Mayday 1971

 “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government,” May Day Protests of 1971 

Mayday, from the French “m’aider,” meaning “help me,” is the code word for a distress call, at sea is indicated by flying the flag upside down.  In a “Doctor Who” episode, “Oxygen,” a character asks the Doctor if he likes distress calls, and he answers, “You only really see the true force of the universe when it’s asking for help.”  May 1 is known as International Workers’ Day and often features large demonstrations.  In “MAYDAY 1971” Lawrence Roberts describes and analyzes the efforts by a disparate May Day coalition to carry out a guerrilla-style traffic blockade aimed at bringing the nation’s capital to a halt.  What resulted was the largest mass arrest in American history, with over 12,000 detained, most enduring unsanitary conditions in overcrowded cells or the municipal football stadium. Richard M. Nixon dirty trickster Charles Colson had crates of oranges sent to the detainees that purported to be from Senator Edmund Muskie, an effort to make it appear that the Maine Senator sympathized with the so-called Mayday Tribe.

 

Mayday 1971 took place a full decade after President John F. Kennedy sent a few hundred advisers to South Vietnam in a misguided attempt to crush a nationalist revolution, a commitment that escalated into a seemingly unending undeclared war that had resulted in over 40,000 American casualties.  The actions of the Vietnam Veterans against the War attracted the most publicity during the weeks-long Washington DC protests; but the climax came on May 3 when protestors blocked bridges and highways throughout the city.  Clustered together of the Fourteenth Street Bridge, for example, were baby doctor Benjamin Spock, New Left historian Howard Zinn, Harvard-trained linguist Noam Chomsky, and ex-marine Danial Ellsberg, who’d soon leak the explosive Pentagon Papers to the press. Tactically, as spokesman Rennie Davis admitted, the operation was a failure, as it got underway too early to affect rush hour traffic and was crushed by police, who had obtained copies of the demonstrators’ plans beforehand. In the long run, however, the heavy-handed tactics of law enforcement turned public opinion against the Nixon administration.  As Judge Harold H. Greene remarked, “Whenever American institutions have provided a hysterical response to an emergency situation, we have come later to regret it.”

 

Though Nixon’s henchmen overruled DC Police Chief Jerry Wilson in demanding indiscriminate arrests of suspected protestors on spurious charges that in almost all cases were invalid and dismissed by presiding judges, the President allowed Wilson to be the scapegoat for the ensuing bad publicity.  When demonstrators gathered peacefully on the Capitol steps at a time when Congress was not in session, police began making arrests as Representative Bella Abzug was addressing them.  Congressman Ron Dellums tried to intervene, but a cop swung a billy club at his ribs.  After an interminable delay, public defenders were finally allowed to see those jailed in a courthouse cellblock, Roberts described what they found:

    The lawyers’ hearts sank.  Cells meant for two people held 20 to 40 detainees each. “Some were sick; others were asleep on the floor or so exhausted they were unable to communicate.  Isolated from counsel or any outsiders for nearly 40 hours, they had little idea of what was likely to happen to them,” attorney Michael Wald reported.

    The other public defender, Kirby Howlett, was shocked at how some of the guards were abusing their charges.  Howlett half expected to see angry militants screaming obscenities at the cops through the bars but instead found most of the kids to be sincere and thoughtful.  Yet the police “had a hatred for them unlike anything I’s ever seen before – far worse than their reaction to blacks or even black cop-killers,” Howlett said later.  “I had nightmares afterward – here it was, unbridled police power encouraged by the highest authority in the country.”

 

Mayday 1971 led to Nixon forming a secret “Plumbers Unit” to discredit would-be Democratic Presidential candidates Ed Muskie and Ted Kennedy, prevent leaks from White House staff, and attempt to link the Democratic Party to radical backers.  This led to the illegal Watergate break-in and the taping of Oval Office conversations that ended with Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.