Jeremy Varon by Bringing the War Home

disillusioned many SDS veterans and repelled newcomers, many of whom had little comprehension of the often esoteric arguments between the organized factions. Bernardine Dohrn was one of SDS’s later adherents. She had grown up in a Republican family in Wisconsin, attended law school at the University of Chicago, and then, after Martin Luther King Jr. brought his “Poor People’s Campaign” north, immersed herself in the contentious politics of race and class of Chicago. Schooled in organizing by activists from the southern civil rights movement, her main work was assisting tenants associations as they battled Chicago’s slum lords. Dohrn became active in SDS in 1968, rising within a year to a position of national leadership within the male-dominated organization. SDS, when she joined, was “famous for being anti-leadership and decentralized and grassroots and anarchistic.” By 1969, however, “the ideological debates,” in which Dohrn reluctantly, if skillfully, participated, had “reduced everybody to nitwits”
    and left SDS “talking in slogans.”89
    As an expression of SDS’s emerging class politics, some sharply repudiated their identity as students. A column in the SDS newspaper in the fall of 1968, co-authored by the future Weatherwoman Cathy Wilkerson, had stated bluntly: “The university is a place DEDICATED to the perpetuation of class exploitation” and urged SDSers to “de-studentize”
    their lives.90 RYM insisted that activists’ acceptance of their “student classification” had been responsible for the “reactionary tendencies in SDS.”91 Others denigrated the cultural expressions of New Left rebellion. At one extreme, PL members rejected long hair and drug use as signs of “bourgeois” self-absorption and styled themselves as disciplined, short-haired proletarians, clad in work shirts. To have a place in the revolu-
    “Agents of Necessity”
    49
    tion, many seemed to believe, one had to renounce one’s prior socialization and affiliate strongly with some properly revolutionary group.
    In the spring and early summer of 1969, eleven SDS members affiliated with RYM drafted a 15,000-word statement titled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” after a lyric from Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” (The title, Mellen recalls, was slapped on at the last minute with little deliberation. The tract was nearly named “The Vandal Statement,” both to quote the line “the pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles” from the same Dylan song and to capture the group’s ambition to “disarm the United States.”)92 The statement’s principal author was J. J. (John Jacobs), a charismatic but notoriously domineering Columbia graduate who had defected from PL and now used his considerable knowledge of Marxist theory on behalf of a new revolutionary model. With the statement, the RYM members sought to limit PL’s power in SDS by responding to what they felt were PL’s heresies: its single-minded focus on the industrial working class; its refusal to fully support the Black Panthers and Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (PL opposed “all nationalisms” as antithetical to “proletarian internationalism”); and its opposition to SDS’s youth politics. The statement appeared in a special issue of New Left Notes printed for SDS’s National Convention in Chicago in late June, where PL and RYM were primed for a showdown.
    True to predictions, the convention was notable for vitriol among the dominant factions. One reporter describing the mood in the vast, dank auditorium, observed: “SDS isn’t the free and open, free form group it once was. . . . Increasingly it is bedeviled by the incomprehensible, Marxist sectarianism which wrecked the old left, as people calling themselves Maoist and Leninist tussle over abstruse, revolutionary metaphysics in a social atmosphere that is depressingly Stalinoid and paranoid.”93 In the proceedings, RYM