Communal Organization and Social Transition REVIEW
Yesterday, Vermonters voted on a number of statewide positions. They basically had to choose between a Republican and a Democratic candidate for Governor. Phil Scott, the Republican incumbent won by a substantial margin. The Democratic candidate was the country’s first major party trans-gendered woman. The following map indicates that she won in towns connected somehow with colleges (Bennington College, Middlebury College, UVM, Goddard, Dartmouth and Marlboro in the Brattleboro area). Marlboro, ironically, plays a key role in the “hippie invasion” of the early 70’s that is the subject of this book review. It is the Vermont town with the highest percentage of support for Christine Hallquist in this recent election.
You can see all that blue in the lower Eastern part of Vermont that surrounds Marlboro. That region is the object of Barry Laffan’s study. Conducted for his Ph.D. research in Anthropology in the early 1970’s, this book explores the origins and demise of the sixty some-odd communes that were active in the Brattleboro area in 1970 to 1972.
In the introduction to the work, Marboro’s professor, Gerald Levy writes about the subjects and quality of Laffan’s study:
“The array of street people, bakers without bikes, back to the land hippies, revolutionary politicos, X political contemplative artists, aging academic seekers, resilient commune mothers, libertarian mystics, and eclectic religious fundamentalists provides the ethnographic basis for an analysis of counterculture politics which is not been matched.”
Barry Laffan lived in one of the communes (“Jackson’s Meadows” he calls it) while he was conducting his research. In the work, he refers to himself as “Patrick.”
“It was the anthropologist Barry who would go back to his camper and type his field notes every night, no matter how much ‘Patrick’ had drunk during the evening.”
In his introduction to his research Laffan writes of the counter cultural movement he observed with guarded enthusiasm:
“Simultaneously seduced by the utopian promises, yet repulsed by the runaway fantasies that accompanied them, I watched the rebellion unfold to include communalism and collectivism as positive ideals, along with negative stances regarding racism, war, corporate capitalism, and after the police riots at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, established political process.”
As of 1972, there were between one and two thousand people living in the Brattleboro area communes with many more transients moving in and out of them. “It was felt,” Laffan tells us, “that the spread of new ideas was more important than working out the bothersome details of fiscal responsibility” noting that half the founders of Jackson’s Meadows came from broken homes, that many lacked employable skills, and many had been unable to navigate the rigors of real college (Marlboro college, at that time, was hardly what one could call “rigorous”).
The following quote captures the essence of the human material out of which these utopias were to be formed.
“What had happened to these people after turning hippie radical freak? Most were in the process of rebounding like pinballs from situations they had gotten into after bidding farewell to the street life: unhappy college experiences, terrible jobs, isolation, broken love affairs, or abuse of certain drugs. In the search for meaning and the reasons for the misfortunes that had befallen them, major shifts in intellectual and emotional orientation were occurring. Two ex-radicals, after finding that political revolutions were not completed after a semester or two, and after discovering that being mauled by the police was out-right traumatic, were in the process of moving away from radical politics, though they retained their conviction that the quality of life in America was terrible. Another was in the process of building the very political perspective the other two had abandoned. Yet another was moving from an interpersonal psychiatric orientation towards out right mysticism. There were many people who did not know which way to move. All this is not to say that the Dobson house was total confusion and despair. Many were enjoying their free-floating status, being only mildly concerned about lack of direction, while others, though repulsed by certain past experiences, were eagerly attempting to discover new possibilities.
“Everyone who eventually joined Jackson's Meadows was in a liminal state; that is, they were attached to no fixed ideology and no fixed institutions. . . .”
“Not everyone, however, held to these ideals with equal enthusiasm. Some agreed to go along with the idea only because there were no other alternatives. Even among those who professed commitment, there were deep vague fears of failure of losing more than they could gain. Finally, they were competing commitments. Some joined the venture because of loyalties to individuals in the group, others to the group as a whole, and still others to an ideal.”
Laffan applies many sociological and anthropological theories in an attempt to understand the “hippie invasion” into Vermont, but he summarizes his primary thesis in this sentence:
“Perhaps the overall factor was that the sheer complexity and confusion of the society itself had out stripped the capacity of those, not in control of it, to cope with it.”
A generational short-circuit you might say.
Many chapters of the book explain the rise and fall of Jackson’s Meadows and time does not permit a record of the details (but they include a house fire that literally killed people). In the end, Jackson’s Meadows was doomed, like Fruitlands, by the inability of its founders to take the material as seriously as the esoteric. “The good life is like a zebra,” I sometimes say. “There are white parts and black parts and you cannot just feed the white parts and expect your zebra to live.” Life is spirit and flesh and a utopia that ignores one or the other will eventually find itself a dystopia. Laffan writes in his conclusion,
“Talk of self-sufficiency, barter, reducing financial needs, and anti-materialistic concerns with human and spiritual values notwithstanding, Jackson's Meadows’ growing isolation had fundamental economic ramifications that affected nearly everything else. Consuming much of the commune’s attention, time, and energy was its constant struggle to obtain money. Jackson's Meadows was becoming a real ghetto with a poverty that was neither voluntary nor ennobling. Unlike the first winter when Peter and some others had some cash reserves to bail the commune out of emergencies, there was no one in a comparable position this winter. All commune money had to come from people earning it, and taxes had to be paid, tools, stoves, and insulation had to be purchased, and grains had to be obtained insufficient quantities to last through the winter.”
“Jackson's Meadows was in a particularly bad position. Full-time members needed money desperately, yet many were unemployable due to mental illness, later stages of pregnancy, single motherhood with dependent young children, and the danger of being jailed if some real identities or Social Security numbers were known.”
“As far as much of Jackson’s Meadows work force was concerned, eventually no monetary need was worth formally working for it if the job interfered with their other interests too much.”
The chapter on the demise of Jackson’s Meadows is fascinating stuff.
I will conclude by saying that it is a mistake to think that utopia’s can be created out of some guy named Peter’s inheritance. Someone has to make traps or silverware. A utopia has to have a plan for paying that involves self-sufficiency. It cannot thrive on someone else’s income transferred to it because the members’ hair is long and they have learned how to obtain and smoke weed.
Having said that, the “hippies” who came to Vermont have given the state a gift in my estimation. They remind us that the pursuit of happiness has to be more than the pursuit of stuff. And along with that, they remind us that as important as it may be to go to college and obtain employable skills, it is a mistake to neglect the importance of humanities, and the study of things like utopias and dystopias and the life of the soul in this world.
Question for Comment: If you were to start a commune, what would you do to support it?
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