Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 08:32:04 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: AUT: Fw:US: Days Of Rage - (Weathermen, SDS, etc)


Message: 12
   Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 02:47:46 +0100
   From: "Stasi" <stasi-AT-lineone.net>
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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