Strategy (74 page)

It seems to me that until you can begin to show—not in language and not in theory, but in action—that you can put an end to the war in Vietnam, and an end to American racism, you can't condemn the violence of others who can't wait for you.

Arendt objected: “To oppose the government in the United States with violence is absolutely wrong.”
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Over the next year, she developed her arguments on violence further, insisting that it could destroy but not create power.
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Attempts by the American radicals to emulate Latin American guerrillas were disastrous. The Black Panthers went so far as to establish a training center in Cuba and had a plan to set up focos in the more mountainous areas of the United States. The plan, as Eldridge Cleaver (a Black Panther leader of the time) recalled, was “to have small mobile units that could shift easily in and out of rural areas, living off the land, and tying up thousands of troops in fruitless pursuit.” He added that in retrospect it seemed “pretty ridiculous.”
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The most serious emulation came from the Weathermen, a faction of SDS.

This group can be traced to the April 1968 occupation of New York's Columbia University by students who complained about the university's encroachments into black neighborhoods and professors doing weapons research. This was not a unique event. Around the world there were upheavals on campuses and demonstrations against Vietnam. In May, the Fifth French Republic was almost brought down by rioting on the streets of Paris. Most depressingly for liberals, Martin Luther King was murdered that April as was Robert Kennedy in June, just when his presidential bid was gathering pace. These murders eliminated in turn the leaders of nonviolent direct action and
those seeking change through electoral politics. After this, Hayden—who knew Kennedy
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—saw no hope in democratic politics. He wrote an article headed “Two, Three, Many Columbias,” picking up on a slogan written on a university wall, which in turn picked up on Che's call to the Tricontinental. He still clung to his own original vision:

The student protest is not just an offshoot of the black protest—it is based on authentic opposition to the middle-class world of manipulation, channeling and careerism. The students are in opposition to the fundamental institutions of society.

But his analysis was now harsher. Universities were linked to imperialism. Hayden spoke of barricades, threats to destroy buildings in face of police attacks, and raids on offices of professors doing weapons research. “A crisis is foreseeable that would be too massive for police to handle.”
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Even sharper was Mark Rudd, one of the leaders of the Columbia revolt. Unlike Hayden, whose radicalism had developed slowly and thoughtfully during the late 1950s, Rudd had radicalized abruptly. His political analysis was correspondingly less subtle and his politics more outraged. He later provided a candid description of himself as “a member of the cult of Che Guevara” who had “evolved a belief in the necessity for violence in order to end the war and to make revolution.” He recalled a regular line in his speeches—“The ruling class will never give over power peacefully”—and Mao Zedong's famous aphorism: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” With the Panthers already fighting a revolutionary war within the United States, a “heroic fantasy” developed by which “eventually the military would disintegrate internally, and the revolutionary army—led by us, of course—would be built from its defectors.”
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Faced by Maoists who brought to the campus a developed revolutionary theory, Rudd's group believed that they had to counter with one of their own, based on a combination of Cuba and Columbia University. They would be urban guerrillas, “rejecting the go-slow approach of the rest of the Left, just as Che and Fidel had begun to reject the Cuban Communist Party's conservatism by beginning guerrilla warfare in Cuba. Our bible was Debray's
Revolution in the Revolution
.” It was out of this faction that the Weather Underground was formed with the aim of moving out of the universities to organize young people for a coming armed struggle. The name came from one of Bob Dylan's lyrics (“You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows”). In place of the sense of experimentation and openness of the early SDS, there was now an old-fashioned Marxist factional fight. The attempts at being urban guerrillas involved farce and tragedy, with their
numbers never more than three hundred and with key figures soon killed by their own explosive devices, on the run, or imprisoned. The fate of the Black Panthers was similar, and even more violent. Rudd later lamented how with his friends he had chosen to “scuttle America's largest radical organization—with chapters in hundreds of campuses, a powerful national identity, and enormous growth potential—for a fantasy of revolutionary urban-guerrilla warfare.”
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Sociologist Daniel Bell, a professor at Columbia, saw it coming. He remarked that “desperado tactics are never the mark of a coherent social movement, but the guttering last gasps of a romanticism soured by rancor and impotence.” The SDS, he predicted, would “be destroyed by its style. It lives on turbulence, but is incapable of transforming its chaotic impulses into a systematic, responsible behavior that is necessary to effect broad societal change.”
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The 1960s had begun with innovative forms of protests that dramatized the gap between the American dream and the harsh reality of southern segregation. Its participants embodied American idealism—dignified, restrained, and articulate. During the course of the 1960s, the context for protest changed dramatically. Political advances in the South came up against the economic despair of the urban ghettoes and the fear of being sent to fight in a vicious war that was widely seen to be both pointless and illegitimate. As the hard political core of the movement began to turn into an approximation of a Leninist vanguard or a Guevarist foco, around the edges a much more individualistic, libertarian, permissive culture was taking root, posing a provocative and enduring challenge to the American way of life. Though they swam in the same demographic tides, there was no logical reason why the counterculture and radical politics had to move hand in hand, other than Vietnam. This pulled them together.

During 1967, gentle, hedonistic “hippies”—often high on drugs—made their appearance offering “love and peace” as a form of “flower power.” They had nothing so formal as a leader, but as a prophet there was the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Although his parents were communists, this had, if anything, turned Ginsberg against political activism. His primary focus, as his reputation grew during the 1950s, was not “rebellion or social protest” but the “exploration of modes of consciousness.”
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A visit to Saigon in 1963, however, had led him to be more political and he became a strong opponent of the Vietnam War.
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There was playfulness about Ginsberg, as if he knew
at times his claims were absurd, yet his belief in the ability of poetry and Buddhist chants to affect consciousness was sincere. His ideas, which were not always intelligible in conception or execution, depended on the power of language.

In 1966, after a poetry reading, he had screamed “I declare the end of the war” to the National Student Association convention. He later explained that the aim was to “make my language identical with the historical event,” so when he declared “the end of the war” this would “set up a force field of language which is so solid and absolute as a statement and a realization of an assertion by my will, conscious will power, that it will contradict—counter-act and ultimately overwhelm the force field of language pronounced out of the State Department and out of Johnson's mouth.” In almost postmodern terms he offered his language in a trial of strength with the “black mantras” of the war-makers. It was a political critique which traded “argument for incantation.”
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The theme was picked up by the folk singer Phil Ochs and led to a November 1967 demonstration in New York with three thousand young people running through the streets, proclaiming loudly “I declare the war is over.” Out of this came the idea for the “Yippies” as the political wing of the hippies.

The founders of the Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Both had been involved in radical protests since the start of the decade. Rubin had been involved in the Berkeley free speech movement and had become a fulltime activist, organizing “teach-ins” against the war. He had a reputation as an imaginative tactician but had also moved well to the left. Both had concluded that standard forms of protest were losing their bite and that new types of spectacle were needed to gain media attention and get the message across. Rubin had urged in 1966 that activists become “specialists in propaganda and communication” and saw in the counterculture a way to challenge the system he opposed on every possible front, from comic books to street theater. This is why Ginsberg's mantra had appealed to them. As they thought ahead to the protests planned for the August 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, they wanted something more than a conventional demonstration. They hit upon the idea of a counterculture event, a “Festival of Life” that would help turn the convention into a circus, blending surreal humor and anarchism. When the Yippie manifesto was launched in January, it looked forward to the festival: “We are making love in the parks. We are reading, singing, laughing, printing newspapers, groping and making a mock convention and celebrating the birth of FREE AMERICA in our own time.”
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With the war going so badly, Lyndon Johnson had decided not to stand for reelection. His vice president and anointed successor, Hubert Humphrey,
got the nomination after Robert Kennedy's assassination and antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy's effective withdrawal from campaigning. Johnson's withdrawal was no reason to abandon the protest. All the different factions of the movement converged on Chicago “like moths to the flame.” There were the new hard men of the SDS, radical pacifists still committed to nonviolent direct action, and the Yippies taunting the authorities with talk of LSD in the water supply, smoke bombs in delegates' halls, and sexual shows of varying degrees of provocation. The gathering mood spoke more of violence than peace. The city's long-time mayor, Michael Daley, who ran one of the most formidable machines in American politics, had form when it came to turning the police onto demonstrators. He was determined to make life as difficult as possible for all those who opposed the careful orchestration of the convention. The police were under orders to show no restraint. Some were operating undercover. Both sides had their provocateurs and both had an interest in confrontation.

Tom Hayden was at the center of the preparations for Chicago, including seeking permits for demonstrations. His rhetoric when talking with other activists was becoming wilder. This was his existential moment. He could show he was not like the “good Germans” who were in denial about the Holocaust. In making his stand against a terrible war, he was prepared—as an existentialist—to pay his own personal price. This was reinforced by the persistent notion that underdogs benefited by appearing as innocent victims of police brutality. Heightened confrontation would push up the internal costs of the war. The establishment, he had concluded, would only abandon South Vietnam on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation, even if this involved arousing “the sleeping dogs on the right.”
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Rubin also bought into the theory that the movement required repression to grow. Repression, he enthused, would turn “demonstration protest into wars. Actors into heroes. Masses of individuals into a community.” It would eliminate “the bystander, the neutral observer, the theorist. It forces everyone to pick a side.”
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Such talk made Ginsberg wary. He had never, he explained later, been a poet of “revolt.” That would have meant trying to “become wiser by becoming dumber, you want to become more peaceful by getting angry.” His aim was to alter consciousness.
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In Chicago, instead of the “academies of self-awareness” and “classes in spirituality” he favored, he saw “bloody visions of the apocalypse.”
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He flew there writing a poem (“Remember the Helpless order the/ Police armed to protect/the Helpless Freedom the Revolutionary/ Conspired to honor”). He later explained his presence at Chicago as a “religious experimenter,” not only on behalf of the Yippies but “also in the context of our whole political life, too.” In the face of police determination to
close down the music festival, he urged caution. Presenting himself as a calming influence, he encouraged demonstrators to chant “Om” in the face of violence or hysteria. “Ten people humming Om can calm down one hundred. One hundred people humming Om can regulate the metabolism of a thousand. A thousand bodies vibrating Om can immobilize an entire downtown Chicago street full of scared humans, uniformed or naked.” At one point during the demonstrations he led chanting for seven hours. The aim of this, and his other antiwar performances, was not to transmit a thought or assert a principle but to “bring about a state of being.”

Once again we see the idea that getting the state to reveal its true nastiness would set people against it, without considering the circumstances in which ordinary people might support the state. The radicals, disappointed with their own numbers, sought to use police brutality as a means of expanding their constituency. Watching it all were the world's media, who were treated to a spectacle of baton charges and bloodied demonstrators.
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Tactically, the hard-liners had won and the movement lost. The progressive radicalization of the decade had reflected the limits of a politics based on gaining attention through sacrifice, appeals to conscience, and assertions of shared values. The early concepts of dignified nonviolence, which “implied erect bearing, silent passage, and respectable dress,” had given way to “shouting and threats, hissing, hoaxes, foul language, heckling, garbage-dumping, a sense of great anger vented, and a growing tendency to violence.”
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