Days of Rage (10 page)

To begin to understand all this, one needs to understand the protest movements of the ’60s, and to understand that turmoil, one must at least glance at the decade that produced all those angry young activists: the 1950s. For much of white America, the ’50s was a time of suffocating conformity, when parents born during the Depression and empowered by winning a “good war” taught their children that America represented everything that was right and true in the world. These were the “happy days,” when a booming economy sent wealth soaring and children, born by the millions, grew up in homes where every family seemed to have two cars in the driveway, a stereo cabinet, and, in fifty million homes by 1960, a television. How happy
were
Americans? When a 1957 Gallup poll asked people whether they were “very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy,” an astounding 96 percent answered very or fairly happy. “The employers will love this generation,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in 1959. “They are not going to press many grievances . . . they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots.”

And then, as if overnight, things changed. More than anything else, it was the pictures young Americans began seeing on those new televisions in 1960—of stoic Southern blacks dragged away from all-white lunch counters, of black protesters being beaten bloody by red-faced Southern deputies—that laid the groundwork for the white protest movement. The violence and injustice itself was shameful enough, but it was what those pictures said about America, about what an entire generation of young people had been taught, that felt like a betrayal. America wasn’t a land of equality. It wasn’t a land of the good and the just and the righteous. It was all a lie.

Those were feelings, at least, that consumed many of the idealistic white students who joined the civil rights movement after those first sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. There were only a trickle at first, but when pictures of Southern thugs beating the first Freedom Riders in 1961 were broadcast, the numbers grew. A host of white groups sprang up to work with SNCC in those first years, but by far the most influential was SDS, at the time an obscure youth branch of an even more obscure socialist education organization called the League for Industrial Democracy, which traced its origins to 1905.

SDS’s emergence was spearheaded by a Freedom Rider named Tom Hayden, a onetime University of Michigan student who served as SDS’s president in 1962 and 1963. It was Hayden who, at a conference of barely sixty SDSers and allies on the coast of Lake Huron, drafted the protest manifesto that became known as “The Port Huron Statement.” Grandly billed as “an agenda for the generation,” the fifty-page document by itself did not electrify or even mobilize campus activists across the country. But it did establish an agenda for SDS—broadly antiwar, antipoverty, and pro−civil rights—that over time would attract hundreds and then thousands of mostly white students across the nation. That the massive baby boom generation would produce a politically liberal or even radical voice had long been anticipated; the
sociologist C. Wright Mills had actually written an open “Letter to the New Left” in 1960, asking what was taking so long. SDS and its intellectual allies, wanting to distance themselves from the communist “Old Left” that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had destroyed, took the “New Left” mantle as their own. SDS thus became the core of the ’60s New Left, much as the New Left became the core of the broader protest movement, “the Movement.”

The Movement grew all through 1963 and 1964, propelled both by social shocks, such as the assassinations of President Kennedy and of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and by the first whiffs of true campus unrest, especially the emergence of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley. Much of white activism was still drawn to the struggle for Southern civil rights, at least until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power served as a warning that white protesters were no longer wanted, much less needed. It was then, when the white protest movement badly needed something new to protest, that the new war in Vietnam, accelerating in 1965, caught its attention.

SDS crouched unsteadily at the center of the gathering storm. Somewhat like a social fraternity, it existed as a string of campus chapters linked by a national office that attempted—through conventions, newsletters, and traveling emissaries—to direct the individual chapters, with mixed degrees of success. In practice, the chapters largely went their own way. But the highest echelon of SDS, its national leadership, did tend to draw the liveliest minds in the Movement, and their utterances were widely followed. All through 1965 and 1966 SDS members peopled myriad civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, hundreds of them, but a kind of malaise soon set in. Every month brought more and larger protests. Yet there seemed to be little improvement in black civil rights, and more American soldiers poured into Southeast Asia every day. Clearly, if SDS and the broader Movement were to bring about the fundamental changes they so badly wanted, a new set of tactics would be needed.

The first stirrings of something greater than mere protest, something momentous, could be heard in SDS leadership circles by the end of 1966. The first to voice them was the organization’s national secretary that season, Greg Calvert, a twenty-nine-year-old history teacher from Iowa State who would be gone from SDS by the time others began going underground. It was Calvert who, in the face of widespread frustration at the speed of change, first began using Malcolm’s word, “revolution,” to characterize the level of struggle the Movement needed to bring to America. In a report to membership in November 1966 he wrote, “Let’s quit playing games and stop the self-indulgent pretense of confusion. . . . I am finally convinced that a truly revolutionary movement must be built out of the deepest revolutionary demands and out of the strongest revolutionary hopes—the demand for and the hope of freedom.”

This was still a long way from planning actual violence, but an intellectual foundation was being laid. Calvert’s call struck a chord, as did the slogan he coined that swept the Movement that winter of 1966−67: “From protest to resistance.” At least initially, no one was entirely sure what “resistance” meant. But out on college campuses, students quickly provided the answers. All through the first half of 1967, protesters who once silently carried signs began confronting authority. When a district attorney tried to confiscate copies of a student literary magazine at Cornell, a crowd of angry students sold it in brazen defiance; when six were arrested, others surrounded the police car and freed them. At Penn State student protesters occupied the president’s office until he provided information about the university’s practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress.

But it was SDS itself that propelled by far the largest resistance movement: to the military draft. The first draft-resistance groups began springing up in early 1967 and were soon widespread, many students openly burning their draft cards or wearing a popular SDS button:
NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON’T
. This kind of open defiance to government authority, along with disclosures of U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese civilians, drew tens of thousands of young people into the Movement even as its intellectual leaders, especially in SDS, began musing about ever more militant ways to confront the government. Protests alone, they could see, were no longer enough.

As an SDSer named Dotson Rader put it:

The meaninglessness of non-violent, “democratic” methods was becoming clear to us in the spring of 1967. The Civil Rights Movement was dead. Pacifism was dead. Some Leftists—the Trotskyites, Maoists, radical socialists . . . some of the radicals in SDS, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Tom Hayden—knew it early. But it took the rest of us awhile to give up the sweet life of the democratic Left for revolt.
¹

One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the “next level” in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. And so it was with the path of “resistance.” No sooner had the broader Movement plunged into the realities of draft and other resistance than the keenest thinkers began pondering what came next. Defying the government was giving way to confronting the government. And there was only one place to go, intellectually, once the government was confronted.

It was Greg Calvert once more who first put it into words, at least publicly, in a front-page article in the
New York Times
in May 1967. The article, which attempted to take stock of student-resistance activities, suggested that violence was the Movement’s logical next step, a contention it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” No other student leader seconded it, and because it suggested a tactic few in SDS had even considered, much less approved, it was broadly renounced. But not by everyone. The intellectual cat was now out of the bag, and as the Movement exploded into public consciousness during 1967’s Summer of Love, the first voices could be heard saying that Greg Calvert was onto something.

 • • • 

After years of talk and restlessness 1968 changed everything. It was as if the earth itself was exploding in protest. Suddenly, as if in concert, students and working people around the world—in France, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Finland, Brazil, even in China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—rose up and demanded that their governments change. Every night on the evening news it was as if the same roll of film were being broadcast over and over from country after country, thousands of young people holding protest signs, students leaping over barricades, steel-helmeted police and soldiers staring impassively or, increasingly, beating them down. For those in power, it felt as if the world was crumbling around them. For those in the streets, it was as if the entire world was aflame. Suddenly there was a single word on everyone’s lips: “revolution.”

The revolution—a single global uprising of the “oppressed”—was happening, right now, all over the world and would soon come to America. It was an idea that seemed to wash over the Movement in a matter of minutes, easy to discuss, harder to grasp, harder still to actually believe. Yet it spread with stunning swiftness. In the summer of 1968, barely a year after Greg Calvert had been pilloried for suggesting that protesters become urban guerrillas, a study found that more than 350,000 young Americans considered themselves “revolutionaries.” The term, of course, meant many things to many people. For most, unwilling or unable to accept the far-fetched notion that a violent uprising might topple the government, the word “revolution” became a kind of shorthand for fundamental change. When they used it, they meant a revolution in American norms, in the power structure, in civil rights, in attitudes toward the poor and dispossessed. No sane person, it was widely assumed, believed the U.S. government could actually be overthrown.

But others did believe it. For the hard core, for those who saw governments teetering everywhere, who felt that the Movement was doomed to failure, who despaired at the murders of change agents such as Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, 1968 bore signs of the apocalypse. For these activists, who might be called apocalyptic revolutionaries, there was a vivid and growing sense that the world was on the brink of historic, irreversible change and that the morally corrupt American government, murdering the Vietnamese, unleashing dogs on Southern blacks, and beating its protesters, was poised for imminent collapse. SDS’s leadership happened to be populated by an outsized number of Jewish students, and for many of these the notion of challenging a U.S. government they imagined as the second coming of Nazi Germany had enormous appeal. All that was needed was a push. Castro had done it in Cuba, Lenin in Russia, Mao in China. Why not in America?

This was a powerful idea, at once outlandish and intoxicating, providing a rush of intellectual adrenaline as strong as any drug. It was also, as Kirkpatrick
Sale notes in his definitive history,
SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society
, the inevitable result of everything that had happened to that point in the 1960s:

Revolution: how had it come to that? It was a blend of many things: bitterness, hatred, and alienation, hope, confidence, and conviction, energy, passion, and need. It was the pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties, the inevitable product of the awakened generation as it probed deeper and deeper into the character of its nation. . . .

There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils
in
America were the evils
of
America, inextricably a part of the total system. . . . Clearly something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system: various reforms had been tried, confrontation had been tried, there had been civil-rights agitation, university pressures, antiwar marches, doorbell ringing, electoral action, student power, draft resistance demonstrations, campus uprisings, even tentative political violence—all to little avail. . . .

Worse, those who wanted peaceable change, who tried to work through approved channels, seemed to be systematically ignored, ostracized, or—as with the Kennedys and King—eliminated. More was necessary, and in the words of [one SDS leader], “What it came to that year was that people came to the conclusion that the only way to stop the war was make a revolution, and the only way to stop racism was make a revolution.” “The monster”—that was the recurrent phrase now—could not be altered, deviated, halted: it had to be destroyed.

Apocalyptic revolutionaries represented a strident new voice in the Movement, but they were able to draw from a wellspring of ideas that weren’t entirely new: philosophies, arguments, books, and films that had sprung up around armed-resistance movements worldwide. They studied Lenin and Mao and Ho Chi Minh—it went without saying that revolutionaries were almost always communists—but their favorite blueprint was the Cuban Revolution, their icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Castro’s swashbuckling right-hand man. A handsome doctor, Che represented the thoughtful, “caring” revolutionary who resorted to violence only to fight an unjust government; by 1968 his poster could be found hanging in dormitories across America. The apocalyptic revolutionary’s favorite movie was
The Battle of Algiers
, a 1966 film that portrayed heroic Algerian guerrillas doing battle against their French occupiers. In time, once people actually began going underground, their bible would become
Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla
, written in 1969 by a Brazilian Marxist named Carlos Marighella; it outlined dozens of strategies and tactics, analyzing weapons, outlining ways to organize a guerrilla cell, even describing the best ways to rob a bank. A number of underground newspapers would excerpt Marighella’s manual.