…the effectiveness of the modern soldier is due more to equipment and training than to individual strength. Women are physically as able as men to perform many jobs classified as combat duty, such as piloting an airplane or engaging in naval operations…. There is no reason to assume that in a dangerous situation women will not be as serious and well-disciplined as men.
It is doubtful that many housewives wanted to become machine gunners or BAR men, or identified with Elizabeth P. Hoisington, director of the Women’s Army Corps, who became America’s first female general in June 1970. Nevertheless, millions of American women—especially younger women—had been changed by the movement. There was a new spunkiness about them, a plucky defiance toward those who would manipulate them for selfish ends, and this was illustrated by the disaster which befell the new fashion known to readers of Women’s Wear Daily as the longuette and to the rest of the country as the midi. Nearly a quarter-century earlier independent women had tried to lead a revolt against the long-skirted New Look, signing manifestos, forming LBK (Little Below the Knee) clubs, and demonstrating against the couturiers.1 They had been routed then. Now the modistes were again turning out longer skirts. James Galanos said, “Long is where the direction is,” Adele Simpson said, “It’s good-bye thigh,” and Leo Narducci said, “Women are definitely ready for a fashion change.” All were confident that the female herd would grovel and buy their wares.
The first mutinous mutters came from Los Angeles, where one Juli Hutner, president of something called POOFF (Preservation of Our Femininity and Finances), told a reporter: “We’re not going to let them pull the wool over our legs as well as our eyes. I know women who’d wear a tin box if Galanos said it was in. I think that’s sick. All we ask is a choice.” KEEP THE MINI ON THE MARKET and LEGS! LEGS! LEGS! said the placards carried by demonstrating members of Girls Against More Skirt (GAMS). Some of them suggested that the midi was a plot against Women’s Lib, that the designers were trying to isolate the feminists by bringing femininity back; others blamed older matrons whose legs weren’t sexy any more and who wanted to make nubile girls hide theirs. Gilman Ostrander, a social historian, said the falling stock market was responsible for the midi, and that it was bound to prevail: “The middle-aged, who like long skirts, determine social standards in times of depression or recession. And young people, who like short skirts, determine standards in times of prosperity.”
By winter the stock market had gone up, however, and the fashion industry’s enthusiasm for the midi had plunged. A New York Times survey found that while a few shop owners gallantly professed faith in the longer look (“It’s here! Everybody’s accepting and loving and buying it!”), most conceded that it had failed wretchedly: “Stores that last fall said they bought lots of midis are now saying they didn’t really. What they did buy didn’t sell very well. And women’s knees are not yet obsolete.” To be sure, more skirts covered the knee. But the dress designers had insisted that the midi was a specific length, measuring 44 to 45 inches from shoulder to hem, which put it at mid-calf for most women. The Times found that only 20 percent of dresses sold at that length, and at the end of the year just 5 percent of the women were wearing them. The other frocks had been returned for shortening or left in the closet.
Bitter retailers said the style had “bombed,” or “laid an egg”; one said it “certainly did fashion a disservice and didn’t take as a look,” and another told a newswoman, “Our customers didn’t want it…. We were never really able to sell it.” The massive attempt to push the calf-length hem did trigger an unintended sartorial shift, however. “The midi,” said the Times, “virtually killed the dress… suddenly there were kickers, gauchos, and pants, pants, pants.” Older women bought pantsuits, and their daughters kept their bare knees by donning very short shorts. Bergdorf Goodman called the shorts “cool pants.” Women’s Wear Daily, closer to the mood of the new women, gave them the name that stuck: hotpants.
***
The streak of violence which had blighted Johnson’s administration continued under Nixon, growing, if anything, more lurid. The great metropolitan ghettos continued to be relatively quiet, but the assassin and the pyromaniac now moved with murderous stealth in the black neighborhoods of smaller cities. Six Negroes were shot to death in Augusta, Georgia. A boy was stabbed in an Oklahoma City racial incident. A church which had been used for civil rights meetings in Carthage, Mississippi, was bombed. And there were riots in East Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Highland Park, Michigan; Michigan City, Indiana; New Bedford, Massachusetts; Asbury Park, New Jersey; South Melbourne, Florida; Aliquippa, Pennsylvania; Oxford, North Carolina; Hot Springs, Arkansas; River Rouge, Michigan; Cairo, Illinois; and three Georgia communities: Perry, Macon, and Athens.
In New York bomb threats were running at a thousand a month. Over a fifteen-month period 368 of the devices had actually exploded in the city, one of them in a second-floor men’s room at police headquarters, and Commissioner Howard Leary told a U.S. Senate subcommittee that he could not guarantee the safety of visitors to precinct stations. At times it seemed as though an open season had been declared on American policemen. In 1970 the FBI reported 35,202 assaults on them, almost quadruple the number in 1960, and fifteen officers were killed, most of them by ambushers, in nine months of the year.
The Little Rock police chief said attacks on cops had become “practically a daily occurrence…. It seemed everyone from school age on up is assaulting police officers.” Commissioner Frank L. Rizzo of Philadelphia said, “We are dealing with a group of fanatics—psychopaths,” and the director of public safety in Omaha suggested that “the problem being experienced by police departments throughout the nation gives all indications that there is a conspiracy. The timing gives another indication. We are piecing together all the information available and we hope to prove a conspiracy.” He didn’t do it, and most law enforcement officials thought it wasn’t possible—“We look upon the assaults as separate and independent incidents,” Leary said—but there was general agreement that at a time when authority was under widespread attack, cops were inevitable targets. As Quinn Tamm of the International Association of Chiefs of Police put it: “Attacks on police are becoming more and more violent as radical groups exhort their members to ‘kill the pigs’…. That blue uniform makes the wearer a highly visible representative of the establishment.”
Hostility to the established order was responsible for the bombings. In some instances the bombers boasted about it. After blasts tore into the Manhattan offices of International Business Machines, the General Telephone and Electronics Corporation, and Mobil Oil, a group called Revolutionary Force 9 took credit for them, declaring that the firms were profiteering in Vietnam. In other cases the terrorists, not being skilled in the use of explosives, blew themselves up. Within a month of the IBM, General Telephone, and Mobil eruptions one revolutionist was killed and another gravely injured when their bomb factory fulminated in a tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. In Baltimore two black militants, protégés of H. Rap Brown, died after one of their bombs detonated prematurely in their automobile. And on March 6 Greenwich Village was rocked by the most sensational bomb disaster of 1970, killing three young nihilists and involving the names of several wealthy families.
Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson was a recent graduate of Swarthmore; Diana Oughton and Kathy Boudin were Bryn Mawr alumnae; all three were Weatherwomen. Diana was the daughter of an ultraconservative, highly respectable Illinois multimillionaire whose extraordinary family estate had been visited by King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, a century earlier. Kathy was the niece of I. F. Stone. Her father, Leonard B. Boudin, was a famous lawyer whose clients included Paul Robeson, Judith Coplon, and Julian Bond; later he would defend Daniel Ellsberg. Cathlyn’s father owned a chain of radio stations. He and his second wife were on holiday in the Caribbean that month. In his absence Cathlyn was entertaining Diana and Kathy, Ted Gold, who had been active in Columbia’s SDS chapter, and another young man—whose identity w
as to remain a mystery—in the elegant $100,000 Wilkerson town house at 18 West Eleventh Street in Manhattan.
At noon on the day of the catastrophe the sky was clear and sunny over New York, with just a suggestion of approaching spring in the air. No one was in the house next door, which belonged to Dustin Hoffman, the actor, and number 18 appeared to be quiet. Inside, however, the young revolutionaries were busy. Two current Weatherman slogans were “If you don’t believe in guns and violence, then you aren’t a revolutionary” and “Bring the war home.” On Monday one of the boys, dressed as a priest, had driven to New Hampshire to buy two cases of dynamite. Now fifty-seven sticks of TNT were strewn about in a makeshift basement workshop, together with friction tape, roofing nails, clockwork timing mechanisms, doorbell wire, thirty blasting tapes, and lengths of plumbing pipe meant to contain the charges.
Probably no one will ever know exactly what went wrong, but somebody bungled and set the lot off. It may have been Diana; her body was the most mutilated—the head, both hands and a foot were blown off, and the torso was riddled with roofing nails. Gold and the unidentified youth were also dead. The first explosion ripped through the living room wall of Hoffman’s house, shattered windows across the street, and rocked a kitchen sixteen doors away. Then the gas mains ignited, touching off two more blasts, and the floors started to collapse.
Inside, stunned and bleeding, were Cathlyn and Kathy, one of them naked and the other partially dressed. Two policemen and a retired fireman—“the girls,” John Neary wryly noted in Life, “would have called them ‘pigs’”—came to their rescue, and a neighbor gave them the use of her shower and loaned them clothing. Then they disappeared. At first firemen thought leaking gas was responsible for the disaster. Then they found the dynamite, the blasting caps, and stacks of SDS pamphlets. Suddenly they wanted to question the survivors. New York authorities learned that Kathy and Cathlyn were out on bail after indictment in Chicago for participating in the Weathermen’s Days of Rage the previous October. When they failed to appear there for trial March 16 the FBI joined the hunt. Their families said the girls had sent word that they were alive but gave no details.
On the other side of the country a weird blend of radical politics and witchcraft was blamed for the worst mass murder in California since the Manson killings. Sheriff’s deputies on a routine patrol saw flames in the $250,000 home of Dr. Victor Ohta, an eye surgeon, overlooking Monterey Bay. They called firemen, who went to the Ohta swimming pool in search of water and there found the bodies of the surgeon, his wife, their two sons, and the doctor’s secretary. All had been tied up with gaudy scarves and shot in the back of the head. Police found a scribbled message under the windshield wiper of the surgeon’s car: “From this day forward anyone… who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death…. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anything or anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop.” The signature was taken from tarot cards: “Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, Knight of Swords.” The signer, found living in a ramshackle hut a half-mile away, was a bearded youth named John F. Frazier. Frazier’s lawyer said that his client had hurt his head in a car accident and had then “changed radically.”
***
That year’s most famous black advocate of revolutionary action in California was a dusky twenty-six-year-old beauty, Angela Davis. A daughter of the black middle class, she had been a Birmingham Girl Scout, apparently contented with society until four of her Negro girlfriends were killed in the September 1963 bombing of a church there. At Brandeis University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, she became an enthusiastic reader of Marx and Herbert Marcuse, and after graduate work at the Sorbonne and in Germany she became Marcuse’s student on the San Diego campus of the University of California. There she joined the Black Panthers and the Communist Party. In one speech she told undergraduates that “the government has to be overthrown”; in another she said that “revolution must be tied to dealing with specific problems now, not a lot of rhetoric about revolution, but real, fundamental problems.” She participated in the storming of a campus building in San Diego and was arrested for refusing to leave a police station.
As an assistant professor on the university’s Los Angeles campus she was teaching philosophy when, in April 1970, Governor Reagan’s Board of Regents voted to fire her, citing a board resolution barring Communists from the faculty. Since both the California and U.S. Supreme Courts had held that Communist membership was insufficient reason to disqualify a professor from teaching in a state university, the board changed the grounds for dismissal to incompetence. A majority of students and UCLA faculty members took Angela’s side. Her fellow professors adopted a resolution expressing “our shock, our dismay, our rage” at her removal. They voted to defy the regents by keeping her on the faculty, and the issue was unresolved when a new development put her case in an entirely different light.
As a black militant, Angela had been among those who were agitating for the release of the “Soledad Brothers”—three Negro prisoners, not actually related to one another, who had been charged with killing a white guard at Soledad Prison on January 16. The most interesting of the three was George Jackson, twenty-seven, who was serving five years to life for a 1961 filling station robbery. As the author of Soledad Brother, a collection of his prison letters, Jackson would become one of the most famous convicts in the country that fall. Some of the most moving notes in the book were written to Angela, who had first seen him during a hearing in a Salinas courtroom that May. In her own letters to him, and in a diary, she declared that she had “spontaneously” fallen in love with him. She called herself his “lifelong wife” and said she would dedicate her life to freeing him. She added that she didn’t care what means she used, a passage which aroused much subsequent interest.
In the first week of August Angela was seen frequently in the company of Jonathan Jackson, George’s seventeen-year-old brother. Three guns she owned found their way into Jonathan’s possession; so did a twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun she bought on August 5. That was a Wednesday. On Thursday she and Jonathan were driving around in a small, bright yellow enclosed Ford panel truck he had rented the day before. On Friday the van was parked in a lot outside the San Rafael courthouse, thirteen miles northwest of San Francisco. Minutes later Jonathan, slim and intense, entered a courtroom wearing a raincoat and carrying a small bag.
On the stand at the time was Ruchell Magee, a San Quentin convict who was testifying in the case of James McLain, a fellow prisoner accused of stabbing a guard. Another black inmate, William Christmas, was waiting to be called. Magee, McLain, and Christmas were powerfully built young men, and McLain, who was sitting at the counsel’s table, was known at San Quentin as a firebrand, an agitator, and a Panther. Superior Court Judge Harold J. Haley was on the bench. The deputy district attorney was Gary W. Thomas, who was married to the judge’s niece. There was a jury, but young Jackson was the only spectator. It was a boring case.
It became much livelier when Jonathan unzipped his bag, drew out one of Angela’s revolvers, and slipped a 30-caliber carbine from under his raincoat. “This is it!” he yelled. “I’ve got an automatic weapon. Everybody freeze!” He ordered the unarmed bailiffs to unlock the handcuffs on McLain, Magee, and Christmas, and handed each of the three unshackled convicts a weapon. He gave the shotgun to McLain, who taped it around the judge’s neck so that the muzzle hung a few inches from Haley’s chin. The other prisoners tied Thomas and three women jurors together with piano wire. McLain commanded the judge to call the sheriff’s office and direct him to give the inmates safe passage out. “I am in the courtroom,” Haley said into the telephone on the bench. “There are a number of armed convicts here.” McLain grabbed the phone and shouted into it, “You’re going to call off your pig dogs. We’re going to get out of here. Call them off!”
Herding the hostages bef
ore them, the blacks paused before the press room, fifty feet down the hall, but the door was locked. As they continued down the corridor McLain called, “We want the Soledad Brothers released by twelve-thirty today!” In the parking lot they shoved the five hostages into the Ford van. McLain slid behind the wheel; Jonathan gave him the keys; Magee took over the guarding of the judge, and they headed for U.S. 101, about two hundred yards away. Watching them were some hundred law enforcement officers, crouched behind other vehicles and the building. Suddenly a San Quentin guard darted in front of the panel truck and yelled, “Halt!”
The next minute was madness, with gunfire pouring into the panel truck and out from it. At one point the shotgun roared in the back of the van. That was the end for the judge; his jaw and part of his face were blown off. Thomas had a bullet in his spine; he would be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. One of the jurors was wounded in the arm. Magee had been shot in the chest but was still alive. McLain, Christmas, and Jonathan Jackson were dead.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 180
