Chapter 2: Days of Rage

June 9, 2022·51 min·4 clips

Bernadine Dohrn declares war on the U.S. government, leading the Weather Underground into the Days of Rage protests.

The episode opens with a recap of the previous chapter, establishing that Bernadine Dorn split Students for a Democratic Society and called for militant action. The narrator, the daughter of Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers, introduces her father — who was lower profile than her mother during her childhood, known mainly as a teacher and professor. His 2001 memoir Fugitive Days was published on September 11, 2001 with a New York Times headline about having no regrets for setting bombs. This timing made him a recurring target on Fox News and then in the 2008 presidential race, when both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin attacked Barack Obama over his association with Ayers. The episode then steps back to Bill Ayers's origin story: a 1965 arrest for anti-war protesting at age 20, followed immediately by a visit to a civil rights freedom school where he ended up covered in green paint and committed to teaching. He dropped out of college to teach full-time. He met Diana Oughton, a Quaker-connected activist and teacher, and they became colleagues and eventually lovers. Their close friend Terry Robbins was more intense and ideologically extreme. By 1968, all three had abandoned the school they'd helped build to become full-time SDS organizers. The episode describes how the Weathermen prepared for the Days of Rage: early morning karate practice, reading The Wretched of the Earth and guerrilla warfare manuals, watching films like Battle of Algiers and Bonnie and Clyde, and experimenting with sexual 'smashing monogamy' as a form of collective bonding. Group self-criticism sessions drawn from Maoist practice became a tool for psychological conformity — members were subjected to extended group interrogation until they broke down. Bill Ayers was targeted for reading a Brecht poem to a woman on a date. Terry Robbins then proposed the first bombing: the Haymarket Square police monument in Chicago, using a device assembled from the DuPont Blaster's Handbook. On October 6, 1969, two nights before the planned protest, the bomb blew the statue off its pedestal. The Days of Rage itself drew only a few hundred participants instead of thousands. Armed with sticks, chains, and rocks — some wearing football pads for protection — the group ran through Chicago's near north side smashing windows and clashing with police. By the end of the week, nearly everyone was in jail, including Diana Oughton and Bernadine Dorn. Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers publicly condemned the action. The Weathermen began making plans to go underground. Bill Ayers had a difficult final dinner with his father, who begged him not to take the next step. A year later, the Haymarket statue was blown up again with a larger bomb, and the Weathermen began targeting objects beyond monuments.

As heard by us

A tense account of protest hardening into militant action.

Days of Rage follows the Weathermen as they drift from protest into militant preparation in Chicago, with Bernadine Dorn helping drive that turn.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the moment a political movement starts acting like a storm.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Mother Country Radicals