Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Then, kaboom, the Big Bang. Anything and everything became believable. Reason was chucked. Dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible. Mailer had written that the New Left, feeling “the militancy of the blacks as a reproof,” were “these mad middle-class children with … their lust for apocalypse.” SDS became the New Left institution, and in 1969 its most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. Its members believed they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war. They issued statements about “the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution” and how “dope is one of our weapons.… Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.” And then they went to work making and setting off bombs. Some got a lot of attention—such as the ones in 1970 at New York police headquarters, in 1971 at the U.S. Capitol, and in 1972 at the Pentagon—but during an average week in 1969 and 1970, at least ten bombs were set off by the far left in America.