It would surprise me if you've heard of photographer Bernie Boston, but I'm willing to wager my 1960s vinyl album collection that you're familiar with his most famous photo.
Boston captured one of the iconic images of the 1960s Vietnam war protests: a young man ( 18-year-old George Edgerly Harris III) stuffing flowers into the rifle barrels of National Guard troops during the October 22, 1967 march on the Pentagon. The photograph, to me, became a visual Allen Ginsberg poem. It embodied the gentle soul and iron resolve of flower children who refused to accept the status quo of a complacent nation at war.
According to Boston, the Guardsmen formed a semi-circle around the protesters and pointed their rifles at the crowd. From what I know, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and other 1960s radicals had promoted the event as a supernatural occurrence in which shamans and mystics would levitate the military headquarters 10 feet off the ground. I guess the notion, as whacko as it sounds today, really freaked out the man in Washington D.C.!
It was what Allen Ginsberg termed a playful moment of "magic politics." Ginsberg himself was out on the forefront of that event, partaking in Tebetan chants in ernest hippie hopes of actually raising spirits and defying gravity.
To say that the nonsensical plot got under the authorities' collective skin would be an understatement. The Big Man himself, President Johnson, over-reacted by deploying a huge display of force -- almost 5,000 police and Guardsmen. Supposedly, placing flowers in gun barrels was Ginsberg's idea. He wanted to create a poetic, visual example of youth against youth, a starkly contrasting portrait of cold, lethal steel against warmth, love and flower power.
Boston happened to have the best angle on the moment, positioned on a wall overlooking the odd yet alarming confrontation. His photo earned him a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize that year. Strangely however, the newspaper he worked for didn't see much value in the historic photo and buried it on Page A12. What were they thinking?
Norman Mailer, who was at the Pentagon the day Bernie Boston snapped his defining photograph, actually won a Pulitzer prize for writing an account of the protest, titled "The Armies of the Night." Have you ever read it? I'm trying to get my hands on it, but haven't had any luck yet.
All these years later, the whole bizarre circus remains brightly stained upon my youthful imagination and sense of rebellion. Sadly, however, the key actors in that memorable drama have for the most part faded into obscurity and dust.
George Edgerly Harris III, the flower child stuffing carnations down gun barrels, died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1982. That was so early in the epidemic that the Gay community was in shock. There was no first or second wall of defense, and the disease just burned like wildfire through an entire generation of artists, writers and creative tribes members, eclipsing the casualties of Vietnam many times over. How sad!
Abbie Hoffman committed suicide in April 1989, swallowing 150 phenobarbital pills. Or so the official story goes. His body was found surrounded by over 200 pages of hand-written notes. Was he a jaded Yippie activist who shrugged in dispair amid a wave of Yuppie consumerism and the mass transformation of the most radical generation ever into a voting block that would later put George W. Bush in power? How tragic!
Jerry Rubin, who later became a Yuppie himself, would go on to insist that "wealth creation is the real American revolution." Ah, the poetic irony of fate! in a final act of petite rebellion, this celebrated iconoclast was struck by a car and killed in November 1994 while jaywalking on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. How futiley fitting, in a Charles Adams sort of way.
David Dellinger, suffering from poor health at age 88, died in May 2004. I am pleased to report that just three years earlier, he had hitchhiked to Quebec City to demonstrate against the North American Free Trade Agreement. Right on, Dellinger. How inspiring!
Bernie Boston died at the age of 74, but I think his photo will live on, speaking for generations to come what the others mentioned above can no longer say.
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