1969The SDS split, Weatherman and RYM IIThe fork

The argument inside SDS was never about the goal. Every faction wanted a revolution, and the fight was over who would carry it out.

Progressive Labor, the Maoist faction, wanted a Worker-Student Alliance and told students to go to the factories. The national leadership answered in December 1968 with a paper drafted by Mike Klonsky, "Toward a Revolutionary Youth Movement," presented to the SDS national council. It declared that the organization's "most crucial ideological decision" was to settle "its direction with regards to the working class," and it proposed organizing white working class youth as the way to reach workers as a whole. The faction took its name from the paper and became RYM.¹

At the June 1969 convention in Chicago, RYM declared Progressive Labor expelled, and SDS, the largest radical organization in the country, destroyed itself in three days.

Then RYM split too.

One wing called itself Weatherman, after a Bob Dylan lyric in the title of its manifesto, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows." It went underground and started building bombs. Once its rivals organized, Weatherman picked up a second name: RYM I.

The other wing, RYM II, led by Klonsky and Noel Ignatin, went the opposite way. It "took seriously the notion of immersing itself in the working class," in Max Elbaum's account, and it called for a Leninist vanguard party to lead the workers. The group lasted less than a year, but the people did not disperse. Elbaum, who came out of that milieu, records where they went: RYM II "provided one of the main seedbeds for the New Communist Movement." Those were the ones who took industrial jobs on purpose.

Dan Berger, the underground's most careful historian, sums up the quarrel: "It was a split over class and race, over aboveground versus underground, Communist party versus armed revolutionary movement."²

Count the roads out of the split. Berger counts them at the chapter level, where the membership sat, and finds four.

Some chapters went with Progressive Labor. Some went with Weatherman. Some went with RYM II. The rest went with nobody, "those favoring (or at least joining) none of the above."

That fourth group was the biggest.

Nobody wrote a paper for them and no convention voted on them. They finished their degrees and went into the schools, the newsrooms, the courts and the faculties, as Hayden had forecast and the Radical Education Project had instructed.³

The armed road is the one people remember, and its veterans are precise about where they got it. The Weather Underground's own collected statements name the sources: the Black liberation struggle, the death of Che in Bolivia in 1967, and the war in Vietnam. "This period," they wrote, "forged our belief in the revolutionary necessity of clandestine organization and armed struggle."⁴

Note what is missing from that list. No European source appears on it, and the Americans needed no German to tell them to go underground. They had Fanon, Marcuse, Guevara and Debray in English, and a war on television.

The roads were never rivals, and the proof is in the underground's own manifesto. Prairie Fire, published in secret in 1974, calls for "a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society," and states that "we use all the weapons available to us," including "mass militant action and guerrilla action to lay the foundation for the decisive armed struggle."⁵ The same document tells radical teachers to work in schools in working class neighborhoods, health workers to choose hospitals in poor communities, and artists and writers to propagandize. Then it instructs that "community-controlled and counter-institutions should be made into insurgent bases."⁶

Teachers and nurses and artists were in one strategy with the bombs, and the word for the institutions they were to occupy was bases.