Subverting the System

In asking the question, how did young people who started with the nonviolent civil disobedience ideals of Thoreau and Gandhi get to the point of street fighting and making bombs, I’ve been reading a bunch of memoirs about the later Sixties. Fascinating people pass through these memoirs, people you may not have heard about, but whose influence or leadership was strong at the time. And because these books are reflective, looking back on a time almost fifty years ago, it is a question many of the writers ask themselves.

Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks, SDS organizers who wrote the Port Huron statement in 1962, were inspired by courageous civil rights fighters and philosophers such as A.J. Muste, to seek social justice using participatory democracy and non-violent civil disobedience. A broad-based student group, by 1965 it had begun to dawn on SDS members that, as Todd Gitlin says in The Sixties, “Suppose the New Left were only apparently small? Suppose it were actually the thoughtful, active vanguard of a swelling social force?”

Frustrated by Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, by 1966 the draft and the complicity of universities in the military-industrial complex began to take top priority on the SDS list. Greg Calvert, elected national secretary, gave a speech in early 1967 describing the difference between being liberal and being radical. Liberal reformists were always “fighting someone else’s battles.” In contrast, “radical or revolutionary consciousness is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed. It leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”

“From protest to resistance,” became the rallying cry of 1967. Later that year, at the Oakland Induction Center, a demonstration against the draft led to the first heady feeling that demonstrators could take on the police and control the streets, even if only for a few hours. In the same month, October 1967, demonstrators at the Pentagon were narrowly prevented from a suicide charge by Greg Calvert and Dave Dellinger, who had intended nonviolent confrontation.

By 1968, the more radical members of the left were reading Franz Fanon, who found that in colonial settings, those who acted on their anger were more emotionally healthy and whole; and Regis Debray, who described small guerilla fighting foco groups. Some members of SDS organized themselves into guerilla fighting cadres, which were in action during the confrontations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

After the convention, impatience and anger led away from open-ended problem solving to ideological commitment, as described by both Bill Ayers in Fugitive Days and Cathy Wilkerson in Flying Close to the Sun. SDS split into several factions including the Weathermen, who aimed to be the most militant, aggressive, outspoken voice in the area, thereby attracting alienated young people. “This confrontational strategy seemed like it might move our aims much faster,” said Cathy Wilkerson. The group also wanted to divert police attention from black activists, who were being brutally harassed and threatened. The “Days of Rage” demonstration in Chicago in October 1969 directly confronted police but turnout was very low.

Fred Hampton, the bright, young Chicago chairman of the Black Panthers, told the Weathermen they were provoking confrontation with law enforcement in a way that was dangerous to themselves and the community around them. Hampton was killed in 1969. That same year, Dick Flacks, the least militant radical, was almost killed by an unknown attacker. Dick and his wife Mickey moved to UC Santa Barbara, where through his classes on social movements and his work with student groups, Flacks inspired young people to go into the world and “make history” for the next 37 years.

Though many people took up street fighting, the fascination with bombs can be traced to only a few. The secrecy and tight hierarchical organization of the cadres the Weathermen developed also kept many of its members from knowing what was going on.

From participatory democracy to ideology, protest to resistance, surrounded by a women’s movement which grew out of the highly-charged political atmosphere, the ongoing struggle for civil rights by blacks, and changes everywhere induced by experiments in new lifestyles, the political left did succeed in “bringing the war home,” until April 1975, when the U.S. finally left Vietnam.

My characters, Line and Marty, are driven by the necessity of finding their ways in life and earning their livings. Though Line does fall in love with a “Movement heavy” and lives in Chicago where heated political action echoes around her, her own activism turns to health and healing. Marty arrives in Berkeley in 1967, where she embraces new aesthetics and the fact that the Left Coast looks across the Pacific Rim to Asia. They both become part of the yeasty process of cultural change and its implications for the future.