Friday, November 27, 1964: Operation Moneybags

     British soldiers are given LSD as part of research into how the drug might affect their capabilities as well as military operations. From the Imperial War Museum's description of the filmed summary (link: @):

     Introductory title places trial in context of recent research to discover chemical agents able to incapacitate enemy forces but with negligible risk of fatal casualties. ... One Marine in state of distress is comforted by nurse, while others smile and laugh hysterically, one attempting to cut down a tree with his spade, and another climbing the tree. ... After exercise Marines rest in bed in Porton ward ... One very distressed Marine is held by duffel coated doctor and scientist, muttering "I am not going to die."  Cut back to end of the exercise, with Marines departing by truck, before concluding title states that despite promising results of experiment, further research is needed into methods of disseminating drug, the effects of larger doses and establishing economical production techniques. "Despite these and other problems, LSD is regarded in the light of present knowledge as one of the drugs which merits more detailed examination and testing."

* Short clip from film: @

* Excerpt from "Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain" (Andy Roberts, 2012): @

* House of Commons communications (1995): @

* "Drugged and Duped" (Rob Evans, The Guardian newspaper, March 14, 2002): @

* "Weapons Against the Mind" (Dr. W.M. Hollyhock, New Scientist magazine, April 22, 1965): @ 

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1964: 'The Prospect of Immortality'

Robert C.W. Ettinger's book about the promise of cryonics is published by Doubleday. From the opening chapter:

     Most of now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality.

     This remarkable proposition -- which may soon become a pivot of personal and national life -- is easily understood by joining one established fact to one reasonable assumption.

     The fact: At very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely. (Details and references will be supplied.)

     The assumption: If civilization endures, medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other cause of death. (Definite reasons for such optimism will be given.)

     Hence we need only arrange to have our bodies, after we die, stored in suitable freezers against the time when science may be able to help us. No matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later our friends of the future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us. This is the essence of the main argument.

     The arrangements will no doubt be handled at first by individuals, then by private companies and perhaps later by the Social Security system.

* Complete text of book: @

* Ettinger biography (from Cryonics Institute): @

* "Can 'Deep Freeze' Conquer Death?" (Ettinger, Ebony magazine, January 1966): @

* "The Iceman" (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, January 25, 2010): @ 

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Sunday, November 15, 1964: 'Don't trust anyone over 30'

Jack Weinberg, whose arrest on October 1 helped ignite the Free Speech Movement at the University of California Berkeley, is quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article written by James Benet:

"We have a saying in the movement that you can't trust anyone over 30."

The quote was reprinted by Chronicle columnist Ralph J. Gleason and soon became a slogan of the counterculture. (It was often shortened to "Don't trust anyone over 30.")

In 1970, Weinberg told The Washington Post: "I was being interviewed by this guy, and he was, or seemed to be, saying something that was bothering me. He was probing into the question of weren't there outside adults manipulating us. There was the implication of a 'Communist conspiracy.' That was infuriating, so I said the thing about not trusting anyone over 30 as a kind of taunt. I was trying to tell him there weren't any graybeards manipulating us." (Link to article: @)

Note: While I have not seen the original article in print or online, the source and date comes from Ralph Keyes' book "I Love It When You Talk Retro" (2009). Keyes also writes in "Nice Guys Finish Seventh" (1992): "Twenty-six years later, now long past 30 himself, Weinberg told me that those words just occurred to him on the spot. He thought they were original to him. Calling them a "movement saying" was his way of trying to give the motto more zing. ... Weinberg's generational redlining touched a nerve among over-thirties. It confirmed their worst fears about how they were perceived by their children. When student activists realized how much this motto bugged their elders, many began to chant 'Don't trust anyone over thirty' in earnest. Before long this became the defining slogan of an era when surly youths were seen as rudely elbowing their parents aside. In Weinberg's words, 'The phrase just resonated.' "

     -- Photo of Jack Weinberg by Harvey Richards

* As mentioned in "We Shall Overcome" (Ramparts magazine, April 1965): @

* "Boom! Talking About the Sixties" (Tom Brokaw, 2007, interview with Weinberg begins on page 591): @

* "What Happened at Berkeley" (Saturday Review magazine, January 16, 1965): @

* "Free Speech Movement Press Bibliography" (btstack.com): @ 

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1964: Gentrification

Writing in the book "London: Aspects of Change," British sociologist Ruth Glass coins the term and explains the concept:

     One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes -- upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages -- two rooms up and two down -- have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Larger Victorian houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent periods -- which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation -- have been upgraded once again. Nowadays, many of these houses are being sub-divided into costly flats or "houselets" (in terms of the new real estate snob jargon). The current social status and value of such dwellings are frequently in inverse relation to their size, and in any case enormously inflated by comparison with previous levels in their neighbourhoods. Once this process of "gentrification" starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.

* Text of Glass' essay (from "The Gentrification Debates: A Reader," edited by Japonica Brown-Saracino, 2013): @

* Glass biography (from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography): @

* "Gentrification" (Oxford Bibliographies): @

* "The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City" (Neil Smith, 2005): @

* "There Goes the 'Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up" (Lance Freeman, 2006): @

* "Gentrification" (Loretta Lees, Tom Slater and Elvin Wyly, 2008): @

* "As 'Gentrification' Turns 50, Tracing Its Nebulous History" (curbed.com, 2014): @

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Tuesday, November 3, 1964: Pay television

Californians have voted to outlaw pay television and, in the process, dealt a crippling blow to the ambitious firm that hoped to pioneer the medium across the nation.
     Sylvester L. (Pat) Weaver, president of Subscription Television, Inc., now operating in Los Angeles and San Francisco, declined comment until more votes are counted.
     But a spokesman for the firm said the defeat, by a better than 2 to 1 margin, will be appealed in the courts.
     "You can't vote down free enterprise," said the spokesman. "It's patently unconstitutional, clearly a violation of the First Amendment."
     Proposition 15, an initiative backed by a $1.5 million kitty from theater owners, declared pay TV "contrary to public policy."
     A leader of the fight against pay TV was Eugene V. Klein, president of National General Corporation, which operates 217 theaters, mostly in California.
     "It's obvious that the people of California are for free TV to pay TV.  Californians find it obnoxious to pay $1.50 to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants while the rest of the country gets their baseball on free TV," said Klein.
     The subscription system transmits its program by coaxial cable to a little box which attaches to the customer's regular TV set. There are three channels. Picture, quality and sound are of high caliber.
     The box permits reception of sound and picture and sends back impulses so the firm can know by electronic bookkeeping how much to bill subscribers.
     -- Associated Press, November 4
     -- Image from campaign against pay TV  (videos: @ and @)

* California ballot proposition, 1964 (University of California Hastings Law Library): @

* "The Box: Will it revolutionize TV, reshape the movies, retune the American mind?" (Life magazine, July 17, 1964): @

* "Pay TV: The Day The Money Stopped" (New York Times, November 15): @

* "Stupid Question, Stupid Answer" (Life, November 20): @

* "California High Court Voids Ban on Pay TV" (United Press International, March 3, 1966): @

* "Court Hits California Pay-TV Ban" (Associated Press, October 10, 1966): @
* "Pay Television" (Museum of Broadcast Communications): @

* "Hollywood in the Age of Television" (edited by Tino Balio, 1990): @ 

* "The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Evolution or Revolution" (Megan Mullen, 2003): @

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Tuesday, November 3, 1964: U.S. presidential election

The nation gave Lyndon B. Johnson a thundering go-ahead for his broad welfare and co-existence programs today after he rocked Barry Goldwater with the worst drubbing any man has taken since Alf Landon.

     Topping Franklin D. Roosevelt on his 1936 rout of Landon, President Johnson took Maine and Vermont, too, last bastions of granite Republicanism, in a sweep of 44 states and the District of Columbia. Riding the tide as his beaming running-mate was Sen. Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.).

     Goldwater's cry for a return to conservatism was shouted down across the nation. He scooped up only his own Arizona and a tier of brooding Deep South states that behaved much the same way in 1948 when they sulked in the Dixiecrat tent.

     -- The Miami News

     -- Map from http://geoelections.free.fr/

* Summary (Presidential Campaigns & Elections): @

* Results (Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections): @

* "The Johnson Landslide" (newsreel; from C-SPAN): @
* Life magazine, November 13: @ 

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November 1964: 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics'

     Richard Hofstadter delivered the first version of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" as a Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University in November 1963, the same month that President John F. Kennedy was murdered; an abridged version appeared in Harper's Magazine the following year. The lecture had grown out of Hofstadter's long-standing apprehensions about the rise of American right-wing extremism after World War II -- most conspicuously the McCarthyite hysteria of the early 1950s but also the profusion of new right-wing organizations such as the John Birch Society. ... 

     Hofstadter discovered a chronic, rancid syndrome in our political life that he called, loosely, "paranoid." The paranoid style, he contended, had long afflicted radical movements on the left as well as the right, and had even touched some good causes, including the antislavery movement. Usually, however, it appeared in bad ones. ...

     Hofstadter studied the Goldwater campaign closely and wrote an essay about its worrisome paranoid emanations. ... To read these selections today is to see a devoted liberal of moderate disposition aroused by his realization that, despite Goldwater's crushing defeat in 1964, some of the worst distempers of American democracy had become, as he wrote, "a formidable force in our politics" -- and, quite possibly, a permanent one.

     -- From the forward to "The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays" (2008 reissue)

* As printed in Harper's Magazine (November 1964): @

* As printed by Harvard University Press (1996): @

* "A Long View: Goldwater in History" (Hofstadter, The New York Review of Books, October 1964): @

* "Richard Hofstadter: A Reading List" (New York Times, 2006): @

* "Why Richard Hofstadter is Still Worth Reading but Not for the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind" (Jon Weiner, University of California, Irvine, 2006): @

* "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography" (David S. Brown, 2006): @ 

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