Creating Riots - Hamilton Miller

The Actors
With the tinder piling high as a result of society's

systemic failures, as with a leaky city sewage
system breeding typhoid bacilli, the stage is set. But
riots don't just happen. They are caused by people.
Who are the actors? What are their roles?
They fall into three major categories whose

triangular interaction determines whether there
will be a mass breakdown of law and order: A. The
civil authorities. B. The violent minority. C. The
pliant, disorganized, decent majority. Each of these
three groups behaves according to historically
predictable patterns in response to one another, to
epochal social forces and to chance historical
developments.
The cast of characters is long and varied. Some of
the riot‐ makers play different roles, slipping from
one to another as the drama unfolds. Study these
twelve groups closely, for they tell much about
what makes riots:
1. The Climate‐Makers.
Career protesters and extremists rub raw the sores
of discontent and widen social cleavages in the
community. Aided by the Hearstian mass media
tradition that "freaks are news," free‐lance
protesters tramp the nation with stock lists of
"grievances" and "demands," supercharging the
climate with revolutionary rhetoric. "You gotta stop
looting and start shooting!" screams "Rap" Brown,
chairman of the Student Non‐Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). "We have to move from
Molotov cocktails to dynamite," Stokely Carmichael
tells a harlem audience at a SNCC fund‐raising
dinner. After the Harlem and Watts riots, motley
apostles of violence promoted the "Burn, Baby,
Burn" fad just as Madison Avenue hucksters
promote hula hoops and the Beatles.
Cincinnati Police Chief Jacob Schott told a Senate

hearing how the climate for his city's week of arson
and looting in June 1967 was prepared. Racial
militants established a toehold through the usual
sit‐ins, lie‐ins and "freedom marching." In April
1967, Stokely Carmichael arrived, and while police
stood by, urged his audience to "stop fighting each
other and go out and fight the police." In May a 30‐
year‐old African‐American was convicted and
sentenced to death for one of a series of seven
strangulation murders that had terrified Cincinnati
for over a year. The militants, claiming
discrimination, organized a "defense fund" and
picketed the city hall, courthouse and federal
building.
A floating "black power" cabal developed, with

about 50 ex‐ tremists representing the Student
Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee, "Black
Panthers," a Black Muslim sect and the Maoist
Revolutionary Action Movement. They began trying
to convert the African‐American neighborhood of
Avondale into their own private duchy; some
intimidated moderate leaders moved their families
out of the city. Chief Schott testified that the
radicals pulled the old tactic of raising impossible
demands, such as no deliveries to stores in the
African‐American area by white truck drivers.
African‐American teenagers began stopping trucks.
One drugstore owner tailed police so he could get a
drug delivery. That touched off the week‐long riot,
with 216 cases of arson.1
Nor have right‐wing climate‐makers been idle.

White supremacist Connie Lynch harangued nightly
rallies in Baltimore's Patterson Park in July 1966,
with chants of "White Man Fight!" until his white
teenage audience stormed through (he streets
beating African‐American pedestrians and stoning
motorists. In 1965 Ku Kluxers plotted to incite
Columbus, Ohio African‐Americans into rioting by
dynamiting civil rights offices, the Black Muslim
mosque, and other places in African‐American
neighborhoods.
The climate‐makers were hard at work before the?
The April upheaval that followed the Martin Luther
King assassination. "America will burn," proclaimed
Daniel H. Watts, African‐American editor of an
extremist magazine, in a Saturday Evening Post
article. "The riots have proved that we have the
power to disrupt—to burn." San Jose State
Professor Harry Edwards, organizer of the African‐
American boycott of the Olympic games, declared,
"I'm for splitting up in twos and threes, killing the
mayor, getting the utilities and poisoning the
goddam water." Self‐styled presidential candidate
Dick Gregory announced plans to disrupt the 1968
Democratic Convention: "We can create an
atmosphere that will make the Democrats afraid to
come to Chicago." Such rhetoric in one city after
another feeds the expectations of young hoodlums
and idle kids looking for excitement. "They're just
waiting for this summer's fun," one congressional
investigator declared, "as if it was the circus coming
to town." In such an atmosphere the assassin's
bullet in Memphis was all that was needed to spark
a gargantuan outburst.
2. Young Rowdies and Criminals.
Trouble‐makers and known law‐breakers lead the

more timid looters and set the fires. In city after
city the figures show overwhelmingly: Teenage
hoodlums and habitual criminals with long records
of tangling with the law are the cutting edge of
every riot. A whopping 53 percent of the 10,771
arrestees in the 1967 summer disorders in 16 cities
were under 25. In the early stages the proportion
of youth invariably runs higher: 71 percent in
Cincinnati's first night, 82 percent in Grand Rapids'
first four hours.
"A very small minority of the minority group is

responsible for these acts," Toledo Police Chief
Tony Bosh told the Senate inquiry into his city's
three‐day eruption. To prove it he laid out criminal
records, "some as long as your arm," of the jailed
rioters. Of the 126 adults a startling 105 had prior
arrests, averaging six apiece. Every single one of the
22 young adults jailed in the first three hours had
criminal records; they averaged only 20 years old
with three prior arrests apiece. The 20 young men
jailed on fire bomb charges averaged even worse:
four apiece.
Well over hall 56 percent of the 11,261 adults jailed
in Watts, Newark, Detroit and Toledo had prior jail
sentences of 120 days or more. "For such people a
riot is only one more round in a continuing war
with law and order, one in which they temporarily
gain a free hand because police lose control," ex‐
plains Carl Perian, a Senate Juvenile Delinquency
Subcommittee staff sociologist who studied the
arrest records."
How quickly these criminal denizens can respond to
trouble was demonstrated in Watts. No
conspiratorial organization was needed to teach
firebombing there. Molotov cocktails were so
common that a year before the 1965 riot the city's
Arson Bureau vainly begged the legislature to make
their manufacture a felony. With but an eighth of
the population Watts produced a third of Los
Angeles' arson cases, at a rate of two and three
"retaliatory" fires nightly. Even so, it was not until
40 hours after the initial incident, after police held
back most of their forces and huge crowds began
looting, that extensive fire‐bombing began. In a
typical case a store security guard suddenly saw a
young African‐American run toward him with a
Molotov cocktail yelling, "Get out of the way!" The
firebomb sailed over his head, through a smashed
window, and exploded. The guard grabbed the
hurler and recognized him: a young man he had
caught shoplifting three months earlier and sent to
court, where he got a 30‐day jail sentence. The
firebomber was a 24‐year‐old African‐American,
born in Louisiana, whose parents had separated
when he was six; he had dropped out of school and
in seven years collected 20 arrests ranging from
armed robbery to attempted rape. So it went:
Virtually every one of the 200‐odd Watts riot
firebugs the Arson Bureau identified had prior
felony records stretching back into their early
teens.
3. The Igniters.
A hapless drunk, a reckless driver, a fleeing thief or
deliberate organizers provide a precipitating
incident. The Rochester, Philadelphia and Watts
riots in 1964‐65 all ignited from routine police
arrests on busy streets, with crowds spontaneously
gathering and fissioning. Typically, in Philadelphia
on a hot August Friday night in 1964 two policemen
found a car blocking a busy intersection while a
drunken couple quarreled, the woman in the
driver's seat. To move the car, the officers, one
African‐American and one white, had to haul the
woman from under the wheel. Cursing and spitting,
she fought back, attracting a crowd. Within minutes
bottles flew, and a three‐night orgy of violence was
on.
Precipitating incidents can be staged. The

Revolutionary Action Movement Maoists
deliberately manufactured the spark for Chicago's
August 1965 riot, according to sworn Congressional
testimony. A false fire alarm was planned, and an
African‐American woman was designated to lean
close and "flop" as the fire‐truck roared from its
station, pretending to be hit. As it happened, she
was killed, and RAM agitators on the scene stirred a
four‐day riot.
A staged incident started the first of the 1967 city

riots. On June 2, a hot and sultry Friday afternoon,
30 African‐American women marched into a Boston
welfare center to protest "insulting social workers"
and "long waits and suspicious investigators." Just
before 5 P.M. they fastened bicycle chains to the
doors, locked in a score of welfare employees.
When police arrived with ladders to rescue the
hostages from their second‐story windows, one
protester began screaming to the crowd outside. A
bottle was thrown—launching three nights of
looting, arson, sniping and bloodshed.
Planned ignitions sometimes fizzle. In August 1965,
Mayor Theodore McKeldin hurriedly convened a
secret meeting of Baltimore civic leaders and
police. The FBI, he explained, had "reliable
information" that African‐American
"revolutionaries" planned to invade a downtown
restaurant and get themselves ejected for
rowdiness. Deployed outside would be
reinforcements from Washington, Philadelphia and
New York to turn in false fire alarms, create a
crowd nucleus, and at the proper signal loose a
volley of bricks and fire bombs at the restaurant
and other storefronts. Only hasty deployment of
police and community leaders and a fortunate
summer thunderstorm squelched the plan.
4. Sandbox Revolutionaries.
A whole new generation of radicals has adopted

the Leninist methodology of planned violence. The
speed with which organized extremists can convert
an incident to riot was demonstrated in Cleveland
one hot, sultry July night in 1966. Six nights
following Chicago's "fire hydrant" riot, several
gangs of young Black Power militants were spoiling
for "a piece of the action." Then a white bartender
in Cleveland's ghetto ordered an unruly African‐
American patron out. The man stood on the
sidewalk cursing, a crowd gathered, a police car
came, a rock was thrown. Within two hours the
militants hit the scene, some wearing African robes.
False alarms sent fire engines and police cruisers on
wild goose chases, sirens advertising the disorder.
Police plainclothesmen and undercover agents
regularly assigned to observing teenage gangs
noticed the same faces here present that they had
seen in a less serious riot in another section a
month before. The riot raged for six days, killing
four and requiring 2,000 National Guardsmen to
restore peace.
Two weeks later a 17‐year‐old "Black Panther" told
a grand jury how his gang planned much of the
systematic arson, sniping and window‐smashing,
and how he himself had thrown Molotov cocktails.
After taking testimony from 40 witnesses, including
undercover police agents, the jurors reported that
adult members of the Revolutionary Action
Movement and Deacons for Defense had
indoctrinated youth "to focus their hatreds" and
demonstrated the use of Molotov cocktails "to
obtain maximum effect." The riot spearheaders
"were in the main young people obviously
assigned, trained and disciplined in the roles they
were to play."
In July 1968, Black Panther Party "Prime Minister"

Stokely Carmichael, back from his sojourns in
Hanoi, Peking and Algeria, and "Field Marshal"
Donald Lee Cox arrived by plane in Mobile,
Alabama. In the following weeks Cox held closed‐
door classes for young African‐Americans in making
and using sophisticated delayed‐action fire bombs
and acid bombs. In the next ten months Mobile
experienced a sharp increase in arson, with 126
cases, 58 of which were attributed to such
explosives. In September 1968, a Panther member
was arrested in San Francisco and found in
possession of party literature on how to make fire
bombs, acid bombs, hand grenades and other types
of explosives.
"This was a teen gang apparently unrelated except
by name and inspiration to what became the Black
Panther Party founded in Oakland.
5. Rumor‐Spreaders and Rally‐Callers.
A few agitators attract and stir the milling masses

to explosion point. On a Sunday afternoon in June
1967, a Tampa policeman chased a young African‐
American felon, called repeated warnings and, as
the fugitive was about to vault a fence, shot.
Neighborhood teenagers attracted by the
commotion saw the young man mortally wounded,
hands over his head, still clinging to the fence. The
rumor spread: A white cop had killed a young
African‐American who had his hands raised trying
to surrender. That evening Tampa's three‐night
ordeal by fire began.
"No riot ever occurs without the aid of rumor,"

writes Harvard's Gordon Allport, a social
psychologist. Wedge‐driving rumors enable one
group to justify violent attacks on another by
depicting their victims as inhuman beasts. Even
before Newark exploded in July 1967, in Plainfield,
18 miles away, tension‐ building rumors buzzed
that "something is going to happen in Plainfield." It
did: a riot in which African‐American teenagers
beat a white policeman to death. For weeks before
its 1964 eruption Philadelphia buzzed with rumors
that New York black nationalists were sending
agents "to create a holocaust."
Indigenous agitators may emerge spontaneously

from the community. In Philadelphia after police
initially calmed the precipitating Friday night street‐
corner incident, Raymond Hall, 25, an African‐
American known as a neighborhood agitator but
with no identifiable political or organizational
affiliation, shouted to passers‐by: "A pregnant black
woman's been beaten and shot to death by a white
policeman." The rumor spread—and so did trouble.
Among the first arrestees was "Abyssinia Hayes,"
also known as "Shayky Muhammud Ali Hussan," a
self‐styled Mus‐lim chief who ran a dry‐cleaning
shop and "African‐Asian Culture Center." Police
arrested him outside his establishment for what
they termed "obscene exhorting of the crowds,"
jumping up and down screaming curses
interspersed with, "We Want Freedom!" At 4 A.M.
a 23‐year‐old woman, secretary in a local charity
office, was arrested atop an overturned
refrigerator haranguing a crowd: "We don't need
Cecil Moore [local NAACP leader trying to 'cool it'].
We don't need civil rights. We can take care of
ourselves." Minutes later her audience surged onto
Columbia Avenue looting and plundering. The
woman, whom a judge described at her trial as "a
lovely young woman," had no previous police
record.
Atlanta's experience with SNCC, in September

1966, shows how the deliberate rumor‐rally
technique works. For weeks SNCC workers in sound
trucks exhorted residents of the Vine City slum and
staged repeated violent and near‐violent "con‐
frontations" with the police. Then one noon a white
officer superficially wounded a fleeing African‐
American car thief. Stokely Carmichael promptly
announced a rally to "tear this place up," and
SNCC's sound truck summoned crowds with
announcements that an African‐American had been
"murdered in handcuffs because he ran a red light."
The ensuing riot raged for 8 hours, with 15 injured
and 63 arrested. Carmichael was charged with
inciting to riot, and Julian Bond, SNCC's press
spokesman and a member of the Georgia
legislature, resigned from SNCC, declaring the
organization had "gone kind of crazy."
6. Street‐Fillers and Weaklings.
Curious and loot‐hungry crowds jump into the

carnival atmosphere. Numerous innocent
spectators are inevitably involved in riots. But many
participants are also simply moral weaklings whose
internalized habits of social control are not strong
enough to keep them from being swept up in the
epidemic of piracy. They "join the crowd" and by
their very presence distract the police from the
violent few.
A Detroit matron stood in a supermarket doorway

yelling at looting youngsters for fully ten minutes:
"Don't do that!" And then she started grabbing
booty herself. In a looter‐crammed Watts store a
woman took a scarf, fingered it hesitantly, mut‐
tered uncomfortably that she had never stolen in
her life and wasn't going to start—and put it back.
But another emerged from a store wearing new
clothes and lugging booty in each hand. The sight of
two police officers stopped her. Like a little girl she
asked, "Can I take them?" One officer shrugged:
"Wait until we're gone." She stepped gingerly back
through the jagged window and sat down. In
Newark a psychologist saw a 12‐year‐old boy
watching looters with shopping carts carts empty a
store. The boy stood for 30 minutes, shifting
uneasily. The man put a hand on his shoulder:
"What's the matter, son?" "It's crazy! I don't see no
sense in it!" the boy exploded. The psychologist
threw out a shrewd guess, naming a parochial
school with strict moral training: "Do you go to St.
…..?"
Wide‐eyed, the boy replied, "Yes, sir—how did you
know?" At 3 A.M., on the same street, a police
captain saw a loot‐laden four‐ year‐old girl hop
from a smashed store window, her mother leaning
from a second‐story apartment window up the
street calling, "Hurry, honey! Be careful!"
In both Watts and Detroit hundreds swept up in the
psychological epidemic later phoned police, to
return booty to its rightful owners. A typical report:
"There's a color television set on my front porch
and I have no idea how it got there!"
7. Bungling and Vacillating Authorities.
Irresponsible or short‐sighted civic leaders hand

hot issues to extremists and temporize or appease
when hard decisions are necessary to enforce
order. Cleveland's urban renewal program helped
create the riot atmosphere there, declared William
L. Taylor, staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission. "The city just simply stopped
enforcing the housing codes. It did not want to
drive up acquisition costs. If there is anything which
in my judgment incites a riot, this is it."
Consciousness of such past sins of both omission
and commission often robs civil authorities of the
moral nerve to act.
But rarely has there been such a record of bungling
and vacil‐lation as that which wrecked the
University of California at Berkeley. A handful of
radicals returning in September 1964 had openly
proclaimed their intent to "organize and SPLIT THIS
CAMPUS WIDE OPEN!" Yet university authorities
handed them a made‐to‐order issue by dusting off
a long‐unen‐ forced rule against setting up tables to
recruit and collect money for off‐campus political
causes on Sproul Plaza, the main campus
crossroads. A non‐student radical defiantly set up a
collection table and, as television cameras
hummed, campus police arrested him for trespass.
Half a dozen student and non‐ student beatniks, a
paroled narcotics convict in the vanguard, flopped
around the police car crying "police brutality." A
few dozen militants held the officers and their
prisoner hostage inside the car, using it as a
platform to harangue the audience.
Swelled by television coverage, the crowd quickly

grew to 5,000. The University's chancellor called for
reinforcements, but its president, Clark Kerr,
refused to let him rescue the hostages; and for 32
hours, while the protesters held their captives, Kerr
"negotiated." Ultimately he agreed to draw up new
campus rules in return for an end to the minority's
lawlessness.
"This retreat before a defiant mob only fueled the

fire," the then vice‐chancellor for student affairs,
Dr. Alex Sheriffs, declared. "It led directly to the
more massive defiance eight weeks later when a
vastly increased mob of 773 students had to be
arrested and hauled bodily out of Sproul Hall.
Surrender to a mob never buys anything except
bigger trouble later on."
Incredibly the same script was played over at

Columbia, Har‐vard and Cornell. On November 7,
1966, when Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara appeared at Harvard for a speech, SDS
demonstrators silenced him with roars of
obscenity, drove him from the hall, surrounded his
car and held him prisoner, flailing at him with the
staves on which their "peace" placards were nailed.
After police rescued McNamara, Harvard's Dean
Monro publicly apologized, but when reporters
asked what pun‐ishment he would give the
offenders he replied, "I see no reason for punishing
students for what was purely a political event." At
that, Harvard's renowned Cambridge neighbor, Al
Capp, creator of "L'il Abner," commented: "Give me
a dean who calls that a political event and I'll give
you a dean who'll call rape an act of love and arson
an act of urban renewal."
At Cornell President James Perkins condoned a long
buildup of escalating lawlessness before the final
disastrous armed revolt in April 1969. In the spring
of 1968 three African‐American students, infuriated
by an economics professor's classroom comments
on the superiority of Western civilization, seized
and held the de‐partment's chairman prisoner.
"When the Perkins administration did not press
charges, it flashed the green light for anarchy,"
reported columnists Rowland Evans and Robert
Novak. In December 1968, the black militants
seized a Cornell building, threw professors and
their belongings into the street, and disrupted
library stacks. When they staged a sit‐in outside
Perkins' own office, Perkins tried to make friends
and sent out for doughnuts and milk, which were
promptly smashed against the wall. Two months
later when the Afro‐American Society demanded
money for bongo drums to celebrate "Malcolm X
Day," Perkins scraped together $1,700 and sent
two black student leaders to New York City in the
university plane. On February 28,1969, Perkins was
bodily pulled down from a speaker's platform.
Chase Manhattan Bank recruiters were physically
assaulted in March, and three white students were
beaten at night on campus—one to the point of
death. By spring Perkins was an object of open
derision. Student militants marched around
sporting sheathed knives, and prudent students
were afraid to stroll the campus quadrangle at
night.
Such paralysis in the face of toddling totalitarians

screeching phony civil rights or antiwar slogans
reflects that phenomenon of moral and intellectual
confusion which sociologist Kurt Baschwitz called
"the paralyzing idea of common goals." Violent
minorities learn instinctively how to use such
slogans to deter authorities. Ku Kluxers in the South
would invariably inhibit law enforcement
authorities and moderates with the query, "You're
for segregation, too, aren't you?" Such was the
climate on U.S. campuses by 1965 that a Kansas
City Star reporter got this revealing answer when
he asked why students had abandoned historic
"panty raid" patterns and similar pranks for open
and riotous rebellion: "Why, you could get kicked
out of school for a panty raid and things like that.
But no one is ever kicked out or punished for
demonstrating for something like civil rights."
8. Paralyzed Law Enforcers.
Inexperienced and undermanned for riots, they fuel
the fires, first by bumbling or inaction and then by
overreaction. In the early stages of Philadelphia's
1964 riot police simply quit. "The hell with it! Let
them do what they want!" one weary officer said,
as a roving teenage band smashed five stores right
in front of him. On the second day word spread:
"North Philly is wide open!" African‐American
community leaders vainly called on the mayor to
"enforce law and order" and either call in the
National Guard or deputize 5,000 African‐American
counter‐rioters to help the police. By nightfall loot‐
hungry mobs were milling and eagerly waiting.
The precipitating incident and initial disorder of the
1965 Watts riot occurred Wednesday night, August
11. But not until almost 30 hours later did the
window‐smashing, looting and arson escalate.
Police used only a small part of their forces. The
Department had become so supersensitive about
possible "brutality" charges that it had divested
itself of both the hardware and psychological
equipment for riot control.9 And as Chief Parker
later admitted, on Thursday he made one of the
biggest mistakes of his career: acceding to African‐
American and white civic leaders, he agreed to pull
his men back from the riot area in hopes it would
quiet itself. * Thus on Friday morning few police
were in sight as crowds began sacking the Watts
business district. When there was no police
response the looting became bolder and spread.
Women and children flocked out of five huge
housing projects. The extensive firebombing began
about noon Friday—only after prolonged police
paralysis. The first of 34 deaths did not occur until
almost 40 hours after the precipitating incident,
and three hours before National Guard troops were
deployed.
Such police impotence in an outbreak's early stages
only encourages rioters and spreads the hysterical
epidemic that sweeps over many ordinarily well‐
behaved people, Dr. James Hudley, Michigan State
sociologist, points out.
In the later stages of violence police often

overreact. "People forget that police too are an
underprivileged minority—in blue," declares Adrian
Jones, an African‐American psychologist
researching police problems at American
University. "For a decade they have been treated
like a persecuted minority, reviled in vicious hate
propaganda, baited viciously at every turn, kicked,
bitten and spat upon—and expected not to
retaliate or show the slightest sign of anger. Like
African‐Americans they have brimming reservoirs
of rage inside."
Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger points
out that Chief Parker acted in response to pressure
from ministers and others who considered
themselves community leaders and promised to
calm the situation if only he would not deploy his
forces in the area. The chief accepted their advice
and kept the police out. "That decision may well
have been the major cause of the Watts riots,"
concludes Younger. "Looking back now, all law
enforcement in our community is in general
agreement that it was a mistake not to apply
massive but restrained force, police force, to the
area immediately." Law Day speech, May 1, 1969,
Congressional Record, August 7, 1969, page E6791.
tions clogged and chains of command crumbling,

both police and National Guardsmen are frequently
little more than a mob themselves. Because jails
were crammed and they were unable to arrest all
the looters, police began administering such
summary punishments as a slap or kick in the
summer of 1967. Many simply stopped bothering
to shout "Halt!" before firing at fleeing looters. In
New Haven several officers brutally beat two
African‐American youths. A Cleveland newspaper
after the 1966 riot ran a photograph of a policeman
picking over a looted store. In Newark's fourth
night of violence at least three state police cars and
a few Guardsmen toured, shooting up African‐
American businesses whose "Soul Brother" signs
had kept them unharmed. In both Newark and
Detroit Guardsmen and police, panicked by
"sniper" fire that was often shooting by other
panicky lawmen, loosed vol‐leys at occupied
apartment buildings, killing such innocents as a
mother of 11 children and a four‐year‐old girl.
Indeed, they sometimes found themselves shooting
at each other; one Michigan Guardsman died, and
possibly a Newark fire captain also, in such wild
fire. Lawmen inadvertently killed 11 of Detroit's 43
dead; 18 more were law‐breakers shot in the act or
in flight. Witnesses claimed one crowd of police
and Guardsmen goaded a young arsonist into
running, then shot him down. Three young African‐
American boys were shotgunned to death in the
infamous Algiers Motel "incident." Two Detroit
policemen were charged with murder. One was
released after his incriminating statement was
thrown out of court under a new Supreme Court
rule on confessions, designed, ironically, to protect
criminal sus‐pects from police interrogators. The
other was acquitted after a trial judge's
controversial charge to the jury. Another officer in
Detroit savagely beat three white sniper suspects in
jail, trying to make them "confess." Others stripped
an African‐American woman and photographed
her—a search process normally performed by
policewomen on dope‐pushers suspected of taping
contraband to their bodies. (These men were
dismissed from the force.)
Nevertheless, Joe Strickland, the black Detroit

News reporter whose brilliant work first exposed
the Algiers Motel atrocity and won him a Pulitzer
Prize nomination, viewed police behavior in
perspective: "What we saw was not so much latent
racism as normal human panic. The cop on the
street remembered the horrible news stories from
Watts and Newark. He had been exposed to
inflammatory headlines in our own Detroit
newspapers wildly exaggerating the amount of
sniping and fatalities from it. We're lucky a hundred
more didn't crack under the strain."
9. Old‐Line Subversives.
These scavengers of discontent constantly search

for any issue or irritant they can convert into white‐
hot revolutionary hate. For this purpose the
Communist Party and its recent offshoot, the
Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), have de‐
ployed schooled cadres across the nation's college
campuses and slum communities. The PLP Reds
researched U.S. Census Bureau data to find the
most‐likely‐to‐explode slum in San Francisco, then
launched a campaign "to raise the consciousness of
the people to a point where they regard the state
as their enemy." PLP Organizer John Ross built
front groups around "hate City Hall" and "hate the
slumlord" slogans. A typical campaign: a
housewives' march on City Hall demanding a traffic
light at a neighborhood intersection. "Such conflict
with City Hall must be created if the people on the
street are going to learn any lesson at all,"
proclaimed the PLP magazine. When the San
Francisco riot erupted in September 1966, Ross was
there to lead a teenage picket line around the
National Guard Armory as troops mobilized to
support the police; a "confrontation" that ended,
predictably, in bloodshed.
Three weeks later Oakland erupted, the

"spontaneous" explosion of a carefully prepared
climate. Attorney Robert True‐ haft, identified in
sworn Congressional testimony as a Communist
Party member, campaigned for district attorney on
a blatant anti‐police platform and collected 74,500
votes. A newspaper whose editorial board included
Mark Comfort, one of those attending the PLP
founding convention in New York City, blanketed
African‐American neighborhoods with headlines
depicting police as "Killers on Patrol." Communist
Party Committeeman Roscoe Proctor organized
African‐American teenagers into "End Police
Brutality" marches. Anonymous "Burn Baby Burn"
placards appeared in African‐American
neighborhoods. Truehaft kicked off a school
boycott campaign with a speech proclaiming, "You
people have to take the Constitution into your own
hands." High schools were blanketed with leaflets.
The day before the boycott African‐American
teenagers walking home from school collected
around policemen trying to unravel a fender‐
bending accident and began throwing rocks. The
Oakland riot was on.
10. Terrorists and Insurrectionists.
Violent messiahs, sure the day of Armageddon has
come, swing into action with standby plans for
parlaying incident into revolution. In Philadelphia
four RAM militants were indicted on charges of
planning to start a riot in July 1967 by phoning
police that a crap game was in progress, ambushing
them, then poisoning food and drink prepared for
policemen at canteens set up in the riot area. Police
seized 298 grams of poison which the FBI crime
laboratory identified as enough pure potassium
cyanide "to kill thousands of human beings." After
police found caches containing 219 sophisticated
chemical fire bombs and 1,206 Molotov cocktails,
Mayor James Tate banned public gatherings of
more than ten people. Philadelphia had no riot.
In Havana, addressing a Castroite revolutionary

congress, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael avowed an
open strategy of using hate propaganda to organize
urban guerrilla war inside the United States,
quoting Ernesto "Che" Guevara: "Hatred is an
element of the struggle, transforming man into an
effective, violent, selective and cold killing
machine." Returning by way of Hanoi, where he
conferred with guerrilla warfare experts,
Carmichael traveled coast to coast holding secret
meetings guarded by "Black Panther" stormtroops,
creating Viet Cong‐like "Black United Fronts"
complete with "sections" on "protection,"
propaganda, and underground organization.
Other leading U.S. radicals shuttle steadily to and

from Hanoi, Havana, Peking and Moscow. Former
PLP revolutionary Philip Luce has revealed that as
far back as 1964 such travelers were given
thousands of dollars in cash to finance their
agitation in U.S. colleges and urban centers; and
secret informants affirm that the money still comes
by way of Cuba, Mexico, Europe and Japan. Indeed,
formal schooling for revolution has reached such a
plane that in 1967 "New Left" radicals in New York
offered a "Demonstration Defense Course"
including such lectures as "coordinated
movement," anti‐police techniques "for future
street actions," "defense against clubs and horses,"
"hand and foot techniques," and "inter‐group
actions."
In Cleveland in July 1968 a band of African‐

American extremists estimated at a dozen attacked
a police surveillance team, using automatic
carbines, at least one machinegun, M‐l rifles and
shotguns. Within 30 minutes two patrolmen and a
lieutenant were dead, and another 14 wounded. "It
was worse than Saipan or Tinian!" exclaimed one
detective‐veteran of both. The attack started a rash
of looting and arson that continued until 2,600
National Guardsmen ended it the next morning.
Ten people were dead from gunfire. A week later in
New York City two policemen were gunned down
by a phantom shotgun terrorist.
11. The Haters.
The people who riot do so because of a state of
mind. This is the conclusion indicated by research
findings in Watts, Newark and Detroit. Social
scientists could find little difference between those
who rioted and those who did not, in such factors
as income, education and employment.12 Indeed,
80 percent of those arrested in Detroit had stable
jobs averaging $115 a week; in Newark, three out
of every four arrestees had jobs. But one
outstanding difference set those who rioted apart:
They were people filled with hate, not only for
"Whitey" but for other African‐Americans and,
seemingly, the whole world.13 Far from despairing,
they were young men who see great possibilities
for "the good life" in America and want instant
millennium.14 They showed a disproportionately
high degree of influence of the most militant hate
groups such as SNCC and the Black Muslims. "The
rioters evidently marched to the drummers who
are most actively advocating a radical
reorganization of American society and the African‐
American's place in it," a UCLA analysis of Watts
rioters concluded.
Why these young men react differently from

nonrioters with similar economic and social
backgrounds is still an open question. But the
findings fit with conclusions of other behavioral
scientists, pointing toward the conclusion that
people riot because they have had their minds
programmed to hate, by a kaleidoscopic
combination of life's accidental circumstances,
individual psychological disposition, and systematic
hate propaganda.
A team of Princeton social psychologists has

carefully mapped the way organizations of
professional hate propagandists (specifically,
Communist parties) attract hate‐prone, emotionally
pathological individuals and provide them with
prepackaged hate targets and rationalizations for
antisocial behavior. Both messianic revolutionary
groups of the extreme left and anti‐Semitic and
racist groups on the right attract disproportionately
high percentages of psychopathic personalities.
And so do riots.
12. The Decent Majority.
The law‐abiding citizens are far more numerous

than the riot mythologists and headlines would
have us believe. A Detroit Free Press‐Urban League
survey showed that even among those people who
were on the streets during the riot, the counter‐
rioters who actively worked against the violence
outnumbered those who participated by almost
half Counter‐rioters generally were more mature,
better educated and had higher incomes. They
failed because police did not back them up in the
early stages by forcefully removing the violent few
hoodlums and thus deterring the more timid
looters who followed in their wake. Time and again,
on Twelfth Street, young toughs yelled down
counter‐rioters and imposed their reign of terror.
From the first hour in Detroit African‐American

citizens phoned police with information on stolen
goods, caches of guns and firebombs and looting
activity. Hundreds volunteered personal services.
Storekeepers served food and cold drinks free to
police and Guardsmen. Homeowners banded
together with shotguns and proclaimed they would
shoot anyone stoning firemen. One is‐land of peace
was the Positive Neighborhood Action Committee,
which in place of the usual anomic disorganization
luckily had a distinctive social infrastructure to
activate during the emergency. With volunteer help
from a real estate firm, residents from 50 blocks
had chipped in $3,000 to buy and convert empty
lots to playgrounds. When the trouble erupted,
their block clubs mobilized quickly to defend their
21,000 residents, keep the youngsters in and the
troublemakers out.
Both the Watts and Detroit surveys showed that a
solid majority of riot area residents stayed home.
There simply was no basic and widespread
breakdown of respect for law and order. Indeed,
quite the opposite. An overwhelming 81 percent of
Detroit's non‐rioters thought police should have
been tougher from the start, and even those who
admitted some riot activity (mostly looting)
thought so too—by a 60 percent majority!
Clearly, the riot was a temporary reign of terror by
a violent few who pushed into dominance because
of police inaction. And the ghetto community's
response—even a majority of those who joined the
"carnival"—was an urgent plea to civil authorities:
PLEASE, DON'T LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!

A Tragedy In Five Acts
1. Natural History of Riots.
Behind the horror and mystery of the American

urban explosions of the 1960's, social scientists and
historians, like scientists watching a deadly typhoid
microbe multiply beneath a microscope, could see
a tragic, familiar "natural history." The epidemic
recurs from the ancient Roman riots sparked by the
Gracchus brothers to Wat Tyler's "Rebellion" in
medieval Lon‐don to the American Colonists' Stamp
Act riots to the Paris mob before the Bastille, to
today.
Until this century, most thinkers about mob

interaction propounded some form of the myth of
mass madness. They generally depicted the crowd
as becoming an organic "mass demon," a kind of
primeval monster that emerges from man in the
mass. But in 1938 a German journalist, Kurt
Baschwitz, who had fled the Nazi tyranny to
Holland, published a book called You and the
Crowd.1 He probed what he called "mass
disturbances of reason," identified by this criterion:
Does the person himself, in the quiet of his own
repose and meditation, tend to view an act
committed within a mass as deviating from his own
standards of behavior under normal conditions?
Baschwitz pondered such phenomena in the light
of what he had seen in Hitler's Germany, in the rise
of fascism in Mussolini's Italy and bolshevism in
Lenin's Russia. And he probed historical examples f
rom (he medieval flagellant manias and anti‐
Semitic persecutions during the Black Death to the
fall of the Bastille, the September Massacres and
Robespierre's Reign of Terror in the French
Revolution. Baschwitz's study broke new ground in
the sociology of crowd phenomena and civil
commotion.
Baschwitz identified seven stages in mass

pathology: 1. In‐roads into the Rule of Law. 2.
Paralysis of the Custodians of Police Power. 3.
Emergence of the Violent Minority. 4. The
(Congregation of the Unscrupulous. 5. The Reign of
Terror and Dumb Panic of the Pliant Majority. 6.
Restoration of Law and Order and Normal Social
Restraints. 7. The Rationalization of Dumb Panic.
The classic natural history of the Baschwitzean

"mass disturbance of reason" unfolds as follows:
Some social upheaval or progressive moral

psychological debilitation robs the normal
custodians of authority of the will to apply force to
maintain law and order. Promoting and en‐
couraging this debilitation there is usually a
violently inclined radical minority, which wars
perennially with the normal state of social peace.
One of the dissident minority's primary weap‐ons is
the paralyzing idea, any ideological‐psychological
device that divides the emotions of the duly
constituted authorities and creates indecisiveness
and vacillation. A favored paralyzing ploy is
"common goals": "You don't want race‐ mixing, do
you?" "You're against the war in Vietnam, too!"
Another is threat of heresy, the threat by word or
gestures that the hot‐eyed haters will deal any
dissenter the same brutal treatment generally
reserved for the proscribed and persecuted
minority. Regardless of what paralyzes or
disintegrates the forces of law and order—be it
historical accident or the machinations of evil
men—the unscrupulous minority of undercivilized
and pathological individuals endemic within every
society discover the moral holiday and congregate
in a cohesive, functioning subgroup. This
"terroristic minority" then intimidates the
unorganized and pliant majority of normal, law‐
abiding citizenry, installing the total or partial reign
of terror. During this intimidation the normative
patterns of civilized humanitarian behavior are
suspended; the depraved minority is free to
commit mass crimes and atrocities against society
at large or a hate‐target minority (Jews, capitalists,
witches, African‐Americans or whatever minority is
readily accessible and identifiable). Eventually,
again by chance or innate social dynamics, the law‐
abiding majority reasserts itself; peace‐loving
individuals reestablish communications, organize
and coordinate action to break the reign of terror,
recontrol the violent minority and restore domestic
peace, due process of law and normal social
restraints. Then comes the majority's members'
rationalization of their inaction while under the
influence of mass intimidation, as they attempt to
explain and justify their acquiescence during the
commission of misdeeds repugnant to their
normative standards of conduct and reason.
In the middle of the 20th century, mass violence

was altered by two new ingredients: instantaneous
electronic communication, especially television and
the application by schooled Leninoid engineers of
social demolition, applying a technology of planned
climatizing and hate targeting. The process unfolds
like a tragedy in five acts:
Act 1. Climate Making
Planned and spontaneous climate‐making events
dry the tinder. Extremists step up their activity,
rumors fly and expectation of violence spreads. Ten
weeks before Harlem's 1964 riot, the New York
Times gave front‐page coverage to news that a
gang of 400 youths, the "Blood Brothers," were
training under Malcolm X's Black Muslim sect to
"build up a strong force to oppose police if trouble
should develop in Harlem." A white storekeeper
and a social worker were knifed to death, and
members of the "Blood Brothers" were accused.
About 75 African‐American youngsters raided a
fruit stand, and when police tried to round them
up, gang members turned the melee into a minor
riot requiring considerable police force and evoking
widespread charges of "police brutality." Jesse
Gray, identified in congressional testimony as
formerly a Communist Party organizer for Harlem,
joined Malcolm X's "advisory board." Soon PLP
Communist chieftain William Epton was organizing
a "Harlem Defense Council," claiming 30 block
organizations. Police began discovering caches of
fire bombs and rocks on rooftops. Three weeks
before the riot, intelligence warned precinct
captains of a plan to place decoy officers into a side
street and stage a "police brutality" incident.
In this supercharged atmosphere a policeman shot
and killed young African‐American who was
charging him with a knife. Epton's PLP Hires ground
out inflammatory leaflets with the policeman's face
and a headline, "Wanted for Murder." Epton
himself harangued a tense, hot, street‐corner rally
four hours before i he violence erupted: "We will
not be fully free until we smash (his state. We're
going to have to kill a lot of these cops and judges."
(This speech got Epton convicted for criminal
anarchy and inciting to riot.) The next day Jesse
Gray harangued her at her rally, with top
Communist Party officials in the audience, uttering
his infamous call for "one hundred skilled black
revolutionaries ready to die." At the same moment,
Communist Party member Michael Eisenscher and
other members of the Party's youth front, the W. E.
B. DuBois Club, were feeding violence by organizing
a march of 300 young African‐Americans from the
Bronx down to Harlem, sending runners into
playgrounds they passed, to collect more juvenile
fuel. Just as they arrived at 125th Street the second
night's rock‐throwing and fire‐bombing erupted,
two blocks away, at the funeral of the slain African‐
American youth.
Detroit's 1943 race riot winged on a false rumor

African‐Americans had tossed a white woman and
her baby off the Bell Isle bridge. Such wedge‐
driving rumors may be deliberately spread.
Marshaling rumors—"Trouble downtown
tonight"—heighten the expectation and summon
the violent‐prone minority like a bugle. On the
heels of Detroit's 1967 eruption, African‐American
teenagers in Toledo planned their own outburst,
chortling the slogan, "Don't buy now—wait for the
riot!"
Act 2. Precipitating Incident
A rally or precipitating incident summons street‐
fillers who overwhelm police and cloak the violent
minority. The Rochester, Philadelphia and Watts
rioting in 1964‐65 were all ignited from routine
police arrests on busy streets, with crowds
spontaneously gathering and fissioning. Extremists
may move in quickly to exploit such incidents.
Leonard Patterson, African‐American former
Communist and graduate of Moscow's infamous
Lenin
School course on mass manipulation and social

demolition methodology, told the author how he
and his comrades sparked Harlem's 1935
"Woolworth Store Riot." A white manager chased
some shoplifting African‐American boys out of the
store. The Reds immediately called a protest rally
and spread the rumor that the boys had been taken
to the store's basement, beaten and killed.
Predictably, the rally erupted into a window‐
smashing riot.
Before the July 1964 riot in Harlem, William Epton
of the Maoist PLP reds had organized the "junkies"
in the various blocks into a reconnaissance net so
he would know the minute any trouble occurred
and would be in a position to launch inflammatory
agitation.
Act 3. Keynoting, Signaling Anarchy
While agitators "keynote" the crowd, young

hoodlums and criminals probe and test, and police
fail to respond, advertising a "moral holiday."
Prankish teenage boys and hardened rowdies start
by throwing rocks and bottles. If police cannot or
do not respond, the paralysis of authority signals
anarchy. Behind the window‐smashers, looters and
street‐fillers, the firebugs go to work.
In the 1967 Grand Rapids, Michigan rioting four out
of every five jailed during the first four hours were
under 25; the proportion dropped substantially in
the remaining 36 hours.3 Toledo's police found that
every single one of the 22 young adults (average
age 20) jailed in the first three hours had a criminal
record, averaging three prior arrests each. These
documented cases are especially illuminating
because in those two towns police were not
immobilized as they were in Watts, Newark, Detroit
and Washington, and their quick arrests provided
an invaluable "snapshot" of the activists in early
phases of riot activity not available in the other
cities.
Act 4. The Drawing Effect
A "drawing effect" begins pulling in fun‐hungry

rowdies, looters, arsonists and criminal denizens.
The moral holiday blooms like a forest fire that
rages on until rain or firefighters stop it or it runs
Out of fuel. The Baltimore riot of April 1968,
following Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination,
pursued the typical pat‐tern. Large milling crowds
overwhelmed police. Then a few probing rocks, a
few fleet looters, signaled anarchy. The loot leaders
and window smashers were chiefly teenagers and
young men, including some carloads of loot‐hungry
rioters from Washington, D.C., already in flames 40
miles away. Later waves of looters included
increasing numbers of women, older men and
children.
At the same time, in Washington, the same process
of testing followed by the drawing effect had
wrecked the city. A Washington policeman said, "I
think we could have stopped this thing if they had
not put us under wraps so. Looters would break a
window, then stand aside to watch our reaction.
When we did nothing, the mob would move in and
ransack the place. We just had to stand there."
Act. 5. Organized Insurrection
Detroit's was the only recent U.S. riot to come close
to the grand finale: open street warfare. Police and
fire departments are not t he only organizations
with standby plans to respond speedily to
spontaneous violence. Extremist groups have a long
tradi‐ t ion of waiting for "the day," and may swing
into action at the li rst alarm. By telephone and
courier they may convene a secret general staff,
assign tasks and with an incredibly small handful of
trained professionals create planned chaos and
mayhem.*
We must turn to history to see the last scene of the
tragedy. In December 1905, Lenin's Bolsheviks
escalated Moscow's "comma strike" (which began
from a printer's dispute over whether typesetters
on piecework wages should be paid for
NEA Columnist Ray Cromley during World War II

commanded the U.S. h;iison group assigned to Mao
Tse‐tung's headquarters. Cromley came to know
many top Red Chinese and Vietnamese guerrilla
commanders and professional ly‐trained
subversives, and kept contact with many after the
war. Their standard texts, Cromley reports, "call for
using a few men—two, three, five or so. When
more men or women get into the riot activist
group, command and control become difficult.
These Asians say the major riots they have first‐
hand knowledge of have been directed by very
small well‐trained squads. Two men have
sometimes been enough to spur on a small riot,
develop it and keep it rolling in an Asian town . . ."
(Washington Daily News, August 18, 1967). setting
punctuation marks) to five days of bloody street
fighting. But the bloodiest example is the Paris
"June Days" uprising of 1848. Radicals badly beaten
in the first free election under a new constitution
chose insurrection, calling out an estimated 40,000
unemployed, militant socialists and "true
believers." They erected barricades, seized
weapons. The new democratic assembly called in
the army. For four days Paris was a raging
battlefield for infantry, artillery and cavalry. At least
1,500 were killed, countless thousands wounded.
As the Cleveland insurrection of July 1968

demonstrates, we have lunatic fringe groups in the
United States—fortunately small so far—plotting
just such a final act.
2. Detroit: Classic Script.
Detroit's 1967 outburst followed a classic format,
ironically repeating the 1943 race riot's crucial
phase: a highly visible police failure in the face of
probing predators and keynoters. The 1967 version
began in the Tenth Police Precinct, whose
population density of 22,300 per square mile
exceeds even Newark's ill‐fated Fourth Precinct.
African‐American refugees from the South's Tractor
Revolution and from Detroit's own urban renewal
were jammed into repeatedly subdivided
apartment buildings. In six years the city gained
100,000 African‐Americans, many in the Tenth
Precinct. No "ghetto," the neighborhood boasts
many fine middle‐class African‐American homes on
neat, decent streets. But splitting them down the
middle is Twelfth Street—The Street" for Detroit's
numbers hustlers, dope pushers, pimps, prostitutes
and repeating felons free between convictions. The
Precinct's 13,773 serious crimes in 1966, ten times
the national average, made it one of America's
most violent precincts, with armed robberies
frequently going unreported because victims felt
the police were impotent. So life on "The Street"
was already virtually a continuous riot. At the first
sign of trouble its denizens emerged: robbers,
rapists, murderers, many with records stretching
back two and three decades. Not a few showed up
in the early police hauls.
Weeks in advance clandestine painters had

stenciled African‐American neighborhoods with
signs depicting a fist raised with a tom‐ mygun and
urging "UNITE OR PERISH—JOIN THE BLACK
GUARD." SNCC literature proclaimed: "We must fill
ourselves with hate for all white things. Modern
America depends on many complex systems such
as electricity, water, gas, sewer‐age and
transportation, and all are vulnerable. . . . We
cannot train an army in the local park, but we can
be ready for the final confrontation. We have to
hate and disrupt and destroy and blackmail and lie
and steal and become bloodbrothers like the Mau
Mau."
In June two events inflamed Detroit African‐
Americans.
—When an African‐American man and his white

wife moved into a white suburb, neighbors
demonstrated and broke windows.
—In a public park white toughs made improper

advances to an African‐American woman, then
killed her husband, a Vietnam veteran, for
defending her.
Then Newark erupted. Detroit News editor Martin

Hayden says, "People sat home in front of their
television screens view‐ing those looters at work in
Newark, and many thought they'd get in on similar
action."
At 3:35 A.M. Sunday, July 23, with the Newark riot
ten days earlier fresh on everyone's mind, the
precinct's four‐man "cleanup squad," after trying
for hours, sneaked a plainclothes‐ man inside an
after‐hours Twelfth Street speakeasy. Squad
Sergeant Art Howison, who a year earlier had
arrested 14 there, was astonished to find 85 people
this time. It was a party for three returned Vietnam
veterans. He called extra paddy wagons, and
instead of the usual twenty minutes police spent an
hour hauling away their prisoners. A crowd of 200
collected, jovial and wisecracking with both police
and the arrested citizens. But soon three agitators
went to work: a dope pusher and pimp, a minor
"black power" militant and a third young mystery
man wearing a green shirt. One officer recognized
"Green‐ sleeves" as the same person who had
heaved a brick at him a week earlier during an
arrest. "Look at them damn whitey cops!" cried
Greensleeves. "They're always messing things up.
Let's run 'em out of here!" The crowd watched with
amusement, expecting the agitators to land in jail,
too. But police did nothing.
Soon the agitators sidled behind the crowd and

lobbed bottles. As the first one crashed at a
policeman's feet the crowd shied, as if to run at the
first sign of reaction. But there was none. The
spectators became tense. "We're going to have a
riot!" Green‐ sleeves chanted. Visibly anxious,
many spectators drifted away. But a few joined the
bottle‐throwers. Soon only 40 people remained—a
hard core of young men. As the last police car
pulled away they unleashed a fusillade that
smashed its rear window.
Advertising Paralysis. A wayward brick shattered

the Es‐quire Clothing Store window down the
street. Then, oddly, the little crowd stood aghast.
They waited, expecting police to re‐turn. A few
young men ventured in haltingly. Then more. After
20 minutes a two‐man police cruiser approached,
siren blaring. Fifty looters fled madly. But the police
turned the corner and drove off. A dismayed cry
rang out: "The police ain't doin' no‐ thin'!" "Let's
get what we want!" At that small packs of young
men scattered, smashing windows and looting.
That news spread like lightning.
Still the Twelfth Street crowd grew slowly but
steadily. A few bottles were hurled, not at police,
but at television crews who were arriving; some
newsmen actively stirred the action. At 8:24 a
looted shoestore began to burn. Firemen doused it
with no interference.
Magnet to Madness. But 9 A.M. was Detroit's point
of no re‐turn, almost five hours after police dodged
the first crashing bottle. The crowd began
mushrooming. Most were still specta‐tors. "They
seemed transfixed," one policeman told me, as
they watched teenage boys dart about. But
reinforcements were on the way. A numbers
hustler told how: "Hey, they're rioting up on
Twelfth!" a friend told him. "What are they doing?"
"Looting. The police is letting them take it. They
aren't stopping anybody." That's all it took: "I said it
was time for me to get some of those diamonds
and watches and rings. It wasn't that I was mad at
anybody or trying to get back at the white man. If I
saw something I could get without getting hurt, I
got it," the hustler later told a sociologist.
Ironically, this admitted looter was incensed by

police behavior: "What have we got them for? They
could have stopped it. I'd have an armful of clothes
or a bagful of diamonds and a cop would say,
'Having fun?' I'd say, 'Plenty,' and go on. They
seemed to enjoy seeing Twelfth Street tore down."
Not really. From the man on the beat to Mayor
Cavanagh the authorities were petrified. News
accounts of Newark and years of "police brutality"
sloganeering had prepared their minds for inaction.
The Mayor and Police Commissioner, called at 5:10
A.M., did not GO out on Twelfth. They stayed in
their offices, mesmerizing themselves with the
myth of a monstrous mob that simply did not exist
at that time. The same thing happened all down
the chain of command to the police on the scene ‐
all were paralyzed—each one afraid to budge
without positive word from above. One sergeant
told me how it was: "Each one of us was thinking if
we tried to make an arrest we might be the
trigger—and go down in history like John Wilkes
Booth."
A teenager who joined the street packs saw it

differently: "Those first hours when the cops pulled
out were just like a holiday. All the kids wandered
about sayin', real amazed like, The fuzz is scared;
they ain't goin' to do nothin'.' I remember one day
me and another kid was locked in the school and
wasn't any teacher around. We had a ball, doin' the
things we'd been wantin' to. We set some fires in
the baskets, emptied the teachers' desks, and stuck
wet toilet paper in the principal's mailbox. Well,
that's what it was like out on The Street."
For nine hours, while the crowds built and the

looting spread, Detroit's police simply did nothing.
They did not even seal the area, though 108 men
deployed in an ineffective cordon around twelve
blocks. The crowd swelled to several hundred, still
mostly spectators. Greensleeves was seen again at
9 o'‐clock, and soon other agitators began to
"keynote" the specta‐tors, urging, "Get 'em! Get
those whitey cops!" But few listened. Policemen let
people pass, laughed and joked with looters, even
stopped traffic to let homeward‐bound looters
cross the streets, their arms laden with booty.
There was no real violence, no personal attacks on
whites or police; just window‐smashing and
opportunistic pilfering. Youngsters skipped and
danced and asked newsmen, "Is this as bad as
Newark yet?"
Though the mayor later denied it, many officers on
the street believed he had issued an order not to
use their guns even if fired upon. One wide‐eyed
11‐year‐old watched the looting and laughed at the
immobile police: "They won't shoot. Mayor
Cavanagh said they aren't supposed to shoot."*
From 5 to 11 A.M. on Sunday police made only 36
arrests in all Detroit—fewer
Mayor Cavanagh's subsequent explanations were

garbled, contradictory, and in one instance—on a
nationwide television broadcast—demonstrably
erroneous. If he did not actually issue an order for
police inaction—he may have been lying in the face
of the subsequent heated controversy—he at least
committed (he cardinal sin for any commander‐in‐
chief of allowing incredible confusion in the ranks.
than in (lie single ordinary Saturday midnight hour
before the riot began. In short, they simply did not
know what they were supposed to do.
Others did—nondescript denizens of "The Street"

who re‐called the "Burn, Baby, Burn" slogan of
Watts, and Detroit's avowed black revolutionaries.
At 10 A.M. by telephone the radicals hurriedly
convened a secret basement meeting, ecumenical
in spirit. Molotov cocktails were already cached. An
informant described that meeting on an NBC
television documentary: Two leaders divided 50 to
70 militants into little groups and sent them around
the city to smash windows, urge people to loot, set
fires, steal arms from the pawnshops and, after
dark, begin sniping. The first major fire was set at
1:16 P.M.: the Victory Paint Store on Twelfth two
blocks from the raided speakeasy. Said NBC's
informant: "The windows had been broken. So first
of all I threw a can of gas and then threw the
cocktail in."5 U.S. Senate investigators verified that
walkie‐ talkie conversations had been monitored:
"Burn that damn place down." "I can't—people are
in there looting." "Dammit, burn it down anyway!"
Flaming Fad. After the first fire on Sunday

afternoon, arson became a fad. Sandlot baseball‐
type organization sprang up. No grand
conspiratorial apparatus was necessary; it really
does not take long for Americans to get organized
for anything— even a riot. A white political science
professor watched in fascination as excited
teenagers recruited and exhorted each other to
sling flaming oilcans into emptied stores. Two
youngsters, one white and one African‐American,
each with long juvenile records, joined to torch
German Brothers Furniture. A 22‐year‐old married
factory worker seized the chance to burn a store
because he "hated the bastard that owned it for
calling the cops on me once." (He also did some
rooftop sniping.) A white arsonist firebombed an
African‐American barber shop. Gusty ten‐mph
winds spread the flames. (In five days firebugs
ignited an estimated 225 buildings, but wind‐
whipped flames burned twice that many more.)
Teenage firebugs torched one corner store and
became frantic as they saw fire spread down a
residential street. Neighbors told them the first two
row houses were rentals. "Oh, that's different,"
they shrugged. But as the third and fourth, owner‐
occupied, began to catch, the arson leaders
became the garden‐ hose brigade leaders. An
African‐American plainclothes officer saw another
firebug torch a corner store and watch in
astonishment as flames marched down the block to
the ninth house—his own.
Criminals, too, knew what to do. All afternoon two
panel trucks toured the alleys behind Twelfth
Street, their drivers overseeing a flock of hired ten‐
and twelve‐year‐olds. They systematically loaded
their trucks with merchandise, drove to
warehouses in other parts of the city and returned.
Very probably some of this organized looting was
directed by Mafia "soldiers" responding to the
golden opportunity. Within 48 hours, the FBI
reported, a flourishing black market in stolen goods
blossomed. Shipments went to "fences" in
Cleveland and Chicago.
At 2 P.M. Mayor Cavanagh assured State Police the
situation was "under control." Ten minutes later,
with fires exploding everywhere minute by minute
and African‐American leaders excoriating him for
inaction, Cavanagh called again and asked State
Police for help; at 4:20 he asked for the National
Guard.
But it was too late. Even as Cavanagh was phoning
for the Guard the first person was shot and George
Messerlian, an elderly white shoe repairman, was
trying to fight off a looter pack with a 20‐inch
saber. He was bludgeoned to death with an iron
pipe. Simultaneously Fire Department radios
crackled to firefighters under bombardment from
young hoodlums: "Protect yourselves! If you have
trouble, pull out! All companies without police
protection—orders are to withdraw." Firemen
simply abandoned a hundred square blocks; (in five
days they were forced to withdraw from 283
blazes.) Two hours later police recorded the first
sniper report, and in Brown's Drug Store on Twelfth
two young men, apparently looters, were trapped
and burning alive. As the sun set, at 9:01 P.M.,
police and firemen drew spasmodic gunfire, and
the bloodbath was on.
The very next issue of the Michigan Chronicle,

Detroit's African‐American‐oriented newspaper,
bannered an angry headline: "IT COULD HAVE BEEN
STOPPED!"
Few could disagree.
3. Washington: Lessons Unlearned Again.
On April 5, 1967, that first terrible afternoon of

electronic‐ borne anarchy popping from city to city
across America after Dr. Martin Luther King's
murder, the Capitol dome disap‐peared in billowing
smoke from the roaring fires of mob vio‐lence in
the Nation's Capital. My colleagues and I have
reported riots from Watts to Santo Domingo,
Harlem to Mississippi, Tokyo to the Congo. But the
three wrenching days of piracy, arson and death we
witnessed in Washington burned into memory as
no others could. The savage scenes were enacted
within sight of the White House, the Capitol, the
Supreme Court—the most sacred symbols of our
national life:
‐As darkness fell, powerful White House floodlights
searched nearby buildings for potential snipers as
soldiers in battledress paced Pennsylvania Avenue
where usually nothing more exciting than a few
crank pickets may be found. Three blocks away, on
Connecticut Avenue, I watched marauding bands
sack some of Washington's finest stores. Nattily
dressed young African‐Americans roared up in two
brand‐new sports cars, a perfectly timed
rendezvous, reconnoitered, and rushed into a
fashionable men's store, cramming armloads of
slacks and shirts into their cars.
•At midnight sentries repeatedly halted us as we

neared the Capitol, where Marines carrying
automatic weapons were de‐ploying to defend the
Senate and House of Representatives. Not since
Pearl Harbor had a president considered it
necessary to dispatch troops to safeguard these
buildings. A Marine lieutenant politely suggested it
might be dangerous to walk about in the darkness
unescorted.
•General William Westmoreland, the American

commander in Vietnam, landed in a Marine
helicopter on the White House lawn Saturday
morning for scheduled talks on the war. "God
knows what's going through his mind," a
presidential assistant muttered. During his
approach to Washington, he saw more fires than
during his departure from Saigon.
•A few blocks away from the White House that
night I paused to talk with three soldiers on patrol
along Seventh Street. "A mob overturned a
Mercedes, dragged out three people inside ;ind
started to beat them," a boyish paratrooper said.
"When we went to help them, snipers started
shooting. The bullets bounced around my feet. I
was in Vietnam a year and never came as close to
getting hit as I did today."
•Up the street, three families huddled, wet and

shivering in (he cold April night, as firemen fought
the raging inferno which minutes before had been
their home. A hit‐and‐run fire‐ bomber, apparently,
had heaved a Molotov cocktail into the li rst floor.
Driving by, a white policeman, Private Robert V.
Hill, Jr., leaped from his patrol car and plunged
upstairs through llame and smoke to bring a dozen
black people to safety. One African‐American man,
half naked, found the young policeman nearby,
grabbed him around the neck and hugged him.
"God bless you! I had given up until I caught your
hand. We'd been burned alive if you had not
come." At that moment, his family's wagging
puppy, whimpering and wet, came running out of
the flaming building, their only remaining
possession. The wife picked him up, hugged and
soothed him—and cried.
•Late Friday night, as the first 13,000 troops

deployed, I looked out from a bluff high above the
Potomac in Virginia over the city below—
smouldering beneath a pall of smoke, dotted by
flickering fires, looking like London along the
Thames after a Nazi raid. It was a scene of ineffable
tragedy.
As in Detroit, it need not have happened.
At 7:16 P.M. on Thursday, April 4, the first radio
bulletins announced that King had been shot in
Memphis. At 8:19 came (he news that he was dead.
Stokely Carmichael was in the Washington office of
SNCC, near the intersection of 14th and U Streets,
N.W., the heart of the Capital's "Harlem." As on any
spring or summer evening, the intersection
thronged with government workers changing
buses, and street crowds shopping (he liquor and
drug stores, prospecting the prostitutes, looking for
dope "buys," prowling the honky‐tonks. Just two
nights ear‐ lier a white policeman responding to a
trouble call at a drugstore there had been
bombarded by several hundred young people with
bottles and stones. The news of King's murder cast
an ugly haze of anger over the milling scene.
After a hurried inner‐office conference with two

cronies, Car‐ michael burst out the door and
headed down the street. Fifteen young men and
women gathered in the SNCC headquarters
followed him. They were the crowd crystal that
grew into the Washington riot. It was 8:45 P.M.
The group began entering businesses, crisscrossing
the crowded streets, asking, telling them to close in
tribute to Dr. King. Despite an intermittent drizzle,
the crowd burgeoned rapidly. At 9:10, one store
owner remembered, the crowd was relatively
polite in asking him to close. But at 9:30, the first
musical tinkle of breaking glass echoed from the
People's Drug Store, scene of the minor riot two
nights before.
Carmichael led his crowd to a movie theater, where
a teen‐ager smashed a glass door. "This is not the
way!" Carmichael shouted, and SNCC members
blocked the entrance. By 9:45 the crowd mood was
ugly. The mass was large enough to fill a whole
block. As Carmichael led them along, individuals in
it would heave a bottle or a trash can through a
store window here and there. A rush would follow,
and a few would scamper off with loot, as SNCC
workers tried to stop them. Teenagers began
chanting: "Beep, beep, black power! Black power!"
A fat woman in her thirties leaned against a
television and appliance store window, bumping it
with her broad derriere until it cracked and crashed
in. SNCC workers rushed to bar entry, and
Carmichael grabbed a teenager struggling to get
through. Stokely hauled out a revolver and waved it
over his head, yelling: "If you don't have a gun, go
home and get your guns. When the white man
comes he is coming to kill you. I don't want any
black blood in the street. Go home and get you a
gun and then come back because I got me a gun."
At that an African‐American youth, perhaps 15

years old, fired two shots into the air from a pearl‐
handled revolver. The startled crowd quieted.
"Don't shoot unless everybody's got their gun,"
Carmichael commanded. Murmurs and cries arose:
"I got my gun— you got your gun?"7
At one point the crowd shrank and seemed to be
out of steam. People dropped off, appearing to
start for home with a light rain falling steadily.
Carmichael, seeing crowds gathering again down at
14th and U, walked back. It was 10:22, and a block
south, a pawnshop's windows were smashed.
Youths from the crowd got there before SNCC
workers could and began scam‐ poring through the
windows grabbing watches, radios, television sets.
The first police trouble call went over the air:
"They're looting! They're looting! They're carrying
out TV's and everything!" A tense‐voiced dispatcher
asked for more details, and the officer reported
windows were being smashed and glass scattered
in the streets. Plaintively, he repeated calmly,
"They're looting." Another voice came over the
radio: "Our orders are not to send anyone up
there."
The policeman on the scene yelled: "Now they're

going into a five and ten cent store!" Again came
the answer: "Sergeant, our orders are not to send
anyone."8
The carnival of piracy was well underway. Stokely

Carmi‐ ehael stood in the doorway of the
Washington office of Martin I .uther King's
Southern Christian Leadership Conference sur‐
veying the scene, then dashed into a waiting
Mustang and sped away. It was 10:40, one hour
and 55 minutes after his march began. Carmichael
knew police plainclothesmen were watch‐ i ng him,
and has since said he was determined to give them
no cause to arrest him.9
A few minutes later—before 11 P.M.—the first fires
were re‐ported: two autos in a used‐car lot. The
looting spread over several blocks, and by 12:30
two food markets on opposite corners were fired,
the first full‐scale fires of the riot. Washington's
police, one of the nation's finest professional corps,
were frantic.
At 10:40 a policeman radioed frantically,

pleadingly, from the riot area: "Won't someone
please tell us what to do?" The answer came back
from Safety Director Patrick V. Murphy, installed
four months earlier as senior in command over
Washington's police chief by the White House and
Attorney General Ramsey Clark. It was hardly an
answer to inspire decisive action by men risking
their lives: "Do whatever you think you should,"
radioed Murphy, who was in a command car
nearby.
Police calls became more and more frantic: "We're
sur‐rounded by a mob of fifty people. What do we
do?" "They're looting. ... Do we arrest them, or do
we leave?" "We're being stoned . . . what the hell
do we do?"
One policeman later told a senator: "I stand there

as a police officer, instructed by the department to
maintain order as much as I can, but refrain in the
use of my service revolver. I felt as though I had
handcuffs on. 1 really couldn't do anything. I felt as
though the department did not want me to do
anything out there."
It was the same old story of police paralysis and
inaction, springing from lack of will at the top. "If
the trumpet give forth an uncertain sound, who
shall follow?"
The 500 policemen on duty at the time, properly

trained, equipped and commanded, could have
handled the situation easily. Indeed, police experts
with broad international experi‐ence have said they
could have done so any time before mid‐night with
a hundred men—and no loss of life. (See Chapter
XVII)
At 11:45, the first busload of 40 fully equipped Civil
Disturbance Unit police arrived and marched one
block along 14th to U in a shoulder‐to‐shoulder
wedge formation, sealing off the intersection. It
was a wholly inefficient allocation of manpower.
Not until over two hours after the first window
smashing did the word to act come over the radio:
"Here are new orders for all Tac units: Enforce the
law for any violations. Take proper action and
arrest. 11:49 P.M."
With tear gas and clubs, the police fought the

crowds and protected the firemen fighting the
blazes. By 3 A.M. the confrontations along 14th
street ended. The riot zone extended along roughly
19 blocks. In six hours 200 stores had been
smashed, 150 looted, seven fired. More than 150
adults and nearly 50 juveniles (under 18) had been
arrested. A few stores outside the main riot zone
had been smashed—including an expensive
Pennsylvania Avenue men's shop directly across
from the Justice Department.
Friday morning, incredibly, everybody in

Washington's ghetto areas expected an early
renewal of the rioting except the police high
command and the White House, which is ulti‐
mately Washington's City Hall and functioned as
such during the April crisis. At 3 A.M. Safety
Director Pat Murphy, the man President Johnson
and Attorney General Ramsey Clark put in charge of
Washington's police above veteran Chief John B.
Lay‐ ton, met with the Army command in its
Pentagon Operations Center. They agreed that the
predawn quiet suggested the next crisis would not
occur until Friday night, and scheduled a meeting at
2 P.M. to plan for possible troop deployment. By
that time, as it happened, the city was in flames.
Later the explanation was offered that President
Johnson's Commission on Civil Disorders had
analyzed 24 riots and found that major violence in
all those cases had occurred at night. But all those
were 1967 riots. The one exception was Detroit,
where the fissioning began in the morning and
exploded around noon. Another exception was not
included in the analysis: Watts, in 1965, where a
Friday mid‐day produced the worst looting and
burning. So it was to be in Washington.
But Murphy muffed. He sent his special Civil

Disturbance Unit home at 5:30 A.M. with orders to
report back at 5 P.M. Friday with shaving gear and
prepared for several days away from home.
Thursday's four‐to‐midnight shift, held over, was
released at 8 A.M. Friday as the regular day shift
arrived, ready for a twelve hour tour. The midnight
shift's tour was extended to twelve hours, too—but
since many had been called in early the evening
before they were sent home by 10 A.M. Friday. The
next shift was not due to come in until 4 P.M. And
so, incredibly, during the crucial mid‐day hours
Friday Washington had only the usual complement
of police on duty, augmented by a few whose
leaves and days off were cancelled. Not many more
men were actually on the street than on any
routine day.
Washington's Fire Department did not make this

mistake. It was ready, with full reinforcements.
Normally off‐duty men were kept in the firehouses,
thus increasing the engine companies available
from 32 to 64. Under an advance emergency plan it
was able to call in 60 companies from suburban
Maryland and Virginia and volunteer companies
came from as far away as Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
But they were not enough to handle the more than
500 fires set that day. After noon fires were set at a
rate of 20 to 30 each hour. By late Friday afternoon
during peak violence some 200 fires were burning
simultaneously.
Washington's Mayor, Walter Washington, did not

make Murphy's mistake, either. A Georgia‐born
African‐American, he had served for years as head
of Washington's housing authority before President
Johnson by executive decree abolished the three‐
man D.C. Commission and made him mayor. Thus
Mayor Washington had sufficient sources of
information and enough rapport to sense
accurately the temper of his community. People
called
him to tell him such things as that many men in the
ghetto areas were staying home from work in
anticipation of loot, that young hoodlums were
making threats, that school children were wild with
excitement. Early Friday, Mayor Washington began
telephoning the White House, trying to reach the
President to plead for troops on the streets—and
fast—to prevent an all‐out explosion. The
President's liaison man for District of Columbia
affairs refused to let him speak to President
Johnson —probably because the President did not
want to talk to him. Two days before the rioting, a
presidential press aide interpreting the mood and
policy toward the prospective "long hot summer"
specifically declared that the President intended no
"hard‐line" policy statements because "he doesn't
want to throw down a gauntlet to the militants—he
wants rather to try to work with them . . ."
Mayor Washington, accompanied by Murphy, went
to the White House shortly after 11 A.M. to join the
presidential party going to the National Cathedral
for a noon memorial service for the slain Dr. King.
After the service he succeeded in ap‐proaching the
President and pleading for troops. President
Johnson flatly refused. As his black limousine pulled
out from the Cathedral Mayor Washington could
look out and see eight blocks burning along 14th
Street, with billowing plumes of smoke streaming
southward in a strong breeze, curtaining out the
Capitol dome. It was 1:30 P.M."
The first fire was set at 12:13 P.M. in a Safeway
store at 14th and U, the scene of the previous
evening's violence. Teenage and young adult gangs
were storming up and down 14th and 7th Streets
by late morning smashing windows, stoning
automobiles and looting. School teachers lost
control of their classes early in the day. With the
noon lunch period all semblance of order dissolved
in the schools, and floods of youngsters poured out
to join the rioting, giggling and squealing the signal
phrase, "It's lootin' time!" The first billowing smoke
and shrieking sirens beckoned more rioters—and
sent frightened whites on their own lunch hours
from the government buildings scurrying to their
automobiles. By 2 P.M. Washington was in the grip
*It was Walter Washington's dissenting conduct

during this crucial period, as much as anything else,
that persuaded President Nixon to ask him to
remain as Mayor under the new Republican
administration.
of one of the most colossal traffic snarls in its
history, and police and firemen were unable to
move. The telephone system jammed too, and it
took as long as 20 minutes even to get a dial tone.
Admirably, in a steadying BBC tone, radio stations
broad‐ east only such sparse but adequate
suggestions as: "Motorists are advised to avoid
Fourteenth Street north of Massachusetts Avenue.
. . ."
The jammed traffic and telephone circuitry stopped
the U.S. Government, too. Indeed, it produced a
veritable three‐stooges comedy at the White House
level.
As the situation deteriorated, the White House

stalled and delayed, hoping hopelessly, thinking
perhaps of the cost in "image" of deploying federal
troops in the Nation's Capital. With Attorney
General Ramsey Clark in Memphis by presidential
order to direct the murder investigation, Deputy
Attorney General Warren Christopher attended the
2 P.M. Pentagon meeting as the President's
representative to make sure that troops would
move only as a last resort. Of course the city was
going up in smoke and anarchy even as the brass
pow‐wowed, but Christopher insisted on taking a
personal look at the riot area before giving his
recommendations to President Johnson. Under
established procedure, local authority must certify
a situation of "serious domestic violence," and their
certification is reviewed by the attorney general,
with the president making the final decision. But of
course Mayor Washington had been figuratively
pounding on the White House door since early
morning.
Christopher, Safety Director Murphy, and General

Ralph E. Haines, Jr., assistant chief of staff of the
Army (in mufti), set out to tour the riot areas.
Stopping at the White House, Christopher
personally delivered the necessary executive order
and proclamation for President Johnson to sign, if
they should judge it necessary. At about this time,
the author was watching looters and arsonists at
work at Seventh and S Streets, N.W., and
wondering what kind of idiocy was delaying arrival
of federal troops. Two forlorn policemen huddled
in the middle of the street, dodging an occasional
bottle, petrified and afraid to move from their
position of symbolic protection for firemen trying
to douse a billowing Safeway store. Even as the
firemen wrenched their hose connections and
called for water, a men's clothing store exploded
on the opposite corner, and the looters and
firebugs scattered. Smoke almost asphyxiated the
author in an adjacent phonebooth, and chased
from his mind the idea of calling a friend on the
White House staff to ask if the troops were on the
way.
The three touring White House representatives,

setting out about 3 P.M., immediately found
themselves trapped in traffic. Cutting in and out of
side streets, they eventually reached 14th Street
and saw block after block of burning buildings,
looters and arsonists scampering along, and a scant
few policemen huddling close to their cars or fire
trucks for protection. They reached Seventh Street,
and saw the same scene—or worse, if that was
possible. They decided to get the troops moving
toward Washington. (Thursday evening 3,000 had
been put on a 30‐ minute alert, with General
Haines the designated "Task Force Washington"
commander.) The intrepid trio decided they should
not use Director Murphy's two‐way police radio to
communicate with police headquarters, since it
would be overheard. They chose to use public
telephones to talk to the President. Fortunately,
they had a dime. But unfortunately, the telephones
did not work: Other citizens, who knew very well
what the White House did not seem to grasp, had
caused an overload. And so the Commander of Task
Force Washington, the Acting Attorney General and
Washington's top cop drove from gas station to gas
station hunting a pay telephone that would give
them a dial tone. The first time the General
stepped out to try he was hit by a heaved rock.
Fortunately the only serious damage was to his
dignity. Ultimately he reached the Army
Undersecretary and at 3:30 P.M. got the first troops
(of the Sixth Armored Cavalry) moving—from Fort
Meade, Maryland, —20 miles away.
But Acting Attorney General Christopher wanted to
see more before speaking to President Johnson, so
they fought the traffic through to H Street, N.E., 20
blocks away, where police felt the rioting was then
at its worst. Finally, after another search for a
workable telephone at 3:58 P.M. Christopher spoke
to President Johnson and recommended that
troops be put on the streets immediately. At 4:02,
crucial hours after Mayor Washington first began
his desperate pleading, President Johnson signed
the necessary proclamation and executive order
empowering the military to restore law and order
in the Nation's Capital.
Well before the Army got into action in

Washington, one D.C. National Guard captain got
there—from Los Angeles. A trucking association
official in civilian life, he was in California on
business. Friday morning, as soon as he saw
television films of the Thursday night disorders, he
hopped the first jet home, landed just as President
Johnson signed his proclamation, ran by his
Annandale, Virginia, home where his wife had his
uniform and shaving gear waiting. By 5 P.M. he was
in Washington reporting for duty—even before the
first Regular Army troops deployed on the
streets.10
Pentagon public relations men touted the

Washington riot control plan, prepared after the
bloody 1967 upheavals, as "an extraordinarily
thorough plan." The "Cabin Guard" blueprint called
for using well‐prepared, elite military units with
strong professional soldier traditions. "These units
had been trained thoroughly in the latest riot‐
control techniques, which emphasized restraint in
the use of physical force," proclaimed one
journalistic account.11
Yet the result was tragicomically far from this press
release prose when a young captain, a West
Pointer and Vietnam vet‐eran, led the first
company of 175 soldiers onto Washington's looter‐
lashed streets. At 5:20 P.M., he swung his company
onto the H Street, N.E., shopping strip. Shoulder‐to‐
shoulder his men formed the riot control wedge
they had learned in training. But the rioters darted
back and forth from sidewalk to sidewalk, ignoring
them as they marched down the middle of the
street. "The people just kept on with what they
were doing," the young captain said later.
So he began to improvise, dropping off men at

every corner, sending groups out to prod
recalcitrant knots of looters along. But he ran out
of manpower after covering only six of his twelve‐
block target zone. Assistant police Chief Jerry
Wilson joined in with a bullhorn, urging people to
disperse and go home. With another company as
reinforcements, and ulti‐mately a full 700‐man
battalion, the Army won the battle.12 But the
"latest riot control techniques" the young captain
and his men had learned were drawn from manuals
thrown together in the Army Provost Marshal
General's office by harried staffers.
Their research and expertise, as one officer

confided to the author, consisted of hauling out
dusty 19th‐century Army manuals and hastily
rewriting. Developed from experience in the
industrial strikes of 1870‐90, those "latest
techniques" were worse than useless for the
African‐American commodity riots of the 1960's, as
should have been evident to anyone who bothered
to look at the 1964 Harlem experience or any of the
subsequent riots, including Detroit.
As in Detroit, a small group of black revolutionaries
previ‐ously organized and waiting, mobilized at the
first disorder. Numbering about 25, they had been
in training for about six weeks before the eruption,
and like everyone else they were caught by surprise
at the King assassination and subsequent eruption.
But they were quick to jump into action. They had
walkie‐talkies for radio communications plus small
stores of gasoline, kerosene and varsol, and even
used a small quantity of dynamite, looted from
construction sites and cached for just such an
occasion. Screened by Friday's crowds and
confusion, they mounted a catalytic campaign of
arson, and succeeded through hit‐and‐run tactics in
spreading the rioting to areas that had been
untouched. "We were like an igniting spark in a lot
of instances across the city," one of the leaders told
a Washington Post reporter later in a secret
interview. "Like in Southeast, nothing was going on,
like the first day out there, man, that first night and
the next day. It was nothing going on out there at
all. A lot of areas we went into man, there was
nothing going on till we got there. But once we
started our thing, man, people just took it up."
What was the price of presidential pride and

inaction that Friday while Washington burned?
Aside from money cost—conservatively estimated

at $27 million—and jobs lost (4,900 thrown out of
work, most of them African‐Americans, according
to one study), there were twelve deaths and 1,190
injuries. The death toll was later hailed by the
Justice Department as a great "success" for a new
policy of "restraint" (see Chapter XVII), but the only
real success would have been to prevent the Friday
eruption. That day eight people died. The way
some of them died tells much about the tragedy:
•Firemen urged one looter to leave a burning
building, heard him shout, "I'm not afraid to die!"
then looked on aghast as a wall collapsed on top of
him.
•A man stood on the sidewalk in front of a clothing
store watching looters, uninterested in anything for
himself. After they departed, arms loaded, he
pulled a gasoline‐filled pop bottle from under his
coat, ignited the wick, and heaved it through the
shattered doorway. It exploded, lifting the roof off
the store. (Witnesses said he had done the same
thing to two other stores down the street.) This
firebug, possibly one of the organized paramilitary
arson squad members, failed to see a teen‐age boy
still inside. When the rubble was cleared twelve
days later his body was found, burned beyond
recognition. He was never identified.
•A policeman, his revolver drawn, grabbed a looter
running from a store and held him facing the wall.
A 15‐year‐old dashed out of the doorway between
the officer and his prisoner, striking the barrel of
the gun. It fired, killing him.
•A 20‐year‐old janitor was backing out of a broken
liquor store window when a policeman saw him. He
suddenly whirled, holding something shiny, the
policeman testified later, in his outstretched hand.
The officer fired, and the looter died. Homicide
investigators found a small, sharp piece of glass
with his thumbprint on it next to his body. (This
was the second and last death by gunfire.)
•Saturday morning Mrs. Thelma Dixon, who lived

several blocks from the worst rioting, got a phone
call from police. Was her 29‐year‐old son missing
from home? He was. His body was found just
outside a school playground fence. His throat had
been cut open, and a trail of blood led to a broken
plate‐glass window in a looted store nearby.
•Teenagers kindled pieces of cardboard and paper

inside a clothing store. "Don't do that!" a black man
shouted. "My mother lives on top of that store and
she can't get out of bed." The man, a 36‐year‐old
bus driver, and his younger brother begged and
pleaded, but the firebugs did their work. Before
firemen and her sons could get her down a fire
escape, Mrs. Annie James, 52, inhaled too much
smoke and died. A "generous and loving woman,"
Mrs. James had cared for more than 40 foster
children and had adopted several others before she
became bedridden.
Such were the victims of "police restraint" in the

federal city.
The Riot Makers In History
1. The Rise of Social Demolition Technology.
A chemist knows that if he drops a block of sodium
into water, it will explode. An engineer knows that
if he buries dynamite in proper quantities and
patterns and detonates it, he can dig an irrigation
ditch. A trained revolutionary knows that if he
chooses proper slogans, gathers a crowd and sends
agents in to agitate it, he can create a riot.
The techniques of starting a riot are as simple, as

scientific and as systematic as that. By varying the
recipe, the profes‐sional revolutionary can produce
a street demonstration, a strike, a general strike, a
mutiny on a ship at sea, an insurrection in an urban
slum, or a guerrilla movement in the mountains or
jungles of an underdeveloped country.
Can mass disorders really be so manufactured?
Five Harvard students in the spring of 1937 decided
to put the question to a test. While "brainstorming"
possible term projects for a sociology course, one
suggested, "Why don't we see if we can start a
riot?" The notion titillated, so they formulated a
plan.1
To prepare the way they started rumors through

the college dormitories. Their rumor campaign
created such an expecta‐tion of trouble that
Harvard Dean A. Chester Hanford issued a formal
warning statement to The Crimson on Monday
after‐noon, May 3, 1937, for the next day's issue,
threatening strict punishment for any disturbers of
the peace.
Hut the trouble began that night, before the

campus daily appeared. It erupted on a narrow
street between two large dormitories for men.
About 11 P.M. screams rang out on the street, oid
studying students flocked to the windows. Bags
filled with water.hurtled down from conspicuous
windows onto passing pedestrians and autos. The
"monkey see‐monkey do" effect ijuiekly produced a
deluge. Next, red flares began to burn, cast‐ iiu* an
eerie, exciting glow over the facing dorms. And fire‐
i rackers began to explode. Within minutes 200
hijinx‐hungry indents gathered at the ends of the
block, laughing and heckling every time some
hapless passerby caught a waterbomb. A drunk ran
back and forth through the gauntlet, adding to the
hilarity. One car, sploshed by a waterbag, stopped,
backed, and caromed crazily through the valley of
cannonading water as spectators howled in glee
and shouted advice. Suddenly the driver leaped
out, leveled a pistol, fired a volley of shots toward i
he crowd. That created instant panic—but the
pistol was shoot‐ing blanks.
The arrival of police only provided new targets.

Stealing their caps became a new challenge. From
that point the riot fissioned automatically, with
students blocking streetcars by itt mg on the rails
and jerking the trolleys off their wires, set‐ i mg
rubbish fires and turning in alarms. The disorder
sputtered on till 1:30 A.M.
Hut this "experiment" produced an unexpected

aftermath: molar episodes flared on other
campuses. Not to be outdone, the next night the
men of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
poured into the streets and battled police. Students
at Columbia, too, joined the riot fad. Before the
week was out the New York Times was grumbling
editorially about the ingratitude of students whose
elders support them with hard‐earned tax money.
The panic, the craze, mass hysteria and riots are
ancient phenomena that have periodically swept
mankind throughout recorded history. Mass
manipulation as a cultivated, esoteric art has been
with us from the earliest tribal shaman and the
priests of the Neolithic farm settlements and
towns. But the systematic development of the art
into a technology had to await developments in
other technologies—transportation, mass
communication, and such mundane matters as
public health, sewer systems and agricultural
technology—that made possible mass human
settlements. In the 20th century, a major new
element has been added to the dynamics of civil
disorders: the professional engineer of social
demolition.
2. Urbanizing "The Naked Ape”
Columbia and the University of California at

Berkeley each have more than 25,000 students.
Michigan State and Ohio State have more than
35,000 and in 1964‐65 the University of Minnesota
had 49,228. Never, before the mid‐20th century,
did the world see such concentrations of students.
Detroit's 10th precinct has 23,000 persons per

square mile; Newark's Fifth has about 33,000, and
Cleveland's Hough has 30,000. Again, such urban
concentrations were unknown until modern times.
Riots are uniquely and endemically an urban

phenomenon, and hence very recent as biological
and cultural evolution go. Throughout most of his
existence, perhaps 2V2 million years, man lived in
small bands of 60 to 80 wandering hunters, and so
mass concentrations of men simply could not
occur. Cultural man has existed for perhaps two
million years, but homo sapiens appeared only
about 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors may have
been using and making tools before that
appearance, but technological progress was hardly
perceptible for eons, as we see when we inspect
Lower Paleolithic tools displayed chronologically in
a museum. Then, about 30,000 years ago, after
virtual stagnation for a million years, technology
began to speed up, at the beginning of the Upper
Paleolithic Age. Not until the invention of
agriculture and its spread during the Neolithic Age
some 10,000 years ago did mankind settle down
and begin to live in permanent settlements. Only
then were riots possible. The very concept
"civilization" begins here, with the Greek word
"civis," or city, and the first civilizations worthy of
the name appeared only about 6,000 years ago.
Man as we know him has the psychobiology
acquired by living as hunter‐predator through some
4,000 generations, as cultivator through some
1,000 generations and as a creature of civilization
for hardly 400 generations.
At that, urban man was only a tiny fraction of the
species until this century. There were no cities as
large as 100,000 people until the Greco‐Roman
civilization, only 2,500 years ago. The largest Greek
city numbered only about 350,000 in the "Golden
Age" of Athens. Scholars estimate that after
hundreds of thousands of years of slow growth the
world's entire population numbered only around
250 million at the time of Christ. It doubled to 500
million by 1650, took almost two centuries longer
to hit a billion in 1830, doubled again, to two billion
by 1930 and then to three billion in 1960.
Not until London reached the mark in 1830 had

there ever been a city of a million human beings
living together in one urban concentration. That
was just 140 years ago. In 1900 only ten cities in
the world had that many people. Today 133 have a
million, and seven have over ten million. And all are
linked by instantaneous communication.
3. The Megamind Era.
In 1776 news of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence required a month to travel from
Philadelphia to Savannah, a distance of 750 miles.
In March 1968 a woman in Georgia watching a
television newscast saw a young soldier in Vietnam
cut down by a Viet Cong bullet. In horror she
realized the soldier was her own son. The next day,
indeed, an Army official came to confirm what she
had seen: her son had been killed in action 10,000
miles away.
Thus technology has magnified explosively the

speed and power of mass communications that the
engineer of mass manipulation and social
demolition can command. This is not only the
atomic era with its megaton bombs. It is the
Comsat era with its megamind audiences. And of
the two, television may prove to be by far the more
powerful invention, for good or ill, fully capable of
disrupting and destroying "the global village."
The first mass communication breakthrough that

equipped mankind to transcend the limits of the
human voice efficiently occurred in 1450, when
Gutenberg printed his first book, the
Bible. The first newspapers were still two centuries
away. They came into their own only in the 18th
century, before and during the French Revolution.
Not until 1833 when Ben Day started his New York
Sun selling for a penny a copy was the common
man, with an average wage of around $8.00 a
week, within the reach of a daily newspaper in the
common language that he could afford to buy. In
1835 Day's Sun ran its famous "moon hoax,"
reports from an imaginary astronomer in South
Africa on a wonderful moon civilization, and
pushed its circulation to 19,‐ 000, proudly
proclaiming it the world's largest. In 1892 only ten
papers in four cities in America counted over
100,000 circulation. On the day after the 1896
presidential election, Hearst and Pulitzer each
printed nearly a million and a half copies of their
New York papers—a new record in mass
journalism.
But the true megamind audience had to await the

development of instantaneous electronic
communication. In 1812 Napoleon traveled with
the news of his Russian disaster from near Vilna to
Paris in 13 days. Traveling with every conceivable
advantage, the best he could average was under 5
mph, about the same maximum speed of
communication that had held good between Rome
and Gaul at the time of Christ.
Yet within 50 years it was possible to flash such
news instantaneously via Morse's telegraph across
whole continents. In another 50 years news of the
"Titanic" sinking flashed via wireless radio. And in
1926 Station KDKA in Pittsburgh, began the first
regularly scheduled broadcasting with the Harding‐
Cox presidential election returns. The number of
radio receivers rose from a few hundred thousand
that year to 14,000,000 in 1930 and 44,000,000 in
1940. The first widespread television audience in
history watched the telecasts of the 1948
Democratic and Republican conventions and the
inauguration of President Truman. Not until 1951
did the first transcontinental telecast occur. In 1960
an estimated 70 million watched the Nixon‐
Kennedy debates, and in 1966, via the new Telstar
communications satellite, an estimated 500 million
people around the world watched the world
championship soccer matches, all cheering and
reacting in unison to the same event. On July 20,
1969, when American Astronaut Neil Armstrong
spoke his first words from the moon, an estimated
600 million people watched and listened, panting
and holding their breath together.
Mass communication among human beings had

come a long way. People marveled in 1825 when
Daniel Webster, foremost orator of his time,
delivered the Bunker Hill 50th anniversary address
and 20,000 heard him without benefit of amplifiers.
That, until a mere 50 years ago, was the maximum
possible audience in human voice communication.
4. The Babeuvist Model for Mass Manipulation.
Buckminster Fuller, in his Operating Manual for

Spaceship Earth, advances the central premise that
man's intelligence is part of nature, and its
activities function as part of the evolu‐tionary
process. Man can do nothing nature does not
permit, and he learns to do what he does in a
natural sequence. Eons ago great pockets of oil
were added to Spaceship Earth's inventory by a
process we call "natural," And in the 20th century
tons of the stuff have been brought to the surface,
spread out to pave expressways and used to power
automobiles and airplanes. Men could produce
power in quantity and tight packages only after
inventing the internal combustion engine, and that
only after discovering and harnessing electricity.
Ben Franklin's kite had to precede the sparkplug,
the automobile and the airplane—and Los Angeles
and Hiroshima.
Likewise, mass manipulation engineering had to

await the invention of mass communications and
the development of urban mass audiences. A
Gutenburg had to precede a Lenin. The rise of an
Adolph Hitler required the invention of elec‐tronic
amplification and radio. What television will bring
even‐tually we can only darkly apprehend, but we
can be sure it will not be an unmixed blessing.
Modern social demolition technology began in Paris
in 1796. A tiny group of messianic radicals gathered
around a talented incendiary journalist named
Francois Noel Gracchus Babeuf, a communist
publicist. They began plotting to overthrow
France's new constitutional government. The
clandestine paramilitary organization they devised
for propagandizing, manipulating and mobilizing
the populace of Paris became the classic
organizational model for mass manipulation.
Under the new Directory and Constitution of 1795,
people were starving and the new paper currency,
the hated assignats, were worthless. In such soil,
the Babeuvist organization grew from conception
to maturity in three quick months. In all parts of the
city secret agents under centralized command
formed "clubs" whose members had not the
slightest inkling they belonged to the front
organizations of a central conspiracy. Babeuvist
agents circulated in the cafes and promoted the
common propaganda line, taken always from
Babeufs journal, which they were required to read.
Placards and handbills were distributed
clandestinely. The police and army units in the Paris
area were infiltrated. The special "Military
Committee" of the "Central Committee" drew up a
detailed plan for a mass armed uprising. In place of
the radio which serves 20th‐century urban
insurrectionists so well, the Babeuvists planned to
call the people into the streets by sounding the
tocsin, the alarm bells of Paris which always
summoned the militia and announced momentous
events. Waiting to form the crowds into
paramilitary units would be the Central
Committee's command structure, trusted agents
who had already been appointed officers of the
revolution. The people's "generals" would lead
their impromptu battalions to the arms shops, the
armories, the key government buildings, food
warehouses, wine shops and city gates. "Orators"
were to circulate, explaining the new day that was
dawning. Proclamations would be posted
explaining the Babeuvist communist ideology. The
plotters thought of and provided for virtually all the
elements that go into today's well‐planned "mass
action." They even instituted a primitive training
program to teach their revolutionary cadres the
arts of social demolition and engineered violence.
In only one way did they slip: internal security. One
of their later recruits, a brilliant young officer
named Grisel who wrote magnificent propaganda
designed to disintegrate military morale, decided to
report to the police. And in the nick of time the
government hauled in the net. Babeuf and his top
lieuten‐ant were guillotined, and the rest hustled
off to jail.
The Babeuvist plot went down in history as "the

Conspiracy of the Equals," a footnote to the French
Revolution. Yet it was the very first attempt by
apocalyptic Utopian radicals actually to seize a
government by force and violence, and to
procrusteanize a whole nation into conformity with
the totalitarian design floating around in their
heads. And their organization was modern history's
first paramilitary political organization. One
conspirator, Phillippe Buonarroti, survived to write
a book describing their ideology and methodology,
and hence the Babeuvists became the prototype
studied by Marx, Engels and Lenin. Marx and Engels
in the Communist Manifesto specifically name the
Babeuvists as honored antecedents. They sought to
have Buonarroti's book translated into German for
use as a handbook on clandestine organization and
mass manipulation in training the Communist
cadres they were planning to infiltrate into
Germany to organize a revolution. In 1919 Lenin
named the Babeuvists as the original forbears of
the new Communist International he was
launching. And as recently as 1948 the Soviet Union
published a new two‐volume edition of
Buonarroti's account of the Babeuvist conspiracy.
5. Other Historical Mass Actions.
Street crowds and mobs have been weapons of

political war‐fare from time immemorial. In the
most ancient of known urban societies, we have
vague inklings of mob activities. They played a
significant role in the politics of the Roman
Republics, during parts of the imperial period, and
throughout the bloody history of imperial
Constantinople. Mobs made the Gracchus brothers
a political power in Rome, helped make and
unmake Marius and Sulla as dictators, and abetted
Julius Caesar's rise. The most celebrated political
riot in history, thanks to William Shakespeare's
iambic pentameter, was the one Mark Antony
touched off with his funeral oration for Caesar.
Antony used the crowd to overthrow the
government and install a triumvirate of his own.
Ever since, the manipulated mass demonstration
and riot have been effective weapons of political
warfare.
We Americans, today's chief victims of stage‐

managed "anti‐ imperialist" riots, ourselves pulled
off the first such operation in the colonial era. This
was the famous "Bloody Massacre" in Boston on
March 5,1770. Sam Adams, whose organizational
and propagandistic skills won him the title "Father
of the American Revolution," organized a boycott
of goods taxed by the British Parliament. The
British governor called two regiments of British
soldiers to Boston. A drunken row erupted
between waterfront workers and the King's
regulars bivouacked on Boston Common. Noses
were bloodied. Then a mysterious "gentleman in
red cloak and red wig" began to harangue the
gathering crowds, variously estimated at 400 to
1,000, who soon marched off hunting Redcoats and
shouting, "Kill the lobsterbacks!" At the
Customhouse, the British guard commander,
Captain Preston, ordered his eight soldiers to prime
their muskets and took up a position between them
and the crowd to prevent firing without orders.
Crispus Attucks, a big mulatto, swung a huge club
at Preston, missed and knocked a soldier sprawling.
The others fired, the crowd fled, and five bodies,
Attucks' among them, remained bleeding in the
snow. Such was the famous "Boston Massacre"
itself. Sam Adams staged a mammoth funeral for
the "martyred patriots," attracting a procession of
12,000 mourners in a town of scarcely 16,000.
Tried in a Boston court, Captain Preston and five of
his soldiers were exonerated and two found guilty
of manslaughter, branded on the thumb, and set
free. John Adams, defending them courageously,
was careful not to probe too deeply into the riot's
origin. Evidence at the trial hinted the whole affair
had been carefully planned by unnamed civilians.
Paul Revere and Henry Pelham produced an

engraving for a broadside that was on sale by
March 26 showing "The Bloody Massacre
perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5,
1770, by a party of the 29th Regt.," probably the
greatest single piece of propaganda of the
American Revolution. It showed seven Redcoats,
dressed in perfect line, shooting into a gathering of
exactly 19 civilians, though contemporary accounts
indicate the mob numbered 1,000. Each Redcoat
face is carefully drawn, showing either arrogance or
hate; and behind them, their captain, Preston,
waves his sword, apparently shouting orders to fire,
while "patriots" swoon and die in pain and profuse
bloodshed. Attucks, the big colored man, is down in
the snow. The colonists' propaganda had a telling
effect. Anti‐British sentiment soared, and
Parliament recoiled, cancelling the hated taxes on
all but ten items.
6. Lenin's Law.
Until the 20th century riots and civil upheavals

generally resulted from spontaneous congeries of
circumstances. True, the "professional
troublemakers" and "agitators" emerged with
unvarying regularity. To stir mob passions history
always found a Mark Antony or brothers Gracchus,
an Amos, Savonarola, Wat Tyler, Ned Ludd,
Nathaniel Bacon, Sam Adams or Robespierre. But
no one had ever begun to analyze their role in a
scientific spirit, to collect the stratagems of
agitation, create a handbook and train professional
engineers of disruption and revolution.
Lenin did so. He and his colleagues in the Russian
Marxist revolutionary movement at the turn of the
century mounted a major effort to collect
revolutionary literature for a special library in
Geneva, Switzerland. There Lenin was provided
with a special study area of his own labeled, "Mr.
Ulianov's table." Vladimir Bonch‐Bruyevich, who in
post‐revolutionary Russia became a Bolshevik
general and Lenin's personal secretary, was one of
the chief collectors. Lenin and his circle devoured
Buonarroti's account of the Babeuvist plot, Auguste
Blanqui's writings on urban insurrection,
Nechayev's "Catechism of a Revolutionary" and
other esoteric lore of propaganda, mass
manipulation and managed violence.
Think, for example, what a powerful weapon for

the social demolitionist is an understanding of the
empirical fact of the spontaneous generation of
pathology. To the agitator bent on causing trouble,
the knowledge that every crowd contains its quota
of statistically inevitable pathotypes is raw
manipulative power indeed. He is no longer at the
mercy of mindless spontaneous forces or of his
own "magic"; he can begin to intervene in
spontaneous social processes, guiding and
concerting them to willed ends.
And this systemization is exactly what has

developed in the 20th century. Lenin very early
recognized the phenomenon of pools of pathology,
and began to study it carefully for manipulative
purposes. In 1901 he recorded his most significant
discovery, at once a profound political insight and
sociological observation. We may call it "Lenin's
Law": There is no single segment of industrial
society, no class in the population, without its
circle, however small, of discontented and malad‐
justed and alienated individuals—predisposed
target audiences for radical hate propaganda—who
can be hooked up to a revolutionary mass
movement. And the professional radical journalist‐
organizer's task, Lenin declared, is to hook up every
possible pool of discontent to the revolutionary
grand strategy of disruption. His exact words: "We
must use every trace of discontent. We must
collect every grain of protest!"
This formula, more than any other single element,

is the heart and soul of Leninism. It is the ultimate
axiom of the Bolshevik technology of mass
manipulation. It is to modern messianic radical
politics what Einstein's E=MC2 is to modern
physics.
The new element of trained, empirical‐minded

social demoli‐ tionists vastly increases the potential
for civil disorders. If spontaneous social conditions
raise the level of frustration and free‐floating
aggression, then the likelihood of explosion
increases, and the social demolitionist's job
becomes easier. But outbursts no longer need
await the spontaneous congregation of necessary
social conditions. For the social demolitionists now
know how, and work steadily to produce, proper
congregations. They sharpen natural social
cleavages, create artificial ones and add the lacking
catalysts such as hate targets, slogans and in‐group
out‐group identifications. "The worse, the better!"
was Lenin's description of the revolutionary's role:
the more disruptive conditions and suffering he can
create, the better for his ultimate goal of
apocalyptic revolution.
7. The Leninist Synthesis.
Two epoch‐making syntheses occurred in 1901.

Guglielmo Marconi signaled the letter S across the
Atlantic in a revolutionary experiment by
combining discoveries of earlier scientists.
And that same year Lenin crystallized a century of

experi‐ence in revolutionary propaganda and mass
manipulation. He synthesized earlier discoveries by
earlier professional revolu‐tionaries and political
organizers that were "in the air." And in both cases
the result was a new theory of mass
communications and mass organization.
Few think of Lenin as a theoretician of mass

communications and mass organization. He is not
studied at all in the journalism schools. Yet his
epochal essay, "What Is To Be Done?" was first and
foremost a philosophy of journalism. He wrote it as
an editorial for the new newspaper he was editing,
Iskra ("The Spark"). It was first published in an
abbreviated form on the front page of the fourth
issue. And it tells what the revolutionary journalist's
job is. "What Is To Be Done?" is one of the most
influential writings of the 20th century. It became
the Bible of Bolshevism and a textbook for
revolutionary training schools the world over; and
is still quoted and parroted by the New Left radicals
today in their essays on campus strategy and
tactics.
"A newspaper is a collective organizer;" Lenin

proclaimed, and the only way professional
revolutionaries had to create "an organization
ready at any time to support every protest and
every outbreak and use it to build up and
consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the
decisive struggle." (Emphasis added.) To Editor
Lenin a national newspaper was a means to create
and train the kind of strong revolutionary
organization he saw would be necessary to
overthrow the Czarist government. His whole
philosophy of journalism was conditioned by the
Marxian mythology of apocalyptic struggle. His
original title, "Where to Begin?" demonstrated his
foremost concern: how to design and conduct the
"Forces of Light." He declared:
A newspaper is what we most of all need. The role
of a newspaper is not limited solely to the
dissemination of ideas, to political education, and
to the enlistment of political allies. A newspaper is
not only a collective propagandist and a collective
agitator, it is also a collective organizer. . . . With
the aid of the newspaper, and through it, a
permanent organization will naturally take shape....
The more technical task of regularly supplying the
newspaper with copy and of promoting regular
distribution will necessitate a network of local
agents of the united party, who will maintain
constant contact with one another, know the
general state of affairs, get accustomed to
performing their detailed functions in the nation‐
wide effort, and test their strength in the
organization of various revolutionary actions.
Today we are faced with the relatively easy task of
supporting student demonstrations in the streets of
big cities; tomorrow we may, perhaps, have the
more difficult task of supporting, for example, the
unemployed movement in some particular area,
and the day after to be at our posts in order to play
a revolutionary part in a peasant uprising.
In short, for Lenin a newspaper was a sort of open
and permanent conspiracy for social demolition,
incitement to riot and organizing insurrection.
When he speaks of "supporting student
demonstrations in the streets of big cities," he
speaks in the context of a strategic concept of an
ever‐escalating revolutionary disruption and
violence. In October 1902 in a note on "the
significance of demonstrations," Lenin defined
them as steps on the way to large‐scale street
fighting: By "increasing the number of active
demonstrators, training marshals for
demonstrations, extending agitation among the
masses, drawing the crowd of onlookers' 'into the
work,' and .. . 'corrupting' the troops ... the
transition to armed street fighting is inevitable,
sooner or later."
The Leninist newspaper is also a recruiting,

rehearsing, and timing device: "If we join forces to
produce a common newspaper, this work will train
and bring into the foreground not only the most
skillful propagandists, but the most capable
organizers, the most talented political party leaders
capable at the right moment of releasing the slogan
for the decisive struggle and of taking the lead in
that struggle."
All this journalistic thought is conditioned by

Lenin's Law— the prevalence of discontent and
maladjustment, and the radi‐cal organizer's duty to
hook it together. Lenin's major point was that mass
movements can and must be artificially promoted,
and primarily through the mass media. His whole
essay was how to do it—the art of starting,
promoting and fanning mass movements through
professional political organization and
management of mass media. "That the mass
movement is a most important phenomenon is a
fact not to be disputed ... The mass movement
places before us new theoretical, political, and
organizational tasks, far more complicated than
those that might have satisfied us in the period
before the rise of mass movement." The new
phenomenon does not mean "bowing to the
spontaneity of this movement, i.e. reducing the
role of [the party] to mere subservience to the
working‐class movement as such."7 The
professional revolutionary is the orchestrator of the
mass movement. He is an activator, a mover and a
shaker, not a passive observer. He is thus the
orchestrator and conductor of tho Marxian
Apocalyptic Symphony, presumably with real
artillery in the final performance, d la 1812
Overture.
Lenin wound up with a clarion call for a corps of

"professional revolutionaries who will give not their
spare evenings but the whole of their lives" to the
task of political organizing for the purpose of
reshaping all of human society. With such a cartel
of organizers, Lenin was superconfident: "I will turn
Russia upside down!."
That Lenin's Law and its corollary Great

Commission—"use every trace of discontent"—still
guide the New Left strategists is evident. In a 1965
visit to SDS headquarters in Chicago, the author
interviewed Clark Kissinger, the SDS national
secretary, and heard this faintly familiar line: "What
we want to do is collect all the sources of
opposition so we'll have a constituency and a
financial base that can really change the structure."
And at the 1968 SDS convention at East Lansing, he
heard it all over again, brilliantly summarized in
American idiom by one Marx‐quoting speaker, an
international revolutionary from Scotland, who
despite the dress of a graduate student was near
forty: "We've got to get all our crap together so we
can all hit the fan at the same time!" (He used the
original vigorous Anglo‐ Saxon four‐letter word,
incidentally, and brought the audience to its feet
cheering.)
3. Lenin Pioneers Manipulatory Sociology.
Long before Madison Avenue discovered

"psychological hooks" for manipulating masses of
people, Lenin was conducting his own brand of
motivational research. It was actually Lenin who
pioneered the "depth interview," sampling
techniques and the application of the behavioral
sciences to political struggle. He saw clearly that
the normal person is largely apathetic to politics,
and that his political actions are largely spasmodic,
irrational and subconscious. And he understood
that anyone who mapped these hidden motives
would have a powerful "hook" for manipulating in
the political arena. So he began to develop his own
primitive techniques of attitude survey and opinion
sampling to detect exploitable notions.
In 1895, when this evil genius was only 25, he
began testing his "product"—slogans and leaflets—
in his "market," the St. Petersburg factory workers,
to discover which issues were the most sensitive,
and what phrasing struck the most responsive
emotional chords. His wife‐to‐be, Krupskaya, was
teaching illiterate workers in night classes, and
Lenin would question her minutely and exactly on
their attitudes. He gave her elaborate written
questionnaires to guide her in eliciting information,
and had her bring trusted workers home for
questioning. He made one such interviewer sweat,
as the poor man afterward recorded, plying him
with questions on which to base a leaflet to be
distributed in his factory. Lenin would also send
Krupskaya and Inessa Armand, another woman in
his entourage, out shopping the St. Petersburg
markets in peasant dress so they could overhear
the conversations, concerns and worries of the
ordinary housewives.
Lenin was developing the techniques of power‐

oriented sociological analysis: the study of social
groupings, attitudes, motivations, loyalties, the
anatomy and nature of mass organizations in
industrial society and the techniques of mass
communication and control—all aimed at
orchestrating social conflict to effect a transfer of
loyalty from the traditionally constituted
government toward the Leninist international car‐
tel of professional political organizers.
By 1907 Lenin was writing expertly on the art of
hate propaganda:
The wording (of our press campaign against our

political foes) is calculated to provoke in the reader,
hatred, disgust, contempt. The phrasing must be
calculated not to convince but to destroy, not to
correct the adversary's mistake, but to annihilate
his organization and wipe it off the face of the
earth. This wording must really be of such a kind as
to provoke the worst notions, the worst suspicions
about the adversary; it must sow discord and
confusion in the ranks and be the opposite of
phrasing which would convince and correct.
This was Lenin perfecting the vocabulary of hate

and the tactic of what he called Ruf Mord, or the
murder of a reputation. This was the simple smear
campaign and character assassination that Hitler
and others later copied so effectively. The Ruf
Mord tactic serves the double purpose of
destroying the leadership of opposing groups and
inhibiting other poten‐tial opponents who might
otherwise step forward. Through practice, trial and
error, Lenin was slowly perfecting his new science
of sloganeering and mass manipulation.
By 1915 Lenin had so cultivated his techniques that
he was able to estimate quite precisely how much
organization and agitation was required to achieve
a given result. That year, through intermediaries,
he secretly advised the German Foreign Office
exactly how much money per worker per day
would be required to produce "spontaneous" mass
strikes inside Russia. A memorandum turned up
among captured German Foreign Office archives
after World War II, in which a German diplomat
canvassing the Russian revolutionary movement
urged his superiors to "get in touch with the
representative of the 'Bolsheviks,' Lenin." The
memo's author declared that a promise to pay
Lenin's organization one and one half marks per
strike day (about 40 cents at that time) for every
worker who went on strike in the Petrograd area
"would produce large strikes and would delay
production of weapons. . . ."* Apparently the writer
had a promise from Lenin or his representative of
what the Bolshevik organization could produce,
given the money.

In 1917 Lenin and his Bolsheviks used their

accumulated experience to harness virtually every
Russian who had a gripe and, promising them true
democracy and reform, ride them all to power. This
has remained the classic pattern of Leninist
methodology: exploit every psychological "hook,"
harness "ev‐
*The date of this document is approximately

February 1915. Its author cannot be identified but
judging from the folder in which the paper was
found, it was addressed to, or originated within the
small task force in the German Foreign Office
concerned with "revolutionizing" Germany's
enemy, Russia (and other countries). The author
must have been either a German diplomat with
pre‐ World War I experiences in supporting Russian
revolutionary movements, or a diplomat who late
in 1914 had been canvassing the feasibility of
revolutionizing Russia. If the latter, it may, and
probably does, reflect experiences of Russian
revolutionaries themselves. Surprisingly well‐
informed about the strike movement within Russia,
he states: "Strike has been the main form of the
revolution in Russia." His conclusion and
recommendations read:
"Since a Russian strike movement is in the interest
of the enemies of Russia —exactly as during the
Russo‐Japanese War it was in the interest of
Japan— it must be supported by the antagonists of
Russia, similarly as the Japanese in 1905 financially
supported strike activities. Consequently an
attempt should be made to get in touch with the
representative of the "Bolsheviks," Lenin, through
private persons, to pay through such third persons,
who should be non‐Germans, a certain amount of
money for strikes. A promise to pay 1.50 Marks for
every strike day to every worker who would strike
in the Petrograd area would produce large strikes
which would delay the production of weapons." ery
trace of discontent" to the insurgent political
warfare machine, create widespread illusions about
the nature and strength of the movement and seize
power. Once gained, the radical grip never relaxes.
9. Schooling for Mass Manipulation.
The vital innovation Lenin added to the technology
of mass manipulation was formal schooling. Using
money obtained from the famed bank robberies by
Stalin and other Bolsheviks, in 1906 the Bolshevik
organization ran a combat school in Kiev. In 1908
one of Lenin's comrades, A. A. Bogdanov, ran a
party school on Capri where the writer Maxim
Gorky was living; Gorky financed the operation out
of his royalties. In November 1910, Bogdanov
established another school at Bologna, Italy, with
money from a recent "expropriation" at Miass.
Lenin was invited to lecture, although he did not do
so. Between June and August 1911, he conducted
his own party school at Longjumeau, ten miles from
Paris, in a rented villa. Lenin gave 45 lectures, and
other party lieutenants lectured as well.10 Their
names read like a pantheon of the Russian
Revolution and Comintern world revolutionary
movement: Zinoviev, Kamenev, Lunacharski,
Riazanov. It was a veritable workshop in social
demolition.
These party schools were of paramount importance
in devel‐oping the Communist techniques of
clandestinity, organiza‐tion, agitation and mass
manipulation. They enabled the most experienced
professional revolutionaries to come together, ex‐
change experiences and ideas and study each
other's innova‐tions and discoveries. And of course
the schools provided the younger Bolsheviks with
first‐class instruction in the Leninist methodology.
Lenin reached his lowest ebb in August 1904.

Having split the Russian Marxist party over his
concept of the party as a cartel of professional
organizers managing a solar system of political and
interest groups, he lost his job as editor of Iskra. He
could muster only 22 Bolsheviks, counting himself
and his wife, to a conference in Switzerland. But
within weeks he linked up with
Japanese intelligence agents seeking to finance

internal upheaval inside Russia during the Russo‐
Japanese War, and got the cash to start a new
newspaper of his own. From 1913 on, he had
Austrian and German support, and his organization
managed to snatch power out of the chaos of war‐
torn Russia in November 1917.
One of the first acts of his new regime was to
provide for colonizing revolutionary organizations
around the world—a massive program of foreign
technological aid in social demolition, fully 22 years
ahead of President Truman's Point Four. On
December 24, 1917, the Soviet Government,
though barely six weeks old, allocated 2,000,000
rubles to "foreign representatives of the
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs for the needs of the
international revolutionary movement," gold
enough to attract radicals, romantics, soldiers of
fortune and political criminals the world over. To a
visiting delegation of foreign radicals Lenin
declared, "It isn't a question of Russia at all,
Gentlemen. I spit on Russia. This is merely one
phase through which we must pass on the way to
world revolution." Early in 1919 he created the
Communist International, a global organization
with radicals from every country he could recruit,
all pledged to Bolshevik organizational principles as
a price for Soviet money and technical aid Among
the "theses" adopted by the second Comintern
Congress (1920) we find:
The fundamental principle of all organization work
of the Communist Party and individual communists
must be the creation of communist nuclei
everywhere where they find proletarians and semi‐
proletarians—although even in small numbers. In
every Soviet of Workers' Deputies, in every trade
and industrial union, in every government
institution everywhere, even though there may be
only three people sympathizing with communism, a
communist nucleus must be immediately
organized. It is only the power of organization of
the communists that enables the advance guard of
the working class to be the leader of the whole
class. Communist nuclei working in organizations
adhering to no political party must be subject to
the party organization in general, whether the
party itself is working legally or illegally at any given
moment. Communist nuclei of all kinds must be
subordinated one to another in a strictly
hierarchical order and system.
By 1921 Lenin had realized that the world

revolution was not going to follow automatically
and quickly on the Russian Revolution. He set out
to systematize the knowledge he and his Russian
Bolsheviks had gained in their 20 years of
experience, and to institutionalize the process of
cultivating this knowledge and passing it on to
younger cadres. They in turn would professionalize
the art of revolutionary organization and mass
manipulation in every country of the world. For this
purpose Lenin started, in Moscow, the world's first
formal academy of revolution—the "University of
the Workers of the East," also known as Far Eastern
University. One student: Ho Chi Minh, organizer of
the Communist movement that became the
government of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong
"Liberation Front" in South Vietnam.
For these training schools the best brains of
Bolshevism wrote texts, codifying their experience
in the practice of radi‐cal organizing. Emilyan
Yaroslavsky wrote the standard work on military
infiltration and decomposition, Work of the Bol‐
sheviks in the Army before the October Revolution.
He ham‐mers at organization, declaring that
winning over "the masses" is not a spontaneous
happening: "Unless special men are ap‐pointed for
the work, without organization and without devot‐
ing great effort and attention to propaganda and
agitation in the army, it will be impossible to
organize the forces of the social revolution or to be
able to utilize the army as a sympathetic force on
our side." Andre Marti wrote Revolt in the Black
Sea, describing the 1919 naval mutiny he
engineered aboard the "Protet." He too reiterates
the Leninist message: organize. Don't be misled
into thinking mutinies are spontaneous. As a law,
Marti asserted that every mutiny breaks out as the
result of some trivial incident, such as a concrete
immediate demand on the condition of food. To be
effective, a campaign in the armed forces requires
systematic propaganda and agitation utilizing the
immediate demands of the soldiers. Marti's book
has been called "a bedside reference work" for all
revolutionaries.
Lenin's successors vastly expanded his program of

formal‐ized revolutionary training. In 1924 Stalin
replaced Trotsky as commissar of war, with a
confidant, Mikhail V. Frunze, who promptly
established a complex system of advanced colleges
to train foreign Communists as professional
revolutionaries. The faculty staffs included the
highest ranking Russian officers and politicians:
such figures as Marshal Tukhachevsky, Bukharin,
and occasionally, Stalin himself.
In the spring of 1925 Bela Kun, chief of the
Comintern's Agit‐ Prop Department, announced
plans for a new Comintern school to train a
maximum of 60 to 70 qualified "students" in both
theoretical subjects and the practical methodology
of revolutionary social engineering. In May 1926
the Lenin School opened in Moscow.
In a very few years the student body grew to 900,
from all over the world. The Lenin School taught a
full course of three years, and a short course of one
year. In the 1920's and '30's it turned out
thousands of trained leaders who made the world
Communist movement a reality. They expanded it
from the 20 Bolsheviks who stood with Lenin in
1904 against the mensheviks to 46 million
Communists in 102 parties around the world today.
From the Lenin School came most of the chief non‐
Russian Communist Party leaders who rose to
prominence after World War II and staged strikes,
mass demonstrations, riots and guerrilla wars on a
worldwide scale. Among them were such men as
Harry Pollitt of Great Britain, Chou En‐lai of China,
Sanzo Nosaka of Japan, Ernst Thaelman of
Germany, Maurice Thorez of France, Gus Hall of the
United States and L. L. Sharkey of Australia. Joseph
Kornfeder, a Czechoslovak‐American who attended
the school and later served as a top Comintern aide
in Moscow and organizer in Latin America, has
testified that by 1959 the total number of radical
leaders trained, worldwide, in the Soviet complex
of revolutionary academies numbered 120,000.
The curricula covered all the arts useful to the

professional revolutionary, ranging from writing
leaflets to conducting guerrilla warfare and street
fighting to the techniques of espio‐nage. But great
emphasis was placed on the conduct of strike,
general strike, mass demonstration and riot
operations, and the theory and practice of
organization.
A young German Communist who attended the

"Communist University" in Leningrad in the winter
of 1925—26 heard lectures on "revolutionary
defeatism and the transformation of an imperialist
war into a civil war," "mass psychology and
propaganda" and "the application of Clausewitz's
Rules of Warfare in the conduct of strikes." He
wrote:
They did not aim at educating academic scholars.
Revolutionary theories were never treated apart
from actual class war experiences. The battles of
the past and present—armed risings, strikes, civil
wars —were analyzed and dissected, the mistakes
of strategy and methods were pointed out, and
lessons were drawn to guide the student in the
actions of the future. All courses led up to and
culminated in the Leninist conception of the most
important step on the road to a classless society—
the seizure of power through revolution, and the
establishment of the dictatorship under the
leadership of the Communist Party. Every thought,
every campaign, every action whatsoever had value
only if it constituted a step forward to the seizure
of power.
This case study technique of analyzing actual mass
operations is a basic pedagogical operational
method of all Communist organizations. After
studying in detail a hundred or more strikes, riots
and mass demonstrations, and every conceivable
form of terrorism, insurgency and planned
violence, a student begins to have a good idea of
how to produce them. An American African‐
American who attended the Lenin School in 1931
and 1932 testified that students analyzed the
famous July 1932 "Bonus March" on Washington,
which was led by the American Communist Party;
they studied mistakes and submitted
recommendations to the Communist International
on possible improvements for better American
operations. After the San Francisco general strike in
1934, the only successful general strike ever
conducted in the United States, the chief
Communist leaders, Sam Darcy and Earl Browder,
left immediately for Moscow to make a detailed
report to the Comintern high command. After the
anti‐American riots of January 1964 in Panama the
top Communist Party functionary and a leading
Student Federation activist also journeyed to
Moscow, presumably for a similar purpose. As Red
handbooks often emphasize, Engels said, "Beaten
armies are a good school," and these post‐
operational critiques are vital to improving
operational technology.
10. The Technique of "Partial Demands" and

"Transitional Slogans."
Before 1921, aside from the strikes in St.

Petersburg industrial plants, the Black Sea mutinies
and disintegration work in Czarist and German
armies on the Eastern Front, the Bolsheviks had not
had truly broad operational experience in mass
manipulation. Their technology was really
embryonic. But as soon as Lenin realized world
revolution was not imminent, he prescribed a
grand strategy of "partial demands" to build up a
global organization. This meant agitation and "mass
actions" on a global scale never before attempted.
The new strategy was elaborated ad nauseam, in

typical Bolshevik jargon, at the Third Congress of
the Communist International in 1921. Into the
wastebasket went the flaming calls for instant
world revolution. Replacing them were less violent
demands for "boring from within" and "united
front" tactics. Lenin saw that a campaign to win
over as many non‐Communist sympathizers as
possible was required. He outlined a strategy of
organizational development—infiltrating
parliaments, labor unions and other non‐
Communist organizations. He further called for the
proliferation of "fronts" and "transmission belts" in
which the large majority would be non‐
Communists, controlled, influenced and directed by
well‐trained comrades. Basic to this whole process
of recruiting and organizational deployment was
the program of agitation around "partial demands."
The 1921 "theses" of the Comintern constituted a
major leap forward toward the ultimate technology
of mass manipulation and strategy and tactics of
protracted conflict:
Thesis on Tactics Partial Struggles and Partial

Demands
Even the smallest communist units must not rest

content with mere propaganda. In all proletarian
mass organizations they must constitute the
vanguard which must teach the backward,
vacillating masses how to fight, by formulating
practical plans for direct action. ... It is essential to
make use of all the economic needs of the masses,
as issues in the revolutionary struggles which, when
united, form the flood of the social revolution. . . .
The struggle for the concrete needs of the

proletariat and partial demands... in their
application, undermine the power of the
bourgeoisie, organize the proletariat, form the
transition to proletarian dictatorship even if the
proletariat have not yet grasped the meaning of
such proletarian dictatorship.
Broadening the Fight
As the struggle for these demands embraces ever‐

growing masses, as the needs of the masses clash
with the needs of capitalist society, the workers will
realize that capitalism must die if they are to live.
The realization of this fact is the basis of the will to
fight for the dictatorship. It is the task of the
communist Parties to widen, to deepen and to
coordinate these struggles which have been
brought into being by the formulation of concrete
demands. As the partial struggles of isolated groups
gradually merge into a general struggle of labor
versus capital, so the Communist Party must also
alter its watchword, which would become:
"Uncompromising overthrow of the enemy." In
formulating their partial demands the Communist
Parties must be careful to see that these demands,
based on the deeply rooted needs of the masses,
are such as will organize the masses and not merely
lead them into the struggle. . . .
Communists should not rest content with teaching
the proletariat its ultimate aims, but should lend
impetus to every practical move leading the
proletariat into the struggle for these aims.
Here, in capsule, is the Grand Strategy of radical

mass manipulation. The Communist sees himself as
the orchestrator of all the discontent that exists in
society. Each spark, each friction, he must see and
seize, promote and fan until it grows into an ever
rising flame. Constantly scanning society, he must
locate each new "pressure point," nurture each
new grievance, sandpaper each complaint. As the
crescendo rises, he assumes the role of conductor,
waving his baton as the grand "vanguard of the
vanguard," the general staff of the revolution,
calling into play each alienated segment of society,
until he works up to a grand, crashing climax of
discord and conflict, all sectors playing in a unison
of chaos from which he can seize total power with
his own tightly disciplined organization.
The 1921 Thesis on Tactics contains a section

entitled "On Propaganda and Agitation." Lenin
wrote it as detailed lesson plan for the various
Communist Parties he was then colonizing around
the world. This document and the instructions for
"Broadening the Fight" constitute a thorough and
highly objective sociological analysis of the
processes by which people are proselytized,
recruited, motivated, engulfed and transformed
into organizational activists. As "hooks," Lenin
declares, Communists must use such varied devices
as "sporting clubs, dramatic societies, reading
circles, excursions, festivals, Sunday rambles, etc."
Anything that interests or excites or appeals to
people can he used as an "intermediary" or
transmission belt. Lenin instructs in the sociology of
discontent:
Communist propaganda and agitation must be

made to take root in the very midst of the workers.
. . .
Therefore the communist watchword and the

whole communist attitude towards concrete
questions must receive our special attention and
consideration.
In order to achieve the correct attitude, not only

the professional propagandists and agitators, but
also all other party members must be carefully
instructed.
The principal forms of communist propaganda and
agitation are: individual verbal propaganda,
participation in the industrial and political labor
movement, propaganda through the party press
and distribution of literature. Every member of a
legal or illegal party is to participate regularly in
one or the other of these forms of propaganda.
Individual propaganda must take the form of

systematic house to house canvassing by special
groups of workers. Not a single house, within the
area of party influence, must be omitted from this
canvass. In larger towns a specially organized
outdoor campaign with posters and distribution of
leaflets usually produces satisfactory results. In
addition, the fractions should carry on a regular
personal agitation in the workshops, accompanied
by distribution of literature.
In countries whose population contains national

minorities, it is the duty of the Party to devote the
necessary attention to propaganda and agitation
among the proletarian strata of these minorities.
The propaganda and agitation must, of course, be
conducted in the languages of the respective
national minorities, for which purpose the Party
must create the necessary special organs.
In those capitalist countries where a large majority
of the proletariat has not yet reached revolutionary
consciousness, the Communist agitators must be
constantly on the lookout for new forms of
propaganda, in order to meet these backward
workers half way, and thus facilitate their entry
into the revolutionary ranks. The communist
propaganda, with its watchwords, must bring out
the budding, unconscious incomplete, vacillating
and semi‐bourgeois revolutionary tendencies which
are struggling for supremacy with the bourgeois
traditions and conceptions in the minds of the
workers.
At the same time communist propaganda must not
rest content with the limited and confused
demands or aspirations of the proletarian masses.
These demands and expectations contain
revolutionary germs and are a means of bringing
the proletariat under the influence of communist
propaganda. . . .
The Communists must take part in all elementary

struggles and movements of the workers, and must
defend the workers' cause in all conflicts between
them and the capitalists over hours and conditions
of labor, wages, etc. The communists must also pay
great attention to the concrete questions of
working class life. They must help the workers to
come to a right understanding of these questions.
They must draw their attention to the most flagrant
abuses and must help them to formulate their
demands in a practical and concise form. In this
way they will awaken in the workers the spirit of
solidarity, the consciousness of community of
interests among all the workers of the country as a
united working class, which, in its turn, is a section
of the world army of proletarians.
It is only through the everyday performance of such
elementary duties, and through participation in all
the struggles of the proletariat that the Communist
Party can develop into a real communist party! . . .
It would be a great mistake for Communists to treat
with contempt the present struggles of the workers
for slight improvements of their working
conditions, even to maintain a passive attitude to
them, on the plea of the Communist programme
and the need of armed revolutionary struggle for
final aims. No matter how small and modest the
demands of the workers may be for which they are
ready and willing to fight today with the capitalist,
the Communists must never make the smallness of
the demands an excuse at the same time for non‐
participation in the struggle. . . .
Communists must also learn how to draw

unorganized and backward workers permanently
into the ranks of the Party. With the help of our
nuclei and fractions we must induce the workers to
join the trade unions and to read our Party organs.
Other organizations, as for instance, educational
boards, study circles, sporting clubs, dramatic
societies, co‐operative societies, consumers'
associations, war‐victims' organizations, etc., may
be used as transmission belts between us and the
workers. Where the Communist Party is working
illegally, such workers' unions may be formed
outside of the Party through the initiative of Party
members and with the consent and under the
control of the leading Party organs (unions of
sympathizers).
Communist youths' and women's organizations

may also be helpful in rousing the interest of the
many politically indifferent proletarians, and in
drawing them eventually into the Communist Party,
through the intermediary of their educational
courses, reading circles, excursions, festivals,
Sunday rambles, etc., distribution of leaflets,
increasing the circulation of the Party organ, etc.
Through participation in the general movement,
the workers will free them‐selves from their petty
bourgeois inclinations.
In order to win the semi‐proletarian sections of the
workers as sympathizers of the revolutionary
proletarians, the Communists must make use of
their special antagonisms to the landowners, the
capitalists and the capitalist state in order to win
these intermediary groups from their mistrust of
the proletariat. . . .
All everyday occurrences which bring the State

bureaucracy into conflict with the ideals of petty
bourgeois democracy and jurisdiction, must be
made use of in a judicial and energetic manner in
the course of communist agitation. . . .
The methods of propaganda in the armies and

navies of capitalist states must be adapted to the
peculiar conditions in each country. Anti‐militarist
agitation of a pacifist nature is extremely
detrimental, and only assists the bourgeois in its
efforts to disarm the proletariat. The proletariat
rejects on principle and combats with the utmost
energy, every kind of military institution of the
bourgeois State, and of the bourgeois class in
general. Nevertheless, it utilizes these institutions
(army, rifle clubs, citizen guard organizations, etc.)
for the purpose of giving the workers military
training for the revolutionary battles to come.
Intensive agitation must therefore be directed not
against the military training of the youth and
workers, but against the militaristic regime, and the
domination of the officers. Every possibility of
providing the workers with weapons should most
eagerly be taken advantage of. . . .
The closest attention and the greatest care are

always required when agitating against the picked
troops used by the bourgeoisie in the class war, and
especially against its armed volunteer bands.
Whenever the social composition and corrupt

conduct of these troops and bands make it
possible, every favorable moment for agitation
should be exploited, creating disruption. . . .
For a Communist Party, there can be no period in

which its party organization cannot exercise
political activity. For the purpose of utilizing every
political and economic situation, as well as all the
changes in these situations, organizational strategy
and tactics must be developed. No matter how
weak the party may be, it can nevertheless take
advantage of exciting political events or of
extensive strikes affecting the entire economic
system, by a radical propaganda. Once a party has
studied to thus make use of a particular situation it
must concentrate the energy of all its members and
party in this campaign.
The limited and confused demands or aspirations

of the proletarian masses. These demands and
expectations contain revolutionary germs and are a
means of bringing the proletariat under the
influence of communist propaganda. . . .
The Communists must take part in all elementary

struggles and movements of the workers, and must
defend the workers' cause in all conflicts between
them and the capitalists over hours and conditions
of labor, wages, etc. The communists must also pay
great attention to the concrete questions of
working class life. They must help the workers to
come to a right understanding of these questions.
They must draw their attention to the most flagrant
abuses and must help them to formulate their
demands in a practical and concise form. In this
way they will awaken in the workers the spirit of
solidarity, the consciousness of community of
interests among all the workers of the country as a
united working class, which, in its turn, is a section
of the world army of proletarians.
It is only through the everyday performance of such
elementary duties, and through participation in all
the struggles of the proletariat that the Communist
Party can develop into a real communist party! . . .
It would be a great mistake for Communists to treat
with contempt the present struggles of the workers
for slight improvements of their working
conditions, even to maintain a passive attitude to
them, on the plea of the Communist programme
and the need of armed revolutionary struggle for
final aims. No matter how small and modest the
demands of the workers may be for which they are
ready and willing to fight today with the capitalist,
the Communists must never make the smallness of
the demands an excuse at the same time for non‐
participation in the struggle. . . .
Communists must also learn how to draw

unorganized and backward workers permanently
into the ranks of the Party. With the help of our
nuclei and fractions we must induce the workers to
join the trade unions and to read our Party organs.
Other organizations, as for instance, educational
boards, study circles, sporting clubs, dramatic
societies, co‐operative societies, consumers'
associations, war‐victims' organizations, etc., may
be used as transmission belts between us and the
workers. Where the Communist Party is working
illegally, such workers' unions may be formed
outside of the Party through the initiative of Party
members and with the consent and under the
control of the leading Party organs (unions of
sympathizers).
Communist youths' and women's organizations

may also be helpful in rousing the interest of the
many politically indifferent proletarians, and in
drawing them eventually into the Communist Party;
through the intent of their educational courses,

reading circles, excursions, festivals, Sunday
rambles, etc., distribution of lea‐flets, increasing
the circulation of the Party organ, etc.
In order to win the semi‐proletarian sections of the
workers as sympathizers of the revolutionary
proletarians, the Communists must itmke use of
their special antagonisms to the landowners, the
capitalists, the capitalist state in order to win these
intermediary groups (torn their mistrust of the
proletariat. . . .
In everyday occurrences which bring the State

bureaucracy into conflict with the ideals of petty
bourgeois democracy and jurisdiction it must be
made use of in a judicial and energetic manner in
the course of communist agitation. . . .
T he methods of propaganda in the armies and

navies of capitalist Mates must be adapted to the
peculiar conditions in each country. All militarist
agitation of a pacifist nature is extremely
detrimental, find only assists the bourgeois in its
efforts to disarm the proletariat. The proletariat
rejects on principle and combats with the utmost
envy, every kind of military institution of the
bourgeois State, and of the bourgeois class in
general. Nevertheless, it utilizes these institutions
(army, rifle clubs, citizen guard organizations, etc.)
for the purpose of giving the workers military
training for the revolutionary battles to come.
Intensive agitation must therefore be directed not
only against the military training of the youth and
workers, but against the militaristic regime, and the
domination of the officers. Every possibility of
providing the workers with weapons should most
eagerly be taken advantage of. . . .
The closest attention and the greatest care are
always required when agitating against the picked
troops used by the bourgeoisie in the class war, and
especially against its armed volunteer bands.
Whenever the social composition and corrupt

conduct of these i mops and bands make it
possible, every favorable moment for agitation
should be exploited, creating disruption. . . .
In a Communist Party, there can be no period in

which its party organization cannot exercise
political activity. For the purpose of utilizing every
political and economic situation, as well as all the
changes in these situations, organizational strategy
and tactics must be developed No matter how
weak the party may be, it can nevertheless take
advantage of exciting political events or of
extensive strikes affecting the entire economic
system, by a radical propaganda. Once a party has
tried to thus make use of a particular situation it
must concentrate the energy of all its members and
party in this campaign.
Furthermore, all the connections which the party
possesses through the work of its nuclei and
workers' groups must he used for organizing mass
meetings in the centers of political importance and
following up a strike. The speakers for the Party
must do their utmost to convince the audiences
that only communism can bring the struggle to a
successful conclusion. Special commissions must
prepare these meetings very thoroughly. If the
Party cannot for some reason hold meetings of its
own, suitable comrades should address the strikers
at the general meetings organized by the strikers or
any other section of the struggling proletariat.
Wherever there is a possibility of inducing the

majority or a large part of any meeting to support
our demands, these must be well formulated and
properly argued in motions, and resolutions to be
submitted for adoption. In the event of such
resolutions being passed, attempts must be made
to have similar resolutions or motions adopted in
ever increasing numbers, at any rate supported by
strong minorities at all the meetings held on the
same question at the same place or in other
localities. In this way we shall be able to
consolidate the working masses in the movement,
put them under our moral influence, and have
them recognize our leadership.
After all such meetings the committees which

participated in the organizational preparations and
utilized its opportunities must hold a conference to
make a report to be submitted to the leading
committee of the Party and draw the proper
conclusions from the experiences or possible
mistakes made, for the future. In accordance with
each particular situation, the practical demands of
the workers involved must be made public by
means of posters and handbills, or leaflets
distributed among the workers, proving to them by
means of their own demands how the Communist
policies are in agreement with and applicable to
the situation. Specially organized groups are
required for the proper distribution of posters, the
choice of suitable spots as well as the proper time
for such posting. The distribution of handbills
should be carried out in and before the factories
and in the halls where the workers concerned are
wont to gather, also at important points in the
town, employment offices and stations; such
distribution of leaflets should be accompanied by
attractive discussions and slogans, readily
permeating all the ranks of the working masses.
Detailed leaflets should if possible be distributed in
halls, factories, dwellings or other places where
proper attention to the printed matter may be
expected.
Such propaganda must be supported by parallel

activity at all the trade union or factory meetings
held during the conflict, and at such meetings,
whether organized by our comrades or only
favored by us,
suitable speakers and debaters must seize the

opportunity of convincing the masses of our point
of view. Our Party newspapers must place at the
disposal of such a special movement the greater
part of their space as well as their best arguments.
In fact, the entire Party organization must for the
time being be made to serve the general purpose
of such a movement, whereby our comrades may
work with unabated energy.
Demonstrations require very mobile and self‐

sacrificing leadership, closely intent upon the aim
of a particular action, and able to discern at any
given moment whether a demonstration has
reached its highest possible effectiveness, or
whether, during that particular situation, a further
intensification is possible by inducing an extension
of the movement into an action of the masses, by
means of demonstration strikes and eventually
general strikes. The demonstrations in favor of
peace during the war have taught us that even
after the dispersal of such demonstrations, a really
proletarian fighting party must neither deviate nor
stand still no matter how small or illegal it may be,
if the question at issue is of real importance and is
bound to become of ever greater interest for the
large masses.
Street demonstrations attain greatest effectiveness
when their organization is based on the large
factories. When efficient preparations by our nuclei
and groups by means of verbal and handbill
propaganda has succeeded in bringing a certain
unity of thought and action in a particular situation,
the managing committee must call the confidential
Party members in the factories, and the leaders of
the nuclei and groups to a conference, to discuss
and fix the time and business of the meeting on the
day planned, as well as the determination of
slogans, the prospects of intensification, and the
moment of cessation and dispersal of the
demonstration. The backbone of the
demonstration must be formed by a well instructed
and experienced group of diligent officials, mingling
among the masses from the moment of departure
from the factories up to the time of dispersal of the
demonstration. Responsible party workers must be
systematically distributed among the masses, for
the purpose of enabling the officials to retain active
contact with each other and keeping them
provided with the requisite political instructions.
Such a mobile, politically organized leadership of a
demonstration permits most effectively of constant
renewal and eventual intensification into greater
mass actions. (Emphasis added.)
Of key importance here in the Leninist sociology of
conversion and recruitment is the emphasis laid
upon "individual verbal propaganda." The New Left
organizers of our own day call this "one‐to‐one
organizing." In this century of mass media —the
rotary press, the radio and television—we tend to
forget that the fundamental and most powerful
human method of communication is still and
always has been face‐to‐face conversation. All the
great religious movements functioned through
direct face‐to‐face proselytization and mostly
individual rather than mass conversion. Lenin's
Bolsheviks, for the greatest part of their early
organizational life, had to depend heavily on
"individual verbal propaganda" since they could not
use the press freely and radio broadcasting was
unknown. Lenin knew well that men are won by
missionaries in face‐to‐face struggles for their
souls, for the simple reason that he had done so
much of it himself in the hotel rooms of Geneva
and Paris, trying to win converts from the
democratic socialist parties of Europe. This form of
evangelism was dear to his heart. The good
Communist, he reiterated time and again, must
make propaganda all the time wherever he is, in
the factory, workshop, lunchroom—everywhere.
11. The German Laboratory.
In the 1920's and '30's the Comintern used the

whole world as a laboratory for experimenting and
perfecting the techniques of mass manipulation
and planned violence. Schooled, battle‐ seasoned
radicals moved from country to country and
operation to operation. Always, after each action,
top commanders would return to Moscow to give a
battle report, to analyze and give a critique of the
operation and to teach the staff and students in the
Lenin School what had been learned.
The Weimar Republic in Germany (1919‐1933) was
for the Communists the most superb laboratory of
all. The German Communists, under close guidance
and coaching of the Comintern staff in Moscow,
worked hard at developing, testing and training in
the tactics of street demonstrations and mass
rallies described in the 1921 Thesis on Tactics. They
ran street marches that became, according to
careful plans, pitched battles with police. In Bavaria
about 1921, they began street clashes with Hitler
and his Storm Troopers. The streets were a
wonderful school for training cadres in social
demolition techniques and the operational arts.
In 1923, police in one of the large western German
cities captured a Communist Party document that
sets forth in remarkable detail an operational
blueprint for street demonstrations. It is, in fact,
the only such document to be published thus far,
though probably similar ones rest in secret police
and intelligence archives around the world.
However, it is typical of known Communist
operational procedures and planning techniques as
taught in the many clandestine Communist Party
schools, even though mass demonstration
technology has progressed considerably in the
intervening four decades:
GENERAL DIRECTIVE FOR THE ORGANIZATION

AND TACTICS
OF DEMONSTRATIONS
1. The Significance and Character of Our

Demonstrations.
The history of all revolutions shows clearly the

extraordinary importance of Demonstrations in the
period of preparation. The Demonstrations appear
as a first, simple expression of the political activity
of the masses in the form of direct action. In
Demonstrations the masses mobilize their forces
and oppose these forces to those of their
opponents in the vital and decisive form of combat
in the streets. In these clashes the masses receive
their first combat experience. The qualitative and
quantitative intensification of revolutionary street
demonstrations becomes, sooner or later, armed
revolt.
Therefore in the period when we stand at the

beginning of a new revolutionary wave, our Party
must give the closest attention to the organization
and execution of Demonstrations. The Revolution
does not fall upon us from Heaven. It develops as a
result of many individual (political and economic)
clashes of the working class with the Bourgeoisie,
among which Demonstrations are a most important
element.
Our Demonstrations in Germany under the military
dictatorship of the White Terror, of the State of
Emergency, etc. shall be markedly revolutionary in
character. They are not the servile Demonstrations
of the S.P.D.18 undertaken with police permission
and under their direction, nor the festive
demonstrations of the victorious Russian
Proletariat, and also they are not Demonstrations
with lamblike proposals to present to the
government. On the contrary, they are the
expression of the sharpest protests against the
existing form of State. They must be part of the
struggle (Teilkampfe) against the White
Dictatorship. Our Demonstrations under the
conditions now existing in Germany are probing
attacks (opening the way) for armed revolt. Their
goal is the awakening of the masses, the
concentration of forces for the decisive battle and
the conditioning of the Proletariat to combat in the
streets!
At the present time, unarmed Demonstrations are

not possible. They end in the ignominious flight of
the Demonstrators before the truncheons of the
Schupo, AND LEAD ONLY TO A HEIGHTENING OF
THE PRESENT PASSIVITY AND COWARDICE OF THE
WORKERS. The Demonstrations, then, achieve their
goal; i.e., the awakening of the masses, etc. only if
the resistance of the police is broken. Therefore
every Demonstration must take place with the aid
of the armed O.D.
The Party must teach the masses not to shirk from
clashes with their opponents and not to run away
from police attacks. The Demonstrations must,
under all circumstances, pursue and achieve their
goals despite the police. Our armed units must,
with the help of unarmed workers, firmly oppose
with armed force every attempt of the police to
break up our Demonstrations. They (O.D. Units)
must conduct the defense of the Demonstration by
offensive tactics and proceed actively against the
police and undertake to disarm them.
In these active Demonstrations we test the combat
efficiency of our O.D., learn its weaknesses and
train it by practical experience to be the effective
Guard of the Proletariat which will destroy the
armed forces of the opponent in the coming
decisive struggle between Capital and Labor.
2. Concerning the Preparations for
Demonstrations.
The failure of the most recent Demonstrations was
primarily the result of insufficient agitation and
organization in the preparatory period. In
consequence of [its] illegality, from the inhibiting
results of which the Party has not yet recovered, as
well as because of personal fear of arrest, the
preparations among the masses have not been
carried out as they should have been. We must
clearly realize that especially in the present
transitional period (transition from passivity of the
masses to activity of the masses), we can only set
the masses in motion after thorough and profound
agitation and organizational preparation. This
preparation must be carried out without regard for
the Party's illegality and for the premature
discovery of the Demonstration plans by the police.
In preparation for the Demonstrations a committee
must beset up in every city, which will consist of:
political leader; combat leader; youth leader,
leader of the unemployed and Agitprop.
In larger cities, district committees must also be

formed. The agitation and organizational
preparation for Demonstrations is the mission of
this committee. It must arrange so that, through
shop calls and meetings of (Party) functionaries,
every Party Member learns in good time of the
impending Demonstration and is given detailed
instructions regarding his specific duties in the
preparation and conduct of the Demonstration.
Further, wherever possible, the Shop Committees'
must be drawn into (the preparations). The Party
Members in the most important factories
(Grossbetriebe) are to be made responsible for the
participation of (the workers of) those factories in
the Demonstration. During the Demonstration,
these Party Members lead the factories' columns.
The committee also names the leaders for the
district columns.
An intensive word‐of‐mouth agitation among the
masses must be carried out by all Party Members
and sympathizers. The slogans for the
Demonstrations should be simple, sharp and clearly
understandable to the masses. The committee
must also organize the leaflet propaganda—and
not for only an hour before the Demonstration, as
has frequently been the case in the immediate
past, but some days beforehand. If, because of
technical or other difficulties, it is not possible to
have leaflets printed, handwritten or typed leaflets
must be provided and distributed in the factories
and on the streets.
3. The Gathering of the Masses for the

Demonstration.
The gathering of the masses for the Demonstration
is the task of:
(1) Our Military Party Members.
(2) All Party Members and sympathizers.
If the Demonstration is to take place before the
end of the working day, squads of Military
Members, Party Members and sympathizers are to
be organized in the factories, who will run through
the shops of the factory and incite the workers to
drop their work and lead them into the street. If
the Demonstration takes place after working hours,
our Military Members, Party Members and
sympathizers shall form a (human) chain in front of
the exits of the factory so as to gather the workers
and to organize them into columns. In both cases,
short meetings must be held immediately outside
the exits of the factories (at least in the case of the
largest ones), in which our orators will speak for
five minutes or so about the aims and the
significance of the impending Demonstration. Our
Military Members will provide protection for our
speakers. The factories which are entirely under
our influence and whose participation in the
Demonstration is assured must stop work earlier
(than the others) and seek to lead the (workers of)
the other factories into the streets. In order to
bring the unemployed into the Demonstration, a
meeting of the jobless must be called. The
unemployed will be divided into columns and move
into the streets independently, or will be brought in
front of large factories to bring the workers out of
the factories to demonstrate with them (the
unemployed).
4. The Movement of the Columns.
Experience shows that moving with weak and

divided columns has no impact, they are also
swiftly broken up by the police. It is therefore
necessary to set the columns into motion in such a
manner that the compact masses are assembled in
the shortest possible time. Massiveness raises the
spirits of the Demonstrators, makes a strong
impression (on bystanders), makes the mission of
the police more difficult and facilitates our
successful resistance.
Since it is not possible to set cut initially in compact
masses, we must learn to lead demonstration
columns through the streets, covered by
reconnaissance groups, without giving the police an
opportunity to attack. Scouts on bicycles and on
foot will be sent out ahead of the demonstration
column and will observe all side streets. In the
same manner, they will follow the demonstration
column at a distance of 100 to 300 meters (in
narrow, winding streets, the distance [is] shorter, in
broad, major streets, greater) and report to the
"Secret Staff" all movements of our opponents.
Then it will be possible for the leadership of the
demonstration column, knowing the streets
intimately, effectively to evade (our foes) and, if
necessary, to lead the Demonstration through the
streets for several hours without the possibility of
disruption.
This is the only method to be used by the Party of
K.I.24 in the present preliminary period for
breaking down the ban on the Party and the State
of Siege (sic). We must suddenly appear with some
hundreds of Party and Youth Organization
Members—preferably in the evening —in the
street in which there is no strong force of police
and build a demonstration column, secure it with
scouts and march through the streets for hours,
singing (at times, for security reasons, completely
silent, whenever near police posts) and cleverly
avoid the police until at the appointed (time for the
?) end of the Demonstration column (sic ??) we
force, unexpectedly and in superior members, a
weak detachment of the Schupo unwillingly to
"acknowledge" our violation of the State of Siege
(sic.) (regulations).
But now back to mass Demonstrations. The aim of
the great district columns must be to push forward
into the center of the city, and after unification (of
the columns), to demonstrate in the main streets.
The columns of neighboring districts must unite
themselves into common columns on the way to
the center (of the city).
The Demonstrations must under no circumstances

proceed in silence, our Military and Party Members
are responsible for seeing to it that the masses sing
revolutionary songs and that appropriate slogans
are chanted (in chorus). Special groups (Women's
Agitation Committees) must be organized for these
tasks.
5. The Distribution of the Armed Forces.
The armed forces which are mobilized for the

Demonstration are divided into active groups
included in the columns and a reserve which
remains at the disposal of the Staff. The armament
is: Pistols and hand grenades. The mission of the
groups included within the columns is the defense
of the columns and active attacks against the
police. The strongest armed forces must be placed
at the point and in the center of the demonstration
column, with weaker forces at the (rear) end of the
column. The unarmed members of the O.D. and the
bravest workers, who can serve as auxiliaries in the
clash with the police, place themselves next to the
armed groups. The large columns will be defended
on the flanks by armed groups placed in the side
streets. The reserve is to be placed at a point from
which it can easily move to the place of
demonstration. It remains at the disposition of the
Staff, which must commit it at the point where the
demonstrators meet the heaviest resistance at the
hands of the police.
6. Tactics in Clashes with the Police.
The tactics of the O.D. during the Demonstrations is
determined by the tactics of the police. If the police
or Reichswehr advances as a line of skirmishers,
under no conditions must the police be fired upon
from a distance nor may even stones be thrown at
them. On the contrary, the Demonstration must be
led swiftly up to the line of policemen. The line
must be broken before the most effective weapons
are used. It will then almost always be possible, by
determined action, to disarm the police at pistol
point. Officers and especially brutal policemen who
incite (their fellows) to attack the demonstrators,
are to be rendered harmless without delay. If the
police advance against the crowd in closed columns
or on motor vehicles, one can oppose them in two
ways:
1. The trucks will be surrounded by the crowd.
A small squad of especially determined O.D.
Members swing themselves swiftly into the vehicle
and thus take the police out of action. During the
revolutionary struggles in Germany these squads of
determined men have been able, in individual
cases, to seize the weapons of the policemen
without serious resistance and to throw them into
the street and thus into the crowd. This method,
however, is very dangerous for the attackers.
Under all circumstances, it is necessary to make
certain that the squads which are to carry out the
disarming of (the crews of) the vehicles are well
armed with hand grenades and that at the first sign
of resistance (they) dispatch the personnel in the
vehicle by throwing hand grenades (among them).
2. If the demonstrators do not have available

exceptionally well disciplined military squads, and if
the revolutionary determination of the masses is
not great enough, the columns and trucks must be
subdued
by a surprise hand grenade attack and the resulting
confusion must be exploited to drive back and
disarm the remaining police.
In the early part of this transition period, the

second method m ust always be used under all
circumstances. Only when the combat efficiency
and the (self) confidence of the masses is enhanced
by major successes and the opponent's formations
are (more) demoralized, can the first method be
employed without danger for the demonstrators.
In all cases, the O.D. detachments which march in

side or parallel streets, must launch surprise attacks
in the rear of the foe.
The greatest danger arises from the efforts of the

police to create a trap for the Demonstration by
blocking the demonstration streets and side
streets. In the case of local reverses, one must
seek, by means of special initiative groups, to
reorganize the dispersed demonstration (column)
now on another street and to carry it (the
Demonstration) through with the greatest tenacity
and revolutionary determination.
In order to accustom the masses to the building of
barricades even in the preliminary period, as well
as for actual protection against police flank attacks,
special squads must lead the masses to build
barricades, primarily on the side streets from which
police attacks may be expected. In general, it is
advantageous to utilize mass Demonstrations to
bring about street battles of short duration.
On October 22, 1923, under Comintern tutelage

the German Communists tried to seize Hamburg.
When it was over every third member of the
Hamburg Party was dead, wounded or in jail—but
the survivors were all thoroughly "blooded" and
experienced cadres. One, Jan Valtin, was 19 at the
time, and it was for him such an exhilarating,
thrilling adventure that he became a confirmed
Communist; he went on to become a top
Comintern specialist in organizing waterfront
strikes and marine mutinies. He described the
experience in his autobiography:
Despite the dead and wounded we had lost, my

group was stronger now. Clusters of volunteers
followed the spearhead. Many streets swarmed
with people. Party agitators endeavored to draw
people into the streets and to keep them there.
Skoblevski's instructors had made it clear to us that
it was important to have crowded streets when
fighting took place. Nothing will rouse the wrath of
the population so much as police firing into
unarmed masses. . . (Skoblevski was a Soviet secret
police general.)
Valtin was typical of the Comintern's globe‐trotting
special‐ists in mass manipulation. He fell into the
hands of Hitler's Gestapo, and upon escaping the
Nazis had to flee the Stalinist NKVD as well, since
he incurred suspicion during the purge trial era.
Valtin's autobiography, published in 1941, was the
publishing sensation of the year, since it was one of
the earliest revelations of the workings of the
Comintern and the Soviet global apparatus. In
America, both Life and Reader's Digest excerpted it.
Valtin's book is invaluable as an insider's account of
the Comintern's great era of development of the
technology of social demolition and planned
violence.
12. The 1928 Comintern Doctrine of "Mass

Actions'
By 1928, the Bolsheviks had nearly three decades

of concen‐trated experience at mass manipulation.
The Comintern's Sixth World Congress was able to
formulate a comprehensive doctrine of mass
agitation, defining its relation to armed
insurrection, revolution and open civil war. The
new doctrine laid heavy stress on "mass actions" as
a tool in the "revolutionary struggle." This
document was world communism's Mein Kampf
and remains to this day the most authoritative and
detailed statement of revolutionary strategy and
tactics ever publicly proclaimed:
The Communist Party is confronted with the task of
leading the masses to a direct attack upon the
bourgeois state. This it does by organizing mass
action, upon which all branches of the Party
agitation and propaganda, including parliamentary
activity, must be concentrated. This mass action
includes: a combination of strikes and
demonstrations; a combination of strikes and
armed demonstrations and finally the general strike
conjointly with armed insurrection against the state
power of the bourgeoisie. . .
The 1928 document went to great pains to

emphasize—and this is the essence of Leninism—
that the Communist must not depend on
spontaneous discontent for his revolution. He must
carefully generate discontent and focus it for his
own revolutionary aims. He must sow discontent
where there is none. He must be like the devil, who
was able to make Eve feel discontented—even in
the Garden of Eden. The professional revolutionary
must learn how to make men reach for the
forbidden fruit, for whatever they don't have. He
must make them rebel against the government,
"imperialism," "the ruling class," "the power elite,"
or any other convenient hate target. He must be
able to convince them that the revolutionaries are
the ones to lead them to the promised land:
When a revolutionary situation is developing, the

Party advances certain transitional slogans and
partial demands corresponding to the concrete
situation; but these demands and slogans must be
bent to the revolutionary aim of capturing power
and of overthrowing bourgeois capitalist society.
The Party must neither stand aloof from the daily
needs and struggle of the working class nor confine
its activities exclusively to them. The task of the
Party is to utilize these minor, everyday needs as a
starting point from which to lead the working class
to the revolutionary struggle for power. . . . This it
does by carrying on propaganda in favor of
increasingly radical slogans (for Soviets, workers'
control of industry, for peasant committees for the
seizure of the big landed properties, for disarming
the bourgeoisie and arming the proletariat, etc.)
and by organizing mass action. . . .
When there is no revolutionary upsurge, the

Communist Parties must advance partial slogans
and demands that correspond to the every‐day
needs of the toilers, linking them to the
fundamental tasks of the Communist International.
Following the 1928 doctrine, in 1931 the Comintern
issued to all Communist parties text books on the
tactics of street fighting, on expanding the illegal
underground organization, establishing secret
printing plants, training the special small groups of
"shock troops" who actively lead strikes,
demonstrations, street fights and riots. Lenin
himself, these handbooks declared, emphasized
that strikes and demonstrations were "schools of
war" admirably suited for training the
revolutionaries and preparing the "masses" to unite
against their govern‐ments.
13. Strikes and Depression Violence.
A worldwide rash of strikes, riots and "mass

actions" followed the 1928 Comintern Congress. It
continued until 1935, when the
Seventh World Congress switched the "militant"

line to a "united front" tactic in the face of rising
Nazi power.
One of the most astonishing successes of the

period was the mutiny of the British Home Fleet at
Invergordon in September 1931. (Red elements
pulled off a naval revolt in the Chilean fleet the
same month.) The Comintern had paid great
attention to the tactics of naval and marine strikes
and mutinies, learn‐ing well the lessons of the great
naval mutinies in the German, Russian and French
fleets in 1917 and 1918.
The Invergordon mutiny began on Saturday night,

September 12, after Sir Austen Chamberlain
announced to the House of Commons a pay cut for
all lower ratings in the Navy.
Party members aboard the "Rodney" organized the
first strike. Two hours later all crews of the Home
Fleet were out. The Red bacillus of rebellion
paralyzed Britain's battleships. After 36 hours the
Admiralty capitulated. No trials were held; 24
ringleaders were merely discharged "for subversive
con‐duct" and given free railway tickets home. (Six
days after the British fleet was immobilized, Japan
invaded Manchuria.)
Of course the usual postoperation analysis was

performed— in May 1932 at the "International
Seamen's Congress," held in Altona, a Red suburb
of Hamburg. There the cream of the Comintern's
organization among world shipping and navies met
to discuss—apart from the conference's open
sessions, of course—intimate conspiratorial
matters. They covered new wrinkles in the
engineering of strikes, communications net‐works,
personnel questions, subsidies, tactics in naval
mutinies of the past, mistakes made, successful
methods recommended for future operations and
concrete plans of action in the merchant marines
and navies of the world.29
In America some of the Depression strikes were

literally pitched battles. The Red‐instigated
Milwaukee Carmen's strike in June 1934 featured
open fights with the police, and of course women
and youth were placed in the forefront. The Reds
also played an active role in the Toledo Auto‐lite
strike of May 1934, organizing the workers and
charging the police and retreating in military
fashion. The National Guard required ten days to
quell the disturbances and the Red‐massed workers
roughly handled quite a few of the troops. The
Communist leadership gloated, "It is a great lesson
to see how the masses can be swung at strategic
moments, with correct slogans . . . plus a minimum
of organization."30 Both these strikes drew the
usual post‐mortems in the Communist Party press.
A special publication, "The Party Organizer,"
published from 1931 to 1938, dealt with the
lessons of these battles; instructions were quite
explicit, particularly in the strike area.
The three most massive and successful Communist
operations in the United States in this period were
the Washington Hunger March, the Veterans'
Bonus Army of 193231 and the San Francisco
General Strike of 1934.
After several Moscow conferences, the Comintern

ordered a giant hunger march of the unemployed
in Washington, set aside $100,000 to finance it and
sent a host of organizers and two supervisors from
Moscow to direct the operation. The movement
started in January 1932 in St. Louis, where local
marchers seized the City Hall and fought police for
hours before being ejected. Other battles were
staged in New York, Akron, Los Angeles and Albany.
In May, Communists in the miners' union provoked
a series of strikes, then turned them into violent
battles with sheriffs' deputies. Many miners were
killed.
With the groundwork thus laid, in December 1932
Communist and Communist‐influenced
organizations sent over 4,000 delegates to a
National Unemployment Conference in Wash‐
ington. The hunger movement was set up like a
national mobilization. Routes for the marchers
were worked out in advance, printed on maps, and
distributed with detailed instructions. Each Party
cell had quotas to fill. New York, for example, had
to provide at least 10 automobiles and 87 trucks.
Altogether, 10,000 people were transported to
Washington at a cost to the Party of $200,000. But
the plans to provoke violent clashes with the
authorities fell flat because the crowds failed to
respond to the oratory and sloganizing and the
organized booing and jeering of President Hoover
and American Federation of Labor President Green.
According to Benjamin Git low Moscow's
representative, supervising the operation from his
room in a fashionable Washington hotel, "turned
purple with rage."32
The Veterans' Bonus March started in the summer
of 1932 in Portland, Oregon, as a genuinely
spontaneous demonstration. A jobless veteran with
nothing else to do just decided one day to hop a
freight train for Wahington, D.C., 2,500 miles away
to see if he couldn't persuade Congress to grant a
cash "bonus" for all World War I soldiers. A handful
of other unemployed veterans joined him, and
their little caravan quickly attracted press
attention. As soon as the story hit the wire services,
their example generated similar movements
throughout the United States. But the Communist
veterans, organized and centrally instructed,
recognized the potential and as the movement
grew they quickly captured its leadership. They
used a typical combination of strong‐arm and
filibustering tactics. As more newspapers publicized
the movement, more veterans around the nation
started marching, commandeering empty freight
cars and forcing the railroads—which were
understandably not entirely hostile, since there was
widespread sympathy for jobless veterans—to
carry them. The Communist veterans were by this
stage well entrenched at the top. Under their
direction, the Capitol and District of Columbia Court
House were stormed. A fight with Capitol police
resulted in the death of one veteran and one
bystander. Finally, to prevent more bloodshed,
President Herbert Hoover sent the U.S. Army under
General Douglas MacArthur to drive the marchers
from their shanty village in Anacostia Flats.
But the most successful Red "mass action" in this

era was the Great San Francisco General Strike of
1934. There Communist waterfront agitators,
executing careful plans laid months earlier by Party
leaders, parlayed minor grievances into a complete
tie‐up. First, they established "Seamen's Clubs" to
attract seamen into a Communist‐dominated
union. The clubs provided bunks, entertainment
and the company of female Party members. Then,
the Red leaders simply made demands they knew
management could not possibly meet, because of
the very structure of the unions and employers'
organizations. But by clever propaganda, they
created the illusion among rank‐and‐ filers that
these demands were reasonable. Insurgents
accused legitimate union leaders of "selling out to
the management," thus isolating them and forcing
them to go along or risk losing their posts and
influence to the militants in their unions.
The result: This Soviet‐inspired operation cost the

United States an estimated $90 million. Before it
was over, three peo‐ple were killed, countless
hundreds injured, and for four days San Francisco
was like a city beseiged at war, as 160 labor
organizations and more than 70,000 workers
stayed out. Kestau rants closed, markets soon ran
out of produce, gas stations ran out of fuel, and
office workers walked to work, lunched on candy
bars and walked home. Martial law was declared,
and 5,000 National Guardsmen had to be called in.
For 45 days no ship sailed from San Francisco
harbor. Of 903 arrests, a third were Communist
Party members, half of these not U.S. citizens. After
it was over Earl Browder, U.S. Communist Party
chieftain, boasted, "There would have been no
general strike but for the work of the Party." He
and Sam Darcy, chief agita‐ tor‐in‐charge and a
Lenin School graduate, went to Moscow to deliver
in person Darcy's detailed report.33
14. The Postwar Riot Era.
Hitler's rise and German rearmament soon forced

Stalin to abandon "mass action" revolutionary war
against other nations and adopt a new tactical line,
the "united front" proclaimed in 1935 at the
Seventh Comintern Congress. But after World War
II the techniques were quickly dusted off. In 1947
Stalin began to realize that the United States was
not going to "collapse" automatically as Marxist
theory ordained. At a Warsaw conclave of the
Comintern's successor agency, the Communist
Information Bureau, he ordered violent mass
actions all around the periphery of the Soviet
Empire. Guerrilla warfare exploded in Burma,
Malaya and the Philippines. Violent
demonstrations, strikes, guerrilla action and
terrorism erupted in India. In Hyderabad
Communists murdered 400 persons, including
village officials, firing homes and torturing women
to extort the whereabouts of their men.34 Red‐
inspired strikes in Australia depleted the paid‐up
capital of 13 large coal mining companies in New
South Wales by 60 percent. Italy and France rocked
with Red‐led riots. In January 1948 the Communists
used their street rioting expertise to wreck a new
British‐Iraqi security treaty redefining the postwar
relations between the two countries on terms
highly favorable to Iraq. Despite these
improvements Communist agitators whipped up
such a nationalistic furor in Baghdad that one day
in January 2,770 people were killed and 300
wounded. That evening the Prime Minister
resigned and fled to Jordan, and the treaty was
junked. It was prec isely the same scenario used a
dozen years later upon the signing of the new
United States‐Japan security treaty, when Red‐
staged Tokyo riots forced President Eisenhower to
cancel a state visit for the signing of the treaty and
Premier Kishi's Japanese government fell.
On April 9, 1948, while diplomats of 21 American

republics gathered in Bogota, Colombia, for the
Ninth Inter‐American Conference, Red shock teams
seized radio stations and launched a two‐day
insurrection that left 1,400 dead. The Colombian
government captured two Russians and 13 other
foreign agents (Fidel Castro, a young Cuban, among
them) who had been leading the rebels; as a result,
Colombia broke relations with the Soviet Union and
outlawed the Communist Party.
As Khrushchev emerged into the limelight of the

mid‐1950's, Moscow began to mount an integrated
psycho‐nuclear assault orchestrating "mass
actions" ranging from protest meetings to threats
to atomize London and Washington to worldwide
anti‐ U.S. riots. The first and most startling display
of this technique was during the 1956 Suez War. In
Moscow mass demonstrations were staged at the
British, French and Israeli Embassies, women
marching with babies held over their heads and
shouting, "Shame to the Aggressors!" Of course this
staged procession was worldwide news, and local
Communists in scores of nations had but to read
the day's headlines or listen to newscasts to see
that Moscow wanted demonstrations—and they
provided scores.
In 1960 alone, within one month, Communist‐

sparked riots overturned the governments of Japan
and Italy. Mobs also played key roles in toppling the
governments of Turkey, Cuba, Venezuela, South
Korea, Laos, Iraq and El Salvador. In 1961 waves of
mass demonstrations rolled around the world after
the death of Lumumba in the Congo and the U. S.‐
backed invasion of Cuba. When Khrushchev
announced an abrupt resumption of nuclear
testing, rupturing the moratorium, Washington sat
back confidently awaiting worldwide protests—and
none came. Yet when President John F. Kennedy
announced a U.S. test series as a response, the
same global protest storm broke. Astonished,
President Kennedy appointed his brother, Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy, to head a blue‐ribbon
inquiry into U.S. capabilities for the global political
struggle. But nothing came of it.
Even the United States was not immune to Red riot
tactics. In San Francisco in May 1960 when the
House Committee on Un‐American Activities held
hearings, identified Communist Party agitators
organized a protest and whipped it into such a
frenzy that students fought police and many had to
be jailed— the first such open clash between
students and police in America. It was a harbinger
of things to come.
Synthesis, Diffusion, and the Leninoids
1. The Common Stream.
Some people think we can somehow separate the

threats of "left‐wing" radicalism and "right‐wing"
radicalism. It is an artificial division, and one that
blinds us to the realities of the historical era we live
in. For those who try to divide the New Left
revolutionaries from the neo‐Nazis and fascists do
not understand the true alignment of forces facing
the constitutional revolutionaries descended from
Mason, Madison, Washington, Morris and
Jefferson.
They forget, for example, that in 1931 Stalin

ordered the German Communist Party to form a
"united front" with Hitler and his Nazis to destroy
the democratic Wiemar regime. They forget that it
was the attacks of the Italian Bolsheviks and radical
socialists that weakened the postwar democratic
regime and paved the way for Mussolini's Black
Shirts to march on Rome. They forget that even
Mussolini himself was an old revolutionary socialist.
And they never studied the lives of Fidel Castro and
his "martyred" lieutenant, Che Guevara. If they
had, they might have learned that both were early
admirers of Hitler and Nazism.

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With the tinder piling high as a result of society's

They fall into three major categories whose

Cincinnati Police Chief Jacob Schott told a Senate

A floating "black power" cabal developed, with

Nor have right‐wing climate‐makers been idle.

Trouble‐makers and known law‐breakers lead the

"A very small minority of the minority group is

Precipitating incidents can be staged. The

A staged incident started the first of the 1967 city

A whole new generation of radicals has adopted

In July 1968, Black Panther Party "Prime Minister"

A few agitators attract and stir the milling masses

"No riot ever occurs without the aid of rumor,"

Indigenous agitators may emerge spontaneously

Atlanta's experience with SNCC, in September

Curious and loot‐hungry crowds jump into the

A Detroit matron stood in a supermarket doorway

Irresponsible or short‐sighted civic leaders hand

Swelled by television coverage, the crowd quickly

"This retreat before a defiant mob only fueled the

Incredibly the same script was played over at

Such paralysis in the face of toddling totalitarians

In the later stages of violence police often

tions clogged and chains of command crumbling,

Nevertheless, Joe Strickland, the black Detroit

These scavengers of discontent constantly search

Three weeks later Oakland erupted, the

In Havana, addressing a Castroite revolutionary

Other leading U.S. radicals shuttle steadily to and

In Cleveland in July 1968 a band of African‐

Why these young men react differently from

A team of Princeton social psychologists has

The law‐abiding citizens are far more numerous

From the first hour in Detroit African‐American

Behind the horror and mystery of the American

Until this century, most thinkers about mob

Baschwitz identified seven stages in mass

The classic natural history of the Baschwitzean

Some social upheaval or progressive moral

In the middle of the 20th century, mass violence

Detroit's 1943 race riot winged on a false rumor

School course on mass manipulation and social

While agitators "keynote" the crowd, young

A "drawing effect" begins pulling in fun‐hungry

NEA Columnist Ray Cromley during World War II

As the Cleveland insurrection of July 1968

Weeks in advance clandestine painters had

—When an African‐American man and his white

—In a public park white toughs made improper

Then Newark erupted. Detroit News editor Martin

Soon the agitators sidled behind the crowd and

Advertising Paralysis. A wayward brick shattered

Ironically, this admitted looter was incensed by

A teenager who joined the street packs saw it

For nine hours, while the crowds built and the

Mayor Cavanagh's subsequent explanations were

Others did—nondescript denizens of "The Street"

Flaming Fad. After the first fire on Sunday