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Weatherman (organization)

For other uses, see Weatherman (disambiguation).
Weatherman (organization):John Jacobs and Terry Robbins at the Days of Rage, Chicago, October 1969.
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John Jacobs and Terry Robbins at the Days of Rage, Chicago, October 1969.

Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization, was a U.S. Radical Left organization consisting of splintered-off members and leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society. The group referred to itself as a "revolutionary organization of communist women and men" whose purpose was to carry out a series of militant actions that would achieve the revolutionary overthrow of the Government of the United States (and of capitalism as a whole). Weatherman imploded shortly after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, which saw the general demise of the New Left, of which Weatherman had been a part.

Originally, the Weathermen were part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement within the Students for a Democratic Society. When they split — first from the RYM's Maoists and then from SDS itself — they distinguished themselves from other self-proclaimed revolutionary groups by claiming that there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States and the capitalist system should begin immediately. To that end, they carried out a campaign of bombings, jailbreaks, and riots.


Contents

Background

The group initially emerged from the campus-based opposition to the Vietnam War and from the Civil Rights Movements of the late 1960s. During this time, United States military action in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam, escalated despite the growing significance of a worldwide movement against the war. In the U.S., the anti-war sentiment was particularly pronounced around the time of the 1968 U.S. presidential election.

After the summer of 1969 fragmentation of Students for a Democratic Society, Weatherman's adherents explicitly claimed themselves the real leaders of SDS and retained control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any leaflet, label, or logo bearing the name "Students for a Democratic Society" or "SDS" was in fact the views and politics of Weatherman, and not of SDS as a whole. Weatherman contained the vast majority of former SDS National Committee members, including Mark Rudd, David Gilbert and Bernadine Dohrn. For this reason, the group, while small, was able to easily commandeer the mantle of SDS and all of its membership lists. For a brief time, affiliations with regional SDS cadre were maintained from the National Office, but with Weatherman in charge the relationships didn’t last long, and local chapters soon disbanded. By February 1970 the group had decided to close the SDS National Office, concluding the major campus-based organization of the 1960s.

The name Weatherman was derived from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, which featured the lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The lyrics had been quoted at the bottom of an influential essay in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. Using this title the Weathermen meant, partially, to appeal to the segment of American youth inspired to action for social justice by Dylan’s songs. It appears also that the “Weatherman” moniker used by the group may have been meant as a rebuke against the Progressive Labor Party, whose Worker Student Alliance SDS faction had succeeded in recruiting many former SDSers to its ranks, and had allegedly co-opted the 1969 convention.

The Weatherman group had long held that militancy was becoming more important than nonviolent forms of anti-war action, and that university-campus-based demonstrations needed to be punctuated with more dramatic actions, which had the potential to interfere with the U.S. military and internal security apparatus. The belief was that these types of urban guerrilla actions would act as a catalyst for the coming revolution. Many international events indeed seemed to support the Weathermen’s overall assertion that worldwide revolution was imminent, such as the tumultuous Cultural Revolution in China; the 1968 student revolts in France, Mexico City and elsewhere; the Prague Spring; the emergence of the Tupamaros organization in Uruguay; the emergence of the Guinea-Bissauan Revolution and similar Marxist-led independence movements throughout Africa; and within the United States, the prominence of the Black Panther Party together with a series of “ghetto rebellions” throughout poor black neighborhoods across the country.

The Weathermen were outspoken advocates of the analytical concepts that later came to be known as “white skin privilege” and identity politics. As the unrest in poor black neighborhoods intensified in the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.”

“Days of Rage”

One of the first things the Weathermen did upon splitting from SDS was to announce that they would hold the "Days of Rage" that fall. The event was advertised with the slogan "Bring the war home!". Hoping to cause chaos on a level able to "wake" the American public out of what the group saw as its complacency with the slaughter of the Vietnamese people, the Weathermen wanted the event to be the largest-scale protest the decade had seen. Although the October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago had failed to draw as many participants as they had anticipated (originally expecting 10,000), the estimated two to three hundred who did attend shocked police by leading a riot through the Gold Coast neighborhood, smashing windows of a bank and then those of many cars. They also blew up a statue dedicated to police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. That night, six people were shot and seventy were arrested. Two smaller violent conflicts with police followed the next two nights.

Submersion

In 1970, following the police raid that resulted in the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, using for the first time its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO), adopting fake identities, and pursuing covert activities only. These initially included preparations for a bombing of a U.S. military noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey in what Brian Flanagan said had been intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".

Greenwich Village explosion

On March 5th, 1970, while preparing the bomb intended for that action, there was an accidental explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house. Three WU members, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins died in the explosion. Several days earlier a young man with far-right ties had stormed the building and had shot and injured the leader of the cell, forcing him to be hospitalized. It was an accident of history that the site of the explosion was the former residence of Merrill Lynch brokerage firm founder Charles Merrill and his son, the poet James Merrill. The younger Merrill subsequently recorded the event in his poem 18 West 11th Street, the title being the address of the house. An FBI report on the incident later claimed that the group had possessed sufficient amounts of explosive to "level ... both sides of the street".[1]

After the Greenwich Village incident, the Weathermen officially went underground. WUO shrank considerably, becoming even fewer than they had been when first formed. There was talk of infiltration by COINTELPRO that later turned out to be both imagined and real. The vast majority of other Radical Left groups that had not explicitly distanced themselves from the group at the beginning largely did so at that point. Despite their marginalization, the Weather Underground pushed on, releasing a number of manifestos and declarations while carrying on a series of bombings, which from then on were both successful and free of human casualties. The bombing actions attacked the U.S. Capitol, The Pentagon, police and prison buildings, and later the rebuilt Haymarket statue, among other targets. To avoid any loss of life as a result of these bombings, a WU member would issue warnings to evacuate the building ahead of time via phone.

Timothy Leary episode

The group also took a $25,000 payment from a psychedelics distribution organization called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love to break LSD advocate Timothy Leary out of prison, transporting him to Algeria. Leary joined Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria; his initial press release contains revolutionary rhetoric sympathetic to the Weather Underground's cause. When Leary was eventually captured by the FBI, he offered to serve as an informant to capture the Weather Underground members to reduce his prison sentence.

The Weather Underground members remained largely successful at avoiding police and intelligence agencies. Finally, most turned themselves in at the end of the 1970s once it was clear the revolution they had all been working towards had failed to materialize.

Dissolution and aftermath

After the group began dissolving in 1977, many members moved on to other armed revolutionary groups and were subsequently arrested and held for long periods. Very few served prison sentences for their time in the Weather Underground; the infiltration and destruction tactics used against them by COINTELPRO made much of the evidence gathered against them deemed illegally obtained and inadmissible in court. Meanwhile, Weatherman members that later revealed themselves to be law enforcement officers offered unapologetic testimonies of intentional incitement to violence and terrorist acts, used as a tactic at key junctures to discredit and destroy the group. Jennifer Dohrn, Bernardine Dohrn's sister, later claimed that according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI planned at one point to kidnap her son when she gave birth.

Widely-known members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Mark Rudd, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, Naomi Jaffe, Cathy Wilkerson, Jeff Jones, David Gilbert, Susan Stern, Bob Tomashevsky, Sam Karp, Russ Neufeld, Joe Kelly, Laura Whitehorn and the still-married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Most former Weathermen have successfully re-integrated into mainstream society, without necessarily repudiating their original intent. For example, Bill Ayers, now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said in a September 11, 2001 New York Times profile that he doesn't "regret setting bombs [against non-human targets]. I believe we didn't do enough." Dohrn and Boudin also still hold to their original beliefs. Members like Brian Flanagan have expressed regret. Still others, such as Mark Rudd, believe the group's original motivation, particularly its position regarding U.S. imperialism, was justified, but its resultant actions were clearly wrong.

The WU insisted that Emile de Antonio shoot the documentary Underground in 1976. However, a much more extensive, widespread, and critically-acclaimed documentary emerged in 2002 with the Oscar-nominated The Weather Underground by filmmakers Bill Siegel and Sam Green. A little seen film called Ice had several WU members in a somewhat fictionalized revolutionary setting.

Chronology of events

Weathermen organization in pop culture

Sing a song for the children who are gone
Sing a song for Diana
Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth
Weather woman Diana
(© 1971 God Tunes and Mole Music Company)

The Weather Underground by filmmakers Bill Siegel and Sam Green, 2002

'American Pastoral' by Philip Roth. The daughter of the central character is a member of the organisation.

'Geek Mafia' by author Rick Dakan includes a character that was once a member of the organization.

The Weather Underground: A Look Back at the Antiwar Activists Who Met Violence with Violence. Guests: Mark Rudd, former member of the Weather Underground, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, documentary filmmakers/directors. Interviewers: Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman. Democracy Now!. Segment available via streaming real audio, or MP3 download. 1 hour 40 minutes. Thursday, 5 June 2003. Retrieved 20 May 2005.

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ http://www.spunk.org/texts/misc/sp000209.txt]
  3. ^ [http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375713392
  4. ^ [2]
  5. ^ [3]

Categories


American communists | Irregular military | Clandestine groups | COINTELPRO targets | Historical political movements of the United States | Terrorism in the United States | Terrorist incidents in the 1970s | 1969 establishments

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