Summer 1969

Wednesday, June 18, 1969, was a gray, dank day in Chicago, perhaps nowhere grayer and danker than on South Wabash Avenue where some two thousand people were milling around in front of the Chicago Coliseum, a huge complex of ugly barn-like buildings which SDS had chosen as the site of its ninth annual convention. (The choice had been more or less forced: more than fifty colleges and universities, with an eye on Washington, had refused SDS permission to have the convention on their campuses. Some New England SDSers had found a college or two in that area that would agree to host the convention, but the National Office hardly wanted to hold deliberations in PL's home territory, so the Chicago site was selected instead, even though that meant postponing the convention a week and paying $440-a-day rental fees on the hall.) Some of those forgathered there were reporters from the major papers and wire services, trying to buttonhole any likely looking youth for a comment on what was going to happen (Abbie Hoffman told them grandly, "We have come to praise SDS, not to bury it’), more frustrated than usual because SDS wasn't letting them in the doors. There were also policemen of every type and jurisdiction, FBI agents with high-powered cameras in the third-floor windows of a vacant school across the street, out-of-town police agents in long hair and beards, regular Chicago cops in their baby-blues (the Coliseum was just a few blocks from the central police station), and Chicago Red Squad agents (whose ranks had been swollen to one thousand for this affair) in obviously unmarked cars, wearing obviously plain-clothes disguises, pretending obviously to be newspaper reporters as they took pictures of everyone who filed along the sidewalk ("This is America," retorted a police official when SDSers complained about the scrutiny; "people can take pictures without fear of harassment"’). And there were the SDSers, perhaps twelve or fifteen hundred this first day, forced to mill about near the entrance of the Coliseum because of a wary registration desk which was set up to keep out suspect police agents and because of a "security cheek," the first one at a national SDS meeting, with NO trusties frisking all the delegates for knives, guns, cameras, tape recorders, and drugs, all of which were theoretically forbidden in the hall.?

Slowly the delegates filed into the mammoth Coliseum, whose cement-block walls and echoing acoustics gave it less the atmosphere of a political convention than a roller-derby site, which in fact it usually was. Around the edges of the hall the various sects and groupuscles had set up tables to display their ideological wares and entice unwary delegates: Progressive Labor, the International Socialists, the Young Socialist Alliance, Communists, Spartaeists, Wobblies, anarchists, Yippies, and assorted others. Adding to the paper barrage were pamphlets and mimeographed sheets from every tendency within SDS: the RYM people came with a series of exposes of PL's dangerous behavior, PL provided documents reaffirming its correctness, REP arrived with neat booklets setting out the RYM position and how it had worked in the past six months, the Bay Area Radical Union presented its "Red Papers” putting forth a pro-Maoist but anti-PL version of militant revolution, and New York anarchists offered Murray Bookchin's sprightly "Listen, Marxist" denouncing all of the other SDS tendencies. And to each of the delegates was handed the convention issue of New Left Notes, full of proposals and amendments, in which the pride of place went to an extraordinary article covering six solid pages with dense type (the longest article the paper had ever run), decorated with pictures of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and a recurring silhouette of armed guerrillas growing larger from first page to last. The title of the piece, cryptic for many, was "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

The "Weatherman" statement was the product of an unpublicized eleven-member committee (Karen Ashley, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis of the New York region, Bill Ayers, Jim Mellen, and Terry Robbins of the Michigan-Ohio area, and Bernardine Dohrn, Gerry Long, and Howie Machtinger from Chicago), which the national leadership had established as early as April to come up with some document to fight PL with at the convention, and it had been further refined at a meeting of two hundred RYM people (mostly from New York and the Midwest, with PLers uninvited) in Detroit in May. Most of the writing was done by the New York City contingent and within that the leading influence seems to have been John Jacobs ("JJ"), a man who had the advantages of having once been through the theoretical thicket of PL, having been a major actionist at Columbia in 1968, and having been a Movement veteran, tracing his first arrest back to 1966.4

The title was taken from Bob Dylan's 1965 "Subterranean Homesick Blues," where, along with "Look out kid" and "Keep a clean nose" and suchlike, it is used as a piece of underground advice to young Americans disaffected from the American system, with the usual Dylanesque overtones of antiauthoritarianism and youthful independence, both of special appeal to the SDSian soul. But in the SDS context it means something more, an implied repudiation of Progressive Labor and its from-on-high dicta to the troops: you already know, the suggestion is, what is happening in this country and what needs to be done to make a revolution, and you don't need Milt Rosen to spell it out for you. (The very choice of a counterculture quotation, the last thing in the world the PLers would have approved of, is of course another repudiation.) Whereupon the statement then goes on to elucidate in intricate detail just exactly which way the wind is blowing.”

"Weatherman" was written with two basic purposes in mind, and it is reasonably successful at fulfilling them. First, it tries to give a theoretical expression to the instincts that characterized those white youths who were moving toward a serious sense of revolution, the instincts born out of the whole decade of Movement activities and capped in the last year by the intoxicating dynamics of the action factions, the increasing identification with the black liberation movement, and the frustrations of powerlessness made evident in the spring's confrontations. Second, it tries to provide a shield of dogma that is impenetrable to all the ideological spears of Progressive Labor, and for this uses a peculiar mixture of categories borrowed from the Old Left, ideas about citywide organizations borrowed from the Bell-Dohrn-Halliwell paper, and the basic premises of the original RYM statement of December and the refined (Ayers-Mellen) RYM position of March. This duality operates throughout.

The statement begins with a sweeping declaration that "the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it," and argues that the job of white Americans is to do anything they can in support of these struggles; here the instinct stems from the identification with the NLF, the Cuban revolution, and Third World guerrillas in general and a feeling that these forces seriously endanger America's world system—put forward in the teeth of PL's aloof criticism of "adventuristic" guerrillas and the "sell-out" Vietnamese. It then goes on to give unstinting approval to all "black liberation struggles," maintaining that blacks are so important in the revolution that they "could do it alone" if necessary and therefore assigning whites the secondary job to "support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to"; this instinct was born out of the ten-year-old identification of the Movement with black struggles, intensified by the "Lexington spirit" of the spring before, and heightened further by the recent close association with the Black Panthers—here meant as a counter thrust to PL's subordination of blacks within the working class as a whole and to its specific denigration of the Panthers. It argues, like the RYM statements before it, that youth (especially working-class youth) have a special part to play in aiding black and international liberation struggles, both because they have less of a stake in the imperialist society and because they are hurt most directly (through schools, the army, and unemployment) by imperialist oppression; the instinct stems from the experience of the previous decade in which it was the young who were responsible for the movements of protest and resistance and for the new counterculturet his position repudiating the PL analysis that youth culture is bourgeois and only the adult industrial proletariat can lead the revolution. It goes on to deny any real revolutionary role at this time for either the liberal professionals or the white working class, because they are bought off by short- or long-term "vested interests," because they want to take advantage of their racial position ("white-skin privilege," as it came to be called), or because they don't understand how their true interests would be served by a revolution; this instinct comes from the years of frustration of trying to awaken American liberals (prototypically, their own parents) and the concrete perception that the hard-hats were hardly even concerned with social justice, much less revolution—and this was set against PL's total commitment to the revolutionary role of the factory workers. It maintains that the task for American youth is to escalate its protest at home, showing solidarity with the worldwide "liberation forces" by opening another front in the anti-imperialist war, up to and including "the need for armed struggle"; this is the instinct generated by the success of confrontations over the years and compounded by the realization from the spring that in a battle of power there is a kind of power that does come out of the barrel of a gun—and it was set against PL's "base-building" slowness and its limitation of most current battles to picket lines and factory agitation.

Finally, the statement declares that what is necessary in the creation of this supportive, white, young, military force is a "revolutionary party" based in cities and organized into collectives with "a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres" and a "centralized organization"; the instinct here stems from the apparent inadequacies of past Movement organizations, including SDS, from a desire to avoid the present debilitating factionalism, and from a sense that a broad, loose organization like SDS was too vulnerable to repression—and here, at last, there is no real disagreement with PL except in deciding which people are to lead that "revolutionary party."

"Weatherman," in short, is a peculiar mix of New Left attitudes clothed in Old Left arguments, the instincts of the sixties ground through a mill of the thirties, the liberating heritage of SDS dressed up in leaden boots from the past.

There is much to criticize in "Weatherman." There is only a passing reference to "the woman question," no attempt to set out a program either short or long range, a total misreading of the centrality of blacks in the economic structure, a thoroughly romantic image of the toughness and heroism of "working-class kids," an unfounded overconfidence in the imminent collapse of the American system, and an utter confusion as to who is the "vanguard" for white youths to follow (blacks? Vietnamese? street kids?). The language is heavy with the sodden phrases of the Old Left now back in fashion ("revolutionary struggles," "oppressed peoples of the world," "achievement of a classless world," "capitalist exploitation," "enslaved masses," "proletarian socialist revolution"). The arguments are mostly scored off other in-groups, revolving about small points of difference about whether revolution comes in two stages or one, whether blacks are really a colony or not, exactly who constitutes the "petit bourgeoisie," whether it is good to have a "united front," and so on—matters which were, even to the majority of SDSers, esoteric arguments of sectarian irrelevance. And the lines of reasoning are tangled and elusive, seeming to mean one thing here and another there, leading even such a patient analyst as Carl Oglesby to say in exasperation, "Any close reading of the RYM's Weatherman statement will drive you blind."

But all of that is almost unimportant next to the two major defects of the statementdefects which, given the importance attached to the document and the identification with it by most of the national leadership, would prove quite important in the months ahead. The first problem is that it is really inaccessible to most people walking the land, young or old, educated or not, almost a polar opposite from The Port Huron Statement of exactly seven years before in its ability to excite and win people; and therefore it immediately creates a sense of distance, exclusion, and elitism, sins which were to beset its adherents over the whole next year. For all its talk about "the most important task" being "the creation of mass revolutionary movement," it really represents the culmination of the separation of the SDS leadership from the broad SDS membership, from the student constituency in general, and from most of the American left. The second difficulty is that it reduces the role of white American revolutionaries to fighting other people's battles, finding their own liberation only by tagging along after blacks and Third World guerrillas, being observers of an American revolution which comes about not through general social transformation by the bulk of its own people but through military defeat at the hands of the colonized people of color, aided perhaps by a few working-class youths in the wings. Not only are students no longer an agency of change, they are not even an object of change; not only do white middle-class college-educated people have no battles of their own to fight, they have no legitimacy as a stratum or validity as a force. This is where the "best minds of the generation" had come to.

The convention proper did not begin until just after two o'clock, when Assistant National Secretary Tim McCarthy called the gathering to order by hitting a rock on a table set up on the stage at one end of the dingy hall, and Mike Klonsky, wearing a cowboy hat, moved through a maze of wires to a microphone at the rostrum. The first order of business was to ratify the NO’s decision to keep out representatives of the overground press unless they paid a $25 registration fee and agreed not to testify against SDS before Congressional committees (New York Times reporter Anthony Ripley had repeated details of his account of the 1968 convention in an appearance before the House Internal Security Committee only weeks before). But Ed Clark, a PLer from New Orleans who had been instrumental in the recent sabotage of SSOC, stood up and challenged Klonsky: there should be no members of the capitalist press in this hall, no matter what fee they pay—they distort and lie and we don't need them. Right there, at the start of the convention, PL threw down the gauntlet. There was some discussion, a vote was taken, and the PL position won handily, by perhaps three-to-two. Hearts among the RYM leaders must have dropped: PL and its WSA caucus, it suddenly seemed, had come in force and no doubt intended to make a bid for power.

Now in fact PL probably had no more than a third of the fifteen hundred delegates under its control. It had worked hard, as usual, to rally its forces, chartering buses from New York and Boston and hiring a plane for some one hundred fifty people from the West Coast—PL leaders having been convinced that this time there would be an all-out attempt to purge it from SDS and determined to fight that at all costs. But there is no indication that PL was planning to try to take over the organization, nor would it have made much sense for them: SDS as it was, after all, provided by far the largest source of PL recruits, infinitely more fruitful than the vaunted factory lines, and it was far larger and more successful than anything PL could hope to produce under its own egis. That first vote was taken by the RYM faction to mean that PL was out for blood, but it more accurately reflected two other facts: that a large number of the delegates, perhaps a third, were committed to neither PL nor RYM and would vote with whichever position seemed best; and that many regular SDSers, especially veterans, had decided not to attend the convention, having been alienated by the distance and rigidity of the national collective over the previous year or simply put off by the succession of bitter and frustrating national meetings in the recent past.

Nonetheless, the NO regarded the press vote as an indication of a serious threat to its power, and that set the tone for much of the remainder of the convention. Two more battles shaped up that very afternoon. First, Jeff Gordon, speaking for the PLers, protested that there weren't enough workshops on the NO’s proposed agenda, to which Klonsky replied that the NO had decided workshops would only be "hunting grounds" for PLers to operate on new and innocent SDSers. No one thought much of that argument, and the vote was overwhelmingly for expanding the number of workshops. Then there came a battle over whether the convention would hear a speech from Chris Milton, a young man who had spent time with the Red Guards in China and was close to the RYM-lining Bay Area Radical Union, whom PLers castigated as a "deviant" who had been denounced by Peking. While this was going on the hall was suddenly in an uproar: the Ohio-Michigan contingent of perhaps fifty Weatherman supporters leaped on their chairs, whipped out copies of Mao's little red book, and in a mocking parody of the PL style began to wave the books back and forth and chant, "Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-tung, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win," which rose in a reverberating roar through the cavernous hall until they all collapsed in laughter and self-applause at their little bit of anti-PL "guerrilla theater." PL, inevitably, took it with dead seriousness: this behavior, one PL spokesman took the microphone to complain, was "waving the red flag to oppose the red flag," a slogan which was immediately taken up by a PL contingent in the balcony and shouted back down to the Weathermen on the floor. (Even Abbie Hoffman, a master of guerrilla theater, was apparently confused by it all—"Through the conference," he later confessed, "I marveled at how little I understand what was being said"—so one wonders what must have been going on in the minds of those for whom this was their first national meeting.) At the end it was somewhat antielimactic when the delegates voted by a thin eight-vote margin to allow Milton to speak—a victory for the RYM forces, but not much of one, their first of the day, and gained only because most of the uncommitted delegates took the civil-libertarian "let's-hear-what-he-has-to-say" line.

The next day was devoted to workshops, for which the PLers showed themselves to be far better prepared than the RYM leaders, and to a general discussion of racism, at which both sides showed themselves to be implacable enemies—Jared Israel and Mike Klonsky ended up yelling at each other ("Klonsky's an authoritarian motherfucker," one NO supporter said during this debate, "but he's our authoritarian motherfucker"). RYM supporters met in caucus in the morning to decide how to go about holding off what they saw as the PL challenge, and there the first major disagreements with the new "Weatherman" line were aired, chiefly from a group of people around Mike Klonsky and Les Coleman, with allies in Noel Ignatin's Chicago Revolutionary League and Bob Avakian's Bay Area Radical Union; this group, which took a more traditional line than Weatherman, especially regarding the role of the working class and the dangers of "adventurism" by the youthful left, coalesced in the course of the convention to the point of issuing their own position paper from whose title, "Revolutionary Youth Movement II," they took the name RYM II. Their differences were submerged for the moment, however, in the shared desire to unite against PL.°

The first opportunity to humiliate PL seemed to offer itself at that Thursday's evening session, when a small band of black and brown allies of SDS were scheduled to speak. First came a member of the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization, then a representative of the Chicano Brown Berets, and slowly the tempo of the attacks on "those who say all nationalism is reactionary" began to increase, and the PLers began to grow restive. Then came Rufus ("Chaka") Walls, the minister of information of the Illinois Black Panther Party, a somewhat older man, with dark wrap-around glasses, flanked by arms-folded "bodyguards," and he lit into the PL "armchair Marxists" with all the macho rhetoric the Panthers had become famous for. He sneered at PL's claims of being a vanguard party and declared that the Panthers were the true vanguard because they had been out shedding blood and the white left hadn't even shot rubber bands yet. And then Walls began talking, quite unexpectedly, about women's liberation: we believe in women in the Movement, he said, we believe in the freedom of love and all that, we believe in "pussy power." Most of the fifteen hundred or so SDSers were stunned—enlightened or not, by the middle of 1969 you didn't go around saying things like that at Movement meetings. Cries of "Fight male chauvinism" were started all over the hall, picked up delightedly by the PL section on the left of the main floor. Walls paused: we've got some Puritans in the crowd, he went on, apparently misunderstanding the source of the audience's discomfort, and then added out of the blue, "Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane." That did it.

The chant swelled, from PLers who sensed an unexpected reversal of fortunes, but from most others as well: "Fight male chauvinism. FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM!" Walls, unable to continue, shrugged and walked off the podium. The NO leaders, bewildered, quickly conferred. Then Panther leader Jewel Cook took the microphone to try to pick up the pieces with an all-out attack on PL. They aren't leading any fights on the campus, he charged, like the Panthers are—you call up Chairman Mao and ask him who's the vanguard party in the U.S. The RYM people at last had a chance to cheer, but then Cook continued. But you got to know, he said, that I'm with my brother in this, I'm for pussy power myself—the "fight male chauvinism" chant began again—and the brother was only trying to say to you sisters that you have a strategic position in the revolution—the chants were even louder now because everyone knew what was coming, an old line of Stokely Cannichael's from the SNCC daysthe position for you sisters ... . is prone! "FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM, FIGHT MALE CHAUVINISM," the chant was deafening, resounding off the cement-block walls and filling the huge hall. "The house," reported the Guardian, "was in pandemonium."”

The RYM strategy lay shattered. The Panthers had humiliated not PL but their own supporters, and in doing so had neatly managed by a single stroke to turn to dross both of RYM's chief theoretical weapons: its alliance with the vanguard Panthers and its support for women's liberation. Klonsky rushed to the microphone to try to stem the rout, spoke feebly and without effect, and cries for a "rebuttal" from PL drowned him out. Jared Israel, with a clutch of PLers around him for support, rushed to the stage and took the microphone, pounding home the wisdom of PL's "principled" stand on women's liberation and black struggles. Someone proposed that there be a full-scale discussion of the Panthers' sexism in the light of what had just happened, but RYMer Naomi Jaffe effectively squelched the move with a declaration that "women's liberation would not be used as a political football." With that a desultory discussion of racism continued for a while—enlivened by a few PL-RYM shoving matches in the back of the hall—but everyone knew that talk was meaningless now.

There was little sleep for the SDS leadership that night. Small knots of people gathered all over the convention floor, in nearby houses where delegates were being put up, and in the NO itself, over on the west side of town, to which most of the RYM leadership had repaired to lick its wounds—and, just in case, to spirit away the New Left Notes subscription lists, whatever membership files existed, and the SDS treasury, such as it was. At each place the topic was the same: was a split with PL imminent, and did RYM have enough votes at the convention to force it?

On Friday there was still no settlement of that issue. RYM forces did win a vote at the first plenary session over whether some non-PL Harvard delegates should be seated in lieu of some absent WSAers, but again the swing apparently came from the uncommitted delegates operating not from fixed politics but from common sense—and Lord knows that commodity could hardly be counted upon to provide victory in an all-out fight. The national leadership decided to bide its time.

That evening the first resolution was presented, a PL proposal called "Less Talk, More Action—Fight Racism" built principally around the issues of an end to university expansion and alliances with campus minority-group workers. Both Weatherman and RYM II spokesmen nailed at it, accompanied by choruses of "racist" and "bullshit" from time to time, Klonsky continuing to ridicule PL's position on black nationalism, Dohrn focusing on the necessity of "self-determination" for the black community. Suddenly Tim McCarthy took the microphone, announced that the Panthers had returned with an official statement, and asked the convention to give them the floor. Agreement was quickly provided. Jewel Cook once again came to the rostrum, and a hush fell on the gathering. Cook announced that he had a statement to read, approved by Chairman Bobby Seale and signed by the Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the Young Lords. It declared:

After long study and investigation of Students for a Democratic Society and the Progressive Labor Party in particular, we have come to the conclusion that the Progressive Labor Party has deviated from Marxist-Leninist ideology on the National Question and the right of self-determination of all oppressed people.

We demand that by the conclusion of the National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society that the Progressive Labor Party change its position on the right to self-determination and stand in concert with the oppressed peoples of the world and begin to follow a true Marxist-Leninist ideology ... .

If the Progressive Labor Party continues its egocentric policies and revisionist behavior, they will be considered as counter-revolutionary traitors and will be dealt with as such.

Students for a Democratic Society will be judged by the company they keep and the efficiency and effectiveness with which they deal with bourgeois factions in their organization.

Whether the statement was entirely the Panthers’ idea, a face-saving retaliation for the humiliation of the night before, or whether it was concocted with the concurrence of the SDS leadership as a way to force the PL split, is hard to say. The apparent disarray with which the NO people reacted to the announcement—the Guardian mentions "tactical blunders, utter confusion, manipulation and unpreparedness"’—suggests that it might have been a surprise to everyone; yet the fact that it came at such an opportune time for the regular SDSers and followed the emphasis on the "self-determination" line by Dohrn, who was the SDSer perhaps closest to the Panther leaders, allows the possibility that it was planned the previous night by at least some of the NO forces. In either case, it provided a dramatic moment for the convention: every person in the hall recognized it as an inescapable ultimatum.

PLers, reacting immediately, began a chant of "Smash redbaiting, Smash redbaiting." Cook tried to go on with a few more attacks on PL—"counter-revolutionary," "chickenshit," "they act like pigs"—but the PL cries became ever more strident: "Smash redbaiting. Smash redbaiting," "Read Mao, Read Mao, " "Bull-shit! Bull-shit!" The NO supporters responded with the Panther slogan, "Power to the people! Power to the people," and with hardly a missed beat the PL delegates thundered back, "Power to the workers! Power to the workers!" The cacophony filled the Coliseum, rising with the passions and the angers on the floor, fifteen hundred people caught in an acoustical tornado. The Panthers turned away, gave the finger to the women at the PL literature table near the stage, and stalked off from the bedlam they had created. As the sound slowly died, Jeff Gordon marched to the podium with a dozen of his heftiest colleagues, seized the microphone, and waited for quiet. Then in an eerie calm voice, and slowly, he said: "PL... will not ... be intimidated out of SDS." Half the audience broke into cheers and applause. Gordon went on: PL has taken a principled stand in support of Third World liberation, it supports black self-determination in the United States, and it supports the Black Panther Party—though it also offers comradely criticism when it feels that this is needed. He was reasonable and firm, playing an avuncular role amid the tumult, taking the high ground of the offended but forgiving party—and it was effective.

The NO leaders—Klonsky, Dohrn, Rudd, and Robbins prominent among them—hastily gathered in a knot at the back of the stage, in heated discussion. Finally Rudd stepped to the microphone and proposed an hour's recess, both to let things cool off and to give the leaders a chance to figure out what to do next. But before the vote could be taken Dohrn wrenched herself away from Klonsky, who was trying to restrain her at the back of the stage, and marched to the rostrum, hair flying, jaw set. We're going to have to decide, she shouted into the microphone, whether we can continue to stay in the same organization with people who deny the right of self-determination to the oppressed—and anyone who wants to talk about that, follow me into the next room. She spun on her heel and marched off the stage down a corridor to the side. It may have been a planned performance, but if so there weren't many people in on the plan. Klonsky looked stunned and momentarily undecided, Rudd paused and stared into the crowd before following after, and RYM supporters throughout the hall only slowly and somewhat uncertainly got to their feet, maybe fifty at first, then slowly another fifty more. PL went into more chants: "Sit down. Sit down, Stay and fight, Stay and fight." A few dozen more people rose, and a procession out of the hall slowly took shape: "No split! No split! No split!" from the PL section. Finally, with perhaps two hundred in all, the RYM supporters crowded into the corridor at the front, now with their fists raised, and shouting back, "Join us! Join us!" and "Two, three, many Vietnams." That last was an unconsciously ironic chant now, for there was no longer any doubt what was happening in Chicago: two, three, many SDSs.

The RYM caucus gathered in a smaller wood-floored arena off the main hall and for the next three hours the NO leaders tried to rally forces behind an all-out split. At midnight, nothing decided, the meeting broke until Saturday morning, when the process started over again; a long, rambling, often boring debate ranging from grand political verities to minor tactical nit-picking, with the heavies doing most of the talking, and the SDSers in attendance ranging from five hundred to a thousand, many of them going out to the main hall from time to time to participate in the ongoing PL-run "plenary" session. For a long time there was no agreement: everyone in the caucus was opposed to PL, all right, but there was a lot of disagreement on how to do the opposing. Some, unhappy with RYM politics to begin with and bothered by the manipulative walkout, wanted to go back in and join the PLers, try to get through the weekend, and go on as before—what happens here doesn't really make much difference to the thousands of people out on the campuses, and out there the PLers are a tiny and unimportant minority anyway. Others favored going back in and debating the PLers head-on, fighting it out on the floor until one or the other gained a majority and won control of the organization: dare to struggle, dare to win, they said, and, besides, the credentials committee has figured that the non-PLers were in a majority. Most of the SDS leadership. Weatherman and RYM II alike, tended to favor the idea of expelling PL outright and constituting the caucus as the "real" SDS. Finally, early Saturday evening, with everyone growing weary and restive but with the pro-expulsion stand gaining favor, Bernardine Dohrn spoke once more, giving what reporter Andrew Kopkind described as "obviously the outstanding political speech of the whole week."’° Pacing back and forth on the floor before the bleachers, in raggedy-cuffed trousers and a faded man's shirt, she slowly went through the history of the Movement in the past decade, described the traditions that had made SDS into the leading organization in this Movement, and showed how PL stood outside this tradition at every point; now, she said, when we are faced with a greater task than ever before, it should be those who represent the true traditions who carry it on, unhampered by the "counter-revolutionaries" who simply stand in the way and want us to deny our decade-old allegiance to the blacks, the Vietnamese, the guerrillas, the youth of America. Expulsion, she argued, was the only answer, and directness the only means: we should simply go in there and tell PL that it is no longer a part of this organization. "We are not a caucus," she concluded. "We are SDS." The die was cast. By a heavy margin, perhaps five hundred to one hundred, expulsion was agreed upon.

No one worried very much at that point about the legality of it all, the constitutional provisions that membership was "open to all who share the commitment of the organization to democracy as a means and as a social goal" and members could not be expelled except "by a two-thirds vote of the National Council." No one bothered much about the firmly entrenched and heretofore highly regarded principle that SDS was nonexclusionist. No one even protested much when the NO leadership decided that the expulsion question should not even be put to a vote of the unified plenary, on the grounds that it would mean "“counter-revolutionaries having the right to 'vote' on their own counter-revolutionary nature." Instead it was decided that a statement of principles should be drawn up explaining the reasons for the expulsion and simply dumped in the PLers' laps; accordingly, several of the RYM leaders. Bill Ayers and Dohrn prominent among them, set to work writing up the document. No one seems very clear about how the various items got included—one of them, for example, pledges SDS support to "the People's Republics of Korea and Albania," an allegiance that many people even in the anti-PL crowd found difficult to subscribe to—and since there wasn't time to supply mimeographed copies it is likely that most of the people in the caucus weren't precisely sure what they were agreeing to.

Nonetheless, the official statement, written in the wooden RYM-speak characteristic of the deadest part of the Old Left tradition (appropriate enough, considering the Old Left action being taken), declares:

The Progressive Labor Party has attacked every revolutionary nationalist struggle of the black and Latin peoples in the U.S. as being racist and reactionary. For example, they have attacked open admissions, black studies, community control of police and schools, the Black Panther Party and their "breakfast for children" program, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

Progressive Labor Party has attacked Ho Chi Minh, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the revolutionary government of Cuba—all leaders of the people's struggles for freedom against U.S. imperialism.

Progressive Labor Party, because of its positions and practices, is objectively racist, anti-communist, and reactionary. PLP has also in principle and practice refused to join the struggle against male supremacy. It has no place in SDS, an organization of revolutionary youth.

For all these reasons, which have manifested themselves in practice all over the country, as well as at this convention, and because the groups we look to around the world for leadership in the fight against U.S. imperialism, including the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets, urge us to do so, SDS feels it is now necessary to rid ourselves of the burden of allowing the politics of the Progressive Labor Party to exist within our organization.

A little before eleven o'clock that Saturday night, with the statement drafted and approved, Klonsky went out to talk to Jared Israel and tell him that the caucus wanted to come back in and address the rump. Israel agreed, and both men pledged that there would be no violence. Israel made the announcement and the PLers suspended their meeting—they had been holding workshops and passing resolutions all the while the RYM people were out of the room—and waited, curious and apparently fearful of trouble ahead. Soon a column of women filed out of the caucus room and surrounded the base of the stage, hands stuck belligerently in jeans, faces unsmiling. Next a file of men, the NO’s "security force," strode out and stood in a line in front of the women, arms folded across their chests, Panther-style.

And the rest of the caucus marched in, slowly filing along the walls under the wary eyes of PL's own "security force" along the perimeters. There was an eerie hush. Finally Klonsky, Rudd, and Dohrn came through the corridor and mounted the stage.

Dohrn was given the microphone. For the last twenty-four hours, she told the gathering, peering out over the podium into the smoky and ill-lit hall, the SDS caucus has been discussing principles; with that, she was off on another speech, twenty minutes of incisive invective, laying out every real or imagined sin of PL since its inception, quoting, citing, pinning, slashing, a performance so masterful that at least one person was convinced it must have been prepared days in advance. At last she paused. SDS can no longer live with people who are objectively racist, anticommunist, and reactionary. Progressive Labor Party members, people in the Worker-Student Alliance, and all others who do not accept our principles ... are no longer members of SDS.

For a moment there was silence, and then the PLers started to giggle: a strange noise in this hall after all that had come before, a forced and awkward laughter of nervousness, the break of four days of tension. PLers quickly found their voices: "SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!" Dohrn glared down at the PLers and with a last shout into the microphone of "Long live the victory of people's war"—the slogan, from China's Lin Piao, was the closing line of the "Weatherman" statement—she stormed off the stage and led the walkout from the Coliseum. Hundreds, perhaps seven hundred in all, followed her, their fists raised, chanting a mélange of slogans—"Power to the people! Power to the people!" "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!"out into the Chicago night.”

On the next day there were two SDSs—and a number of oddments in between. Many of the Old Left-style sects, such as the Labor Committees, International Socialist Clubs, and the Spartaeists, stayed with PL-SDS, where they could debate traditional sectarian Marxism without interference from the traditional SDSers and their unorthodox and "anarchistic" tendencies. Other pre-formed groups—Yippie collectives, the Panthers, and the Radical Union, for example—stayed with the SDS regulars. And some, like a group of anarchists, left the whole thing, issued an appeal for followers ("Tired of people throwing red books at each other? Tired of the old rhetoric? Come breathe a breath of fresh rhetoric!") and went over to the last remaining outpost of official anarchism, the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World on Chicago's north side.

In the Coliseum some five to six hundred people met: PLers, WSA members, those who opposed the walkout on principle, and those who were simply unhappy with the RYMers' behavior, either before or during the convention. PLers were not particularly pleased with the split, fearful of now drying up the lake they had been fishing in so successfully for the last three years, but at. the moment it seemed best to put as good a face as possible on the whole affair and try to claim legitimacy for their side. Accordingly, they went ahead, asserting that they were the "real" SDS—"There is only ONE S.D.S.: This meeting in the Coliseum is the 1969 National Convention of SDS. This attempt to split and destroy the student movement must and will be fought"—and held a hypothetically ordinary meeting complete with amendments to the constitution (to increase NC representation) and the passing of resolutions (the PL racism proposal and a half-hearted "women's liberation" proposal). Officers for the new year were duly chosen, proposed by PLers and elected unopposed. John Pennington (actually Elgar John Pennington III, but that would hardly do in PL circles), twenty-four, a longtime PLer and Boston-area traveler for the party, became the new National Secretary; Alan Spector, twenty-three, a Wisconsin graduate who had been a New England regional traveler and WSA supporter but not a member of PL, was chosen as the new Education Secretary; and Patricia Forman, twenty-five, a NYU graduate and WSAer from San Francisco State, was elected Inter-organizational Secretary.” With that, they decided to move their version of the National Office to Boston and they all went home, happy in the feeling that, as Jeff Gordon told the delegates at one point, "we've just taken over the most important organization in America."

Meanwhile, in a Congregational Church on the west side of town, not far from the National Office, the regular SDSers met, their number estimated at nearly a thousand, swelled overnight by presumably reluctant but choiceless supporters of the national leadership. Little joined the regulars together, however, besides their detestation of PL—natural enough, given the traditionally loose character of SDS—and all attempts to forge a new organization with unified politics with which to fight the revolution were doomed to disaster: you can't go to the barricades with an umbrella. Instead, the regulars decided on two specific action proposals, one to co-sponsor a meeting with the Panthers in July to forge a "United Front Against Fascism," the other to hold a "mass action against the war" in the fall.14

The lack of unity was underscored in the election of officers, where both the Weatherman and the RYM II group put up separate slates, though the politics of neither were discussed in any detail: Weatherman chose Mark Rudd for National Secretary, Bill Ayers for Education Secretary, and Jeff Jones for Inter-organizational Secretary. RYM II co-sponsored Jones, chose Bob Avakian for National Secretary, and put up Lynn Wells, a close Klonsky ally who had represented the left wing of SSOC, as Educational Secretary. After desultory debate, the Weatherman slate won by a fairly large margin, and into the national leadership came three of the most active and most dedicated SDSers, each of whom had long ago decided to give his life to the revolution.’

Mark Rudd, who had just turned twenty-two, was perhaps the best known, the media having made him almost into a personification of SDS ever since the Columbia uprising; indeed, Rudd used this very fact in plumping for his election: "The Movement needs leadership," he said, "the Movement needs symbols, and my name exists as a symbol." He was quite good for the part, actually, tall, with large shoulders that gave him a kind of hulking posture, piercing blue eyes, a prominent lower jaw, and an overall look of tough handsomeness, plus a thoroughly egocentric energy and a perpetually on-stage manner which the press liked to call "charisma." The second son of an upper-middle-class Jewish immigrant family in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey—his father was a real-estate operator and a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves—Rudd had an exemplary and undistinguished boyhood: Boy Scouts, good grades, well-liked. It was not until he got to Columbia in the fall of 1965 and began talking with the active students there ("They were the only people doing anything") that his politics grew: he began working for SDS in the fall of 1966, devoted more and more time during his junior year, and as we have seen, became chairman of the chapter on an action-faction platform in the spring of 1968. Since then he had dropped out of school to devote full time to SDS, based in the New York Regional Office but traveling across the country several times on fund raising and organizing tours, during which his blunt, profane style and his single-minded, humorless dedication attracted large audiences of students but did nothing to improve SDS's reputation for arrogance and rigidity.

Ayers, twenty-four, had also become a well-known figure—though within SDS circles rather than without—in the course of the last year, during which his good humor and enthusiasm had attracted attention both at national meetings and on the Ohio-Michigan campuses he traveled. Of only medium height, he gave off a kind of boyish air despite his age (he was generally known as "Billy") with his unkempt mop of light-brown hair, a wide-eyed look behind steel-rimmed glasses, and a soft, youthful face. Ayers was born in the wealthy suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, his lather being the chairman of Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago and a trustee of Northwestern, an eminent pillar of the Establishment whose generous allowances in later years, the son averred, were used "to finance the revolution." He had gone to the University of Michigan for three years, during which he had been arrested at a draft board sit-in (the October 1965 affair that had called down the punitive wrath of Selective Service Director Hershey), but he dropped out of school after the spring of 1966 to devote himself full time to an Ann Arbor Children's Community School, a vaguely Summerhillian primary-school experiment started the year before. For two years he labored in the school—working with Diana Oughton, with whom he lived for much of the time, and Skip Taub, another Michigan SDSer—trying to make it politically and educationally successful; he served as director from 1967-68, and even ran for the local school board, a bid which failed because of reaction to his uncompromising politics. The school itself failed in the summer of 1968—the attempt to create new human beings in the bowels of the old system provoked only controversy among the rather conventional parents, and soon both support and money dwindled—leaving Ayers extremely bitter about the possibilities of peaceful change. That summer he worked in the National Office for a bit, became a leader of the activist Jesse James Gang at Michigan that fall, and devoted himself full time to SDS as a regional traveler.

Jeffrey Jones, twenty-two, was somewhat less flamboyant than the other two—his coolheaded chairing of the RYM caucus was one of the factors in his election—but he had been a committed organizer for just as long. Born in Philadelphia, he had gone to Antioch College in 1965, then quit after a year to work in the Movement, first serving as a regional organizer for SDS in the Midwest and then acting as an SDS representative (with Steve Halliwell and Cathy Wilkerson) at a meeting with the NLF in Cambodia in the fall of 1967. He was elected to the NIC the previous June as a New York City representative and worked out of that office for a while before going out to San Francisco State to lend a hand in the strike there during the early spring. An impressive sort of man with neat features and long straight blond hair sweeping to his shoulders, he became one of the leading public figures for SDS in the months ahead.

On Monday morning, June 25, it was all over. The country was then greeted by the curious spectacle of two "real SDSs" and no SDS—that is to say, two tight factional groups, neither recognizable to earlier SDSers as an SDS organization, and both excluding by design or inevitability the great bulk of ordinary SDSers on the campuses or in the streets. The rea/ SDS could not stand up: it had been buried once and for all beneath the Chicago Coliseum.

"Weatherman". was hardly more than another position paper when it was written, certainly not the foundation of an ideology nor the blueprint for a new youth organization. But out of the turbulence of the convention, during which Weatherman emerged both as the inheritor of the SDS tradition and the chief opposition to Progressive Labor, and then out of the buffeting experiences of the summer, when Weatherman tried to puts its principles into action, it grew into a new kind of political group, a self-conscious army of revolutionariesragtaggle and erratic, perhaps, but sincere and single-minded—a force unlike any ever seen before in America.

In the days after the convention, the Weatherman leaders—soon to be known, naturally, as the Weatherbureau—moved into the Chicago National Office and began overseeing the two major programs of the summer: the first, a series of city-based "action projects," as mapped out in the Ayers-Mellen paper at the Austin NC ("Weatherman" itself was devoid of programs), designed to propagandize and enlist working-class youths into the revolution; the second, preparations for the fall antiwar march, or "National Action," which was being billed as an "absolutely crucial"!© demonstration for SDS around the theme of "Bring the war home!" The three top officers were in Chicago, of course, but many of the other Weatherleaders stayed there, too (chief among them: Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Gerry Long, Jeff Melish, Terry Robbins, Cathy Wilkerson), trying to forge themselves into a true "political collective" around Weatherman polities, giving SDS a truly homogeneous leadership that it had never really had since the earliest days.

The city "action projects" were begun even before the convention, with SDSers renting apartments in bands of ten or a dozen in several medium-sized cities which were seen as appropriately "working class" in demography: about thirty people going to Seattle and fifteen to Denver in the West, some forty to Detroit, thirty to Cleveland, and twenty-five each to Athens and Columbus in the Midwest, and thirty to New York City (the Bronx and Queens) and half a dozen to Newark in the East—more than two hundred in all. Generally those attracted to the projects were college students from actionist SDS chapters on campuses where there had been some kind of major confrontation: Columbia, Wisconsin, Kent State, Colorado, Chicago, Seattle Community College. (Interestingly, if unexplainably, Weatherman and its summer projects seemed to attract very few people from California, even where campus disruptions had been large.) There were interesting similarities with the ERAP summer projects—about which the current people, alas, were ignorant—but these proved to be even more chaotic and wrenching, even more manic in their successes and failures, driving some people forever back into the arms of collegiate luxury, turning others into absolutely dedicated revolutionaries ultimately willing to die for their commitment.

The Columbus, Ohio, project seems to have been fairly typical of the Weatherman ventures that summer; it was, by their own account, " 'Weatherman' in practice." About twenty people from outside—four from Kent State (including the project leader, Howie Emmer, twenty-two), two from Penn State, and others from other Ohio colleges—moved into the city, joining a half-dozen other Ohio State and local high-school people already living there, renting three separate $60-a-month apartments in decidedly un-posh neighborhoods; something, like a third of them were women, and their average age was twenty, the oldest twenty-four and the youngest eighteen. Several of them began by getting jobs in the area, but most people who didn't know the town found it difficult to get work and those who were employed generally quit as the summer wore on and their political work got heavier. Money seems to have been of no real concern: it took very little to keep them going, most of them had parents who were prepared to support them for the summer (at least two had wealthy parents), several were willing to chip in their own savings accounts, and some money apparently came from the Weatherbureau in Chicago.’”

At the beginning no one had any sure idea of just how they were supposed to carry out the Ayers-Mellen directive of "broadening our constituency to other sections of white workingclass youth"; as one woman in the project, Lorraine Rosal, put it, revealingly: "All of us, both men and women, came off our campuses timid, physically afraid of moving in the streets, but more importantly psychologically afraid of the people." On July 4, a little more than a week after the convention, the putative revolutionaries tried marching with an NLF flag through a local park and passing out leaflets about the next American Revolution compared to the last one, but that action apparently won nothing but animosity and bewilderment from most of the holiday strollers; a similar propaganda assault at a fireworks display that night ended up in a shoving match with a bunch of local right-wingers that had to be broken up by the police. For the next two days the collectives talked over their July 4 actions, in a bout of navel-gazing that seems to have been typical of all the collectives across the country—"criticism-self-criticism" it was called, in proper Maoist fashion—and it was agreed that something more had to be done. Just about then the word came down from the Weatherbureau that the fall's National Action should take top priority in organizing work, with the prime target being high-school-age people hanging around the summer streets or, in Weatherlanguage, "to develop cadre, 16 year old communist guerillas [sic], to build a city wide revolutionary youth movement to smash the pig power structure."

Accordingly, the collectives decided to concentrate their efforts on the poorer and tougher neighborhoods of Columbus. For days on end the SDSers would hang around the street corners and drugstores where teenagers were likely to gather, "rapping" with the local youths about the rich and the poor, how everyone should be equal, the need to have a revolution; at nights they would go to the hamburger joints and the schoolyards, acting tough and sure, talking about the need for militant action, about taking to the streets, "kicking ass," "getting us a few pigs," striving to find that resonant chord which the RYM theoreticians had assured them would be there in working-class kids. One night a small band of SDSers, operating under secrecy so stringent that not even other collectives were notified, made a nighttime raid on a high school to spray-paint the walls with slogans ("Off the Pigs," "Viet Cong Will Win" "Fuck U.S. Imperialism"), a commando action whose daring greatly impressed the people in the project but, when they bragged about it to the local teenagers, seemed to produce only genuine puzzlement or yawns. On another night the SDSers invited one group of youths they knew up to one of the apartments for beer, wine, a few cigarettes, and a display of three guns—a.22, a shotgun, and an M-1—which were the total armed might of the Columbus revolution and, as such, seemed pretty paltry to the high-schoolers. All of this effort proved to be notably unsuccessful; one of the SDSers, a local student who later dropped out of the organization, recalls:

It was nice talking to them [the teenagers], and I wanted to talk to them, and they, you know, they agreed that there were a lot of things wrong. But the SDS plans for them was to get them to fight the police, you know, and to get them to attack the schools and whatever, go to Chicago, and it didn't make any sense, you know. These kids weren't going to do it. I mean they lived in the neighborhood, they wanted to stay out of trouble, and they wanted to make a living and just get along; and they have enough problems without getting themselves into more trouble. And the SDS line on them was all backwards, it was telling them to throw any chance they got away and fight, and fight even though they knew they were going to lose. You know, what you learn in SDS is that maybe you'll get killed, but the movement will grow, you know, and that's a helluva thing to go and tell a kid, I mean a kid who grows up on the street—he's gonna say you're crazy.

After a couple of weeks of this, the local kids finally did conclude the SDSers were crazy, and the organizing effort collapsed one night when half a dozen of them got into a fist fight with a bunch of SDSers and chased them from the neighborhood, where they were nevermore seen again.

But while the attempt at outreach was not notably successful, there was an intensive ingrowth, and this was true for most of the Weatherman projects. The more dedicated SDSers were determined to make themselves into true revolutionaries in the course of the summer (the less dedicated played along for a while and dropped out), and for them that meant it was as important to abolish their old middle-class ideas and habits as to win over the high-schoolers. They were trying to turn themselves into new men and women, into what they called "good communists," people for whom politics was all—"We have one task," Bill Ayers was to say, "and that's to make ourselves into tools of the revolution." Operating beneath their quest was the wisdom of the insight, shared by many Weathermen though not all, that the capitalist system operates not simply through obvious material and military ways but infests daily lives and thoughts with a million ideas and patterns which reinforce its power: not just racism and sexism and elitism, but all the other elements of socialization ingrained since childhood—attitudes to property, privacy, material goods, family, competition, collectivization, romantic love, homosexuality, power, status, and all the rest.

And though this insight did not always shine through in practice—there was still a lot of arrogance and impatience in these actionists—the attempt was made at every commune: "The fight to destroy the shit in us," as one woman wrote, "is part of building a new society." They threw themselves into Mao and Marx, they practiced karate and survived on brown rice diets, they tried abstinence (off and on) from drugs, alcohol, even pets.

Accustomed property feelings had to be rooted out, so that no one felt attached to "personal" belongings, and in many cases Weathermen reduced themselves to a single set of clothes. Individualism and selfishness had to give way to a collective spirit, and this meant totally: nothing, including an individual's desire to leave the apartment for a walk, was to be decided without group discussion. The desire for privacy also had to be uprooted, smacking as it did of individualism and self-centeredness, and in several collectives no one was permitted to be separated from another communard (this had its security advantages, too, of course). Attitudes to wealth and materialism had to be challenged, eventually to the point of requiring the Weathermen to donate their personal savings to the collective, a step many found difficult to take. Anything hinting of racism, national chauvinism, or liberalism had to be confronted collectively, dissected, and discarded. Male chauvinism, both in word and action, had to be purged, again through collective sessions often resembling group therapy more than anything else, and the Weatherwomen grew in strength at most projects over the summer as they banded together to oversee this purgation. And accustomed sexual relations were to be scrapped in favor of a freewheeling partner-swapping that would allow people to concentrate on their particular jobs in the revolution rather than on the comforts or needs of any one other individual.

This last aspect of collective life—"smash monogamy" it was called in Weatherlanguageattracted a good deal of attention both inside and outside the collectives, and because it was such a dramatic shift, with couples (even married couples) being separated and in some cases new partners selected with spin-the-bottle arbitrariness, it stands as symbolic of much of what Weatherman was trying to do. In many ways it was mechanical and stifling, as with the Columbus couple who were told they had to live separately and found after a while that they were behaving far more selfishly and cruelly apart than they had together; they eventually dropped out and went back together to fight the revolution their own way.

"Very often," some Weathermen later wrote, "we failed to see how the strength that could come from a very close loving relationship between two people could be a very revolutionary thing." And yet for many people, and many collectives, the end of monogamy turned out to be truly liberating. A pair of New York Weathermen noted:7°

The results of ending monogamy in our collective were amazing. Women, who for years had been silent or someone's girlfriend, in two or three weeks became strong political leaders. Women grew incredibly close to each other and used that closeness as a source of revolutionary strength.

And a Weatherwoman, reflecting a sense that seems to have been shared most particularly by the women in the Weathercollectives, has written:

Our monogamous relationships broke up because we simply didn't need them any more. We began not to have to identify ourselves through men and could become total human beings. Women began digging one another, jealousy and competition were not necessary any more because our point of existence was the revolution and the old way of life became intolerable to us .... We do not view ourselves as sex objects but as part of the revolution. Sex isn't something to happen isolated from daily work. Destroying the one man, one woman relationship was perhaps the most liberating thing that happened to us. We could speak at meetings without being uptight or being on an ego trip and most important we were upfront at demonstrations along with men. We became self reliant and don't have to protect any one, we are forced to struggle and it makes life more meaningful. We changed because of the necessity of the times and dig the changes.

Naturally this kind of collective pressure, the attempt to make instant communists, took its toll. Especially racking, apparently, were the "criticism-self-criticism" discussions, sometimes so brutal and probing that in some collectives they were given the name "Weatherfries." One woman left the Columbus project in August, frantic and nerveshattered, unable to take this version of the communal life: "I had to ask group permission even to go upstairs to read a book. I'm a private sort of person, but was never allowed to be alone. I broke under the pressure." Another Columbus man chafed under the collective discipline:7?

I mean if you say something, just happen to say something that somebody might construe as being racist or imperialist, well, right away, call a meeting, everybody in the collective has got to sit down and we have to discuss this. And I want to go out to my mother's to see if I got any mail out there or to do my laundry, we have to have a meeting about that, you know.

He dropped out of the project with such a vengeance that he ended up "confessing" everything to the Columbus police on a tape recording later used by the House Internal Security Committee. But it was not only the collective experience that caused difficulties in the Columbus project: there was also the haunted effect of knowing you are being watched by the police every day (the 'Columbus agents apparently made no secret of it), the distrusts and enmities that develop in any group where strangers are thrown together, and the gnawing feeling of uncertainty that came with the failure of the project to live up to its hopes. And then the fact that all but two of the Weathermen ended up the summer having been arrested, several with high bonds and court cases and possible jail terms in front of them, could hardly have been a source of much comfort. Under these kinds of pressures, many Columbus Weathermen of June went back to being students by September. Of the two dozen people originally in the project, only half a dozen went on to the fall's National Action.

But they were the committed ones, molding themselves into the new men and women, the cadre who were the backbone of Weatherman. Lorraine Rosal wrote after a summer in Columbus:

The political polarization that has occurred through these struggles has been the basis for our organizing success. Every day it becomes clearer that struggle is the only way to build a fighting movement ... .

We have rejected our programmed bourgeois roles as the bastion of conservative forces in the home, on the job, and in the community; we have attacked our being used as a surplus labor force for imperialist, racist dogs; we have attacked our role as chattel, scabbing on the international liberation struggle. Instead, we have accepted a new role—a role of dignity—a role as members of a women's army, fighting not just for our own liberation, but for the liberation of all the people.”

"Struggle is the only way to build a fighting movement": this was the sampler over the Weatherman bed. Struggle ...action ... confrontation ... fighting: Weatherman made the summer into a time to test itself, prepare itself, steel itself. Out of the action factions, convinced that power was not in broad support but in pinpointed militance, the Weathermen came with a determination for action. On every front.

Some actions were mild: attempts to leaflet and speak to rock concerts in Detroit and New York, impromptu speeches during the intermissions of such movies as Ché! and Easy Rider, an official booth set up at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in August (though, truthfully, no one seems to have any memory of what went on at that booth). Others were more violent: there were fist and chair-leg fights with Progressive Labor-WSA forces in New York on July 7 when PLers, trying to crash a RYM meeting at NYU, started a minor brawl broken up by guns-drawn police; in Boston on July 16 when Weathermen, taking the battle into enemy territory, tried to exclude PLers and found themselves with another fight on their hands, this time with one WSAer wielding a broken bottle; in Oakland in mid-July when PLers and SDSers clashed at least twice in a park outside the Black Panthers' United Front Against Fascism convention (according to PL two Weathermen were hospitalized, according to New Left Notes [Chicago] ten PLers were hospitalized). There were confrontations between Weathermen and cops in several cities, usually staged by the former so as to give themselves a "tough" reputation among the street kids they were trying to impress—in Denver in August when six Weathermen were arrested resisting police who tried to break up a march on a local IDA project; in Seattle in August when fights between Weathermen and hostile youths at a local beach turned into fights against police and hostile youths, resulting in the arrest of some sixty people; in Milwaukee in September when Rudd and other SDSers scuffled with police at a teenage hamburger hangout; and in Detroit on September 27 when police tried to arrest John Jacobs for leading a march of sixty Weathermen through downtown streets and were surprised when the young people, both men and women, turned on them and fought back with rocks, feet, fists, and a chain, creating a brief mélée in which several police were roughed up, one suffered a broken wrist, eleven Weathermen were arrested, and one severely beaten. There were even internecine battles within the Movement—Weathermen stormed the stage of a Student Mobilization Committee convention in Cleveland in August to push and publicize their militant National Action politics; members of the "Motor City" collectives broke up an antiwar meeting in Detroit the same month, again urging their "kick-ass" tactics for the fall; and SDSers and other militants broke out of the march lines and took over the stage during a Hiroshima Day demonstration in New York, after which Jeff Jones proceeded to harangue the assembled marchers and the entire Movement for insufficient toughness.

But the tactic of choice for the summer was the invasion of classrooms and schools"jailbreaks," in Weatherlingo—and these took place in Akron, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Flint, New York, and Pittsburgh, with the two most dramatic in Warren, Michigan, and Pittsburgh”*. In Warren, a Detroit suburb, on July 31, ten women from the Motor City collectives descended on Macomb County Community College—chosen because its students were held to be "working class"—and invaded a classroom where students were taking final examinations. They barricaded the door and started lecturing the thirty bewildered students about imperialism, racism, sexism, and the upcoming National Action in what must have been fairly incomprehensible terms ("They rapped about ... how the Vietnamese women carry on armed struggle together with Vietnamese men against US imperialism," according to New Left Notes), and shoved one older man into his seat when he started to complain and pummeled another man when he tried to escape (New Left Notes proudly told of "attacking the men with karate," but the victim himself said it felt more like biting and scratching). But the women failed to prevent the teacher from slipping out a back door and calling the police, so all but one of them were trapped and arrested in the parking lot as they were making their getaway. Despite the arrests and bail of $6,500, however, despite the generally hostile reception from the Macomb students. New Left Notes proclaimed the women heroic warriors: "Women's liberation will come when women exercise real power as is done in Vietnam and in the Macomb college classroom."” The Pittsburgh action took place four weeks later, on September 4, when a contingent of some seventy-five women moved into the city, some of them casing the South Hills High School, thought to be a typical working-class school in a working-class city, and others going into the local American Friends Service Committee offices where they kept six of the workers hostage while they ran off leaflets for the "jailbreak." During the lunch hour they descended en masse on the school, and while one group outside distributed leaflets and papers another group stormed into the building itself, and at least some of them apparently raised their shirts over their heads exposing their breasts, which seems to have made a major impression on the male school administrators. Gathering outside with an NLF flag, one woman standing atop a car near the school entrance, the Weatherwomen began an impromptu rally trying to make instant recruits for the National Action. It didn't take long for the first two policemen to arrive, but when they tried to break up the demonstration they were set upon and pelted by the women, and it took the arrival of eight squad cars of reinforcements to send the women running; most escaped, but twenty-six were arrested, including NICer Linda Evans, Cathy Wilkerson, and New York SDSers Naomi Jaffe and Eleanor Raskin. Again New Left Notes saw a triumph: "The kids at the school know that what really happened was that women, speaking in support of the Vietnamese, black and brown struggles and against the pigs, the teachers, and the courts came to their school, fought the pigs, and won."

In fact there was never any noticeable evidence that these school invasions had this, or any other intended, effect. They seemed to have inspired more hostility than warmth, more puzzlement than respect. But such was the state of self-centeredness and self-intoxication of the Weathermen by now that the action became more important than the reception.

There were other factors, too, contributing to the growth of Weatherman attitudes that summer, most especially the split with the Black Panthers, the further rift within SDS itself, and the international contacts made with Cuban and Vietnamese revolutionaries.

The Panther split grew out of the United Front Against Fascism conference, July 18-20, in Oakland, called by the Black Panther Party to try to mobilize white support against the very real and escalating campaign of repression waged against them by the government. It was an awkward affair to begin with, since its convening was really a confession by the Panthers that they had failed to build an effective popular base in their own black communities and had to depend upon the white left for aid and comfort in a time of crisis; it was made more awkward by the Panther's open dependence upon the discredited Communist Party, which was obviously footing most of the bill, and their rigid and authoritarian handling of the meetings. But the worst of it was that the whole conference was called to consider, and ended up approving, a Panther campaign for community control of the police, and the Weathermen felt that they simply couldn't go along: community control in black areas, yes, the NIC told the Panthers the day after the conference, but community control in white areas "not only undermines the fight against white supremacy" but would only lead to white vigilante bands, and that they couldn't support. This dissent, coupled with fairly common criticism of the conference by Movement whites, seems to have really enraged the Panthers and, as at the Chicago SDS convention, they struck out harshly in hurt response. Early in August Chairman Bobby Seale and Chief of Staff David Hilliard let fly at SDS, Seale denouncing them as "a bunch of those jive bourgeois national socialists and national chauvinists," and Hilliard added:7°

We don't see SDS as being so revolutionary. We see SDS as just being another pacification front .... SDS had better get their politics straight because the Black Panther Party is drawing some very clear lines between friends and enemies. And that we're gonna make it very clear that we're not going to be attacked from any of those motherfuckers .... We'll beat those little sissies, those little schoolboys' ass if they don't try to straighten up their politics. So we want to make it known to SDS and the first motherfucker that gets out of order had better stand in line for some kind of disciplinary actions from the Black Panther Party.

This was not exactly the kind of fraternalism SDS thought it had been establishing with the Panthers, not the sort of unity it thought had emerged from the June convention. SDS was in a difficult position, being publicly denounced by the group that it had declared was both the "vanguard" and (in an issue of New Left Notes even then on the press) the "model for all who will fight"—the group it had even purged its ranks to accommodate—and this was made all the more difficult when Bobby Seale was arrested for murder three days later and white sympathies for the Panthers soared even further. Publicly the NIC confined itself to a small item in New Left Notes, a reprinting of its original stand on community control, plus a few bitter remarks toward the Movement papers that made much of the disagreements; privately, however, SDSers were hurt and stung, tending to agree with Guardian columnist Julius Lester that "the contempt shown SDS in this instance cannot be said to exemplify the conduct and attitudes one has a right to expect (and demand) from anyone claiming to be revolutionary." In the minds of many, the Panthers could no longer be counted upon as friends or allies, and it seemed clear to many of the Weathermen that they would have to go out and do the job themselves, an attitude that would eventually grow into an unspoken conviction that it was really Weatherman that was the vanguard of the revolution, after all.

The split within SDS ranks only increased this sense of isolation and commitment. As Weathermen evolved their politics and carried out their actions over the summer, major segments of the old SDS, including those among the leadership, found it impossible to go along. The most serious break was with the RYM II faction. As early as July, Mike Klonsky and several other people associated with the RYM II paper had begun voicing their doubts about Weatherman's direction, Noel Ignatin wrote a scathing indictment of "Weatherman" (expressing "profound, total and unresolvable disagreements"), and finally Klonsky formally resigned from the National Action Committee in Chicago and moved back to California.

Klonsky's differences were aired in the August 29 New Left Notes, where he accused Weatherman of paying too little attention to the working class, destroying potential bluecollar support by the "arrogance" and "militancy" of such actions as the Macomb College raid, and displaying a "sectarianism and adventurism" about the National Action that had alienated most people, even in the Movement, and would turn it into a "big flop." Mark Rudd and Terry Robbins, speaking for the Weathermen, fired back an uncompromising—indeed, an unfriendly—reply, defending their plans for a militant demonstration and asserting that they would never compromise their politics just to gain Movement support. The result was that by the end of the summer those who leaned toward RYM II—chiefly the Avakianites in California, the REP collective in Detroit, Ignatin and his Revolutionary League in Chicago, Lynn Wells and the former "left wing" of SSOC in the South, and SDS alumni like Carl Davidson and Clark Kissinger—simply decided to go their own way and organize their own separate demonstration in Chicago in October.

The final determinant of Weatherman's character over the summer was its contact with the Cubans and Vietnamese, concrete experiences of the Third World revolution it had been so highly touting. NICer Linda Evans made a journey to Hanoi in July, along with six other antiwar activists, in order to bring home three captured U.S. pilots whom the North Vietnamese had released in honor of America's Independence Day. The experience of being in a country resisting American imperialism—"to see how they are carrying out a People's War," as companion Norm Fruchter said afterward—was as profound on Evans as it had been on every other previous traveler, and she returned to Chicago full of enthusiasm for the way the Vietnamese were "winning total victory."

A week later a contingent of Weathermen’ returned from an intensive eight-day meeting in Cuba with representatives of North Vietnam and the new Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam full of the same enthusiasm, only coupled with the additional elation of seeing the Cuban society at work. The messages from the Vietnamese were two, both grist for the Weathermill: first, in the words of a man from the People's Liberation Armed Forces, that "the U.S. can never escape from the labyrinth and sea of fire of peoples' war" and was suffering a total defeat in Vietnam; second, that American revolutionaries had the job of building the American Movement to the point where it could put invincible pressure upon the government for withdrawal. To the Weathermen, this meant that the collapse of the U.S. government was imminent, perhaps a matter of months rather than years, that the "duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution," and that Americans had to go back and fight in the "mother country" as vigorously as the Vietnamese and the Cubans in the Third World.

People from other sections of the Movement who made the trip with the Weathermen (and for the most part ended up in bitter disputes with them) recall that on the boat going back the Weathermen were going around promising to "kick ass" once they got back—which could hardly have been what their hosts had in mind in urging the expansion of the American Movement. But the Weathermen were not to be swayed from their vision; as Ted Gold put it, in an article for Liberation News Service which apparently reflected the passions of all the Weathermen who had made the trip:7°7°

As people who are located inside the monster, revolutionary Americans are in a position to do decisive damage to the U.S. ruling class's plans to continue and expand its world rule. The upcoming U.S. defeat in Vietnam will be a vital blow to those plans; we must aim to do everything we can to speed up that effect.

And in every Weatherman collective that message was taken to heart.

By the end of the summer. Weatherman was moving full speed toward a new style of revolutionary politics. In Cleveland on the August 29-September 1 weekend some three hundred people gathered for what was billed as a Midwestern "National Action Conference" but actually was more like Weatherman's first national convention, at which they hashed over their summertime experiences and worked to mold themselves into a unified force for the upcoming assault in October. It was by every account a high-strung event, a release and a foretoken, a mix and match of youthful excitements, the first time in months that like-minded SDSers could get together without the hassles of sectarian infighting—and day by day the people gathered got steadily more intoxicated on the sense of fellowship, liberation, and commitment. Discussions were abnormally intense, an extension of the criticism-self-criticism spirit of the summer collectives; people displaying even casual signs of sexism, racism, chauvinism, and the like were subjected to harsh and occasionally brutal group discussions. Everything was political, and all politics was directed toward making better revolutionaries. "Cleveland," wrote two New York Weathermen, "was a mind-fuck ...

seventy-two hours of nonstop political struggle."

Women, having asserted themselves with rare strength in the collectives, played an especially strong role in Cleveland, too, meeting for the most part by themselves, trading experiences of the summer, eventually coalescing with such purposiveness that they planned the Pittsburgh jailbreak right then and there as a national Weatherwoman's action.

The overwhelming consensus was that the fight against monogamy was important and that it had proved to be a crucial lever, the collectives the fulcrum, in moving aside the immense bulk of male supremacy. One woman reported later: °°

In Cleveland we began to see concrete examples of how monogamy politically weakened women. One woman told how she and her boyfriend were working in a Weatherman summer project together. She contributed very little and sort of hung around. When her boyfriend went to jail for a month she assumed some leadership of the summer project. Her fears about herself diminished, yet immediately upon his return she retired into the background again. Most of the women present had been through similar experiences. We then realized that if we were to become revolutionaries these relationships had to be broken because people had to become self reliant to do what has to be done to fight the state.

That weekend many couples who had survived the summer, including a few married couples, made the decision to live in separate collectives for the six weeks remaining until the National Action.

The emergence of the Weatherbureau as a unified and powerful political force also became evident in Cleveland. There was no more worry about whether there should be leaders or an "elite" at the top of the organization, the issue that so colored the early years of SDS; now the assumption was that a revolutionary organization had to be hierarchical, that orders had to come from the top, and that the people at the top should be strong and assertive. A pair of Weathermen later said:

It was in Cleveland that the Weatherbureau firmly established its leadership of the organization. That leadership existed on many levels .... [On one occasion] Rudd asked a group of us why we thought the Weatherbureau was leadership. People gave various answers, none of which satisfied Mark. "The reason we lead this organization," said Mark, "is that we're right more often than anyone else. Because we try and work out a correct understanding of what has to be done and then implement that understanding."

It was logic which seemed to persuade the participants:

Leadership was a totally important concept for Weatherman. We were among the first white radicals to understand that strong leaders were good leaders, that leadership was seized, not granted, that being a leader meant doing it first, taking the most risks, being most open about yourself, fighting pigs hardest, building cadre most.

So much for participatory democracy.

But the high point of the weekend was a speech by Education Secretary Bill Ayers, full of his infectious enthusiasm and of the optimism which the national leadership was feeling, apparently genuinely, about the October demonstrations. He used the occasion to dispel the criticism that had been made from a variety of quarters about the Weathermen's plans, especially that they were acting like "a bunch of adventurist fools":

If it is a worldwide struggle, if Weatherman is correct in that basic thing, that the basic struggle in the world today is the struggle of the oppressed people against US imperialism, then it is the case that nothing we could do in the mother country could be adventurist. Nothing we could do because there is a war going on already, and the terms of that war are set. We couldn't be adventurist while there is genocide going on in Vietnam and in the black community ....

We have been attacked, he went on, specifically by Klonsky, for "fighting the people"instead of serving the people:

The more I thought about that thing "fight the people"—it's not that it's a great mass slogan or anything, but there's something to it. What's true about it is that we've never been in a struggle where we didn't have to fight some of the people .... There's a lot in white Americans that we do have to fight, and beat out of them, and beat out of ourselves. And that part of it is ttue—we have to be willing to fight people, and fight things in ourselves, and fight things in all white Americans—white privilege, racism, male supremacy—in order to build a revolutionary movement.

Ultimately, as Ayers saw it, the National Action would be successful if people felt confident about it:

What we have to communicate to people is our strength, and to show people our strength we have to show them the strength of fighting on the side of the worldwide movement ... . That's the image of Vietnam, it's that strength, that confidence, and that's what we have to bring to our own constituency ....We can't project that phony kind of image that you join the movement because you get a dollar more an hour, you join it cause you get New Left Notes, some bullshit—though that's a good thing, not a bad thing. You join the movement because you want to be part of that worldwide struggle that's obviously winning, and you win people over to it, and you win people over by being honest to them about the risks, by being honest to them about the struggle, by being honest to them that what they are getting into is a fight: it's not a comfortable life, it's not just a dollar more, it's standing up in the face of the enemy, and risking your life and risking everything for that struggle. But it's also being on the side of victory, and that's the essential thing we have to show people ....

Strategically, in the long run, it's our overwhelming strength that we have to play off of and that we have to win people to, and we have to communicate to people, and that's the only way people are going to come to understand the reality of the fact that we can, and will, and beginning in October are going to bring that war home in Chicago.

An extraordinary speech: Ayers managed to justify for the Weathermen their recklessness, arrogance, self-righteousness, and isolation, in the strongest and most persuasive terms.

The Progressive Labor Party's third annual summer work-in caused an enormous storm in the business community beforehand, helped on by dire warnings from the FBI, but it actually seems to have taken place with virtually no effect at all.

The National Association of Chain Drug Stores, the New York Commerce and Industry Association, and the National Association of Manufacturers all issued alarms to their members, and the NAM distributed four thousand copies of a special "Checklist for Plant Security" specifically to protect them against SDSers. Local chambers of commerce replicated the warnings, the businessmen in Berkeley, for example, sending out memos against SDS's "insidious plan to disrupt our economy," and the Long Island Association of Commerce and Industry alerting its members that "the militant left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), responsible for most of the violence and anarchy on the nation's campuses, are planning to invade industrial plants and other business organizations this summer for the purpose of disrupting operations and conducting intense propaganda campaigns among employees." All of the business press—the Wal/ Street Journal, Business Week, U.S. News, Barren's, and the trade journals—carried articles or editorials steeling their readers to the summer's onslaught: Barren's predicted "intimidation, sabotage, and violence," and Industry Week ran glossy two-page advertisements for its treatment showing a young man with bandoliers and rifles, a young woman with a burning Molotov cocktail, and the headline, "These kids worked up a wild new act for Industry. It's a riot." A variety of unions also denounced the work-in, including teamsters, carpenters, brewery workers, auto workers, and machinists; one labor paper declared:

We don't think the SDS is made of the stuff of which the Commies were made a generation ago. Those were real working-class stiffs. The SDS is only made up of arrogant, big-mouthed, so-called intellectual bumpkins. They never toil, just look for trouble.

And a Congressman from Texas, James M. Collins, announced that he had a list of twentyfour defense plants which SDS was planning to infiltrate (where this could have come from is a mystery), which the FBI put sufficient faith in to set up a special watch at all defense installations for the summer.

All of this thunder preceded only the merest summer sprinkle. Apparently none of these high-powered bulwarks of American industry was aware of the difference between PL and SDS, and assumed that when PL announced its work-in plans it was speaking for SDS and, moreover, the "SDS" of rioting and subversion which the press had created. In fact, however, PL had no intention of trying sabotage or disruption or rioting: the purpose of the work-in was to give students, especially the young ones brought into the Worker-Student Alliance groups, some factory-line experience so that they would be better WSAers and eventually easier recruits to the party. The work-in manual did suggest that if everything went as hoped the students could talk to workers about "the CLASS perspective," but in general, as PL's Challenge put it.*4

The main emphasis of the work-in is not to organize or preach to the working class, but to get a deeper understanding of the problems workers face, their ideas, and their power in struggle. While doing this, students will also talk to workers about racism, the student movement, the war, etc ....

The work-in is not a self-cultivating missionary experience. It is a key part of the strategy of building a worker-student alliance. This strategy flows from seeing that the exploitation of workers is the basis of this imperialist society.

Moreover, there were certainly no more than a thousand people involved in the whole affair, and they were concentrated mostly in New York, Boston, and Chicago—hardly enough of a force to "disrupt our national economy," even if they'd wanted to.

Naturally, then, the work-in had very little impact on the captains of industry. Business Week reported that not one single SDSer was ever found by the personnel departments or union bureaucrats, and added, "Across the country, the story was much the same: If SDS infiltrated plants, it was done so subtly that nobody noticed it—and nothing happened"; the Associated Press, similarly, took a sixteen-city survey in September and found the universal response: "no problems." In fact, the only time SDSers were noticed is when they made themselves obvious, largely during various strike-support efforts (in Atlanta, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.), and these were projects outside of the work-in proper. Whatever else may have gone on that summer, there was certainly nothing in the 1969 work-in to cause businessmen any sleepless nights.

By the beginning of the fall the new shape of Weatherman was clear. A small group of people, perhaps no more than two or three hundred, finally dedicated themselves to the revolution in a wholehearted way: they were making themselves into new people, organized and living collectively, rooting out most of what they had been brought up to believe, accepting the necessity of violence, producing their answer to the problem of revolutionary power. Certain tendencies that had only been hinted at in the "Weatherman" document itself were now solidified into beliefs: the primary attachment to Third World revolutionaries, the sense of the imminent collapse of the American state, the unwillingness to depend upon other sources in the society (either liberal or working-class), and the allegiance to violence.

If the job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution, that's what the Weathermen, in their own particular way, were trying to do.

At the same time, much was hampering their success. The summer's purgatory had produced in many Weathermen a dedication and commitment which turned very easily into arrogance and belligerence, which the Weathermen in their attempts to communicate power did not try to dispel. The process of forging instant revolutionaries through collective life and confrontational actions proved too abrasive for many originally sincere and hopeful people.

Others felt, as one man put it in Cleveland, that he knew his "hang-ups" about living with one woman were bourgeois but just now he wasn't willing to get rid of them simply for the sake of being "a good communist." The emphasis on violence bothered a number who had been brought up in pacifist ways, but even many of those who were willing to accept political violence thought that fighting with teenagers on Detroit beaches or running through the streets of Chicago into tear gas and billy clubs was hardly the best way to display it. In short. Weatherman was estranging people—people who tried it, people within the same organization, people close to it within the Movement—even as it took shape.

Which bothered the Weathermen, at least professedly, not at all. They had no real use any longer for a student movement—except as an area of potential recruits—and little more for a left movement. They were themselves the vanguard of a revolution which was inevitable, and though they welcomed those who wanted to fight they cared little for trying to make themselves into a broad national organization. Whatever SDS had been was no longer of interest to them—Mark Rudd said at one point, "I hate SDS, I hate this weird liberal mass of nothingness"—for the old SDS was too loose an organization and too undisciplined, too diverse in its politics and preparedness, too susceptible to infiltration and subversion, too varied in its willingness to operate militantly. SDS was not, in short, an organization with which you can realistically fight a revolution. Weatherman was—or thought itself to be.