Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

One faction, the Progressive Labor Party, a severe, crew-cutted Maoist cell that banned the use of drugs, had stealthily taken over the SDS bureaucracy. Another faction—for Byzantine reasons of factional history, they called themselves Revolutionary Youth Movement II—joined in tactical alliance with a group that called themselves Weathermen to try to win the organization back. They labeled Progressive Labor false Maoists and ersatz revolutionaries and had attempted to prove their revolutionary superiority by recruiting angry white working-class high school students, who were supposed to serve as foot soldiers under the vanguard leadership of the Black Panther Party. The Weathermen were, meanwhile, working to harden themselves as urban guerrilla warriors and had brought black and Latino street toughs into the meeting as ringers. When an entirely separate faction, the Women’s Liberation Caucus, offered a motion against male chauvinism, the street toughs roared back in mockery, chanting, “Pussy power! Pussy power!” The floor disintegrated into a cacophony of contending chants: “Fight male chauvinism! Fight male chauvinism!” “Read Mao! Read Mao! Read Mao!”