Features

In 1965, the late Hunter Thompson got his first break as a journalist when he was asked to write an article for the venerable Left journal The Nation, about Berkeley after the Free Speech Movement. 

His piece is of interest automatically, as the first significant work by a fellow who came to be regarded as a seminal figure in transforming the journalism of an era. Many will scan it for early developmental traces of Thompson’s famous “gonzo” style. But in truth, those exuberant flights of prose, those feverish fictions illuminating sordid realities, that sprang from his subsequent adventures with the Hells Angels and mind-loosening drugs, are barely hinted here. What interests me instead—in this reflective portrait of the social fauna and culture of this seminal town in a seminal time—is how clearly Thompson recognized and characterized the polarities of “cultural” and “political” activism whose complex interaction and effect in the larger society worked out during the next decade. 

It’s notable that his observations and analysis were made entirely within the young white activist community—with only tangential reference to Berkeley’s proportion then of 25 percent Negroes, and no hint that this high point preceded a population decline as dramatic as the paradoxical rise of black power in the city’s bureaucratic politics. But hey, why not? Why shouldn’t Thompson have focused simply on white youth activism as a barely-differentiated generative force? It was the moment after the FSM made everything strange and catalyzed a community that could begin to wonder what it was; it was the moment before the anti-war movement began to march, the day before the name “hippie” was coined to explain a conundrum away. By late spring of 1965, when he wrote, the local Civil Rights movement had hardly advanced past summoning white sympathizers from the campus to sit-in against job discrimination—let alone to calling itself Black. The Farmworkers had just begun to march, half a state away, not yet calling for grape boycott. The women’s movement had not yet become aware that it was emerging; ditto for the gays’; the modern ecology and environmental movement(s) were pregnant unphrased as growing numbers of young whites began to smoke weed and sense the pulses of grass and planet, pollutions of air and food.  

In this moment of complex, opened potentials in the yeasty culture of a still-white-university town, Hunter focused on the mythical and actual persona of the “non-student.” His entire article explores only this—but in this, how observant and clear he was, and how much ground he covered! The divergences, tensions, and dialectic between “hippies” and “politicos”; the incipient commune movement; the deinstitutionalization and alternative-institutionalization of higher education; the development of underground media—all these and more are visible here in presage, as early traces of profound developments, more surely than the early traces of Thompson’s peculiar style. From this distance, 40 years later, he is visible working entirely within the journalistic canons of the time, as a journalist quietly superb.›