I remember where I first heard about the Weatherman, or as they later came to be called, the Weather Underground (Organisation). Some time during the 1970s I was thumbing through the pages of the 1973-74 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia❈ and came across an entry on this oddly named group subsumed under the section on “Ideas and Beliefs”…the meteorological sounding name triggered my curiosity. As the Pears editor noted of the name: a “rather incongruous name for the most radical and volatile of the many groups making up the so-called ‘underground’ in the United States of America“⊡.

What most struck the editor about the phenomenon was that “the Weathermen appear(ed) to be largely drawn from the highly intelligent and well-educated strata…well-to-do, academic backgrounds”, something Pears opined to be “sinister and ominous” (a hint toward class betrayal perhaps?). The entry goes on to explore a classic conspiracy theory, the “fantastic speculation, widely held in America” that “the Weathermen are in reality financed and backed by the country’s extreme right—as a means of discrediting in the public eye the slow but steady move toward socialism that seems to be developing there”(?!?). The Pears writer adds a coy reference to one of the leaders of the group (unnamed), “an attractive and dynamic woman university lecturer (who in 1970) was placed on the FBI’s notorious ‘most wanted criminals’ list”✥.

(Source: Yale University)

The origins of the Weather Underground lie in the tumultuous politics of Sixties America—the emergence of the “New Left” and the “Counterculture”, the struggle for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement of those disaffected by the growing catastrophe of Vietnam. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had assumed the mantle of leadership of the “youth rebellion” in America and of the anti-war movement. The Weathermen, dissatisfied with the SDS’s limited, reformist approach to curing the ills of modern capitalist society (with its emphasis on disruption and non-violent student demonstrations), split off from the SDS, who they labelled “movement creeps”, in 1969. After the Chicago “Days of Rage” riot, the Weathermen determined on a new, direct and revolutionary approach to changing a society that they avowed hatred for.

Bombed interior of Capitol (Wash DC) (Photo: Washington Post) 🔻

1970 was the year that domestic terrorism embarked on a rapid upward trajectory in the US. The catalyst for the Weathermen adopting a more extreme line was Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Laos and Cambodia and the Kent State student murders. The fringe policos went underground and turned ‘outlaws’. “Declaring war on the United States”✪, the network operating in small clandestine cells launched a series of bomb attacks on targeted sites—police stations, court houses, military installations, banks, the Capitol and Pentagon buildings in Washington DC, etc. Weather Underground attached the tag-line “bringing the war back home” to this serious switch of tactics.

1971, the assault on the “Amerikan war machine” continues

The following year brought no let-up by the Weather arsonists and incendiaries. The International Association of Chiefs of Police declared 1971 the worst year for bombings in US history. Despite causing such upheaval, the Weathermen failed abjectly to achieve any of their avowed aims [Daniels, Stuart. “The Weathermen.” Government and Opposition, vol. 9, no. 4, 1974, pp.430-459. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44482282. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020].

A giant fail

The Weather faction (WUO) failed for a multiplicity of reasons fundamentally arising out of a muddled understanding of how to effectively use political discontent to build a mass movement. The Weathermen aspired to be the revolutionary vanguard to lead the revolution that overthrew US imperialism and capitalist society. Yet it laid none of the groundwork necessary to achieve it! WUO established no popular support base for its leadership and it stayed numerically small, a “Prairie Fire” that failed to ignite!₪

Finally, in 1974, the folly of this omission was recognised within Weather and some members tried to re-orient the organisation to a policy focused on wooing the American working class. The hardliners in WUO however resisted and predictably clung to the old guerrilla war tactics, with the result of a splintering and further weakening of Weather [‘How the Weather Underground Failed at Revolution and Still Changed the World’, (Arthur M Eckstein), Time, (02-Nov-2016), http://time.com].

Rather than the Weathermen’s actions and tactics leading to a crystallisation of the (new) left in America as a cohesive force, its recourse to the nihilism of violence, the pattern of random bombings, alienated it from other sections of the far left such as SDS (Daniels). The greatest damage of the group’s bombings in fact was a self-inflicted one, when three of the Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970⊕.

🔺 Scene of the WUO terrorists’ backfiring bomb (Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)

The middle-class dilemma

The Weathermen were essentially middle-class kids who took inspiration from grass-roots radicals and authentic working class militants like the Black Panthers. Therefore, they knew that to be taken seriously they needed to lose the bourgeois tag, to ‘declass’ themselves (to use Michael Miles’ term). Hodgdon has suggested that they were motivated partly by the “guilt arising from members’ acute consciousness of their own white privilege” [Hodgdon, Tim. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 144–146. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41887583. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020]. The outcome was a resort to high focus violence by WUO which it equated with the demonstration of revolutionary commitment. Ultimately, violence became a habitual self-indulgence for the Weathermen. Fascinated with the idea of terrorism per se, their actions became more anarchic and nihilistic and only served to further isolate them from Middle America (Daniels).

Weather logo 🔺

A junket of romance and fantasy

Students of the WUO phenomena have noted how remarkably detached the group was from the realities of contemporary USA. Exhibiting a romantic view of Third World Liberation Movements, importing the urban-guerrilla tactics of the Tupamoros of Uruguay, of whom the Weathermen were only ever pale imitations. For ideological underpinnings, the Weathermen cherrypicked from Marxist political theory (Mao, Guevara, Marighella, Debray, etc) to forge a blueprint for extreme militant action. The often immature and at times infantile Weather members revelled in their status as deviants in society…and in their notoriety as politicised “bad-boy rock stars” of crime. Clearly, more than a few of the members gained a huge thrill from being publicly portrayed as fugitives, enemies of the state [‘”Prairie Fire” Memories’, (Jonah Raskin), Tablet, 18-Jul-2019, www.tabletmag.com].

🔺 The character “Mark Slackmeyer” in Garry Trudeau’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic is based on Weatherman Mark Rudd

Their ready resort to acts of violence was one manifestation of this, as was their indulgence in drug-taking (wholeheartedly embracing LSD and ‘grass’) and “free love” as integral to what they saw as liberating themselves from the strictures of a rigid and corrupt society (Daniels).

PostScript: Weather Underground, fade to black

Having failed to make the slightest dint on the fortress of the American political and economic elite, the Weathermen reduced their bombing acts after 1971 and continued to scale back through the rest of the seventies. The Weather Underground lingered on for several years before eventually petering out. This however did not stop the FBI from pursuing the home-grown terrorists long after they had ceased to be active. As Eckstein noted, the FBI’s responses to the Weather phenomena had caused the Bureau embarrassment. The FBI, the nation’s chief law enforcement organisation, continued to get them wrong…initially they underestimated Weather’s seriousness as a hostile element, then they overestimated its effectiveness. The FBI persisted with a misreading of their strength, thinking there were around 1,000 Weathermen guerrillas at large in the US, overstating the reality by a factor of ten. The FBI also illegally botched the evidence against the group so none of the Weathermen could be prosecuted for conspiring to bomb government buildings [‘The Americans who declared war on their country’, (Mark Honigsbaum), The Guardian, (21-Sep-2003), www.theguardian.com ; Eckstein, Time; ‘Bad Moon Rising’, AM Eckstein, www.yalebooks.yale.edu].

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❈ an annual British publication (first published 1897, now discontinued), a one-volume compendium of general and specialised knowledge in a select number of different fields

⊡ the original name, ‘Weatherman’, was taken from the lyric of a 1960s Bob Dylan song

✥ Bernadine Dohrn – who with Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Trevor Robbins, Kathy Boudin, Karen Ashley, Howie Machtinger and John Jacobs, founded the Weathermen. Jonah Raskin points out that a significant number of the members were, like him, Jewish (Raskin). Dohrn also headed up a Women’s Brigade within WUO

✪ a ‘symbolic’ war as Todd Gitlin described it

₪ Prairie Fire was the name of WUO’s 1976 published political statement, and a metaphor that the organisation was fond of using (eg, “a single spark can start a prairie fire”)

⊕ the three WUO bomb assemblers were the only victims of Weathermen bomb explosions as the group always forewarned the target locations so that humans could be evacuated from the spot in time