Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971

Radical Society, Dec 2002 by Kauffman, L A

MAYDAY. The largest and most audacious civil disobedience action in American history is also the least remembered, a protest that has slipped into almost complete historical obscurity. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but it wasn't part of the storied Sixties, having taken place in 1971, a year of nationwide but largely unchronicled ferment. To many, "the Movement" had ended in violence and infighting two years earlier, in 1969. That year, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the totemic organization of the New Left, had disintegrated into dogmatic and squabbling factions, one of which-Weatherman-took up street-fighting and bombings to pursue its chimerical program of revolutionary change.

Early in May 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.-from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service Agency, Justice Department, and other government agencies-upwards of 25,000 young radicals set out to do something brash and extraordinary: shut down the federal government through nonviolent direct action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: "If the government won't stop the war, we'll stop the government." An elaborate tactical manual, distributed in advance, detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, jury-rigged barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was "to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people."1

Opinions vary as to whether the action was successful. Most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they got into position: thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the government knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. The intended tactics had been highly controversial, and the mainstream media lost no time in calling it a rout. As Mary McGrory wrote in the Boston Globe, "It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed." Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who originally conceived the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed.2

But the government's victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of extreme measures. A force of more than 14,000 police and National Guardsmen was mobilized to remove the radicals from the streets, and a staggering 13,500 people were placed under arrest. (Many of these were uninvolved bystanders: as one protester noted, "[A]nyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street.") Nominally, the government still functioned-but only as a result of the largest sweep-arrests in U.S. history, which turned the workaday bustle of the district's streets into "qualified martial law."3

The Mayday civil disobedience, moreover, was larger than any action organized by Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, more protesters were arrested on the first day of the action than in any other single event in U.S. history. According to one of the few historians to have studied the event, Mayday so unnerved the Nixon administration that it palpably speeded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. White House aide Jeb Magruder said that the protest had "shaken" Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday "a very damaging kind of event," noting that it was "one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war."4

Yet Mayday has no place in our collective memory, thanks in part to the pop culture habit of shoe-horning protest history into "the Sixties." This nonviolent radical action, moreover, doesn't fit into the classic narrative of the New Left's rise and fall, a story in which noble democratic ideals degenerate into bitterness and violence; large movement organizations are painstakingly built and then collapse; and revolutionary phantasms overtake a radicalism based on homegrown traditions of dissent.

Mayday 1971 deserves rediscovery, for it occupies a pivotal place in American radical history. It was organized differently from any protest before it, in ways that have influenced the form of most major protests since. This flawed and daring action marks the birth of the style of radicalism that vaulted onto the world stage at the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the forgotten segue between the activism of the New Left and the decentralized direct action movements of today.

Mayday took place a year after the Nixon administration invaded Cambodia, an escalation of the Vietnam War that had provoked angry walkouts on more than a hundred college and university campuses. At one of these, Kent State, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four and wounding nine; ten days later, two students were killed and twelve wounded at nearby Jackson State. The deaths sparked strikes at hundreds more campuses and inspired thousands who had never protested before to take to the streets. By the end of May 1970, it's estimated that half the country's student population-perhaps several million youth-took part in antiwar activities, which "seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent."5 While most of these demonstrators did not become anything like committed, full-time activists, so many people were radicalized during the spring 1970 uprising that the antiwar movement suddenly swelled with a new wave of organizers spread all throughout the country, in places that had seen relatively little activism before then.