They must bust in early May

“Maggie says that many say

They must bust in early May

orders from the D.A./Look out kid ... ” - Bob Dylan

“If the Government doesn't stop the war, we’ll stop the Government.” - MAYDAV slogan

“Stay away from hard drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.” - Abbie Hoffman

“What is this BULLSHIT?” - Leslie Bacon

The planning for the Mayday action the demonstrations in Washington that occured from April 24 to May 2nd, and on into the next week thanks to Uncle Sam — started somewhere around 1940, or whenever Mahatma Ghandi began using his celebrated “nonviolent” civil disobedience as a tactic to gain liberation. Then people like Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez picked up on it in the U.S., and by the fall of 1970, a bunch of people who wanted to rip apart the Nixonian ruse about withdrawing troops while dropping millions of tons of bombs on Indochina decided that the idea was worth another shot. Mobilizing masses of people to take over Washington D.C. for a week or so and if Richard Nixon was gonna watch his color tv during THIS one, he sure wasn’t gonna see a football game.

The specific planning for Mayday occured in Ann Arbor, the first weekend in February. About 2000 activists from around the country met and ratified the People’s Peace Treaty, drawn up by the Vietnamese and American students the month before, the last line of which read:

“Americans pledge to take whatever actions are appropriate to implement the terms of this joint Treaty and to insure its accept tance by the government of the United States.”

The Seattle Proposal, which stated that people should break down into regions, and that two representatives from each region should be selected and meet several times before May 1 as a sort of co-ordinating committee on tactics, was adopted and everyone split back to their communities to start organizing.

The task, allowing for the usual enormity of mobilizing 50,000 (moreor-less) people and getting them to a national demonstration became a lot more difficult; because of sectarian splinterings, a | tradition which dates back to at least 1928 — or whenever Stalin kicked Trotsky out of the USSR. NPAC — the National Peace Action Committee which was the new front group for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party composed of all the Trots from the New Mobe, which grew out of the Old Mobe (try to follow it — capsulizing movement chronology is no mean feat) — decided to have their own, separate action the week before May 1.

They wanted another November 1969, a mere Moratorium, where everyone would congregate under cherry blossoms and listen to Fred (“the Red”) Halstead and sixty-one other working-class heroes say that the next time we all came to Washington, we have to have TWICE as many people as this time. Then everyone could go back home and tell their grandchildren that they helped stop the war.

But the Mayday Collective and the non-Trot people from the old New Mobe, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, believed that if people were serious about stopping the Nixon administration’s genocidal moves aginst the Indochinese, creative new methods of militant demonstrations were needed. We felt that we had to arouse young peoples’ spirits, make them believe that we have the power to make the government listen to our anger if we are together. We wanted, essentially , to capture the spontaneity of the Cambodia aftermath, infuse it with a sense of military discipline and create a guerrilla street army which could invade Washington and literally stop the government from functioning and DEMAND that Congress ratify the Peace Treaty.

The single overriding reason that brought these people to Washington was a sense of .commitment to the Vietnamese: a feeling that after four thousand years of fighting agressors and having beaten the most technologically powerful ground army ever assembled, they were being hit with a horrifying, new kind of aggression that the" Vietnamese, alone,-could not halt any longer.

There have been twice as many tons of bombs dropped in Viet Nam — about five million — than the U.S. dropped in the European and Asian theatres combined in World War If . It has escalated to the equivalent of three and a half Hiroshimas a week. Vietnamese mothers are giving birth everyday to deformed babies — their chromosomes as well as their rice paddies are being napalmed. There are no birds left flying in South Viet Nam. Now, after a seventeen year rule by CIA-installed puppets, the forces are now coming together that will enable the people living in the South to overthrow their government internally .

We wanted to do more than show symbolic support, however — we wanted to help spark the impetus that would inspire the. Vietnamese. We wanted to show that we are fighting the same enemy, on the same terms. A mere march would never do this — we had to experiment with new forms, based, on what we are learning from other revolutionary struggles, especially the Vietnamese themselves. So the idea of militant, nonviolent but creative, disruption emerged and we began to tackle the problems of pulling it off.

The action would not be limited to young people. The participation of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), the National Farm Workers Union, as well as the omnipresent Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), established that everyone would pick targets to close down, choosing them according to their own oppression once in the city: the Veterans to the Pentagon, the welfare mothers would go to HEW, etc. Different strokes for different folks.

But the Mayday Collective had to bring in the young people and freeks; we geared our propaganda to that aim and tried to set up a living breathing community of our culture right in the aortic valve of the monster in the week prior to May 1.

The weekend of May 1, we would have a cultural celebration, a Festival of Life, without the unprepayedness of Chicago 68 or the mindlessness and greedhead rip-off of Woodstock ’69.

People began dividing up work areas; for example, I wanted to work on the the Mayday newspapers. We produced two, writing the first wiped out on apocalyptic Columbian grass, and tried to project how far out Mayday could be if lots of people would decide to come. It was rough — it was late February and most of the details were still but a gleam in our collective eye. We had to appeal to as many, different kinds of young people as possible (steady on the militant tufftalk); we wanted to avoid the dreamythology of Chicago ‘68’s propaganda and goddammit, SCRAP off-the-pig rhetoric.

(Author’s timeout: What has passed for “revolutionary” mouthings, in the macho, condescending pantheresque woof tickets the underground press and various leftist publications have been selling for the last couple years is nothing but a lame excuse for a tragic laclcof understanding of how to convince people. At least, these mindless droolings appear to be disapating, after having turned off great hordes [to refer to them as “brOad masses” would be to illustrate too precisely my point] to an extent such that really positive changes people are talking about are being dismissed as so much suchsame drivel. We have a lot of unstereotyping of ourselves to do to regain our credibility.

Particularly odious is the concept of trashing when applied as a form of criticism of a aster or brother or anyone other than an utter and despicable enemy such as Melvin Laird. The only effect I have ever seen it have on people is to make them uptight about accepting any criticism or to make them feel like a piece of literal shit. Or both. However, ten of these off-the-wall spatterings strung together is infinitely preferable to one weary Liberal crassity about working within the system blahblahblah. Those kind of words KILL PEOPLE — through his hypnotic yeasayings of genocidal Presidential policies, Walter Cronkite is just as responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam as LBJ, despite the fact that he is now a great journalistic hero for daring to challenge Pentagon body counts. But back tothe ballgame.)

The month of March began with a bang. I awoke to the news, M'arch 1, that the Capitol had been bombed and went charging into the street expecting to see the Dome caved in. I didn’t see that, not only because it wasn’t, but because twenty odd FBI agents blocked my vision.

At the office, the atmosphere was one of delirium.

“No fucking shit? The fucking CAPITOL’S been bombed. No fueking SHIT!”

Right into the middle of Nixon dropping god-knows-how-many tons of bombs on Laos, right under his nose in the same building where the billions of dollars that make the bombs that kill thousands of people every week are appropriated, a very timely bomb rips the monster’s womb.

Think of the Vietnamese peasant, after seeing a B52 turn his rice paddy into a mooncrater for the umpteenth time, hearing of the news that the Capitol Building of the ynited States of America has just been bombed. I was so exhilirated, I spent the rest of the day walking around the Smithsonian smoking dope, looking up more than once to make absolutely SURE the dome was still there.

The next day the Weather Communique admitting the action and explaining it to the American people came out, arid the action became complete (though some people were and probably still are convinced that it was a Reichstagean act of sabotage). But a curious phenomenon r ^developed. It was understandable when John Mitchell declared that, in his opinion, the Weathermen had nothing to do with the bombing. He was so horrified that the shit he had said the summer before in delivering the Weatherman ^indictments was coming true that he had to discredit it publicly in order to cover up his total inability to nab any of the W eatherpeople.

% Mitchell declared, “There is obviously no conspiracy by the Weathermen or anyone else involved (in the bombing).” So he set about inventing one — as we shall $ee shortly.

The Movement, for the most part, -seemed largely disinterested and/or unbelieving about the communique. LNS hot only refused to run it, they gave it pne brief paragraph which stated that a letter was received claiming the Weatherunderground was responsible for the bombing, but that there were no fingerprints on the letter. Therfore, they concluded, it was probably untrue. (The effect of 50 years of J. Edgar Hoover is far-reaching indeed!)

The same people who, two months before, were embracing the New Morning statement as the greatest doctrine since Das Kapital were now shocked that, if the Weatherman did indeed commit the bombing, they were hypocrites because the New Morning statement said they Were “giving up’’ this kind of “violence”. What jin fact New Morning did stress was th(at Armed Propaganda — militarily attacking a symbolic pig institution and then explaining it in terms everyone can understand — is only one level of struggle, $nd thjat many, many levels of struggle are needed to stop the war and destroy American imperialism. They DID admit Jheir jfast mistake in believing that armed Struggle was the only kind — “a military frror”. But:

“It is time for the movement to go out into the air, to organize,' to risk calling ‘‘ rallies and demonstrations, to convince "T that mass actions against the war and in support of rebellions do make a difference. Only acting openly, denouncing Nixjon, Agnew and Mitchell, and sharing numbers and wisdom together with ■u young sisters and brothers will blow away the fear of the students at Kent K State, the smack of the Lower East Side, and the national silence after the bombings of North Viet Nam...”

Tfye bombing of the Capitol intensified £ur commitment to make sure that this mass action against the war was really going to make a difference.

During the next month and a half, the ?May4ay Collective solidified. To me, the lack i of antagonism and the righteous warmth that the three dozen people in the Mayday office felt — many of whom had never worked together before or known each other previously — was amazing. We became a collective in name and spirit. We lived together, slept together, ate together, smoked and dropped together, planned to shut down the government together. This was no token conspiracy.

The scenario of the actions leading up to Mayday and the first week of May started coming together as people split up into committees to tackle all the numerous tactical problems. The government was pulling its usual stunt of refusing to grant any land permits, thereby hoping to discourage people from attending, but it became clear that we ’were going to get land somewhere.

The Veterans were to kick everything off with a series of actions in the third week of April, followed by a week of lobbying Congress to ratify the Peace Treaty after the big NPAC rally on the 24th, during which time we would set up camp and begin to live on the land.

By the end of the week, most of the people would be in the city, in preparation for the Festival of Life on the actual May Day. The regional representatives met regularly, and people in the different regions were picking specific targets in the city — 21 in all — that they would be responsible for closing down Mayday week.

It became clear that one of our most important jobs was to encourage a lot of the half million or so people that would come to the April 24th rally to stay for May day, and that our Festival of Life on May 1st and 2nd had to really be that. A joyous celebration of our culture, nothing less. So Leslie Bacon, Stu Werbin and I began trying to set up the music for three rock festivals in the span of one week — two weeks before they were supposed to happen.

Everyone wanted to avoid the whole super-than-thou hype of the capitalist festivals that served to perpetuate the separation of music from people. So we contacted numerous people’s bands from communities all over the country, and most of them were really turned on by the idea of playing. Elephant’s Memory in New York, Tayles from Madison, Wilderness Road from Chicago, Grin from Washington and other bands from Boston to Minneapolis began scrounging up the bread to make it down, since for the most part we were so broke we could only help minimally with expenses. Some groups, like Ann Arbor’s Brat, agreed to come down for the concert on the night 6f the 24th, stay the whole week playing whenever they could on the campsite and play at the festivals Mayday weekend. Better established groups were eager to play, too, and in some cases even cancelled already-arranged gigs to pay their own way to D.C. and play for free.

Mitch Ryder, for instance, flew in from St. Louis, played a high-energy hour set, May 1, and flew back to St. Lows the same day at a cost of over $ 1500. In fact, so many groups wanted to play that it became our unpleasant task to tell bands that they couldn’t come down and play — we were booked solid from dusk to dawn.

The other really unpleasant chore was preventing some of our unthinking friends from exploiting the whole thing a la Michael Laing. As the 24th approached, it seemed Leslie, Stu and I were on the phone 10 times a day to radio stations, newspapers and local mimeo machines. “No, John and Yoko aren’t coming. No, the Grateful Dead haven’t said for sure they’ll play, don’t use their name. No one has ever contacted Joni Mitchell. Stop saying Crosby Stills and Nash will play.” The usual Dylan ruse occured too — someone purporting to be Dylan called Dave Herman on WPLJ-FM in New York and said he was interested and that his manager would call us. Ho hum.

But no one knows how to exploit music so blatantly, as it turned out, as the Trots. They sandwiched Country Joe, Pete Seeger and Mary Travers for one song each in among their revolutionary luminaries making two-minute dronings, with all the grace of a top forty disc jockey doing a Clearasil commercial.

Around four in the afternoon, people bggan drifting from the rally to our stage setup at the Sylvan Theatre (outdoors) in the very shadow of the Washington Monument. By 7 p.m. there were at least sixty thousand people tightly packed up the hill from the stage to the Monument — a horizon of humanity. The show was going to be killer except that the sound system still hadn’t arrived; Bill Hanley had to move his equipment from the Capitol to the Monument. The Washington police were terrified — they gave Hanley a full police escort to expedite things.

It lasted until nine the next morning. Redbone, the Indian group, did the rockingest set of the night — everybody stomped. As the sun began coming up, about four a.m., and the Brat began their high-energy crusade to rouse everyone to start moving again, it’s a surreal anomaly to look out and see thousands and thousands of young freeks, Viet Cong banners and brightly painted camperbusses against the backdrop of that huge white phallic monolith. What a mindfuck!

The expected unforeseen problems began to develop just about as soon as the last wired-out, Manson-eyed speed freak finally drifted offstage and back to Uranus or wherever.

Continued on page 70.

Continued from page 16.

One of them emerged in the person of ope Algonquin Aronowitz (“Just call me Al.”) He is — evidently — the 45 year-old, (latent bloomer) house freak and rock kolumnist for the New York Po$t. He also manages a group called David Bromberg, a folky acoustic band that played one song for the Trots, then came back to play for us that night. It seems ol’ Al was pissed at the way his boy was treated by the Trots and, hearing that there was going to be another rock festival the next weekend, decided to wreak his revenge, without even the customary bother like telling the truth or trying to find out the facts of the situation. In Monday, April 26th’s Post Aronowitz reported that we were bringing bands to Washington for the, sole purpose of luring innocent hippies to the promise of a taste of sweet music, only to tell them when they arrived that there was a .War in Vietnam and they better prepare themselves to lay down their lives. Or some such garbage.

He followed it up with day-by-day accounts that we were promising every big name rock group on Earth would be in D.C,. Mayday and that we hadn’t in fact contacted most of the big name rock groups on Earth (the only accurate thing he reported) and the ones that'we had slotted were thinking about pulling out because of the lying, deceptive way Mayday was goihg about recruiting.

In truth, we redoubled-our efforts to quash any rumor-morigering fantasies about the superstars -playing, calling in live to major FM stations across the country and dousing any specific rumors about unconfirmed bands. We were determined to provide as much high-quality music as possible for the people to come together behind Mayday, but we were absolutely committed to NOT billing this as a Woodstock-OnPotomac. Nor were we interested in calling anyone to Washington merely for music. We repeatedly told everyone, in, our propaganda that our sole purpose in coming to Washington was to stop the war and ratify the peace treaty.

Repeatedly, we attempted to call Aronowitz and ask him to at least check with us before he slandered us anymore, but he was much too busy to answer or return our calls. Busy contacting the big-name groups that had committed themselves to playing and desperately trying to talk them out of it in time for next day’s big scoop. That, and cqmpiling a list of quotes from managers of groups who hadn’t been either contacted or committed and saying that they wouldn’t play now for all the smack in Turkey.

Some groups, like Johnny and Edgar Winter, refused to be gimmicked. Some, like the Grateful Dead, got paranoid and cancelled. Finally, Aronowitz decided to call the Mayday office and on Friday, April 31, at 1 p.m. (after everybody had crashed, exhausted, hoping to catch some sleep before the big day) he talked to a wayfaring young Yippie who would only identify himself as Crunchy Granola (with typical adeptness, Al reported his name as Grunchy Granola). Ol’ Crunch said, yeah, the Airplane, the Dead, Dylan, James Taylor, Neil Young and Kim II Sung were all going to show up and fuck you, revolution for the hell of it, the streets belong to the people, off the slime. All of which ArOnowitz faithfully reported to his readers as direct information from a Mayday spokesman. (He barely managed a weak gulp when the first five bands that played the next day were’ the Beach Boys, Mitch Ryder, Linda Ronstadt, Charlie Mingus and NRBQ. Ex post facto, who gives a shit.) If he isn’t a CIA agent, Richard Helms should at least give him an honorary merit badge.

The next problem was much more ominous. John Mitchell was really getting uptight. His very masculinity was being challenged every night by darling Martha, who absolutely refused to sleep with him again until he produced the Capitol bomber. (Not that he didn’t try. In the first two weeks after the bombing, his agents were snatching Mayday people off the streets forcing them into their cars — or breaking into their apartments at night — and offering them inr creasingly gross sums of money to tell them whodunit. By the time they tried to kidnap Rennie Davis, the amount was $200,000. Rennie told them Bernadine Dohrn did it, and the fuckers not only wouldn’t keep their promise to pay but when Rennie was arrested May 2 that was the exact price of his bond.)

By day, those goddamn veterans were grabbing all the headlines by tearing apart their war decorations like so much confetti, throwing bags of cowshit on the steps of the Pentagon and openly defying the Supreme Court by camping on the Monument grounds. Plus all his red-baiting of the Mayday Collective just wasn’t scaring people the way Joe McCarthy used to do it.

So, on April 28, forty of his toughest, best-equipped agents ripped off Leslie Bacon on the grounds that one of their undercover agents said that Leslie had a friend who knew a friend who had a cousin who once met a Weatherman and that as such she obviously was key witness in the Capitol bombing. And the REAL cincher — in an incredible stroke of luck, they later discovered that Leslie was actually in WASHINGTON DEECEE the day the bomb went off! So they put her on a plane, whisked her off to Seattle on $100,000 bond, set her up before a secret grand jury, then put her in jail for taking the fifth amendment (contempt of court, £ou know). Judge, jury and executioner in one neat manuveur without even fucking around with those constitutional luxuries like right to counsel, or incriminating evidence or any other obsolete nonsense. Plus, the press was now insinuating all over the place that Mayday must have planned the bombing since Leslie was in the Collective. He and Martha hadn’t done it as well as that night since Bobby Kennedy was Assassinated.

It was a real drag. Leslie is a beautiful, loving sister and it was a real (though of course temporary) loss to Mayday and the movement.

Let us now turn to the campsite. After holding out as long as they could (until people began congregating in the city parks), the Feds finally granted us a permit to stay in West Potomac Park, and Peace City — alternatively, Insurrection City — finally happened. And brought with it the realization Of just how far we are from becoming a real revolutionary culture.

Acid heavily laced with strychnine (one brother died), heavy cunt-and-fag baiting. At least six actual rapes, with lots of other sisters molested and thrown around. But the women and gay people dealt with it — they were by far the most together groups in the Mayday office and the Mayday action. (Over three-fourths of the staff of Mayday were women and gay men.) They organized self-defense cadres and confronted the Machomen with their incredible energy, so that by the last day on the land, conditions were almost tolerable. But who wants to risk their lives for a tolerable revolution???

The rest is all history. Fifty thousand people showed up Mayday, and the music and the musicians were great (with a couple exceptions, one being Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth. They arrived on the scene and immediately demanded $1,000. When they didn’t get it, they showed up an hour before they were supposed to play and started demanding to be moved up. Then little Tracy decided she wouldn’t play at all — “If I had known it was political I would never have come.” In the end she decided to play because “my boys want to.” Bravo, sister.)

At six thirty the next morning, four thousand fully armed Washington police moved in and, with an announcement that the permit for the park had been cancelled (not to mention the scheduled rock and soul concert for that day) they warned anybody not out of the park by noon would be arrested. It was the telling blow. People had no place to go and the police and national guard infested every sewer in the city. Stu Werbin said there were so many of the cops he thought they were literally going to pick up the stage and carry it away.

They didn't have to. People had no place to go and our army was thinned considerably. “Come on, move on, now, move on — no loitering.”

They out-trooped us — no ohe ever doubted they would. But a lot of people were freaked that they didn’t even give^ people a chance to commit non-violent civil disobedience.

Success on any kind of guerilla scale depends on the element of surprise. And yet we had openly published and discussed every single tactic, every single target, which we were considering using, letting the enemy know just as much as OUR troops knew. This was not so much out of naivete as out of necessity

this, was a public, mass action and there is no way to hide your intentions or strategy. The single thing that would spell success or failure would be large numbers. With 50,000 people taking to the streets and converging simultaneously at pre-arranged loci, it was going to take at least twice as many enemy troops to counter us. (I should add right now that never did we consider the National Guard soldiers as the “enemy”, but as guys caught up in an unfortunate contradiction of being young and yet under direct orders from the Pentagon. Had Nixon ever been forced to call in the regular army, I believe the shit would really have hit the fan. Being subject to senseless, stupid, castrating Army discipline for three years straight, instead of just weekend stints like the Guard, has resolved a lot of those contradictions, as the GX’s who came by the score to the Mayday office were always proving.) And at that point their troops merely add total numbers. Forced to try and stop us, we felt, the utter confusion and sheer mass of humanity on both sides would produce the havoc needed to shut down the city.

The government’s decision, then, to revoke the permit and drive everyone out of Insurrection City was their masterstroke, a brilliant but ancient military ploy — divide and conquer. Dazed, sleepless, hassled and discouraged, well over half of our army deserted rather than relocate at one of the three universities where temporary, makeshift headquarters were being established. Had the Mayday leadership been together enough to plan alternative gathering places, in advance, and spread the word before the police raid, we might have counter-acted the police raid. But as it stood, less than 15,000 of us were left — and all the detailed theoretical blueprints for troop deployment split along with our retreating brothers and sisters.

We. got a little taste of Nixon’s dreams, too, with the concentration camps they set up for about half of the 12,000. people they finally arrested. People in the jail really acted like brothers and sisters — no one was left stranded because of bail money.

Nixon claimed the action was a failure because we didn’t stop the government May 3; no one expected to. Mayday didn’t stop when we left Washington — it’s going to continue until we do stop the war. Plans are already underway for the Second Annual Fourth of July National Toke-Down and another invasion is tentatively scheduled for this fall. People went back to their communities more determined than ever to really build local actions and programs..

It looks like some of us won’t be able to make it back July 4, however. Last week, two hulking godzillas armed with J. Edgar Hoover’s autograph handed me a subpoena to appear at a Grand Jury investigation of the Capitol bombing. Altogether more than 15 people in three other Seattle-type grand juries in New York, Washington and Detroit have been subpoenaed to testify. With the spectacular defeats he’s been suffering in open court these last few months (the Panther 21, Ericka/Bobby victories are only the latest examples) Mitchell has decided that Leslie Bacon is a vanguard example of how to put people away. None of us will testify about anything — we refuse to be confined in a secret Inquisition chamber and intimidated by Mitchell’s hatpoonery.

And that ain’t all. “This was definitely a conspiracy in the next couple of months, I think you’re going to see a lot of these Red Hooligans tied up in court battles,” sayeth His Obnoxiousness. It’s true; we are — in his words — “ideological criminals”, and there is no legal defense I can think, of to cover that one. We definitely conspired together. And if conspiracy to stop the slaughter of two thousand innocent people a week is a crime, we all plead guilty. ,

(At 21, Ken Kelley is a well-traveled movement figure. Upon leaving high school in Ann Arbor, Kelley entered the University of Michigan and began the local underground newspaper, the Ann Arbor Argus — named after Washtenaw County’s first newspaper.

Later, he was to become Minister of Information for the White Panther Party, a post he held for over a year, until he left in the middle of last winter. He then moved on to help organize the May'day demonstrations, which he discusses above.

As this issue was going to press, Kelley had been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Detroit, in regard to the the Capitol bombing: basically behind the same Inquisition-like ruse that the government has used to snatch Leslie Bacon.

Its strange talking to a friend over the phone and knowing, for deadly certain, that he will shortly be in jail. It is also symptomatic of the vast disease, and the extent of that disease, that infests American government at the moment. Kelley, Bacon and the rest are not good Jews, and they will assuredly not walk silently into the star chamber of American jurisprudence. Just as certainly, they all deserve all of our support.

For more information, and in order to aid the conspirators financially and otherwise, contact: KEN KELLEY c/o THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD OF DETROIT

We are all Sptariacus. Ed.)