You Say You Want a Revolution?

The New Left and the Weather Underground

Jacob Polowin 582 4199 HIST 420 Caralee Daigle March 30, 2011

On June 15th 1962, the fledgling organization Students for Democratic Society (SDS) adopted the Port Huron Statement at its first annual convention in astonishingly Port Huron, Michigan. Serving as the foundational document for what would become the most powerful organization of young people in the American New Left, the statement called for student engagement in participatory democracy going so far as to advocate nonviolent civil disobedience in order to reform an American society that it saw as racist, undemocratic and militaristic. Striking a chord with young, white college students, the Port Huron Statement became a manifesto for a generation bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in the universities, looking uncomfortably to the world [it] inherit[s].1 This was a generation that had grown up under the shadow of the bomb, a generation discontented with the prejudices of their parents, a generation that would ultimately rise in a wave unlike any seen before to crash upon the edifice of affluent America. On March 6, 1970, an explosion ripped through a townhouse in Greenwich Village, New York City. Caused by the accidental detonation of a nail bomb intended for a NonCommissioned Officers dance at nearby Fort Dix, the explosion killed three leading members of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO),2 an organization claiming to be the legitimate successor of the by then defunct SDS. Yet, this latest incarnation was clearly driven to far more extreme ends than its predecessor in seeking to kill American servicemen, the WUO had strayed far from the promise and optimism of Port Huron. Indeed, far from the moderately left wing, loosely organized, open, national organizational that was the SDS, the WUO had become a

SDS Port Huron Statement in Takin it to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 51. 2 Throughout its history, the WUO would be known by several different names, including Weatherman, the Weathermen, the Weatherpeople and the Weather Underground, before adopting the title of the WUO. For the purpose of consistency as well as gender-neutrality, it will be generally be referred to as the WUO throughout the paper, though in certain circumstances other titles will be necessary.

radical, militant, rigidly organized collection of semi-autonomous underground collectives, willing and eager to engage in acts of terrorism in order to lead the white kids to armed revolution to topple the imperialist American regime in favour of a communist government.3 The questions are thus begged: how did calls for participatory democracy lead to bombings? How did a mass movement of students become an exclusive cadre of committed revolutionaries? How and why did a group of white, middle class students, raised in relative privilege,4 turn against everything society had given them? The answers unfold like a Greek tragedy. It is the story of, to paraphrase Ginsberg, the best minds of a generation destroyed by alienation and frustration. It is the story of the best intentions of a movement and of a generation co-opted and ultimately wasted by a militant few. It is the story of the wave crashing against the political establishment of America, and establishment holding firm. It is the story of the WUO. The following will chart the rise and fall of the WUO, beginning with its origins in the SDS, through its emergence onto the national stage during the 1969 Days of Rage protests in Chicago, the decision to go underground and the issuance of a declaration of war in 1970, and the major actions and statements of the organization until its dissolution in 1976-1977. Further examined will be the shifts in ideology and strategy that occurred throughout the WUOs existence, evidenced in its official statements and documents. Indeed, this paper will argue that originally, the direct actions of the WUO, such as the Days of Rage, were reflective of broader

WUO, A Declaration of a State of War in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, ed. Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 149. 4 Klaus Mehnert, Twilight of the Young: The Radical Movements of the 1960s and Their Legacy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 50-51.

trends in the New Left,5 which had increasingly begun to see violence as a justifiable means to accomplish political ends. However, the decision to go underground and declare war represented a perversion of the ideology of the New Left, as the WUO rejected political organization in favour of revolutionary purity and the pursuit of violence against the state as an end in itself. The publication of the New Morning communiqu in 1971 represented a further shift in ideology, as it attempted to strike a balance between the violence of the WUO and the traditional New Left impulse for political organization, while with the publication of Prairie Fire in 1974, the WUO completed an inversion of sorts, largely repudiating violence and embracing political ideologies and strategies it had summarily rejected just five years before. The story of the WUO begins with the SDS. By 1968, the optimism of Port Huron had largely disappeared, washed away amid mounting frustration over continued American escalation in Vietnam, despite the growing resistance to the draft and massive anti-war demonstrations. In response, SDS increasingly opted for direct confrontation with authorities, with a series of SDS-led demonstrations including the 1967 March on the Pentagon, 1968 protests in San Francisco, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and on the campus of Columbia University ending in spectacular and violent clashes between protestors and police and garnering national attention for the organization.6 As the actions of SDS became more radical, so too did its ideology. Indeed, Harold Jacobs argues that by mid-1966, SDS had shifted ideologically from the centre-left organization of 1962 to one that was developing in a revolutionary Marxist direction.7 This shift was supported by huge numbers of students, as evidenced by a 1968 Fortune magazine poll that
5

For the purposes of this paper, the term New Left should be interpreted as referring specifically to the New Left in America, unless otherwise stated. 6 Stuart Daniels, The Weathermen, Government and Opposition 9, no. 4 (1974): 433. 7 Harold Jacobs, Introduction to Part 1 in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 2.

found some nineteen percent of respondents at last partially in favour of the creation of a mass revolutionary party.8 Yet, this ideological shift was by no means universal or monolithic. While SDS was united around its opposition to the war, the loosely organized association lacked any sort of unifying ideology. As might be expected, this led to all manner of ideological factionalism, as SDS was torn by questions of who and what the revolution and the revolutionaries would be.9 By the June 1969 annual convention of SDS in Chicago, this rising factionalism had split SDS to its core. The convention was dominated by conflict between the Progressive Labour (PL) faction of SDS, a self-styled Marxist-Leninist party, and a loose coalition of other factions including Revolutionary Youth Movement I (RYM I) and RYM II that were bitterly opposed to PL. PL conceptualized the coming revolution as essentially traditionally Marxist, and thus sought to subordinate the aims of groups such as the Black Panthers who struggled for national liberation for blacks in America to the wider goals of the revolution. The RYM coalition, on the other hand, viewed the Panthers as the preeminent revolutionary party in the country and thus argued that any revolutionary actions undertaken by white students should be in support of, if not subordinate to, the aims of the Panthers.10 Writing in New Left Notes, the official SDS newsletter, in support of the RYM position, Bernadine Dorhn later to become one of the iconic leaders of the WUO argued, The best thing we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the revolutionary black liberation struggle is to build a fucking white revolutionary movement.11

8 9

Mehnert, 40. David Cunningham, Theres Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 59. 10 Ron Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (London: Verso, 1997), 13. 11 Quoted in Ron Jacobs, 13.

In an attempt to provide a unifying, defined ideology to serve as a bulwark against PL, the national office of the SDS (which was opposed to PL) distributed a position paper to delegates entitled You Dont Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows. Taken from the lyrics of Bob Dylans Subterranean Homesick Blues, the documents title, like the song, implied that delegates did not need someone to tell them what was happening in America and the world. The answer was blowing in the wind and they could clearly see that revolution was coming, that the times were a changing. Outlining what would become the ideological foundation of the WUO, the document argued that the main struggle going on in the world today is between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it12 and thus the goal of SDS must be the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.13 In order to achieve this, the document called for creation of an underground, clandestine revolutionary party, supported by a mass revolutionary movementbased on the full participation and involvement of masses of people in the practice of making revolution; a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.14 Thus, while advocating an underground element to the revolution, the document hewed closed to SDSs tradition of mass political mobilization, while justifying indeed calling for the increasingly radical and confrontational tactics of anti-war protestors. The document, while galvanizing much of the convention against PL, caused an irreparable split in the delegates. Hundreds sided with the RYM faction which would henceforth be known as the Weatherman faction,15 in honour of the resolution and led by Bernadine Dorhn, left the convention hall, proclaiming itself the true SDS, decrying the
12 13

SDS, You Dont Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, New Left Notes, June 18, 1969 ibid. 14 ibid. 15 Here the term Weatherman faction is used rather than WUO in recognition of the fact that at this point the group in question was merely a faction of SDS, rather than at semi or fully separate entity.

remaining PL members inside as usurpers. The Weatherman faction was able to win control of the crucial national office henceforth referred to as the Weather Bureau and would continue to refer to itself as the SDS for some months, but the organization had been mortally wounded. No longer able to contain the rivalries and conflicts seething within, the great stalwart of the New Left and a national force had been torn asunder in three short days.16 Yet, the convention had not been entirely unproductive. Indeed, the Weatherman faction of SDS had persuaded the convention to begin planning for what would become known as the Days of Rage protests, to be held in October 1969 in Chicago. Inspired by the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, this national action would be unprecedented in its revolutionary ambition, as SDS for the first time called for deliberate and widespread violence on the part of the protestors. A leaflet circulated by the Weather Bureau before the protests made no pretentions as to the aim of the protests, proudly claiming that tens of thousands would converge on Chicago to tear the mother-fucker apart.17 Yet, while the call for deliberate violence on such a massive scale was a first for SDS, it merely reflected the next logical step for an organization that increasingly saw direct action as the only way to achieve its goals. Indeed, the concept of the Days of Rage grew out of a resolution adopted at a SDS meeting in 1968 entitled "The Elections Don't Mean ShitVote Where the Power IsOur Power Is In The Street" which, as its title suggests, called for direct and violent action to achieve in the streets what could not be achieved at the ballot box.18 The time for peaceful protest had come and gone. It was now time, as the SDS posters proclaimed, to bring the war home.19

16 17

Mehnert, 45-46. Quoted in Ron Jacobs, 51. 18 Varon, 61. 19 Tom Thomas, The Second Battle of Chicago in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 197.

Such was the revolutionary fervour of the Weatherman faction that its members, with the resources of the SDS now behind them, spent the summer travelling the country, setting up Weatherman collectives of radicals in many major cities and promoting the coming October protests as the spark that would start the revolution. Furthermore, the Weather Bureau went so far as to send members of its leadership to Cuba to meet with Castro and other Third World leaders, to consult on revolutionary ideology and tactics.20 Yet, regardless of the best efforts of the collectives, on October 8, the planned beginning of the Days of Rage, only some three hundred protestors showed up in Chicagos Lincoln Park. Though these were committed revolutionaries, armed with chains, pipes and clubs, they were a far cry from the army of youth envisioned by the Weather Bureau. Pressing on, the protestors rioted throughout the city over the course of three days, managing to inflict over one million dollars worth of damage in the affluent neighbourhoods of The Loop and Gold Coast. However, in addition to suffering from initial lack of numbers, the protests failed to attract any significant numbers of people to their cause over the course of the three days and were easily contained by police, while many protestors were seriously beaten and 284 including much of the leadership were arrested.21 Yet the protests managed to capture sufficient attention from the national press garnering headlines such as SDS Women Fight Cops and Radicals go on Rampage to allow the Weather Bureau to claim moral victory, while admitting tactical defeat.22 Indeed, Weatherman Shinya Ono argued that Chicago was an unqualified success, as it demonstrated the bona fides of the WUO, proving that its members

20

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1989), 81-82. 21 Ron Jacobs, 63-64. 22 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), 293-294.

could go toe-to-toe with the authorities, while at the same time galvanizing support among the youth and providing necessary training and experience to the protestors themselves.23 The protests further demonstrated that violence was now a justifiable and legitimate tactic for the New Left. Though the actions in Chicago provoked criticism from some sectors of the New Left, including from the Guardian newspaper and much of the old RYM II faction of SDS which had split from the Weatherman, or RYM I, faction shortly after the June 1969 convention the majority of commentary on the New Left was supportive of the violence.24 This was reflective of the growing trend towards violent and direct action that by 1969 was evident throughout a movement whose roots lay in pacifism. Indeed, Jeremy Varon argues that armed struggle was merely an extreme expression of ideologies, attitudes, and sensibilities deeply embedded 25 in the New Left, and that New Leftists discussed taking up arms as early as 1967.26 Thus, while the Weather Bureaus adoption of mass violence against the state doubtlessly represented a shift in tactics on the New Left, it was an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary shift. Far from breaking with the ethos of the New Left, the actions in Chicago were merely a large-scale adoption of a trend that had been growing organically within the movement for some time. Yet, in Chicagos wake, such a break would occur. The Days of Rage had made the WUO an object of national, and consequently, government investigation. It was the subject of investigations by both the FBI and the Senate Committee of Internal Security, while its members

23

Shinya Ono, A Weatherman: You Do Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 271-273. 24 Ron Jacobs, 66-73. 25 Varon, 3. 26 Varon further states that this tendency towards violence was reflected in the West German New Left as well, demonstrating that the WUO were not unique in a global sense.

were subject to constant harassment, surveillance and arrest often on trumped up charges.27 Furthermore, the WUO bore witness to a time of shocking and unprecedented governmental repression of political dissent in the form of the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), as the FBI, in conjunction with local police, carried out a systematic campaign against a multitude of organizations on the New Left. Aside from surveillance, this campaign involved harassment, planting of false intelligence, propaganda, and in some more extreme cases, even kidnappings and assaults.28 Even murder was not out of the question, as evidenced by the gunning down of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed by Chicago police officers working under the direction of the FBI.29 Faced with mounting pressure from COINTELPRO, and increasingly frustrated by the lack of revolutionary fervour among white youth as evidenced in Chicago the Weather Bureau decided that the time had come to fulfill their mission, to become a clandestine organization.30 Outlined in You Dont Need a Weatherman, begun with the establishment of WUO collectives in the summer of 1969, the process would be completed at a War Council held in Flint, Michigan. The time had come to go underground. Though billed as a SDS National Council it was clear from the outset that the Flint convention, held from December 27-31, 1969, would constitute a break from the organization of the past, with an article in Fire (formerly New Left Notes) promising that the Flint would witness the birth of the new SDS.31 Attended by around 400 delegates nearly universally loyal to the Weathermen Faction the meeting was held in a ballroom stained by the blood of a recent shooting, and bedecked with posters of revolutionary icons, a giant machine gun, and additional

27 28

Ron Jacobs, 73-74. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, COINTELPRO: The FBIs Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens (1976) 29 Cunningham, 33. 30 Varon, 3. 31 SDS, National War Council in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 337.

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posters of the WUOs enemies Nixon, Agnew, Reagan, Daley with symbolic bullets affixed. Amid this air of revolutionary fervour, speeches made by attendees began to stray far beyond the usual rhetoric of the New Left. In light of the low turnout in Chicago, as well as a lack of backlash to the vicious attacks made by COINTELPRO on the Black Panthers, members of the WUO began to denounce white students their brethren in the New Left attacking them as soft, weak and not sufficiently committed to the revolution. In the words of Harold Jacobs, compared to its earlier abstract commitment to a socialist revolution made by an overwhelming majority of the American people, Weatherman began to believe that the enemy was not just the ruling class, but in its words white, honky racist Amerika (sic) itself.32 Thus, the WUO rejected not only the New Lefts impulse for mass political organization, but also its own commitment, as outlined in its foundational document, to build a mass revolutionary movement.33 With this realization, the decision to go underground was finalized. Having lost faith in the movement as a whole, attendees came to believe that their best chance for revolution was to abandon organization and to focus all their energies on covertly waging war on the state, in support of the black revolutionary movement, with the hopes of provoking a general uprising. Ideologically, this represented a sharp break from the WUOs roots, as it constituted a total rejection of the core New Left belief in the power of the masses. This break from the movement was symbolized by the decision to officially disband the SDS, the great organizer of the masses, in favour of the establishment of a small, committed revolutionary band.

32 33

Harold Jacobs, Introduction to Part 3 in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 311 SDS, You Dont Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

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Yet, beyond renouncing the New Left, at Flint the WUO showcased a desire to become the antithesis of everything honky America which the New Left was now considered a part of stood for. In this regard, members renounced and denigrated the middle class upbringing and values that for the most part served as a unifying thread throughout the white New Left. Indeed, the convention bore witness to speeches praising Charles Manson, and to serious debates as to whether white babies should be killed so as to prevent them growing into adult bourgeoisie oppressors. Rhetoric framed the WUO as Visigoths, barbarians raining terror upon the empire, while Bernadine Dohrn presented the ideal Weatherman as not simply a determined revolutionary, but rather an agent of disruption, chaos and fear.34 Demonstrating the allencompassing nature of the ideological shift undertaken by the WUO, Harold Jacobs argues that the organizations frustration at not being able to put together the machinery that could begin to immediately smash the system led to a vulgar negation of its values.35 No longer was it enough to not support imperialist, corrupt America. Rather, unless one was directly fighting against it, one was supporting it. This was a radical shift indeed. Following the convention, the underground organization was built through the collectives that had been established in the summer. These collectives small, insular and self-contained by necessity became the laboratories in which Weatherpeople sought to negate the bourgeoisie values of middle America, to move past their own middle class upbringing, to achieve revolutionary purity, to, in the words of Bernadine Dohrn scare the shit out of Honky America.36 This desire manifested itself in the smash monogamy campaign, in which monogamous relationships were disallowed and sexual taboos including homosexual and
34 35

Varon, 159-160. Harold Jacobs, Introduction to Part 3, 311. 36 Quoted in Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91.

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group sex were encouraged, and occasionally forced.37 Furthermore, collectives participated in Weather Fries, in which members were subjected to brutal group and self-criticism, in an effort to substitute a group identity for an individual one, to replace the will of the individual with the will of the collective.38 These bizarre practices demonstrate the degree to which the tactics, but more importantly the very values, of the New Left and SDS were rejected following Flint. Retreating into the underground, the WUO sought to transform itself into something never before seen: an organization capable of destroying not only the political establishment of imperialist America, but the very fabric of its society individualism and monogamy being important elements of that fabric. With the release of A Declaration of a State of War, the WUOs war became public knowledge. Recorded on a tape deck by Bernadine Dohrn, and released to radio stations around the country on May 21, 1970, the declaration reiterated that, tens of thousands have learned that protests and marches dont do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.39 Furthermore, the declaration promised support for the black liberation movement, and warned that the WUO would adopt the classic guerilla strategy of the Tupamoros an urban guerrilla organization active in Uruguay in the 1960s.40 While it did not contain any new revelations regarding the groups political thinking, the declaration was significant in that it formalized the groups break with the New Left, by promising to enter into a period of underground warfare, without any correlating above-ground organization. Furthermore, it warned, Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan (sic) injustice.41 Thus, the war would begin.

37 38

Collier and Horowitz, 84. Collier and Horowitz, 92. 39 WUO, A Declaration of a State of War,149. 40 Ibid, 149. 41 Ibid, 151.

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The war began some twenty days later, with the bombing of the New York City Police Headquarters. To mark its occasion, the WUO released a communiqu that closed with the words political power grows out of a gun, a molotov, a riot, a commune and from the soul of the people.42 In case there was any lingering doubt, the bombing and communiqu shattered any remaining illusion that the WUO was operating in the tradition of the New Left, and could conceivably be reigned in or contained. Rather, it demonstrated the WUOs firm belief that political power came from violence, not numbers, and that only violence would be capable of stirring America to action. This belief was put into action with the beginning of the Fall Offensive on October 8, 1970, the one-year anniversary of the Days of Rage. Begun with the bombing of the Haymarket Police Statue which had been bombed by the WUO one year before and had since been rebuilt this period would be the WUOs most active, witnessing its bombs exploding in Chicago, Long Island, Cambridge, and Marin County, California during October alone.43 Representing perhaps the closest that the WUO would come to open war with the state, its belief in the inefficacy of any alternative tactics was reiterated in a communiqu marking the start of the offensive, which blasted student leaders for renouncing their radicalism, and trusting a government that promised peace while bombing Cambodia and murdering its own students at Kent State and Jackson State. Rejecting what it saw as the empty promises of the establishment, it warned, dont be tricked by talk. Arm yourselves and shoot to live!44 In many ways, the Fall Offensive marked a high point for the WUO. Operating with seeming impunity, always steps ahead of the pigs, its actions
42

WUO, Headquarters in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, ed. Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 152. 43 Ron Jacobs, 198. 44 WUO, Fall Offensive in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, ed. Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 157.

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captured the attention of the media and the nation, winning the group many wealthy benefactors on the Left ironically those whom the WUO disparaged as bourgeoisie agents of American imperialism. Yet, all was not well in Weatherland. Even before the bombing of the NYPD Headquarters, the official start of the WUOs war, the organization had been rocked by tragedy, with three of its members killed in the aforementioned Greenwhich townhouse explosion. The explosion affected the WUO deeply. Despite constant bravado about revolution, violence and war against the state, the majority of WUO members were the children of the middle class, and had experienced relatively sheltered upbringings. The notion of violent death had only really existed in the abstract, the fate of the enemies in the revolutionary fantasy, not of the revolutionaries.45 Thus, the experience proved a watershed moment for the WUO, prompting a serious reevaluation of the groups tactics, beliefs and strategies at a retreat in California. Here, the tactic of indiscriminate violence against individuals was repudiated, in favour of the targeting of symbols rather than people.46 This decision was the major reason that not one person was been killed during the Fall Offensive, and that the WUO would go to great lengths to ensure a lack of casualties with their subsequent bombings. While still preoccupied with violence, this violence would now be directed against the symbols of the state rather than its civilians. Yet, the most important development to come out of this self-evaluation was the New Morning Changing Weather communiqu. Distributed to members of the underground press on December 6, 1970, it admitted that the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed

45 46

Mehnert, 50-52. Varon, 182.

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struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle,47 while renouncing the WUOs tendency to consider only bombing or picking up the gun as revolutionary48 This rejection of the previously macho attitude of the group was confirmed by the documents praising of the womens movement, and its adoption of the gender-neutral title of the Weather Underground.49 Furthermore, the communiqu repudiated the groups elitist disdain for the New Left, stating we became aware that a group of outlaws who are isolated from the youth communities do not have a sense of what is going on, cannot develop strategies that grow to include large numbers of people, have become us and them.50 Finally, in a truly surprising revision of its earlier positions, the WUO praised the youth culture which it had so vehemently mocked at Flint, while calling for the similarly mocked tactics of mass organization finally recognizing that an underground cadre without a mass base of popular support was doomed to failure.51 Thus, the fires of Greenwhich prompted the WUO to at least begin to return to its roots. While its actions were doubtlessly still beyond the pale of anything practiced by the mainstream New Left, its recognition of the efficacy and necessity of mass political organizing, and its reembracing of the culture from which it sprang, demonstrated a determined effort by the WUO to reconcile its revolutionary fervour with the views of the movement it had left behind, to achieve a kind of if it can be said less radical radicalism. Yet, New Morning had come too late: too late to save SDS; too late to win the WUO a sufficient following to make it a force in American politics; and too late to do anything but reframe a struggle to topple the American government

47

WUO, New Morning Changing Weather in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, ed. Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 162. 48 Ibid, 164. 49 The group had heretofore referred to itself as Weatherman 50 WUO, New Morning Changing Weather, 164. 51 Ibid, 164-168.

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that was destined to failure.52 The irony is apparent and glaring. Less than two years after playing an integral role in the destruction of SDS, ridiculing its members and tactics, the WUO now struggled fruitlessly to regain those members and to rebuild the movement. Nevertheless, the WUO plodded along. If New Morning sparked fears that it had gone soft, those fears were quickly put to rest by perhaps the WUOs most spectacular action: its bombing of the U.S. Capitol on March 1, 1971. Though causing relatively minor damage, the bombing indicated that the WUO could strike at the very heart of American power, and garnered tremendous attention from the media. Furthermore, it served as an inspiration for a movement that had according to media reports been petering out, and galvanized the New Left ahead of massive anti-war demonstrations planned for the end of April.53 For a brief, fleeting moment, it seemed as if the entire enterprise could be rebuilt, with the WUO assuming its rightful place at the vanguard of the revolution It was not to be. Though the protests attracted huge numbers of people, and resulted in some twelve thousand arrests, the WUO was almost entirely uninvolved. Indeed, Collier and Horowitz argue that from the moment it went underground, members of the WUO were far more occupied with the basic necessities of staying alive and free than with planning and carrying out the revolution.54 Though the organization would continue bombing symbols of American imperialism California prison offices, the offices of the New York Commissioner of Corrections, and the office of McGeorge Bundy in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972, and the offices of ITT Corporation in 197355 its time in the spotlight had largely passed. From 1969 -1975, the WUO claimed credit for just twelve bombings, nearly all causing negligible damage. This paltry
52 53

Varon, 188. Ron Jacobs, 130-131. 54 Collier and Horowitz, 104. 55 Ron Jacobs, 198-200.

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effort was not even in the wildest fantasies of the most committed revolutionaries nearly enough to spark the revolution, or even to scratch the American windmill towards which the WUO continued to so quixotically charge. Even the organizations communiqus began to seem worn and repetitive amidst changing times, as many once-revolutionary groups attempted to move back into the political mainstream, abandoning violence for community organizing and voter registration.56 The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 seemed to spell the end for the WUO, and the broader New Left. Bereft of the great unifier of American imperialist aggression in Vietnam, the movement gradually faded into the annals of history. Facing this existential crisis, the WUO completed its final shift in ideology and strategy, what Weatherman John Jacobs termed the Weather Inversion.57 Now, the WUOs ideology would come full circle. Facing much less pressure from authorities,58 the decision was made to have much of the WUO come out from the underground, and to reform the WUO as a mass revolutionary communist political party.59 As a result of this decision, in 1974 the WUO published Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary AntiImperialism, an 150-page book dealing with, among other things, the history of revolutionary leftist thinking, anti-imperialist struggles and minority struggles, as well as outlining the WUOs new political philosophy. While its introduction called for a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build a new

56 57

Ron Jacobs, 153. Collier and Horowitz, 110 58 Many charges against the WUO were dropped in 1973 due to revelations of years of illegal techniques and massive police abuse by COINTELPRO. 59 Varon, 108.

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society, in reality its tone was much softer, and represented a fairly substantial departure from the WUO of the past.60 Largely renouncing its guerilla tactics, Prairie Fire described the WUOs bombings as armed propaganda, intended to arm the spirit and stir the imagination rather than instigate an outright war.61 Furthermore, the WUO now placed nearly all of its emphasis on political organization, beyond even the emphasis outlined in New Morning, maintaining its underground arm only to perpetuate the myth of the WUO as righteous guerillas. Additionally, Prairie Fire embraced Marxists rhetoric about the necessity and primacy of organizing workers in support of a broad-based communist revolution.62 This was supremely ironic given that this was the very rhetoric for which the WUO had so denounced PL in 1969, the very rhetoric over which it had been willing to destroy SDS. The WUO sought to implement this new organizational impulse through the Prairie Fire Organizing Committees (PFOCs), designed to organize students and workers in a manner similar to the old SDS.63 Thus, the Weather Inversion was complete. With Prairie Fire, the WUO adopted ideology it had struggled so passionately against, while seeking to revive an organization and a movement it had once found so contemptible, an organization and a movement it had once been so integral in destroying. This desire to revive the movement manifested itself in the Hard Times conference to be held ironically enough in Chicago in 1976. Conceived of as a revival of the New Left, it was organized by the PFOCs and attended by some two thousand activists and radicals, and sought to create an umbrella organization encompassing the spectrum of radical groups. Yet, far
60

WUO, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism in in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, ed. Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), 234. 61 Ibid. 242-243. 62 Varon, 294. 63 Collier and Horowitz, 110.

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from the glorious revival of the WUO and the movement, the conference sounded the death knell for both. Torn by issues of race and ideology ironically similar to the issues that had divided the 1969 SDS convention the conference soon devolved into chaos and infighting. By its end, the WUO had split into competing factions.64 Though some of its members would continue the underground struggle into the 1980s, the majority would surface over the next few years and reintegrate into society. The revolution was over. The wave had broken. The WUO was no more. Thus, what always been an impossible dream ended not in a blaze of glory, but with a whimper. Born out of alienation with an increasingly unsustainable and corrupt American state, catalyzed into action by the inefficacy of the conventional channels in which its members had been taught to believe, the WUO at first found itself at the vanguard of a movement and a generation. Indeed, the violence witnessed during the Days of Rage was merely the next logical step for the movement out of which the WUO was born, a movement which increasingly saw violence as necessary, justifiable, and the only effective tool left against an evil state. Yet, frustrated by the ineffectiveness of even this violence, the WUO renounced not only American society but also its brethren on the New Left, breaking with the ideology, tactics and even values of the movement, in an effort to attain revolutionary purity, to scare the shit out of honky America.65 However, when faced with the death of its own, the WUO realized the unsustainable nature of its positions on the margins, and thus sought at least to begin to move back towards the movement. With New Morning, the WUO began to re-embrace some of the ideology and the values it had repudiated, seeking to strike a balance between the mass organization of the New Left and its own desire for guerilla warfare. This trend back towards the

64 65

Ibid, 112-113. Quoted in Stephens, 91.

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mainstream, coupled with the desire to stay relevant in a post-Vietnam world, culminated in the publication of Prairie Fire , spelling out the Weather Inversion in which the WUO embraced the workers, mass organization and politics it had rejected just five years earlier. In a final fit of regret, the WUO sought to rebuild the movement it had shattered, yet it was not to be. Thus, the epitaph of the WUO is a sad one indeed. Unable to confront the monstrosity of their government, in all its agent-orange-dropping, napalm-lighting, My Lai-massacring horror, members of the WUO instead sought shelter in the world of the underground, assuaging their guilt through fantasies of revolutionary war, deluding themselves into justifying terrorism. Yet, in their quest for ascetic revolutionary purity, they managed to destroy the very institutions best capable of achieving some measure of the revolution they so desperately sought, ripping the New Left apart with an almost suicidal fervour. Indeed, the final attempts of the WUO to rebuild the movement it destroyed - desperate, ironic, regretful and tragicomic as they were come off as just that, and the appropriately tragic end to a misguided and Sisyphean enterprise. In a final twist of the knife, the story ends thusly: Those who avoided death or jail grew up, got jobs, had children and became part of America. Honky America. As the wave receded, the beach lay intact, aside from perhaps a few misplaced pebbles.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, COINTELPRO: The FBIs Covert Action Programs Against American Citizens. 1976. Students for a Democratic Society, National War Council in Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs, 337-340. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970. Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement in Takin it to the Streets: A Sixties Reader, edited by Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, 51-61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Students for a Democratic Society, You Dont Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows, New Left Notes, June 18, 1969. Weather Underground Organization, A Declaration of a State of War in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, edited by Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones, 149-151. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Weather Underground Organization, Fall Offensive Weather Underground Organization, Headquarters in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, edited by Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones, 156-158. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Weather Underground Organization, Headquarters in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, edited by Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones, 151-152. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Weather Underground Organization, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary AntiImperialism in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, edited by Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones, 230-387.s New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Weather Underground Organization, New Morning Changing Weather in Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqus of the Weather Underground 1970-1974, edited by Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones, 161-169. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. Secondary Sources Collier, Peter and David Horowitz. Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1989. Cunningham, David. Theres Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan and FBI Counterintelligence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

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Daniels, Stuart. The Weathermen. Government and Opposition 9, no. 4 (1974): 430-459. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Jacobs, Harold. Introduction to Part 1 in Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs, 1-13. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970. Jacobs, Harold. Introduction to Part 3 in Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs, 301-312. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970. Jacobs, Ron. The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. London: Verso, 1997. Mehnert, Klaus. Twilight of the Young: The Radical Movements of the 1960s and Their Legacy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Ono, Shinya. A Weatherman: You Do Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows in Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs, 227- 274. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970. Stephens, Julie. Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Thomas, Tom. The Second Battle of Chicago in Weatherman, edited by Harold Jacobs, 196225. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970.

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