Blundering into History: A Woodstock Eyewitness Remembers

Newswise — "An image, a parable for a greater American experience" is how history professor and Woodstock eyewitness Maurice Isserman describes the fabled event. Author of "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s," Isserman observed , "From the moment I crested the hill above the stage and looked down on the multitudes gathered below, I had a sense of having unexpectedly blundered into the opportunity to make history " a bracing feeling that I've seldom felt thereafter, and one that went a long way to compensate for the fact that during the next 24 hours I spent perched on a soggy blanket on a muddy hillside, I would neither eat nor sleep."

Isserman has commented and has been quoted by the media often on his experiences at Woodstock and his perspectives on its social and historic role. Most recently he has been interviewed with Woodstock performer Richie Havens on Minnesota Public Radio and has published an essay on the event in "The Chronicle of Higher Education." Pasted below are some of Isserman's comments on Woodstock:

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Media reaction: In the end, he says, "Woodstock was embraced (and tamed) by the media - including a famous eight-page color spread in Life magazine a week or so afterwards -- for its deference to the nation's pastoral myth, which seemed to endow the festival goers with a wholesome American innocence, despite the nudity, drugs, and hard-rocking musicians."

Adult perceptions: "Woodstock was a source of great fear to adults in the days leading up to the festival (the New York National Guard was mobilized, and some locals barricaded themselves in their houses to fend off hippie intruders), was subsequently embraced as evidence that 'the kids are alright.'" A lot of that, Isserman suggests, had to do with its setting: "Max Yasgur's farm in rural Bethel, New York, complete with cows, was a non-threatening venue for a mass gathering of the nation's youth -- unlike, say, Grant Park in Chicago the previous summer, or any number of university campuses like Berkeley and Madison, associated in the public mind with radical protest and violence."

Woodstock as it relates to today's events: "Woodstock is reduced in popular memory to a weekend of blissful abandon, a chance to dress up in flower-child trappings, a brief excursion to nirvana and back. Maybe on this fortieth anniversary, at a moment when the country faces challenges and decisions every bit as important -- and divisive -- as 1969, we can remember Woodstock as a more complicated, less 'innocent' phenomenon."