courtesy of the Coumbia University archives
Notes from the Underground
mark rudd wanted a revolution—then he grew up
PrintSacco and Vanzetti died in their late thirties, Simon Bolivar when he was 47, Che Guevara when he was 39. Most militant revolutionaries—even those from the ’60s—never reach their sixties, so it was a pleasant surprise to hear that Mark Rudd was not just alive, but teaching and writing as well.
His new book, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, is probably the first time most of the world has heard from him since the famous 1968 Columbia student insurrection and its aftermath, during which Doonsbury creator Garry Trudeau, immortalized him as “Megaphone” Mark Slackmeyer.
The Rudd familiar to campus history buffs is the one known for leading the campus SDS in a takeover of Hamilton Hall, Low Library, and three other buildings. Rudd will also forever be associated with a celebrated directive issued to then-University President Grayson L. Kirk: “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” He’s known as a revolutionary icon, a mythic emblem of a particular moment. But what about Mark Rudd, the human?
This is the question Rudd himself grapples with in Underground, and the answer lies in what Rudd was before and after his blaze of glory. It turns out that he grew up in pretty ordinary circumstances: “I was raised in a town that was literally 99.9 percent White,” he writes, referring to ’50s and ’60s Maplewood, New Jersey.
From there, Underground takes us through a familiar trajectory: admission, matriculation, disenchantment, depression. From the prologue, with its schizoid mixture of triumph and contrition, Rudd dissects his previous selves with sobriety and analytical ardor. But most of the characters young Mark meets along the way are stock stereotypes: the donnish psychoanalyst, the cadres of meathead jocks, the careerist professors. Self-centeredness and a lack of empathy with human nature are certainly legitimate shortcomings that seem to plague revolutionaries: Marx, for example, knew everything about himself but failed to forecast Mao and Stalin. Yet I don’t see the same kind of solipsism in Underground. Given Rudd’s interpersonal genius, humanity, and conscience in bringing off the 1968 coup, I like to think that this is just how some people are.
Besides, characters don’t need to be sketched in depth in order to be compelling. Doonesbury readers met Megaphone Mark weeks after the comic strip’s 1970 inception. Doonesbury at the time was a hilarious hodgepodge of political satire and college humor—the South Park of the ‘70s—and Rudd’s send-up perfectly demonstrated both of its tropes. The first panel of my favorite strip shows Mark proclaiming to an audience of zero: “Even though the President has given in to all my demands, I have decided to act!” He enters an office in the next panel, saying, “I’m sorry Mr. President, but until my demands are enacted, I’m taking over this office! HOW ABOUT THAT, HUH?” The president replies, “Well, yes, that seems fair. I’ll leave immediately. Before I go, shall I show you where I keep my brandy and cigars?”
In reality, Grayson L. Kirk didn’t go down without a fight and acceded to none of Rudd’s demands—equality, divestment, and so forth—but readers of Underground will learn that the brandy and cigars existed. Kirk’s office was lined with books with unbroken spines, Rudd writes, which added to his 20-year-old self’s impression of Kirk as an ivory-tower phony. This brings me to another common complaint against activists—everything they see has significance. To them, each detail is just a truth waiting to be uncovered by whichever infallible hermeneutic system they ascribe to.
Beyond Kirk’s books, Underground is refreshingly free of these sentiments, too. Rudd doesn’t have a stellar memory for detail, but there are enough details included in the book to convey the sense that it’s meant to entertain rather than to provide tendentious commentary. When I ask Rudd, “Is it more a memoir or a manifesto?” he answers instantly, “It’s not a manifesto—it’s a story. It’s a kid from New Jersey who crosses the river and finds himself in this milieu, where people are learning about the war in Vietnam and starting to protest it.” Underground is shot through not with a philosopher’s telos to truth, but with the storyteller’s compulsion to divert.
Of course, a rougher telos makes for a better story. As Rudd tells me, “The organizing work paid off. The first part of the book is stories about good organizing; the second part and the third part are about good organizing turning into bad organizing. The faction in SDS called ‘Weathermen’ was terrible organizing.”
Terrible organizing indeed: SDS splintered soon after Rudd’s conquest at Columbia, and his fragment—the Weathermen—pulled off a few non-lethal bombings in 1969 and 1970. (Of 1970, Rudd says, offhand, “That was the year I became a fugitive.”) All the while, the Weathermen dwindled in membership. Megaphone Mark settled down and became a sometime student and college radio DJ. Rudd himself went underground to hide from the FBI for seven years, and his movement faded from public imagination and political relevance.
Yet these seven years were still eventful, and their immortalization in Underground is ample justification for their having happened. Rudd’s recounting of Timothy Leary’s harrowing escape from prison and all of Underground’s sex scenes come to mind—his book reads like an adolescent’s fantasy of life after college, except it’s also tinged with sorrow, solitude, and squalor. All this directionless wandering culminates in the accidental death of two friends when their homemade bomb blows up in their faces. The event must have been gut-wrenching, but Rudd’s direct and simple style, which works well elsewhere, is unable to conjure genuine pathos.
When the prose is rougher than the events it describes, Underground begins to sag. Rudd’s odyssey becomes less interesting after the bomb tragedy, and his writing less polished: “Because of the strength of the longshoremen’s union, I’d typically make $60 to $80 a shift, which in those days was excellent money, the minimum wage at the time being $1.90 per hour,” he remembers. Wasted words like the redundant “in those days” and “at the time,” are annoying, especially since Underground clocks in at a baggy 324 pages. So is the sermonizing tone, as he goes on to relate his hesitancy to tell the blue-collar dockworkers of their dependency on the war. On the same page, Rudd recalls “the loneliness”: “I was nobody, doing nothing except surviving ... it’s not a good way to live.” It’s unclear whether this is false modesty or self-loathing.
Whether Rudd hates himself or hates to like himself, one of the conceits behind a memoir is that the reader must love the character, or at least love to hate him. Fortunately, Rudd the narrator’s charisma is enough to carry the book, even when Rudd the character is at his least sympathetic—when Timothy Leary rats him out, he repays the favor by writing the following:
“For some reason, probably because I like audacious old charlatans, I’ve never felt angry or vindictive toward him. I exempt Leary from the principle ‘Thou shall not rat out thy comrades.’ He died in 1996, an apostle of space colonization, having transformed his identity multiple times in the previous two decades. Seven grams of his ashes were rocketed into space.”
A mix of vignettes, principles, exceptions, revisions, reminiscences, and insights: this is Underground at its best. For some reason the mélange just works. Rudd isn’t a strong prose stylist—he’s an orator, not a writer, after all—but here it doesn’t matter.
Timothy Leary was shot into space, but what has happened to Rudd in his later years? After turning himself in to the FBI in 1977, he retired to New Mexico (what is it that the counterculture loves about New Mexico?) and became a teacher at the local vocational institute.
On the phone, Rudd is easygoing, relaxed, and serene. The world is still a mess, but it’s no longer entirely his responsibility. “Obviously I’m still a progressive on most all issues,” he says.
“So the ends are the same, but the means are different?”
“Yeah. I think you’ll find this rather funny—in one of the first chapters in the book I talk about the split between the ‘Practice Faction’ and the ‘Action Faction.’ I think the people who advocated slow, patient organizing were right. In a way, I’ve done a 180 on that,” he says.
Rudd rues the years he spent under the Weathermen, but he doesn’t regret that the Columbia gym is a dank, subterranean dump. He says that university culture now is better, more diverse, but residually racist and overtly classist—still, by his own admission, he doesn’t know enough about Manhattanville or ethnic studies protesters to pass judgment on their goals or methods. He says that “the goal of organizing is always a mass movement,” and that Obama’s election is in part a byproduct of that—but an environmental disaster is still looming, and society is still shot through with “social failures” and “market failures” that range from education to racial biases.
If Rudd could have picked something to do differently, he says, “I think I’d probably try to go to a college that was further from my own background. Maybe Rutgers-Newark.” The paradox behind a book like Underground is that, while it illustrates its point that experiences offer a better education than going to school and reading books, reading this book is an experience worth having. Rudd is, after all, a teacher. “I think teaching is very important,” he says. “Very few top-notch thinkers go into teaching.”
Rudd may not be a top-notch thinker or a top-notch writer, but he is a good thinker and a passable writer with top-notch experiences. What you take away from Underground can be anything from activist axioms to simple pleasure. This is the mark of a good book, and anyone at all interested in or entertained by Rudd, Columbia, activism, civil rights, betrayal, free love, LSD, marijuana, New York, San Francisco, New Jersey, New Mexico, teaching, or learning should read it.
30 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 12
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