"Bring the war home"—that phrase, which John Jacobs and other Columbia SDSers had begun using during the May days of 1968, became the theme of the Weathermen's National Action in Chicago, emblazoned in two-inch-high letters on the cover of New Left Notes, superimposed on gummed stickers, used for captions and headlines on an immense variety of pamphlets and posters which began to emerge from the National Office in the weeks after the Cleveland meeting. What it meant was simple:
When we move with the people of the world, against the interests of the rulers, we can expect their pigs to come down on us. So we're building a fighting force to struggle on the side of the Vietnamese, the blacks, and oppressed people everywhere. There's a war we cannot 'resist’. It is a war in which we must fight. We must open up another front against US imperialism by waging a thousand struggles in the schools, the streets, the army, and on the job, and in CHICAGO: OCTOBER 8-11.
It was not a slogan or a politics that seemed to attract many people: as Jeff Shero pointed out that fall, "While most want to end the war, SDS offers the unprepared a new war at home." But it seemed to sum up all that the Weathermen had become over the summer, convinced despite the chaotic nature of their actions that militant confrontation was still the correct component for the left in the equation of power. One Weatherman explained it thus:
The primary purpose, and the stance, of our organizing could not possibly be to "turn people on," or to have them like us, or to make them think that we are nice, but to compel them to confront the antagonistic aspects of their own life experience and consciousness by bringing the war home, and to help them make the right choice over a period of time, after initially shaking up and breaking through the thick layers of chauvinism-racism-defeatism. If being "arrogant," "pushy," "hard," if putting some people up against the wall, helps to create that tension and the requisite fluidity and space, then we ought to be "arrogant" and "hard."
And as the school year began, Weatherman continued its up-against-the-wallism.
Weatherleaders, with Rudd the most visible, scoured the country trying to drum up support for the National Action by haranguing student audiences, engaging PLers and others who disagreed with them in bloody fist fights, coming on with macho toughness. Rudd's appearance at Columbia on September 25 was typical, involving skirmishes between regulars and PLers, two separate meetings with guards at the doors, and Rudd's usual pitch to the regulars about how they should all be in Chicago on October 8. Rudd, in heavy boots, workshirt, leather jacket, and cloth cap, gave off vibrations of restless energy during his speech, pacing back and forth at audience level in front of an unused podium, brandishing a chair leg he had used in the PL battle, yelling at the students there for being soft and "wimpy," and bragging of how he was preparing for the revolution ("I've got myself a gunhas everyone here got a gun? Anyone? No?! W-e-ll, you'd better fuckin' get your shit together"). After some fifteen or twenty minutes of this, Paul Rockwell, a short, stocky nonWeatherman SDSer, got out of his seat and moved toward the front of the room, declaring that Rudd had had his turn and now he wanted to speak. Rudd took two menacing steps toward Rock-well, hulking over him, but Rockwell just barreled ahead, slammed Rudd against the podium, pushed Rudd's fists away, and turned to face the audience. Rudd's face was a picture of stunned fear, all his rhetoric having done nothing to overcome his ingrained middle-class unfamiliarity with, and anxiety about, violence; he stood there a moment, shrugged, then slunk off to join his friends to one side. The macho mood was dissipated; no one seemed to have joined the Weatherranks that night.
Nor were Weatherman's continued "jailbreak" and confrontation actions any more successful. Seven high schools in all were raided in the four weeks before the National Action, including Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, where the invaders bound and gagged two teachers while "rapping" to their classes, and English High School in Boston, where a teacher was punched around with some viciousness and the students the next day organized a "Down With SDS" march through the streets. A band of twenty Weathermenled by Eric Mann, a long way now from his NCUP days—invaded the Harvard Center for International Affairs, whose work included counterinsurgency research for various branches of the government, and ran screaming through the building, smashing windows, shoving secretaries, kicking and hitting professors, dumping over typewriters and files, pulling out telephones, and then running away before police could make arrests; five, however, were subsequently arrested and tried, and Mann was given a two-year jail sentence for assault and battery. In Cleveland a band of Weathermen tried to disrupt the Davis Cup tennis matches in Cleveland Heights in September, ending up with sixteen arrested and no disruption achieved. And in Chicago, when the Conspiracy trial opened at the end of September, Weathermen were among the crowd of two thousand doing battle with the police and a dozen (including Dohrn, Joe Kelly, Howie Machtinger, Russ Neufeld, and Bob Tomashevsky) were arrested on charges ranging from "mob action" to assault on a policeman.?
Still, Weatherman, flush with the expectation of rising revolutions, approached the National Action—or, as it was increasingly being called, the "Four Days of Rage"—with optimism.
True, not one Movement organization except YAWF actually offered support; Fred Hampton spoke for the Panthers when he called Rudd "a motherfucking masochist" to his face and proceeded to deck him with a single blow—but the Weatherleaders were counting on "the kids" to come anyway. A Weatherwoman working with youths in Denver predicted that "hundreds of them are ready for Chicago"; the "National Action Staff" in Chicago announced that "all over the country, from Detroit to Houston, from Miami through the cities in Ohio and on to Denver, Colorado, people are digging on the action—and digging on SDS"; and Mark Rudd in a TV interview in Columbus said, "We're gonna have a huge action in Chicago in October where we get together thousands and thousands of young people to Chicago to fight back, to fight the government, to fight their agents, the police."*
What must it have felt like, then, in the early evening of Wednesday, October 8, 1969, standing in the darkness on a light rise at the south end of Lincoln Park, gathered around a small bonfire to ward off the chill of a Chicago fall, waiting for the thousands of revolutionaries to appear, and finding yourself in the midst of a tatterdemalion band of no more than two hundred people? One man, looking nervously around, must have spoken for all: "This is an awful small group to start a revolution."* Obviously, whatever the Weathermen had been doing, it wasn't the right way to recruit a Red Army: probably no more than six hundred people showed up in Chicago throughout the four-day period, only half of whom regarded themselves as Weathermen "cadre"—that is, members of a collective or "affinity group" that had prepared for the demonstrations—while the rest were either hangers-on who were close to but not in Weatherman or had simply been drawn by the chance to "tear apart pig city." And as near as one can tell, the large majority of these six hundred were disaffected college students and former SDSers, not "street kids" from the working class won over by Mark Rudd's militance; in fact, one nineteen-year-old laborer who did take part in one action ended up in jail with this succinct reaction: "The guys in here are war-Mongols. They all want a revolution and they are all with S.D.S. They are all fucking crazy."
But those whom Weatherman had persuaded to show up came prepared for something more than the ordinary peace march. Most were wearing helmets (army surplus, motorcycle, construction, even football), gas masks, goggles, gloves, heavy boots, leather or denim jackets, shirts taped at the sleeves (against gas), jock straps and cups or padded bras, first-aid kits, emergency phone numbers written in ink on their hands—and, generally hidden, such things as sticks, lead pipes, chains, blackjacks, rolled pennies. Mace, and at least one can of oven-cleaning spray.
“ Facts and figures on the 287 people who were arrested during the National Action were compiled by the Illinois Crime Investigating Commission (later published by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Part 4, June 10, 1970), and they probably give a fair picture of the demonstrators as a whole. They indicate that the summer's high-school recruiting was a failure: only twenty high-schoolers were arrested, nine from the Chicago area, and only two dozen other nonstudents who might have been street kids, half of them from Chicago. National outreach was also a failure: at least 30 percent of the people came from Illinois, most of them centered around the Chicago Weatherbureau, another 17 percent from three nearby states (Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana), and the only other states with significant percentages were those with strong collectives already established (New York, Ohio, Washington, Colorado, and Maryland, in that order). The campus appeal had been negligible: more than half the demonstrators were nonstudents, and university contingents of half a dozen or more came only from Purdue, Wisconsin, Seattle Community College, Columbia, Reed, and Kent State, all of which had experienced fairly sizable confrontations in the spring. Ages ranged from fifteen to thirty-seven (one fifty-one-year-old man was arrested, but he turned out to have been a counterdemonstrator), with a little over two-thirds between eighteen and twenty-three, twenty-eight under eighteen and thirteen over thirty. All but eleven were white.
There they stood, cold, with the adrenalin of fear and excitement, as the night darkened. It grew colder; cadre were sent out to break up the park benches and wooden railings for firewood. A group of perhaps a hundred, many in gleaming white motorcycle helmets, marched in from one side, shouting slogans, giving "Battle of Algiers" war whoops, and spirits rose for a time. Around nine, Bernardine Dohrn spoke through a bullhorn to the crowd, reminding them that the rally was called on the second anniversary of Ché Guevara's death, a fact out of which she tried to inspire revolutionary fervor—but, for those who remembered how Guevara had died, at the head of a tiny band without friends in a foreign territory he didn't know and surrounded by hostile police and soldiers, the evocation of his name was probably something less than cheering right then. The contingent from YAWF showed up, with three orange banners. Another speaker, who did not announce his name, took the bullhorn to give the standard speech about imperialism, fighting in the belly of the monster, building a Red Army, and the chant came up from the waiting cadre, "Build a people's army, fight a people's war." Someone tried to lead one of the Panther chants"Rev-o-/u-tion's beg-u-u-un! Off the pig! Time to pick up the gu-u-un! Off the pig!"—but after a time that faded. Another Weatherman group of perhaps two dozen marched across the grass, in two files, military style, NLF banners held high. The time dragged slowly by; more people went out to break up benches for the fire. Someone shouted that everyone should be facing away from the fire so that their eyes wouldn't become unaccustomed to the darkness, and people turned around, a little awkwardly, staring into the night and at the small knots of bystanders and police who had come to look at them. At about ten, Tom Hayden, in old tennis shoes and with his shirt hanging out, the first-generation SDSer having come to try to establish a link with these third-generation SDSers, took the bullhorn to tell them that the Conspiracy people he represented supported the National Action and welcomed any means to "intensify the struggle to end the war"—though ending the war was hardly what the Weathermen were concerned with now—but he spoke only briefly, as if perceiving the generation gap, the incredible gulf that separated the beginning of SDS from its end.
“In the next several days, Hayden came to have doubts about the Weathermen's particular intensification of the struggle, and six months later he would say: "There was something wrong with what had happened in Chicago. To us revolution was like birth: blood is inevitable, but the purpose of the act is to create life, not to glorify blood. Yet to the Weathermen bloodshed as such was ‘great.’ ... Their violence was structured and artificial, because in their heads they were part of the Third World. They were alienated from their own roots .... They were not guerrillas swimming like fish among the people; they were more like commandos, fifth columnists, operating behind enemy lines." (Ramparts, July 1970.)
A few more chants, some more wood on the bonfire. Suddenly, at about 10:25, one man, probably Jeff Jones, stepped from the crowd and shouted, "I am Marion Delgado."” It was the code word that everyone had been waiting for, the final signal from the Weatherbureau about what the night's action, heretofore a top secret, would be. The speech was brief: The area to the south of Lincoln Park is called the Gold Coast, that's where the rich people, the pigs of this city, live, and that's where Marion Delgado would like to go; Judge Hoffman—the man presiding at the Conspiracy trial—lives down there at the Drake Hotel, a big fancy pig pen down on Michigan Avenue, "and Marion Delgado don't like him, and the Weatherman don't like him ... so ... let's go get him." and with shouting and whooping the Weathermen stormed out of Lincoln Park, into the city streets, running at nearly top speed, pulling out their concealed pipes and sticks and chains, ready at last to tear up pig city.
Now the Chicago police had figured they were ready for the Weathermen. Throughout the park, their crew cuts and ties marking them plainly, were literally dozens of plain-clothes men, on the fringes of the grass were masses of unmarked police cars phalanxed by police, and in the surrounding area the city, canceling all days off, had mobilized no fewer than two thousand uniformed policemen. Each man there had a score to settle with the types who had provoked the police riot of the year before and had given the Chicago police a bad name; each man knew that the statue of a policeman in Haymarket Square, the only such monument erected to the constabulary in the entire nation, had been blown ten feet off its pedestal by a Weatherman bomb two days before; each man remembered the words of the head of the police sergeants' association in response to that bombing: "We now feel it is kill or be killed." The police were prepared—only, as usual, they were prepared for the last war: they had expected that the Weathermen would stay in the park to defy the eleven o'clock curfew, as the demonstrators did in 1968. This time the demonstrators stormed into the Gold Coast before the cops knew what was happening.
* Marion Delgado was a five-year-old Chicano who had derailed a passenger train in Alameda County, California, in 1947, by placing a twenty-five-pound slab of concrete on the tracks, and a photograph of the boy recreating his crime had found its way to the National Office, where he was quickly taken up by the Weatherbureau as a kind of ironic folk hero and inside-joke symbol. The picture was used on the cover of an issue of New Left Notes in September, people began signing letters and notes with his name, and he was listed as the editor of New Left Notes in October. At least one of the telegrams sending bail money to jailed Weathermen after the National Action was signed with his name.
The crowd swarmed down the streets, shouting and ululating and trotting with a supercharged emotion and a flush of unleashed energy—"I saw and felt the transformation of the mob," a New York Weatherman, Shin'ya Ono, wrote later, "into a battalion of three hundred revolutionary fighters"—and then within moments they began the assault—"Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!"—throwing rocks and bricks through the windows of posh apartment houses—"Dare to struggle, dare to win!"—smashing the windows of parked cars—"Bring the war ho-o-o-o-me!"—shoving pedestrians and bystanders out of the way—"Off the pig!"even knocking aside (and in some eases pausing to pummel) the solitary policemen isolated within their sweep. "Each one of us," Ono said, "felt the soldier in us." Their courage fed on the noise, the almost tingle up the spine, creating for moments on end the hypnotic sense of vast and unstoppable numbers, invincible and righteous power. Their adrenalin rose at the forbidden, musical sound of breaking glass: ten plate-glass windows in a bank went crumbling, a Rolls Royce had every window in it shattered, on one block every parked ear got hit, the windows of the Astor Hotel, Mon Petit Restaurant, Park Dearborn Hotel, Lake Shore Apartments were smashed and splintered, and the windshield of a police car was instantly cobwebbed, the cops inside too startled to move. They swept down the streets and sidewalks, unmindful of the ashtrays and flowerpots rained on them by the more indignant apartment residents, pushing aside those citizens who tried to get in their way; one young man who tried to save the windows in his car was pushed roughly to the sidewalk, kicked in the groin by two Weathermen, and when the woman with him tried to intervene, she, too, was shoved to the pavement.’
The Weathermen swooped south in the direction of the Drake Hotel, and they had gone more than four long blocks before the police managed to set up a barricade, with patrolmen in riot gear standing two deep across an intersection, backed up by police cars and paddy wagons. The young warriors got within a half-block of the police line, quickly halted, veered east, and then continued the march, still moving at almost top speed. After a block they cut south again, and again found the police waiting. This time they decided to meet the enemy head-on, testing their rhetoric and their courage, and they ran straight at the helmeted lines—"Cha-a-a-a-a-arge!" "Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-a-a"—flailing and swinging at the astonished police. A number of the Weathermen in the front ranks, including several of the leaders, broke through, whooping off to the south, but most proved no match for even the Chicago police—who at least had the advantage of being familiar with bodily assaults—and some thirty of them were eventually subdued and taken off to the waiting vans.
Now the Weatherforce was split, some still going south, some having turned around and headed east again, some taking a completely different route back to the park—and none of them, apparently, very familiar with the Chicago streets. The main battalion, the Gold Coast, and the sounds of shouts and shattering glass continued to fill the night, mingled now with the whine of sirens and the incessant clang of a dozen burglar alarms. But by now the police were on the attack, covering the area in force with perhaps a thousand men in uniform and uncounted others in private cars and plain clothes, apparently out for a little off-duty revenge. When the police found an isolated group of demonstrators cut off from the main body they would barge in, using their heavy riot sticks, going after the knees and groins, trying for unprotected heads and faces, bashing the neck if the head was helmeted: "Bodies were just mangled," one Weatherwoman said later, "people were bleeding out of their mouths and their noses and their heads ... it was vengeance." At least twice police ran their squad cars full speed ahead into running crowds, knocking bodies ruthlessly aside, heedless of injuries. The acrid smell of tear gas wafted through the streets. One patrolman attacked by three Weathermen pulled his pistol and fired into a young man's neck; several other police fired revolvers at a clutch of demonstrators trying to escape through a building under construction; one cop fired into a small band which quickly fled for cover, then he turned and found a helmeted man standing alone to one side, shot him point blank, and ran off; shotguns, though hardly regulation issue, were hauled out from police-car trunks, and presently two people, a man and a woman, lay bleeding from buckshot wounds. Bring the war home.
After a little more than a hour, the force of the Weather-attack was dissipated. The demonstrators ended up thoroughly splintered, much of the leadership having either been arrested or isolated, many of the cadre were in paddy wagons, and most of the leftovers moved stealthily in small groups back to their lodgings. Before midnight it was all over: twenty-eight policemen were injured, none seriously, at least six Weathermen were shot (only three taken into custody), an unknown number injured, and sixty-eight arrested, twenty-five of them women. Back at the park, when at last the night was quiet, only embers of the bonfire remained. A tall, hunched figure in a coat and tie suddenly emerged from the darkness, looked around as if bewildered, stood a moment, and walked quickly off: it was Mark Rudd, in “straight” disguise, a general who it seems had decided not to march with his troops.
After the spasm of the first day of rage, a day or two of quiet. There was one action, a "women's militia" march the next morning, begun with militant speeches and braver-than-thou songs, but it drew only seventy women and twice as many police and it never had a chance. The militia leaders, showing considerable bravery if not much military sense, charged into the police lines, fought and kicked the cops for three or four minutes while their followers stood around cursing and yelling, and then were subdued in hammerlocks and half-nelsons and hauled off to jail. The rest of the women, forced to carry their helmets in their hands and march in straggly single file, were herded off by the police to a nearby subway, their action ignominiously crushed, their Leila Knaleds and Rosa Luxemburgs lying frustrated inside. Thereafter all the planned Weatherman actions—a rock concert, a march on the Conspiracy courthouse, "jailbreaks" in the city's high schools—were canceled, and Weatherman retired for a little introspection.
RYM II filled the gap, but with demonstrations of such an orderly and peaceful nature that the Chicago police who surrounded each of them must have been quite dumfounded as to what the initials "SDS" really meant. With support from the Black Panthers and Young Lords, with Klonsky and Noel Ignatin acting as its chief spokesmen, and with a following of perhaps two hundred, RYM II held a peaceful rally in front of the Conspiracy courthouse, a rhetoric-only demonstration at an International Harvester factory, a quiet rain-soaked mobilization at Cook County Hospital, and a black-white-brown march through Spanishspeaking areas which drew some two thousand people, the largest crowd in all the four days. The speeches were earnest but for the most part subdued, in vivid contrast to those of the other faction, with much emphasis upon the working class, the oppression of black and brown, racism both institutional and individual, and the lack of responsiveness from the institutions of government; of imperialism and the Third World and monster's bellies there was very little. The lines between the two factions were so sharply drawn, in fact, that when a bunch of Weathermen were arrested in the crowd of a RYM II rally by police who said they recognized them from the Gold Coast melee, RYM II supporters refused to offer any resistance: the word was, they're not part of "our" Movement.
Meanwhile, the Weathermen tried to get themselves ready for the next battle in their private war, a daytime march through the downtown Loop area on Saturday. In long and crowded criticism sessions in the intervening days they hashed over the effectiveness of the Wednesday action, debating for hours on end whether it had been worth the injuries and arrests; many blamed the Weatherbureau for insufficient preparation and bad leadership, and a number declared their intention of dropping out altogether. They confronted their own justified fears about going up against the police again, for they knew that the police would be fully prepared this time for any violence, that the state of Illinois had mobilized twentyfive hundred National Guardsmen and issued them ammunition, and that the chances were very high indeed of being beaten and arrested—possibly even shot—if another confrontation took place. Still, it was the general feeling that the opening action of the Days of Rage had ultimately been worth the price and that to give up now would be a confession of defeat; as Shin'ya Ono put it:
For us to return to the streets on Saturday meant that we were going to respond offensively to, rather than be cowed by, the enemy's escalation after his defeat of Wednesday night .... To go back on Saturday meant that we begin to feel and live the law laid down by Ché. You either win or get offed.That's what a revolution takes. Such an obvious truth, yet so hard to really feel and live by.
So on Saturday, courage screwed to the sticking place and beyond, some two hundred Weathermen, all that was left now of the depleted Red Army, took to the streets once more for "the second battle of the white fighting force." (It did nothing to bolster them when, before the march, plain-clothes men arrested four Weathermen at the starting point, among them Mark Rudd, who had come disguised with a fake dime-store mustache looking every bit like Mark Rudd with a fake dime-store mustache.) Marching swiftly through the downtown streets under the watchful eye of a double row of police, the Weathermen suddenly broke from the approved line of march and surged into the Loop area, startling the crowds of Saturday shoppers, flailing again at store windows and parked cars, swarming disconnectedly through the stalled traffic, and, when the waiting police closed in, going after them with their chains and pipes and fists and, in one instance, spiked railroad flares. This time, however, the police were ready and they sealed off the marchers quickly, descended in full force, and proceeded to club and collar them without undue ceremony; beefy plainclothes men, unidentifiable and unrestrained, assaulted anything wearing long hair and jeans, even running from one clutch of already-arrested demonstrators to another to get in a few extra kicks and jabs. Within fifteen minutes the brave and pathetic warriors were dispersed, more than half of them hauled into paddy wagons, bloody and bowed, the rest scattered along the city streets, heading for home. The toll: thirty-six policemen hurt (one with a broken nose, one a broken kneecap, the rest with minor wounds), nineteen windows broken, and 123 demonstrators arrested, most suffering one kind of minor injury or another; most serious of all, a city official. Assistant Corporation Counsel Richard Elrod, who delighted in joining the police on actions like this, was paralyzed from the neck down after he tried to tackle a demonstrator headfirst and apparently smashed into a wall instead.
(Brian Flanagan, a twenty-two-year-old Weatherman from New York, was arrested and charged with attempted murder in connection with this accident and was immediately found guilty by the Chicago press; at a subsequent trial, however, he was acquitted and the true version of the event was established.)
Thus did the Weathermen announce themselves to the world. In the course of four October "Days of Rage" they had provided a whole new political stance for the white American Movement, a symbolic watershed, an event by which many people on the left, now and later, were to measure themselves and their commitment, a genuine act, however feeble, of revolution. They had initiated offensive action against the property and the protectors of a major American city, deliberately committing a series of crimes in the name of their cause.
They had wrought thousands of dollars' worth of damage and expenses ($183,081.99, according to the Illinois Crime Commission which investigated the action, including $100,000 for the National Guard payroll, $35,000 in building damages, and $20,000 for Elrod's medical expenses) and inflicted injury on seventy-five Chicago policemen and officials. They had attracted the riveting attention of the city's and the nation's media, winning steady television coverage and headlines such as "Radicals Go On Rampage," "Gold Coast Damage Runs High," "Guard Called in Chicago As SDS Roams Streets," implanting the idea of Weatherman in the national consciousness, occupying overnight the left end of the political spectrum to the point where people like Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey could refer to it with the knowledge that good American citizens would be horrified.” And somewhere in the course of it—at the first charge into the police lines, or during the long hours of self-criticism and evaluation, or huddled in the jail cells in the aftermath—they had transformed themselves—those that stuck with it, anyway—into a truly dedicated band of revolutionaries:
Chicago was key in the development of a national organization. What happened in the Movement center, where we slept, and in our political meetings was often as important as what happened in the streets. Real strength and unity came from struggling with our people from other collectives and different parts of the country. More than ever before we felt that, however weak we were, this was the beginning of the army and the party.
It was about this time that the Xerox Corporation decided to change the name of its computer subsidiary from Scientific Data Systems—known widely as SDS—to Xerox Data Systems.
In the minds of the Weathermen, publicly at least, the whole thing had shown itself on balance to be a victory; the next issue of New Left Notes declared, in the characteristic extravagance of Weatherlanguage:
We came to Chicago to join the other side ... to do material damage to pig Amerika and all that it's about ... to do it in the road—in the open—so that white Amerika could dig on the opening of a new front ... to attack ... to vamp on those privileges and destroy the motherfucker from the inside.
We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IN IT'S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA BEWARE: THERE'S AN ARMY GROWING RIGHT IN YOUR GUTS, AND IT'S GOING TO HELP BRING YOU DOWN.
But that is only half the picture. "Revolutionary" or not, if this was Weatherman's answer to the problem of power, perhaps it hadn't understood the question. The National Action was tactically foolhardy, the product more of guilt than of courage, and obviously a far cry from the true guerrilla warfare of hit-and-run, swimming-in-the-sea, stealth-in-the-night that the Weathermen professed to respect. It was nearly suicidal—"Custeristic" was the word the Panthers used—and sorely debilitating to the Weatherman organization: probably two hundred people in all were injured, some seriously, and at least that many arrested, including all of the top leaders except Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Jeff Melish; the Weathercoffers, already depleted, were scraped to the bottom by the imposition of $2.3 million worth of bail bonds, $234,000 of which had to be supplied immediately in cash (most of which ultimately came from reluctant parents and impoverished friends); and on top of everything was the prospect of lengthy court appearances (in many instances without the services of able lawyers since so few wanted to handle the cases of these revolutionaries), and sentences of up to five years in jail, all added to the innumerable cases left over from the summer. And it had not attracted the numbers expected, it had not drawn in the Chicago-area working-class and high-school youths, and it had not even kept the allegiance of some of those who originally attended—several people who started as Weathermen dropped out before the four days were over, either out of disagreement with the organization's style (one woman later wrote that Weatherman "was the most fascist organization I've come in contact with"?*) or disagreement with particular actions (another wrote, "If I had to take sides, I would have fought against the Weathermen"). Much later, two New York Weathermen acknowledged sadly:
“As it worked out, the longest sentence actually meted out was 112 days, and this to a Weatherman who had already spent that time in jail awaiting trial. Most of the sentences were for terms of less than a week or were purely probationary, and many involved only fines, amounting in all to more than $35,000. However, it should be noted that these cases involved mostly the less prominent—about thirty Weathermen, including many of the leaders facing the stiffest charges, did not show up for their trials in Chicago and went underground as fugitives without ever receiving sentences. (Illinois Crime Investigating Committee Report, 1970.)
We won very few people over to our politics. We were not yet capable of leading masses of kids. Our dogmatism and intolerance, though it came out of conviction, fucked over many sisters and brothers who are or will be strong revolutionaries. We were lazy. It was so easy to accept a political line from the Weatherbureau, rather than struggle to develop a politics of our own. We had succeeded in hardening ourselves—we could be critical of each other, we could fight for our ideas, we could fight pigs. But in all this hardening, we lost some of our humanity. We often confused our revolutionary hatred for the oppressors with bourgeois self-hatred and hatred for each other. Very often we lost sight of the deep love that had made us revolutionaries in the first place.
On October 10 a press release was issued from "SDS National Headquarters" in Boston
putting forth the PL-SDS view of the National Action:
SDS CONDEMNS WEATHERMEN PROVOCATEURS
For the last two days a group of provocateurs claiming to be from SDS have attacked students and working people in Chicago. Wednesday night they broke windows of people's homes and cars and attacked cab drivers ... .
These actions are all the work of a group of police agents and hate-the-people lunatics who walked out of SDS at the June Convention because their ideas had been rejected. Led nationally by Mark Rudd, this gang calling itself SDSRevolutionary Youth Movement-Weatherman has absolutely nothing to do with SDS. They have been running all around the country attacking people.
NO SDS CHAPTER SUPPORTS THEM ...
We want to build a movement that sides with the masses of American people against the boss class that runs this country. The bosses have used the tiny Weathermen gang of provocateurs as an excuse to call in 2,500 National Guards. They want to do two things: smear and discredit SDS, smash the honest student movement which is beginning to involve thousands of students in allying with workers. The bosses want to take peoples’ minds away from seeing the bosses as their enemy and focus on the student movement as a scapegoat, while at the same time carry through an attack in working peoples’ living and working conditions. This is the oldest trick in the book. The facts cannot be hidden for long though. We have confidence that the vast majority of people will see through this trick and repudiate Weatherman and RYM II—who have nothing to do with SDS—and build a united movement of workers and students to fight against racism and imperialism.
We won very few people over to our politics. We were not yet capable of leading masses of kids. Our dogmatism and intolerance, though it came out of conviction, fucked over many sisters and brothers who are or will be strong revolutionaries. We were lazy. It was so easy to accept a political line from the Weatherbureau, rather than struggle to develop a politics of our own. We had succeeded in hardening ourselves—we could be critical of each other, we could fight for our ideas, we could fight pigs. But in all this hardening, we lost some of our humanity. We often confused our revolutionary hatred for the oppressors with bourgeois self-hatred and hatred for each other. Very often we lost sight of the deep love that had made us revolutionaries in the first place.
On October 10 a press release was issued from "SDS National Headquarters" in Boston putting forth the PL-SDS view of the National Action:
SDS CONDEMNS WEATHERMEN PROVOCATEURS
For the last two days a group of provocateurs claiming to be from SDS have attacked students and working people in Chicago. Wednesday night they broke windows of people's homes and cars and attacked cab drivers ... .
These actions are all the work of a group of police agents and hate-the-people lunatics who walked out of SDS at the June Convention because their ideas had been rejected. Led nationally by Mark Rudd, this gang calling itself SDSRevolutionary Youth Movement-Weatherman has absolutely nothing to do with SDS. They have been running all around the country attacking people.
NO SDS CHAPTER SUPPORTS THEM ...
We want to build a movement that sides with the masses of American people against the boss class that runs this country. The bosses have used the tiny Weathermen gang of provocateurs as an excuse to call in 2,500 National Guards. They want to do two things: smear and discredit SDS, smash the honest student movement which is beginning to involve thousands of students in allying with workers. The bosses want to take peoples’ minds away from seeing the bosses as their enemy and focus on the student movement as a scapegoat, while at the same time carry through an attack in working peoples’ living and working conditions. This is the oldest trick in the book. The facts cannot be hidden for long though. We have confidence that the vast majority of people will see through this trick and repudiate Weatherman and RYM II—who have nothing to do with SDS—and build a united movement of workers and students to fight against racism and imperialism.
The reaction on the campuses to what had now become of SDS—or, more properly, the shell of SDS—was made clear almost as soon as the universities reopened. Neither Weatherman nor PL-SDS seemed to inspire any great enthusiasm among the studentscertainly the summer's work-in and the material out of the Boston NO did nothing to strengthen PL's position, and the glaring lack of response to the National Action indicated the failure of the Weathermen. PL was dismissed most often with the comment that it was, as the phrase had it, "irrelevant," while Weatherman was pinioned by the widely circulated remark of one Wisconsin SDSer: "You don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are." Faced with a decision of where to turn, many SDS chapters simply splintered, duplicating the factionalism of the national organization on a smaller scale, and others, without the luxury of a decision, simply collapsed within weeks for want of a guiding national presence. Several of the WSA-dominated chapters declared allegiance to the PLSDS, a few groups made formal bows toward RYM II, but as far as is known no chapter formally allied itself with Weatherman (which, logically, would have entailed the abandonment of the chapter anyway and a move en masse into the collectives under Weatherbureau discipline). The most common response, however, was a-plague-on-bothyour-houses, exemplified by the widely reprinted statement of the theretofore uncelebrated SDS chapter in Fayetteville, Arkansas: **
Fayetteville SDS declares itself independent of either National Office because we do not feel that either bureaucratic Stalinistic group represents the politics of our chapter. Both national offices represent a petty bourgeois constituency of SDS, and we feel that neither NO represents the rank and file membership of SDS or any other segments of any other substantial New Left group ... .
We feel that the people who will make a revolution do not need a vanguard to tell them how to run either that revolution or the society which will emerge.
We do not believe that either of these bureaucracies have any understanding of, or respect for, the revolutionary traditions and heritages of the American proletariat. Rather than making a true revolutionary analysis of this society,
they have distorted and dogmatized the revolutionary experiences of dissimilar societies.
Both NO’s have degenerated all political discussion into the chanting of meaningless slogans and empty rhetoric.
Because of these and other basic disagreements, we of Fayetteville SDS feel that both of the so-called leaderships of SDS are a serious threat to the Movement and therefore we cannot align ourselves with either "SECT"!!!!
"All Power to the People!!!" / NO POWER TO THE STALINISTS.
Many chapters, like Fayetteville's, at first chose to keep the initials "SDS," feeling that it gave them some identification with the past or hope for the future.” But as the fall wore on and it became obvious that no new SDS was going to rise from the ashes of the old, most chapters or chapter remnants chose to continue their activism under some such rubric as the "Revolutionary Organizing Committee" or the "Independent Radical Caucus"; Boston's November Action Committee and New York's December 4 Movement were two of the most prominent of these.
The collapse of SDS on the nation's campuses had several important ramifications. For one thing, the lack of a single strong student group, even one as loose and at times as divided as SDS, meant that any sustained national action—a march or an antidraft campaignwould be much more difficult to mount, and the tendency for each local group to pick and choose among the various causes would be accelerated. There would generally be no pamphlets or literature tables, no newspapers to proselytize with, no buttons to sell, there would be no regional travelers giving advice, no Movement veterans dropping by, no national meetings for recurrent contacts and inspiration. There would be no outside sources of sustenance and direction, leaving individual groups to their own devices for strategy and targets, to their own resources for money and energy. There would be no national identity for the press to focus on, nothing to give the chapters that mediaized sense of being part of a single nation-wide force, nothing that the incoming freshmen would know and anticipate, even pick their college because of.
This in turn meant that the job of political transmission, of passing on political insights, connections, meanings, and ideology from one subgeneration to the next, was stymied and all but abandoned. True enough, SDS had increasingly faltered at this particular task over the last two years, as its arrogance, paranoia, and distance grew apace, but at least while there was an organization with regular publications and regular meetings there was always the inevitable transmission, even by osmosis. Now there was nothing—or, to say the same thing, a blathering cacophony of things. It was impossible, of course, to stop the activism of college campuses—that was a function of the role of the university in mid-twentieth-century America, of the young in the economy, of authority in the society, and that would not change—but now there was no easy way for that activism to be infused with politics, with the kinds of understanding that from the beginning SDS had worked so hard to project and transmit. A campus might explode with anger over a tuition increase, but there would be no common appreciation of how that connected with the role of the university in a corporate society; a lengthy campaign against ROTC or university investments might excite a college, but there would be little understanding of the links with imperialism; students across the land could get outraged at the perilous condition of the ecology without ever seeing the nature of the capitalist system and how it works to produce and prolong that peril. Without something like an SDS, there would be no ready political mooring; without a political mooring, activism goes adrift.
One such, a fledgling group at Central Connecticut State College, in Bridgeport, even gained legal fame by so doing. At the beginning of the fall term it voted to be unaffiliated with either National Office but asked for official college recognition as "Students for a Democratic Society" because it hoped that would have a certain attraction among politically minded students. The college administration then forbade them to use that name because it had determined in its wisdom that any such group would be a pernicious influence on campus. A group of eight students thereupon sued the college in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court (No. 71-452, Healy v. James), which decided in 1972 that the college had overstepped its powers and SDS should be permitted on campus—only if, however, it agreed to obey "reasonable campus rules." (The New York Times, June 26, 1972.)
The rest of the school year played out this unhappy script. There was plenty of protest activity, more so than even the year before—though it was played down by the commercial press, victims of their own predictions about "the cooling of America" and, as usual, meliorists for a troubled time—reaching more than two-thirds of the campuses during the year and striking at a rate of more than one a day. If in nothing else, the year was noteworthy in establishing new marks for the largest number of faculty members ever arrested (forty-five, at Buffalo, in February) and the largest number of students ever arrested in a single sweep (eight hundred and ninety-one, at Mississippi Valley State, also in February). But the activity tended to be isolated, contained, single-issued, and could not be sustained or directed.
In October there was an enormous campus outpouring for a liberalorganized Vietnam Moratorium Day, fully a third of the colleges and universities taking part in various local actions and many cities holding demonstrations besides—yet the Moratorium Committee, bewildered as to its constituency and direction, had no sense of how to keep the effort going and within a few more months it had collapsed. In November there was the largest peace march ever, again in Washington, with more than half a million souls in attendance, many from the campuses—yet it was followed by an awkward silence, an embarrassed realization that the mass-mobilization tactic had been used beyond endurance, and the New Mobilization Committee limped its way into the spring and died. In October Bobby Seale was bound and gagged in the courtroom of the Conspiracy trial and in December Illinois Panther Chairman Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed by Chicago police—but there was no mass protest on the campuses at all, no one to force the issue onto the white constituency, no one to call the rallies and make the connections and rouse the passions.
In February, following the guilty verdict in the case of the Chicago Conspiracy, there were scores of separate "TDA" ("The Day After" the verdict) outbursts across the country, in Boston, Washington, New York, Madison, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Seattle—but these protests had no coordination or unified political base, they erupted essentially where local conditions were ripe, and they were almost all done with and forgotten as fast as the tear gas could clear. In April there was an event called Earth Day, featuring local rallies and exhibits drawing attention to the earth's ecology, in which nearly half the campuses in the nation participated—yet no one oversaw the affair to make sure that it would be anything more than liberal hand-wringing, no one was able to go on from there to establish a radical national organization on ecology, and within a few months most student attention had turned elsewhere without having been made any the wiser. And the climactic event of the year, the student strike in May, produced (as we shall see) one of the most serious crises in the nation's recent history—but it was directionless and unorganized, and so devoid of radical politics that it was easily coopted into a liberal electoral exercise. All of this, in short, from moratorium to strike, was rootless and bootless activism, often painfully and obviously without politics, and adrift.
The void caused by the demise of SDS was thus apparent to everyone on the left, and it should not be thought that the school year lacked for candidates to fill it.
A verdict eventually overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, on November 21, 1972, chiefly on the grounds of Judge Hoffman's legal errors and "antagonistic" behavior.
The first, by virtue of continuity if nothing else, was the PL version of SDS, and it plowed into the fall trying to look for all the world like the genuine article: New Left Notes came out, demonstrations were held, the NIC met and passed resolutions, and chapters which had had strong PL and WSA contingents went right ahead meeting and setting up tables as if nothing had happened. But there was very little impact, and no noticeable outreach. Very few chapters which were not already in the PL orbit joined now, and some WSA groups (especially in the South) even decided to go their own way, avoiding the PL hegemony and carrying out worker-student politics by their own lights; a number of the smaller and more parasitic WSA caucuses apparently disintegrated altogether when their larger SDS hosts ceased to function during the fall. PL-WSA strongholds continued in the Boston and New York areas, with pockets in Los Angeles and San Francisco and isolated groups at schools such as Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Florida State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Yale, but in none of those places was SDS any longer a power and in most of them the ranks were embarrassingly small. Chapters may have numbered as many as forty, at least at the start, but total membership was probably not more than three thousand at any time.
One of PL-SDS's failings was its notable inability to work out any attractive strategy of its own. Over the summer, the PL heavies had hatched the idea of the campus worker-student alliance (CWSA) which they saw as perfectly suitable for their new all-to-ourselves student front; having students join campus cafeteria workers and maintenance men in raising grievances and strikes seemed the ideal way to get them to understand the working class and without having to budge from the campus. It was a sorry flop. Aside from a few goingthrough-the-motions actions here and there—support for a fired dining-hall worker at Yale, agitation for increased wages for "painters' helpers" at Harvard, a rally for free parking for campus workers at Wisconsin—the CWSA idea had all the impact of a siphonless flea. The workers, who filled the most marginal and shaky of jobs anyway, saw little point in joining with student "agitators" and even less in taking risks to create alliances with transient allies; the majority of students found the problems of campus janitors very small pickings indeed and without any connections to their own lives and their own grievances. Though PL-SDS pursued the strategy doggedly through the year—livened here and there by a few antiROTC and antiracism fights—the CWSA line never did get off the ground and died a quiet death sometime over the next summer. PL-SDS almost, though not quite, died with it.
The second former SDS group that tried to fill the void was RYM II. Though no formal RYM organization had come out of the June conference, the general politics was represented in a number of cities, often by SDS old-timers who hoped that a new position midway between the Weatherman "crazies" and the PL "politicos" could be worked out. This hope led to a national conference in Atlanta in November, at which some three hundred people formally established the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a new organization devoted to building a "mass anti-imperialist youth movement"—in other words, a new 1968-vintage SDS—with a program of fighting racism and male supremacy, organizing in the high schools, and even (the ghost of Kissinger's Kamikaze Plan) organizing in the army. Such was the reactive mood of these ex-SDSers at this point, however, that they went out of their way to give the new organization an unwieldy structure and an ineffective set of officers that could not possibly develop into an "elite" or an "NO collective," an attempt to make amends for the past (without learning from it) that condemned RYM to inefficiency, invisibility, and eventually disintegration. Such was the mood of the campuses, also, that any attempt simply to duplicate SDS faced an uphill battle, something for which RYM had neither the resources nor the talent nor the energy—nor, indeed, the politics. By the spring, except for a pocket here or there, RYM was dead.
Of the non-SDS candidates to fill the SDS gap, there were a number of sects—the National Caucus of Labor Committees, YAWF, a new Communist Party group called the Young Workers Liberation League, the Workers League, varieties of anarchists, a temporarily revived Youth International Party, the International Socialists, the Spartacist League (and, eventually, its youth group, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus), and the Young Socialist Alliance. The YSA, the nine-year-old youth group of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, fared the best of all these groups, in part because it was not very demanding in its membership requirements ("general agreement with the organization's program") and in part because it operated with a certain seriousness and discipline that seemed attractive after the laissez-aller of SDS (in December, for example, fifteen former SDS chapter heads announced they were joining YSA to escape SDS's "personality cliques, based on personal alliances rather than political orientation"). Still, the YSA could never shake off its Old Left heritage and its rather stuffy brand of Marxism, so its appeal to college students was definitely limited—even by its own inflated estimates, the YSA had only sixty chapters by the middle of 1970 and somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 members, only 3,000 or so on the campuses.?®
Somewhat greater success was enjoyed by the antiwar group controlled by the YSA and SWP, the Student Mobilization Committee, and for a time it seemed that it might actually be able to take the place of SDS. Its politics was reductionist, concerned only with the war ("the SMC is open to all youth opposed to the war," ran its creed, "regardless of political belief or affiliation"), and its tactics were confined solely to organizing mass marches—but it was at least active and visible, and its membership in 1969 climbed to an estimated 20,000 people at more than a thousand schools and colleges. The critical point in SMC's development came at a conference it called in Cleveland in February 1970, when some 3,500 people showed up, many of them independent radicals hoping to broaden SMC's politics, inject an imperialist analysis into its antiwar policies, and turn it into a multi-issue organization that could succeed SDS. But the YSA and SWP vigorously resisted any changes in what had been a very successful front group for them and by maintaining rigid control over the proceedings were able to beat back the challenge and keep the SMC to the narrow antiwar path. The independents eventually found their way into the multi-issued coalition that grew out of the defunct New Mobilization Committee over the summer—first called the National Coalition Against War, Racism, and Repression, later known as the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice—but there was no other student-oriented membership group for them to influence and all attempts at originating such an organization failed to get off the ground.*?
There was, in short, no formal organization on the left that could replace SDS in the life of the Movement: a testimony to the value of SDS and to the tragedy of its collapse. A plethora of political groups continued to operate on the campuses in succeeding years—the sectlets, socialist parties, single-issue committees, ad hoc coalitions, women's groups, homosexual organizations—but none had the life or depth of SDS, none could match the sweep it had even in its late faltering stages.
It was a time of significant depression for the radical and revolutionary studentry. "We've learned that the only thing that can work is a revolution," one bitter Cornell SDSer said, "and it looks like a revolution can't work." Splintered and in disarray, student leftists floundered: some dropped out, some went back to the books, a few turned to the simplicity of bombs, many found a solace in drugs, and those who continued political work concentrated on narrow organizing projects (food coops, daycare centers, rent strikes) or small local activist groups (women's liberation, gay liberation, "consciousness-raising," Marxist study). Having put so much of themselves into politics, and with so much frustration to show for it now, many former SDSers went into what they half-jokingly called "retirement"—leading private lives, coming out for a march or demonstration when it was called, but for the most part hanging back, looking inward. And it was no small thing: 30,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 SDSers had to reshape their lives in one way or another. For some, of course, it meant no more than one less meeting to go to or one less pamphlet to write; but for many it meant agonized rethinking, reassessment, rejuggling of their assumptions and their lives.
The League for Industrial Democracy, still living its half-life in the shadows of the antiCommunist left, issued a report in August of 1970 which declared that the New Left was dead. In a survey of fifty institutions and several thousand "campus leaders," the LID discovered that most students did not identify themselves with the New Left (only 8.5 percent, as compared with 30.5 percent who called themselves liberals, and 25 percent identified with "new politics"), did not regard Tom Hayden as highly as Michael Harrington, and were not members of the Students for a Democratic Society. The New Left, it said, had collapsed because it had not followed liberal politics: "By provoking the opposition of labor, the representative black groups, and the traditional liberals, the New Left destroyed its possibilities of becoming a mass movement." The result, it said, was a disintegration on the left and the rise of fragmented and competing organizations, turning the student movement into a force "with no shared sense of direction, and very often with profound and even bitter internal differences." The lesson of the report was that the time-honored tenets of the LIDmoderation, anti-Communism, liberalism, mainstream politics—were the requisite goals for any new student movement.
In truth, it was much too late for all of that—but the LID still had not learned.
The failure of Weatherman to attract people to the National Action and to establish any base whatsoever on the campuses in the fall of 1969 served only to nurture their "vanguarditis," their conviction that if there was to be a serious attack upon the system they would have to start it themselves without waiting around for the peace-marching students or the jobhunting working-class kids or even the breakfast-feeding Panthers.
Weathermen with every passing week grew more and more isolated, from the campuses, from the Movement, from the street kids, from America. In the collectives they cut themselves off from family—in Linda Evans's passport, for example, the space under "In case of death or accident notify ..." bore only, "SDS, 1608 W. Madison, Chicago, Illinois"and from friends—as Dotson Rader wrote upon seeing an old friend then in Weatherman, "He was like a young priest who had taken vows and was under discipline and who consciously steeled himself against the past." Their standard was to see the Weatherlife as all, and it was on this basis that new members were specifically recruited:
The issue was whether or not the potential cadre had the "guts" to carry out armed struggle, to be a rea/ revolutionary, to be a Weatherman. Are you revolutionary enough to smash your closest relationships? Are you revolutionary enough to give away your children? This style of "struggle" came to be known as "gut-check." It was an important form of "struggle" within the organization on every question.
The life style of the collectives grew inward, too. People going through daily self-criticism sessions (which had, apparently, mellowed after Chicago to emphasize more supportiveness and less venom) got to know each other in a special, almost selfish way. Reorganization of sexual lives reinforced this inwardness, and whether or not the new everyone-sleep-witheveryone patterns were healthy, they certainly gave those within the collective a shared sense that no one on the outside could know; homosexuality, for example, especially among the women exploring a new sexual freedom but also among the men, broke down barriers in a surprisingly swift and effective way. The shared drug experience—a good deal of marijuana for relaxation, special group sessions with LSD, hashish, and in some cases barbiturates—also helped to draw people together, to establish new connections both personal and political. "We're moving, dancing, fucking, doing dope," one Weatherman flyer said that fall, "knowing our bodies as part of our lives, becoming animals again after centuries of repression and uptightness." The continual concern, the so-called paranoia, about official repression and harassment—born of the knowledge that in fact phones were tapped, letters opened, doors watched, cars tailed, rooms bugged, and trusted friends likely to be planted by the FBI—exaggerated the insularity.” And shot through everything else was the growing development of a special politics, a politics very much in flux from one week to the next, very much in the experimental stage, but informed by one singular idea: "Once you really understand the need for the revolution, it becomes part of you and your whole life makes sense for the first time.
Not everyone could take this kind of life, of course, not everyone liked the top-down discipline urged by the Weatherbureau, not everyone agreed with the go-it-alone isolationism. A number of people, even among those who had been in it from the summer, dropped out: some went back to more conventional Movement work (several to the Venceremos Brigade), some carried on Weatherpolitics apart from the collectives and the discipline of Weatherman itself, and others repudiated Weatherman and organized antithetical groups emphasizing outreach and nonviolence (the Seattle Liberation Front, for example, was organized by several ex-Weathermen specifically as a counterthrust to Weatherman). But as these people left, the hard core became harder, and new people were continually added—a woman from the Chicago Conspiracy office, a man who had been in a WSA caucus, a high-school dropout bored with his factory job; one newcomer explained what it was like:
It struck me, at a meeting I went to, that they were a family. A big, very tight family. I wanted to be part of that. People were touching each other. Women together, men together. They were beautifully free. I felt that they were experiencing a whole new life-style that I really hadn't begun to understand.
They were so full of life and energy and determination and love.
To avoid infiltration and expose agents, collectives often administered what was known as the "acid test" to suspected informers, giving them LSD to see how they would react when their guard was down and their psyche opened up. One Weathercollective in Cincinnati thought it had tumbled to an infiltrator, one Larry Grathwohl, when he announced during a heavy two-day acid trip, "You're right, I AM a pig"—but it turned out that he was merely expressing a general guilt for having served in the army: "I'm a pig because of what I did in Vietnam; because I stood by and saw brutality of what was being done to innocent people," and he was accepted into the collective. A mistake. A few months later he fingered two New York Weatherwomen for the FBI. (Liberated Guardian, September 27, 1970, from Berkeley Barb.)
The logical result of what Weatherman was becoming that fall was for it to go "underground," abandon entirely the public ways that were the legacy from SDS and split into small secret cells operating each in its own way to bring the war home. It was an honored tradition, the tradition of the Maquis, the Fidelistas, the Vietnamese, the Tupamaros, and now for the first time it would be followed in modem America. "More than ever," wrote members of one New York collective, "we saw the necessity of moving to a higher level; armed struggle had to become a reality. Clearly our present form of organization (open collectives,) was not capable of carrying out higher levels of struggle." No one knew for sure what an underground life would mean—*?
Should we all go hide in a basement and read about explosives until we were ready to get an aircraft carrier? Could an underground provide political as well as military leadership for the mass movement? What exactly is the relation between an underground and an overground?
—but there was a general conviction that it was the only real way to fight the revolution militarily and even a general surge of feeling that it stood a good chance of winning: "Out of the often tortuous months we spent in collectives, out of confronting the task of building an underground, we feel an incredible confidence and joy in being part of the final destruction of imperialism and the building of communism."
The National Council—or "National War Council," as it had become—was held in Flint, Michigan, over the Christmas holidays, Weatherman's last public fling before this inevitable journey underground, a farewell to the old Movement, a last appeal for comrades. It was without doubt one of the most bizarre gatherings of the decade.
Some four hundred people showed up—attendance was kept down because the Weatherbureau didn't let out where the site would be until mid-December, but still the numbers were an indication that Weatherman had not grown substantially in the last six months—of whom perhaps two to three hundred were official "cadre" and the rest infiltrators, the curious, and assorted hangers-on, quite a few as young as thirteen and fourteen, some (the reports have it) even accompanied by their mothers. The "Giant Ballroom" in a black ghetto of Flint was decorated with huge semipsychedelic posters of Weatherheroes (Castro, Cleaver, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Mao, Malcolm X), one wall was covered with alternating red and black pictures of Fred Hampton, one banner showed scores of bullets each bearing the name of some Weatherenemy (Alioto, Daley, the Guardian, Humphrey, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, even Sharon Tate, only recently murdered while eight months pregnant), posters showed a rifle with a high-powered sight labeled "PIECE NOW," and from the ceiling hung a huge six-and-a-half-foot cardboard machine gun.
There was none of the usual National Council routine, no resolutions or programs, no workshops or formal plenaries, nor any opportunity to introduce any of these things—the Weatherbureau was in firm control of the affair and they wanted a happening, not a meeting:*°
The war council was a frenzy, a frenzy in anticipation of the armed struggle they were calling for. Most Weatherpeople slept an hour a day; the rest was heavy, heavy rapping, heavy listening, heavy exercising, heavy fucking, heavy laughing, a constant frenzy-strain that went through the whole four days, all the time no flab, no looseness, no ease in anything that was done.
Daytimes were given over to informal, haphazard groups of people talking about the Weatherlife and about going underground, the nighttimes to chaotic mass meetings billed as "wargasms." The wargasms began with a group karate routine (sloppy, it was felt by most), then conventional exercises, then a few songs from the Weatherman songbook, after which everyone burst into Indian war whoops and ululations and settled down for speeches from the Weatherleaders. And these performances, by all accounts, were extraordinary.
Bernardine Dohrn led off with a little story about how Weathermen behave: "We were in an airplane, and we went up and down the aisle 'borrowing' food from people's plates. They didn't know we were Weathermen: they just knew we were crazy. That's what we're about, being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honky America." Mark Rudd's turn featured: "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building." And "JJ" offered: "We're against everything that's 'good and decent,' in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare." "The raps," according to one swept-up woman who went on to join the Weathermen, "were of such intensity that there was just nothing left to say." No doubt.
Something of the mind-set of the Weathermen during this period can be seen in the way the Weatherleaders in Flint talked about death, with a characteristic combination of ruthless if distorted logic and a sense of guilt so strong it had turned to rage. The Weatheranalysis held that whites were virtually useless in the worldwide confrontation going on, and except for a few brave street fighters like the Weathermen they all were corrupted, bought-off tyrants. Logically, then, the death of a white baby is a positive revolutionary action, and indeed the Weathermen actually held abstract debates at the "war council" about whether killing white babies is "correct," a Weatherman at one point shouting to the audience, "All white babies are pigs." From there it was only a step to Dohrn's ecstatic speech about the Charles Manson gang, the drugged and degraded children responsible for the recent Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles: "Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!" In later months Dohrn would come to regret this adulation (her account of the facts, incidentally, is wrong), not the least because Charles Manson was obviously a cruel master of a virtual harem where women were treated as objects with less value than cow dung; but at the time Manson seemed the perfect symbol of American values stood on their head, and this is what the Weathermen were after.”° Amid all this wildness, there was very little in the way of real business transacted at Flint, but it was clear to all that the meeting marked a turning point; as one Weatherwoman remembered it:
The War Council was a new beginning. A leap. A new era had begun. People were determined to destroy the State. The things that were talked about were things that people would be doing in the very near future—higher levels of struggle.
Some samples. To "White Christmas": I'm dreaming of a white riot/Just like the one October 8/When the pigs take a beating/And things started leading/To armed war against the state. We're heading now toward armed struggle,/ With ev'ry cadre line we write./May you learn to struggle and fight/Or the world will off you ‘cause you're white.
To the fifties' rock-'n'-roll "Oh, Donna": There once was a town, Chicago was its name./Since we went there, it's never been the same,/Cause we offed that town,/Chicago, brought it down/To the ground./Down to the ground. To "Maria": The most beautiful sound I ever heard:/Kim II Sung./Kim II Sung, Kim II Sung, Kim II Sung, etc. To the tune of the Beatles’ "Nowhere Man": He's a real Weatherman,/ Ripping up the mother land./Making all his Weatherplans/For everyone;/ Knows just what he's fighting for./Victory for people's war,/Trashes, bombs, kills pigs and more,/The Weatherman.
"Higher levels" meant two things to the Weathermen. First, it was decided that they would commit themselves to violence, to "armed struggle," giving up all notions of organizing a broad movement and just getting ahead with the business of destruction, in a packet handed out in the hall, Weatherleaders said:
The notion of public violence is increasingly key. That is, planning, organizing, and carrying off public and visible violent action against the state .... We have to answer all the pig sounds about sabotage and terrorism being terrible, suicidal, and adventurous with what we have learned from the Vietnamese and from Black revolutionists:
Any kind of action that fucks up the pigs' war and helps the people to win is a good kind of action.
EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER ... Armed struggle starts when someone starts it. International revolutionary war is reality, and to debate about the "correct time and conditions" to begin the fight, or about a phase of work necessary to prepare people for the revolution, is reactionary. MAKING WAR on the state creates both the consciousness and the conditions for the expansion of the struggle, making public revolutionary politics, proving that it is possible to move and that there is an organization with a strategy.
Second, the Weathermen decided to break up the collectives into smaller groups—called variously cells, affinity groups, or, following the Latin American guerrillas, "focos"—and finally go underground. As they were to announce in the very last official publication out of the National Office:
As the level of struggle has risen, a lot of people have felt the need for tighter and stronger forms, and now there are hundreds of collectives being built all over the country, chains of affinity groups linked together by strong leadership, discipline, and political coherence. A network of many collectives which can strike in coordinated ways and share resources, etc. And we are building an army, a centralized military organization that can lead the struggle.
On. January 1, the self-styled Red Army went forth. Two hundred, perhaps three hundred, in a land of two hundred million. "Cuba started with 80 men at Moncada," they said, "Vietnam's General Giap started armed propaganda with 38 men"—but it was still a pathetically small band of people, isolated by intent as. well as failure, taking the last desperate step they knew how to take to live their lives in such a way that it did not contradict their politics.
In New Haven, December 28-31, PL-SDS held its own National Council meeting, the first time it convened as a separate organization.. The NC gave formal endorsement to the campus-worker-student alliance strategy:
We believe that an alliance of students with workers is the only way to oppose the injustices such as the Vietnam war and racism which America's rulers inflict on the people of this country and the world .... The group with whom we can now ally to implement a worker-student alliance strategy is campus workers. There are thousands of campus workers; they face the same administration boss which students face when they combat ROTC, expansion into the surrounding community, recruiters, etc.
Another National Council meeting, for the West Coast, was held January 30-February 2 in Los Angeles, attended by several hundred people. This unique solution to the problem of geographical distance was possible largely because PL operatives managed things so that both NCs endorsed the same general principles.
There were also resolutions on women's liberation, community-college organizing, and support for the workers on strike against General Electric (the last of which was billed as "the most significant struggle against imperialism in the Movement's history"). The NC also came out against "nationalist black studies courses," ROTC, and open admissions; no resolutions were passed concerning the war, repression of the Black Panther Party, or students.
The Weatherman decision to turn to underground political warfare was perfectly consistent with the evolution of violence on the left in the decade of the sixties as we have seen it so far: from sit-ins and pickets, to marches and teach-ins, to confrontations and disruptions, to rock-throwing and trashing, and ultimately to bombings and arson. Common to it all was a consistent New Leftist tradition of personal commitment, political militance, and moral righteousness, but the tactics changed dramatically as each method was tried, found wanting, and discarded, none being able to break through America's barriers of indifference and resistance, each eventually ignored or coopted or crushed by a Hydra-headed system.
And as the issue came to be put in terms of raw power, active political violence—power at its rawest—seemed for many to be the only possible response of the left. Mike James, for example, addressing a Chicago audience, declared:”°
Non-violent marches have their place, but they won't bring about the changes necessary for freedom. Capitalism won't crumble because of moral protest. It didn't in India, where only the color of the agents of the oppressors changed.
Once again: revolution, liberation and freedom must be fought for. And that means we're dealing with power. They've got the guns, we've got the people. Right now they're stronger. The time will come when we'll have to use guns.
Don't let that hang you up. Some of you say violence isn't human. Well, taking oppression isn't human; it's stupid. You only live one time, so you'd better make it good and make it liberating. The jerking of the brake may be violent, but sometimes the rolling of the wheel is more violent. For otherwise, the violence of liberation and the violence of oppression will only increase for those who follow. Violence, when directed at the oppressor, is human as well as necessary. Struggle sometimes means violence, but struggle is necessary, because it is through collective struggle that liberation comes. And life is nothing if it is not about liberation.
And the Weathermen themselves, in their first public communiqué after going underground,argued:
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five or twenty-five years in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we've been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know that the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.
This was not just rhetoric: the statistics indicate that it was being taken seriously. In the spring of 1968, when bombs were first used by the white left, there were ten bombing instances on campuses; that fall, forty-one; the next spring, eighty-four on campus and ten more off campus; and in the 1969-70 school year (September through May), by an extremely conservative estimate, there were no fewer than 174 major bombings and attempts on campus, and at least seventy more off-campus incidents associated with the white left—a rate of roughly one a day. The targets, as always, were proprietary and symbolic: ROTC buildings (subject to 197 acts of violence, from bombings to window breakings, including the destruction of at least nineteen buildings, all of which represented an eight-fold increase over 1968-69), government buildings (at least 232 bombings and attempts from January 1969 to June 1970, chiefly at Selective Service offices, induction centers, and federal office buildings), and corporate offices (now under fire for the first time, chiefly those clearly connected with American imperialism, such as the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Motors, IBM, Mobil, Standard Oil, and the United Fruit Company).
It seems likely that even this figure may represent only a sixth of the actual number. It is based upon police reports and newspaper accounts as compiled by the Senate Investigations Subcommittee (Part 25, July and August 1970) and by the now-defunct Scanion’s magazine (January 1971)—but they pinpoint only some 862 incidents of bombing and attempted bombing in the period from January 1969 to April 15, 1970, whereas a more extensive survey by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of the U.S. Treasury (Part 24, July 1970) shows at least 5,000 bombings and attempts during this period. This latter survey established that there were no fewer than 40,934 bombings, attempts, and threats (by admittedly "conservative" estimate) during these fifteen and a half months, and of the 36 percent it was able to attribute, something like 8,255 incidents were related to "campus disturbances." By extrapolation, we can figure that of the other 64 percent at least 13,000 incidents could be attributed to student activity, for a total of 21,000 incidents, or approximately 50 every day; of those, also by extrapolation, one can estimate some 2,800 were actual bombings, or approximately 6 a day for the entire period.
But the violence wasn't all bombings and burnings. On the campuses this year there were more than 9,408 protest incidents, according to the American Council on Education, another increase over the year before, and they involved police and arrests on no fewer than 731 occasions, with damage to property at 410 demonstrations, and physical violence in 230 instances—sharp evidence that the ante of student protest was being upped. Major outbreaks of violence occurred in November in Washington, when 5,000 people charged the Justice Department and had to be dispelled by massive doses of CN gas (this was the demonstration which Attorney General Mitchell and Weatherleader Bill Ayers both agreed, in totally separate statements with totally different meanings, "looked like the Russian Revolution"); at Buffalo in March when police clashed with students and twelve students were shot and fifty-seven others injured; at Santa Barbara in February, when students kept up a four-day rampage against the university, the National Guard, local police, and the Bank of America, more than 150 were arrested, two people were shot, and one student was killed; at Berkeley in April, when 4,000 people stormed the ROTC building, went up against the police, and kept up an hours-long assault with tear gas, bottles, rocks; at Harvard in April, when several thousand people took over Harvard Square, fought police, burned three police cars, trashed banks and local merchants; at Kansas in April, where students and street people caused $2 million worth of damage during several nights of trashing and demonstrations, forcing the calling out of the National Guard; and finally the massive confrontation of May.3?
Off the campuses, there were other forms of political violence. Attacks on police increased dramatically in 1969, with eighty-six policemen killed (up from the average of fifty-three a year heretofore) and a record of 33,604 assaults on cops (up from 16,793 in 1963), including sniper fire and bombings. Threats against public officials rose dramatically and in the course of fiscal year 1968-69 337 were arrested (and 269 convicted) for attempts or threats against government officials. And for the first time in recent American history, actual guerrilla groups were established, operating in secrecy and for the most part underground, each dedicated to the revolution and each committed to using violent means. There is no way to gauge the number of these groups operating in 1970, but of those whose existence is known there were, in addition to the Weathermen themselves, the New Year's Gang, the Quartermoon Tribe (Seattle), the Proud Eagle Tribe (Boston), the Smiling Fox Tribe (New York City), one unnamed group around Columbia University, the John Brown Revolutionary League (Houston), the Motherfuckers (now living in New Mexico), and various (generally unofficial) branches of the White Panthers and the Black Panthers; in addition, one nationally organized group of revolutionaries is known to have operated in the fall of 1969, led by blacks but with white members, and a Newsweek reporter in the fall of 1970 profiled a young white guerrilla warrior in California who estimated from his experience that there were some twenty groups actively training for revolution in various parts of the country.
It is important to realize the full extent of the political violence of these years—especially so since the media tended to play up only the most spectacular instances, to treat them as isolated and essentially apolitical gestures, and to miss entirely the enormity of what was happening across the country. It is true that the bombings and burnings and violent demonstrations ultimately did not wreak serious damage upon the state, in spite of the various estimates which indicate that perhaps as much as $100 million was lost in the calendar years 1969 and 1970 in outright damages, time lost through building evacuations, and added expenses for police and National Guardsmen. It is also true that they did not create any significant terror or mass disaffiliation from the established system, in part because violence is already so endemic in American society ("The United States is the clear leader among modern stable democratic nations," the President's Violence Commission declared in 1969, "in the rates of homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and it is at least among the highest in the incidence of group-violence and assassination") and in part because Americans generally cannot conceive of violence as a political weapon and tend to dismiss actions outside the normal scope of present politics as so unnecessary and inexplicable as to seem almost lunatic. Nonetheless, the scope of this violence was quite extraordinary. It took place on a larger scale—in terms of the number of incidents, their geographical spread, and the damage caused—than anything seen before in this century.
It was initiated by a sizable segment of the population—perhaps numbering close to a million, judging by those who counted themselves revolutionaries and those known to be involved in such acts of public violence as rioting, trashing, assaults upon buildings, and confrontations with the policeand it was supported by maybe as much as a fifth of the population, or an additional 40 million people—judging by surveys of those who approve of violent means or justify it in certain circumstances. And, above all, the violence was directed, in a consciously revolutionary process, against the state itself, not against individuals, racial or ethnic groups, local businesses, or private institutions, as had been the pattern of American violence heretofore; for the first time since the Civil War, and over far more of the country, violence struck against the institutions of American government and those corporations and universities seen as complicit with those institutions, with an explicit aim of destroying or at least shaking that system. Political violence of the end of the decade, in other words, may not have brought about a revolution—but it was the closest thing to it that an ongoing society could imagine. Or perhaps endure.”
The culmination of campus violence occurred in May, without doubt one of the most explosive periods in the nation's history and easily the most cataclysmic period in the history of higher education since the founding of the Republic.
On April 30, Richard Nixon announced that American troops, in contravention of international law and the President's own stated policy, were in the process of invading Cambodia, and within the hour demonstrations began to be mounted on college campuses.
Three days later a call for a national student strike was issued from a mass gathering at Yale, and in the next two days students at sixty institutions declared themselves on strike, with demonstrations, sometimes violent, on more than three dozen campuses. That was remarkable enough, especially for a weekend, but what happened the following day proved the real trigger.
On May 4, at twenty-five minutes after noon, twenty-eight members of a National Guard contingent at Kent State University, armed with rifles, pistols, and a shotgun, without provocation or warning, fired sixty-one shots at random into a group of perhaps two hundred unarmed and defenseless students, part of a crowd protesting the war, ROTC, and the authoritarianism of the university, killing four instantly, the nearest of whom was a football field away, and wounding nine others, one of whom was paralyzed for life from the waist down. It took only thirteen seconds, but that stark display of governmental repression sent shock waves reverberating through the country for days, and weeks, and months to come. Clark Kerr, who knew a thing or two about campus protest, seemed shaken to his boots:
The climax of dissent, disruption, and tragedy in all American history to date occurred in May 1970. That month saw the involvement of students and institutions in protests in greater number than ever before in history. The variety of protest activities—both violent and nonviolent—seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent.
The impact is only barely suggested by the statistics, but they are impressive enough. In the next four days, from May 5 to May 8, there were major campus demonstrations at the rate of more than a hundred a day, students at a total of at least 350 institutions went out on strike and 536 schools were shut down completely for some period of time, 51 of them for the entire year. More than half the colleges and universities in the country (1,350) were ultimately touched by protest demonstrations, involving nearly 60 percent of the student population—some 4,350,000 people—in every kind of institution and in every state of the Union. Violent demonstrations occurred on at least 73 campuses (that was only 4 percent of all institutions but included roughly a third of the country's largest and most prestigious schools), and at 26 schools the demonstrations were serious, prolonged, and marked by brutal clashes between students and police, with tear gas, broken windows, fires, clubbings, injuries, and multiple arrests;*altogether, more than 1,800 people were arrested between May 1 and May 15. The nation witnessed the spectacle of the government forced to occupy its own campuses with military troops, bayonets at the ready and live ammunition in the breeches, to control the insurrection of its youth; the governors of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and South Carolina declared all campuses in a state of emergency, and the National Guard was activated twenty-four times at 21 universities in sixteen states, the first time such a massive response had ever been used in a nonracial crisis. Capping all this, there were this month no fewer than 169 incidents of bombings and arson, 95 of them associated with college campuses and another 36 at government and corporate buildings, the most for any single month in all the time government records have been kept; in the first week of May, 30 ROTC buildings on college campuses were burned or bombed, at the rate of more than four every single day. And at the end of that first week, 100,000 people went to Washington for a demonstration that apparently was so frustrating in its avowed nonviolence that many participants took to the streets after nightfall, breaking windows, blocking traffic, overturning trash cans, and challenging the police in an outburst which ended with 413 people arrested and which one Weatherman called worse than the Chicago National Action. The next day, a Sunday, George Winne, a student at San Diego State College, burned himself to death in protest against his nation and its war.
Protests took place at institutions of every type, secular and religious, large and small, state and private, coeducational and single-sexed, old and new. Eighty-nine percent of the very selective institutions were involved, 91 percent of the state universities, 96 percent of the top fifty most prestigious and renowned universities, and 97 percent of the private universities; but there were also demonstrations with a "significant impact" reported at 55 percent of the Catholic institutions, 52 percent of the Protestant-run schools, and 44 percent of the two-year colleges, all generally strict and conservative schools which had never before figured in student protest in any noticeable way. Full details can be found in a study by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, "May 1970: The Campus Aftermath of Cambodia and Kent State."
Alabama, American, California (Berkeley, Los Angeles), Denver, Eastern Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Jackson State, Kent State, Kentucky, Maryland (College Park), New Mexico, New York (Buffalo), Northwestern, Ohio, Ohio State, South Carolina, Southern Illinois, Stanford, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Yale.
ROTC buildings were damaged or destroyed that month at Brooklyn Polytechnic, Buffalo, California (Berkeley, Davis), Case Western Reserve, City College of New York, Colorado College, DePauw, Hobart, Idaho, Indiana, John Carroll, Kent, Kentucky, Loyola (Chicago), Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio University, Oregon State, Princeton, Rutgers, St. Norbert, San Francisco State, Seton Hall, Southern Illinois, Virginia, Washington University, Wisconsin, and Yale. One or more campus buildings, usually administration offices or those associated with military research, were damaged or destroyed at Alabama, Bowling Green, Bradley, California (Berkeley), California State (Fresno, Fullerton, Los Angeles City, Long Beach, San Francisco, San Jose), Cleveland State, Colorado State, Columbia, Fisk, Fordham, Illinois Wesleyan, Iowa, Livingston, Long Island, Marietta, Marquette, Miami (Ohio), Middlebury, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York State (New Paltz, Stony Brook), New York University, Northwestern, Northern Michigan, Ohio University, Penn State, Princeton, Richmond, Rockefeller, Rosary, Scranton, Southern Illinois, Southwest Missouri State, Valparaiso, Virginia Union, University of Washington, Western Illinois, and Wisconsin.
One other tragic event marked these violent days. On May 14, white police and state patrolmen in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of black students from Jackson State College, killing two and injuring twelve. Another wanton murder by officials of the state, but this time, no doubt because the students were black, the country was most subdued in its reaction: The New York Times, which had given a four-column headline and fifty-one inches of copy to the Kent State killings, gave this story a one-column headline and six inches; the students, who had been outraged at Kent State, mounted protests this time at only some fifty-three campuses, most of them black.
The events of May had a profound effect upon the country, condensing and climaxing as they did the entire decade of student rebellion, providing for a brief time a clear look at the significant new position in society occupied by the American studentry. The Nixon Administration, which had been responsible for it all, reacted with cruelty at first (Nixon greeted the Kent State deaths with the remark that "when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy,"*’ as if it were the students there and not the bastions of law-and-order who had turned to real violence); but the extent of the outbursts, accompanied by resignations and protest statements at all levels of the government, finally made the Administration aware of the crisis in the land and it was forced to commit itself to a revision of policy (early withdrawal of troops from Cambodia), to a humbling public apology for its inflated rhetoric, and to the appointment of two high-level investigations of student attitudes (one by Vanderbilt President Alexander Heard and the other by a Presidential Commission headed by former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton). The media reacted first with bewilderment, victims of their own propaganda about the death of student protests, and then with blindness, acting out their role as social moderators: they generally overlooked the actual violence on the campuses—tossing off in a few paragraphs clashes that in other years would have rated front-page treatments, playing down the trashing of the capital, totally ignoring the incredible wave of bombings—to concentrate on Washington and the words out of official mouths, leaving the May insurrection as one of the great unreported stories of the decade. The public reacted, with encouragement from press and politicians, with a genuine sense of fear and alarm, made more ominous by its genuine lack of comprehension—resulting, for example, in a wanton and brutal attack by New York construction workers upon students marching peacefully at City Hall; in a Gallup poll for May which showed that campus unrest was regarded as the nation's leading problem (ahead of the war, racism, drugs, and crime); and in an outburst of antistudent, antiyouth sentiment manifested throughout the land but most dramatically demonstrated in Kent, Ohio, where every poll and paper showed that the overwhelming opinion, even among those with children in the May 4 demonstration, was that the Guardsmen should have shot every single student on the campus that day:°8
When I reported home [one Kent State student has recounted] my mother said, "It would have been a good thing if all those students had been shot." I cried, "Hey, Mom! That's me you're talking about," and she said, "It would have been better for the country if you had all been mowed down."
The reaction of the students themselves was perhaps most interesting of all. Without the lead or participation of a strong radical student group such as SDS, without the sense of politics such a group might have transmitted, and consequently without a vision of how to effect real change at this unique point, most campuses turned toward the familiar path of electoral politics: a third of them engaged in letter-writing campaigns for dovish Congressmen and bell-ringing projects for antiwar petitions, a fifth sent representatives to pressure Congressmen in Washington, and hundreds mobilized people for mass marches in front of state and national legislatures. In this the students were of course encouraged by the instruments of the Establishment—newspapers, university administrations and faculties, political groups, and ultimately by the U.S. Congress itself, which passed legislation lowering the voting age in federal elections from twenty-one to eighteen (this eventually became the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution)—and a dozen different electoral student groups were established with liberal funds (among them the Movement for a New Congress, Project Pursestrings, Campaign '70 Clearinghouse, Universities National Antiwar Fund). But either instinctively or analytically most students realized that within-the-system politics was no real answer to the evils that had prompted their protests, and it didn't take long for the electoral movement to dwindle: by the summer, only 12 percent of the colleges and universities could report any electoral activity among even 5 percent of their students, and by the fall less than 1 percent of the institutions gave students time off for electoral work (the so-called "Princeton Plan"). On November 3 the effect of the student vote was minimal.
But in spite of the comparative ease with which the protests were contained and channeled, in spite of the fact that no long-lasting effects emerged, there is no question that they were an expression of a profound dislocation in the American system, one made manifest early in the sixties and continuing into the seventies. Not many people chose to listen to the words of the Presidential Commission which examined those events in detail, but its conclusions were wise and went far beyond the immediate circumstances:
The crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War. The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric, and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying opposing camps. Campus unrest reflects and increases a more profound crisis in the nation as a whole ... . If this trend continues, if this crisis of understanding endures, the very survival of the nation will be threatened. A nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos. A nation that has lost the allegiance of part of its youth is a nation that has lost part of its future.
Four dead at Kent State, two at Jackson State: that brought the death toll of college students murdered at the hands of the nation's machinery of repression in the decade of the sixties to at least fourteen: Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in June 1964, Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith at Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February 1968, Willie Ernest Grimes at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in May 1969, James Rector in Berkeley in May 1969, Kevin Moran in Santa Barbara in April 1970, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder in Kent, Ohio, in May 1970, and Phillip Gibbs and James Earl Green in Jackson, Mississippi, in May 1970. The lesson was unmistakable, and not lost upon most students: the government would go to any lengths, including killing, to repress the forces working for significant change in America, and from now on death had to be considered part of the stakes of student protest.
The corollary was equally frightening: the government would not take action against uniformed murder, no matter what the evidence and justification. The Kent State aftermath, watched bitterly by students across the land, attested eloquently to that. Despite evidence that the National Guardsmen had committed unprovoked and possibly premeditated murder, despite the finding of the Presidential Commission that the Guardsmen's acts were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable," despite evidence that the Guardsmen subsequently conspired to lie to the police and FBI agents investigating the case, and despite pleas from officials of Kent State, a petition from 10,380 Kent State students, a formal appeal from twenty U.S. Congressmen, and editorial calls in many of the nation's newspapers, the federal government adamantly refused to authorize an investigation or convene a federal grand jury. Instead, the Portage County grand jury, made up of fifteen Kent area citizens, was allowed to be the sole official voice, and it completely exonerated the National Guard, put the chief blame for the deaths upon the administration of the university, and vociferously castigated the faculty, the Yippies, youth culture, and students in general. Ultimately it indicted neither the Guardsmen who fired into the crowd nor the state officials who ordered them to the scene, but rather twenty-four students and exstudents and one faculty member—"They blamed us," one student said, "for getting in the way of the bullets."*° The charges proved to be so flimsy that only three students were found guilty of minor misdemeanors, one was acquitted, and the cases against the other twenty-one were dismissed for lack of evidence, but not until nineteen months and thousands of dollars later.
But of course by May 1970 there was no longer any doubt that the government intended to use any weapon at its disposal to contain student dissent. The Administration again set the tone. Nixon himself gave an unusual betrayal of his mind-set in an impromptu speech delivered just after ordering the Cambodian invasion in which he used a pejorative said to be the most Calvinistically emphatic in his entire vocabulary:
You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue [the war].
Against this melody, the drone of Agnew rhetoric: "impudent snobs," "ideological eunuchs," "vultures," "arrogant, reckless, inexperienced elements," "political hustlers," and on and on, until the final warning, concentration camps:
Three more were killed by police in July: in Lawrence, Kansas, Rick Dowdell and Harry Rice, freshmen at the University of Kansas, and in Milwaukee, Randy Anderson, of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. One black man, Carl Hampton, was also killed by police in Houston in July, in a raid that left ex-SDSer Bartee Haile, then working with the Peoples Party II, seriously wounded.
We cannot afford to be divided or deceived by the decadent thinking of a few young people. We can, however, afford to separate them from our societywith no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.
Given these attitudes it was probably natural, but somewhat surprising, that the Administration with thinly disguised public scorn rejected both of its own Heard and Scranton reports when they failed to excoriate the students and absolve the government.
Nixon followed this in the fall by writing an out-of-the-blue letter to nine hundred college presidents, telling them to restore "order and discipline" on the campuses or suffer the consequences (and enclosing an article reflecting his own views by one of the most virulent critics of the left, the LID doyen, Sidney Hook), and then proceeded to base the entire Republican campaign for that fall on whipping up public sentiment against youth and students.
The Administration simultaneously increased the federal machinery of repression, expanding by 300 percent its funds for local law enforcement (including a national computerized information network), enlarging its surveillance operations to the point where The New York Times could report of federal files "on hundreds and thousands of law-abiding yet suspect Americans," adding $20 million in 1970 for riot equipment and training for the National Guard, and prosecuting more than four thousand draft-resistance cases. Above all, it made the Department of Justice into the center of the most elaborate and extensive operation against political dissidence ever seen in this country.
The FBI continued to be the department's most active branch. Despite Hoover's claim on November 19, 1970, that "we have no special agents assigned to college campuses and have had none,"** documents liberated from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, four months later indicate that every single college in the country was apparently assigned an agent and most of them had elaborate informer systems as well. Even as tiny a bureau as the Media one engaged in full-time surveillance and information-gathering on every campus in its area, sixty-eight in all, ranging from Penn State with its thirty-three thousand students down to places like the Moravian Theological Seminary with thirty-five students and the Evangelical Congregational School of Theology with forty-one, and it used as its regular campus informers such people as the vice-president, secretary to the registrar, and chief switchboard operator at Swarthmore, a monk at Villanova Monastery, campus police at Rutgers, the recorder at Bryn Mawr, and the chancellor at Maryland State College. As if that was not enough, the FBI added twelve hundred new agents in 1970, mostly for campus work, established a "New Left desk" (plus an internal information bulletin called, without irony, "New Left Notes"), and its agents were directed to step up campus operations:
There was a pretty general consensus [reported an internal FBI communiqué] that more interviews with these subjects and hangers-on are in order for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an FBI Agent behind every mailbox. In addition, some will be overcome by the overwhelming personalities of the contacting agent and volunteer to tell allperhaps on a continuing basis. The Director [Hoover] has okayed PSI's [Potential Security Informants—i.e., campus informers] and SI's [Security Informants] age 18 to 21. We have been blocked off from this critical age group in the past. Let us take advantage of this opportunity.
And lest it be thought that these youthful informers and aging switchboard operators were all harmless molehills, it should be noted that the FBI reported that in fiscal year 1970-71 FBI informers supplied information which led to the arrests of at least 14,565 people.
At the same time the Department of Justice built up its Internal Security Division, a McCarthy-era leftover, into a full-scale national "Red Squad" for the investigation and prosecution of political dissidents anywhere in the country, and it acknowledged in the press that it was giving "top priority" to the new system. The division operated through two main agencies, separate but complementary. The Interdivisional Intelligence Unit was set up as the chief headquarters of all intelligence-gathering in Washington, combining for the first time the manifold files of the FBI, the Army, the Secret Service, the Narcotics Bureau, and other federal and local agencies. The Special Litigation Section was a team of eleven lawyers dispatched around the country to supervise and give information in cases involving the left and to operate federal grand juries for what were admitted frankly to be "investigative purposes" rather than judicial ones. This section instigated more than fortyfive grand jury cases, including inquiries into SDS and the Weathermen in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Harrisburg, Kansas City (Missouri), Los Angeles, Manhattan, Seattle, Tucson, and Vermont;’ it oversaw the operation of the conspiracy weapon again against the year-old White Panther Party (including ex-Jesse James Gang member, Skip Taub) in Detroit in October 1969, seven activists in St. Louis in the summer of 1970, and eight members of the Seattle Liberation Front (including four ex-Weathermen—Joe Kelly, Roger Lippman, Michael Justesen, Susan Stern—and three former Cornell SDSers—Jeffrey Dowd, Chip Marshall, Michael Abeles) in Seattle in May 1970.
Next to this, whatever the legislative branch of government could mount would have to be a poor second, but it did not seem to be reticent in trying. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee subpoenaed the bank records and files of the SDS National Office, the New York Regional Office, Liberation News Service, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Cambridge Iron and Steel; the Senate Investigations Committee held hearings in the summer of 1970 to show that the Weathermen and the Black Panthers were primarily responsible for the spate of bombings in the nation; and the House Internal Security Committee continued its investigation of SDS, its chairman declaring in December 1969, "I doubt if there has been any organization which has been the subject of a more comprehensive and continuing review by any committee than has been SDS." As to actual lawmaking, the Congress showed its general commitment to repression by passing an Omnibus Crime Bill in 1969 which set up an intelligence system to coordinate for the first time local police reports from around the entire country, an Omnibus Crime Bill of 1970 which gave full largess to the FBI in any investigation of campus violence, and a District of Columbia Crime Bill in 1970 which provided for such heretofore forbidden measures as preventive detention and "no-knock" police raids on private homes. By the middle of 1970 there were no fewer than ten separate federal acts on the books aimed at punishing college protesters, chiefly by denying them federal money and grants, a penalty which was suffered by at least a thousand students in 1969 and 1970.
These inquiries were considerably aided by a 1970 "use immunity" law passed by Congress which forced all witnesses either to answer grand jury questions about anything in their lives or be sent to jail for terms of up to eighteen months. Typical of the questions put to witnesses—not even defendants, mind you, or suspects—is this one by an Internal Security Division lawyer before the Tucson grand jury: "I want you to describe for the grand jury every occasion during the year 1970, when you have been in contact with, attended meetings which were conducted by, or been any place when any individual spoke whom you knew to be associated with or affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, the Weatherman, the Communist Party or any other organization advocating revolutionary overthrow of the United States, describing for the grand jury when these incidents occurred, where they occurred, who was present and what was said by all persons there and what you did at the time that you were in these meetings, groups, associations or conversations." (The Nation, January 3, 1972.) Five witnesses who refused to answer such questions in Tucson were jailed.
Given ample warning by the government, colleges and universities continued to expand their own operations. Undercover agents were discovered or acknowledged in 1969-70 on at least sixteen campuses—Berkeley, Colorado College, Harvard, Kansas, Kent State, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, NYU, North Carolina, Northwestern, Ohio State, Texas, University of Washington, Wisconsin, and Yale—and that must have been only a small percentage, for, as The New York Times finally reported in the spring of 1971, "Undercover activity ... has now become almost a permanent institution on the American college scene." Many state universities, including those in California, Iowa, Maryland, and Wisconsin, were endowed with special provisions giving their president greatly enlarged powers of campus repression; schools in at least thirty-two states by June 1970 were subject to state laws demanding that they punish student and faculty protesters. Most universities also increased (and often armed) their campus police forces during this period, and adopted such other varied forms of control as identification cards, telephone taps (at perhaps a quarter of the campuses, according to one study), videotaping of demonstrations, wood-pellet bullets for riot control, closed-circuit television systems, and high-intensity spotlights along campus walks.
Repression is an ugly concept, conjuring up images of police states and totalitarian governments that Americans prefer not to think about, but a growing chorus of individuals and organizations (for example, the ACLU, Ramsey Clark's Committee for Public Justice, New York Mayor John Lindsay, even Senator Margaret Chase Smith) were warning now that repression was indeed on the way. But the thousands of young leftists harassed, arrested, beaten, shot, and jailed by this time needed no further convincing that repression, at least in its initial stages, existed in the United States by the middle of 1970. Even if the organizations of the left had been stable and powerful, even if they had been prepared for the intensity of the government's reaction, even if they had been psychologically set for a government willing to go to war against its own people, even then they would have had a difficult time holding together, advancing the Movement, pushing out new ideas, broadening the left. But they were not, and the repression in these years took a doubly heavy toll.
Random examples: Columbia increased its force in 1970 from eighty to one hundred, Cornell from twenty-four to thirty-six, George Washington from twenty-six to fifty, Ohio State from thirty to sixty. Northwestern from three to twenty-five. Southern Illinois from twenty to seventy-five, and UCLA from nine to fifty-two.
Underground in America. During the first week of February 1970 the Weathermen began dropping out of sight, cutting themselves off totally, moving into apartments in out-of-theway corners of large cities or cabins in the remote countryside. All earlier contacts, with family or Movement people, were severed. The last job, that of closing down the National Office, was left to Vickic Gabriner, a Cornell graduate and now a New York Weatherwoman.
She phoned a friend, Pat Quinn, at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison—long known as having one of the best collections of left and labor history material in the country, and the place where many of the earlier files of the NO had been stored—and she offered to turn over the complete contents of the NO if the society would come across with a quick $300. Quinn somehow finagled the money out of the Historical Society treasury, took a Society panel truck, and the next day appeared at the NO, handed over the money, and confronted an office that he says looked like "a garbage pit": piles of rubbish, papers scattered around, dirty clothes, sleeping bags, half-eaten food in various stages of decay, used rubbers, stacks of old newspapers, broken furniture, dust and dirt everywhere.
Working quickly, since it was assumed that the Chicago Police had a stakeout on the office and would soon get around to wondering what was afoot, Quinn set to work to sweep up everything in sight; ultimately he loaded thirty-four large cartons with files, letters, an unwrapped Frisbee, Cuban posters, minutes of old NCs, miniature flags, long-unused chapter folders, tapes, magazines, anything at all inanimate, and packed them into the Society's truck waiting below. As soon as he was done and had gotten behind the wheel, two plain-clothes detectives suddenly appeared, threatened Quinn with arrest, and demanded that he turn over the contents of the truck. Quinn refused, arguing that the contents legally belonged to the sovereign state of Wisconsin whose servant he was, and he threatened to call the governor of the state if he was not released immediately. After much checking and scurrying, and lots of staring at the lettering on the side of the truck to determine if it was genuine, the police decided they were in the presence of an official, and nominally superior, branch of government and they let the truck and contents depart unmolested. So the last of SDS disappeared with the Weathermen.
Underground in America.
On February 21, the Wilkerson townhouse cell set off three firebombs at the home of Judge John Murtagti, then presiding over the case of the New York "Panther Twenty-one." On March 6, the townhouse exploded, and six days later three New York City commercial buildings were bombed, presumably though not certainly by another Weatherman cell. On March 30, Chicago police raided an apartment on Kenmore Avenue and claimed to have uncovered a "bomb factory," stocked with dynamite and "subversive literature," for which they sought Dohrn and Jacobs, who are known to have stayed there, and Boudin and Wilkerson, who had not. And on May 21, just after the furor over Cambodia and Kent State was beginning to die down. Weatherman issued its first underground communiqué, promising an attack on "a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice" within the next two weeks. Nineteen days later a devastating blast went off at the headquarters of the New York City police department, heavily damaging the second story, shattering windows throughout the building, causing seven minor injuries to policemen: this was Weatherman's first large and publicly acknowledged bombing.
Underground in America.
Two separate grand juries, one in Chicago and one in Detroit, went after the Weathermen in their new habitat. On April 2, after a six-month investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office, a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted twelve of the top Weatherleaders for crossing state lines with the intention of inciting and participating in a riot—that was Title 18 of the United States Code, the same conspiracy law used against the Chicago Eight and the Seattle Seven—and for actually having committed one or more of forty different acts, including making inflammatory speeches and striking policemen; a total of fifteen counts was brought against the defendants, any one of which carried a penalty of five years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Three months later, on July 23, a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted thirteen Weathermen on additional conspiracy charges, this time stemming from the Flint National Council meeting, at which it was alleged that plots were laid to blow up police stations, corporate offices, and campus buildings in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Berkeley; this time, however, the only overt act it was able to lay to the Weathermen, and none too convincingly at that, was an aborted bombing attempt at a police association building in Detroit on March 6." In all, nineteen top Weatherpeople were indicted as defendants in three months—and though they were the objects of an extensive nation-wide search by FBI and local police, though Dohrn even made it on to the FBI's "most wanted list," though FBI and Red Squad agents were obliged to undergo regular refresher courses on the Weathermen's mug shots for at least the next six months, only three arrests were ever made (by the middle of 1972): Linda Evans and Dianne Donghi were fingered by Grathwohl in New York on April 15, causing him to blow his cover, and Judy Clark was spotted by an FBI agent at a movie theater in New York in December. The rest, with the exception of Robbins, lived and continued to carry on their revolution underground.
Underground in America.
Dohrn issued another Weather-report in December 1970:
A growing illegal organization of young women and men can live and fight and love inside Babylon [the name for the United States then being used by the Black Panthers, borrowed from the old Baptist pulpit-thumpers as a symbol of high decadence and imperial evil]. The FBI can't catch us; we've pierced their bullet-proof shield ... .
Because we are fugitives, we could not go near the Movement. That proved to be a blessing because we've been everywhere else. We meet as many people as we can with our new identities; we've watched the TV news of our bombings with neighbors and friends who don't know that we're Weatherpeople. We're often afraid but we take our fear for granted now, not trying to act tough. What we once thought would have to be some zombietype discipline has turned out to be a yoga of alertness, a heightened awareness of activities and vibrations around us—almost a new set of eyes and ears ....
We are in many different regions of the country and are building different kinds of leaders and organizations. It's not coming together into one organization, or paper structure of factions or coalitions. It's a New Nation that will grow out of the struggles of the next year.*® Underground in America: ten years after its first conference, after its first impact on the nation's campuses, after its first faint stirrings on the nation's left, SDS had come to this.
Those indicted were national officers Mark Rudd, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones, and Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark, Bernardine Dohrn, Linda Evans, John Jacobs, Howie Machtinger, Terry Robbins (his body was still officially unidentified), Mike Spiegel, and Larry Weiss. Indicted as co-conspirators but not defendants were Corky Benedict, John Buttney, David Chase, Peter Clapp, Karen Daenzer, Dianne Donghi, Howie Emmer, Courtney Esposito, Brian Flanagan, Lynn Garvin, Ted Gold, Ann Hathaway, Lenore Kalom, Samuel Karp, Mark Laventer, Karen Latimer, Jonathan Lerner, Chip Marshall, Celeste McCullogh, Brian McQuerry, Jeff Melish, Jim Mellen, David Millstone, Diana Oughton, John Pilkington, Roberta Smith, Susan Stern, and Cathy Wilkerson. This seems to be a fairly good estimate of the top leadership of Weatherman.
Those initially indicted included five defendants on the Chicago list—Rudd, Ayers, Boudin, Dohrn, and Evans—plus Bo Burlingham, Dianne Donghi, Ronald Fliegelman, Larry Grathwohl (in fact an FBI informer), Naomi Jaffe, Russ Neufeld, Jane Spielman, and Cathy Wilkerson. A subsequent Detroit indictment (December 7, 1972) charged all of the above except Grathwohl and Spielman, plus John Fuerst, Leonard Handelsman (a Weatherman in Cleveland), Mark Real (a Kent State Weatherman), and Roberta Smith (a California activist); unindicted co-conspirators were Karen Ashley, Kirk and Paul Augustin, Clapp, David and Judith Cohen Flatley, David Gilbert, Gold, Linda Josefowicz, Michael Justesen, Laventer, Mark Lend, Machtinger, Peter Neufeld, Oughton, Wendy Panken, Robbins, Robert Roth, Deborah Schneller, Pat Small, Spiegel, Marsha Steinberg, Robert Swarthout, and Joanna Zilsel. This indictment charged Weathermen with specific acts of constructing or transporting bombs in Cleveland, San Francisco, Tucson, and St. Louis, and with a fire-bomb attack on the home of a Cleveland policeman on March 2, 1970.