The following article is the third of six parts.
Despite overwhelming national consensus which supported ending the war in Vietnam, Nixon was dragging it on. He secretly invaded Cambodia, provoking a strong Congressional rebuke. In 1970, National Guardsmen (not active-duty troops) had shot and killed four white students at Kent State University and two black students at Jackson State University.
When I turned 18, I registered for the draft, and did not know if I would be one of the men called up to go to Vietnam. On April 24, 1971, I joined a peaceful demonstration of 200,000 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
I returned to D.C. two weeks later, with a much smaller group this time, the 25,000-strong Mayday Tribe. The Mayday Tribe was launched by Chicago 7 defendant Rennie Davis, with the slogan: "If the government won’t stop the war, we will stop the government."
The plan was to block 21 key bridges and intersections in Washington D.C., with the goal of blocking all traffic and thus paralyzing the city. No looting, no Molotov Cocktails, just block the intersections. Arguably a "peaceable assembly to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." I was sent to East Potomac Park to block the entrance to the 14th Street Bridge, which handles 70% of Pentagon personnel traffic.
President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell of course blanketed the city with Metropolitan Police as well as with National Guardsmen, who were frequently deployed at antiwar demonstrations. This time, given the Mayday Tribe’s provocative game plan, Nixon called in the active-duty Army 82nd Airborne paratroopers, and dozens of helicopters also landed next to the Washington Monument, bringing Marines into the city. Police and military forces totaled 14,000. Nixon did not invoke the Insurrection Act, he just called in the Army and the Marines on his own. Newsweek said it "seemed more appropriate to Saigon in wartime than Washington in the spring."
Photocopies of the action plan were circulated widely, so police and military were already stationed at the 21 targets hours before we arrived. The bus carrying some of my contingent at the 14th Street Bridge were arrested literally as we stepped off the bus. Nobody read us any Mirandas. We were not even blocking any traffic.
Most of the paralysis of Washington, D.C., that day was the result of the capitol’s workforce staying home. CIA Director Richard Helms said “It was obviously viewed by everybody in the administration, particularly with all the arrests and the howling about civil rights and human rights and all the rest of it . . . as a very damaging kind of event. I don't think there was any doubt about that.”
A total of 7,000 protesters were arrested, the greatest mass arrest in US history. Jails were full. Thousands of us were hauled off to the big Redskins practice field next to RFK Stadium surrounded by an eight-foot fence. Guardsmen and a large contingent of the 82nd Airborne were guarding the perimeter. Hundreds of us went right up to the fence yelling antiwar slogans. Then we started leaning on it and it just slowly fell over.
At this point, the soldiers began advancing on us, firing tear-gas canisters. We quickly retreated, and over the next several hours, they herded us into RFK Stadium across the way. At no point were we arraigned or told what the charges were. The police and military did not provide food, but kind souls were allowed to send in baloney sandwiches. From arrest to release, most of the 7,000 were held in the field and the stadium for two days. Clearly, the government was nervous about losing a habeus corpus petition.
Later, a class action suit was brought by the detained protesters, and eventually the U.S. Congress acknowledged that the arrests were illegal and paid a settlement to the protesters. I did not get a check, but the protesters were the only citizens in U.S. history to receive financial compensation for the government’s violation of our First Amendment right "peaceably to assemble to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
"Mayday, the scruffy and forgotten protest that helped speed US withdrawal from Vietnam, changed the course of activist history as well. It came at a time of crisis for the left—indeed, the distress call embedded in the mobilization’s name could apply equally well to the state of American radical movements in 1971 as to the conduct of the war they opposed. The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism, one rooted as much in its practices as in its ideas or demands. This quixotic attempt to "stop the government" — so flawed in its execution, yet so unnerving in its effects — was organized in a different manner than any protest before it, in ways that have influenced most American protest movements since."
-L.A. Kaufmann, "Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism"
More to follow in Part IV.
Henry Seggerman managed Korea International Investment Fund, the oldest South Korean hedge fund, from 2001 until 2014. He is a regular columnist for the Korea Times and has also been a guest speaker, written for, or been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg Television, Reuters and FinanceAsia — covering not only North and South Korea, but also Asia, as well as U.S. politics. Read Henry Seggerman's Reports — More Here.