Ideological Mystification and Social Issues: the Ecological Action Movement in the United States

Abstract

There were flowers and children’s games, young couples in love and hippy communities, and a racial mixture unusual for California. There were trees and animal cries, there was a garden where a few weeks before had stretched a desolate piece of land surrounded by wire netting, an abandoned park destined for use in some vague extension scheme for the University of California at Berkeley. The students decided otherwise; it was to be the ‘People’s Park’. While troops of volunteers worked on it from day to day, thousands of people relaxed there, enjoying themselves in the spring sunshine; but the university administration deliberated, and Ronald Reagan began shouting about respect for public property. The police received their orders. On 15 May 1969 they occupied the park during the early hours of the morning, destroying the installations and driving out the campers. When the people tried to return to their park, it had become an entrenched camp for 3000 national guards, bayonets fixed. They fired. More than 100 people were shot. Student James Rector never got up again. After a day of manhunts, silence was restored to the park before the arrival of the machines which were to turn it into something for ‘public use’.