Jeremy Varon (16 page)

The Weatherleader Jeff Jones, announcing himself with the code phrase “I am Marion Delgado,” then revealed the target of the action.

(Marion Delgado was a Chicano boy who had derailed a train by placing a concrete block on the tracks in 1947; the Weathermen and other radicals took him up as a rebel folk hero and, on occasion, used his name as an alias.) The group, by now 350 or so strong, was to tear through Chicago’s fashionable Gold Coast and pounce on the home at the Drake Hotel of Judge Julius Hoffman, who was presiding over the Chicago 8

conspiracy trial. Jones shouted, “Marion Delgado don’t like [Judge Hoffman], and the Weathermen don’t like him, . . . so . . . let’s go get him!”21

The Weathermen then trotted in orderly columns to the Gold Coast while, in a surreal scene, hundreds of plainclothes police kept pace alongside them.22 On cue, the Weathermen erupted. With bricks and pipes, they smashed the windows of automobiles, restaurants, stores, and hotels. The destruction appeared to be both targeted and indiscriminate. They attacked not only a Rolls Royce, police cars, and the façades of “upper-class” establishments, but also ordinary cars, a barber shop, and, on side streets, the windows of lower-middle-class homes. Twice the Weathermen charged police blockades. The police opened fire, wounding an attacking Weatherman in the neck and another, who posed no immediate threat, in the shoulder. Those captured were pummeled by the police.

The Chicago photographer Duane Hall reported: “[The police] had a couple of guys in the street and they were beating them real bad. . . . And there were [women] in this too. They were bleeding all over. And one guy was laying there knocked out and I was shooting a picture of three policemen beating the guy. They were just beating and kicking him.”23

The fighting subsided after an hour. Hobbled Weathermen returned to the movement centers, while activists sympathetic to the group made sweeps in vans to pull the wounded off the streets and take them to hos-pitals far from the center of Chicago, where they might avoid the police.

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Sixty-eight had been arrested, twenty-eight police had been injured (though none seriously), and at least six Weathermen had been shot.

Early the following morning, Phoebe Hirsch vividly recalled, the Weathermen were paid an unexpected visit by members of the Mafia, who candidly introduced themselves, pointed out that Mafia-owned property in downtown Chicago had been damaged during the march, and warned that the Weathermen “would hear from them” if it happened again.24

The morning’s main activity was to be a raid on a Draft Board office by the “Women’s Militia.” Some seventy Weatherwomen gathered at Grant Park, where Bernardine Dohrn gave a speech praising their valor.

As they attempted to leave the park, however, they were easily overpowered by the police, who were clearly livid from the day before. Hirsch says that a policeman tried to break her arm as “added punishment” for the mayhem. The police were not the only ones upset at the Weathermen. Hirsch’s uncle, in order that she “learn a lesson,” refused to bail her out of Cook County Jail, where she remained for a week.25 Dohrn later confessed to the contradictory feelings she had during the Days of Rage: “This can’t be done. I’m doing it.” Elaborating on her resolve, she joked that the protest was like “showing up at the wedding knowing this is a terrible mistake, but going through with it anyhow.”26

Later in the day, Illinois Governor Richard Ogilvie announced that more than 2,500 National Guardsmen had been called in to protect the city. The Weathermen wisely canceled scheduled “jailbreaks” at area high schools and an evening rally, advertised as a “Wargasm.” Instead, they would join the demonstration organized by RYM II to protest the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial at the Federal Building, claiming that they were attending under the leadership of the Black Panthers.27 But at the rally, Fred Hampton denounced the Weathermen, who had broken their promise of restraint. “We do not support people who are anarchistic, opportunistic, adventuristic, and Custeristic [i.e., suicidal],” he said.28

The last of the Days of Rage featured the most intense fighting. The night before, there had been a chilling prelude when the group discovered a police informant in its midst—a young Hispanic man whom a Weatherman had recently seen in a police station while being processed for an arrest. A Weatherman severely beat the informant before releasing him. Wanted posters immediately went up, accusing the assailant of felony assault. The Weatherman in question soon fled Chicago and changed his identity, making him the first among the group officially to go underground.

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The Importance of Being Militant

The day’s violence began when police charged a noon rally at Haymarket Square, picking five Weatherleaders out of the crowd and beating them with clubs. Later, at Chicago’s downtown Loop, the Weathermen and police again engaged in combat. During the battle, Assistant Corporation Counsel Richard Elrod, the mastermind of the Chicago 8

conspiracy indictments and a close friend of Mayor Richard Daley, tried to tackle Weatherman Brian Flanagan. In the process, Elrod hit his neck against a concrete wall and became paralyzed. Insisting spuriously that Flanagan had beaten Elrod, the police charged the young Weatherman with attempted murder. Duane Hall observed with stunned awe the scene of near-mortal carnage: “You’d see the police chasing [Weathermen] into alleys . . . ; you’d hear them screaming and then you’d see them laying on the ground, and you knew they’d be dead. By some miracle, they just weren’t dead.”29 By midafternoon, the fighting had ceased, one hundred more Weathermen had been arrested, and the Days of Rage were finally over.

Perhaps 600 people altogether participated in the four-day action. A total of 287 were arrested (some more than once), mostly on charges of

“disorderly conduct” and “mob action.” At least twelve demonstrators were charged with assault or aggravated battery. Of those arrested, roughly two-thirds were male. Most were between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, but one was only eleven, and two were as old as fifty-one. Their combined bail exceeded $2 million. More than 800 automobile and 600 residential or store windows had been smashed.30 As prosecutors prepared their cases, the FBI’s Chicago office drafted a lengthy report, sent to all FBI field offices with significant SDS activity, that chronicled Weatherman’s activities in the early fall and, as best it could, described the tumultuous protest.

.

.

.

Because something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mister Jones?

Bob Dylan,

“Ballad of a Thin Man”

The city of Chicago, although conditioned by the 1968 Democratic Convention to being in the eye of a political storm, reacted to the Days of Rage with bewilderment and disgust. Mayor Daley denounced the

“riots” as an “outrage.”31 Clergy who had let the Weathermen use their The Importance of Being Militant

83

churches also condemned the violence, claiming that they had been misled by the group about the nature of the protest. (The Weathermen had even taken wooden poles from coat racks in one of the churches to use as clubs, naïvely planning to put them back once the protests were over.)32

Using headlines like “Radicals Go On Rampage” and “Cops, Troops Guard City,” the
Chicago Tribune
portrayed a community under siege.33

Following the last of the Days of Rage, the paper triumphantly declared

“105 Seized in Loop Battle” and lavished praise on law enforcement.34

By adopting a kind of battle reportage, the
Tribune
oddly affirmed Weatherman’s intention to “bring the war home.” But if the city was certain it was locked in battle, it strained to understand just what and whom it was fighting.

Daley set the tone for expressions of confoundment by announcing,

“This senseless and vicious behavior is not dissent. . . . We witnessed planned attacks on persons and violent destruction of property with no provocation or justification.”35 Even sharper condemnation came from the mother of Brian Flanagan, whose son was held responsible for the paralyzing injury to Elrod. She declared, “I don’t blame the Chicago police. They should have knocked the heads off every one of them. . . . I don’t understand these kids at all. The world I knew is much different from the one they inhabit now. I just don’t understand.”36 Describing the Weathermen’s actions as a “carnival of mindless terror” and “insane efforts to organize a putsch,” the
Tribune
called for an uncompromising crackdown against the “New Barbarians.”37

Denunciations of New Leftists for pushing beyond the limits of “responsible” dissent had been a stock reaction of the media and public officials for years. Shocked parents incredulous at the behavior of their activist children were virtually a cliché in the strained relations between the generations, but Weatherman’s leap from self-defensive violence and petty “trashing” of property to planned offensive assaults caused a total breakdown in the dialogue between the establishment and the radical left. Weatherman’s aggression could neither be sanctioned by any civic principle nor even explained within any familiar political frame of reference. Neither could it be easily forgiven, in light of the admonitions of the clergy and Mrs. Flanagan, by Christian or parental love. While the demonstrations at the Democratic Convention had been repellent and confusing to many Americans, they were the object of a widely publicized trial in which the politics of the antiwar movement and the counterculture could to some degree be displayed and debated. The Days of Rage would be subject to no such public evaluation. Many of the Weath-84

The Importance of Being Militant

ermen would go underground before the most serious indictments aris-ing out of the Days of Rage were handed down. In a pretrial hearing shortly after the action, a group of Weathermen marched into the courthouse wearing street-fighting clothes and chanting revolutionary slogans, to which a stunned judge declared, “I feel like I’m in a mob action right now.”38 In the Days of Rage, Weatherman revealed itself to the mainstream as monstrous; incapable of being comprehended, the monster had only to be stopped.

Much of the left nearly concurred. Movement critics found the Days of Rage not so much inscrutable—they were familiar with Weatherman’s rationale for the action—as politically senseless. Hampton complained to reporters that the Days of Rage were “not revolutionary even. . . .

[G]oing out on the streets and getting people shot, killed and maimed is insanity.”39 Others saw the action as evidence of Weatherman’s “adventurism,” which made a fetish of violence and turned against, rather than to, “the people” in its efforts to build a socialist future. New York’s
Guardian,
an independent socialist weekly widely read on the left, commented derisively that “the most significant aspect of the surrealistic con-tretemps created by the Weatherman microfaction of SDS last week was that the rest of the movement had the revolutionary sense to stay away.”

To the claim of the Weathermen that their willingness to die in street battles signified their singular commitment, the
Guardian
answered: “If American radicals must die it shall be in genuine struggle for the people, not for a bit part in a penny dreadful Keystone Kops melodrama.”40

The Liberation News Service, whose syndicated stories appeared in dozens of underground papers, complained that Weatherman had failed to “define and isolate the enemy” or educate “the masses” on how capitalism oppressed them.41 It noted that Weatherman clubs had hit both Volkswagens and Cadillacs, barbershops as well as banks. RYM II supporters contrasted glowing accounts of solidarity among students, blacks, Hispanics, and workers at their events with the familiar criticism that the Weathermen pursued revolutionary struggle without popular support.42 The Progressive Labor Party, with characteristic vindictiveness, described the Days of Rage as “the work of police agents and hate-the-people lunatics,” whose true goal was to discredit the “real SDS,” namely, itself.43 Chicago’s main underground newspaper,
The Seed,
feared that the Days of Rage would legitimize the repression of activists of every sort in the eyes of an anxious public. According to much of the left, in its first, great moment of truth, Weatherman had demonstrated only the futility The Importance of Being Militant

85

of middle-class radicals using anti-imperialist diatribe and acts of machismo to organize white working-class youths into a suicidal Red Army.

The monstrous Weatherman, judging by the Days of Rage, would soon stop itself.

A minority of commentators who were witness to the protests offered something other than unalloyed contempt. The
Berkeley Tribe
reporter Steve Haines was a veteran of the tumultuous struggles in 1969 over Berkeley’s “People’s Park.” (After activists seized an empty plot of land owned by the University of California and turned it into a community garden, a battle ensued for control of the park. In one confrontation, police opened fire, wounding more than fifty of the park’s unsuccessful defenders and killing an unarmed protester, James Rector.) Haines, seeing the Weathermen march in tight formations, erupt in a torrent of destruction, fight police in hand-to-hand combat, and then “disappear into the night,” described the first evening of the Days of Rage as “the most incredible thing

[he] had ever experienced.” The Weathermen, he concluded, “confronted the gut issue of personal courage in a way few of us who consider ourselves revolutionary ever have. They confronted it and they won.”44 David Schanoes of the
Ann Arbor Argus
saw the Days of Rage as evidence of Weatherman’s complete detachment from the working class and poor. In his telling, a member of the Young Lords—a radical Puerto Rican group based in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods—provided the most “coherent criticism of the action” with the comment, “Who ever heard of breaking windows and not taking anything?” Schanoes nonetheless praised Dohrn for saying in a speech to the battle-ready group: “‘We are not going to be good Germans in a Fascist State.’” “That’s it on the line, and forget the rest,” he exclaimed. “Right on Bernardine!”45 The radical journalist Andrew Kopkind wound up in jail with the Weathermen and reported: “We all thought in the cell block that night that simply not to fear fighting is a kind of winning. . . . Almost everyone . . . now thinks the spirit of the Sixties has found its end. But at night in the cell block, we believed that it had found a new beginning.”46