Armies of the Night Revisited.

Written by Evan Stark to
The New York Times Book Review, January 3l, l997

To the Editor:

Amidst the other unsubstantiated jibes that comprise Jonathan Rieder’s review of For the Hell of it (Jonah Raskin’s biography of Abbie Hoffman) is this particularly scurrilous accusation. “In Chicago, he (Hoffman) really did conspire, at least to put innocents and the movement at risk.” The charge, which first surfaced in a Wall Street Journal editorial several years ago, is that Hoffman and other New Left leaders deliberately provoked police to attack demonstrators outside the l968 Democratic convention, resulting in several hundred injuries, most to young people. Because this “fatal error” shifted the focus of debate off the Vietnam War, Reider demands an apology to the “Democratic” and “liberal” left.

The facts are these. Prior to the Chicago convention, a group of about 50 of us met at a YMCA camp outside of the city to finalize plans for the demonstration. A few weeks earlier, dozens of youngsters had been beaten when Mayor Lindsey’s police attacked a peaceful “Yippie” demonstration Abbie had called at the spur of the moment at Grand Central Station. He felt personally responsible for the NY debacle, stayed drug-free, raised the specter of a similar police reaction in Chicago and, ultimately, challenged the wisdom of the “illegal” march. Ironically, it was myself, Dave Dellinger and other pacifists who carried the day. With the world watching, we believed, officials would keep their cool and allow us our witness.

If anyone conspired to hurt innocent people, it was Mayor Daley, not Abbie Hoffman. It was Daley, his police and the Democratic National Committee who showed “hatred for the country and its traditions” that day, not the former pharmacy student who worked his way through Brandeis selling sub sandwiches and proudly wore a shirt made out of an American flag. Ultimately, the “fatal error” Reider attributes to Abbie proved to be theirs. Far from the focus shifting, opposition to the War built so rapidly after the violent reaction in Chicago that it cost the Democrats the election. From ‘68 until the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, there was little else the U.S. could focus on.

—Evan Stark
New Haven, CT

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Property is Theft.

Written by Stuart Ewen to
The New York Times,
April 11, 2007.

To the Editor:

In the 1870s, when John D. Rockefeller bought or wiped out small oil businesses, and created the giant Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ, today Exxon-Mobil), he created a monopoly over the energy sources that would drive the twentieth century and continue to dominate.

In 1989, when Bill Gates founded Corbis (“A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge,” Business Day, April 10), which since then has ravenously laid claim to copyright ownership over millions of images—including many of the most important historical photographs that document the story of the modern age—he began building a monopoly very different from Rockefeller’s leviathan Standard Oil of New Jersey, but one that perhaps, in its own peculiar way, may be as consequential.

Just as dependence on the CO2 emitting fuels—controlled by the progeny of John D’s SONJ—is largely responsible for a perilous hole growing in the earth’s atmosphere, Gates’ monopoly over the imagistic world threatens to burn a hole in peoples’ collective memories. As historians and others must increasingly use visual evidence as critical element for unraveling the past, the need to fork over tidy sums to Corbis for every historical image they wish to use in a book or film will make the texture of our heritage more and more costly to relay. How can one hope to tell the story of the twentieth century (among other centuries) without employing visual documents?

Imagine what would happen to written history if each time we quoted a passage from the Declaration of Independence, or from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, we had to pay a fee? Visual memory should be a common birthright, not something that one rich man can control. As an historian of visual culture, this issue has already had an impact on my work.

—Stuart Ewen
—Distinguished Professor
—Ph.D. Programs in History & Sociology, —CUNY Graduate Center
—Film & Media Studies, Hunter College

EDITOR’S NOTE:
The New York Times, of course, would never have published this letter. While less inclusive than Corbis’ endless archive, the Times also charges tidy sums for their photographs, as well as other photographs and images over which they have gained “ownership.” So, too, do numerous other for-profit archives. Many years ago, the great Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse (Tashunka Witko) declared that “one does not sell the earth upon which people walk,” words that expressed a rare, and mostly forgotten, wisdom about nature’s bounties. Perhaps the same should be said of memory and history. Access to them must not be for sale.


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