrest."

"How much time have we got?" screamed one kid.

"The curfew is now in effect. All persons will leave the Boston Common immediately, or be subject to arrest."

Slowly, everyone began to leave. It appeared for a few moments as if there would be no arrests, no confrontation. But it was just the first stage of the agreed-upon mobile tactics. A crowd of 75 or so left the Common, but returned 15 minutes later. At 3:40 a.m., a line of police cars and paddy-wagons formed a few hundreds yards from the crowd.

By now, there was dissension among the demonstrators. A small hard-core group was standing on the Common proper, goading others to join them, but most of the others remained in the relative safety of the pavement circling the Common. The police cars made their move. It was total confusion. Kids who had been listening to the tall New Yorker with sideburns now didn't know which way to go. Were they supposed to run, or stay? Some people scattered. Some began to battle the police. It was impossible to tell whether this was a public protest, or a battle out of the American revolution. Kicking kids were dragged by three cops into a paddy-wagon. Cop cars chased individuals across the grass. One young boy threw an empty bottle against a paddy wagon, and immediately five or six policemen and a couple of other citizens descended on him, and dragged him into a wagon, apparently breaking a couple of his limbs in the process, or so it seemed.

As the confused police tried to deal with the kids who were scattering and regrouping but never leaving the Common, I remembered something else the tall New Yorker had said; "We haven't really enough people here tonight to make mobile tactics offensively effective. But there will be other nights." And then as I saw that kid getting his arms and legs twisted as the cops dumped him in the wagon, it occurred to me that talk of police brutality in a situation like this was almost meaningless. This was no protest; this was a miniature war. Most of the kids on the Common hadn't wanted a war, but they nonetheless listened as the tall New Yorker told them that it was like the American Revolution, "and we're the ones who are gonna fight like Indians."

By 4:15 a.m., it was pretty much over for the night. Not as big a bust as the night before, a bit bigger than the ones which would follow on the two nights afterwards. Frank promised that there would be a police sweep every night if it was necessary to enforce the curfew.

The Man, in the guise of Barney Frank and Mayor White, was not taking the hippie challenge lying down. Somehow, one got the feeling after watching everyone chasing everyone else around for an hour, kids screaming, bottles smashing, blue lights flashing, that the police could do this every night forever, if so ordered. Somehow, even if one sympathized with the hippies' right to sleep on the Common, one wondered what was accomplished that night.

But the saddest part was that it seemed that most of the kids hadn't really wanted the evening to end this way; that next night the leaders were going to have to find some new followers because a lot of this batch of troops had had enough. There was so little real emotion and revolutionary fervor behind it all.