Weatherman

aka Weatherman Organization, Weather Underground, Weather Underground Organization (WUO)

Weatherman, a militant group of young white Americans that grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement, engaged in bombing campaigns across the United States for more than five years. Weatherman sought to advance communism through violent revolution, and the group called on America's youth to create a rearguard action against the U.S. government that would bring about its downfall.

Weatherman evolved from the Third World Marxists, a faction within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the major national organization representing the burgeoning new left in the late 1960s. Led by Bernardine Dohrn, James Mellen, and Mark Rudd, this “action faction” of the (by this point skeletal) SDS advocated street-fighting as a method for weakening U.S. imperialism. At the SDS national convention in June 1969, the Third World Marxists presented a position paper titled “You Don't Need a Weatherman to Tell You Which Way the Wind Blows” in the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. The article, the title of which was taken from a Bob Dylan song, asserted, among other things, that black liberation was key to the movement's anti-imperialist struggle and emphasized the need for a white revolutionary movement to support liberation movements internationally. This article became the founding statement of Weatherman.

Weatherman launched an offensive that summer. In one action in the Northeast, it tried to recruit members at community colleges and high schools by marching into classrooms, tying up and gagging teachers, and presenting revolutionary speeches. At the Harvard Institute for International Affairs, Weatherman members smashed windows, tore out phones, and beat up professors.

From October 8 to 11, 1969, Weatherman worked to organize thousands of young people in what it called National Action but what newspapers called the “Days of Rage”—a direct assault on the police, or the “pigs.” The protests were to begin on the second anniversary of Che Guevara's death and coincide with the trial of the Chicago 8, eight men charged with conspiracy for their actions during the Democratic Convention in Chicago one year earlier. On October 6, 1969, Weatherman members blew up a statue in Chicago's Haymarket Square that commemorated a policeman who died in a riot in 1886. That message of confrontation and violence was echoed in Weatherman's signs and slogans, which read, “Bring the war home” and “The time has come for fighting in the streets.” However, Days of Rage proved minimally successful. The demonstrations had a low turnout—as low as 100 by some counts—as well as several incidents of random, pointless rioting. By the end of the weekend, 284 people, including local youths and SDS members, had been arrested; total bail amounted to more than $1.5 million.

Frustrated with the inefficacy of traditional forms of political protest after Days of Rage and other antiwar demonstrations throughout November, Weatherman called for a national “war council” meeting of the SDS that December. Members of the group discussed the need to instruct themselves in the use of firearms and bombs in order to target and attack sites of power in the United States, as well as the need to kill police. Much of this discussion was fueled by the recent killings of Black Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton by Chicago police. In that meeting, held in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman decided to become a small-scale paramilitary operation that would carry out urban guerrilla warfare and to go underground.