I finally saw the award winning 2003 documentary on The Weather Underground, the 1970's dissident/terrorist organization which aspired to a sort of third world revolution in the US.
Not the most realistic movement in the history of the New Left.
The Weather Underground had its roots the early sixties civil rights and anti-war movements, chiefly in the faction ridden Students for a Democratic Society led by the noted historian of the New Left--and a favorite writer of mine--Todd Gatlin.
There seems to be about as many opinions on the Weather Underground as there were in the Sixties. Most Conservatives believe them to be nothing more than terrorists. Those in the far left--especially the Trotskyite/Nadar true believers--seem to hold a only thinly disguised admiration for them. Moderates like Gatlin, believed, then as now, that they embodied everything that was and is wrong with the Left: too ideological and uncompromising for its own good, and far, far too fanatical.
The S.D.S. annual convention was traditionally known for almost comically accomplishing nothing other allowing for a yearly forum in which the various factions of the organization could bicker at one another. As the sixties progressed, the Left became ever more radical and militant--and powerful. By 1969, the S.D.S. had over 100,000 members and even more supporters. Controlling the organization would confer a great deal of power on whomever that might be, which therefore became to chief goal of several factions. The central power struggle occurred between an ultra-left fringe party called the Progressive Labor Party and the faction that would eventually become know as the Weathermen, a named based on complex and fascinating paper they put forward at the convention suggesting that the imperial interests existing then within the America power structure were so firmly entrenched, it was unrealistic to believe they could be removed by anything other than total revolution. The paper suggested "it didn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blew," thus provided the weathermen with their name.
The weathermen, each of them giftedly bright, charismatic, and personally attractive would eventually win the battle for control of the S.D.S. Over next year, the manner in which they wielded power would become progressively more radical and threatening to the federal government, specifically to J. Edgar Hoover.
Gatlin writes that Weathermen became ever more unrealistic and isolated: "it was a seamless loop: growing militancy, growing isolation, growing commitment to the revolution, sloppier and more frantic attempts to imagine a revolutionary class." They met with delegates from North Vietnam in Cuba to discuss ending the war, became intertwined with other militant groups like the Black Panthers, and even organized a riot among the city of Chicago's youth in August of 1969. The riot was brutally repressed by the city police and soon after this it became clear that they becoming targets of the US government.
After the Chicago riot, the Weatherman Central Committee began discussing going underground. Many of their members had been either arrested or were wanted, and they were daily under F.B.I. surveillance. Then, on December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, was assassinated by the Chicago police in his bed, sealing the Weathermen's decision to go underground. Mark Rudd, one of the organizations key members recently said, "For the police to have murdered him so blatantly, I think it was incredibly decisive. I think a lot of people felt like this was starting to be Germany in the 1930's, when people you knew would start to get gunned down. I think it felt like this was the time to do something, because if you waited too long it was going to be too late."
However, before they went underground, they staged one final anti-war conference to discuss strategy and tactics for further militancy with the other members of the S.D.S. leadership. Gatlin describes it as a descent into madness. At the conference, Mark Rudd spoke of pigs and destruction. "It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building," he said. Jeff Jones declared, "We're against everything that's good and decent in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
And that is essentially what they did for the next eleven years. The rest of the story requires more detail than I am able to provide, so I have lifted a large excerpt from an anonymous site sympathetic to the Weathermen.
Having staged the "Flint War Council", the weathermen had finished with their last above ground stand. On February 9th, 1970 the national S.D.S (weatherman) office was quietly evacuated and closed down. The vast quantity of S.D.S archives housed in the office were sold for $300 dollars to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Over the next month weathermen began to sever ties with family and friends and disappear. As Jeff Jones would later put it, "The best place to hide a leaf was in the forest." The weathermen disappeared into the sea of humans that populated the country. The Weather Underground had been born.
In January, just before going under, the Weathermen had developed a central command structure know as The Weather Bureau. Members of the Bureau traveled to weathermen collectives across the country and engaged them in harsh self-criticism sessions where L.S.D usage was a prerequisite. The L.S.D. served to weed out police infiltrators, as well as to reveal the hidden bourgeoisie tendencies that might prevent certain individuals from becoming effective guerilla fighters. After these sessions, the Weather Bureau made decisions about who would go under and who would be asked to leave the organization and serve as above ground support (It was practical usages of L.S.D., such as was just described, that many right winghistorians have used to discredit the weathermen as crazed druggies). In February, after all members had severed above ground contacts, sold off their possessions, pooled their monies, and developed false identities, they were ready. Small cells of 3-5 weathermen each, organized as Focos , were sent out across the country to set up bases and compile lists of targets.
The Weather Underground had been born, but before they even had a chance to get started a horrible tragedy occurred that would stop the weathermen in their tracks and forcefully snap them from the delusions of revolutionary violence they had harbored over the past six months. Surprisingly, this tragedy, as devastating as it was, may have been a blessing in disguise.
On March 6th, 1970 inside of a townhouse in the Greenwich Village area of New York, a cell of weathermen were working on the construction of a timed dynamite device. This device was being constructed to mimic the anti-personal devices used by the U.S. army in Vietnam to kill N.L.F. fighters. The intended target of the device was a U.S. army officer's ball that was to be held that month. The device was meant to kill. The traditional account of the event stated that, while wiring together the device, a wire was accidentally crossed causing the bomb to ignite and destroy the apartment and the lives of many inside. Three members of the weatherman cell who were constructing the bomb were killed in the explosion: Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin survived the explosion, crawled from the rubble, and disappeared.
Bill Ayers, who had been a close friend and lover of Diana Oughton, provided an alternative story of this event in his memoir, Fugitive Days, decades later. This version of the story held that Diana had developed reservations about the use of revolutionary violence and had left Bills cell to spend time with Terry Robbins. Terry had been a loose cannon in the past and she may have been trying to talk the cell out of their action. Could she have purposefully detonated the device, knowing that it was the only way to stop an action form occurring that might have had unbearable consequences that no one in the weather underground was willing to consider or understand?
What really happened that day in the Townhouse can only be know by those who were there. What we can know is that the event changed the weathermen forever. Soon after the explosion, a national meeting was called by Bernardine Dohrn and the Weather Bureau, to take place in a safe house somewhere on the coast of California. At this meeting, Dohrn took command: "We've come out of a burning house, and on the ashes of that burning house we can build a new house, a safe house. But there's no way weapons and militarism can ever be allowed to lead, because in the end every successful resistance is first and foremost about consciousness, and then about popular action."
Eventually the group came to a consensus that the town house tragedy was not just the result of a technical failure in bomb making. The tragedy was not just in the blast, but in the deluded and dishonest ideology they had developed for them selves that led to the explosion. Jeff Jones stated that, "We blinded ourselves, we lied to ourselves. The root cause was political, and if we refuse to look at that fully we'll simply wander off the cliff farther along."
After the meeting, the weathermen in attendance drifted away, back into the underground to re-connect with their cells and continue on with the struggle. As a result of the meeting, the Weather Underground had developed a concrete tactical unity. The targets of their actions were to be property, not life. To create campaign of strategic bombings, carefully planned so that no one was injured, would be the future of the organization. The bombings were to be against carefully chosen targets that represented the ills of the imperialist system. It was hoped that the effect of these bombings would be to raise a revolutionary consciousness among the public, to compliment above ground mass movements, and to serve as an example and inspiration for the formation of other underground groups.
On May 21st, 1970, Bernardine Dohrn released the first communiqué of the Weather Underground. It became known as "The Declaration of War". It promised that Weathermen would attack a symbol of Amerikan injustice within 14 days. On June 9th, an anonymous call warned that a bomb had been placed and that evacuation was necessary. Shortly thereafter explosions blew apart the headquarters of the New York City police department. The blast had the force of 14-15 sticks of dynamite. The weather underground issued a communiqué stating that the blast was retaliation for Kent State, as well as the murders of Fred Hampton and other police killings in the city.
This was the first in a series of 25 bombings that would span nearly a decade, the last of which would occur in 1977 [see attached chronology of bombings]. Some of the most publicized actions included the liberation of Acid Guru Timothy Leary from prison in September of 1970, ferreting him and his family to Algeria to live with a group of Black Panthers who were in exile there. There was also the bombing of the Pentagon in 1972 that ruptured a water main, flooding sensitive air force computer systems and causing a temporary halt of bombing in Vietnam! Through out the years the weather underground managed to elude capture despite a massive F.B.I. manhunt. Federal Indictments of weather underground members were handed down left and right for various felony charges including interstate flight, mob action, riot and conspiracy. Bernardine Dohrn eventually made it onto the F.B.I's 10 most wanted list for a time and was labeled by J. Edgar Hoover as "The most dangerous woman in America."
Keeping with their mission and tactical unity, in all the bombings, not one single person was killed. The Weather Underground also made a concerted attempt to explain their actions to a mass audience. In July of 1974, the Weather Underground produced a book entitled "Prairie Fire: the politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism." This bookcontained a chronology of actions up to that point and layed out the theory and ideology behind the Weather Underground's actions. The book was also a thorough history of American imperialism beginning with the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of Native America, and ending in the 20th century with the Vietnam War and Intifada in Palestine. The book had over 40,000 copies distributed in the mid 1970s.
In 1975 the Weather Underground continued with its outreach campaign and produced the 1st of four issues of a newsletter called "Osawatomie", the name referred to the battle of Oswatomie in 1856 where John Brown and his guerilla army beat back an assault against armed slavery supporters who were trying to make Kansas a slave state. Oswatomie was the last attempt by the Weather Underground to interject their theory of revolutionary anti-imperialism to the masses of people in the United States. It was at this time that the decline of the Weather Underground began.
By 1976 the Weather Underground split in two due to internal disagreements over issues of race, class, gender, and the role of an above ground revolutionary movement. At this point, the New Left in America was all but dead, and the remaining members of the Weather Underground were increasingly isolated - their relevancy deeply diminished. By 1980, all the wanted members of the Weather Underground had either been arrested, or had surrendered to Federal Authorities.
It's often difficult to recall just how frieghtening the Cold War was, how intense the ideas and passions of the era were. I think its safe to say the post-9/11 era really gives us only a glimpse of the fear that was prevalent throughout the era and of how the U.S. government used that the fear to rationalize many questionable actions.
The Weathermen are important in that they were far-sighted enough to recognized this at the time, but they were also tragic because they had no idea how to respond to this knowledge. Therefore the history of the Weather underground is also a important cautionary tale for all activists. It points out that because activists are drawn to one another's company, and because activism almost by its very nature is dogmatic and to certain extent fanatical, it tends to be prone to group-think and extremism. And at the heart of it all is a belief in a faith or value-based truth which seems to be larger than life. The extremism results when the truth seems to becomes too big for the activist to adequately respond to.
At the end of the film, Mark Rudd, looking back on his actions and thinking at the time says, "These are things that I am not proud of, and I find it hard to speak publically about them. And to tease out what was right and what was wrong. I think part of the Weatherman phenomenon that was right was our understanding of the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we just couldn't handle. It was too big. We didn't know what to do. In a way, I still don't know what to do with this knowledge. I don't know what needs to be done now. And its still eating away at me just as it did thirty years ago."
Timeline
- Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, holds its first convention in Port Huron, MI, calling for progressive alliances among activist groups.
- The Civil Rights Act passes, while America's involvement in the war in Vietnam escalates.
- Berkeley Free Speech Movement spurs massive student protests against the Vietnam War. The first SDS anti-war march in Washington attracts 15,000 people.
- Huey Newton and Bobby Seale form the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated. Anti-war demonstrations turn violent at the Chicago Democratic Convention and shut down Columbia University.
- Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark die in a Chicago police raid. The Weathermen form.
March: Three Weathermen are killed when bomb manufacturing goes awry. The organization becomes the Weather Underground as key players including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin go into hiding.
June: New York City police headquarters are bombed and the Weathermen take credit, issuing a communiqué from underground.
July: Thirteen Weathermen are indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to engage in acts of terrorism. A New York bank is bombed in retaliation.
September: Timothy Leary issues a statement from the underground after escaping from prison with the help of the Weathermen.
- 50,000 anti-war protesters march on Washington, D.C.
- Cease-fire accord in Vietnam.
- Weathermen Mark Rudd and Cathy Wilkerson emerge from years of hiding and surrender to the police, receiving two years of probation and three years in prison, respectively.
- Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers resurface from the underground, pleading guilty to bail-jumping charges from a 1969 anti-war protest. Dohrn is fined $1,500 and given three years' probation.
- The unofficial end of the Weather Underground occurs when Kathy Boudin resurfaces to participate in an armed robbery in Nanuet, New York, which results in the shooting deaths of three men. Boudin is sentenced to 22 years in prison, and is released in 2003.
For more information on the Weather Underground here are several good websites I've found, and there is also the documentary, which I highly recommend.
Chronology of Bombings
San Diego Independent Media Center's interview with Mark Rudd and the films director, Sam Green.
Interview with Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers
Alternet's Review of the Film
An Anonymous Defense of Their Activities
MoralQuestionsBlog.com