60. Memories of the Newport Jazz Festival Riots of 1960

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When will we ever have a riot like the one that closed down the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960? I mean a riot like, when it's over things are clear. At Newport you had students just drunk, just partying, throwing rocks at the police just to make trouble. Rich kids' trouble. They'd come into town in MGs and BMWs (you saw dozens of them down by the beach — I was there) and their clothes (when they kept them on) were the latest Bermuda fashion. Moralists like me could express pure disapproval.

And what support we had! The music community was right with us, mad as hell about losing their festival. And to whom? Not to people worked up by the music. Not to people so eager for it that they'd fight to get tickets. No. To people who didn't know crap about the music. Or anything. I believe it was Whitney Balliett, jazz critic of the New Yorker, who called them "Yahoos." Yes, Swift's name for unregenerate mankind. Gulliver found them in trees, throwing excrement. Perfect.

And the intellectual community? Oh, they were with us. They had to be. The whole thing started in downtown Newport when a fight broke out between two fraternities. Intellectuals can't be seen close to fraternities. They run with the music community. Whitney Balliett.

So we were at the center of a solid moral, esthetic, and intellectual front with a clear view of the opponents we faced. They were the uneducated; we were the educated. They were the immature; we were the mature.

That was 1960. In a few years nothing was clear. What looked like the same youth, throwing the same rock at the same policeman, could not really be the same youth, the one we disapproved of. He had a cause. First civil rights, then ending the war in Viet Nam. We approved of those causes. We were, by and large, doing nothing to further them. How could we disapprove of this youth who was, at least, doing something? Who was "more moral"? Could you call somebody less mature and educated than you were when he was more moral?

Then there was the view of policemen. In 1960 the young people were looking at officials with no history. A few years later they were looking at officials with a history of "brutality," variously earned but surely named. That let the young refocus our attention, and quickly. The issue after a riot (or an act of "civil disobedience"; it all came under "lawbreaking") became the performance of the authorities. "Yes, we broke the law but you didn't punish us right." Well, sometimes the police punished right and sometimes they didn't. Oi. There were enough complications without adding that one.

The recent riots in England roused my memory of these sixties' complications. The riots' origin in a protest over police action against a minority immediately raised a banner like one I honored in the sixties. The subsequent mindless behavior raised the same doubts. The authorities' reaction raised the same question about punishment.

All this makes me realize how lucky I am, in a sad sort of old-age way. The chances of life seem to have put me far closer to significant riots (or acts of disobedience) than a moralist has any right to expect. After the Newport riots I was in the student march on the Pentagon in 1967 and I was on the campus of Ohio University in 1968. I knew all about the bombing of the ROTC building and the storming of the President's house and the coming of the National Guard and the closing of the University. And I was in Seoul, South Korea, close enough to the fall of Syngman Rhee to be inspired — no, thrilled — by an account of the march that brought him down.

At the same time I was lucky to be assigned to teach two authors not often found in one professor's course assignments, Herman Melville and John Milton. Nowhere else could I have stumbled on such well-timed wisdom about the riotous human being. In the next post or two I will, as I recall the riots and street actions I have witnessed, try to make something of my luck.