Forty years ago, the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drafted a statement to be employed in a factional dispute with the Maoist Progressive Labor (PL) wing of the organization. At the June 1969 Chicago convention of SDS, the RYM group, now known as the Weathermen, expelled the PL wing and effectively dismembered SDS as a national student organization. This document was prepared by Karin Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis and would become known as the Weather Manifesto based upon lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965)—”you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing.” (Click here to read an abridged version of the Manifesto; scroll down to Document 5.)

The Weather Manifesto assailed the Progressive Labor movement for failing to comprehend the revolutionary nature of global anti-imperialism in which American capitalism and empire were under attack in Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria, Bolivia, Angola, and throughout the Third World in conjunction with domestic revolutionaries such as the Black Panthers. Living in the belly of the beast, it was imperative that radicalized American students join the revolutionary struggle that would usher in the millennium of world communism. White youth would be radicalized to support black liberation through the example of the Weathermen renouncing nonviolence and joining the armed struggle against American imperialism. The Manifesto concluded, “The strategy of the RYM for developing an active mass base, tying the city-wide fights to community and city-wide anti-pig movement, and for building a party eventually out of this motion, fits with the world strategy for winning the revolution, builds a movement oriented toward the power, and will become one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to the many Vietnams which will dismember and dispose of US imperialism. Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!”

The bellicose nature of the Weather Manifesto evoked considerable controversy then and now, as the radicals sought to embody their principles with the formation of revolutionary collectives that would “bring the war home.” In other words, the goal was to subject Americans to some of the violence and destruction inflicted daily upon the Vietnamese people. Terming themselves the Weather Underground, the New York City collective planned a bombing that would simulate the Vietnam experience by creating death and destruction during a military dance at Fort Dix in nearby New Jersey. Instead, on March 6, 1970, the bomb was triggered by accident, destroying a New York City townhouse where the explosives were being assembled. Dead in the explosion were Weather members Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins.

Following this tragedy, the Weather Underground re-evaluated their strategy. While not disavowing the principles of their Manifesto, the Weather Bureau, or leadership cadre, asserted that symbolic attacks against institutions and manifestations of imperialism such as military induction centers and government offices would galvanize the support of the American working class. Thus, the Weather Underground did not consider themselves terrorists, as their goal was not to induce fear among the American people but rather to demonstrate that it was possible to strike against the institutions and property of the capitalist “pig” state that sought global control over the working class and people of color. The Weather Underground conducted a series of bombings in the early 1970s that sought to symbolically bring the war home without the taking of human life. Warnings of impending explosions were provided to authorities in order to avoid the type of tragedy that occurred in the Weather townhouse explosion.

But the Weather Underground failed to incite a working-class revolution in the United States, and with the end of the war in Vietnam, many radicals attempted to re-enter mainstream society. Individuals such as Rudd, Ayers, and Dohrn surrendered to authorities and were able to arrange plea bargains as more serious charges were dismissed due to massive civil rights violations and illegal domestic surveillance by the government in the COINTELPRO or Counter-Intelligence Program. Other Weather Underground members such as David Gilbert and Judy Clark remain incarcerated for their roles in a Brink’s robbery in which three people were killed.

What are we to make of the Weather Manifesto and Underground after forty years? Efforts by the political right to keep the cultural wars of the 1960s alive were negated in the 2008 presidential election as few voters were influenced by accusations that Barack Obama was linked to terrorism through his far from intimate associations with Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

The Weather Manifesto was a product of the times and reflective of an increasing radicalization of the antiwar and civil rights movements fostered by government suppression and the frustrations of addressing de facto segregation, economic inequality, and the intransigence of a government intent upon pursing a war of aggression in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Weathermen destroyed SDS, the organization best equipped to organize the growing campus unrest with the Vietnam War. In addition, the Weather Manifesto abandoned the principles established in the 1962 founding document of SDS, the Port Huron Statement. Addressing issues of imperialism, racism, economic inequality, the military-industrial complex, and the sense of alienation experienced by many individuals seemingly overwhelmed by the powers of impersonal institutions such as the university, the Port Huron Statement advocated greater democracy rather than armed revolution. The document concluded, “America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.” These sentiments would seem to resonate well with the young people of today who have re-established SDS. The youth of the twenty-first century are technologically savvy and intent upon creating a world community to formulate solutions for environmental concerns of which the protesters of the 1960s were only dimly aware. Perhaps social networking will provide the organizational impetus to implement the democratic vision of the Port Huron Statement rather than the days of rage envisioned by the Weather Manifesto.

Ron Briley is a history teacher and assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has taught for over thirty years. His teaching has been recognized by the AHA Beveridge Prize, the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award from the Society of History Education, and the OAH Tachau Precollegiate Teaching Award. His books include Class at Bat, Gender on Deck, and Race in the Hole (McFarland, 2003), James T. Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball (Kent State, 2007), and All Stars and Movie Stars (Kentucky, 2008).