A 1959 manifesto framed police harassment of Beats as political persecution

Evidence

As 1959 ended, David McReynolds, a socialist-pacifist sometime Voice contributor who had recently decried the Beat Generation’s apolitical alienation, published a manifesto entitled “The Hipster General Strike.” New York was plagued by destructive “slum clearance,” pointless juvenile gang wars, and Madison Avenue mendacity, not to mention indifference to the suffering poor. New York was a city “from which justice has taken holiday and compassion is on an indefinite leave of absence.” More locally, McReynolds cited the “morality drive” launched by the police to shut down the poetry cafés and run the folksingers out of Washington Square, as well as “the trumped-up and much-trumpeted narcotics raid in the Village” apparently designed to transform the Beats into “public scapegoat #1.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 97

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The police ‘morality drive’ against poetry cafés and folksingers is another material condition (harassment-as-catalyst) that fits the reader’s test case for what makes avant-garde scenes cohere.