WHEN THE 'VISIBLE SAINTS' COME MARCHING IN

...And it created a kind of politics that eventually crossed over into criminal insanity...

...As the experience of Weatherman and American Communists has shown, the flight to visible sainthood has been particularly useful at those junctures when the Left has been faced with a need to broadly redefine its tasks and purposes...

...The adoption of Protestant evangelical forms of organization and self-consciousness has helped American socialists to conceal from themselves any awareness of their own isolation...

...Under this formulation, American blacks were regarded as colonial subjects of the imperialist mother country and, therefore, as participants in the Third World revolution...

...Many of the communists who divided the party believed, as the Weatherman leaders did, that revolution was on the agenda in the United States...

...Weatherman's leadership contended that the proper role for SDS and, more broadly, for all white leftists in the United States, was to support Third World armies struggling against American imperialism...

...said Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn of the Manson family's murder of Sharon Tate and her friends...

...Three historical precedents help explain the Weather organization and the role it played in the self-destruction of the New Left...

...Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach...

...The Weatherpeople viewed the white working and middle classes as "honky bastards" whose television sets, automobiles, and double-knit suits had been made from the blood and bone of Third World peoples...

...Weatherman also belongs to the history of the American socialist Left...

...Practices were assessed in terms of what had been done by the Red Guards or the women of Long Bow, China...

...It began by expressing and ended up hopelessly exaggerating the anger, guilt, and frustration of a generation...

...But Weatherman and much of the rest of the SDS leadership preferred the shortcut of otherworldly illusion...

...Except for a few acts of random and mindless violence, the Weather UnderJohn Judis, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is the political editor of In These Times...

...Its Days of Rage attracted barely 200 beleaguered demonstrators who, in the words of one contemporary, "ran wild through the streets demonstrating their fury, but little else...

...In 1969, the challenge was to build a movement that would strike at the causes of war and injustice • • • The rest of America was held in odious contempt...

...They have their roots in the experience of the Puritans, who limited membership in their congregations to those "visible saints" elected by God and the existing church members...

...The Wall Street Journal, in an October 23 editorial spilling over with demonology, advised Federal investigators to pursue the ties between Clark and Boudin and the Soviet KGB...

...The Weatherpeople, with their hatred of their parents' values and their exaggerated view of black revolutionary prowess and virtue, were the hipsters of the New Left...

...Last October, when Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark—among the last of the Weather Underground leaders still at large—were arrested in connection with a clumsy holdup of an armored truck that involved the shooting deaths of three guards, the Right was handed an instant cause celebre...

...Just as the New Left had to rise from the ashes of the interfactional struggles of the first half of the century, any new New Left will have to rise from the rubble of the old...

...It was loosely allied with a black liberation movement, led by Oakland's Black Panthers and Detroit's League of Revolutionary Black Workers...

...mass action is the only thing," a Communist Labor Party founder declared...

...At its December 1969 War Council in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman celebrated Sirhan Sirhan, the killer of Robert F. Kennedy, and Charles Manson, the psychotic mass-murderer...

...The other groups were, for the most part, throwbacks to an imagined past of industrial radicalism...

...Weatherman was formed in 1969 for the specific purpose of challenging the Progressive Labor Party for control of SDS...

...These sectarian splinters vied to be recognized as the true disciples of Mao Tse-tung and devotees of world communism—they competed, that is, for the distinction of making the socialist Left seem wholly irrelevant to most Americans...

...The hipster has absorbed the existential synapses of the Negro...

...When a radical paper in Chicago published a cartoon strip showing a black and a white teenager who started out fighting but then discovered they had a common enemy and ought to fight together, Weatherman denounced the strip...

...Before the troops had even come home from Vietnam, it was possible to pronounce the movement dead...

...It was the Weatherpeople who fell heir to Students for a Democratic Society, the organization that midwifed the New Left of the 1960s, and it was the Weatherpeople who presided over the dissolution and death of SDS...

...The Weatherman manifesto asserted that American blacks could abolish "this whole imperialist system . . . without white support...

...We are behind enemy lines," one communique gamely observed...

...Historian Martin J. Sklar, among others, has observed how the American socialist Left has periodically replicated the forms of evangelical Protestantism...

...Instead, Weatherman and much oftheSDS took the shortcut of otherworldly illusion The Communists, like Weatherman, defined their politics through foreign revolutionaries—in their case, the Russian Bolsheviks...

...When the 'Visible Saints' Come Marching In There aren't many in that number BYJOHNJUDIS For a dozen years now the Weather Underground has held a prominent place in the consciousness of the American Right, which is always looking for a pretext to unleash the dogs of repression, and in the faded dream of what remains of the New Left, which keeps rehearsing its collapse the way a football coach perversely rethreads the projector with the game films from a bad season...

...There is an eerie similarity in the circumstances surrounding the disintegration of the Socialist Party after World War I and those attending the collapse of SDS after 1968...

...When Weatherman, as it was then called, took over SDS at the July 1969 convention in Chicago, SDS had an estimated 100,000 members...

...In 1919, the Socialist Party still had more than 100,000 members, although it had endured fierce repression for its opposition to the European war...

...But it did manage to destroy in a matter of months what had been the most promising organization on the Left...

...And under the aegis of the Communist International, they entered into a series of bizarre organizational and political practices that ensured their isolation from the American mainstream...

...The holdup was also invoked to justify the easing of restrictions on FBI investigations of dissidents...

...Shinya Ono, one of the more sophisticated cadre, argued that "the destruction of imperialism and socialist revolution [was] both possible and necessary in our generation...

...The first is broadly cultural: In this century, some middle-class Americans have been painfully embarrassed about being Americans...

...The Weather Underground was to serve as a fifth column within the mother country...

...ground never posed a real threat to the system it despised...

...The Communists and the Weatherpeople both draw on the traditions of Protestant Evangelism in America...

...The source of Hip is the Negro," Mailer wrote...

...But it was Weatherman that epitomized the craziness that overtook the American Left in the late 1960s...

...The Weatherpeople—most of them sons and daughters of professionals or corporate executives—repudiated their own origins and sought through violence and bizarre sexual rites to rid themselves of their "liberalism" and their "bourgeois hangups...

...Such embarrassment found minimal expression in the desire of aspiring professionals to learn French and travel abroad...

...Alexander Stoklitsky declared that the split itself was the "direct result of a growing revolutionary ferment in the great masses of the American people...

...It has not achieved the kind of continuity that could prevent the outbreak of sectarian frenzy...

...This incident reveals not only the continuing threat of terrorism to American citizens, but also our nation's lack of sound preparedness to deal with or prevent these attacks," said Senator John East, North Carolina Republican, a member of the Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism...

...In subsequent years, the Weather Underground claimed responsibility for a number of antiwar bombings, the escape from jail of LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, and the publication of an anti-imperialist tract, Prairie Fire...

...As its first major action in the fall of 1969, Weatherman announced it would mount the October "Days of Rage" in Chicago to "bring the war home...

...The social group from which the Weatherpeople were drawn continues to search for its identity among computer terminals and Blondie hits, somewhere between Jerry Brown and L. L. Bean...

...While Dohrn and some other Weather leaders surfaced later in a more mellow and somewhat self-critical state, others, like Boudin and Clark, continued along the path laid out in Flint...

...Tom Hayden, a defendant in the Chicago Conspiracy Eight trial, remarked that he didn't know how trashing curbside Volkswagens would "materially aid the Vietnamese...

...The visible saints were predestined for heaven...

...Our political objective is the destruction of honki-ness...

...The Weatherpeople identified their cause and their politics with Vietnamese and Chinese revolutionaries...

...By 1921, after it had split into the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Communist Labor Party, the combined membership of the whole socialist movement was only 36,000...

...Weatherman, in its attempt to mimic the style of the Wild West outlaw and to express its slogans in rock anthems, in its disdain for materialist America and its identification with American blacks, was a cultural as well as political event...

...Less sophisticated followers thought the revolution was, perhaps, as long as five or ten years away...

...But the shame and guilt dimly felt by the hipster and the hippie magnified, under the impact of Vietnam and the ghetto riots of the 1960s, into politics of enduring self-hatred and guilt...

...whether of Marx, Mao, Lenin, or Trotsky, rather than to contemporary history, and their disagreements over the word have resulted in the formation of countless new sects—some with fewer than ten members, but aspiring nonetheless to lead Americans to socialism or world communism...

...For that reason, the Weather Underground was viewed with interest and even sympathy by many young people who would not have dreamed of joining the organization...

...it's too late for industrial unionism...

...Like the Weatherpeopie, they rejected any hint of a reformist politics in favor of a direct assault upon the citadels of power...

...Weatherman quickly degenerated...

...Wild...

...As the Puritans fell into quarrels about the interpretation of the word, Protestant sects began to proliferate...

...In the best of circumstances, such a task would have required great secular patience...

...The Weatherpeople should not be charged with all the blame for destroying SDS...

...Nonetheless, one year after the 1969 convention, SDS had virtually disappeared, and its allies in the black movement would soon vanish too, or at least be stripped of any popular support...

...But in that brief period when Weatherman reigned, the sense of a united national Left movement and leadership was destroyed...

...They marbled their political argument with citations from the works of Mao and Lin...

...Moreover, it was the spearhead of a far-flung movement of students and former students—a movement that had spread from a few elite campuses to community colleges and small-town high schools...

...The Vietnam war was winding down, a Republican President was in the White House, and it seemed unlikely that the 1970s would provide opportunities to mount the kind of broad-based assault on American capitalism that many in the New Left deemed necessary...

...In defining their tasks, they have appealed to "the word...

...Some SDS members, to be sure, called for unity among blacks and whites, but Weatherman preached subordination of whites to blacks...

...There will be precedents to draw on, and various threads of history from which to spin a new movement...

...Male supremacy was resisted by "smashing monogamy" and compelling individuals to direct their intimacy toward the revolutionary collective rather than toward another person...

...Soon after the Flint meeting, the Weather organization, whose leaders faced various misdemeanor and felony charges in Chicago and elsewhere, announced it was going underground...

...The Weatherpeople were swiftly identified as instruments of the Soviet-backed international terrorist conspiracy which flourishes these days in official and unofficial ultraconservative fantasy...

...It has been manifested more dramatically in the self-imposed exile of many important American artists and writers...

...American black revolutionaries were also objects of Weatherman reverence and awe...

...Under the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the split in the second International between Social Democrats and Communists, some American socialists engineered a similar split in the American party...

...More modest projects have survived from the 1960s...

...In 1969, the challenge confronting SDS was how to build a popular movement that would go beyond its student base and address itself not merely to ending the war or racial inequality, but to removing the causes of both...

...In a 1958 essay, The White Negro, Norman Mailer argued that the hipster's means of escaping the prison of middle-class materialism and conformity was through identification with blacks...

...Weatherman remained a real, if frenzied, expression of the culture of the 1960s—a culture formed by a new social group, the college-educated Americans of the post-World War II years who were seeking some identity in a society whose foreign policy they abhorred, whose domestic morals they found constricting, and whose career opportunities they found dull and uninspiring...

...But this flight from self and nation on the part of whites has also taken the form of a fascinated interest in American blacks...

...The Weatherpeople's political theory, set out in a manifesto entitled You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows, was derived from a 1964 pamphlet by Chinese Red Army commander Lin Piao...

...Many of the Weatherpeople believed revolution in the United States was imminent...

...On Earth, they were charged with keeping God's covenant—a task they accomplished by acting in accord with His "word" in the Bible...

...They had much help from competing factions in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and groups that became the Revolutionary Union and the October League...

...The Weather Underground is finished, but the American Left has by no means outgrown the conditions that gave rise to it...

...But it surely should have been possible to keep some sort of movement alive...

...Organizations like those of the Communists, the Trotskyists, Progressive Labor, the Weather Underground, or the Revolutionary Communist Party have banded together in tight cadres of visible saints whose covenant with foreign revolutions or revolutionaries has entitled them to spiritual lordship over lesser Americans...

...As SDS's leadership, it took SDS along...

...Weatherman's job was to build a "Red Army" that would inflict "material damage" upon the United States...

...Not all of the New Left was destroyed when SDS disappeared and the black liberation movement fell apart...

...In Long Live People's War, Lin had declared that "the contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the principal contradiction in the contemporary world...

...it was "racist" not to have the black beat up the white...

...We are going to wipe out the imperialist state and every vestige of honky consciousness in white people...

...Craft unionism is out of date...

...Both SDS and the black movement had begun as attempts to make good on the failed promises of liberalism, but by 1969 many new leftists in SDS and in the black movement had become socialists of one or another persuasion...