Outlaw violence in America has long had a romantic aura. In the 1967 movie version of their story, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank but don’t take money from waiting customers. It was rumored that when the sad-eyed gunman of their era, Pretty Boy Floyd, robbed banks, he also tore up mortgages. Woody Guthrie burnished the myth:
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
The militant sect the Weathermen, soon to become the Weather Underground, was formed in 1969, at a time when the United States was riven by bitter divisions. It took its name from Bob Dylan’s line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” One member openly praised Bonnie and Clyde, calling them “consciousness-expanding.” The group idolized the movements that had brought revolutionary regimes to power in North Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and elsewhere. Its members—many of whom had been upper-middle-class students at elite colleges—savored the heady belief that they were on the side of oppressed people everywhere, both in the Global South and among the Black population of the US.
The Weather Underground—like millions of the rest of us—was right to be appalled by the slaughter and devastation wrought by the bombs and herbicides that the US was unleashing on Vietnam. The deaths of up to several million Vietnamese in that war, and the maiming of many others, is one of the great crimes of our history. And Black Americans were certainly often the victims of government racism: for example, the police killing in 1969 of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and a colleague in a predawn raid on his Chicago apartment was an outright assassination.
But the Weather Underground carried idealism one step further. If the state was using violence on Vietnamese and on the Panthers at home, it declared, those in solidarity must strike back with violence. And that in turn would stimulate the latent revolutionary feelings that, Underground members believed, simmered beneath America’s surface.
During the first half of the 1970s the group planted more than two dozen bombs in police stations, the Pentagon, the Capitol, a bank, an army base, and the offices of corporations it saw as exploiting the oppressed. None of these bombs killed anyone (although more than half a dozen people suffered injuries), for the Weather Underground telephoned warnings in advance. That policy was adopted, however, only after three members managed to blow themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970. The Weather cell there had been constructing a powerful bomb studded with roofing nails to be planted at an army dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. It took the deaths of three of their own to shock the Weather Underground into realizing just what a bomb could do. Ironically, the townhouse accident garnered far more publicity than any of the group’s subsequent bombings.
The last Weather Underground bomb exploded in 1975. Several years later, former members began to surface. Few did any jail time, because there was little proof of who was responsible for which bombing, and in gathering evidence the FBI had carried out so many black bag jobs and warrantless wiretaps that prosecutors decided they could not make charges stick.
Three Weather veterans made a final foray into action in 1981, when they helped the Black Liberation Army, an armed descendant of the Black Panther Party, rob a Brink’s armored truck in suburban New York. A Brink’s guard and two police officers were killed, and others were wounded. The three were caught and served decades in prison.
Former Weathermen and Weatherwomen have written more than half a dozen memoirs, and by now there are at least three books by their adult children. The latest, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, is of particular interest. He writes vividly and thoughtfully about his childhood memories of life underground. His father, Bill Ayers, and especially his mother, the charismatic Bernardine Dohrn, were the group’s most important leaders. Zayd is deeply curious about them. How did their class backgrounds affect their politics? What shaped their beliefs? How could they want to be both parents and saboteurs?
His early childhood was a strange mixture. His family was loving and surprisingly nuclear—the “smash monogamy” period of Weather Underground life was over. His parents used every encounter or visit to a historical site to teach him about injustice in America and heroic figures like John Brown and Nat Turner. At the same time, afraid of being discovered, they moved frequently, often at short notice, piling into a car at night to set up house in a new city, arranged through calls—always from pay phones—with fellow members of the underground.
When Dohrn was three or four, his father taught him how you could walk in certain patterns to make sure no one was following you and “how to recognize a plainclothes cop or undercover FBI agent on the street.” One clue was shoes: “Even disguised in long hair and scruffy jeans, undercovers usually wear cheap leather loafers, well-shined.” Or cars: “The government buys in bulk and won’t spring for cosmetic extras. So, look for American-made cars—GMs or Chevys”—with no “fancy hubcaps” but with “a souped-up antenna.” And finally, who’s in the car? “A Black guy and a white guy rolling by together, in Harlem? In 1981? Unless they’re Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, they’re probably cops.”
Dohrn’s parents, more than most of their comrades, are famously unrepentant about what they did. To his credit, their son holds little back. For instance, he describes how, before the decision to telephone advance warnings, his father had been part of a cell that planted thirty-six sticks of dynamite in a Detroit police station, which would have caused a blast big enough to kill dozens. Luckily the fuse burned out and the bomb did not explode. Ayers entirely skips this episode in his largely defiant memoir, Fugitive Days (2001), although he does, in passing, acknowledge planting a smaller bomb in another police station that likewise failed to detonate.
Dohrn also sees that the Weather Underground had begun evolving into a cult:
Anyone in the cell urging caution or moderation…would have to admit to weakness. Ambivalence. Self-doubt. All cardinal sins in the Weather Machine, likely to lead to accusations of ignoring Black and Vietnamese suffering, to all-night struggle sessions, social ostracism, even expulsion.
Comparing that pattern to the interrogation scenes in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), he gives a searing picture of how this shrinking band of true believers held ever more “criticism/self-criticism” sessions in which members were forced to acknowledge their “white skin privilege” and confess to being insufficiently radical. Even Dohrn’s mother, six months pregnant with him, voluntarily sat through days of denunciations and finally recorded a humiliating statement confessing that she had “completely failed to support and organize for the revolutionary struggle.”
Dohrn is a subtle and sensitive chronicler of such madness. But when it comes to passing full judgment on the path his parents took and led others down, he is evasive. This is not surprising, for it is virtually impossible to write a completely honest memoir about parents—or anyone else, for that matter—who are still alive and whom you love. All the more so when they are simultaneously brave, idealistic, and morally flawed.
At times Dohrn seems to question his parents’ choices: “A resistance movement that justifies violence, especially against civilians, will often alienate its natural allies and betray its own ideals.” There are moments when violence is justified, he says, “but were the conflicts of the 1960s—the Vietnam War and the assault on the civil rights movement—such a time? Is today? In any case, who gets to decide?” Well said. But he does not challenge his father’s statement that he gladly would have supported “the French Revolution; the Haitian, Cuban, or Russian revolutions.” Really? France and Haiti, OK. But the revolutions that produced the Gulag and the Castro family monarchy?
Dohrn ends his book by hazily trying to smooth over the gap between his parents’ generation and that of his two daughters:
They may not have their grandparents’ radical impulse to take to the streets or blow things up, to overthrow a system. They might not become outlaws or fugitives. But they’re all still engaged in the same necessary, vital, and revitalizing work: to invent and reinvent themselves to match and move the spirit of their times; to imagine and reimagine a better future; and to grow up to be good revolutionaries.
Yet the problem that the Weather Underground never faced and that Dohrn never really acknowledges is that, despite its origins, for better or worse the United States is a profoundly unrevolutionary country.
There are certainly times and places when, if there is tinder ready to be set alight, an act of violence can spark a revolution. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the 1791 slave uprising in Haiti did so. But when several hundred Weatherman militants and their followers poured through the streets of downtown Chicago in 1969, battling with police officers and smashing the windows of cars, shops, homes, and restaurants, they may have thought of themselves as like Che Guevara, but to most Chicagoans they were simply vandals.
When they turned to bombing, the disjunction was still greater. Most Americans to some degree viewed favorably the targets of the Weather Underground bombings: the police, whatever their faults, were there to protect them, and corporations were a source of jobs. You can argue that those feelings were misguided, but they were widely shared.
Nor, with the exception of small groups like the Panthers, were most Black Americans eager to play the part of revolutionary vanguard assigned them in Weather ideology. The white proletariat was no more revolution minded. When Weathermen and Weatherwomen stormed into working-class high schools, raced down corridors, broke into classrooms, and shouted “Jailbreak!,” most students were bewildered.
By the time the movement went underground at the end of 1969, it had only about a hundred active members, although the FBI, which spent years searching in vain for its leaders, mistakenly estimated it to be ten times that size. But its bombings and numerous copycat attacks by smaller groups tarnished the image of the much larger antiwar movement. The millions of us who took part in that hoped that our peaceful mass demonstrations and support for draft refusers would show a moral contrast with the unrelenting stream of Agent Orange, napalm, and high explosives raining down on Vietnam.
Sadly, the Weather Underground bombings gave the Nixon administration the excuse to speed up its already wide-ranging infiltration of radical and antiwar groups of all kinds and to attack them as sinister, un-American—and violent. Nixon railed against “blackmail and terror at home” and against those “who say that if they don’t get their own way the answer is to burn a bus or bomb a building.” In 1972 he was reelected in a landslide over the antiwar Democratic candidate for president, George McGovern.
If members of the Weather Underground had looked more closely at the past, they might have taken a lesson from half a century earlier. At that time, paranoia that the Russian Revolution could spread to the United States provoked a horrendous wave of political repression. More than a thousand people, among them Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, went to prison solely for things they wrote or said. The government forced some seventy-five newspapers and magazines to close down. Unimpeded by police, right-wing militia groups thrived, working as strikebreakers and beating up labor organizers.
Hoping to ignite an uprising, on June 2, 1919, a small group of Italian American anarchists set off bombs in eight cities. At most of the sites they left leaflets on pink paper proclaiming that “class war is on and can not cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat.” A month earlier a mail bomb had exploded in the home of a former US senator from Georgia, blowing off the hands of his maid. And thanks to an alert postal clerk who noticed a group of identical brown paper packages addressed to people like John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Jr., officials defused some three dozen other bombs. The bomb that got the greatest attention on June 2 went off at the house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The bomber failed to kill his target but, after apparently stumbling on Palmer’s front steps, blew himself up.
These bombings, of course, did not spark a revolution. But they gave President Woodrow Wilson the excuse to rail against “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos.” They also allowed Palmer, eyeing the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination, to accelerate the crackdown already underway and to order the arrests of more leftists.
That drive reached its peak some months later in the notorious Palmer Raids, in which the Justice Department arrested some 10,000 radicals whom Palmer hoped to deport—and deport conspicuously, in a way that would help his run for the White House. Ironically, the real architect of the Palmer Raids, at the time just twenty-four, was a man whose influence was increased by the Weather Underground bombings decades later: J. Edgar Hoover.
Not all Weather Underground veterans are as defensive as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Mark Rudd’s memoir, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (2009), is particularly nuanced and reflective. A central theme for Rudd, reached after years of soul-searching, is
the difference between organizing to build a movement, such as the millions-strong anti–Vietnam War movement, and self-expression, which was where Weatherman and the Weather Underground went wrong.
Looking back on his underground days, Rudd sees himself and his friends as deluding themselves about the effects of their bombings. Comrades told him:
“People in the movement loved our latest action,” whether referring to bombing the Pentagon, the Capitol building, or another site….
[They] would tell me about how well their collective’s work was going, how many people were being “organized.”… Inevitably the reports were untrue and often masked total failure.
He makes the analogy between this experience and the notoriously exaggerated “body counts” of the Vietnam War:
Low-level officers would produce phony numbers of how many Vietnamese their units had killed, which would then be inflated at each command level up to the generals and the president. No one wanted to give a higher-up bad news.
Rudd renounces none of his passion against injustice but takes full responsibility for how “what we started” led to the deaths of his three Weather comrades in the 1970 townhouse explosion and the killing of three more people in the Brink’s robbery eleven years later. He ends his book with a plea for peaceful organizing and coalition politics.
Early this year we saw an eloquent example of exactly that work in action. As ICE and Border Patrol agents swarmed through the streets of Minneapolis, arresting people with accents or darker skin as possible undocumented immigrants, they were met by an outpouring of men and women of all ages, classes, and colors. In subzero weather, people turned out by the tens of thousands to use whistles and text messages to warn of agents’ presence, to deliver milk, food, and diapers to immigrants afraid to leave their homes, and to escort immigrant children to school. Local businesses closed in solidarity with those targeted. A chorus sang protest songs outside hotels where ICE agents stayed. Tragically, two who took part in the resistance were killed by federal agents.
What if, instead, someone had planted a bomb at an ICE office? It would have given Donald Trump the same gift the Weather Underground gave Nixon. In Minneapolis, however, this enormous monthslong nonviolent mobilization against federal agents bristling with masks, body armor, and guns made clear that they were the violent ones. The confrontation did not stop ICE deportations, but it modeled resistance that can be practiced elsewhere, forced Trump to change his tactics, helped turn public opinion against the administration, and gave people across the world hope that we Americans might finally be able to free ourselves from its mad grip.