A detailed diagram of how to put together a Molotov cocktail was probably not what most readers of The New York Review of Books would have been expecting on the magazine’s cover, but in the summer of 1967, that is what they found.
In large, capitalized black type, “Violence and the Negro” read the coverline of the August 24, 1967 issue. Beneath that were the titles of the issue’s two feature articles in bright red, one by journalist Andrew Kopkind about “King & Black Power” and one by activist Tom Hayden on what he called “The Occupation of Newark,” referring to the riots the city had witnessed in mid-July, kicked off by an act of police brutality against a black cab driver.
Beneath the text on the left-wing broadsheet, taking up half the cover, was a labeled line-drawing of a Molotov cocktail. More than just an image, it was a schematic, basically a set of directions for how to make one of the incendiary DIY devices. One-third of a glass bottle should contain “dirt & small amount of soap powder,” two-thirds filled with “gasoline (from pump),” and the neck stopped up with a bit of “gas-soaked rag” into which is stuck a “fuse (clothesline).”The gesture proved as divisive and combustible as the object it depicted, not least because Hayden’s piece on the Newark riots registered as a statement in support of violence. In it, Hayden describes how “two Molotov cocktails exploded high on the western wall of the precinct” and “the people, now numbering at least 500 on the street, let out a gasp of excitement.” The piece includes observations that during the rebellion, people felt they were “creating a community of their own” and that against both liberal and conservative views that rioting is “less-than-civilized behavior,” a third view must be considered, that “a riot represents people making history.”
The Molotov cocktail issue was a flashpoint in an already heated debate about the role and the direction of the New Left. Perhaps even more than that, it set a radical new standard against which a burgeoning conservative movement could define itself.