Last of four parts
The second week of August is still high summer in New England. But up in the hills of Montague, Massachusetts, not quite 20 miles south of the Vermont border, it’s not uncommon to see the reddening of maple leaves, the first hints of death of the natural year.
On Aug. 11, 1968, when Marshall Bloom returned to the Pioneer Valley, America was tearing apart at the seams. The war in Vietnam had descended into sheer brutality. Early 1968 had seen the Tet offensive, the unnerving Saigon execution photo on Page 1 of American newspapers, and the My Lai massacre. U.S. troop levels had now surged past 500,000.
At home, American idealism was crumbling. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in California. The Democratic Convention devolved into chaos.
Marshall Bloom, who turned 24 a few weeks before he arrived in Montague, was a human bonfire: crackling with wit and argument, smoldering with despair. His sexuality didn’t fit approved definitions — drawn to some women, drawn increasingly to men. Like many in his generation, he embraced drug use as a way of life.
The two years and two months since he had led the walkout of his college graduation had been a churning, volatile time for a man who felt every sling and every arrow. Former college friend Dan Keller says Bloom possessed a “superhuman sensitivity.”
He looked different now. Known to some as “Mad Marshall,” he was no longer the clean-cut kid with short-cropped hair. Instead, he rocked a Fu-Manchu mustache and a Jewfro — a huge mound of dark curls billowing above his glasses.
Bloom had fled New York City to purchase with friends a shambling 60-acre farm in Montague that dated to the 1790s. The Montague Farm would become one of the nation’s first back-to-the-land communes and a place of almost mythic significance in western Massachusetts. It sat just 12 miles from his former haunts at Amherst College.
His path since his college days had included soaring achievement and debilitating crash. Again and again, his high ideals and magnetic personality elevated him to leadership, only to be knocked from the pedestal, in part because of a personal style that could be erratic, righteous, even authoritarian.
In the fall of 1966, Bloom enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE), as did his freshman roommate from Amherst, Elliott Isenberg. Nominally in search of a master’s degree in sociology, Bloom also used graduate school as a way out of Vietnam. Elected president of the Graduate Students’ Association, he led a protest when LSE hired a new director, Walter Adams, who had supported apartheid in Rhodesia. The event turned tragic when a university porter, trying to calm the masses, suffered a heart attack and died.
According to Isenberg, Bloom dissolved in tears. He was suspended from LSE, and returned to the States — and to journalism.
Appointed executive director of the United States Student Press Association, he soon ran afoul with the executive board, accusing the organization of accepting funds from the Central Intelligence Agency. Harping on what he considered blatant hypocrisy, Bloom was fired.
In the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, he co-founded an organization that would prove perhaps his greatest legacy. Teaming with Ray Mungo, a counterculture soul mate and former editor-in-chief of Boston University’s student newspaper, he created the Liberation News Service.
LNS spoke to Bloom’s conviction that journalism was fundamental to democracy. It was the watchdog. But if that dog was sleeping, if the so-called Fourth Estate fell short by becoming compromised or cowardly or complicit, it was essential for an alternative press to rise up.
In the late ’60s, LNS became the hub of the underground press, alternative newspapers cropping up in cities and on campuses across the country.
Bloom and Mungo devised a radical version of the Associated Press. Setting up shop in Washington, D.C., six blocks from the White House, they printed packets of material on all aspects of “The Movement.” Before long, the twice-weekly packets were sent to 400 paid subscribers.
It was a forerunner of social media, aggregated content with little to no editing, shared widely. Some of it was cutting edge — accounts of the March on the Pentagon in October 1967 and the Columbia University student uprising in April 1968. Some considered it over the edge, particularly the vivid writing about psychedelics and the sexual revolution.
Bloom connected with the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Muhammad Ali. He drew into his orbit a remarkable array of talent for LNS, young voices brimming with intelligence, conviction, and irreverence, people like Steve Diamond, Harvey Wasserman and the poet Verandah Porche.
But while LNS was Marshall Bloom’s baby, the bath water was churning. Internal friction in the LNS ranks (possibly fueled, in part, by FBI infiltration) led first to a controversial relocation of the office to New York, over Bloom’s objections, to join a growing – and larger – faction of the news service in Harlem. There the organizational fault lines deepened, then rumbled, before erupting later that summer in what would become known as “The Heist.”
For an LNS fundraiser in August, Diamond managed to secure American rights to the Beatles’ new movie, “Magical Mystery Tour,” getting permission directly from George Harrison. Bloom and his compatriots took thousands of dollars in profits — and the offset printing press — up to Montague, where he had located a rickety red farmhouse, an old barn, and 60 acres of hilly land for $25,000.
The jilted faction of LNS roared north the next night and confronted Bloom and his friends, a chilling interaction captured in Mungo’s colorful memoir “Famous Long Ago.” It turned violent as the house was vandalized, and Bloom was roughed up and bloodied.
The LNS rupture, right out of hippie Hollywood, mirrored a splintering of the American left. (For all the progressive energy, the country would elect Richard Nixon in November.) It led to a brief period of two versions of the Liberation News Service, one printing in New York, one in Montague. Bloom’s version would prove short-lived as the printing press froze and was rendered useless in the long, cold, lonely winter of 1968-69.
For Marshall Bloom, a city dweller most of his life, the farm represented, if not Eden, at least a quest for serenity. He began a draft of a founding document:
“we are people who have traveled about a bit and now find ourselves here, where chaos stops at our border and Nature’s order and unity may begin.”
Trying to will the world together would not prove easy.
In the early days, the commune members were ill-prepared for the rigors of rural life.
“How funny it was,” said Tom Fels, who came to Amherst College a year after Bloom and followed him to the farm, “that these people who didn’t know anything about the country all wanted to go to the country.”
That first winter at Montague Farm was fierce. The commune members scrambled to eat, to pay bills and to stay warm. They cut green wood and huddled together as it smoked and popped in a poorly equipped stove. According to Fels, who would later write books about the farm communities, that first year was “a true lesson in idealism.”
On many levels, Bloom was grappling with that lesson. In his years since Amherst, he had, in part, embraced a principled poverty. Depicted in Diamond’s memoir “What The Trees Said” as decorating his room with “old newspapers, a chain saw dripping oil on top of a worn copy of Gandhi’s ‘Autobiography’,” Bloom was also attached to vestiges of the material world. He drove a Triumph Spitfire, known on the farm as “Green Power.” Frequently riding shotgun was Bloom’s frenetic Irish Setter, Max.
Bloom was accustomed to running the show — whatever the show was — and that would prove hard to do at Montague Farm. “He didn’t expect perfection, but he expected a kind of toeing the line for these high ideals,” said Fels, who believes Bloom struggled with “how to be a leader in a leaderless society.”
Struggles abounded. For one, the demise of his part of the Liberation News Service felt personal, a loss of his identity as a journalist. He conceived of a new magazine — The Journal of the New Age —but it never came to pass. He was also under scrutiny from his draft board (and, as would later become clear, the FBI). Though granted conscientious objector status, he faced the possibility of required alternative service at a local hospital.
Back in Denver, the Blooms had never given up on Marshall, but in some ways they sensed him slipping away. Not long before the move to the farm, his mother had written a plaintive letter about her “heavy and broken heart,” lamenting, “With your great qualities — leadership, brains, education — how can you do this to yourself? You have changed so much, Marshall.”
Drugs, of course, were a part of the equation.
With so much swirling in the summer of 1969, Bloom tried to calm the gathering storm. Occasionally he drove to the Emily Dickinson homestead at Amherst College to borrow books from Chaplain Lew Mudge, who had introduced him to civil rights. He had visits on the farm from former classmates, including John Merson, who had served in Vietnam, and Hal Wilde, who had traveled with Bloom to St. Augustine five years earlier.
Bloom poured himself into two business ventures, tending a cucumber patch to sell to a pickle company in Deerfield, and making bay-scented candles he marketed as “Village Idiot Candleworks.” He proudly brought sacks of cucumbers in his Triumph to the Oxford Pickle Co., but it didn’t amount to much profit. The candle business never took off. (That same year, Michael Kittredge started making candles from crayons in Holyoke. His business, Yankee Candle, would sell in 2013 for almost $2 billion.)
That summer brought both Woodstock and Stonewall: the riots in New York City that would come to be viewed as the beginning of the LGBT Movement.
There is no indication Bloom was aware of Stonewall, but he was still grappling with his sexuality. He still had intense connections with some women. He unburdened his heart to former LNSer Lis Meissner (whom he considered marrying in 1969), and to Gopher Neelands (who later wrote a haunting reflection on her bond with Bloom, including discussions about what they called “the Abyss”).
But Bloom’s deepening draw was, without doubt, to men. He literally kept it in the closet, stuffing bodybuilding magazines behind a closed door on the second floor of the farmhouse. And as the year unfolded, he found himself beginning to obsess about Dan Keller.
They had met in 1965 on Keller’s first day at Amherst when he was introduced to his senior dorm adviser in Pratt Hall. “Marshall, even at that point, was a radical and a revolutionary,” said Keller. “I could sort of sense it.”
In the fall of 1968, during Keller’s senior year, he drove to Montague to reconnect. Upon graduation, he joined the commune group, moving to nearby Wendell Farm, where he lives to this day. He was a frequent visitor to Montague, and to the increasingly troubled inner world of Marshall Bloom.
Bloom’s last journal is filled with yearning for a deeper relationship with Keller. He writes admiringly of Keller’s appearance (“that lovely hair behind his neck…how strong his stomach is”). He laments Keller’s decision to read one night out in the hall (“Perhaps he lovingly wanted me to have aloneness though that isn’t what I exactly wanted”). He worries about Keller’s reaction to things (“How does [Dan] feel and why?”), and he revels in Keller’s optimism — a trait that he felt slipping away in himself (“The one way Dan is younger than me — and more joyously youthful—is that he has that boy’s glint of total full idealism”).
The friendship was deeply reciprocal; the romantic part never was.
The journal shows Bloom taking a last trip back to Denver in October to resolve his draft status. He enjoyed doing chain-saw work with his father, and resisted his parents’ pleas to get a haircut. The journal also shows him brooding about perceived failures and yearning in a child-like way for acceptance (“it seems everyone wants in their heart of hearts the same thing — to love and be loved, to be happy and at peace”).
And it shows him struggling to fend off the darkness. At one point he writes, “The cold chill of my madness is my only company 2night.”
On the morning of Nov. 1, 1969 — the leaves in Montague mostly down, winter coming, Marshall Bloom drove his green Triumph off the farm, bought a copy of the New York Times, then headed to a nearby field. He hooked a vacuum hose to the exhaust, fed it through a window that he closed tightly, opened up the newspaper, and turned on the ignition.
He left a few writings, including a last will and testament. His property, including the farm, was willed to a “Fellowship of Religious Youth” — the farm members. As executors, he directed Ray Mungo to go through his second-floor closet, and Dan Keller and Verandah Porche to manage his papers. He closed by writing:
“My love to all, especially to my parents, and to too many to name here who have given me joy and love; would that my life could have been more help to them; I am sorry about all this.”
The Amherst College Class of 1966 returned to campus this week for its 50th reunion. Though he has been gone for 46½ years, Bloom is anything but forgotten. One reunion session was dedicated to his stewardship of the student newspaper. Another focused on the walkout of their graduation.
“If I had things to do over again, I would have loved to have known him better,” said Paul Bloom, Marshall’s classmate and near namesake. “I think I missed a lot.”
Ray Mungo, who lives in California, is still asked occasionally about his co-founder of the Liberation News Service. The dedication of Mungo’s 1970 classic, “Famous Long Ago” — a book reprinted four years ago by the University of Massachusetts Press — is haunting:
This is dedicated to Marshall Irving Bloom (1944-1969), who was too good to be also wise. Some months after I completed this manuscript, Marshall went to the mountain-top and, saying, “Now I will end the whole world,” left us confused and angry, lonely and possessed, inspired and moved but generally broken.
The Montague Farm became the hub of anti-nuclear protest: the toppling of a nuclear weather tower by farm member Sam Lovejoy in 1974; the Clamshell Alliance antinuclear coalition, led in part by farm member Harvey Wasserman in 1976; and the planning of the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden in 1979 (featuring Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen).
The commune continued in Montague until 2002. It is now the site of the Montague Retreat Center, where weddings are hosted in the refurbished barn, just across from the sagging old farmhouse where Bloom once lived.
A few miles away, Keller leaves Wendell Farm and heads for work most days at the old Victorian home in Turners Falls that is the office of Green Mountain Post Films. He and colleague Chuck Light have made several documentaries, dealing with subjects like anti-nuclear protest and communal living. Keller calls his office “the Bloom Institute of Media Studies.”
He keeps a trove of Bloom’s writings, and generously makes them available to researchers. In one room, over a fireplace, hangs a painting of Bloom made by former farm member Susan Mareneck. It depicts Bloom in his final days, bare-chested, hair swirling, eyes closed reflectively.
Keller smiles when asked about Bloom’s role in his life:
“I can still hear his voice. I can hear his opinion about things, his slant and his energy and his humor. It’s all still vivid.”
Once in awhile, Keller travels to the Montague Farm, out along the dirt road where a sign reads “No Outlet.” Earlier this month, it was quiet there, save for the sound of a gurgling stream. Spring was on its way.
The fiddlehead ferns were poking through the ground like green question marks.
Former Gazette staff writer Martin Dobrow is a professor of communications at Springfield College. Marshall Bloom is one of the central figures in his forthcoming book about civil rights.