Word: underground
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...protesters and triggered a student strike that paralyzed the campus for a month. He later took part in the "days of rage" demonstration in Chicago, in which several hundred radicals went on a four-day rampage. Then, rather than answer criminal charges stemming from both episodes, Mark Rudd went underground. For seven years his face peered stonily from WANTED posters across the country. A special squad of FBI agents-up to 35 at one point-shadowed his friends, tapped their phones and examined their mail in a fruitless hunt for Rudd and other fugitive firebrands...
Some veteran leftists of the 1960s regarded Rudd's reappearance as an isolated event. Others thought it signaled the collapse of the radical underground-estimates of its members range from 40 to 200-which has shielded more than a dozen fugitives for several years...
Indeed, Rudd's band, known as the Weather Underground Organization,* has not claimed responsibility for any revolutionary activity since the bombing of a New York bank in 1975. The group, moreover, has been racked by bitter quarrels over whether the fugitives should try to change U.S. society from above ground. The dispute came sharply to a head last year, after five of the radicals-Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, Cathy Wilkerson, Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones-outraged their colleagues by willingly appearing in Director Emile de Antonio's film Underground. Dohrn later had second thoughts. Said...
During the '50s, the C.P. went underground, forced to retreat in the face of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is hard, now, to understand the kind of fear that the committee inspired; Mitford describes the terror of the blacklist, and the sense that the FBI followed suspected party members everywhere. It has all been told before, of course, but rarely from such an honest, individual stance. Mitford has a way of engaging--and holding--the reader's sympathy, and the HUAC loses any legitimacy it might have held in the face of her good-humored description...
...departure from the party, which was prompted by the 1958 revelations about Stalin's purges, because she does not want to undermine the validity of the years she spent with the C.P. By 1958, she says simply she felt the party had become stagnant through having been forced underground; more effective work for the cause could be done through outside radical movements. She and her husband, a radical labor lawyer, had no regrets about the time they spent with the party--in a way, she writes, "the Party experience proved to have been a kind of adult Project Head Start...