An Interview with John Haag
By Suzy
Williams
John Haag – whose long
career of fighting for the rights of Venetians has earned him the title of
People’s Doge of Venice.
He was
the proprietor of the Venice West coffeehouse and led the fight for the right of
poets to read their poetry at a time when it was illegal in Los Angeles without
an entertainment license.
Haag was a founder, and a long-time leader,
of the Venice Peace and Freedom Party and co-founder, along with Rick Davidson,
of the Free Venice movement.
In
addition, Haag “...served as founding president of the Venice Chapter of
the ACLU, chairman of the Venice Forum, publicity chairman of the Venice/Santa
Monica chapter of CORE, ‘action chairman’ of the Westside United
Civil Rights Committee, rally chairman of the Congress of Unrepresented People
(COUP), chairman of the International Days of Protest Committee, arrangements
committee chairman of the Southern California Committee to End Police
Malpractice...” (Venice West - The Beat Generation in Southern California,
John Arthur Maynard, Rutgers University Press,
1991).
John Haag has been in the thick
of every struggle to defend Venice for the past 40 years. He was instrumental in
the successful opposition to a freeway through Venice, turning the canals into a
yacht harbor, fighting police brutality in Oakwood and throughout Venice,
upholding the rights of artists and poets to perform and sell their creations,
and against commercial overdevelopment in Venice. He was interviewed by
Beachhead Collectivist Suzy Williams in
October.
Suzy Williams: Welcome Mr.
John Haag! Say, how would you describe
yourself?
John Haag: Boy, I don’t
know whether I would try. I’ve been in retirement, in seclusion for so
many years, but prior to that I would have described myself as a self-taught
organizer. I started out not having the vaguest idea of where I was going. But,
I found myself organizing a picket line down on the boardwalk protesting police
harassment of the Venice West Coffeehouse.
SW: Right, I was just reading in
Venice West, the book, and it said that you posted a sign on the door that said
“NO MORE POETRY! The anti-intellectual yahoos at the LAPD want it to stop.
Poets ARISE!”
JH: Well,
I’m not very graceful…
SW:
Au contraire! So that was your first
organizing?
JH: Well, yes, except when
I was working for CBS in New York City, I organized my work group to call for
strike. I got a unanimous strike vote from that group of television news film
technicians. The strike didn’t have to take
place-
SW: You mean you got the raise
before you had to...
JH: Yes,
right.
SW: But that was heartening for
you and encouraging.
JH: It was
startling, because when I started out working, I was relatively anti-union.
SW: You were!
Why?
JH: I think it was the background
I came from. My father was a machinist, which is really a craft, I don’t
know if that had anything to do with his bias, but he was virulently anti-union
and I just picked it up.
SW: Was he a
Republican?
JH: Oh, yes he
was.
SW: Like James Brown is a
Republican. Certain specialists are just
conservative.
JH: Yes. So I had to join
the union when I got this job, and I became friends with the shop steward.
SW: Do you think the roots of your
political journey began with that
friend?
JH: I don’t know about
that, because it wasn’t out of an ideology, there was an unfairness on the
part of the company. I think it happened just before I came to California. I
spent a year in Italy and I spent quite a bit of time with a Communist official.
It just so happened that he liked to take midnight walks. And I’m pretty
much of a night person. So somehow, he lived in the same neighborhood where I
was living with an Italian family. I think these midnight conversations with
Marco gave me some theory, you know, economics and
politics.
SW: I see; now, according to
this book, Venice West, you became a
Communist.
JH: That book is full of
expletive deleted!
SW: So it’s
not true!
JH: Not only was I never a
Communist, but I had many battles with the Communists. I worked with them in the
anti-war movement, because my attitude was to work with anybody who agrees with
me! I don’t know why that guy printed that or where he got that. I worked
as long as I could with them but then I broke, and I suffered the usual
consequences, of being called a turncoat, and a Trotskyite. It was over the
opposition to the war. For a time I was the Los Angeles Chairman of the W.E.B.
Dubois Club, oh yes and The Evening Outlook did call that organization
“Communist inspired”.
SW:
Who was W.E.B. Dubois? I forgot.
JH: He
was a founder of the NAACP, born in the 1860’s, from Great Barrington,
Massachusetts, a scholar, Black historian, a great orator who called for change,
and a Socialist most of his life and towards the end finally he became a
Communist and moved to Africa.
SW: He
was a leader and a gatherer of
people.
JH: Yes,
definitely.
SW: You were involved in
civil rights, I see you were involved with C.O.R.E. What did that stand
for?
JH: Congress of Racial
Equality.
SW: Ah, but let’s get
back to Venice West, the coffeehouse. (At 7 Dudley, where Sponto’s is now)
When did you take ownership of it?
JH:
Well, it was 1962 to 1966. I have to say that the coffeehouse was an enormous
education to me, I learned so much from so many, you know 20 different varieties
of Socialist!
SW: Even more than at
Harvard!
JH: At Harvard I did get an
education I wouldn’t normally have had. I majored in English, and took
several languages, and courses in Art: sculpture,
drawing…
SW: And Poetry? Because
you are such a sublime poet.
JH: No! I
never took a literature course, because I didn’t want to be told how to
write.
SW: You
rebel!
JH: One of my instructors made
this assertion that you could never write a political sonnet in the English
language. Two of the poems I sent to The Beachhead recently were political
sonnets.
SW: So tell me, were you
hassled a lot at Venice West?
JH: The
LAPD tried a couple times to employ an ordinance having to do with
entertainment, but the judge ruled that what was happening there was not
entertainment in terms of the ordinance. Nobody was getting paid! The kind of
harassment that happened was not usually violent, but certain people were asked
day after day for their I.D; trying to wear you down. Sometimes the cops took
you to the county line and told you “ Don’t come back ”. Of
course, this wasn’t a legal procedure. I learned the law very quickly.
SW: It’s so funny, we
romanticize the sixties, especially in Venice, thinking of it as a freer time,
but in fact life was harder to live
then.
JH: I haven’t been hassled
about my long hair in twenty years!
SW:
So what all went on in Venice West, besides
poetry?
JH: I think that the
coffeehouse was one of the only places on earth where you were encouraged to
talk about anything, and talk turned political in 1964, especially. I’m
pretty sure someone brought in a leaflet about a protest of the Vietnam War, so
there we were at the Veteran’s Cemetery on Sawtelle, about thirty of us. I
don’t think there was any hostility, I don’t think anybody knew what
we were talking about, no one knew about the war. I was living—I should
say working at the coffeehouse where people were talking politics right and left
- pardon the expression - and eventually there was a lot of talk that we ought
to have a radical political party. I had a little stint where I ran for Assembly
and I got a taste of the Democratic Party and not the worst part of it, either.
I mean, the Santa Monica club was fairly liberal, you would think, until you get
to talking to them! I mean the idea that you had a candidate that ran a
coffeehouse! Scandal!
So then there
came a time to get real about starting a party. I checked into the election code
and found a way that seemed possible by registering sixty-seven thousand people,
that would qualify you for the ballot – as opposed to the impossible
petition that required six HUNDRED seventy thousand signatures! Then, what
should we call the party? There were meetings of radicals of north and south
California, and after much noisy discussion, we came up with the name,
“Peace and Freedom Party.”And so, with a dozen colleagues, we
started registering people on June 23, 1967.
SW: John, can you tell me - how did
the Beachhead begin?
JH: There you have
one of my favorite stories. The first election that the Peace and Freedom Party
was involved in was 1968. We had these three candidates running in Venice. And I
had the fixation that we were not going to have this campaign disappear in
November. We knew we were not going to get our candidates elected. So what were
we doing with all this time and effort? There wasn’t enough time to
discuss it before the election, but when it was over, the campaign committee got
together and started discussing it: “How about a community radio?”
“How about this or that?” The decision was finally made to have a
community newspaper. We went from campaign committee to Beachhead collective.
And we had the first issue out in December of
1968.
SW: Was it well received right
off the bat?
JH:
Yes.
SW: Isn’t that funny? It is
today, too. Some things are just so consistent, ya
know?
JH: And month by month people
looked for it. Over a period of time, we got a whole lot of people distributing
it on their own block or maybe two or three blocks. And they did it happily. At
its peak we had 5,000 papers delivered door to door. The other thing was the
structure of the Beachhead. I don’t need to tell you, there’s no
editor, there’s no publisher, there’s no boss. It’s truly a
collective, each person having equal voice and vote and nobody getting paid for
anything. And that went on for twenty-plus years. And I think that’s some
kind of a miracle.
SW: I know, it is
astounding.
JH: I will say this: I feel
I’m mostly responsible for that structure. Because by then, I had really
thought about how to set things up and how to keep them
going.
SW: Say, what does
“Beachhead” mean, anyway?
JH: It’s a military term
describing the initial phase of an invasion. But of course, I had in mind that
we were all beach heads. I mean, this paper is a poem and you get all sorts of
ambiguity.
SW: Tell us about some of
the characters who used to write for the
Beachhead.
JH: There were people who
got on the Beachhead who became writers. Jane Gordon comes to mind. She was part
of the original collective and bit by bit she started writing about things and
later she helped organize the feminist caucus in the Peace & Freedom Party.
But I think the dynamic was that people joined the Beachhead and developed this
talent, not that they necessarily had the talent and came to the Beachhead! Some
did, like Arnie Springer, who’s no amateur. He was a professor at Long
Beach, but he was a mainstay of the Beachhead for years. Now, I didn’t
stay with the Beachhead very long.
SW:
You didn’t?
JH: No, and it
wasn’t that I didn’t like the Beachhead, I love the Beachhead, but I
had to go on to other things. I had the State Peace and Freedom Party to worry
about, I had elections to worry about, I had getting on the ballot in other
states to worry about. I had to do
tours.
SW: But didn’t you send
back articles? Didn’t you write that great article on John Muir? Oh, that
might have been Rick Davidson.
JH: Oh,
most likely.
SW: Was he like your
brother?
JH: (Chuckles) Rick was as
close to being a brother as anybody. We had a long history, we started out
together in the coffeehouse, doing subversive things. We didn’t always
agree, but then brothers don’t. We were always on the same side, but we
had different ideas of strategies and
tactics.
SW: You were a non-violent guy
from the get-go, no?
JH: One of the
things I am most proud and grateful for is that all the demonstrations I was
responsible for, there was not a single arrest or injury. I don’t know how
many I’m talking about…I’m talking 1966 to 1970. On the beach,
at the Federal Building, on the boardwalk, on Main St. (when the U.S. invaded
Cambodia). They all related to my commitment to non-violence. It involved a
dedication to avoiding arrest. And communicating with police. Many of whom I
worked with were dead-set against dealing directly with the police, but I
didn’t look at it that way. The way to avoid trouble was to tell them what
we were going to do and stick to
it.
SW: You treated the cops like human
beings.
JH: To the extent that I could
bear it, yes. I remember we had a demonstration at the Rand Corp. in Santa
Monica, and I saw a Police Lieutenant striding towards me. I felt worried. But
it turned out that he was just reminding me to take some flyers I had forgotten
with me!
SW: So how do you feel about
Venice Cityhood?
JH: No question that
I’m in favor of that. On principal, if nothing else. Venice was basically
blackmailed into joining Los
Angeles.
SW: Blackmailed! What do you
mean?
JH: Well, they said they would
cut our water off.
SW: That’s
mean!
JH: But you see, they gobbled up
most of the county that way. No wonder the valley wants to
secede!
SW: Well, John this has been a
great start, a wonderful insight into you, and a pleasure talking with a man
that so many of my friends speak of with hushed, respectful
tones.
JH: Thank you.
Posted: Fri - November 1, 2002 at 06:40 PM