By the summer of 1970, ten years after it had begun, SDS existed only in two bizarre distortions. Both continued on for several years more, each at its own games, each purporting to lead the revolution, but neither any longer had any connection with the organization which had given them birth.’
Weatherman was to go on as an underground force in America and as a symbolic influence upon the left for another year or so, though with diminishing effect as time wore on.
Underground life became wearying after months of work that seemed to bring the revolution no closer, shattering the earlier confident dreams. Some cells disintegrated, their members surfacing for more traditional political action if they were not wanted by the police, or living secret private lives in street communities and college towns if they were fugitives. Many other cells continued, with a membership of between one and two hundred people altogether, but they underwent changes too. More emphasis came to be placed on relating to the existing youth culture rather than denouncing it as somehow "bourgeois": Weatherman came to see it, Dohrn wrote later that year, "as the forces which produced us, a culture that we are a part of, a young and unformed society (nation).""? Those groups which had chosen to emphasize personal development, trust, love, and communality came to be taken as models over the more militaristic and disciplined ones, and the growing role of liberated women in these "families" helped to emphasize the search for new styles of sexuality, intimacy, and openness. Ideas about leadership came to be altered, too, with the authoritarian hierarchy of the National Action period giving way to a more communal and open way of governing, downgrading the aggressive and dominating types who had assumed power before. ("We've learned from Fidel's speeches and Ho's poems," Dohrn wrote in December, "how leaders grow out of being deeply in touch with movements. From Crazy Horse and other great Indian chiefs we've learned that the people who respect their tribe and its needs are followed freely and with love.") The Weatherbureau, wherever it was, reflected these changes too, for Mark Rudd—whose macho style must have been impossible in one of these new intimate "families"—was demoted some time in 1970 and his name was no longer included among the leadership by October. The implicit sexism of Weatherman now gave way to the locution "Weather Underground," the phrase with which the group's communiqués have been signed since December 1970, and to the general term "Weatherpeople."
It was as a reflection of this new perception that the Weathermen in September 1970 designed and executed the escape of Timothy Leary, the high priest of the drug culture, from a minimum-security prison in San Luis Obispo, California, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for possession of marijuana. Weatherpeople helped Leary climb over the walls, kept him in hiding in several cities, and supplied the passport that enabled him to escape to Algeria.
Whatever its internal changes might have been, Weatherman was to go on to attract attention over the next two years largely through a series of dramatic and symbolic bombings and through the messages accompanying them. In October 1970 it announced a "fall offensive" during which "families and tribes will attack the enemy around the country" and then it proceeded to blow up the police statue in Chicago's Haymarket Square again, and bomb the Hall of Justice in Marin County, California, and the Long Island Court House in New York, both on behalf of political prisoners. (At the same time a half-dozen allied groups across the country, perhaps Weathercells or perhaps separate revolutionary groups also concerned with symbolic violence, launched attacks at government buildings. Damage from all this was said to be half a million dollars, media coverage was dramatic and extensive, and President Nixon intervened to order "a new crackdown" on those who would use bombs five thousand miles away from Vietnam.) On March 1 of the next year the Weather Underground set off a bomb in a toilet in the Capitol in Washington, making front-pages everywhere and this time leading Nixon to denounce the "shocking act of violence that will outrage all Americans"; it was accompanied by a long, detailed, and thoroughly rational letter explaining that the act was taken in retaliation for Nixon's escalation of the war into Laos—a message almost totally ignored by the commercial media. On August 30, 1971, the Weather Underground bombed the Department of Corrections office in San Francisco after the shooting of black revolutionary leader George Jackson, and on September 17 it bombed the Department of Corrections offices in Albany in retaliation for the murder of twenty-eight prisoners at Attica Prison a few days before. On May 19, 1972, the Weather Underground set off an explosion in the Air Force section of the Pentagon, only days after Nixon had announced increased bombings of North Vietnam and the mining of its harbors. All told, eight major bombings, publicly admitted and defended, over the course of two years, each dramatic and specific, accompanied by an explanatory statement; with the exception of one person, Leslie Bacon, picked up for the Capitol bombing but later released, no one has ever been arrested, much less convicted, for any of them.
And thus would grow the Weathermyth. Whatever else the Weatherpeople might stand for, the fact that they continued to use symbolic bombings, continued to defy the authority of the state, and continued to run free, living underground, confounding the most massive police force in the world, gave them a certain stature. They were living evidence of young, white, armed revolutionaries in America, one pole of the possibilities of politics, and even if very few wanted to join up, many responded to their reverberations. Many political groups would measure themselves against the Weathermen in terms of politics, courage, commitment. Violence, straight-out political violence, became an issue in political meetings as never before. The meaning of Weatherman's attempts to create new men and women, if not exactly its means of doing so, sank into the consciousness of student activists. Women's groups, particularly, paid attention to the Weatherpeople's attempts to smash monogamy and reestablish sexual lives. And from time to time the Weathermen were even paid the flattery of imitation: small bands of quasi-Weathermen would take shape, living under their own discipline without direction from the official Weather Underground, surfacing with a bombing or a night-time trashing and proclaiming themselves Weathermen even if no one in the original group had ever heard of them.”
“ The New Year's Gang in Wisconsin, which carried out the bombing of the Army Math Research Center in Madison in August 1970—resulting in the death of a graduate student, the second victim of left violence in the decade—was one of these groups. Without any known connection to or sanction from the Weather Underground it regarded itself as a Weathercell and it even signed its bombing communiqué, "Marion Delgado."
And so the Weathermyth held on, for a few more years at least, even as Weatherman itself faded. Weatherman symbols—first a "W" on top of an "M" with a bolt of lightning passing between, later a crude rainbow with lightning running through—became familiar graffiti in every large city and college town ... women marching in San Francisco in 1971 read a Weatherletter aloud and chanted, "Angela, Bernardine, Madame Binh, Sisters in struggle, gonna win" ... Jerry Rubin dedicated a book to the Weather Underground in 1971, Abbie Hoffman regretted he hadn't given money to them instead of the Black Panthers, but "I didn't know their address" ... Eldridge Cleaver announced, "When checking out the wretched of the imperialist earth, it is obvious the Weathermen as warriors of the people are a part of humanity's solution," and the Black Panther members on trial in New York, in defiance of their West Coast leadership, wrote: "We feel that the Weather underground fits truly in a revolutionary manner with Malcolm's 'whites who are really fed up,' ‘like old John Brown,' and are showing it in a progressive and revolutionary manner" ...a women's march on the Pentagon in April 1971 carried flags with the Weather rainbow and pictures of Bernardine Dohrn ... a poet in the Chicago Seed wrote of "Bernardine Dohrn, alive, well, in amerika," with the words "Lightning and rainbows to all the Sisters" across a full-page photograph other face ... and a whole book, not very good but 519 pages long, was published presenting all the major documents by and about Weatherman in the first year of its life, a distinction few organizations could claim.°
PL-SDS played out the illusion of being a mass student organization for the rest of the 1969-70 school year and would go on to twist itself into a variety of odd forms thereafter, but there was little doubt that its deformed version of SDS was a failure.®
The campus-worker-student alliance strategy, though a proven failure, was still made the central focus of chapter energies for many months, but its irrelevance to the lives of students only served to clinch PL-SDS's campus reputation as a remote organization off in a mad sectarian world of its own. The short-haired abrasiveness of these SDSers did nothing to overcome this, nor did their continuing opposition to such things as marijuana, the rock culture, and homosexual liberation. PL-SDS refused to join the general antiwar agitationduring the April 1970 antiwar marches, for example, it confined its role to storming the various speakers’ platforms and trying to keep liberal politicians from speaking—and it avoided both campus issues of moment (tuition, student power) and national ones (racism, repression of the Panthers, complicity). When the uprisings came in the wake of the Kent State murders, PL-SDS was isolated, without a role to play or a constituency to lead, and on some campuses, notably in California, it was actually hostile to the student strike. By the end of the school year, PL-SDS was down to perhaps a dozen strong chapters, with a membership of not much above two or three thousand, its income had dwindled to less than $1,500 a month (or $18,000, a sixth of what the old SDS had been operating on), its publications were almost at a standstill. New Left Notes barely coming out even once a month, and its scheduled national convention had to be postponed, and then canceled.
PL-SDS would continue to survive for at least the next two years, pumped up by the leadership and finances of the Progressive Labor Party, continually searching for some way to sell itself to the American studentry. Over the summer of 1970 it tried to adopt the war issue for a change, to become a left-wing SMC, and for a time it attended antiwar conferences pushing a hard anti-imperialist, no-negotiations line (pushing, in the case of one Boston meeting, to the point of all-out fist fights). When this scheme proved ineffective PL-SDS retreated for the 1970-71 school year to the old idea of the worker-student alliance, supporting local strikes, picketing on behalf of General Motors workers, marching in Washington against unemployment and low wages. This, too, inevitably, was a resounding failure and by the end of that school year PL-SDS was in pathetic shape: a number of former chapters (major ones like Columbia and Chicago among them) had broken from the national organization to go their own way, most groups outside the New-York-BostonCalifornia orbit had disintegrated, once-strong chapters at places like Harvard and San Francisco State had become tiny study groups with only occasional flashes of activity, and the National Office, moved from Boston to Chicago, was in a state of what all acknowledged to be exhaustion. Normally such an organization would have died right there, but PL apparently decided to give it one last injection for the 1971-72 school year. It revived SDS as a broad, even reformist, student group, soft-lining and nonsectarian, avoiding the rhetoric and principles of socialism, class analysis, and the like, and open to anyone (in the words of a new constitution adopted in March 1972) willing to fight "against daily problems and their roots ... against racism, imperialist wars, the subjugation of women and exploitation of every kind"; at the same time it guided that new SDS to concentrate almost exclusively now on the issue of racism—confined however to racism in classes and textbooks, since PL continued to believe that students would only get interested in narrow campus issues. Initially at any rate, most campuses received this newly furbished PL-SDS with indifference.’
Whatever its twists and turns, PL-SDS would continue to suffer under the twin weights of its domination by a senior organization which thought of it chiefly as a recruiting grounds and its Old Left political heritage which prevented it from achieving either a style or a strategy that was attractive to broad numbers of students. Something called "SDS" would go on as long as PL felt it was getting its money's worth out of it, but it would have no relation to the organization that had borne those initials in the decade of the sixties.
Was this all that it had come to, then, this Students for a Democratic Society that had affected so much of the life of the sixties? Happily, no: though it achieved none of its longrange goals, though it ended in disarray and disappointment, it left a legacy, as suggested in the beginning, of deep and permanent worth. It shaped a generation, revived an American left, transformed political possibilities, opened the way to changes in the national life that would have been unthought of in the fifties; it was in good measure responsible for the changes in university governance, the liberation of campus life, the reordering of curricula, the aeration of American education; it played an important role in molding public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia and increasing public understanding of the imperialistic nature of that war, and in the corollary achievements of weakening the institution of the draft, lessening the overt role of universities in military research, and abolishing or transforming ROTC units at many campuses; and it directly affected the lives and consciousnesses of hundreds of thousands of university and high school students across the land, many in only initial and tentative ways, but many more in thorough and enduring ways, ways that will cling for the rest of their lives, producing at the very minimum a pool of people, many of them of the finest minds and talents, who have forever lost their allegiance to the myths and institutions of capitalist America and who will be among those seeking to transform this country, as SDS had always hoped, into "a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation."® Whether from this legacy will evolve a new organization and a new leftward spirit to carry on the task that SDS began, only the future can tell. But it is certain that this is the place to begin.