Memories of Mayday

Bill Knight column for 5-2, 3 or 4, 2019

Upon hearing I’d donated the complete run of a weekly newspaper I put out in the 1970s and ’80s to a university archive, an old friend shook his head and asked, “When did our past become other people’s history?”

Our pasts can fade, as memories become muddled on details and significance, so it was a good to read a historian’s take on something I participated in, clarifying and confirming the experience.

Forty-eight years ago this week, about a dozen of us from downstate Illinois piled into a station wagon and a VW bug to make a 12-hour drive to Washington to take part in Mayday, an overlooked event recounted in L.A. Kauffman’s 256-page paperback “Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism” (Verso Books).

A series of large-scale demonstrations May 1-3, 1971, it was led by Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago Conspiracy defendants, and a group that named it Mayday in connection with International Labor Day and the word’s usage as an emergency signal.

Arguably the largest, maybe boldest, direct-action protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was more than another march, having followed a “spring offensive” of demonstrations for days in April, led by the inspiring Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

Occurring a year after the invasion of Vietnam neighbor Cambodia ordered by President Nixon (who’d campaigned on ending the war but actually escalated the conflict) and shootings of anti-war demonstrators at Kent State and Jackson State universities, Mayday sought to shut down the federal government, and about 25,000 demonstrators descended on the Capitol to nonviolently try.

Organizers suggested streets, bridges and building entrances to block, and some were disrupted, but Washington Police Chief Jerry Wilson revoked Mayday’s park permit because of a “wide use of drugs,” and mass arrests ensued: 7,000 were swiftly rounded up by 10,000 baton-wielding police in riot gear, plus Marine MPs, soldiers with rifles, and National Guard troops, with 4,000 troops supposedly on reserve nearby.

As long as the drive East was, it was a longer day for 20 of us jailed in a two-person holding cell at a neighborhood police station for 13 hours, forced to stand since there was no way to sit, with no water or food and one toilet. Thousands of others were “luckier,” transported by city buses or trucks to RFK Memorial Stadium, where there were no blankets or restrooms. Author Benjamin Spock was one of them and commented, “Calling this a concentration camp would be a very appropriate description.”

Another 6,000 were arrested over the next few days, when Vietnam veterans tossed their medals over barricades at the Justice Department and other government buildings.

After being released, we realized that standing anywhere meant likely arrest, so we kept moving, from the Washington Monument to the White House. As Kauffman reports, Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist (later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) conceded it was “qualified martial law.”

Mayday was the last major demonstration against the Vietnam War, apart from 1972’s GOP and Democratic national conventions in Miami (another personal story yet to be shared), but it was the first time I’d been tear-gassed. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to Washington for an anti-war protest, but it was the last. (My next visit 12 years later was on a newspaper assignment, which led to a year-long job on a weekly paper there.)

The charges were dismissed, the American Civil Liberties Union sued and eventually settled, and somewhere I have a booking slip and photocopy of my share of the disposition: a $10 check.

But I’ve wondered: Was it worth it? Some traffic was interrupted, and the government may have felt under siege, but it stayed open. Life went on – as did death. The Vietnam War continued for four years and another 3,305 U.S. casualties out of an eventual total of 58,220, according to National Archives records (plus other countries’ troops and civilians).

Kauffman thinks so. She writes, “White House aide Jeb Magruder later noted that the protest had ‘shaken’ Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday ‘a very damaging kind of event,’ noting that it was ‘one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war’.”

The war had become unpopular and Mayday further eroded public support. A vivid memory is, while jailed, benefiting from a few sympathetic police officers letting supporters from the neighborhood pass  lunchmeat sandwiches through the bars.

Helms later added, “It was obviously viewed by everybody in the administration – with all the arrests and howling about civil rights and human rights and all the rest – as a very damaging event. I don’t think there was any doubt about that.”

Good.