Political Violence Used to be a Daily Fact of Life in New York
Lessons from a podcast series about the Weather Underground
As the New York mayor’s race unfolds and the chances of a Zohran Mamdani victory grow more likely, a number of commentators have expressed the worry that the city could be at risk of returning to the “bad old days.”
When people use this expression, they mostly mean to conjure the ghosts of the fiscal crisis (“Ford to City: Drop Dead”) and the dramatic increase in street crime that happened a half century ago (“Welcome to Fear City”). But radical politics also played an important role in the 1970s, contributing to the general feeling that the social fabric was coming apart. As Time reports:
During the 1970s…protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade—so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. As one woman sniffed to a New York Post reporter after an attack by a Puerto Rican independence group in 1977: “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?’”
Several of the bombings resulted in deaths and injuries, but most did not — typically, officials would be warned to evacuate the targeted buildings hours in advance of detonation. Still, the prospect that a bomb might go off while you were visiting an office building or a government agency was something people had good reasons to worry about. Millions of dollars worth of damage was done to a range of prominent buildings, including the Pentagon and NYPD headquarters, disrupting business and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of people.
But the bombings were just one of several different kinds of “actions” undertaken by extremist groups — actions that effectively amounted to a campaign of domestic terrorism. The 1970s also saw dozens of “expropriations” (aka bank robberies) as well as a handful of targeted assassinations of police officers and several successful prison breaks. It is little wonder that New York, the focus of much of this activity, saw nearly a million residents flee to greener (read: safer) pastures over the course of the decade.
Why aren’t these developments better remembered today? Time heals a lot of wounds of course, and many of the people who lived through those days are no longer here to share their memories. But Bryan Burrough, the author of Days of Rage, has argued that the political violence of the 1970s is largely forgotten because no one directly involved has a stake in calling attention to what happened — both the radicals and the law enforcement officers who were central protagonists in the story want to get on with their lives without highlighting the crimes they committed during those years. (Two FBI officials — including Mark Felt, who would later be revealed as “Deep Throat” — were convicted of authorizing illegal break-ins and wire taps in pursuit of the Weather Underground.)
Even 50 years after the fact, the threat of legal liability hangs over Mother Country Radicals, a 10-part podcast series from 2022 that focuses on the life and times of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayres. Dohrn and Ayres were two of the leaders of the Weather Underground, a group of college-educated young people who were committed to the idea that “revolutionary violence” was the only way to destroy the American empire. Throughout the podcast series, Dohrn and Ayres refuse to answer a number of questions, not wanting to incriminate either themselves or their co-conspirators in the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party.
While much goes unsaid in Mother Country Radicals, it still makes a compelling listen. I went into the podcast with a fair amount of skepticism because its principal author is Zayd Ayres Dohrn, Bernadine and Bill’s son. But Zayd quickly won me over with his fair mindedness. He views the actions of his parents and his parents’ friends with a generous spirit, but Mother Country Radicals is by no means a simple-minded, heroic depiction of the Weathermen. You can almost feel Zayd rolling his eyes at some of his parents’ more outlandish pronouncements, including Dohrn’s infamous celebration of the Manson family murders.
While Mother Country Radicals is about a political movement that affected all Americans in one way or another, what animates the series — and gives it real poignancy — is an intensely personal quest. In addition to recounting his own challenges growing up underground, Zayd interviews a handful of other children whose parents were active in the revolutionary movement. These “Weather kids and Panther cubs” are understandably haunted by a nagging question: Why did our parents value the abstract cause of social justice more than they valued us?
Dohrn, Ayres and their colleagues in the radical underground demonstrated time and time again that they were willing to put themselves and their families in jeopardy by participating in “actions” that could easily have gotten themselves (or others) killed. It is clear from Zayd’s conversations with Chesa Boudin (son of Kathy Boudin, who spent decades behind bars for her role in a botched robbery that left three dead) and Kakuya Shakur (daughter of Assata Shakur, who escaped from prison in New Jersey and has lived in exile in Cuba ever since) that the next generation paid an enormous price in the process.
As the podcast series reaches its conclusion, Zayd asks a number of the surviving radicals, who are all in their retirement years, whether they have any regrets. If given a chance, would they do it all again? While a couple interviewees make perfunctory “mistakes were made” noises, the general consensus seems to be that most would make similar choices again if given the chance. There is very little sense that anything that has taken place since the 1970s — including not just the damage done to their families and the cities they lived in but the manifest failure to spark the revolution they sought and the enduring conservative backlash that their activities played no small role in engendering — has caused them to rethink their underlying assumptions. I must confess that I found this more than a little dismaying.
While each of the radical political groups of the 1970s had its own unique set of concerns — Puerto Rican independence, the war in Vietnam, racial justice, the ravages of capitalism, etc. — they often operated in solidarity with one another. And there is little doubt that they fed off of one another, with one bombing leading to another, as each group attempted to up the ante in a spirit of friendly competition. In this way, violence begat violence.
This dynamic is yet another reason why we should be very concerned by recent incidents of political violence, including the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, an antisemitic attack in Colorado that left one dead and dozens injured, the murder of a Minnesota legislator (and attempted murder of another), the slaying of two Jews in Washington DC by an assailant who allegedly shouted “Free Palestine,” and, of course, two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump.
The good news is that we are still a long ways from the bad old days of the 1960s and 70s, when political violence truly had become a daily fact of life in cities like New York and there were multiple organizations explicitly dedicated to perpetuating acts of aggression. The bad news is that it took more than a decade for the fever to break — it wasn’t until the 1980s that extremist violence in America really subsided.
I’m not exactly sure why the political violence of the era ground to a halt. The end of the Vietnam War was probably a crucial turning point, depriving radical groups of one of their most powerful recruiting tools. I’m pretty sure the normal maturation process was also a factor: most people age out of risky behavior and many key figures in the underground had become thirty-something adults, many with kids of their own.
Finally, I think that leading politicians and influencers, across the political spectrum, made a difference. By consistently denouncing political violence, prominent political figures sent a strong signal to their followers, denying permission to those looking for an excuse to take their political commitments to the next level. This is one of the most worrying parts of our contemporary political discourse — we just don’t seem to have the same kind of political consensus about anything any more, even the dangers of political violence.