Mayday 2021

If Woodstock was the cultural peak of what we remember as The Sixties, then the political landing came two years later with a nationally if loosely organized “Spring Offensive” that culminated in “Mayday.”

Whether we stuck that landing or not is open to debate.

In the half-century that has passed since the largest and most prolonged demonstration against the Vietnam War, I have always paused a moment before answering a question my students, most all of them college freshmen, asked me in every class every semester for over 20 years:  Were you at Woodstock?

“Was I one of ‘half a million strong’?  No, but I was one of 14,000 arrested in DC during Mayday.”

“What was that?”

Well, they never asked if I was in Vietnam, and that lasted eleven years. Why feel slighted if a few weeks in DC are left out of the stories told by their parents and taught in their schools? Why should I flinch at questions about Woodstock, a word they pronounce in tones that verge on worship?

If it’s a matter of comparison, the golden age of rock-and-roll and the fascination of prog-rock slipped into glam and punk soon after Woodstock.  Soon after Mayday, America scaled back drastically from Vietnam and helicoptered off the tops of besieged buildings in 1974. Traffic jams we caused all over DC were messy, but so was the mud on Yazgur’s Farm.

Even though counter-cultural events in the Sixties may be as related as Honey Crisp and Granny Smith, comparisons are misleading. From Richie Havens’ persistent “Freedom” to Jimi Hendrix’s defiant “Oh say can you see,” the music of Woodstock was the soundtrack of Mayday, making it a chicken vs. egg question. For what it’s worth, consider what must have prompted Crosby, Stills, and Nash to sing:

What a field day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying the signs…

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According to Mayday 1971:  A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest, we did stick the landing. Both mess and success are carefully documented and colorfully detailed in a third-person, 342-page narrative surprisingly as fast-paced as an NCAA semi-final by career journalist Lawrence Roberts.

While his website includes ten of the book’s forty-plus photos, those who were there may want to scan to rest to find themselves sitting on a street, fleeing teargas, or peering out from the chain-linked fence that held us in a practice football field outside RFK Stadium.

Roberts has kept such a hawk-eye on his subject that, when I asked on social media which musicians played in West Potomac Park for the encampment of protesters on the weekend prior to the sit-ins, he sent me the entire card. Since I had never met nor corresponded with him, I have to guess he subscribes to a cyber-service that alerts him whenever the subject is broached. (If so: Hi, Larry!) As for the line-up, you will find it in his book–from the Beach Boys to Linda Ronstadt, from Charles Mingus to a hot DC band, Claude Jones, “named in honor of their sound technician, who actually didn’t play a note.”

Behind-the-scenes accounts will surprise those who were there and thought we knew just how it all happened.  The story of how Playboy magazine–as part of a settlement out of court–helped finance and organize Vietnam Veterans Against the War is worthy of a feature by an outlet to which Roberts is a frequent contributor, such as the Washington Post or ProPublica.

VVAW was in DC before May 3 when we started blocking traffic.  As the opening gambit in the Spring Offensive, they started gathering in Potomac Park on April 19. Days later, they sat in before the Selective Service Office and threw their medals and ribbons over the wall, and on the 23rd and 24th they testified before congress. As it unfolded, it was the revolutionary significance of the April 19 date that was most noted, but as soon as it was over and to this day it is best remembered for John Kerry’s haunting question: “How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

According to Roberts in a passage with recent echoes of its own:

Kerry’s words echoed through the ranks of the protesters, the office canyons of Washington, and the West Wing. That same afternoon, the White House made a futile attempt to draw attention away from the vets. Nixon held a ceremony for three Medal of Honor recipients who’d died in Vietnam protecting their comrades. The press largely ignored it. Kerry, in contrast, would get extended time on all three television networks that night. Excerpts of his speech would be reprinted in the Washington Post.

More than any other event, that hearing gained public support for the action of May 3 when we blocked intersections until we saw police coming, and then dispersed to other intersections and sat there. Sit, disperse, repeat, and repeat until caught, at which time we offered no resistance–as Roberts’ calls it, “a kind of hit-and-run civil disobedience.” He adds that the Nixon Administration had wildly underestimated the size of the protest as well as being unprepared for its “mobile tactics”:

Cops with cruisers, motorcycles, or scooters scrambled to the scene. [In one case] demonstrators dashed into the adjacent woods or across the highway… As the minutes ticked by, the police radio began crackling non-stop with reports from all over town. Several police cars broadcast emergency calls at the same time, talking over each other in rising anxiety…

From our viewpoint:

The tactical advantage underpinning the Mayday plan was now apparent, the asymmetrical warfare of a guerilla force against a standing army. It was nearly impossible to defend against small decentralized bands who could shift on a dime, tie up police or troops at one spot, and then get to another place before authorities could adjust, choosing spots that weren’t even on the original list in the Mayday tactical manual.

Of course, as Roberts points out, the police had that manual. And I had one as I moved from spot to spot dodging arrest with far more effort and exhilaration than I dodged the draft. Yes, we stuffed those maps in our pockets and trusted our eyes and instincts to find another target. While reading Roberts’ account I wondered, perhaps whimsically, if that manual could have padded the slight glance of one of those scooters on my knee. Wouldn’t have been enough to knock me down, but I was turning and so I lost my balance. When I looked up, I was already laughing when I saw the policeman’s hand extended to help me back up. Rather than arrest me, he apologized.

No doubt there were scenes where tempers flared, and Roberts reports a few “skirmishes.” Otherwise, Mayday 1971 squares with what I saw: Protesters there to get arrested, and police there to arrest, both knowing and respecting each others’ roles. Worth noting here that we saw mostly African-American police, including the one who offered me his hand, and thought them sympathetic, a far cry from what we faced in Chicago or Boston. While the cat-and-mouse chase may have been frantic, the arrests were efficient, verging on friendly. If anyone started to lose it, they were outnumbered by friends and allies who calmed them as they stepped all together into police wagons.

Compare that to January 6, 2021.

Timed to coincide with next month’s 50th anniversary, Mayday 1971 could not be more relevant.  It was barely on the shelves on a day that should have seen mass arrests but saw relatively few–despite the threatening and violent features we never considered in 1971: a gallows and a noose, bear-spray and excrement, fire extinguishers as projectiles, and flagpoles with Old Glory still on them as battering rams.

Then again, our plan was to get arrested, while the 1/6ers merely wanted to assassinate a few legislators and the vice-president, and to trash the Capitol while doing it.  So yes, in what passed for logic two-weeks before America’s four-year reality/horror show came to an end, we deserved far worse.

Mayday 1971 has also enjoyed the good fortune of appearing simultaneously with The Trial of the Chicago 7 with its six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.  The trial took place two years earlier, and as Roberts shows, was a springboard for the Mayday actions. Two of the defendants, Rennie Davis and David Dellinger, respectively the most pragmatic and most conscientious of the lot, were lead organizers of Mayday. Roberts offers biographical sketches of both to give us the complex motivations that led to the event and the strategy that outlined it.

Roberts’ own strategy, offering those and six other sketches of key players, makes Mayday read like a thriller even if we know the ending.  We are in the Oval Office with advisor Egil Krough, in the cruiser with DC Police Chief Jerry Wilson, on a midnight ride with Yippies Judy Gumbo and Stew Albert, undercover with Vietnam Vet John O’Connor, and in court with Public Defender Service Director Barbara Bowman.

Those are the lead characters in a narrative that engages us with the rapid give-and-take between protesters and police, of dueling interests among the protesters themselves, and of government officials at odds with each other behind closed doors. And they take their bows in an epilogue that satisfies us not just with aftermaths–such as Bowman joining Jimmy Carter’s Justice Dept. and promoting a federal judgeship for one Ruth Bader Ginsburg–but with credible cause/effect connections from Chicago to Kent State to Mayday, and inevitably to Watergate.

Most surprising is the last paragraph of the epilogue. No, I will not give it away. As I so often thought fifty years ago–and as I so often notice today–it is a paradox of politics that the best moments are remembered more in song than in books. Roberts’ final notes grace the long and long-overdue song that is Mayday 1971.

Fifty years ago, we stuck the landing. Fifty years later, may the memory of Mayday help us stick it again.

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