![]() ![]() The Prairie Fire Organizing Committee was founded to prepare the way. In an 186-page book called Prairie Fire-clandestinely printed by Weather, and clandestinely distributed with great success, despite the FBI-the leadership concluded that the only way to mount a revolution in the United States was to win over the American working class. By 1974, the leadership realized the problem. Yet however large Weatherman’s constituency of radical students became, it turned out to be too small to be politically effective. Get a book from our History collection with your paid subscription to TIME. Even the Berkeley Tribe, the most radical underground newspaper in the country, publicly warned that lethal bombings would discredit Weatherman and isolate the would-be guerrillas from potential supporters-if they killed, they would be alone. But the Weatherman bombing policy had not won support even on the extreme Left. While they worried that the bulk of the white working class was corrupted by relative prosperity, and ineradicable racism which they called “white skin privilege,” they hoped that in the counterculture, made up of disaffected young people, they might find a constituency capable of eventually empowering their revolutionary project. They yearned to expand their numbers beyond a tiny revolutionary cadre. The Weathermen thought of themselves as revolutionaries-that is, not merely as students acting out of anger over Vietnam and racism, but as politically minded organizers. There they have lived peacefully (if on the far Left) for the last 40 years. The Weathermen remained at large until 1977-1980, when most of them simply gave up their revolution and surfaced, resuming lives within mainstream society. Yet the fact is that FBI never permanently caught a single major Weatherman figure. On the FBI side, then, bureaucratic interests and imperatives, not merely fears for national security, fostered a disproportionate effort to eradicate the group. This was partly because of the occasional bombings, but also because the sheer presence of all those young Weathermen faces on all those wanted posters year after year constituted a humiliation to the Bureau-and the prestige of the Bureau was part of its power. They diverted hundreds of agents and tens of millions of dollars away from fighting traditional crime. If that had been the case, Weatherman might have constituted a serious problem for the country but in fact the FBI overestimated the scale of the Weatherman organization by a factor of ten-and panicked.īy autumn 1971-long after they had changed their name to the Weather Underground-it was clear that the FBI had been exaggerating the scale of the Weather threat yet the Bureau still committed vast resources to pursuing the group. And when in summer 1970 the original decision was made to put some Weatherman leaders onto the Most Wanted List, the FBI believed there were as many as 1,000 Weatherman Underground guerrillas at large in the United States. They consistently proclaimed their desire to destroy the very system the FBI was sworn to defend. Moreover, the Weathermen were determined revolutionaries, not kids out on a lark. True, some of its operations were spectacular: the bombing of the Capitol itself (March 1971), the bombing of the Pentagon (May 1972), the bombing of the State Department (January 1975). Why? After all, by any rational measure, Weatherman was not an existential threat to the country it was too small. Yet for years the FBI leadership remained obsessed with capturing the Weathermen, and they remained prominent on the FBI wanted posters. After that, Weatherman on average set off only one bomb every six months, mostly in the bathrooms of government buildings and corporation headquarters. And fully half of those bombs were detonated early on, in 1970. But Weather only set off a total of 25 such bombs during its entire seven years of existence, all of them relatively small. The Weathermen believed that the evil of these acts warranted an extreme response-in fact, it warranted a revolution. To be sure, it was almost unique among radicals in that period in using dynamite bombs to protest government war policies, racial unfairness and corporate greed. ![]() Yet the Weather organization was minuscule. The FBI decision garnered Weatherman a huge amount of publicity and made some of its leaders famous. In retrospect, it seems odd that the Federal Bureau of Investigation elevated a band of about one hundred young people, mostly college students, into a leading place on the Bureau’s Most Wanted List. Starting in the summer of 1970, FBI wanted posters featuring images of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and a dozen others were hung prominently in every post office in the United States, and this continued for years. The Weather Underground Organization was the most famous American radical group committed to political violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ![]()
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