to raise a family, pursue a career, or continue their education. Some of these people shifted rightward in their political views, but more simply scaled back or ceased political action. “The Los Angeles Times recently cited the figure of 2 to 3 million erstwhile activists who retain their radical allegiance, though they may lack a cause to which they can pledge it,” wrote onetime Weather Underground militant and Ramparts editor Bo Burlingham in 1976. “Even if the numbers are accurate, I told myself, there is a difference between 3 million former activists with radical notions, and radical activity. The former is just a statistic; the latter is a political force. And political force, at least for most of my friends and myself, hasn’t been a compelling preoccupation in the last couple of years.”3
The end of the Vietnam War demobilized the ranks of protesters and activists as surely as it did the ranks of the armed forces. The last US troops pulled out in 1973, and the war was finally over in 1975, when the North Vietnamese overtook the capital of South Vietnam. Just ten days after the fall of Saigon, the War Resisters League and other groups organized a celebration in New York’s Central Park, featuring performances by such movement luminaries as Pete Seeger and Odetta; some 50,000 people attended. But however much grassroots activism had hastened the conflict’s end, too many people had died—combatants and civilians, Americans and Vietnamese—to make it feel like the movement had prevailed in any meaningful way, and the jubilation was tinged with melancholy. “I’d say we won,” reflected WRL organizer Ed Hedemann in a 1999 interview, “but not in the cleanest, nicest, best sense, because it just wasn’t a simple victory. There was a lot of pain and agony.”4
For those who had hoped for a more profound change in the existing order, there was disappointment, too, at the movement’s lost momentum, a realization that a time of retrenchment was setting in. “There was a tremendous sense of not only relief that the war was ending but also [pride] that we had made some contribution to ending it,” remembered veteran organizer Leslie Cagan. “But there was also a tremendous frustration: seeing how quickly any kind of antiwar movement collapsed, disappeared, just wasn’t there any more … Somehow we weren’t able to translate it into an ongoing movement beyond the crisis of the war.”5
The temptation was to look inward when searching for the causes of this collapse—to blame infighting, bad strategic decisions, flawed organizational structures, rhetorical excesses, or any of the other faults that the movements of the sixties might have had. But a series of dramatic revelations across the decade of the 1970s showed that the government had also very actively done its part to bring the movements down. A small group of antiwar activists who suspected their movements were being infiltrated broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania in March of 1971, stealing all the files. The documents they released to the press revealed a huge network of paid informants and a concerted plan, in the FBI’s words, to “enhance the paranoia endemic in [activist] circles.” Over the next few years, Congressional hearings, journalistic investigations, and activist lawsuits filled out these disclosures, revealing vast FBI efforts under its COINTELPRO program to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activists of the ‘New Left’ by counterintelligence methods,” to quote one memo from the Bureau. These and similar inquiries also uncovered a massive and illegal parallel program of domestic surveillance and infiltration by the CIA known as MH/CHAOS.6
How much of the left’s shrinkage was due to its own failings, or to changing political winds, and how much to government disruption? It would never be possible to say. Certainly the FBI operations against black movements in the 1960s had been especially vicious and far-reaching, with J. Edgar Hoover naming them “hate groups” across the board, targeting them for systematic disruption, and going so far as to sanction the murder of black leaders. The FBI notoriously tried to hound Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself, and helped the Chicago police assassinate nineteen-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in a middle-of-the-night 1969 raid, supplying the police with a map showing where Hampton would be sleeping and having an informant drug him with secobarbital to ensure he wouldn’t wake up before being shot point-blank in the head. Files released in 2012 by the FBI in response to a lawsuit by scholar Seth Rosenfeld strongly suggest that the man who first supplied guns to the Panthers, Bay Area radical Richard Aoki, was a longtime FBI informant. But the disclosure raised as many questions as it answered: Was it Aoki’s idea to arm the Panthers, or the FBI’s? Was the FBI guiding Aoki’s actions, or was he merely providing them with reports? Might the Panthers have embraced armed self-defense anyway, even without the initial arsenal provided by Aoki? Barring some huge new release of documents from the FBI, no one will likely ever know.7
Many of the efforts to investigate grassroots activists, though, were stunningly inept. Despite all its illegal wiretaps and hundreds of break-ins to activist homes and offices, the FBI never tracked down the peace activists who had burgled its offices in 1971, even after these activists directly thumbed their noses at the Bureau. (While the investigation was in its most intense phase, burglary ringleader William Davidon helped organize a “Your FBI in Action” street fair in his Philadelphia neighborhood, where he posed with a large cut-out of Hoover and local children assembled puzzles with photos of the FBI agents assigned to the case.) Nor did the FBI ever solve any of the dozens of Weather Underground bombing cases, though there may of course have been reasons why they didn’t want to solve those. Much of the so-called intelligence the FBI gathered through its vast network of informants was routine information with no special strategic value. Overall, though, COINTELPRO and MH/CHAOS played a significant role in amplifying divisions within movements—especially black radical movements, which were targeted the most heavily, followed by the militant wings of other movements of color, including the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Government operatives also clearly pushed radicals to adopt more extreme tactics and rhetoric than they would have without paid provocateurs within their midst, which in turn marginalized and destabilized their movements.8
Learning about the extent of this political sabotage, however, didn’t make dealing with the diminished present any easier. The alternative press was filled with the introspective writings of activists trying to adjust to the changed reality. In the radical feminist newspaper off our backs, organizer Carol Anne Douglas entitled her 1977 reflections, “What If the Revolution Isn’t Tomorrow?” Activists, she wrote, “need to appreciate that resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the corner … The struggle is going to take all of our lives, not just a few exciting, hectic years.”9
Many American radicals responded to the new political climate by focusing on the small, on what affected them immediately: the local and the particular, single issues, questions of identity, politics on a manageable scale. This tendency built upon the critique of the mass—and the move toward affinity groups, collectives, and communes—that had shaped activism in the earliest years of the 1970s. It also reflected the feminist embrace of the small group, as a way of safeguarding radical ideals of participation, egalitarianism, and self-expression. The identity-politics exhortation to “organize around your own oppression” and the emerging logic of radical ecology, with its small-is-beautiful search for sustainability, further reinforced radicals’ inclination to pursue their broadly transformative goals on a modest and manageable scale.
The catch-phrase for this approach, now something of a cliché, was “think globally, act locally.” The slogan was coined by the scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer René Dubos, on the occasion of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. By it, Dubos meant to convey that uniform solutions to global environmental problems were unworkable; policymakers needed to take the cultural and ecological characteristics of distinct locales into account. But as the phrase gained in popularity, adorning bumper stickers and buttons or working its way into newsletters and speeches, its meanings multiplied, as so often happens. To some activists in groups like Citizen Action (founded in 1979), it was a call to neighborhood organizing, canvassing door-to-door for financial and political support (a technique first developed in the early 1970s). Other activists
