Listening to the shocked voices in the media after 9/11, I wondered: Don’t any of these commentators remember that terrorism was once common on American soil? To be sure, no one had ever before brought down tall buildings with hijacked jetliners, and yet, in the early 1970s, terrorist bombings occurred daily in the U.S.
In Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, The FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin Press), Bryan Burrough recounts how homegrown radicals placed explosives inside the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, federal buildings, courthouses, police stations, banks and corporate offices across the country. In 1975 Puerto Rican terrorists blew up the Fraunces Tavern on Wall Street, killing four, injuring 40 and shattering windows up and down the street. San Francisco was called “America’s Belfast” in 1974 and ’75 as more than 40 bombs exploded in the Bay area. People were killed or maimed albeit, in contrast to Al Qaeda, the Weathermen and allied groups usually sought to minimize civilian casualties.
Formerly with The Wall Street Journal, Burrough conducted interviews with surviving participants in the guerilla war against the Establishment. Some refused to recall their euphemistically termed “political actions,” preferring romantic reminiscences of youthful idealism and life on the run; others insisted on anonymity. Most emerged long ago from jail or hiding, found jobs, founded families, blended in, or chose between selling out or working inside the system.
Burrough has pulled together a readable, even page-turning account of the gaggle of revolutionary groups that emerged from the civil rights and anti-war movements of the ’60s and took up arms through disappointment with the results of peaceful protest and impatience with the slow pace of change. Most “were driven by hazy dreams of becoming the vanguard for the masses, only to be disenchanted by the apathy and hostility of the working class they claimed to represent.”
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Social origins divided the radical groups. The most diverse among them was the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army, led by a black ex-con and eventually numbering heiress Patty Hearst in its ranks. African American groups such as the Black Panthers had a better footing than most in social reality as they channeled resentment over racism into violence. The Puerto Rican FALN was a minority within a minority. The white middle-class Weathermen were delusional in their willingness to believe that Richard Nixon could be toppled by warfare and in their blindness to the implications of the cultural and social revolutions advancing around them. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll proved more attractive to America’s youth than overthrowing the system.
