Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 25: All Power To My Sisters, 1970

Chapter 25: All Power To My Sisters, 1970

Increasingly, though, some Movement women were starting to question the political drift towards the use of militant tactics that would include destroying U.S. corporate and military property by anti-war bomb-planting. Political arguments started to be made by certain Movement women that it was not only left-adventurist to resist the war machine by planting bombs, but that it actually expressed an anti-feminist politics of macho for Movement people to either support or practice the use of revolutionary violence in the U.S.—even if Black Panther Party activists also justified its use in response to fascist repression.

In March 1970, Newsreel’s women’s caucus, under Andrea’s leadership and influenced by the example of the women’s takeover of the (now-defunct) Rat counter-cultural newsweekly, began to push for Movement women control of Newsreel. Because about two-thirds of Newsreel’s 40 to 50 New York City members were Movement women, the demand for radical feminist control of Newsreel could not be logically resisted on democratic grounds. As Movement women took control of Newsreel, those men who wished to remain in Newsreel were compelled to equally share organizational shitwork duties and child care duties with Newsreel women.

Newsreel men were also compelled to accept “personality criticism,” as well as political criticism from Newsreel women, at intense meetings, in order to rid their personalities and political practice of male chauvinist tendencies. Newsreel women were also required to submit to collective personality and political criticism in these emotionally-draining March 1970 criticism-self-criticism sessions. But criticism of Movement women was usually done in a less harsh and more supportive way than was the criticism of Movement men. Mass organizing and mass outreach work pretty much came to a standstill because Newsreel women felt that the organization’s top priority should be to eliminate all vestiges of male chauvinism within the organization, before resuming any mass outreach work.

Some of the criticism that Newsreel people leveled at each other was productive. But much of it seemed organizationally and emotionally self-destructive. Some Newsreel people began to feel emotionally closer or politically empowered because of the intensity and frankness of these criticism-self-criticism sessions. But many activists were trashed by other members of Newsreel, whom they were quite fond of previously, for petty reasons, in a politically destructive way.

Sometimes it seemed like the predominantly upper-middle-class white Movement women were using the predominantly upper-middle-class white Newsreel men as surrogates for their lovers in previous failed marriages or relationships or for male supremacist institutions in general; given the resentment and bitterness that came out in these demoralizing meetings. Many Newsreel people no longer seemed to trust each other or accept the weirdness or eccentricities of each other’s personality or style of doing political work. Movement men who were not attached romantically to Newsreel women were at a special disadvantage now within the organization; because they lacked a Newsreel woman to certify to other Newsreel women that they were “dealing with their male chauvinism” adequately.

Some Movement women who felt dissatisfied with the quality of their love relationships with Movement men attempted to solve some of their relationships’ sexual or emotional problems by criticizing their lovers at these formal Newsreel criticism-self-criticism sessions. One Newsreel woman criticized a Newsreel man in front of the rest of the collective for not letting her lie on top of him when they made love to each other. Newsreel men were requested by Newsreel women to take turns revealing the history of all their previous relationships with women to other Newsreel men, in order to collectively deepen their anti-sexist consciousness.

When I mentioned to my sister some of the ways in which Newsreel women were pressuring Newsreel men to “deal with their male chauvinism” and change their personalities, she was somewhat surprised and remarked that the process sounded somewhat “neurotic.” A Leviathan magazine article by Marge Piercy, titled “The Grand Coolie Damn,” was also influential in encouraging the Newsreel women to verbally trash white Movement men at the height of the Panther 21 trial and the war in Viet Nam.

I concluded that it was politically positive for Newsreel women to set the agenda for their Movement organization, given the depth of inter-personal and institutional sexism both within and outside the Movement. But I also concluded that it no longer made much political sense for me to work with Newsreel. Without a distribution network for its films, Newsreel really wasn’t able to make any mass political impact in the U.S. And until the demoralizing internal conflicts between Movement men and women were satisfactorily resolved, it appeared unlikely that any adequate mass distribution network for Newsreel films would ever develop.

Before leaving Newsreel, I attempted to get Florrie interested in me romantically, since I still was wild about her, despite my feeling that Newsreel wasn’t really making any political headway because of its internal and external political problems. But Florrie was not interested in getting any closer to me outside of a Movement work-situation. So when I finally managed to beat the draft near the end of March 1970, I dropped out of Newsreel.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 24: The Explosion At West 11th Street, 1970

Chapter 24: The Explosion At West 11th Street, 1970

Less than two weeks after I had moved into the E.6th St. apartment, I was staffing the Newsreel office on a weekday in early March 1970. Around 10:30 in the morning, I glanced at the New York Times front page and noticed an article about some kind of fire in the Village which had produced fatalities. As I read through the first few paragraphs, it began to sink in emotionally that Ted was now dead. [According to the book Family Circle by Susan Braudy:

“…In front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house’s crumpling brick Greek-revival façade. Since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, he had been posing as an architectural historian…”

A footnote in Braudy’s Family Circle book also noted that “another FBI agent, Larry Granthwol, would attempt to take credit for the explosion, claiming he had tampered with the bomb’s mechanisms.”]

I put the newspaper down on the Newsreel office desk, told another Newsreel activist that somebody I knew had died in this Village explosion and said I was going outside for a few minutes to get something to eat. On the street, I walked around the block in a daze, began to contemplate what the loss to the U.S. Movement of Ted meant, and cursed the imperialist and totalitarian U.S. society that had forced its most humanistic white youth to become urban guerrillas.

Over the next few days, Diana was identified as another dead victim of what was being defined by the media as a “townhouse bomb-making factory.” Cathy and Kathy were identified as two women who had fled nude from the post-explosion fire; and a third body was not identified. There was some newspaper speculation over the next few weeks that the third casualty was Mark. But it was eventually determined that Terry was the third casualty.

I had not met Diana personally before her death, but her life pattern had resembled the pattern of other Movement white women I had met: 1. born of great wealth; 2. unselfish missionary-type Peace Corps work in a Third World country; 3. identification with, and non-violent participation in, Civil Rights and Anti-War movement activity; 4. radicalization as a result of the Movement’s failure to end the Viet Nam War or prevent government repression of the Black Liberation Movement; 5. increased consciousness of the depth of female oppression in the U.S.; and 6. commitment to Weatherman-led armed struggle in the U.S. in order to materially aid the Vietnamese and stop the repression of the Black Panther Party by “bringing the war home.”

I had met Terry once at Mark’s W.110th St. apartment during the 1968-69 school year and I hadn’t been that impressed with him. He was an SDS regional organizer in Ohio, who had evidently done great political work, under adverse conditions, at Kent State University in the late 1960s. But he seemed more elitist, less warm and less interested in learning about the work other New Left activists were engaged in than most other Movement people I had met. Within the Weatherman organization, however, Terry had evidently blossomed into one of its most courageous, audacious activists and his militant fighting spirit and selfless commitment to making Revolution apparently had matched Ted and Diana’s commitments in intensity.

Life suddenly seemed more meaningless and empty, now that Ted was dead. At Columbia, neither Ted nor I had assumed that either of us would die at so early an age. At worst, we expected to be jailed, exiled, or just temporarily caught in life-threatening situations at an early age, as a result of either draft resistance activism or revolutionary political activism.

There was no funeral for Ted, Terry or Diana. Most non-Weather Movement people were afraid to put together any kind of funeral because it was felt that the event would be crawling with FBI agents; and because other Movement people were fearful of possibly being associated with support for Weather bomb-making plans if they were seen at such a funeral. After the Townhouse explosion at 18 West 11th Street, Weather activists in New York City appeared to totally vanish, so they couldn’t put together any Weatherman funeral for Ted, Terry and Diana. And Ted’s grief-stricken parents were too deeply shocked and embittered at the Movement to set up any public funeral for Ted. It was not publicly revealed whether Ted was cremated or buried.

In the evening of the day I read of Ted’s death, I telephoned my mother to assure her that I wasn’t involved in what Ted had been up to. But I told her that Ted had “lived the way he wanted to live” and “his life had been rich in deep experiences,” despite the tragedy of his early death. For the next few weeks, I would usually dream of Ted. It was hard to accept the reality that Ted was gone and would not see the Revolution that he had worked so hard for in the 1960s and that Movement people expected to be just around the corner.

Three days after Ted’s death, SNCC activists Ralph Featherstone and “Che” Payne were killed in Maryland when a bomb exploded in their car, near where the trial of SNCC leader H.Rap Brown (n/k/a Jamil Al-Amin and currently imprisoned in a Southern jail) was taking place. There was uncertainty about whether the deaths of Ralph Featherstone and “Che” Payne resulted from an FBI-engineered assassination or were accidental. Later in March 1970, also, some corporate offices in New York City skyscrapers were bombed by some anti-war activists. The 1970s seemed like it might be a “heavy” decade, in terms of the level of popular struggle against the U.S. corporate establishment.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (v)

Lala was also one of the women who participated in the women’s takeover of the underground newsweekly Rat around this time. Rat’s willingness to use hip pornographic images of the female body to increase its circulation and the relegating of its women staff members to shitwork roles angered Rat women and other radical feminists within the Movement. So led by Robin Morgan and Jane Alpert, the Rat office was taken over by women. The male Rat underground journalists were soon eased out of editorial positions. Over the next few months, Rat became a non-commercial voice of the early 1970s radical Women’s Liberation Movement.

At this time, Jane Alpert was out on bail after being charged with joining Sam Melville in some kind of bombing conspiracy. Sam had been locked up a few months earlier and charged by an agent-provocateur named “Crazy” George Demmerele, the head of the Lower East Side’s anti-war “Crazies” group, with plotting to bomb a National Guard armory truck. At first, Jane Alpert and Rat had indicated that the bombing conspiracy charge against Sam, Jane and two others was a frame-up. And when Jane Alpert spent an evening meeting with High School Student Union women in late January in my W.16th St. apartment, Movement people had still not been told by her that the bombing charges against her and Sam were not total fabrications. Nor did she hint that she was going to go underground prior to her trial.

Alpert had attended Columbia graduate school but had not been active in the Movement there. After the April 1968 student revolt, she became involved in the Strike Committee’s Community Action Committee that started the Columbia Tenants Union, which attempted to mobilize more community residents to actively resist Columbia’s gentrification policies. In the Community Action Committee, Alpert met Sam Melville and she soon moved down to the Lower East Side to live with him.

On the Lower East Side, Alpert began to write for Rat. Although I was impressed with the articles that Alpert was writing for Rat at this time and I felt that she must be doing politically effective work if the government wished to jail her, I found Alpert to be much colder and elitist in her personality than most other Movement women. There was something about the vibes she gave off that made me uneasy; and I thought it strange that she had not been involved in Columbia SDS before the ’68 revolt, despite her current level of political militancy. But I did not suspect her of being a potential Movement turncoat.

In February 1970 the Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial verdict and the contempt sentencing of Abbie, Dave Dellinger, Hayden, Kunstler and the others were announced. Large numbers of anti-war youth and white radical youth responded with militant street protest in New York City that included trashing and breaking of windows. Street tactics that had been considered adventurist when utilized by the Weathermen in October 1969 were now considered respectable by Movement people, after the guilty and contempt verdicts were decreed by Judge Hoffman’s Conspiracy Trial courtroom.

The night before “The Day After” demos around the United States to protest the Conspiracy Trial verdict, Howie and I did some spray painting, for a few minutes, on bank windows in Midtown Manhattan. We were stopped by a cop car and were warned not to get caught with a spray paint can again if we wished to avoid an arrest next time. The following afternoon I joined thousands of other anti-war militants outside 100 Centre St. When I bumped into a group of my old Richmond College Social Change Commune friends as the demo was gathering, I realized that the demo was going to be large.

The anti-war people were in a militant mood and we started to block traffic. Very quickly the cops started to charge into us with horses and clubs, forcing people to run towards the side streets. In the confusion, Florrie grabbed my hand for a few minutes, as we were pushed closer together by the threat of the approaching cops, since she wanted a comrade to clutch on to, in the middle of the police attack. Florrie and I managed to avoid being hit by any of the clubs and we got away. Once she had escaped, she let go of my hand and we were soon separated from each other, as more of the anti-war militants began to scatter in a confused way, some throwing rocks at store windows and cop cars, as we all ran.

In mid-February, Newsreel decided to open an office in Chicago and it was collectively agreed that Steve would move out there and help set it up. Once Steve had moved out of the W.16th St. apartment, I felt less interested in living there anymore. The apartment pretty much became defined by Howie’s scene. And although it was fun getting stoned with Howie and doing anti-capitalist things spontaneously (like unsuccessfully attempting to gatecrash into a rock concert at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East theatre one night), I felt I should move on when Steve moved on to Chicago. So in early March, I began to crash at an East 6th St. apartment which my sister was subletting from a Movement person who was visiting Cuba for a few months.

Prior to my move to the Lower East Side from Chelsea, I became briefly involved with an anti-war nursing student who lived in one of Columbia’s dormitories near Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. But, after a few weeks, I realized that I was too hung-up on Florrie to become more deeply involved with the anti-war nursing student.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (iv)

By working in the Newsreel office and hanging out around the Falks’ East 15th St. house in February 1970, a few weeks prior to a March 1970 Women’s Day march and a New Haven women’s demonstration in support of the imprisoned Black Panther Party activists, I was able to converse with both Bev and Lala at length.

Bev had grown up on the West Coast and been some sort of childhood performer. In the 1960s, she had married a musician with whom she developed a male chauvinist relationship, which included her getting battered by him on occasion. After moving East and rebelling against the oppressiveness of her marriage situation, she split from her husband and began working in the Movement in the late 1960s. In early 1970, she was in her late twenties and one of the politically strongest women in Newsreel’s Third World community outreach caucus and in Newsreel’s women’s caucus.

Bev was about average height, had long dark hair, always wore jeans and was very sweet, warm and good-natured—if she liked your politics. Like Lynn, she seemed both militantly idealistic and militantly anti-sexist in her politics, as well as revolutionary socialist. Unlike Lynn, Bev wasn’t a radical filmmaker, but was primarily an activist-organizer at this time.

In early 1970, Bev was also studying some karate in order to better protect the space around her from cops, rapists, and male chauvinists. One Sunday morning, I stopped by the Newsreel office to pick up some films for a screening and I noticed that Bev looked quite fierce in her karate suit, as she practiced punches and kicks on the big punching bag that had been set up for the self-defense class that was being held in the Newsreel loft. Bev’s fighting spirit and her affectionate nature appealed to me. In cold weather, she usually wore an army jacket.

Lala was as tall as Sara, but seemed physically and psychologically stronger and much less traditionally “feminine.” She had been a Go-Go dancer in D.C. and a “hippie-chick” who “balled” a number of men, while stoned on psychedelic drugs, in emotionally meaningless ways.

“I remember one night in D.C., when I was balling this guy while on acid, that it all became clear to me. Unless you’re able to be totally self-reliant and totally independent emotionally, you’ll never be free. I realized that I had to learn to live totally alone without getting lonely, in order to be both a revolutionary and free,” Lala advised me in the Falks’ house on East 15th St. one night.

In early 1970, Lala was working and living with Siegel. Siegel was closer to the New York Panthers on a personal level than the other Newsreel filmmakers and Lala seemed even closer to Weatherman in her political views than was Lynn. Lala was more militantly anti-racist than Lynn, but less willing to equate sexual oppression of women with what she felt was the more intense racial oppression experienced by African-Americans. Like Bev, Lala was also learning some karate.

Of all the Newsreel women, Lala seemed the most impatient to make the Revolution, the toughest and the one most willing to actually begin waging armed struggle, as soon as possible. She reminded me somewhat of Bernardine. In early 1970, Lala was writing articles for the underground newspaper Rat, under the pseudonym “One White Woman,” which stressed the idea that Movement people’s practice was more important than their rhetoric; and that U.S. radical women should prepare themselves to escalate the level of resistance to the U.S. war machine, in support of Vietnamese and Black Panther Party women activists.

Although by early February 1970 I had fallen madly in love with Florrie, I was also extremely fond of Lala and felt very close to her politically. Like Lala, I felt the need to resist hip capitalist rock cultural rip-off artists by having the Movement utilize non-commercial rock street bands at its various Hotel Diplomat fund-raising benefits. When Lala helped organize a late February 1970 “Free The Panther 21” benefit at the Hotel Diplomat, I referred her to a street band in which a musician from High School Student Union circles, named Reggie, was featured on lead guitar.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (iii)

Our high school organizing caucus’s attempt to recruit working-class high school students by leafleting and hanging out near Brooklyn high schools in January, February and March of 1970 also proved to be an impractical strategy. Florrie and I went out together late one weekday morning and, after handing out underground newspapers in front of a high school to students who were leaving the morning session, we spent an hour hanging out in a White Castle Hamburger restaurant. We weren’t able to recruit any high school students to the Movement, but we did end up feeling closer as a result of organizing unsuccessfully together.

Most of the white working-class high school students who hung out in White Castles were just interested in securing boyfriends or girlfriends, pot, ups, downs or acid and listening to rock music. Although they all hated high school and were anti-authoritarian, they could not see how revolutionary politics or books related to their desire for freedom and love. They were still too young to feel either affected by the draft, racism or the work-world.

It seemed utopian to have believed that small groups of post-college-age revolutionaries could recruit working-class high school students to the Revolution. Only revolutionaries who were also high school students seemed to have a chance to recruit their white working-class peers to the cause. White working-class high school students tended to view us as “outside agitators” because we weren’t inside their schools as either radical teacher-allies or high school student activists. It seemed that unless post-college-age Movement people were willing to march in front of public high schools by the hundreds in order to recruit high school students and, by their mass march example, prove that the Movement was more real than two or three “outside agitators” handing out flyers or hanging out in White Castles, white working-class high school students could not be recruited by us.

On another weekday, Sara and I took the subway early in the morning to New Utrecht High School to leaflet students who were entering the school for their first period class; and to hang out in Seymour’s Coffeehouse with students who began classes at 9 a.m. or at 9:45 a.m., who were also hanging out there. Again, we had negative results as far as recruiting high school students to the Movement. But—as had happened with Florrie—Sara and I felt closer as a result of our unsuccessful organizing together.

Sara had joined the high school organizing caucus in January 1970, a few weeks after I had attended my first meeting of the caucus. She was taller than me and had been more into modern dance than radical politics before 1970. After graduating from college a few years before, Sara had lived on a kibbutz in Israel/Palestine for awhile but had been turned off by the inter-personal selfishness and anti-Arab feeling she discovered on the kibbutz. She was in her early 20s and worked part-time as a secretary, in a job which she found deadening. I had first met her in my W.16th St. apartment, after she spent a night sleeping with Steve, who had been a boyfriend of hers for a brief period. Her friendship with Steve led her to become interested in joining Newsreel.

Compared to Lynn, Florrie, Andrea, Karen and most of the other Newsreel women, Sara was less politically aware and more traditionally feminine. Although she was very sweet, she was still more into wearing expensive chic dresses than most of the other Newsreel women (who generally all wore blue-jeans). Emotionally, though, Sara was much warmer and affectionate than the other Newsreel women. She was quicker to put her arm around you and hug you affectionately than the other Newsreel women, except for Florrie; for Florrie also found it easy to hug her comrades in a friendly way.

In early January 1970, Sara still lived alone in a bourgeois West Village apartment, where she spent a few hours each day practicing her dancing. By February, however, Sara had moved into a less bourgeois apartment in the East 30’s and seemed to be becoming a lot more politically sophisticated, as a result of being involved in Newsreel’s internal political discussion.

On at least two occasions, I was detained with Andrea and other members of the high school organizing caucus. Once, after meeting Richard, Andrea and Florrie in Andrea and Richard’s W.92nd St. apartment, all of us were picked up by cops who spotted us attempting to paste posters, which advertised a “Free The Panther 21” demo, on Upper West Side poles. The cops brought us into the local precinct house, held us for a half hour and then let us leave, after warning us not to do it again. Another time, Andrea, Jim and I were detained inside a Brooklyn high school by a cop for a half hour, after handing out underground newspapers in front of the school. We were released after the principal argued with us in his office and warned us not to return to the high school entrance again.

At this time, Andrea considered herself both a Maoist and a radical feminist, but not a feminist separatist. She seemed more committed to making a revolution and building the Movement than to any kind of literary careerism. She expressed no desire to become a professional writer within an imperialist and sexist society; and she appeared totally committed to the cause of white working-class liberation, as well as to women’s liberation and African-American liberation.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (ii)

In early January 1970, we held a high school organizing caucus meeting in Kramer’s Lower East Side apartment. Kramer—a talented documentary filmmaker—had attended Weatherman’s “War Council” in Flint, Michigan in late December 1969 as an observer; and he gave a summary of what he had observed. He noted how Bernardine had given a flamboyant critique of white oppressor nation “honky culture” that appeared to gloat over the Sharon Tate murder. From listening to Kramer’s description of the Flint, Michigan meeting, it seemed to me that the Weathermen were still serious about attempting to “bring the war home” and were preparing to wage armed struggle in support of the Black Panther Party. But I did not yet realize that the Weathermen were apparently contemplating the start of a bombing campaign analogous to what an activist from the Columbia Community Action Committee, Sam Melville, had been accused of doing in November 1969—and apparently were even considering the start of some even “heavier” kind of bombing campaign.

I only bumped into Weathermen on three different occasions around the time I worked with Newsreel. One afternoon, while visiting Frank out in Bayside, I bumped into Stu, who was crashing there. When I said “Hi, Stu” in the presence of a third friend who was visiting Frank, Stu looked irritated and motioned for me to go into another room in the apartment with him.

“I’m going by the name `Tom,’ now,” Stu said in a conspiratorial tone.

“Oh. I didn’t realize that,” I replied.

On another occasion, I happened to stop inside Columbia’s Ferris Booth Hall one evening and accidentally bumped into Josh and Linda, who were sitting together in the lounge of Ferris Booth Hall.

“Hi! I haven’t seen you for awhile,” I said with a smile. “How is it being in Weather?”

Josh replied in a scornful, sarcastic tone: “It’s a great, meaningful job…Why aren’t you in Weather?”

“I’m working with Newsreel now.”

Josh sneered. “With the cameras? What good does that do?”

“It helps raise the consciousness of white working-class youth.”

“White working-class people are hopelessly brainwashed and hopelessly racist, Bob,” Josh replied. “The only place to be now in the Movement is with Weather. And it’s a better option than hanging out in some sterile, plastic university like Columbia.”

Josh and Linda appeared in a hurry to leave. So we didn’t spend much more time talking before they left Ferris Booth Hall—after giving me a farewell look that seemed scornful and disapproving.

“Take care of yourself, Josh. Bye, Linda,” I called after them.

The final occasion when I bumped into the Weathermen around this time was at a meeting in the parents’ apartment of a high school student who attended Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn. The meeting occurred when the high school student’s parents were down in Florida on vacation. Steve and I—representing Newsreel—and Lew—representing the December 4th Panther Support Movement (which had been formed by some ex-Columbia SDS people after Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed)—were there to discuss ways Fort Hamilton High School student activists could support the “Free The Panther 21” campaign. Judy and another Weatherwoman also showed up with a woman high school activist recruit. Judy urged the students to run through the high school shouting “jailbreak”, no matter how few they were in numbers, instead of just handing out leaflets about the planned Panther support march to other students.

“There’s a war going on and you have to choose which side you’re on. It’s not enough to just leaflet. Leafleting is bull-shit. You’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. And if you’re too chicken-shit to do anything more than leaflet at your high school, then you’re part of the problem,” Judy argued in an emotional way.

Judy’s intensity and fanaticism appealed to me on an emotional level. But I felt that, despite her beauty and her bravery and her selfless devotion to the Movement, Judy’s strategic recommendation that the 10 activists in the high school immediately risk suspension, by running through the halls without having any mass base of students behind them, wasn’t practical at this time.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970

Chapter 23: With Andrea Eagan and Newsreel, 1970 (i)

After a brief interview in the Newsreel office in late December 1969, I became an official member of Newsreel and began to work with its high school organizing caucus. Other members of the caucus were Florrie, Karen of Newsreel, Steve, Sara, Mindy, Zarrow and three other activists from the Columbia SDS scene: Andrea, Richard and Jim. As a Newsreel member I also met Bev and Lala for the first time and attended collective meetings that included 1960s Movement “heavies” like Norm, Lynn, the Falks, Allen Young, Kramer, Siegel and Melvin.

Most of the activists in Newsreel were upper-middle-class artsy-bohemian whites in their mid-to-late 20s, who were from wealthy intellectual backgrounds. Newsreel offices were located in New York City and San Francisco and plans were being made to set-up or expand existing Newsreel offices in Chicago, Cambridge and Putney, Vermont. Over 80 films were being distributed from Newsreel’s New York City office and there were many requests for Newsreel films at this time from white and African-American student groups at campuses all around the country, from faculty at various educational institutions and from political, church and community groups in Latino and African-American communities.

What was good about Newsreel was that it would provide its films for free to activist groups that could not afford to pay any film rental costs but wished to use the revolutionary films as organizing tools. Better-financed, institutionally-affiliated individuals and groups, however, would be billed at the listed rental fee. Because Newsreel was willing to provide its films to activists for free and wasn’t into moneymaking, it was not a profit-making “alternative” Movement media venture, economically. But it did seem to have the potential in early 1970 to make a good impact on U.S. life politically. It had been formed less than 2 ½ years before, but its collection of films produced and its Movement reputation were already quite impressive. Politically, most Newsreel people were close to the Black Panther Party in their views and even less sectarian than Columbia SDS’s New Left faction had generally been.

Working with Newsreel in January, February and March 1970, I attended many internal political meetings, brought Newsreel films to be screened and led discussions at places like Richmond College, the High School of Music and Art, Mamaroneck High School, Cardozo High School, Erasmus High School and a special education high school in Westchester. I took my turn every few weeks staffing the Newsreel office for a day and, in March 1970, took a turn as office manager for a week.

As a member of the high school organizing caucus, I also handed out Rising Up Angry underground newspapers and “Free The Panther 21” Committee leaflets to students entering and exiting different high schools; and I spent a number of weekdays hanging out in White Castle Hamburger restaurants, across the street from city public schools. I also performed day care duties at the Falks’ townhouse on East 15th Street in Manhattan.

Like all the other Newsreel activists, I neither expected nor received pay for this kind of revolutionary organizing. But my low rent enabled me to survive by just working about 10 hours a week in the early evening, for two months, as a file clerk for pay, at American Express’s corporate offices, in a skyscraper on Broad Street. I got this early evening job through a temp agency and it provided me with enough money for food and my low rent.

By the time I started to work in an intense way with Newsreel, the main political issue within the organization was how to organizationally respond to the Newsreel women’s radical feminist criticisms of the way the organization functioned and the way the Newsreel men related to Newsreel women, politically and personally. At the first internal Newsreel high school organizing caucus meeting I attended (which was held in Mindy’s Lower East Side apartment), much of the discussion was devoted to criticizing Steve’s male chauvinism. He was criticized for describing Florrie as “pretty,” for putting his arm around Newsreel women in the Newsreel office and for relating to Mindy in a male chauvinist way when they did a film screening together. Movement men were also criticized by Florrie for still sometimes referring to women as “chicks” or as “girls.” Although there was also some talk about the best way to turn on high school students to the Movement, the main focus of the discussion was on combating male chauvinism within the Movement.

Mindy was not as physically beautiful or as personally warm as Florrie or Karen of Newsreel. And unlike Florrie or Karen of Newsreel, Mindy appeared to generally dislike men. But she seemed very intellectual and very politically conscious and the observations she made about male chauvinism among Movement men appeared to be valid. Florrie also impressed me for the first time at this meeting with her intellectual power and her political consciousness. Along with Andrea, Florrie appeared to be the dominant strategist within the high school organizing caucus. Clearly, Florrie was as capable of being a Movement political leader, and not just a Movement office worker, as any Movement man.

Andrea seemed even more intellectually self-confident and politically aware than she had been during the 1968-69 academic year as a Columbia SDS leader. Andrea was the daughter of a medical doctor; and she had been married to a brute of a first husband, following her graduation from Bennington in the early 1960s. After enrolling at Columbia, however, Andrea met Richard. But neither Andrea nor Richard had been active in the Movement while at Columbia until the April 1968 revolt, during which they were married inside Fayerweather Hall when it was still occupied.

Initially, like nearly everyone else who had been active in Columbia SDS during the 1968-69 school year, Andrea and Richard identified with the Weatherman faction. But by Fall 1969, Andrea and Richard felt the Weathermen were off-the-wall and so, instead, they became active in something called the “Mad Dog Caucus.” When the “Mad Dog Caucus” (which was a sect that was militantly anti-imperialist, but not as militant as the Weathermen) broke up in late November 1969, Andrea and Richard drifted into Newsreel.

Karen of Newsreel seemed as politically dedicated, personally sweet and as unselfish personally as she had seemed when I first met her at Richmond College. But she appeared content to let Florrie and Andrea exercise strategic and intellectual leadership within the high school organizing caucus.

Despite all the internal conflict around the struggle against male chauvinism, I, initially, felt we would be able to turn on high school students to the Movement, once we began leafleting and hanging out around the white working-class high schools we were going to focus our organizing on.