Season Of The Witch

David Talbot took the title of his 2012 non-fiction book, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love, from Donovan’s psychedelic rock song of the same name (subtitle notwithstanding). In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Talbot explained why the title suits his retrospective of San Francisco between the years 1965 and 1982: “The song caught that paranoid and eerie aspect of the 1960s, so it was appropriate to the mood of much of my book.” While “eerie” may seem an unlikely term to characterize the upheavals of the 1960s, as “ground zero” for the era’s cultural revolution, San Francisco experienced a striking number of strange events. The emerging progressive forces clashed with the city’s longstanding Catholic power structure, and the fallout included nothing less than abduction, assassinations, and mass suicide.

But to begin, Talbot goes back to the 1930s to the madcap romance of Vince Hallinan, a San Francisco attorney, and his plucky girlfriend, Vivian Moore. Together, they outfoxed the law to protect Vince’s shady clients. Eventually, they married, had six boys, and turned their combined talents to defending labor leaders and civil rights. Talbot argues that “because of the Hallinan family […] the seeds [of progressivism] had been sown in San Francisco. It all came back to the Hallinans.”

The book’s first section, “Enchantment,” covers the early stages of the city’s counter-cultural movement, beginning with the Human Be-In of January 1967. Billed as an event open to “every tribe” in America, it attracted a crowd of 20,000 to Golden Gate Park, where rising icons such as Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead took the stage. The momentum rolled forward into the 1967 “Summer of Love,” during which time some 75,000 young idealists flocked to the city. For the conservative Irish Catholic mayor and his chief of police, this youth wave constituted an invasion to be met with iron-fisted law and order. Residents of the hippie Haight-Ashbury neighborhood—home to Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead—anticipated that “Summer of Love” pilgrims would overrun their district, taxing its resources. City administrators disregarded pleas for help, so the Haight community created its own social services network. A group known as the “Diggers” opened “free” stores, where the indigent young could get food and clothing at no cost. In response to skyrocketing incidences of drug overdose and STDs, David “Doc” Smith established the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.



Music funded the Free Clinic. Rock concert promoter Bill Graham was both a father figure and talented manager for bands like the Doors and the Grateful Dead. At the old Fillmore Auditorium, he staged successful benefit concerts for the Free Clinic. Scott Newhall, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, struck a tone of benevolence toward hippie culture, encouraging tolerance for the lifestyle among its readers. The paper’s music editor, Ralph J. Gleason, avidly covered the emerging music scene, while DJ Tom Donohue helped launch the new Rock sound on his start-up underground FM radio station. Talbot writes that “music was the signal” that called the young to San Francisco.

But the giddy days of psychedelic music and free love soon gave way to a darker side, as Talbot relates in the “Terror” section of his book. Rampant drug-related activities in the Haight inevitably led to sordid mayhem, and the murder rate jumped. In the last years of the ‘60s, the city was terrorized by the return of the Zodiac Killer, still at large after having committed a series of signature murders earlier in the decade. Then a group of Black Muslim militants randomly murdered and dismembered over a dozen whites during the “Zebra Killings” of the early 1970s. In 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The group, self-described anti-fascists, hoped to score a big ransom for Hearst but instead, met its end in a police shoot-out. Jim Jones orchestrated the next atrocity. Pastor of the Peoples Temple in San Francisco, he held hundreds in his thrall with his charismatic sermons on racial justice. When accusations of abuse and extortion surfaced, several hundred worshipers followed Jones to his compound in Guyana, where he directed their mass murder-suicide in 1978.

Ten days after this tragedy, San Francisco politician Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the U.S. During the late ‘60s, San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood had become a sanctuary for gay culture, and Milk’s political activism started on Castro Street. Mayor Moscone supported gay rights, but many of the city’s old-guard Catholic politicians did not. Dan White was among the latter, and his actions signified the conservative backlash against increasingly liberal policy-making. After shooting Moscone and Milk, White surrendered himself to police officers. He was convicted of manslaughter, a crime less serious than murder, triggering riots and subsequent police crackdowns in gay nightclubs.



In the final section of his book, “Deliverance,” Talbot claims that two occurrences in the 1980s healed the city’s collective psyche after the trauma of the previous years. The 1982 San Francisco 49ers’ Super Bowl victory provided catharsis, and afterward, Talbot writes that “many of the Faithful simply remained in their seats […] some in tears, letting all the tragedies of the past come spilling out of them.” Secondly, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, which ravaged the gay community, paradoxically united the city. The federal government simply ignored the crisis, so San Francisco, under the leadership of Mayor Dianne Feinstein, pulled together to provide medical services and care for its own.

Talbot’s book sets up San Francisco in the 1960s as a crucible of opposing forces from which, in the 1980s, it emerged as a progressive “beacon of enlightenment.” But lest this sound like a reductionist battle between the good liberals and bad conservatives, know that it’s not. Talbot exposes the complicity of the city’s liberal leadership in the Jim Jones massacre. Clearly besotted with San Francisco, Talbot measures everyone, left and right, against its enlightened ideals.