Primary Source Documents

Norman Mailer: The March on the Pentagon^*

In the 1960s, the lines between fiction and journalism began to blur as Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Norman Mailer (among others) pioneered the New Journalism. Neither truly fact nor fiction, the New Journalism went beyond the traditional "objective" reporting to include the author's point of view, atmosphere, characterization, and other literary devices. In the following excerpt, Mailer describes the violence that broke out late at night during the October 1967 protest march on the Pentagon.

The line of soldiers would stamp forward until they reached the seated demonstrators, then they would kick forward with their toes until the demonstrators were sitting on their feet (or legally speaking, now interfering with the soldiers). Then the Marshals would leap between their legs again and pull the demonstrators out of line; he or she would then be beaten and taken away. It was a quiet rapt scene with muted curses, a spill in the dark of the most heated biles of the hottest patriotic hearts--to the Marshals and the soldiers, the enemy was finally there before them, all that Jew female legalistic stew of corruptions which would dirty the name of the nation and revile the grave of soldiers like themselves back in Vietnam, yes, the beatings went on, one by one generally of women, more women than men. Here is the most brutal description of a single beating by Harvey Mayes of the English Department at Hunter.

One soldier spilled the water from his canteen on the ground in order to add to the discomfort of the female demonstrator at his feet. She cursed him -- understandably, I think -- and shifted her body. She lost her balance and her shoulder hit the rifle at the soldier's side. He raised the rifle, and with its butt, came down hard on the girl's leg. The girl tried to move back but was not fast enough to avoid the billy-club of a soldier in the second row of troops. At least four times that soldier hit her with all his force, then as she lay covering her head with her arms, thrust his club swordlike between her hands into her face. Two more troops came up and began dragging the girl toward the Pentagon.…She twisted her body so we could see her face. But there was no face there: All we saw were some raw skin and blood. We couldn't see even if she was crying -- her eyes had filled with the blood pouring down her head. She vomited, and that too was blood. They rushed her away.…

The logic here speaks of the old misery of the professional soldier, centuries old. He is, at his most brutal, a man who managed to stay alive until the age of seven because there were men, at least his father, or his brothers, to keep him alive -- his mother had drowned him in no oceans of love; his fear is therefore of the cruelty of women, he may never have another opportunity like this -- to beat a woman without having to make love to her. So the Marshals went to work; so did those special soldiers saved for the hour when everyone but themselves and the Marshals was gone from the Pentagon. Now they could begin their beatings.…Yes, and they beat the women for another reason. To humiliate the demonstrators, to break them from their new resistance down to the old passive disobedience of the helpless sit-in waiting one's turn to be clubbed.…

1		Identify the elements in these paragraphs you would not find in a traditional newspaper article.
2		What view does Mailer have of soldiers? Would it influence your answer to know that he was himself a veteran and author of a major war novel on World War II?
3		What does Mailer mean when he uses the phrase "that Jew female legalistic stew of corruptions?" Whose point of view is this purported to be?
4		Assuming that Mailer is accurate in reporting that the soldiers beat more women than men, why do you think that may have been the case? Does your answer square with Mailer's view?