Media remembrances earlier this month marked Amtrak’s 40th
birthday, having hatched on May 1, 1971, naturally losing endless
federal dollars ever since. Almost unremarked but more interesting
was the 40th anniversary of the huge May Day anti-war protests in
Washington, D.C. Over 200,000 yippies and hippies strove to shut
down the federal government, and its war machine, by blocking key
bridges and intersections. President Nixon ordered that government
workers still report to work, even while he found refuge at his San
Clemente home on the Pacific.
The May Day 1971 protests mark some of my earliest
memories. I had just turned age 6! We lived in nearby Arlington,
Virginia. And my mother always enjoyed political theater. So she
drove my 2-year-old brother and me into the city to watch the
protests. We were joined by my equally adventurous grandmother, who
took the day off from her Navy Department job to “protect” us. My
father, an Arlington policeman, was stationed near Key Bridge to
impede any hippies blocking Virginia traffic.
Naturally, the four of us were trapped in the car for
hours on Washington’s gridlocked streets. But it was great
entertainment, as we watched (from behind tightly closed car
windows) thousands of very hairy, tie-died counterculturists,
festooned with signage, vent their anger against the Nixon
Administration, against America, against the war, and against the
political and cultural status quo. May Day 1971 was one of the last
great anti-war extravaganzas. Nixon was already withdrawing U.S.
troops from Southeast Asia while he “Vietnamized” the
war.
Across several days, D.C. police, backed by the U.S. Army,
arrested over 12,000, reputedly the largest mass arrest in U.S.
history. Famously, many demonstrators were incarcerated in a
makeshift detention camp outside RFK Stadium. The May Day 1971
uproar almost certainly enhanced the White House’s siege mentality.
Within 2 months, the White House “Plumbers Unit” was formed for
special illegal operations, starting with the break-in at Daniel
Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and disastrously culminating with
Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. The May Day protest failed in
its initial goal of forcing a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from
Vietnam. But it ultimately contributed to Nixon’s collapse and the
subsequent implosion of U.S. support for South Vietnam, ensuring
communist triumph throughout Southeast Asia.
A chief organizer for the May Day protest was Rennie
Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for their role in the riots
at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was helped by, among others,
Michael Lerner, himself one of the “Seattle Seven,” whose attempt
to ensnarl Seattle freeways in an earlier anti-war protest was a
model. Lerner, later a rabbi and founder of Tikkun, would
develop the “politics of meaning” that captivated Hillary Clinton
before her accession to the White House with her husband. According
to a Time magazine report of that time, Davis sought
counsel from communist North Vietnam and later recalled: “The
Vietnamese were saying that now was a time to act, that it might be
possible to set off a chain of events that would end the war.” He
appealed to fellow American peaceniks: “Unless the Government of
the U.S. stops the war in Viet Nam, we will stop the Government of
the U.S.” He also declared: “If there are still people in this town
who don’t feel they are guilty, who can get up and put on their
coats and ties and go to work, we are going to stop those people on
the streets and find out what is in their heads.”
Davis and tens of thousands of kindred spirits failed to
shut down the U.S. Government but not for lack of exertion.
Time likened their “preposterously ill-organized” impact
on D.C. traffic to a “heavy spring rain.” Maybe for some. But I
vividly recall my own family’s voluntary entrapment in Davis’s
protest for what seemed like many hours.
On Saturday, May 1, 1971, about 45,000-50,000 (according
to Time) “dope freaks, troubadours of the counterculture,
teenyboppers, committed soldiers of the movement, longhairs on an
oblivious narcotico-political binge” gathered in West Potomac Park
to await Monday morning’s hoped for traffic snarl and government
closure. According to the Washington Post, they were
happily “making love, drinking wine, and smoking pot,” having
turned the area south of the Lincoln Memorial into a “smaller
version of…Woodstock.”
Unamused by the frolic, the U.S. Park Service abruptly
cancelled the merrymakers’ permit at dawn Sunday morning.
Preemptively, thousands of D.C. and U.S. Park Police in riot gear
announced the party’s end on loudspeakers and then scattered the
remaining encamped demonstrators by marching into and tear gassing
West Potomac Park. They were backed by thousands of U.S. Army
troops and National Guardsmen. Thousands of disrupted, coughing
protesters fled. Many escaped into Virginia some in their
Volkswagen vans, never to return. Others fled to college campuses,
especially Georgetown University. Davis complained that President
Nixon had decided to “suspend the Constitution.”
Undeterred, demonstrators reassembled Monday morning,
targeting bridges and several key traffic circles. U.S. Army troops
surrounded key monuments and federal buildings. National Guardsmen
lined the bridges. Clearing the streets, D.C. police were
ultimately instructed to arrest thousands of obstructing protesters
in mass, dispensing with normal arrest procedure. The ultimate
round-up of 12,000 inevitably included some reporters, bystanders
and even counter-protesters. Davis, who was himself arrested,
complained of the “good Germans” who still dutifully marched to
their federal offices, despite their complicity in the war. But
Time commented that the police overall “showed exemplary
discipline; a less well trained, less tightly controlled force
could have brought about a very different outcome: people seriously
wounded or even dead.” The ACLU loudly complained, while North
Carolina Senator Sam Ervin commended the police for a “rather fine
job.”
After we finally escaped the traffic imbroglio by crossing
Key Bridge, we spotted my father with other Arlington police
outside the Key Bridge Marriott. My grandmother hailed her
son-in-law for “protecting the country,” while my more liberal
mother responded with amusement.
President Nixon announced the May Day protests, which
Attorney General John Mitchell had watched with binoculars from his
U.S. Justice Department balcony, had been handled in a “very
competent and appropriate way.” In little more than a year, Nixon
and Mitchell would be enmeshed in Watergate. And in less than 4
years, hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees would flee to
America, many to the Washington, D.C. area. They were the bitter
fruit of the anti-war campaign for America to abandon Indochina to
tyranny and genocide. The May Day protests would help fuel a far
worse disaster than the founding of chronically insolvent Amtrak on
the same day.
