Jeremy Varon (10 page)

“Agents of Necessity”

47

Terry Robbins. Ayers, the son of a Chicago energy executive, had graduated from East Lansing’s Michigan State, where he engaged in early antidraft activities. He then used his enthusiasm, initiative, and famous charm to become a leader in the Ann Arbor chapter of SDS at the University of Michigan. Oughton, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois businessman, had become radicalized while working in Guatemala and now ran, with Ayers, an experimental school for young children. Robbins, from Ohio’s Kent State University, rounded out the inseparable foursome.

Excited by the militancy at August’s Democratic Convention and the recent spike in interest in SDS everywhere, they set out to transform SDS’s identity in their region. As part of the so-called Jesse James Gang they took over the leadership of the Ann Arbor SDS, foreshadowing the conflict between PL and the Weathermen. Equally important, they used confrontational action, an in-your-face politics, and their boisterous, even anarchic, spirit to help build large SDS chapters at colleges and universities in such places as Ypsilanti and Kalamazoo, Michigan—never before strongholds of student activism. Mellen, contrasting their appeal with the failure of their rivals, explained, “We wanted all kinds of people to rebel. Also, our dynamism, our ability to manipulate symbols, our charismatic leadership and ability to move crowds proved frightening to some of these staid Stalinist intellectuals, who were frightened by crowds, frightened by new ideas, frightened by the massive, impetuous, spontaneous development of people’s feelings. Hence, they hated us with a passion.”85

At a national level, their activities culminated in the presentation of a proposal, called “Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement” and conceived chiefly by Mellen, at a National Council meeting of SDS in December 1968. Asserting that SDS’s “most crucial ideological decision”

was to determine “its direction with regards to the working class,” the proposal urged that SDS organize white working-class youths as a way of reaching workers as a whole.86 Working-class youths, RYM reasoned, were open to a radical message by virtue of their limited stake in a system that subjected them to the draft, few economic opportunities, and harassment by authorities. The New Left, to play a revolutionary role, would have to transform itself from a middle-class student movement, hamstrung by its commitment to “student power” (this, RYM explained, was a form of “economism” rooted in students’ “petite-bourgeois” class interest) and strongest still at “elite campuses,” into a trans-class youth movement that penetrated into the junior colleges, the high schools, and even the military.87 Militancy, RYM conceded, might alienate older work-48

“Agents of Necessity”

ers, but would be impressive to youth and was therefore an important tool in their radicalization. RYM also insisted on the vanguard status of black radicals, and the Black Panthers especially, in the movement as a whole. Radicalizing working-class white youth therefore meant educating them about racism and the need to accept black leadership.

The infusion of revolutionary “ideology” into SDS caused a dramatic shift in the organization’s discourse and culture. Marxist theory, though giving the New Left a language with which to talk about class and to understand global struggles, largely served to tangle SDS in factional, jargon-laden debates reminiscent of the sectarianism of the Old Left. (The RYM proposal had been followed by a torrent of critiques and rebuttals, each of which invoked the letter of Marx, Lenin, and Mao to accuse the other of deviation from the “correct” analysis paving the proper revolutionary path.)88 This new climate disillusioned many SDS veterans and repelled newcomers, many of whom had little comprehension of the often esoteric arguments between the organized factions. Bernardine Dohrn was one of SDS’s later adherents. She had grown up in a Republican family in Wisconsin, attended law school at the University of Chicago, and then, after Martin Luther King Jr. brought his “Poor People’s Campaign” north, immersed herself in the contentious politics of race and class of Chicago. Schooled in organizing by activists from the southern civil rights movement, her main work was assisting tenants associations as they battled Chicago’s slum lords. Dohrn became active in SDS in 1968, rising within a year to a position of national leadership within the male-dominated organization. SDS, when she joined, was “famous for being anti-leadership and decentralized and grassroots and anarchistic.” By 1969, however, “the ideological debates,” in which Dohrn reluctantly, if skillfully, participated, had “reduced everybody to nitwits”

and left SDS “talking in slogans.”89

As an expression of SDS’s emerging class politics, some sharply repudiated their identity as students. A column in the SDS newspaper in the fall of 1968, co-authored by the future Weatherwoman Cathy Wilkerson, had stated bluntly: “The university is a place DEDICATED to the perpetuation of class exploitation” and urged SDSers to “de-studentize”

their lives.90 RYM insisted that activists’ acceptance of their “student classification” had been responsible for the “reactionary tendencies in SDS.”91 Others denigrated the cultural expressions of New Left rebellion. At one extreme, PL members rejected long hair and drug use as signs of “bourgeois” self-absorption and styled themselves as disciplined, short-haired proletarians, clad in work shirts. To have a place in the revolu-

“Agents of Necessity”

49

tion, many seemed to believe, one had to renounce one’s prior socialization and affiliate strongly with some properly revolutionary group.

In the spring and early summer of 1969, eleven SDS members affiliated with RYM drafted a 15,000-word statement titled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” after a lyric from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” (The title, Mellen recalls, was slapped on at the last minute with little deliberation. The tract was nearly named “The Vandal Statement,” both to quote the line “the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles” from the same Dylan song and to capture the group’s ambition to “disarm the United States.”)92 The statement’s principal author was J. J. (John Jacobs), a charismatic but notoriously domineering Columbia graduate who had defected from PL and now used his considerable knowledge of Marxist theory on behalf of a new revolutionary model. With the statement, the RYM members sought to limit PL’s power in SDS by responding to what they felt were PL’s heresies: its single-minded focus on the industrial working class; its refusal to fully support the Black Panthers and Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (PL opposed “all nationalisms” as antithetical to “proletarian internationalism”); and its opposition to SDS’s youth politics. The statement appeared in a special issue of
New Left Notes
printed for SDS’s National Convention in Chicago in late June, where PL and RYM were primed for a showdown.

True to predictions, the convention was notable for vitriol among the dominant factions. One reporter describing the mood in the vast, dank auditorium, observed: “SDS isn’t the free and open, free form group it once was. . . . Increasingly it is bedeviled by the incomprehensible, Marxist sectarianism which wrecked the old left, as people calling themselves Maoist and Leninist tussle over abstruse, revolutionary metaphysics in a social atmosphere that is depressingly Stalinoid and paranoid.”93 In the proceedings, RYM adherents and others rallying around the “Weatherman” statement successfully portrayed PL as anathema to SDS. With shrewd determination and great drama, they expelled PL by means of plebiscite. (Duplicity may have been involved as well. The Weatherman Johnny Lerner recently alleged that he and two other SDSers threw out pro-PL ballots; if true, the group, with “democratic” in its name, rigged perhaps its most pivotal election.)94 From the rubble of the convention, in which SDS crumbled into several warring parts, Weatherman was born.

The meeting concluded with the election of a number of “Weatherman” advocates as SDS’s national officers. Among these were Bernardine Dohrn; Mark Rudd, the former head of Columbia SDS, who became a 50

“Agents of Necessity”

nationally known figure during the 1968 protests; and the veteran organizers Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones. This group and their supporters, known collectively as the Weathermen, now controlled SDS’s national office in Chicago and the SDS newspaper
New Left Notes.
Though PL, based in Boston, insisted that it was the true SDS, most New Leftists recognized the Weathermen as the organization’s leadership. But many rank-and-file SDSers did not identify with either Weatherman, PL, or any of the smaller factions. As they withheld their support, SDS functionally dissolved as a national organization.

Weatherman represented much more than an answer to PL. The statement offered what the Weathermen felt was a bold new direction for SDS

(or what was left of it) and a way for the New Left to make itself into a genuinely revolutionary movement. Though not all Weatherman followers were necessarily versed in the detail of the cumbersome statement, it nonetheless articulated the key components of the group’s politics to which all Weathermen at least implicitly adhered.

The essence of Weatherman’s ideology was contained in the statement’s opening declaration that “the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.” Weatherman gave this conflict the status of the world’s “principal contradiction” and announced that the task of the revolutionary was “to solve this principal contradiction” on the side of “the oppressed.”

The goal was “a classless world.”95

Targeting imperialism, the Weathermen took aim at their society’s apparent crowning achievement: its vast wealth. “We are within the heart-land of a world-wide monster,” they proclaimed. “The US empire . . .

channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. . . . [A]ll of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz’s automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree, to the people of the rest of the world.”96 Weatherman also rejected the approach to socialism of much of the American left. To Weatherman, the comparative privilege of the American working class made any effort to organize domestic workers without addressing the exploitation of foreign labor an expression of “national chauvinism.”

Furthermore, the “white skin privilege” of white workers virtually precluded the possibility of their alliance with blacks, who had a lesser stake in supporting a system in which they would always be subordinate to whites, irrespective of their economic status.97

Weatherman concluded that the impulse to revolution in the United States—at least initially— could not possibly come from the adult white

“Agents of Necessity”

51

working class. Instead, it would come from three main sources: liberation movements in the Third World, the struggle of American blacks, and the activism of white working-class youths supporting the first two. To the Weathermen, Third World movements were chiefly responsible for the current “crisis of American imperialism,” manifest not only in America’s futile intervention in Vietnam but also in conflicts at home spawned or exacerbated by the war, from widespread protest to rampant anti-authoritarianism and even, Weatherman insisted, the breakdown of the family.98 Beyond declaring the Black Panthers to be the leaders of the American movement, Weatherman held that blacks could overthrow imperialism “alone if necessary.”99 Weatherman hoped, however, that blacks would be joined in doing so by white working-class youths. The immediate task of SDS was therefore to take the message of militant anti-imperialism to working-class youths in their own communities and build a “mass revolutionary movement” that, like the Chinese “Red Guards,” would “participate in violent and illegal struggle.”100

Though late-1960s radicals often invoked the notion of imperialism, they rarely defined it with any specificity and thereby avoided confronting its problems as an analytical frame. Principally, they were hard pressed to demonstrate a strongly economic—and hence narrowly imperialist—

motive for American intervention in Vietnam and other parts of the Third World. Neither the natural resources, nor labor, nor markets of poor countries like Vietnam were vital to the U.S. economy, in which exports and foreign investments played only secondary roles. In this light, the charge that the Vietnam War was fought essentially for the sake of corporate profits appears grossly exaggerated. Less credible still was Weatherman’s claim that
every
commodity in the United States was somehow the result of imperialist plunder.

The notion of imperialism fared far better, however, as a general description of U.S. power internationally. The United States, according to both the proponents and critics of its policies, sought to retain or expand its “spheres of influence.” Though individual countries like Cuba or Vietnam might fall to communism without any great impact on the domestic economy, the United States could scarcely afford to lose whole
regions
like Latin America or Southeast Asia. The economist Harry Magdoff defended the use of the term “imperialism” along precisely these lines:

[A]ttempts to explain isolated actions in “bookkeeping” terms make no sense. Small Latin American countries that produce relatively little profit are important in United States policy-making because control over all of Latin America is important. . . . [T]he killing and destruction in Vietnam 52

“Agents of Necessity”

and the expenditure of vast sums of money are not balanced in the eyes of U.S. policy makers against profitable business opportunities in Vietnam; rather they are weighed according to the judgment of military and political leaders on what is necessary to control and influence Asia.101

The other side of this image of American power was the sense that many Third World populations rising in concert
could
effectively erode the American empire. Russell Neufeld, reflecting on the optimism he felt in the late 1960s, pointed to just this sense. Raised in a progressive Jewish household in Long Island, he became an activist at a very early age (he was twelve at the time of his first march). A regional director of “Vietnam Summer” in 1967, Neufeld found himself attracted by 1969 to Weatherman’s internationalism and militant approach to protesting the war. As the American war effort faltered and left-wing movements worldwide gained strength, he came to think “that the Vietnamese revolution would be decisive” in a process of global revolution—a position akin to “believing in the domino theory, but thinking it was good.”102 Weatherman’s task was to help topple the last (and first) great domino: the United States itself.