- Burrough, Bryan.
Days of Rage.
New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
ISBN 978-0-14-310797-2.
-
In the year 1972, there were more than 1900 domestic bombings in
the United States. Think about that—that's more than
five bombings a day. In an era when the occasional
terrorist act by a “lone wolf” nutcase gets round
the clock coverage on cable news channels, it's hard to imagine
that not so long ago, most of these bombings and other
mayhem, committed by “revolutionary” groups such as
Weatherman, the Black Liberation Army, FALN, and The Family,
often made only local newspapers on page B37, below the fold.
The civil rights struggle and opposition to the Vietnam war had
turned out large crowds and radicalised the campuses, but in
the opinion of many activists, yielded few concrete results.
Indeed, in the 1968 presidential election, pro-war
Democrat Humphrey had been defeated by pro-war Republican
Nixon, with anti-war Democrats McCarthy marginalised and Robert
Kennedy assassinated.
In this bleak environment, a group of leaders of one of the most
radical campus organisations, the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), gathered in Chicago to draft what became a sixteen
thousand word manifesto bristling with Marxist jargon that
linked the student movement in the U.S. to Third World guerrilla
insurgencies around the globe. They advocated a Che
Guevara-like guerrilla movement in America led, naturally, by
themselves. They named the manifesto after the Bob Dylan lyric,
“You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind
blows.” Other SDS members who thought the idea of armed
rebellion in the U.S. absurd and insane quipped, “You
don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes
are.”
The Weatherman faction managed to blow up (figuratively) the SDS
convention in June 1969, splitting the organisation but
effectively taking control of it. They called a massive protest
in Chicago for October. Dubbed the “National
Action”, it would soon become known as the “Days of
Rage”.
Almost immediately the Weatherman plans began to go awry. Their
plans to rally the working class (who the Ivy League Weatherman
élite mocked as “greasers”) got no traction,
with some of their outrageous “actions”
accomplishing little other than landing the perpetrators in the
slammer. Come October, the Days of Rage ended up in farce.
Thousands had been expected, ready to take the fight to the cops
and “oppressors”, but come the day, no more than two
hundred showed up, most SDS stalwarts who already knew one
another. They charged the police and were quickly routed with
six shot (none seriously), many beaten, and more than 120
arrested. Bail bonds alone added up to US$ 2.3 million. It was
a humiliating defeat. The leadership decided it was time to
change course.
So what did this intellectual vanguard of the masses decide to
do? Well, obviously, destroy the SDS (their source of funding
and pipeline of recruitment), go underground, and start blowing
stuff up. This posed a problem, because these middle-class
college kids had no idea where to obtain explosives (they didn't
know that at the time you could buy as much dynamite as you
could afford over the counter in many rural areas with, at most,
showing a driver's license), what to do with it, and how to
build an underground identity. This led to, not Keystone Kops,
but Klueless Kriminal misadventures, culminating in March 1970
when they managed to blow up an entire New York townhouse where
a bomb they were preparing to attack a dance at Fort Dix, New
Jersey detonated prematurely, leaving three of the Weather
collective dead in the rubble. In the aftermath, many Weather
hangers-on melted away.
This did not deter the hard core, who resolved to learn more about
their craft. They issued a communiqué declaring their
solidarity with the oppressed black masses (not one of whom,
oppressed or otherwise, was a member of Weatherman), and vowed
to attack symbols of “Amerikan injustice”. Privately,
they decided to avoid killing people, confining their attacks
to property. And one of their members hit the books to become
a journeyman bombmaker.
The bungling Bolsheviks of Weatherman may have had Marxist
theory down pat, but they were lacking in authenticity, and
acutely aware of it. It was hard for those whose addresses before
going underground were élite universities to present
themselves as oppressed. The best they could do was to identify
themselves with the cause of those they considered victims of
“the system” but who, to date, seemed little
inclined to do anything about it themselves. Those who cheered
on Weatherman, then, considered it significant when, in the
spring of 1971, a new group calling itself the “Black
Liberation Army” (BLA) burst onto the scene with two
assassination-style murders of New York City policemen on
routine duty. Messages delivered after each attack to Harlem
radio station WLIB claimed responsibility. One declared,
Every policeman, lackey or running dog of the ruling class must
make his or her choice now. Either side with the people: poor
and oppressed, or die for the oppressor. Trying to stop what
is going down is like trying to stop history, for as long as
there are those who will dare to live for freedom there are men
and women who dare to unhorse the emperor.
All power to the people.
Politicians, press, and police weren't sure what to make of
this. The politicians, worried about the opinion of their black
constituents, shied away from anything which sounded like
accusing black militants of targeting police. The press,
although they'd never write such a thing or speak it in polite
company, didn't think it plausible that street blacks could
organise a sustained revolutionary campaign: certainly that
required college-educated intellectuals. The police, while
threatened by these random attacks, weren't sure there was
actually any organised group behind the BLA attacks: they were
inclined to believe it was a matter of random cop killers
attributing their attacks to the BLA after the fact. Further,
the BLA had no visible spokesperson and issued no manifestos
other than the brief statements after some attacks. This
contributed to the mystery, which largely
persists to this day because so many participants were killed
and the survivors have never spoken out.
In fact, the BLA was almost entirely composed of former members
of the New York chapter of the Black Panthers, which had
collapsed in the split between factions following Huey Newton
and those (including New York) loyal to Eldridge Cleaver, who
had fled to exile in Algeria and advocated violent confrontation
with the power structure in the U.S. The BLA would perpetrate
more than seventy violent attacks between 1970 and 1976 and is
said to be responsible for the deaths of thirteen police
officers. In 1982, they hijacked a domestic airline flight and
pocketed a ransom of US$ 1 million.
Weatherman (later renamed the “Weather Underground”
because the original name was deemed sexist) and the BLA
represented the two poles of the violent radicals: the first,
intellectual, college-educated, and mostly white, concentrated
mostly on symbolic bombings against property, usually with
warnings in advance to avoid human casualties. As pressure from
the FBI increased upon them, they became increasingly inactive;
a member of the New York police squad assigned to them quipped,
“Weatherman, Weatherman, what do you do? Blow up a toilet
every year or two.” They managed the escape of Timothy
Leary from a minimum-security prison in California. Leary
basically just walked away, with a group of Weatherman members
paid by Leary supporters picking him up and arranging for he and
his wife Rosemary to obtain passports under assumed names and
flee the U.S. for exile in Algeria with former Black Panther
leader Eldridge Cleaver.
The Black Liberation Army, being composed largely of
ex-prisoners with records of violent crime, was not known for
either the intelligence or impulse control of its members. On
several occasions, what should have been merely tense encounters
with the law turned into deadly firefights because a BLA
militant opened fire for no apparent reason. Had they not been
so deadly to those they attacked and innocent bystanders, the
exploits of the BLA would have made a fine slapstick farce.
As the dour decade of the 1970s progressed, other violent
underground groups would appear, tending to follow the model of
either Weatherman or the BLA. One of the most visible, it not
successful, was the “Symbionese Liberation Army”
(SLA), founded by escaped convict and grandiose self-styled
revolutionary Daniel DeFreeze. Calling himself “General
Field Marshal Cinque”, which he pronounced
“sin-kay”, and ending his fevered communications
with “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE
OF THE PEOPLE”, this band of murderous bozos struck their
first blow for black liberation by assassinating Marcus Foster,
the first black superintendent of the Oakland, California school
system for his “crimes against the people” of
suggesting that police be called into deal with violence in the
city's schools and that identification cards be issued to
students. Sought by the police for the murder, they struck
again by kidnapping heiress, college student, and D-list
celebrity Patty Hearst, whose abduction became front page news
nationwide. If that wasn't sufficiently bizarre, the abductee
eventually issued a statement saying she had chosen to
“stay and fight”, adopting the name
“Tania”, after the nom
de guerre of a Cuban revolutionary and companion of Che
Guevara. She was later photographed by a surveillance camera
carrying a rifle during a San Francisco bank robbery perpetrated
by the SLA. Hearst then went underground and evaded capture
until September 1975 after which, when being booked into jail,
she gave her occupation as “Urban Guerrilla”.
Hearst later claimed she had agreed to join the SLA and
participate in its crimes only to protect her own life. She was
convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to
7 years. The sentence was later commuted to 22 months by U.S.
President Jimmy Carter and she was released in 1979, and was the
recipient of one of Bill Clinton's last day in office pardons in
January, 2001. Six members of the SLA, including DeFreeze, died
in a house fire during a shootout with the Los Angeles Police
Department in May, 1974.
Violence committed in the name of independence for Puerto Rico
was nothing new. In 1950, two radicals tried to assassinate
President Harry Truman, and in 1954, four revolutionaries shot
up the U.S. House of Representatives from the visitors' gallery,
wounding five congressmen on the floor, none fatally. The
Puerto Rican terrorists had the same problem as their
Weatherman, BLA, or SLA bomber brethren: they lacked the support
of the people. Most of the residents of Puerto Rico were
perfectly happy being U.S. citizens, especially as this allowed
them to migrate to the mainland to escape the endemic corruption
and the poverty it engendered in the island. As the 1960s
progressed, the Puerto Rico radicals increasingly identified
with Castro's Cuba (which supported them ideologically, if not
financially), and promised to make a revolutionary Puerto Rico a
beacon of prosperity and liberty like Cuba had become.
Starting in 1974, a new Puerto Rican terrorist group, the
Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación
Nacional (FALN) launched a series of attacks in the U.S.,
most in the New York and Chicago areas. One bombing, that of
the Fraunces Tavern in New York in January 1975, killed four
people and injured more than fifty. Between 1974 and 1983, a
total of more than 130 bomb attacks were attributed to the FALN,
most against corporate targets. In 1975 alone, twenty-five bombs
went off, around one every two weeks.
Other groups, such as the “New World Liberation Front”
(NWLF) in northern California and “The Family” in the
East continued the chaos. The NWLF, formed originally from remains
of the SLA, detonated twice as many bombs as the Weather Underground.
The Family carried out a series of robberies, including the deadly
Brink's holdup of October 1981, and jailbreaks of imprisoned
radicals.
In the first half of the 1980s, the radical violence sputtered
out. Most of the principals were in prison, dead, or living
underground and keeping a low profile. A growing prosperity
had replaced the malaise and stagflation of the 1970s and there
were abundant jobs for those seeking them. The Vietnam War and
draft were receding into history, leaving the campuses with
little to protest, and the remaining radicals had mostly turned
from violent confrontation to burrowing their way into the
culture, media, administrative state, and academia as part of
Gramsci's
“long march through the institutions”.
All of these groups were plagued with the “step two
problem”. The agenda of Weatherman was essentially:
- Blow stuff up, kill cops, and rob banks.
- ?
- Proletarian revolution.
Other groups may have had different step threes:
“Black liberation” for the BLA,
“¡Puerto Rico libre!”
for FALN, but none of them seemed to make much progress
puzzling out step two. Deep thinker Bill Harris of the
SLA's best attempt was, when he advocated killing
policemen at random, arguing that “If they killed
enough, … the police would crack down on the oppressed
minorities of the Bay Area, who would then rise up and
begin the revolution.”—sure thing.
In sum, all of this violence and the suffering that resulted
from it accomplished precisely none of the goals of those who
perpetrated it (which is a good thing: they mostly advocated for
one flavour or another of communist enslavement of the United
States). All it managed to do is contribute the constriction of
personal liberty in the name of “security”, with
metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs, X-ray machines,
rent-a-cops, surveillance cameras, and the first round of
airport security theatre springing up like mushrooms everywhere.
The amount of societal disruption which can be caused by what
amounted to around one hundred homicidal nutcases is something
to behold. There were huge economic losses not just due to
bombings, but by evacuations due to bomb threats, many doubtless
perpetrated by copycats motivated by nothing more political than
the desire for a day off from work. Violations of civil
liberties by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies who
carried out unauthorised wiretaps, burglaries, and other
invasions of privacy and property rights not only discredited
them, but resulted in many of the perpetrators of the mayhem
walking away scot-free. Weatherman founders Bill Ayres and
Bernardine Dohrn would, in 1995, launch the political career of
Barack Obama at a meeting in their home in Chicago, where Ayers
is now a Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. Ayres, who bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the
Pentagon in 1972, remarked in the 1980s that he was
“Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great
country.”
This book is an excellent account of a largely-forgotten era in
recent history. In a time when slaver radicals (a few of them
the same people who set the bombs in their youth) declaim from
the cultural heights of legacy media, academia, and their new
strongholds in the technology firms which increasingly mediate
our communications and access to information, advocate
“active resistance”, “taking to the
streets”, or “occupying” this or that, it's a
useful reminder of where such action leads, and that it's wise
to work out step two before embarking on step one.
December 2018 