In 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that it was “morning in America.” He declared that the American dream wasn’t over—far from it. But to achieve that dream, the United States needed to lower taxes, shrink the size of the federal government, and flex its military muscles abroad. Some called his program the Reagan Revolution.

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Meanwhile, a tiny band of American-born, well-educated extremists was working for a very different kind of revolution. They’d spent their entire adult lives embroiled in political struggles: protesting against the Vietnam War, fighting for black, Puerto Rican, and Native American liberation, and fighting against what they called U.S. “imperialism”—that is, U.S. military aggression, political domination, and economic exploitation, particularly in the Third World.

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Many of them had been close to, or involved in, the violent far-left scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were part of the so-called Generation of 1968, a worldwide cohort that embraced drugs, sex, rock music, and revolutionary politics with equal enthusiasm.

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The Weather Underground Organization was among the most notorious elements in this extremist scene. An offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society—possibly the largest left-wing student group in U.S. history—the Weather Underground, inspired by Third World revolutionaries, sought to foment domestic insurrection and confront U.S. imperialism from the inside, and with force.

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“We’re tired of tiptoeing up to society and asking for reform,” said Bill Ayers, a leader of the Weatherman faction. “We’re ready to kick it in the balls.” By the mid-1970s, Weather had taken credit for dozens of bombings of government and corporate buildings.

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Women were part of Weather—they were founders, they were members of its ruling Central Committee (also known as the “Weather Bureau”), and they were cadres in its underground cells. But while the group supported women’s liberation in theory, Weather’s largely male leadership was different in practice.

The group’s “Smash Monogamy” campaign, ostensibly designed to shatter repressive sexual paradigms, created new opportunities for male erotic aggression and domination. Weather Bureau member Mark Rudd, a leader of the SDS uprising at Columbia University in 1968, confessed in his memoirs that the campaign “meant freedom to approach any woman in any collective. And I was rarely turned down, such was the aura and power of my leadership position.”

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Members were often subjected to blistering, hours-long “criticism/self-criticism” sessions and these blistering collective critiques were often were directed against women that Weather males saw as particularly headstrong and independent. Susan Stern, a former Weather member, recalled a five-hour session in which she was denounced by here comrades as “individualistic, egotistical, self-centered, power-hungry, manipulative, monogamous, dope-crazed, sexually perverted, dishonest, counterrevolutionary and arrogant.”

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By the late 1970s, Weather was defunct. Most of the leadership, exhausted from nearly a decade on the run, surfaced from the underground, and those wanted on criminal charges surrendered to the authorities. Ultimately Weather’s clandestine enterprise had been a failure. Many other Vietnam-era radicals also called it quits and returned to graduate school, started careers, and reentered ordinary American life. 

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But pockets of militancy remained. In certain parts of New York, the Bay Area of California, Chicago, and Austin, Texas, a revolutionary sensibility “still [smoldered and sparked,” as one participant recalled. The Weather Underground was gone, but she and just a few others vowed to continue the struggle and to do so by any means necessary.

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“We lived in a country that loved violence,” she said. “We had to meet it on its own terms.”

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In 1978, some of the militants created a new organization to wage a war against imperialism, racism, and fascism. They derived the group’s name from the birthday shared by two of their ideological heroes, Malcolm X and and Ho Chi Minh: the May 19th Communist Organization.

May 19th was unique—unlike any other American terrorist group before or since. May 19th was created and led by women. Women picked the targets, women did the planning, and women made and planted the bombs. They’d created a new sisterhood of the bomb and gun.

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In 1979, just after May 19th’s founding, the Talking Heads released “Life During Wartime.” Reportedly inspired by accounts of terrorist groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the song is a driving, hallucinatory first-person chronicle of a hunted, unnamed figure moving through an unspecified underground realm: “Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons/Packed up and ready to go.”

May 19th lived the band’s lyrics, and in real time.

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Copyright 2019 by William Rosenau

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