AUT: Fw:US: Days Of Rage - (Weathermen, SDS, etc)

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Message: 12
   Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 02:47:46 +0100
   From: "Stasi" <stasi@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: US: Days Of Rage - (Weathermen, SDS, etc)

Tom Wells, "The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam" (Henry
Holt, 1996)

"They Are All with SDS. They Are All Fucking Crazy!"

On Monday, October 6, shortly before midnight, antiwar protesters
blew up the nation's only monument to policemen. The statue in
Chicago's Haymarket Square was blown clear off its twelve-foot
pedestal, throwing chunks of the leg onto a nearby expressway. A
hundred windows in the surrounding area shattered from the force of
the explosion. The blast was the opening salvo of the Weathermen's
Days of Rage. "We now feel that it is kill or be killed," a Chicago
police official ominously declared.

Over the next forty-eight hours, youths steeled themselves for the
first mass action of the Days, a rally in Lincoln Park on Wednesday
night followed by a probe into Chicago's streets "to feel out the
city and the pig situation." They "struggled" over their fears of
violence and anxiety about "offing the pig." Most practiced the
"basic moves" of "stick fighting," "some awkwardly, others with
obvious experience," as one wrote. Many honed their karate and judo
skills. "If you have anything short of a mortal wound, you are
expected to fight on," one Weatherleader commanded his troops. Mused
a wide-eyed teenager, "It's amazing that in a couple of hours I might
be dead."

Come Wednesday evening, only three hundred had gathered in Lincoln
Park. Most found the paltry turnout unsettling. "This is an awful
small group to start a revolution," one student remarked. The young
revolutionaries were outfitted in full battle gear: helmets,
"shit-kicker boots," goggles, gas masks, heavy clothes, first-aid
kits. Less visible were clubs, lead pipes, chains, brass knuckles.
The youths tried to screw their courage up by screaming high-pitched
"Battle of Algiers" war whoops. Observing them were hundreds of cops.

At around ten o'clock, Tom Hayden of the Chicago Eight addressed the
crowd. A proponent of armed revolution who had begun organizing
target practice for movement rifle squads, Hayden conveyed the
Chicago Eight's support for the protest. A few minutes later, the
Weatherleader Jeff Jones, his blond hair dyed black to conceal his
identity, stepped into the flickering light of the bonfire in the
center of the group and announced, "I am Marion Delgado." [Delgado
was a Chicano youth who had once derailed a train with a piece of
concrete for no apparent political reasons.] The nearby Gold Coast
district was "where the rich people live," Jones told the crowd,
including the rich judge in the Conspiracy trial, Julius Hoffman.
"Marion Delgado don't like him and the Weatherman don't like him, so
let's go get him," Jones exhorted the demonstrators. His tough talk
notwithstanding, Jones was shaking in his combat boots. "More than
once I have said that that particular night required the strongest
act of will to overcome personal fear," he commented years later. "I
mean, to say 'we're going to march out of this park and we're going
to march to Judge Hoffman's house, and we're going to fight anyone
who gets in our way,' and then do it, is not my natural personality.
. . "

The ragtag army charged out into the streets, whooping and unveiling
their weapons. After one youth heaved a rock through a bank window,
glass began shattering in every direction. Bystanders caught in the
onslaught were knocked to the pavement. Police watched with their
jaws open as store and car windows splintered one after the other. "I
just don't believe it," one officer gasped. Said a pedestrian, "I
don't know what your cause is, but you have just set it back a
hundred years." Dave Dellinger, who had secured a safe house for the
Weathermen outside of Chicago, was also appalled by the destruction.
On the scene as "a disgusted observer," he noticed "that a
disproportionately high percentage of the cars wrecked were
Volkswagens and other old and lower-priced cars," and that youths
were trashing "small shops, proletarian beer halls, and
lower-middle-class housing." With each broken window, each trashed
automobile--each blow against the pig state--the youths' courage rose
another notch. Some cops separated from their brethren were "vamped
on severely."

Soon police lines began forming ahead. Jones and other youths in the
front of the mob charged directly into one line, screaming and
swinging. At last they were going to get to test their mettle, at
last they were going to get themselves a few pigs. Jones pierced the
line and was immediately pounced on by six cops:

"They grabbed me and knocked me down. I got kicked a few times. The
worst thing that happened . . . was that someone Maced me right in my
eyes from about two inches away. It blinded me for a couple of
minutes. And that scared me. While that was happening ... they said,
'Who are you?' And I identified myself. And they said, 'No, you're
not,' and kicked me a couple more times, because my hair was dyed. So
I said, 'I have my wallet.' So they took out my wallet, and they
said, 'Sure enough, it is Jones.' And then I was thrown into a
wagon."

For another hour, the chill Chicago night air was filled with the
sound of breaking glass, war whoops, police sirens, burglar alarms.
By the end of this "Gandhian violence," as Abbie Hoffman called it
(his definition: you announce the time and place and then show up and
commit an act of violence), six Weathermen had been shot, a great
many had been injured, and nearly seventy were in police custody."

The next morning, Weatherman's "women's militia" took to the streets
for more hand-to-hand combat. "Showing considerable bravery if not
much military sense," the leaders of the militia (helmets, goggles,
and all) also stormed into a police line, flailing away. They were
swiftly subdued.

After a day of calm, the two hundred Weathermen not out of action
returned to the streets for "the second battle of the white fighting
force" on Saturday. They swooped through Chicago's Loop, bullying
more pedestrians, smashing more windows, and swinging at more cops.
Within thirty minutes, more than half were sitting in paddy wagons or
police cars, bloodied and bruised. The day's worst injury occurred
when a city official fond of joining in police roundups of protesters
dove to tackle one and smashed into a wall instead. He was paralyzed
from the neck down.

That night and the previous two, Weathermen held interminable
"criticism-self-criticism" sessions on what had gone down. Many
bemoaned the small turnout for the protest. "Some people in the
leadership did feel it was a defeat. Some people thought, 'Where were
the trainloads from Michigan?'" Bill Ayers recalled. More than a few
wondered whether fighting armed cops wasn't a loser. Some "warned
against the 'death trip.'" A blue-collar teenager who had
participated in one action said from jail, "The guys in here are
war-monguls. They all want a revolution and they are all with SDS.
They are all fucking crazy." But other Weathermen felt they'd shown
that white kids could "do it in the road" and win. "We'd . . . proven
that it was possible--we didn't all die, we were still there," Ayers
said. Carrying out the protest despite forbidding circumstances was
itself a victory. Perhaps most important, they'd strengthened
themselves. "People felt, 'We'd proved ourselves, we'd toughened
ourselves, this is a necessary step, we're finding out who's really
committed,'" Ayers remembered. That most observers thought they were
nuts was hardly cause for concern. "Most people will be turned off,
you have to expect that," lectured one Weatherleader. "They are going
to be fighting on the side of pigs if they ever fight at all." "As
you might expect, those of us who had really pushed this thing
through had a lot invested in calling it a success," Jones frankly
stated.

Some Weathermen felt the military battle was the right battle but
that it could ultimately only be waged successfully from underground.
The Man would continue to come down hard on militant public
demonstrations, they argued. Also, "we had gone to this level of
militancy and still the war was going on," Jones recalled thinking.
"Even that wasn't enough." Said Ayers: "We felt that there was a need
to escalate the opposition to the war and to make it more painful to
the warmakers. We felt that we were ineffective . . . and if we can't
stop the war by convincing the majority of people, we can certainly
make the price greater. ... We can build an underground force that's
not going to be constantly persecuted and prosecuted by the state."
This force would carry out bombings and other terrorist acts while
its members continued to participate in public political activities."

The Days of Rage had attracted few working-class youths to the
struggle and had not even begun to tap the rising reservoir of
antiwar sentiment in American society as a whole. Jones conceded the
failure, even while exaggerating the turnout: "We were mobilizing for
the National Action at a time when literally tens of thousands of
people would come to an antiwar demonstration--and we got eight
hundred people. And the reason we got eight hundred people was
because we demanded that people come to a level of struggle where
they were willing to fight the police in the streets of Chicago as
their antiwar statement. It didn't make sense-although we did it. .
."

"I don't want to equivocate on just how big a failure it was," Jones
reflected. "Violent, aggressive fighting with the police and property
destruction just wasn't something that was going to mobilize masses
of people." The Days of Rage also promoted public perceptions that
antiwar protest and violence were one and the same, hurting the peace
movement's image; as Bill Gavin gloated to Haldeman, "the vital force
of radicalism has ... been . . . driven into outright physical
violence for all to see." The protest hurt the Weathermen as well;
most were injured or arrested (many of the leaders faced stiff
charges), their bail bonds were gargantuan, and, according to Dave
Dellinger, at least half defected from the group afterward, having
seen the light on kamikaze-ism.

Reaction to the Days among other protesters ran from admiration to
disgust, but tended heavily toward the latter. The most common
response was summed up in the remark of a Wisconsin SDSer: "You don't
need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are." Years later
SDS's Greg Calvert maintained that the Weathermen's actions as a
whole "did more to set back the development of a meaningful American
left than anybody else in the country. And I think in that sense that
they played right into the hands of the state."

Following the Days of Rage, Weatherman became increasingly taken with
the notion of building an underground. "From about the National
Action on, that's what we ... spent our time doing," Ayers
remembered. "I think we all felt it was something we had to do,"
Jones said. "And I think we all each in our own way felt pretty
scared. . . . That period . . . had a lot of sort of ominous feelings
to it. And the feeling that you'd never come back from it, you know.
That doing this was . . . sort of like victory or death. If not
death, then long years in jail."

Weathermen began cutting themselves off from family and old friends.
Facing March 1970 court dates for charges stemming from the Days of
Rage and having no intention of showing up, some started living under
assumed names. "We wanted to get a head start on the official date at
which we would become fugitives," Jones recalled. With each step
underground, their bunker mentality grew."





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