There's a Riot Going On by Peter Doggett

Author:Peter Doggett [Doggett, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802197740
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

DEATH VALLEY

The murder of Fred Hampton and the blatant injustice of the Chicago Conspiracy trial suggested that America was now out of control, no more able to restrain its violent impulses at home than it was to tame the guerrillas of the Viet Cong. The nation was now held together by paranoia and hatred – of outsiders, dissidents, non-conformists, any strand of society that ran ‘counter’ to the American way. As the inverse reflection of mainstream culture, the movement was inevitably distorted by the national mood of aggression. If, as Abbie Hoffman believed, the peace and love ethos of Woodstock had translated into apathy, then the only alternative to the violence of the American government was equally extreme violence. But, as both the establishment and the counter-culture discovered during the darkening months of 1969, violence pollutes everyone it touches. As the Chicago trial grew ever more absurd, and the clampdown on black power suffocated the country’s morality, so the movement began to mutate into an uncontrollable force, just as likely to wound its own supporters as it was to strike at the enemy.

The rapid implosion of the student anti-war movement illustrated the way in which every version of America was now tearing at its own entrails. The emergence of the Weatherman collective in June 1969 promised a future in which activists would become more militant and more incisive – but also more elitist, to the point where any pretence at representing a mass movement would be abandoned. As the hippie hordes made their way home from Woodstock in August 1969, Weatherman announced a National Action to demand the end of the Vietnam War. Three of the collective, Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn and Terry Robbins, issued a statement to explain their decision, under the (inevitably) Dylan-derived title of Bringing the War Back Home: Less Talk, More National Action. Their aim, they declared, was ‘to build an anti-imperialist, working-class youth movement in the mother country; a movement that allies with and provides material aid to the people of Vietnam, of the black and brown colonies, and to all oppressed people of the world’. Hence the need to Bring the War Home – and where else was home in 1969 but Chicago? Weatherman’s mass National Action was scheduled for 8–11 October, to coincide with the prosecution testimony in the Conspiracy trial. Like the Yippies’ Festival of Life, the National Action was planned as a multi-faceted event. There would be a memorial rally for Che Guevara, on the second anniversary of his death; a ‘Jailbreak’ for school and college kids; a militant women’s action; a ‘youth-rock music festival’; an event designed to ‘Stop the Trial’; and a march through the city centre. ‘We must be prepared to defend ourselves in the event of any vicious attacks by the Chicago pigs,’ Weatherman advised. They believed that the Action would put the convention protests of 1968 into the shade.

Across the remnants of SDS, the Weather agenda dominated discussion that summer. To maintain the links with the counter-culture, the collective’s adherents continued to borrow imagery from rock music.

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