Some excerpts from :The war within : America's battle over Vietnam," by Tom Wells. University of California Press. Kindle edition is $9.95. On May Day 1971.
CHAPTER NINE 1971 “The Next Six Weeks Will Determine the Future of Western Civilization” "In January 1971 the National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression gathered in Chicago. The coalition remained seriously divided. Backed by Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis continued to push for massive civil disobedience in Washington in early May that would “stop the government.” Dellinger and Davis felt this May Day protest would help revitalize a movement increasingly skeptical of its power. “It was clear that there was a fatigue, a quasi-disillusionment” with legal demonstrations, Dellinger recalled. To many activists, they had become “yesterday’s mashed potatoes.” But by undertaking massive direct action, Dellinger and Davis believed, activists would feel their power. The government would, too. “The aim of the Mayday action is to raise the social cost of the war to a level unacceptable to America’s rulers,” a May Day “tactical manual” stated. “To do this we seek to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people.” The protest, however, “may divide us from certain constituencies,” Davis told the conference delegates. May Day would be decentralized and unchoreographed. There would be “no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out,” the manual promised activists.1 (The National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression, was derided by some activists as the “coalition against everything.” See my 2nd excerpt, from a previous chapter, after the <SNIP> Note the aside by Sidney Peck on the SWP. The May Day Tactical Manual, is reprinted in : Mayday 1971, or, How to Lose Street Battles and Alienate People <https://archive.org/details/mayday-1971-or-how-to-lose-street-battles-and-alienate-people>." M.P.) Other protesters were apprehensive. Indeed, many “were scared to death” of May Day, as Dellinger remembered. Some felt Davis and Dellinger “had gone crazy.” Although giving lip service to nonviolence, Brad Lyttle perceived, Davis had no intention of keeping things pacific. “I looked at what they were putting together and said, ‘This is a disaster,’” Lyttle recalled. So did the War Resisters League leader David McReynolds. “I’ll tell you, the May Days in 1971 scared the shit out of me,” he remembered. McReynolds “didn’t trust Rennie” either and feared he “was leading us into a trap, that we would all get down to Washington and…find out there’d be provocations that would allow Nixon to unleash the National Guard on us. The May Days looked to me like a real setup.” Plus, “it was based on an apocalyptic vision,” McReynolds felt—“‘If they don’t close the war down, we’re going to close them down.’ And that [suggested] we had more power than we did.” Moreover, “we had to be aware politically that if we did close the government down…we would be violating where most people wanted it to go.” The former SDS leader Carl Davidson, who was then covering the antiwar movement for the radical Guardian newspaper, also distrusted Davis and his May Day plan. “I thought that Rennie Davis was spaced out, and I thought he was burning out,” Davidson reminisced. “I thought there was all kinds of weirdness developing around it.… It wasn’t, like, really together.” So distrustful were McReynolds and other activists of Davis that they suspected him of being a CIA agent. McReynolds even raised the possibility with Dellinger.2 Dellinger himself had doubts about Davis’s commitment to nonviolence and agreed that his vision of May Day was apocalyptic (Dellinger was not pleased when Davis told prospective recruits to the protest that “the next six weeks will determine the future of Western Civilization”). However, Dellinger thought he could keep Davis on a reasoned path. “I used to be able to sober him up,” he recalled.3 The January conferees could agree on only a very general program for the spring. They would organize to “implement” a symbolic “People’s Peace Treaty” previously negotiated by Davis and others with Vietnamese students. They would also hold “nonviolent and militant” protests that went “beyond rallies and demonstrations” but included them too. “It was a hard meeting, that’s all I can say,” NCAWRR’s Sidney Peck pensively reflected. “It was a real difficult meeting.”4 Further splitting the conferees were accusations that some NCAWRR leaders were losing touch with their troops. “I went through a tremendous personal trashing on elitism and jet-setting,” Peck remembered. Two of the accusers later turned out to be government agents.5 The following weekend, representatives of the SWP-controlled National Peace Action Coalition and NCAWRR met to consider uniting on a mass legal demonstration that spring. NPAC urged NCAWRR to help build the demonstration it had already called for April 24. NCAWRR preferred rallying on May 2, the day before May Day would begin, instead. The two groups failed to reach an agreement. “We had all kinds of games being played back and forth,” Fred Halstead ruefully recalled.6 Shortly thereafter, NCAWRR disbanded. NCAWRR leaders set up another group—the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ)—in its place. Given the mounting sectarianism in the movement, the coalition leader Doug Dowd didn’t think PCPJ was going to fare any better than NCAWRR. “I remember lacking any kind of enthusiasm or hope about PCPJ,” Dowd said. “I remember believing that this was nothing that was going to get any place. It was already riddled with internal opposition.”7 PCPJ established its headquarters in Washington. In the same building, one floor below, resided NPAC. One floor above sat the office of the May Day Collective (later known as the May Day Tribe), a largely countercultural grouping “filled with strange personalities” prone to using “lots of various kinds of chemical stimulants,” Lyttle recalled. The three organizations were most unlikely neighbors. Lyttle remembered visiting NPAC’s headquarters shortly after PCPJ set up shop in the building: “When I came in there I went up to their office, and it was a fortress. They had a steel-plated door, and they had two-by-fours that you could put across it. And I said, ‘What the heck do you have all this here for?’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t want to be attacked by the police.’ Well, obviously it wasn’t the police [they were worried about]; the police could get in if they wanted to. What they didn’t want was to be attacked by the rest of the movement.”8 This was what the peace movement had come to...." <SNIP> Decline Also in September, representatives of the Mobe’s summer regional meetings and national peace groups met in Milwaukee. They formed the National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression (NCAWRR). Many activists soon belittlingly referred to NCAWRR as the “coalition against everything.” Even some of its organizers were unexcited about it. “It took on such a wide range of stuff that there was no clear focus,” Sidney Peck remembered. “I felt that had blurred our opposition to the war to some extent.” NCAWRR’s fall agenda included demonstrations in support of jailed Black Panthers and welfare rights, multi-issue community organizing, and antiwar protests. As Dave Dellinger writes, many groups in NCAWRR “put only limited energy into its programs, preferring to ‘go it alone’ organizationally.” Doug Dowd recalled that there was “real notable” and “increasing difficulty in holding the coalition together.… Each of the groups in the coalition increasingly became insistent that its position, its path, its goals, had to be primary. It got to the point where it came to be kind of a bad joke, you know, where you couldn’t have a demonstration without having thirty-five speakers, and the only kind of position you could get any kind of agreement on was watered down or stupid.” And “once you finally gave in, so to speak, and got agreement from two hundred different groups…then nobody would go out and organize for the fucking demonstration.… So you’ve got more people at the fucking organizing meeting than at the demonstration.” It “became very, very difficult to move an inch,” Dowd said. The antiwar leader felt the mounting sectarianism in the movement “was like a bunch of fucking vultures over a carcass.… They were making a carcass out of something that had been alive.”149 Rennie Davis was then trying to garner support for a massive civil disobedience action in Washington early the next May if the war persisted. NCAWRR agreed to help build the “May Day” protest. In New York, activists were pressuring the city council to adopt a resolution to “Take New York City Out of the War—Now!” The campaign gained little momentum. In several other cities, activists campaigned for antiwar referenda. The referenda passed. VVAWers were meanwhile planning national hearings on American war crimes in Vietnam. They wanted to show that My Lai and other atrocities were not isolated incidents, but logical results of U.S. policies. The veterans debated whether to work with the Citizens Commission to Investigate War Crimes, which wanted to hold the hearings before Congress. “Some people in VVAW from the Midwest argued, ‘No, it really ought to be out there in middle America,’” Jan Barry recalled. “‘Everything’s been directed at Congress for years, and what have those fuddy-duddies ever done? If we take it out to middle America and we shake up middle America, they’ll shake up Congress.’” VVAW decided to hold the hearings in Detroit early the next year. They dubbed them the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” a reference to Tom Paine’s 1776 statement about “summer soldiers” who shrink from duty during crises. Jane Fonda promoted the hearings.150 The antiwar demonstrations called by the SWP-controlled National Peace Action Coalition on October 31 were small. Aware now that they couldn’t organize massive demonstrations on their own, SWPers urged NCAWRR to participate in an NPAC conference on December 4. Peck and the handful of other NCAWRR leaders who attended requested that NPAC refrain from setting a date for the next spring’s antiwar demonstrations until a NCAWRR meeting in early January so the coalition could shape the decision. NPAC refused. It issued a call for peaceful, legal demonstrations on April 24. “They were constantly setting dates and then compelling the rest of the movement to [go along],” Peck disdainfully recalled. “That was their big thing.” This date had special significance—it would limit participation in the May Day civil disobedience, the SWP schemed, since few people would stay in Washington two weekends in a row.151<SNIP> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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