A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

‘urban guerrillas’ who called themselves the Weathermen were already trying to undermine the
capitalist system with bombs placed at military installations, banks and the offices of big
corporations.
In San Francisco, this idea of total revolution was taken very seriously by a group of ‘hippies’ who
had formed around a charismatic little guitar player named Charles Manson. Born in 1934, Manson
spent his first term in reformatory school at the age of nine. By the time he drifted to San Francisco
in 1967, Manson had spent most of his adult life in jail, mostly for such offences as car theft and
credit-card fraud. He found himself in the midst of the new ‘psychedelic’ culture. The hippies of
the Haight-Ashbury district took LSD, smoked pot, and called themselves ‘flower children’. No
one cared that Manson had been a jailbird; on the contrary, it was regarded as being greatly to his
credit. Manson was older than most of the ‘drop-outs’, and girls seemed inclined to regard him as a
father-substitute figure. Runaways began to gather round him, and soon the Manson menage in the
Haight district seemed to be full of emotionally deprived girls and admiring youths (Manson seems
to have been bisexual). If they had never read Marcuse, they nevertheless practised his idea that sex
could be used as a form of ‘unrepressive sublimation’ to unfold our higher possibilities.
By 1968, Manson was trying hard to move into the pop music business; Manson’s ‘family’ even
moved for a time into the luxury home of a member of a successful group called the Beach Boys.
Manson’s lack of success seems to have made him increasingly embittered. The ‘family’, now
numbering about thirty (and including children) moved out to a ranch owned by an old man named
George Spahn, and lived there in exchange for cleaning out the stables.
With so much drug-taking, violence was inevitable. In July 1969, Manson shot a negro dope-dealer
named Bernard Crowe in the chest; in fact, Crowe recovered and decided not to go to the police.
Later that month, Manson and his friend Bobby Beausoleil tried to persuade another drug-dealer,
Gary Hinman, to finance a move to Death Valley; when Hinman refused, he was tortured, then
stabbed in the chest and left to die. On the wall above his body, Beausoleil wrote ‘Political piggy’
in blood - intended to lead the police to the belief that the Black Panther movement was
responsible.
Manson’s plan was to cause a revolution by setting whites against blacks (whom he detested). On
Friday, 8 August 1969, four Manson disciples - three girls and a man - drove out to a house in
Benedict Canyon which had been rented by a man in the pop music business against whom Manson
had a grudge; in fact, it was now occupied by the film director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon
Tate. Polanski was in London, but Sharon Tate had three guests to supper, two men and a woman.
Afterwards they took a psychedelic drug and went into various states of dissociation. As the
Manson family members entered the drive, they encountered a youth who had been visiting the
houseboy; he was shot in the head. Then they went into the house and killed Sharon Tate and her
three guests. The men were shot, the women stabbed to death. The word ‘Pig’ was written on the
hall door in blood.
The murders created the sensation Manson had hoped for; the following day, the ‘family’ watched
the television newscasts with satisfaction. By that evening, every gun and guard dog in the Los
Angeles area had been bought up by frantic householders. Manson decided to strike again while the
iron was hot. That evening, after taking LSD, he led six followers to a house in the affluent Los
Feliz district of Los Angeles, the home of a supermarket owner, Leno LaBianca and his wife
Rosemary. Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and tied them up, then sent in three
followers, who stabbed the LaBiancas to death. They wrote ‘Death to pigs’ in blood on a door, and