Weather Underground

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The Weather Underground, originally Weatherman, was a left-wing radical movement that began during the collapse of the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at its 1969 convention. The movement took its name from an article published in New Left Notes in 1969, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" (deriving its title from a line in a Bob Dylan song), which argued that the United States was doomed, communist revolutions were imminent throughout the Third World, and the role of leftist revolutionaries in the U.S. should be to support those revolutions by hastening the collapse of the United States and awakening a vanguard of working class youth such as high school students.

The Weather Underground came to prominence following a series of violent street protests; the membership subsequently went underground and engaged in a series of terrorist bombings during the 1970s.

Contents

[edit] Background

Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1960 out of the former student wing of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), a liberal group which espoused democratic socialism and supported the Cold War. SDS soon broke from LID's anti-Communist line in the name of supporting a participatory democracy in which all points of view would be welcome, and SDS and LID would soon mutually sever their ties over the matter of SDS refusing to exclude Communists. After going through an early 1960s stage of liberal activism such as students going into poor areas to do social work in an SDS program called the Economic Research and Action Project, and traveling to the south to register African-American voters at great personal risk, SDS went through a more radical and quasi-libertarian "prairie power" stage during the middle 1960s supporting draft resistance and organizing the first large protest against the Vietnam War, during which SDS attracted a sizeable following in the midwestern states.

In 1968 and 1969, SDS was pulled hard to the left, partly due to inspiration from militant groups like the Black Panther Party and the Yippies, and partly by an attempted takeover by a small Maoist party, the Progressive Labor Party (PL). SDSers opposed to the PL takeover responded by also gravitating toward Maoism, while proclaiming a pro-Maoist but anti-PL line, and people who would soon become major Weather Underground figures such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd rose to leadership positions in the SDS national office. At its 1969 convention, SDS collapsed and splintered into three main factions: Revolutionary Youth Movement II, Weatherman, and the PL-controlled remains of SDS - all three Maoist. Weatherman, to put it nicely, proceeded to go batshit insane.

[edit] Days of Rage

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Under the belief that revolution was imminent and that only total dedication to the revolution would do, Weatherman imposed a gruelling regimen on its adherents in an attempt to eliminate any "bourgeois" tendencies and toughen themselves up for street fighting. Private possessions, privacy, marriage, even monogamy itself were condemned; free love, communal living, LSD use, and long criticism/self-criticism sessions were practiced.

Weatherman started street brawls and entered high schools in actions they called "jailbreaks" to trash school property and attack random people, supposedly on the grounds that this would radicalize high school students, and most notably, proclaimed four Days of Rage in October 1969 in Chicago, during which about 600 Weathermen, dressed in a motley assortment of scrounged-together helmets, boots, and padded clothing and carrying an equally motley assortment of baseball bats and chains, attempted to trash the city and attack police out of revenge for the Chicago police behavior during the 1968 Democratic Convention. This only resulted in dozens being injured, with over 280 of their members arrested.

[edit] Going underground

In March 1970, a bomb being constructed in a Greenwich Village, New York City apartment where a Weatherman cell group lived exploded prematurely, killing three members. Weatherman had already lost most of its early following who were quickly alienated from the group due to the extreme cult-like regimen and disillusionment over the pointless violence and street brawls, which had accomplished nothing except turn people against the group and make Weatherman persona non grata among the rest of the New Left; as a then-popular slogan about Weatherman went, "you don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are".

The Greenwich Village explosion however had a deeper effect on the remnants of the movement. Deciding they had made a "tactical mistake" in the early random violence and trashings, they decided to go completely underground, take new identities and regular jobs, and engage only in specifically targeted bombings of symbolic targets which would be accompanied by anonymously leaked explanations of the relevance of their targets to U.S. imperialism. The Weatherman name, by then deemed sexist, was dropped and they became known as the Weather Underground or the Weather Underground Organization.

Regular bombings attributed to the Weather Underground continued for a few more years, as well as members breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and smuggling him to exile in Algeria, but after 1973 some members began to resurface or became inactive. One reason for this was the emerging revelations during the Watergate scandal of the FBI's COINTELPRO program and a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision which forbade electronic surveillance without a court order, causing the federal government to drop remaining charges against many Weather Underground members. In 1974, four members published the manifesto Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.

Two groups were formed among the remaining Weather Underground members, the May 19th Communist Organization, which favored staying underground, and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, which favored going aboveground and operating openly. The last known terrorist act attributed to the Weather Underground was a robbery of a Brinks armored car in 1981. The May 19th Communist Organization engaged in a series of terrorist acts of its own between 1979 and 1985, when most of its members were arrested and convicted.

[edit] Modern conspiracy theories

See the similarity? Neither do we. Maybe with the right combination of psychedelic drugs...

Wingnuts have attempted to link the Weather Underground to the presidency of Barack Obama. No, really. This has ranged from claiming that former Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, now college professors, were Obama's mentors, to noting comparisons between the Weather Underground's logo, three lines in a rainbow shape with a lightning bolt through them, and Obama's campaign logo.

[edit] Further reading and viewing

  • "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" on archive.org
  • "Weatherman" article, Prairie Fire and other documents
  • Ayers, Bill: Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Beacon Press, 2001.
  • Gilbert, David: Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, PM Press, 2011.
  • Jacobs, Harold: Weatherman, Ramparts Press, 1970.
  • Rudd, Mark: Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, William Morrow, 2009.
  • Sale, Kirkpatrick: SDS, Vintage Books, 1973.
  • Wilkerson, Cathy: Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman, Seven Stories Press, 2007.
  • The Weather Underground, 2002 documentary film
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