Review of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
by Mark Rudd
324 pages, Morrow, $25.99

In mentioning to people that I was reviewing his book, I’ve been surprised to find Mark Rudd less widely remembered than I’d expected.  It appears that if you didn’t arrive in college by a certain point, you don’t know who he is, the drop off in recognition coinciding with part two of the tale told in his new memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen.  Up to that point he was famous long ago, no doubt.  Chairman of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its 1968 student strike coordinating committee, he was the very model of a modern student radical.  (Although just how archetypical is disputed: a photo caption in the book calls him “the prototype of the Doonesbury character, Megaphone Mark,” but in Boston the word was that the model was local writer Mark Zanger who’d gone to Yale with Gary Trudeau.)

The events at Columbia very simply set the standard for the student activism of the day.  SDS and the Columbia Student Afro-American Society (SAS) had mounted a campaign fundamentally challenging their prominent university’s role – from the global to the local.  They wanted Columbia out of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), in Rudd’s words, “an obscure twelve-university consortium” that in the Vietnam era developed “such techniques and weapons as the use of chemical herbicides to destroy the insurgents’ jungle cover – the horrible ‘defoliation’ using highly toxic Agent Orange, and the use of airpower for counterinsurgency.”  And there “was even an IDA report on the suppression of ghetto insurgency.”   And the two organizations also opposed the school’s plan to build a new gym in Morningside Park, taking their lead from Harlem residents who considered it an unwanted encroachment upon their neighborhood.

Protests eventually led to the student take over of five university buildings.  There were over seven hundred arrests, several hundred injuries, and a student strike.  Columbia dropped both IDA and the gym.  Tom Hayden, SDS leader of an earlier day who had actually participated in the Columbia building take overs, wrote a Ramparts magazine piece calling for “two, three, many Columbias,” to echo Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams.”

After being expelled from Columbia, Rudd dedicated himself to helping spread the word through SDS, which was at the time the loosest of organizations.  Get five students willing to plunk down five dollars apiece for dues and you had a nationally recognized chapter and you could say and do what you wished.  But by 1968, there were many chapters where you would find a new flavor in the mix – the Progressive Labor Party.  PL were the Marxists your mother, J. Edgar Hoover, and the comic books you read as a kid all warned you about, humorless dogmatists who argued in terms that you knew must be (poorly) translated from some other language – Chinese, presumably, as they appeared to be Maoists.

PL did have the useful side effect of making some people curious enough to actually read Karl Marx and associates because they figured that no one would ever have heard of him if he was actually as ridiculous as these people made him out to be.  But as Rudd puts it, “The most pernicious effect of PL was that SDS regulars, myself included, became convinced that we needed a well-worked-out revolutionary theory – and dogma.”  And his crowd came up with a doozie: a manifesto called “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”  (after a Bob Dylan lyric) which gave the group the name that stuck – the Weathermen.

No one who took part is likely to forget the 1969 SDS national convention.  After having your picture snapped by photographers from every government agency that maintained an interest in such things and submitting to frisking (pretty much like an airport today, but unusual for the time), you entered the vast and gloomy Chicago Coliseum for a couple of days of theater of the absurd.  First up was a group from Ohio and Michigan – literally – they leapt up on their chairs in the midst of some procedural debate and start waving Little Red Books, chanting “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung!  Dare to struggle, dare to win!”  Rudd explains that the event was intended tongue in cheek, as a sort of mockery of PL, a possibility I had not previously entertained since it had seemed of a piece with everything else that happened at the gathering.

The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a faction that had developed in the organization’s national office, comprising the Weathermen and another group with which they had already split, controlled the agenda and brought in a representative of the Black Panther Party to denounce PL and when that maneuver went bad on them, they declared PL expelled from SDS.  But since it was not clear that RYM actually commanded more support than PL, rather than try to physically eject them, RYM opted to repair to an inner chamber of the Coliseum and the two conventions proceeded at odds with one another under one large roof.  (And separate friskings for each convention.)

In the inner hall, Bob Avakian (who has himself now been underground for nearly three decades even though it’s not clear if anyone’s looking for him) delivered an amazingly fast speech retroactively outlining the principles of unity that had necessitated PL’s expulsion from SDS.  They included support for the revolutionary governments of China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea.  And when someone from the crowd shouted out “and Albania,” Avakian added “and Albania,” without missing a beat.  Now, that’s comedy – and they used to say that Maoists had no sense of humor!  Mark Rudd was elected national secretary of the truncated organization.  He announced the need to “bring the war home.”

For many campus SDS chapters, the first order of business that fall was a name change.  For the new Weatherman leadership, it was organizing for an October national action scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the trial of the “Chicago 8″ for alleged conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention.  The more the Weatherman organized for it, the clearer it became that they intended to literally fight the police, and the more people decided to make other plans for that period of time.  Eventually only two hundred or so showed up for what had become known as the “Days of Rage.”

When a documentary film called Weather Underground appeared in 2003,  I went to see it with some hesitation.  It seemed a necessary enough film and yet wasn’t there still something of a glow of admiration for the Weathermen about it?  I was glad enough to find that most of the participants interviewed in the film now seemed to understand that their project had been insane. Still, I didn’t leave the theater thinking that these were a bunch of people whose political opinions I’d ever be likely to seek out.  There were a couple of exceptions, though.

I’d only met Rudd once, in 1968,  at a lower Manhattan, upper floor warren of antiwar offices in whose shared space he was, appropriately enough, running off something on the mimeograph machine, as radicals were wont to do “in those pre-Xerox, pre-digital days” he writes of.  (The book’s dates also suggest that it might really have been him that I spotted walking down Market Street, San Francisco with long hair and a beard a couple of years later; no conversation that time, however.)  But somehow I’d always had the vague impression of him sharing a certain arrogance common among some student leaders of the day – a perception that his book seems to confirm, as he notes that “In my speeches at rallies, I had taken to referring to [Columbia University] President Kirk as ‘that shithead.’”  So it came as a particular surprise to me that of all of the people in the film, the one who stood out as most profoundly chastened by the whole experience was Mark Rudd.

It is that same Mark Rudd you will find in the pages of “Underground,” which makes for a very useful book.  “Underground” gives you your fill of the background to the headlines – the “Wargasm,” the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the Timothy Leary jailbreak, and all the rest – with no suggestion that it was all okay because the participants meant well.

Considering it the most important student organization to have come along in decades, Rudd writes that “The destruction of SDS … was an historical crime,” a judgement buttressed by the fact that no organization of comparable significance has followed it, either.  As an anonymous analyst wrote in his FBI file, “By their stubborn adherence to pseudo-Marxist/Maoist dogma which is out of step with the present realities, RUDD and his colleagues have alienated a large segment of potential and heretofore willing followers.”  Rudd writes, “I couldn’t have said it any better.”

After seven years underground, during which “rather than doing any useful political work we were just surviving,” he surfaced to surrender.  Due to the federal government’s own illegal tactics, all of the major charges against the Weathermen had been dropped and Rudd slipped into a quiet life as a math teacher in New Mexico where he has been politically active on the local level.  Today, he calls the 1974 Weather Underground proclamation, “Prairie Fire: The politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” “omniscient to the point of arrogance” and the infighting that went on in its wake “beyond absurd.”  There is, however, a clear line in his mind as to when he went “over the cliff” and he writes of the Columbia Strike with pride, even including a campus map.

There’s more of Rudd’s sex life in the book than some might really want to know, but then his line “My penis was a magic wand of liberation” may make it all worthwhile.  And overall, even though you never needed a Weatherman to know which way the wind blew, in  “Underground,” Rudd has, after all these years, reestablished himself as someone whose opinion it might be worth asking.

Tax Resisting Takes a Stand on Tax Day

Last Wednesday was tax day for most Americans. I say “most Americans” because there are some who recognize the legal obligation to pay taxes, but who chose not to pay some or all of their taxes for ethical or moral reasons. And, in big cities all over the United States, groups gathered on April 15 to protest the bank bailouts, gay marriage laws, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the argument that paying taxes to the federal government encourages corporatism, discrimination, or unjust combat.

In the United States, some citizens subject themselves to IRS fines and penalties and actually resist paying taxes. And while many Americans may be disgruntled by Timothy Geithner’s bank plan, tax resisting (not to be confused with tax evasion, which is subject even stricter penalties and possible jail time), has always has been an integral part of American democracy in spite of the the fact that it is subject to fines and penalties. In the 1790s the first US Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, implemented a controversial luxury tax on whiskey that had some citizens so riled up that they actually tarred and feathered a handful of tax collectors. While Hamilton insisted that the tax had to be instated in order to pay off debts from the Revolutionary War, the tax resisters were not pleased with that explanation, and in 1794 Washington had to send an army of 12,000 to rural Pennsylvania to quell a rebellion (by the time the troops arrived, the dissenters had dispersed).

Of course, Henry David Thoreau is probably the most famous tax resister, spending a night in jail for refusing to pay six years of back taxes on the principle that he did not support the Mexican-American War and institutionalized slavery. But what about today? Is withholding taxes, despite the fact that it is subject to heavy government penalties, still one of the best ways to show anger and frustration towards one’s government?

A resident of Brooklyn, who I will call Barb Smith for purposes of anonymity, thinks that if you’re frustrated with your government, it makes you a “more responsible citizen.” At a demonstration on the front steps of the New York Post Office, she and fellow disgruntled citizens gathered to lend their voice to the anti-war movement. Handing out fliers that document military spending in this country, Smith, a third-year tax resister and war protester, pointed out that, “Money has an impact and where you spend your money has an impact. My decision [not to pay federal taxes] is in alignment with my conscience.”

Also gathered on the steps on the Post Office was a small group of elderly women from an international pacifist organization. One woman brandished a sign that said, “Raging Grannies and their Daughters.”

However, the sign did not mention granddaughters and Smith noted that, “Unfortunately, there are not many young people involved [in the tax resisting movement]. It’s mostly middle-aged and older people who are passionate about the issue.”

However, despite the age gap, the movement definitely gained momentum this year in cities around the country. Fox News had all day coverage of  “tea parties” in cities like Atlanta and Salt Lake City where protesters angrily voiced their tax boycott of the Wall Street bailouts. In Austin, Texas, Governor Rick Perry galvanized a crowd of angry citizens and even suggested that Texas might secede one day while, in downtown Houston, close to 2,000 people turned out to protest the federal government and threaten secession.

In Boston (the home of the first tea party back in 1773) gay rights groups gathered to protest their inability to file federal joint tax returns, even though Massachusetts has legalized gay marriage. A group with similar concerns gathered on the steps of the New York Post Office but when asked, none claimed to be resisting taxes. “We just want Albany to give us equality,” one woman implored.

Yet, despite all the hoopla surrounding tax resisting this year, the demonstrations still beg the question, does tax resisting in spite of the potential penalties really make a difference?

“I don’t know if the IRS cares,” another protester, who I will call Mark Johnson for anonymity, a fifth year tax resister from New Jersey said, “but I’m appalled at what the money is used for and I resist with a token amount.”

When asked what he does with the money he owes, Johnson insists, “I don’t keep it, I give it to organizations that do good that hopefully counterbalance what the government would do with the money. This year, I’m giving the $198 I owe and I’m sending it to the Iraq Collateral Repair Project.”

And, while he admits he only protests with a small amount of money, Johnson notes that there “is not enough outrage” and that he does the little that he can to press the point that he is not pleased with military spending in this country.

Although it is doubtful that Congress or the Obama administration paid much attention to tea parties, protests, or tax resister demonstrations on Wednesday, many see tax resistance, despite the fact that it is illegal, as the one act outside of voting that citizens can participate in to vocalize their disappointment with their government. And, while there is always the possibility that you can be audited, Smith notes that, “This is America. I’m not afraid of the IRS.”

Editor’s Note: This Web site does NOT in any way endorse or condone any act of tax resisting or tax evasion. Because of possibly incriminating statements, the names of quoted individuals were changed at the request of the editor.

Economic Development: Lessons From Boston

Before I came to academia, I worked for eleven years in the field of economic development, a profession which is about many different things but, above all, about stealing some other city’s businesses with public money. By the time I was smart enough to form my own doubts about the job, I’d gotten good enough at it to be hired by the City of Fort Lauderdale to run their dedicated “Corporate Headquarters Recruitment” program–itself intended to exonerate the seven meanest, richest people in south Florida from standing accountable for their stupidly over-built downtown office market.

My first assignment (after one of the meanest and richest had gotten done refusing even to accept my business card, that is), was to spend a week in Boston–presumably stealing everything but the drapes. It was the first job because it was also supposed to have been the easiest one. What business its right mind would choose to stay in one of the most expensive markets in the world, both in terms of labor and tax burden, when new technologies enabled it to swap these out for beachside condos and blended drinks on Las Olas Boulevard? We’d even hired a marketing firm to pre-screen fifty or so contacts in Beantown who’d agreed at least in principal to consider the idea.
Know how many we got?

For five grueling days, I crisscrossed the greater Boston area, from Newton to Randolph and back to downtown, glad handing corporate real estate professionals in industries ranging from telemedicine to fiber optics to clutch plates, and not a single one of them expressed even the cursory interest that it would have taken to accede to an all-expenses-paid junket to South Florida. None of them. Zilch. Nada.

What could possibly have gone wrong? I mean to say, we were both cheaper and sunnier–the two things that Republicans have been telling us a business demands from its hosts, at least going back to Reagan and Stockman and the first ugly invocation of the words “supply side.” To hear them tell it, a chance to save half or more on both the labor and the tax-line items and sit on a beach after work every day to boot should have been the pitch that lobs itself. And yet there they were, their cars bogged in slushy parking lots, all but laughing me out of their offices.

It’s a single anecdote, of course, but it’s a powerful one, precisely for what it teaches us by counterexample about the fundamentally wrong-headed assumptions behind Republican economics. In their headlong rush to the sandy slopes of Mount Business-Friendly, Republicans have forgotten one of the most long-standing and crucial rules of Business: You get what you pay for.

True, costs are higher in Boston. But in Boston those higher costs are offset by the appeal of a significantly better-trained and more professionally minded workforce, having gotten that way through the benefit of some of the most well-funded educational infrastructure on all of planet earth, joined to its workplaces with some of the best physical infrastructure on earth, with most of both either directly paid for or at the very least subsidized, with public money.

That this story is such a cruelly perfect microcosm of America’s fading star on the global economic stage is a suggestion that hardly requires a rehabilitated economic developer to make: We’ve transformed the United States into the low-priced knockoff of the world, a place where leisure is vastly more important than ownership in one’s efforts, business decisions are based on instant gratification, college graduates can’t answer simple questions about the geography of their own country, and only those born into families of power and privilege are allowed to seek the highest office in the land without being dismissed as egocentric celebrities. And the world has taken notice, even if we haven’t, outsourcing all but its most menial tasks to places we’d never have dreamed of losing our jobs to, even ten years ago. And all the distressed mortgage buyouts on the planet aren’t going to fix that.

No, the way back to greatness for the United States is to start taking a few more lessons from the supposedly high-cost, anti-business climate up in Boston, and not through slashing taxes on those fortunate few who already pay some of the world’s lowest taxes for persons of their station. The way to fix this quieter, bigger mess of lost American industrial prominence is to redouble our investments in physical and social infrastructure.

And the way to start is to elect Barack Obama on November 4th to be our nation’s forty-forth President.