Jeremy Varon (15 page)

The prediction of movement skeptics that the Weathermen would lead vulnerable youths into massacre did not come to pass; nor did the Days of Rage remotely satisfy Weatherman’s hope of devastating a major American city. Only a few hundred demonstrators, nearly all of them Weathermen, came to Chicago. They used chains and pipes to destroy property and battle police. Denounced by much of the left, ignored by working-class youths, and opposed by thousands of police and soldiers, the Weathermen were routed in Chicago. Weatherman had nonetheless honored its commitment. It had acted. Yet during and after the Days of Rage, there was little understanding of what the action meant, either for Weatherman, the movement, or the nation as a whole; in their lack of 74

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precedent and with their crazed energy, the Days of Rage challenged basic efforts to render the protest comprehensible, raising a problem of reading or representation.

However enigmatic, the Days of Rage revealed the importance of militancy for the New Left. Much more than a tactical orientation or style of protest, militancy was a defining ethos of the movement. Young radicals invested militant action with special power to enlighten, inspire, and mobilize. It provided a way for them to establish the authenticity of their commitments, to assert their dissident or “revolutionary” identities, and to live what they considered meaningful and engaged lives. The Weathermen drew on each of these attributes in promoting violence as the highest expression of militancy.

The Days of Rage also exemplified the hazards of this action ethos.

Militancy, as the Weathermen both illustrated and discovered, could encourage fatally reductive analyses, alienate potential supporters, and turn activism into a contest of personal dedication tending toward self-destruction. In extreme form, it violated outright the ends it meant to serve. Militancy was also intimately bound up with the efforts of New Leftists to define and connect with “reality.” Their concern with “reality” stemmed from two main desires: to understand the true nature of the forces that shaped their existence, and to separate themselves from an “inauthentic” or “unreal” world that discouraged political and moral engagement. The New Left’s politics of reality had its own ironies, however, in that it distanced militants like the Weathermen from credible apprehension of a reality they so desperately sought to change, even as it drove them to confront realities America tried so hard to deny.

.

.

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Hope you have got your things together

Hope you are quite prepared to die

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather

One eye is taken for an eye

Creedence Clearwater Revival,

“Bad Moon Rising”

The Weatherbureau, Weatherman’s leaders, anticipated arrests and injuries at the Days of Rage. A leaflet it issued from the SDS National Office in Chicago urged that cadres bring bail money and be familiar with basic first aid.1 The leadership felt, however, that a wholesale massacre was 76

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highly unlikely, reasoning that from the standpoint of the “ruling class”

the killing of large numbers of white demonstrators would be “impermissible.” Not wanting to instigate lethal violence, it ordered that firearms, which some collectives had already begun stockpiling, not be brought to the protest.2

Even so, the Weathermen conceded the possibility of serious injuries and even deaths in Chicago. The prospect seemed both to terrify and to intrigue them. Shin’ya Ono, a New York Weatherman, admitted to being afraid but explained that the killing of whites would have a devastating impact on Weatherman’s opponents. In addition, by suffering what

“were by Third World standards relatively light casualties, when the probable political gains were so clear,” the Weathermen would decisively renounce their “white-skin privilege” and demonstrate their solidarity with other revolutionaries.3 In her richly descriptive memoir, the Seattle Weatherwoman Susan Stern evokes the desperate pride and almost manic determination she felt as the Days of Rage approached: We weren’t just a bunch of superviolent kids out to destroy Chicago because we enjoyed vandalism. . . . We were serious revolutionaries, who felt the necessity of doing something so earth-shattering in America that the American masses would finally take notice. Mr. and Mrs.

America would . . . see our bodies being blasted by shotguns, our terrified faces as we marched trembling but proud, to attack the armed might of the Nazi state of ours. Running blood, young, white human blood spilling and splattering all over the streets of Chicago for NBC and CBS

to pick up in gory gory Technicolor. . . . But in order to make America really look and see, we had to do something so unholy, so strong and so deadly, that they would have no other recourse. And that is what we’re about.4

For Stern, the prospect of martyrdom—in all its spectacular gruesome-ness—defined the Days of Rage and the very spirit of Weatherman.

As the Weathermen made their way from cities across America to Chicago on October 6, 1969, they had good reason to be afraid. The spirits of the travelers were temporarily raised by news that Chicago Weathermen—in fact, Bill Ayers and Terry Robbins—had blown up the landmark statue commemorating the deaths of policemen in the 1886

Haymarket riots (after which labor leaders clearly innocent of any crimes had been cruelly executed).5 But this small triumph did little to assuage the creeping sense of the catastrophe to come. The promised flood of SDS militants and working-class youths into Chicago turned out to be a trickle. The New York collective, which had anticipated bringing a The Importance of Being Militant

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thousand people, managed to attract only thirty recruits. At the bus station, police had taunted the departing Weathermen about their meager numbers.6 By Weatherman’s estimation, only one out of every seven people who had pledged to come to the Days of Rage actually made the trip. Hundreds of police would be waiting for them.

Developments behind the scenes were scarcely more encouraging. The night before the action, the Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton met with several Weatherleaders, with Dave Dellinger, one of the defendants in the trial of the so-called Chicago 8 for conspiring to cause the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, and with the attorney William Kunstler mediating between the two sides. Earlier in the day, when Mark Rudd had answered Hampton’s criticisms of the protest by questioning Hampton’s political dedication, Hampton knocked Rudd flat with a punch. In the evening session, Hampton reiterated his view that the Days of Rage would likely result in useless arrests and injuries and invite greater repression of both white and black activists. After assurances by the Weathermen that they would show restraint, Hampton agreed not to denounce the group publicly but stopped short of pledging the Panthers’ support for the action.7

Despite weeks of intense organizing—speeches at campuses, outreach to other movement groups, daily trips to high schools, and “exemplary”

acts of militancy—the Weathermen brought almost no one new to Chicago. There was some sense to Weatherman’s goal of organizing a “revolutionary youth movement.” White working-class youths seemed to have much to gain and, relative to middle- and upper-class youths, little to lose in opposing a system that held few economic opportunities for them and shipped them off to war by the hundreds of thousands. But Weatherman’s belief that its anti-imperialist raps and scattered displays of toughness could transform the youths’ anxiety about the future and dislike of authority into enthusiasm for combat proved entirely misguided.

One Weatherwoman said of her attempts to recruit high school students:

[T]hey agreed that there were a lot of things wrong. But the plans for them was to get them to fight the police . . . and get them to attack the schools and whatever, go to Chicago. . . . 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 . . . [We were] telling them to throw away any chance they got and fight, and fight even though they were going to lose. . . . [M]aybe you’ll get killed, but the movement will grow . . . 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.8

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As if in search of Weatherman’s mythical youth army, Jeff Shero, the editor of New York’s
RAT: Subterranean News,
toured working-class towns in Arizona and talked to teenagers there just before the Days of Rage. He concluded that their basic aspirations—for romance, stable jobs, and perhaps a taste of the adventure the counterculture offered—

hardly squared with Weatherman’s designs for them.9 Assessing the Days of Rage years later, Phoebe Hirsch bluntly described the group’s failure:

“The goal was to bring a lot of people . . . but we were creating the kind of action that was designed to not have anybody come.”10 Russell Neufeld lamented that Weatherman’s message boiled down to, “‘The streets belong to the people, off the pig, dig it, do it,’ and it left out why [we] were doing these things.”11

Weatherman’s insistence that teenagers were ready to fight sprang in part from the group’s sense of how the political climate had changed since even the early and mid 1960s, when most of the Weathermen became politicized. Widespread opposition to the war, the growing generation gap, and the crisis atmosphere that characterized the late 1960s, they erroneously reasoned, made becoming a revolutionary a near-instantaneous process. The Weathermen thus imposed expectations on others that greatly diverged from their own experiences. Their radicalization had typically entailed years of political education, membership in left-wing organizations, interaction with black activists, participation in demonstrations, and skirmishes with police. Working-class youths were somehow to skip this process and discover revolutionary identities virtually ex nihilo. At root, Weatherman held a romanticized view of the working classes, believing that their beleaguered social position and presumed familiarity with violence at the level of everyday life gave them an instinctive rebelliousness and disposition to revolution. Years later, Cathy Wilkerson described the Weathermen’s militant posturing as “intellectuals playing at being toughs.” Even worse, by celebrating the anti-intellectualism, sexism, and violence of working-class culture as political virtues, the Weathermen appealed to the “most reactionary macho instinct[s]” of the youths they tried to recruit.12 Tellingly, the FBI informant who most successfully penetrated the group, Larry Grathwohl, was a working-class Vietnam veteran from the Midwest. The Weathermen seemed so enamored with his “authenticity” that they looked past clues to his actual identity.13

On the night of the October 7, the Weathermen checked into designated “movement centers” at area churches and seminaries, where they would stay during the demonstrations. The following evening a small The Importance of Being Militant

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crowd officially began the Days of Rage with a commemoration in Lincoln Park of Che Guevara’s death one year earlier. Describing the scene, Kirkpatrick Sale voiced what any observer would wonder: “What must it have felt like . . . standing in the darkness on a light rise at the south end of Lincoln Park, gathered around a small bonfire to ward off the chill of a Chicago fall, waiting for the thousands of revolutionaries to appear, and finding yourself in the midst of a tatterdemalion band of no more than two hundred people?”14 Ono gave a glimpse of the sensation.

He reported being so numb with dread and disbelief that he could hardly concentrate on the speeches.15 A Chicago-area teenage girl suffering from epilepsy had a grand mal seizure on the spot. Stern thought to herself, This is all there is, there are no more coming, no train from Michigan, no band of ten thousand whooping Indians from everywhere, just us, us only. . . . Tears formed in my eyes and slid down my cheeks. Beverly muttered, in a voice choked from between clenched teeth, “All that work, and our lives almost destroyed and nothing.” . . . I really didn’t mind dying, but only if I had to. But this really was suicide.16

Stern did not ultimately know why she stayed to do battle and what her possible martyrdom might be worth. She speculated: “Maybe I actually believed that I was part of the real revolutionary vanguard. I don’t really think so, but I have no other answer.”17 According to Larry Weiss, doubts and fears by that point “didn’t make a difference. We were revolutionary; you had to do it.”18

Naomi Jaffe seems the exception in confessing no great fear. The daughter of communist farmers in upstate New York, she had been “born with the sense that mainstream American culture . . . did not work for a lot of people.” Her father had taught her that a key lesson of the Cuban revolution was that the oppressed “had a right to seize their rights by armed struggle”; at her high school valedictory address in 1961, she had denounced the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As protest grew in the 1960s, her feeling was that “something really important was happening” that “I had longed for all my life and I didn’t want to miss.”

In order to be part of what she saw as a growing revolution, she joined Weatherman, and took a hard-nosed approach to being a revolutionary.

As for the Days of Rage, she explained: a “willingness to take risks . . .

didn’t come hard for me. . . . People said they were terrified. I wasn’t.

[They] thought they were going to die in October. I just didn’t.”19

Members of the Weatherbureau arrived at Lincoln Park an hour late.

They alone knew the destination of the march. Undeterred by the small 80

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numbers, they made speeches praising Guevara and the courage of the Weathermen prepared to follow his example. SDS co-founder and Chicago 8 defendant Tom Hayden briefly addressed the crowd. The Weathermen, in their battle dress of football and motorcycle helmets, heavy jackets and clubs, looked to him “like a primitive, neophyte army.” Despite his misgivings about the Weathermen, Hayden told them not to believe media reports that the Chicago 8 defendants disapproved of the action. Co-defendants Abbie Hoffman and John Froines had also come to the park, but they chose not to make speeches and quickly left.20