Jeremy Varon (21 page)

“Violent” dotting the collage.

On the reverse side, a National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) star sat in the middle of more battle pictures, over which Weatherman wrote: On Monday, October 6, a pig statue honoring the murderers of Chicago strikers was blown to bits. On Tuesday, October 7, the head of the Chicago Pig Sergeants Association said that “SDS has declared war on the Chicago Police—from here on in it’s kill or be killed.” On Wednesday, October 8

a white fighting force was born in the streets of pig city. . . . We came to 108

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Chicago to join the other side—to stop talking and start fighting . . . to destroy the motherfucker from the inside.

There were only 500 of us, but we forced Pig Daley to call in the Guard. . . . We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IN IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—

WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE

NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA—BEWARE: THERE’S AN ARMY

GROWING RIGHT IN YOUR GUTS, AND IT’S GOING TO HELP

BRING YOU DOWN. DID THAT PIG SAY KILL OR BE KILLED?111

Judging from
FIRE!
the Weathermen emerged from the Days of Rage ju-bilant and filled as never before with enthusiasm for combat. Their statement reads like an imitation of the Panthers’ defiant street speech combined with a rhetoric of relentless showdown. The group’s imagery—or imagination—of battle soon grew still more fantastic. The front page of a subsequent issue of
FIRE!
featured a medieval etching of corpses hanging from trees and littering a battlefield, with the legend: “The above photograph was taken at the SDS National Action last month in Chicago.

The figure at the left, drinking from the wine skin, is youth culture freak Marion Delgado.”112 The paper also showed an eerie charcoal drawing of a woman, her face blackened with ashes, sitting near a pile of skulls, while a battle rages in the distance.

The group stressed the transformation of the Weathermen themselves in the crucible of battle. The first issue of
FIRE!
shows Brian Flanagan, who faced attempted murder charges, leaving a Chicago courthouse with a clenched fist. Below his picture an explanation ran, “When we used to ask for a war to end wars . . . there was a kind of protection we got from the man. . . . Nobody in the ‘white movement’ had to do a lot of jail time.

Our people haven’t got offed yet. . . . But we’ve changed. We’re not trying to end wars. We’re starting to fight a war.”113 Weathermen exalted Flanagan, who appears more frightened than defiant in the photo, as a virtual martyr, who proved their willingness, as whites, to suffer jail or death. Yet Weatherman’s display was conspicuous in what it left out.

FIRE!
made no reference to the virtual boycott of the action by working-class youths, the denunciations by the Panthers, and the avalanche of criticism from the movement. All this, in Weatherman’s overheated imagination, melted into irrelevance, leaving the Weathermen and the police alone to play a deadly game of King of the Mountain, governed by the stark challenge to “kill or be killed.”

Weatherman’s more analytical statements on the Days of Rage echoed the self-congratulation of
FIRE!
while confronting some of the action’s The Importance of Being Militant

109

obvious shortcomings. On one level, the group tenaciously clung to the notion that it represented the beginnings of a phase of militant mass struggle in America. Shin’ya Ono, assessing the action a month later, restated Weatherman’s view that “without this leap” into violent, galvanizing action, “the movement will continue to be a mere aggregate of individuals who may wish things to be otherwise . . . but who really have no concrete idea of how to make a revolution.”114 The Days of Rage, he claimed, forced “millions of kids” to “grappl[e] for the first time with the existence” of a white fighting force and helped those already in the movement to “re-examine the nature of their revolutionary commitment . . .

and struggle harder.”115 At the same time, Weatherman tried to come to terms with its inability to field the army it had promised. The Weatherbureau officially blamed “the sectarian and dogmatic spirit that perme-ated every aspect of our work” and the “humorless franticness which we mistook for seriousness” for driving youth away.116 Weatherman ultimately dealt with its failure by reconceiving the priorities of its supposed white army: the toughening of the group’s own cadres was now the main goal. Two anonymous Weathermen claimed: “Our failure to attract thousands of kids turned into an important victory. . . . [The action] fixed in us a very deep part of our politics: being a revolutionary means fighting as hard as we can with whatever strength we’ve got.”117

Weatherman’s insistence that the Days of Rage had been a success had a tangle of roots. Some participants privately judged the event a failure and left the group, taking their criticisms with them. Among those who remained, strong personalities dominated the dissenting voices inclined to argue that Weatherman should rethink its fundamental approach.118

Certain troubling issues, such as the destruction of “working-class” cars in Chicago, were neither resolved nor even seriously discussed.119 To the extent that Weatherman retained faith in its capacity to lead a revolution by violent example, it became a prisoner to both its ideology and the myth it had created about itself. The self-imposed isolation of the members in tight-knit collectives, where doubts were taken as signs of weakness, served to reinforce their questionable assumptions.

And yet there is a sense in which the Days of Rage conformed to at least some of Weatherman’s basic premises and goals. Beneath its blus-ter, the group recognized that the system was powerful, that identification with it ran deep, and that it would be incredibly difficult to persuade people in positions of privilege of the need to fight. Hirsch explained that Weatherman felt “allied with the world’s struggle [but] separated from a lot of white people.” The group’s isolation in Chicago—far from caus-110

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ing the Weathermen to abandon what could seem a dangerously false and lonely path—only affirmed their sense of being “exceptional” whites. She continued, “We wanted to create havoc . . . not meaningless havoc [but]

with a clear sense of why we were doing it. . . . We wanted to shake up day-to-day life and we certainly did that.”120 Another Weatherwoman allowed that “public officials’ negative response was always a barome-ter of how” the Weathermen viewed themselves, adding to their self-congratulation over Chicago.121 Some Weathermen looked past the problems with the protest because they were already so strongly focused on the next step—one so big, so bold, and so demanding that it seemed scarcely to permit eruptions of doubt and equivocations of will. Braley reports: “We had already made a commitment to build armed struggle on some level. We didn’t know what it meant at that point, but I had personally made that decision. [The action] came, it went, it didn’t affect what I thought about things because at that point I felt the development of clandestine work . . . was the primary thing to do, and whether there were 50

of us or 100 or 40,000 of us wasn’t the question.”122

The place of militancy within the ethos of the New Left suggests that the cathartic experience of combat itself substantially drove Weatherman’s estimation of its achievement. So much of the preparation for the Days of Rage consisted of conditioning the members’ courage. Two anonymous Weathermen asserted: “For each one of us . . . Chicago would be a crucial test. We knew that some of us might be killed. . . . We understood that to say we dug the Viet Cong or the Tupamaros or the Black Panthers and yet not be willing to take similar risks would make us bull-shitters and racists.”123 Years later, Jones judged the Days of Rage an unequivocal political failure, but he observed that the Weathermen had overcome “tremendous personal fears.” Given the courage he had summoned up to lead the march on the first night, he counted the action as one of his proudest experiences as an activist.124 Jim Mellen not only acknowledged, but also questioned, the group’s courage. As he walked to the Weatherman action on the last of the Days of Rage, a policeman threatened to attack him later in the day. Yet he could not say to his fellow Weathermen, “‘Sorry gang. They’re gonna hurt me so I’m not gonna show up today,’ because all our people knew they were going to get hurt.

It was sort of a collective puberty rite. We’re all out hunting the simba; out hunting the lion and nobody can say to the other, ‘I don’t want to do it. . . . We don’t need a lion.’”125 The Days of Rage were, in short, the ultimate gut check—one the Weathermen passed.

Yet fear persisted, affecting the group’s outlook in profound ways.

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Gitlin described the “willful suspension of disbelief” as the “spiritual heart of the new militancy” that emerged with the turn from “protest to resistance.” Suspending critical judgment about the weakness of the movement and the strength of the state worked against the potentially “imprisoning sense of isolation” and “paralyzing fear” as New Leftists pushed

“to the outer rim of what [their] generation, by itself, could accomplish.”

The Weathermen were easy prey to this denial. To Braley, the Days of Rage were “like a train you grabbed onto.” Though some of Weatherman’s expectations were “completely unreal” and “self-deceptive,” he recalls, “it was too scary to believe that no one else was going on that train.”126 To Larry Weiss, looking back, by the time of the Days of Rage,

“all connection with reality was over.”127

The New Left further tried to neutralize fear by believing, in Gitlin’s words, that it had “outdistanced known reality [and] therefore also the judgment . . . of cool heads and internal restraints.”128 Hirsch recalled:

“We were stepping out of the norm. . . . You had Old Left–New Left; this was a new New Left,” intent on confounding conventional assumptions about what a rebel movement should do or be.129 Yet Ayers confessed that behind the group’s apparent confidence there was a sense that we were not only going out in unmapped territory, but [that]

it was unmapped territory that was deeply mined and that we were likely to hurt ourselves badly. And the feeling of dread . . . was growing in my stomach and I think in our collective stomachs. . . . We were steeling ourselves for intense action. We felt that we would die, that some of us would die, and we looked at ourselves with an edge of both determination and a kind of despair.130

In light of this grim undercurrent, the variously campy and gruesome imagery in
FIRE!
can be read as a way of refracting the trauma produced by the decision to fight—a form of psychic defense, similar in function to gallows humor, that at once alluded to and provided distance from the mortal seriousness of Weatherman’s undertaking. Projecting themselves into cartoon land by portraying their actions in collages and word bubbles, the Weathermen could de-realize the possibility of their own deaths.

Invoking visions of annihilation, they could express an anxiety over their chosen paths that would be difficult to acknowledge either privately or in their public statements. However great their courage or yearning for

“reality,” the Weathermen hesitated in confronting the perilous reality of their endeavor head-on.

That hesitancy took on increasing relevance as the Weathermen as-112

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sessed the “military” lessons of the Days of Rage. Ono insisted, incredibly, that “militarily and tactically, the action was a victory” by virtue of the extensive property damage and the relatively minor injuries to the Weathermen. Yet he also concluded that the Days of Rage had proved that “mass street action is a necessary, but a losing tactic.”131 Retiring the model of street fighting, the group soon explored a strategy of sabotage, in which bombs, not fists and bricks, were to provide the desired conflagrations. Just weeks after the Days of Rage, Weatherman’s New York collective quietly began assembling an arsenal of explosives with which it would try to take the armed struggle further.

c h a p t e r 3

“Hearts and Minds”

The Antiwar Movement, Violence, and the Critical Mass
While Weatherman was attempting to fashion itself into a revolutionary vanguard by fighting in the streets and planning for sabotage, other activists were devoting their energies to the more immediate goal of ending the war in Vietnam through mass mobilization. Demonstrations in October and November of 1969 were the centerpieces of the antiwar movement’s fall strategy to show that the public had turned decisively against the war. Despite the desire of the organizers for unity around the message of peace, the demonstrations served as an occasion for intense debate among protesters over the nature of the war, strategies for ending it, and the ultimate goals of antiwar activism. The demonstrations also had an important bearing on the growing impulse within the left to violence. The Weathermen and other aspiring revolutionaries shared with less radical or risk-prone activists the concrete objective of ending the war. Doubting the efficacy of peaceful protest, however, they promoted violence as a vital, even necessary, means to that end. In addition, the war elicited a groundswell of anger, particularly among the young, which radicals tried to tap and further politicize. Opposition to the war, in short, was the main impetus for New Left violence, and it was from the antiwar movement that any larger push by whites toward armed struggle was most likely to come.

Mass demonstrations were among the defining acts of the antiwar movement and 1960s protest in general. They functioned as complex signs—events that everyone could regard as significant, but whose fun-113

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damental meaning and impact defied any single interpretation. Like the Days of Rage, these demonstrations posed challenges to representation, as activists and others argued over what they accomplished and labored to fit them into competing ideological and strategic assumptions. More specifically, the fall protests revealed the interdependent relationship between violent and nonviolent protest—how each was supported against the perceived limitations or even dangers of its alternative. For some, the size and intensity of the protests enhanced the hope of ending the war through peaceful, democratic channels, while strengthening fears that violence would undermine their efforts. For others, the very size of the protests, given that they produced no obvious change in war policy, only enhanced the sense of the futility of nonviolence. These debates raged, even as the line between purely violent and nonviolent protest blurred.