Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud

were energized by the gathering. Or rather—in a sign of the separatism, personalism, and inward focus that would characterize identity politics for much of the seventies—they were energized by the time they spent among themselves. “For a number of us, gay and straight, the women’s part of the conference was getting to know one another through dancing, swimming, making music together, singing, rapping in small groups, in twos and threes, digging on each other,” one woman wrote in Atlanta’s underground paper. “We blew each other’s minds by our beauty, our strength. We grew by loving each other.” A gay man similarly described the gay caucuses as “really a high for me … I’d forgotten about the atmosphere of total personal openness, openness about one’s deepest confusions, that is so lacking in straight-dominated meetings.”⁵⁴

      The Mayday Tribe ceased to exist soon afterwards. But in May 1972, when Nixon announced the mining of seven Vietnamese harbors, the underlying political shifts that had shaped Mayday were dramatically on display. Demonstrators all around the country quickly organized themselves and blocked highways, key intersections, and railroad tracks. The sites were mainly not notorious hotbeds of radicalism: they included Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Boulder, and Gainesville; Evanston, Illinois; East Lansing, Michigan; Oxford, Ohio. Protesters blocked the New York State Thruway and Chicago’s Eisenhower Expressway; others shut down Santa Barbara’s airport by occupying its runways. In Davis, California, demonstrators sat down on Southern Pacific tracks; still more did the same on the Penn Central commuter line in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In St. Louis, the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War occupied the top of the Gateway Arch, while another group of radicals took over the decommissioned mine sweeper USS Inaugural, saying they wanted to repair it and take it to Vietnam to clear the harbor of Nixon’s mines. It was nationwide mayhem, neither coordinated nor led by anyone. Longtime activist Leslie Cagan, one of the participants in the mine sweeper action, who would later go on to coordinate many of the largest protests of subsequent decades, from the million-person 1982 anti-nuclear protest in Central Park to the enormous 2003 protests against the Iraq War, recalled that there wasn’t “any kind of national organization or network that put out a call for these kinds of bolder actions. It was just one of those moments where a lot of people were on the same wavelength.”⁵⁵

      The Mayday Tribe hadn’t succeeded in its stated goal—“If the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government”—and its singular experiment in nonviolent obstruction was soon forgotten, too messy or perhaps too unsettling to be part of popular understandings of the Vietnam War and the movements that opposed it. But the daring action had in fact achieved its most important aim: pressuring the Nixon Administration to hasten the end of the hated war. While neither activists nor anyone else would remember this unpopular protest for the outsized impact that it had, the political innovations of Mayday would quietly and steadily influence grassroots activism for decades to come, laying the groundwork for a new kind of radicalism: decentralized, multivocal, ideologically diverse, and propelled by direct action. As one participant observed in the protest’s immediate aftermath, “Twenty thousand freaks carry the seeds now, and they’ve been blown to every corner of the land.”⁵⁶

      Seeds, of course, are small, and only sprout and grow after a period of dormancy. A new era of political retrenchment was beginning, and many of those who dreamed of fundamentally reshaping American society and politics were trying to put down new roots, as the first act in a long process of radical reinvention.

       2

       Small Change

      As late as spring 1971, when radical activists organized the Mayday direct action against the Vietnam War, it remained possible to believe—without too much self-delusion—that the United States was on the verge of a revolution and “the System” was nearing collapse. What collapsed instead, with stunning speed, was any sense that a grand transformation of the existing political and economic order was possible. “I don’t know whether it happened in 1969 or 1972, but somewhere along the line the 1960s ended and the 1970s began,” mused Roberta Lynch, a longtime feminist and left-labor organizer, in 1977. “When the activists of the ’60s perceived that the system was not infinitely elastic and that there was often massive indifference to their goals, naiveté gave way to cynicism.”¹

      To be sure, small insurrectionary pockets remained active across the decade of the 1970s, still trumpeting the goal of revolution; but the ways they pursued it only confirmed—and increased—their political isolation. The remnants of the Weather Underground continued to bomb corporate and military targets, using “Hard Times Are Fighting Times” as the slogan for their 1976 organizing conference, and groups including the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the May 19 Communist Organization embraced the idea of armed struggle, adopting tactics like kidnapping and bank robbery and the goal of overthrowing the government by force. As they claimed the mantle of revolution, these groups—and their unarmed counterparts in the “party-building” left of the 1970s and 1980s, that squabbling world of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist grouplets, shrill and dreary in tone and obsessed with refining a correct political line—mostly just discredited it for everyone else.²

      The massive economic crisis that began in 1973, combining deep recession with steep inflation, undercut even middle-class activists’ ability to devote most or all of their energies to organizing: it was simply no longer possible, as it had been throughout the sixties, to comfortably skate by with minimal income. Many drifted away from organizing altogether to raise a family, pursue a career, or continue their education. Some of these people shifted rightward in their political views, but more simply scaled back or ceased political action. “The Los Angeles Times recently cited the figure of 2 to 3 million erstwhile activists who retain their radical allegiance, though they may lack a cause to which they can pledge it,” wrote onetime Weather Underground militant and Ramparts editor Bo Burlingham in 1976. “Even if the numbers are accurate, I told myself, there is a difference between 3 million former activists with radical notions, and radical activity. The former is just a statistic; the latter is a political force. And political force, at least for most of my friends and myself, hasn’t been a compelling preoccupation in the last couple of years.”³

      The end of the Vietnam War demobilized the ranks of protesters and activists as surely as it did the ranks of the armed forces. The last US troops pulled out in 1973, and the war was finally over in 1975, when the North Vietnamese overtook the capital of South Vietnam. Just ten days after the fall of Saigon, the War Resisters League and other groups organized a celebration in New York’s Central Park, featuring performances by such movement luminaries as Pete Seeger and Odetta; some 50,000 people attended. But however much grassroots activism had hastened the conflict’s end, too many people had died—combatants and civilians, Americans and Vietnamese—to make it feel like the movement had prevailed in any meaningful way, and the jubilation was tinged with melancholy. “I’d say we won,” reflected WRL organizer Ed Hedemann in a 1999 interview, “but not in the cleanest, nicest, best sense, because it just wasn’t a simple victory. There was a lot of pain and agony.”⁴

      For those who had hoped for a more profound change in the existing order, there was disappointment, too, at the movement’s lost momentum, a realization that a time of retrenchment was setting in. “There was a tremendous sense of not only relief that the war was ending but also [pride] that we had made some contribution to ending it,” remembered veteran organizer Leslie Cagan. “But there was also a tremendous frustration: seeing how quickly any kind of antiwar movement collapsed, disappeared, just wasn’t there any more … Somehow we weren’t able to translate it into an ongoing movement beyond the crisis of the war.”⁵

      The temptation was to look inward when searching for the causes of this collapse—to blame infighting, bad strategic decisions, flawed organizational structures, rhetorical excesses, or any of the other faults that the movements of the sixties might have had. But a series of dramatic revelations across the