Maurice Isserman: 3 Days of Peace and Music, 40 Years of Memory
[Maurice Isserman is a professor of American history at Hamilton College. Among his books are "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s" (third edition, revised, Oxford University Press, 2007), with Michael Kazin.]
In describing the 1913 reunion of Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg, the historian David Blight noted that "the veterans were men out of another time, icons that stimulated a sense of pride, history, and amusement all at once." To Americans of a younger generation who attended or read about the commemorative events, the veterans "were at once the embodiment of Civil War nostalgia, symbols of a lost age of heroism, and the fulfillment of that most human of needs—civic and spiritual reconciliation."
Without wishing to stretch the analogy too far, I felt a little like one of those ancient Civil War veterans this summer, when I found myself taking my 14-year-old son, David, to the Museum at Bethel Woods, site of the original Woodstock music festival. It was my first time there since August 1969. Our national military parks are littered with monuments marking the exact spot where this or that regiment took its heroic stand, or this or that general fell while leading his men to glory. For my part, I tried to pick out and show David the exact spot where I stood in the crowd while singing along with Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." David was impressed (and also, I suspect, amused).
Anyway, thanks to Woodstock, the dairy farmer Max Yasgur's 600 acres, including the natural amphitheater formed by its sloping fields and overlooking the lake at its base, remain as pristinely pastoral as they were 40 years ago. Like our more famous Civil War battlefields, they have been spared the shopping malls and tract housing that might otherwise have befallen them. Minus the stage, and the half-million or so festivalgoers, the field still powerfully evokes those much-celebrated "Three Days of Peace and Music."
This year's 40th anniversary of Woodstock is being marked by a flood of books, movies, exhibits, and the like. The Road to Woodstock (Ecco), by Michael Lang, principal organizer of the festival, has just been released. Warner Brothers has reissued Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock (1970) in a "director's cut" on DVD and Blu-ray. Ang Lee's film Taking Woodstock will open at the end of the month. Simon & Schuster has published Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock, by the well-known disc jockey Pete Fornatale, for which McDonald has written a foreword. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cleveland, is celebrating the anniversary with an exhibit running from July 3 to November 29. Add a CD package by Rhino and a TV documentary on VH1.
There were only a few people on the grounds at Bethel, N.Y., when David and I visited, but I'm sure that with the anniversary, both the museum and the site will be crowded with nostalgic visitors, including my fellow veterans, as well as many pilgrims born in the years since 1969. What will they be seeking?
Blight has argued that the purpose and spirit of Civil War commemorations underwent a significant shift in the decades following the 1860s. At first such gatherings served as a reminder of the issues and passions that had driven North and South into their conflict. But by the time veterans of the Blue and Gray met at Gettysburg, 50 years later, the anniversaries had come instead to symbolize the end of sectional division and the eclipse of the issues (including, unfortunately, any national commitment to black equality) that had loomed large during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Woodstock nostalgia and commemorations, on the contrary, have tended to be about reconciliation, with an emphasis on the values that unite Americans across generational and partisan lines. Woodstock's enduring mythic legacy—a dream of innocence, redemption, self-reliance, and self-invention that owes so much to the traditional American narrative—began to define the event in popular and historical memory even before Jimi Hendrix brought the concert to an end on Monday morning, August 18, 1969, with his inspired retooling of the national anthem.
In the months leading up to Woodstock, however, many observers had predicted the festival would prove a disaster. After all, the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago just a year earlier had also been billed as a kind of countercultural festival, and they had turned (largely because of the heavy-handedness of Chicago authorities, it should be said) into a weeklong street battle between demonstrators and Mayor Richard J. Daley's police. Only some 10,000 or so had been involved in that donnybrook, but 100,000 or more were expected to show up for Woodstock—a very scary prospect to many people, especially older residents of upstate New York. In his memoir, Lang recalls the opposition from local people in Wallkill, the town where Woodstock was originally intended to be held. "The phone line at our field office was getting bombarded with death threats from hippie-hating residents," he writes. And the callers weren't kidding: A blast of shotgun pellets ripped into the festival's office walls one dark night. A barrage of legal challenges finally forced the organizers to look elsewhere for a concert site, which is how they wound up in Bethel, with less than a month to get everything prepared...
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
In describing the 1913 reunion of Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg, the historian David Blight noted that "the veterans were men out of another time, icons that stimulated a sense of pride, history, and amusement all at once." To Americans of a younger generation who attended or read about the commemorative events, the veterans "were at once the embodiment of Civil War nostalgia, symbols of a lost age of heroism, and the fulfillment of that most human of needs—civic and spiritual reconciliation."
Without wishing to stretch the analogy too far, I felt a little like one of those ancient Civil War veterans this summer, when I found myself taking my 14-year-old son, David, to the Museum at Bethel Woods, site of the original Woodstock music festival. It was my first time there since August 1969. Our national military parks are littered with monuments marking the exact spot where this or that regiment took its heroic stand, or this or that general fell while leading his men to glory. For my part, I tried to pick out and show David the exact spot where I stood in the crowd while singing along with Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag." David was impressed (and also, I suspect, amused).
Anyway, thanks to Woodstock, the dairy farmer Max Yasgur's 600 acres, including the natural amphitheater formed by its sloping fields and overlooking the lake at its base, remain as pristinely pastoral as they were 40 years ago. Like our more famous Civil War battlefields, they have been spared the shopping malls and tract housing that might otherwise have befallen them. Minus the stage, and the half-million or so festivalgoers, the field still powerfully evokes those much-celebrated "Three Days of Peace and Music."
This year's 40th anniversary of Woodstock is being marked by a flood of books, movies, exhibits, and the like. The Road to Woodstock (Ecco), by Michael Lang, principal organizer of the festival, has just been released. Warner Brothers has reissued Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock (1970) in a "director's cut" on DVD and Blu-ray. Ang Lee's film Taking Woodstock will open at the end of the month. Simon & Schuster has published Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock, by the well-known disc jockey Pete Fornatale, for which McDonald has written a foreword. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cleveland, is celebrating the anniversary with an exhibit running from July 3 to November 29. Add a CD package by Rhino and a TV documentary on VH1.
There were only a few people on the grounds at Bethel, N.Y., when David and I visited, but I'm sure that with the anniversary, both the museum and the site will be crowded with nostalgic visitors, including my fellow veterans, as well as many pilgrims born in the years since 1969. What will they be seeking?
Blight has argued that the purpose and spirit of Civil War commemorations underwent a significant shift in the decades following the 1860s. At first such gatherings served as a reminder of the issues and passions that had driven North and South into their conflict. But by the time veterans of the Blue and Gray met at Gettysburg, 50 years later, the anniversaries had come instead to symbolize the end of sectional division and the eclipse of the issues (including, unfortunately, any national commitment to black equality) that had loomed large during the war and in its immediate aftermath. Woodstock nostalgia and commemorations, on the contrary, have tended to be about reconciliation, with an emphasis on the values that unite Americans across generational and partisan lines. Woodstock's enduring mythic legacy—a dream of innocence, redemption, self-reliance, and self-invention that owes so much to the traditional American narrative—began to define the event in popular and historical memory even before Jimi Hendrix brought the concert to an end on Monday morning, August 18, 1969, with his inspired retooling of the national anthem.
In the months leading up to Woodstock, however, many observers had predicted the festival would prove a disaster. After all, the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago just a year earlier had also been billed as a kind of countercultural festival, and they had turned (largely because of the heavy-handedness of Chicago authorities, it should be said) into a weeklong street battle between demonstrators and Mayor Richard J. Daley's police. Only some 10,000 or so had been involved in that donnybrook, but 100,000 or more were expected to show up for Woodstock—a very scary prospect to many people, especially older residents of upstate New York. In his memoir, Lang recalls the opposition from local people in Wallkill, the town where Woodstock was originally intended to be held. "The phone line at our field office was getting bombarded with death threats from hippie-hating residents," he writes. And the callers weren't kidding: A blast of shotgun pellets ripped into the festival's office walls one dark night. A barrage of legal challenges finally forced the organizers to look elsewhere for a concert site, which is how they wound up in Bethel, with less than a month to get everything prepared...