We early ’60s radicals believed ourselves anointed as a new “tell-it-like-it-is” generation.
We promised to transcend the “smelly old orthodoxies” (in Orwell’s phrase) of Cold War
liberalism and class-based, authoritarian leftism. Leading the students into the university
administration building for the first mass protest, Mario Savio, the FSM’s brilliant leader,
from Queens, N.Y., famously said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine
becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. … And you’ve
got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free,
the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
