The dance concert posters were not “political” in the same way that the peace posters were. In his dissertation on the psychedelic rock concert posters, Kevin Moist nevertheless identifies what he calls a “form of subcultural visionary rhetoric.” Moist writes that in Haight-Ashbury, the core of the psychedelic culture, “during the mid-to-late 1960s we find nary a protest nor political demonstration of any kind.”45 Moist argues that the Haight subculture did have a politics, but that hippie politics refused what it and Moist characterized as the old-fashioned, polarized, either-or of the New Left taking on the Establishment. Moist elaborates on the cultural meanings and the politics of “dropping out” as a rejection of the futility and violence of the old order. To be sure, the New Left had its share of ambitious posturing and sectarian struggle, although Moist’s portrayal of these traits is too sweeping. In any case, Moist’s observation about the dropout culture as an alternative prompts the question of whether the Berkeley peace posters themselves share the doctrinaire rigidity Moist seems to attribute to the New Left. The psychedelic posters were available to the artists and viewers of the Berkeley peace posters as examples of the power of poster art. It may even be that, besides enriching the storehouse of poster styles, the dropout culture’s suspicion of sectarian leftism tempered and provided a more complex context for the peace demonstrations of May 1970.
Matthieu Poirer argues that the Paris uprisings of May 1968 were directly linked to the international and the specifically French psychedelic avant-garde of the 1960s. Poirer draws attention to the immersive, participatory sensory disruptions of French psychedelic art that stood in contrast to the countercultural utopian dropout strain noted by Moist. May 1968, argues Poirer, drew inspiration from the ambition of psychedelic art to change “consciousness, disturbing sensorial stability.” It also drew inspiration from the development of the “happening,” an immersive artistic and theatrical experience that directly engaged the audience. Poirer observes that “it is no coincidence that the [French] minister of education at the time, Edgar Faure, likened May 1968 to a large ‘happening.’” In French psychedelic visual art, Poirer continues, “these intransitive works appeal directly to the senses and are subsequently stripped of any cross-reference to external style other than their own phenomenological reality.”46 In the case of the Atelier Populaire, it seems evident in retrospect that the ambition of the poster artists to induce something like the direct, pure, social, and perceptual disruption of the happening and of psychedelic art was paired simultaneously with traditional poster-art appeals to militant political dissent. Such a pairing may have contributed to their peculiar power and to the unlikelihood that they would stimulate lasting social and political change. Writing of the British psychedelic scene in the 1960s, Andrew Wilson argues that “1968 marked the moment in which a belief that social and political change might happen naturally was exchanged for an understanding that such change had to be organized for, willed and made to happen. . . . However necessary thought, feeling, and imagination might be for such a revolution to succeed, the events of May 1968 exposed the split between those voyagers of inner space who believed that imagination was enough, and activists who understood that social and political struggle entailed a return to more orthodox—even Marxian—forms of analysis, conflict and action.”47
Walter Medeiros, in contrast to Moist on the San Francisco scene and Wilson on the British 1960s, describes not so much a sharp break between the political and the psychedelic but a highly complex mix of shifting activities and people, many of whom crossed the lines of art, music, and politics. It seems likely that attendees at dance concerts and political rallies, though sometimes entirely separate populations, were often the same people. Rather than viewing the political and the cultural as two separate strains, and without simply collapsing the whole Bay Area experience of the 1960s into an amorphous mix, Medeiros sees common strains of impatience with politics and culture stimulating a variety of sometimes divergent, sometimes interactive political and cultural events.48 Underground newspapers in the Bay Area liberally mixed sex, drugs, rock and roll, radical cultural movements, massage parlors, Black Panthers, and antiwar activism. A cover drawing in the Berkeley Barb for June 12–18, 1970, is typical: a pistol-packing seminude woman; a naked cop with Black Panther tattoo carrying a “Now” placard with raised black and white fists; a Capitol dome toppling in an explosion of smoke and psychedelic stars; a street fighter raising his fist; and the slogan “Only a United People’s Liberation Front Can Win—The Pigs Are Everywhere.”
It seems clear that there were at least some direct connections among the Berkeley peace posters of May 1970 and the poster art of the Atelier Populaire, the politics of Paris in May 1968, and the worldwide uprisings in 1968. But it seems unlikely that May 1968 was a dominating force in the rhetorical consciousness of the United States in the late 1960s or in May 1970. The war in Vietnam and turmoil over civil rights and racial justice, together with assassinations, riots, and political instability, consumed the country’s attention. The assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 created grief and uncertainty. Historian James T. Patterson identifies 1965, “the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural and political change and polarization, . . . as the time when America’s social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called ‘the Sixties’ broke into view” and “lasted into the early 1970s.”49 Every year seemed to bring new disturbances, with even the great progressive changes in civil rights—voting rights, public accommodations—bringing their own backlashes. In 1967, riots spread through the inner city of Detroit. That fall saw large demonstrations in Washington against the war. In addition to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, 1968 brought the Tet Offensive and Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not run for reelection.50 George Wallace of Alabama emerged as a candidate of the Southern backlash against civil rights, and Richard Nixon won the presidency with a promise to execute his secret plan to end the war and to restore order in the streets, along with the code words of the new Republican Southern strategy. The year 1969 brought further frustration in Vietnam and further division at home. The political and civil turmoil of the 1960s was matched by a widespread cultural upheaval. The Berkeley posters themselves have direct antecedents in Paris of May 1968, but the larger political and rhetorical climate of Berkeley in May 1970 was distinctively American.
The antecedents of the Berkeley peace posters reach beyond the recent Paris posters and the local psychedelic posters to the nineteenth-century development of the poster for commerce, art, propaganda, and protest, and further back through a long history of prints, handbills, broadsides, signs, and graffiti.51 In the United States, poster art was employed as government rhetoric in World Wars I and II, as well as in the New Deal. The New Deal stimulated a rich government investment in public arts of all sorts, partly to develop a sense of national cohesion and optimism, and partly as a means of providing direct support to artists in all spheres—painters, writers, actors, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, designers, architects, and poster and print artists. Roger G. Kennedy and David Larkin note that in announcing the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt “was not announcing a program of princely patronage or largesse. He was, instead, inviting each of his countrymen, artists among them, to come forward in a covenant of service. Artists were among the many who needed work in 1932, and the nation needed the work artists could do.”52 Kennedy and Larkin emphasize that New Deal art was not simply propaganda or make-work, but a diverse and needed contribution to the public good “that summoned forth pride out of common experience.”53 In his pioneering 1987 study of the posters produced