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The SLA Was Almost a Cultural Test Tube, a Specimen Sample from a Bitter Side of the Sixties That Marched Apace After Virtually All Their Comrades Veered Aside

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The SLA Was Almost a Cultural Test Tube, a Specimen Sample from a Bitter Side of the Sixties That Marched Apace After Virtually All Their Comrades Veered Aside UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The End of an Era: The Rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army and Fall of the New Left A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Gregory Garth Cumming December 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Clifford Trafzer, Chairperson Dr. Molly McGarry Dr. Ralph L. Crowder Copyright by Gregory Garth Cumming 2010 The Dissertation of Gregory Garth Cumming is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements A dissertation cannot be completed alone. All through the process I have received a great deal of encouragement. I want to thank Professor Molly McGarry and Professor Ralph Crowder for their insightful comments during the oral exams. A special thanks goes out to Dr. Clifford Trafzer who served as the Chair for my Dissertation Committee. His patience and guidance provided me the opportunity to realize my dream and complete my formal education. I also want to thank the Sayles family for their enduring friendship. Dr. Stephen Sayles increased my love of history and served as my mentor throughout my undergraduate studies. I am fortunate to be able to refer to both Dr. Trafzer and Dr. Sayles as my mentors. My parents always encouraged my academic pursuits, even when I had placed them on hold. Thank you for always believing in me and allowing me the opportunity to find my way. To my amazing wife Lupe and our children Taylor and Jake – thank you for allowing me the opportunity to “finish strong.” My studies have taken time away from the three of you and I appreciate what you have given up to allow me to reach this point. The hardships of writing a dissertation fell upon the members of my family just as much as it did upon me. I love the three of you as much as any person can love another. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The End of an Era: The Rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army and Fall of the New Left by Gregory Garth Cumming Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History University of California, Riverside, December 2010 Dr. Clifford Trafzer, Chairperson The San Francisco Bay Area, and in particular Berkeley, served as a Mecca for the remnants of the New Left in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Eight out of the ten members of the SLA moved to the Bay Area, either in search of education or to relive the passions and the protests of the anti-Vietnam war movement of the late sixties and early seventies. As the war in Vietnam began winding down with American participation ending in January 1973, so did the student protest movement. In Northern California, the prison reform movement began to take center stage with what remained of the New Left. In the case of escaped convict Donald DeFreeze, and a group of nine others, found their African-American leader to jumpstart the revolution that deceased inmate George Jackson had so forcefully written about. v The SLA announced their arrival with the assassination of respected educator and Superintendent of Oakland schools, Marcus Foster. As the first African-American Superintendent of Oakland schools, Foster served as a role model for success for many. His assassination brought nothing but scorn from the New Left towards the SLA. Following the capture by police of two SLA soldiers, Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, the remaining members of the revolutionary group went underground and began planning the abduction of Patricia Hearst in order to free their comrades from jail. Instead of freeing Little and Remiro from jail, Hearst provided the SLA with almost unlimited access to the media. The actions of the SLA did not serve as a vanguard for revolution as they had hoped. Instead, the SLA brought back memories of the violence and anarchy of the late sixties and early seventies that many did not wish to relive. America had moved on even though the membership of the SLA had not. This revolutionary group, however, served not as the vanguard of change, but the last gasp of the New Left and the student protest movement. vi Table of Contents Introduction..................................................................................1 Chapter 1 In the Beginning............................................................................11 Chapter 2 Cinque………...............................................................................23 Chapter 3 The Formation...............................................................................35 Chapter 4 Battle for Control..........................................................................49 Chapter 5 The Assassination of Marcus Foster.............................................59 Chapter 6 Triumph Turns to Turmoil............................................................71 vii Chapter 7 The Kidnapping of Patricia Campbell Hearst…………...…….85 Chapter 8 The FBI.....................................................................................109 Chapter 9 The Media.................................................................................127 Chapter 10 From Captors to Comrades......................................................135 Chapter 11 Tania – Queen of the Revolution.............................................149 Chapter 12 On the Road to Purgatory........................................................172 Chapter 13 The End of an Era....................................................................210 Bibliography………………………………………………..219 viii “The SLA was almost a cultural test tube, a specimen sample from a bitter side of the sixties that marched apace after virtually all their comrades veered aside. Yet they marked time oddly, retracing rather than resolving the past. Culturally rootless, out of their time, they leaped into the social void – and in an eerie half-life of their plunge, among themselves, if nowhere else, they recreated something of the pained and pimpled adolescence of the New Left.”1 Introduction The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) existed for a brief 192 days beginning with Marcus Foster’s assassination in November 1973 and ending with the shootout in Los Angeles on May 17, 1974. By 1972, the radical New Left had splintered into many different factions, the most violent, the Weathermen, had exited for life underground. With the re-election of President Richard Nixon by a landslide in November 1972 and the announcement of the end of active United States participation in Vietnam in January 1973, the synergy which produced the anti-war movement had reached its end. Berkeley, California, however, still maintained its unique counter-culture persona and life style. With war in Vietnam winding down, protest movements began to focus once more on issues of civil rights through the reform of California prisons. On February 1, 1960 four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University ushered in a new era for colleges and university students throughout the United States. These four African-American students decided to challenge segregation in the South by sitting down at a lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The chairs at the counter were for white customers only and they were refused service. This incident sparked a wider protest that led to a sit-in, which would be a staple of the civil rights movement and student protests on various college campuses. This single act of defiance and courage preceded the Port Huron Statement by two years and the Free Speech Movement by four, serving as a road map for future politicization of America’s college students. 1 Vin McLellan and Paul Avery, The Voices of the Guns (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 495. 1 Since the Free Speech Movement began in 1964, Berkeley served as a focal point for dissent on college campuses. They initially fought administration policy to ban the tables of political literature from the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenue. Many of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement spent their previous summer involved in the Civil Rights movement. As administrators of the University of California were soon to find out, the students found them much less threatening than the Ku Klux Klan. The arrest of Jack Weinberg just outside the gate of the University of California, Berkeley, unleashed a powerful student protest movement. 2 Berkeley student Mario Savio, whose speeches on top of the police cruiser would forever link his name with the Free Speech Movement (FSM), declared in the fall of 1964 that “Last Summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley.”3 In a direct challenge to the status quo often associated with the Eisenhower Administration, Savio Challenged the UC Board of Regents and administrators when he stated that “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”4 Little did Savio know that his words spoken in 1964 spoke for the discontent of a generation of college students. 2 W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 19-24. 3 Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87. 4 Mario Savio Speech on the Steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, California, December 2, 1964. 2 Although over 200 colleges and universities
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