Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971
Jul 26 2007 22:08
Two years after SDS committed suicide, a year after the Kent/Jackson State shootings, one of the largest mass direct actions in US history. "If the Government won't stop the war, we'll stop the Government"
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4053/is_200212/ai_n9149052/print
Quote:
Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971
L A KauffmanMAYDAY. 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
Jul 26 2007 23:04
#2
The action, like most such, wasn't a "sucess", but it seemingly scared the crap out of Nixon and company. I'm speculating that they were probably nervous, among other things, about the remote possiblity mayday tribe or groups like them would hook up with rebel postal workers and truckers, who had national wildcats the previous year.
Thanks whoever fixed my screwup! 
libcom mods rock! 
Jul 27 2007 06:20
#3
I was at the Washington march. Kinnda funny actually. I traveled to DC with a local family. The parents were CP. My parents were freakin out that I was going with that family. I just turned 16. Wow....i think it was actually my first DC demo come to think of it.
I thought the Yippies! were rigt-on. The old left and the new old left were pretty stiff and the who knew anything about leftist intrgue at that stage in my life. As high-school anti-war "activists" we were teen-age kids with eclectic politics. I probably was the only anarchist.....well,maybe we were all cultural anarchists of sorts at that stage. It was probably a year or two later that I consciously knew what an anarcho-syndicalist was....and here we are all these years later.
Anyway... as the then popular song by the Jefferson Airplane goes: "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America..."
Jul 27 2007 16:10
#4
Speaking of Jefferson Airplae, I wonder who played the free concert mayday tribe organized? Interesting that around half the crowd left town after the gig, some things never change it seems
Jul 28 2007 04:24
#5
syndicalist wrote:
t.....well,maybe we were all cultural anarchists of sorts at that stage.
Anyway... as the then popular song by the Jefferson Airplane goes: "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America..."
Indeed! all this sixties history got me feeling nostalgic.
In case anyone's curious what it was like growing up white, "weird" and southern in the mid to late '60's, I just found this:
"“Lambda Sigma Delta - We love you!”
undated memoirs of a group of high school students in rural Tift County, Ga.
I'd say 1967 or 68 as an educated quess.
http://thestripproject.com/lambdas.html
My crew in the Atlanta suburbs was considerably more political, we had access to the underground press and local sds contacts, but we went through some of the same minor struggles.
I love this article, what a gem. There's another one from '71 in Ramparts magazine ("anatomy of a movement"?) that took a very critical, in depth look at the whole undertaking (the good and the not-so-pretty).