NEWS: Demise of the Commune Movement, NY Times 8/3/98
et in dc (prop1@prop1.org)
Mon, 03 Aug 1998 09:51:29 -0400
August 3, 1998, New York Times
Excesses Blamed for Demise of the Commune Movement
By SALLY JOHNSON
EST BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- A gaggle of aging
hippies gathered here over the weekend to
assess what went right -- and wrong -- with the
commune movement that brought them "back to the
land" of southern Vermont 30 years ago. They
concluded that theirs was a radical social experiment
that died by its own hand, impaled on its excesses.=20
The occasion for their self-criticism was a conference,
sponsored by the University of Vermont, at the West
Village Meeting House, a stone's throw from Guilford,
the mecca of the commune movement that began in the
late 1960's with the influx of disaffected urban and
suburban youths, seeking self-sufficiency, unfettered
freedom and an alternative to the nuclear family. The
conference attracted about 50 people, many who had
joined the movement at the time.=20
In its brief heyday, the movement in southeastern
Vermont included a loose network of communes
clustered around the towns of Guilford and Putney,
encompassing the Red Clover Collective, the Johnson's
Pastures Commune, Packer Corners and the Montague
Farm. A few of the communes, where people lived
together as an extended family, still exist, although in
modified form.=20
The glue for the conference was the posthumous
publication of the book "Communal Organization and
Social Transition" (Peter Lang, 1997) by the
sociologist Barry Laffan that documents the life and
times of the counterculture over 30 months at the end of
the 1960's. The book is one of the first ethnographies to
deal with that brief period of American culture.=20
The quest for a utopia soon turned into a
self-destructive orgy of excess, many participants
concluded, culminating symbolically in the fire that
razed the big house at the Johnson's Pastures
Commune, by far the largest of the communes. The
blaze, on April 16, 1970, killed four people.=20
Chuck Light, a witness and member of the commune at
the time, recalled during a panel discussion that the fire
known as J. P. was precipitated when, after a night of
drinking and drugs, someone tipped over a candle.=20
"I was living in a hovel in the back of a truck at the
time," Light said. "We heard screaming and came
running; people were leaping out of second-story
windows. The old wooden house went up in minutes."=20
That blaze, he concluded, "became a central symbol of
the movement, symbolic of the personal fires and
conflicts that were going on around us and among us."=20
The communes inspired several spinoffs, including the
Free Farm in Putney, intended as a place where anyone
could grow their food.=20
But "it was more about making political statements
than about farming," said Robert Houriet, who moved
to more structured communes in northern Vermont and
is now an organic farmer in Hardwick. "The Free Farm
was in plain view of a building where the local
Democrats met, and they got offended by all the weeds
and the bare-breasted women. Eventually, there was an
ugly confrontation between hippies and an armed
vigilante group, led by the local sheriff."=20
Even within the movement itself, however, the patterns
of the broader society still held, said Howard
Lieberman, a commune member who became a
corporate headhunter. Lieberman, who now lives in
Minnesota, said that he and Laffan "spent years trying
to puzzle through the class distinctions."=20
"The Red Clover Collective was the educated, affluent
kids," Lieberman said. "The people at the Free Farm
were middle-class kids, emulating the Red Clover
hippies, and the J. P. was the Ellis Island of the
commune movement, drawing people with nowhere to
go and nothing else to do."=20
In fact, Johnson's Pastures and its membership
policies, or lack thereof, became the epitome of the
movement in its extreme. The former landowner,
Michael Carpenter, a silent, bearded man who attended
the weekend sessions, set an open-door policy,
refusing to turn away anyone.=20
The result, said Light, was that "during the summer of
1969, somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people
passed through the J. P. Lots of them would come in
buses. The place became a slum. The class differences
were very relevant; the first communards had shared
values and education, but it quickly sank to the lowest
common denominator -- the criminal element. What
happened at the J. P. was a colossal failure."=20
Others disagreed with that assessment. Verandah
Porche, a poet and a past and current member of the
smaller Packer Corners commune, said she "admired
the spirit and generosity of the Carpenters, and I
wouldn't diss it as naivet=E9."=20
"Somebody had to try it," Ms. Porche said. "I had the
luxury of sending along the people I didn't want at our
house down the road to his house."=20
What she remembered from those early years was a
utopian life on an old farm "with a blooming peach
orchard" and mortgage payments of $227.10 a month.
Her memories were of a life of generosity and
connection, both among the communards and with the
local farm families. "Their kids didn't want to hear the
old stories about making cheese and sap beer," said
Ms. Porche, "but we did. We ate that stuff up. We were
in a listening mode."=20
Marty Jezer, a co-founder of Packer Corners, blamed
the failure of the movement on the profound conflict
within the counterculture. "We had a big cider press
operation at Packer Corners," Jezer recalled, "and I
remember being up on top of the press one day, feeding
in apples to make cider. A bunch of hippies had come
by to help, but instead they were dancing around the
press, throwing apples at each other. It wasn't much
help. We had an impractical but noble vision that was
constantly undermined by people who came just to
play."=20
In all, Houriet concluded, the important lesson of the
commune movement was that "open-ended, anarchistic
communities didn't work because of problems with
leadership, with land ownership, the role of drugs and
booze, plus internal conflicts among the members.
There was a lot of trauma involved, and not just from
chemicals. The movement opened a Pandora's box of
the liberated self, and the trauma proceeded from the
inability of people to deal with themselves."=20
If Johnson's Pastures went up in flames, he said, "many
communes dissolved with a whimper as people just
drifted away."=20
The later, more successful communes, he said, were a
result of lessons learned in the early movement: "that
there has to be some leadership and decision-making,
some control of membership, that you can't sell drugs
to people in town, go skinny-dipping in the town pond
and offend your neighbors."=20
Then, all these years later, Houriet's eyes filled with
tears and his voice choked up. "There was a brief,
shining moment when we knew it could work," he said,
scanning the panel of his fellow communards. "We
knew it could work, but we blew it."=20
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