Ted Gold
Encyclopedia
Theodore "Ted" Gold was a member of Weatherman
.
. He was the son of Hyman Gold, a prominent Jewish physician and a mathematics instructor at Columbia University
who had both been part of the Old Left. His mother was a statistician who taught at Columbia. His parents lived in an upper-middle-class high-rise apartment on Manhattan
's Upper West Side
. While Gold's father had gone to medical school, Gold's parents had experienced economic hardship. But Gold considered his parents affluent and upper-middle-class, although certainly not part of the Establishment
or ruling class
.
In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Gold had attended his first civil rights
demonstration in Washington, D.C.
As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red diaper babies at Camp Kinderland
, Yiddish
for Children's Land in upstate New York
. From 1959-1961 Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) on 92nd street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue.
Gold attended Stuyvesant High School
, an elite public high school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the school's cross-country track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society. Arriving at Columbia University
in Fall 1964, Gold immediately became involved in campus Civil Rights Movement activity. He organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) at Columbia as one of the campus's Friends of SNCC coordinators. Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with the activists of any other Civil Rights Movement groups.
During his freshman year at Columbia College
, Gold had lived at home with his parents. At the beginning of his sophomore year, however, he had moved into an 8th floor single dormitory room in Columbia University's Furnald Hall. Initially Gold had planned to major in mathematics
at Columbia, but by his junior year in Fall 1966 Gold had decided that sociology
was a more relevant field for him.
By the Fall of 1966, Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States. If some other campus leftist would argue against a political position of his by stating that "Lenin wrote" or "Marx said" or "Mao says" however, Gold would generally reply by reminding the other leftist that "Marxism is a method and a tool, not a dogma". In November 1966, Gold became very active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) at Columbia, saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist and seemed to be, among like-minded activists, one of the most dedicated, intellectual, and politically experienced and knowledgeable activists on Columbia's campus.
"Praxis Axis" faction, which emphasized education, rather than confrontational direct action, as its primary campus organizing strategy. They distributed materials, held rap sessions in the dorms, protested recruiters, and held referendums.
to demand that the Columbia Administration ban the U.S. Marines
from recruiting inside the John Jay Hall lobby. After a group of pro-war right-wing Columbia student athletes violently attacked the non-violent anti-war protesters inside the lobby, Gold quickly urged Columbia SDS people to retreat from John Jay Hall and return to the sundial rallying point in order to avoid further violence.
When the rally following the right-wing student attack on Columbia SDS people had ended, the Columbia SDS steering committee and Columbia Professor of Sociology Vernon Dibble, who was Columbia SDS's strongest faculty supporter, retreated to the back of the West End Bar on Broadway and 114th Street to plan what to do next.
"You let them push you out of John Jay Hall today. You have to go back there again tomorrow to keep your credibility as a radical student group," Professor Dibble insisted.
Gold and other Columbia SDS leaders all then got into a debate. Everyone agreed that Columbia SDS activists had to go back to confront the Marine recruiters the next day. The major point of debate was whether Columbia SDS would gain more politically and win more mass support by stopping campus Marine recruitment and possibly fighting it out with other students, the right-wing protectors of the U.S. Marines, or by having a more mass-based, non-violent anti-war demonstration directed at protesting the policies of its main political enemy, the Columbia Administration.
"The Administration likes nothing better than to have students fighting other students. Then it can portray itself as 'above politics' and as 'a neutral'. We shouldn't fall into the Administration's trap and alienate all our new mass student support by leading students into a violent confrontation, which is what the Administration now wants us to do," Gold argued.
Gold's views were broadly supported by the rest of the Columbia SDS leadership. Its April 21, 1967 demonstration of the next day was going to be non-violent, disciplined, and focused more on protesting against the Columbia Administration's policies than on the jocks. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC) aide, James Bevel
, would be invited to address the campus rally.
Gold then played a major role in collectively writing the following letter from Columbia SDS to Columbia University
faculty members, which indicates how Columbia SDS's leadership thought politically at that time. A photocopy of this letter was found in the de-classified NYC Police Department
's Red Squad
organizational file on SDS, in 1987:
Following the April 1967 confrontation with the Marine recruiters, most of the newly politicized and radicalized Columbia SDS supporters returned to their normal academic and hedonistic routines. But Gold and a few other Columbia SDS steering committee "heavies" spent the next few weeks putting together a Columbia SDS publication called New Left Notes: The Journal of Columbia SDS. This SDS newspaper contained articles and columns on the SDS-Marine confrontation, on the 'free speech/freedom to recruit' vs. responsibility to resist Columbia complicity with the war machine controversy, on draft resistance, on the latest Vietnam War
escalation and on Columbia's connection to the Pentagon
's Institute for Defense Analyses
(IDA). It also included a short poem by Bertolt Brecht
. A photocopy of this particular newspaper was found in the de-classified FBI
file of Columbia SDS activist Bob Feldman in the late 1970s.
Much of the work of putting out this May 1967 Columbia SDS chapter newspaper was done at the West 115th Street apartment of Teddy Kaptchuk, who was the Columbia SDS chairman between late March 1967 and late March 1968. Nancy Biberman, a Barnard College
student who was active in Columbia SDS, did most of the technical preparation and layout of the 4-page newspaper, following article contributions from members of the Columbia SDS steering committee and editing by Ted "Acapulco" Gold. Because Gold, like many associated with the New Left, was smoking cannabis
on a regular basis by this time, people thought it was funny to start calling him by that nickname.
At the end of the Spring 1967 term, Gold decided he wanted to move out of his eighth floor Furnald Hall dormitory room and into an off-campus apartment during his senior year. Columbia SDS founder David Gilbert also needed new living space in September 1967. It was agreed that Gold and Gilbert and another Columbia SDS activist, Bob Feldman, would rent an off-campus apartment together during the 1967-1968 academic year.
After visiting Berkeley, California
and the West Coast in early June 1967, Gold returned to his Furnald Hall room by July 1967 and, for the second year in a row, worked as a summer group counselor of inner city high school students in Columbia University's "Double Discovery" tutoring program. Gold also organized with other Columbia SDS activists on the Upper West Side a "Vietnam Summer" anti-war off-campus summer organizing project.
Patterned after the Freedom Summer
campaign of 1964, "Vietnam Summer" was a nationwide student anti-war campaign to raise off-campus consciousness about current events in Vietnam. SDS activists around Columbia set up tables on the sidewalks and canvassed Upper West Side apartment buildings.
In late July 1967, Gold and other Columbia SDS steering committee people started to meet in the high-rise apartment on LaSalle Street of the two Columbia SDS activists who were already married, Peter and Linda Schneider, a few blocks from Columbia's campus. Meetings were held in the evening during the week, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Political strategy for the coming 67-68 school year was discussed. At one of the meetings, two Princeton University
SDS activists also participated in the strategic discussion, talking about common experiences in attempting to mobilize students in opposition to both Princeton and Columbia's Institute for Defense Analyses connections and both Princeton and Columbia's performance of Pentagon-sponsored basic research and weapons development activity on campus.
Nearly all the people attending the informal summer Columbia SDS steering with Gold were "Praxis Axis" people. Columbia SDS activist Bob Feldman brought to one of the meetings new research about IDA's involvement in "Project Agile" which directly related to weapons research for Vietnam War operational activity. There was also much theoretical discussion at these informal summer meetings about New Left political strategy and Columbia SDS chapter internal organization and education. Peter Schneider, Columbia SDS Chairman Teddy Kaptchuk and Gold, especially, seemed to feel that too great a gap existed between the political consciousness level of Columbia SDS's leadership and its rank-and-file's political consciousness level. Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups to maximize their participation in Columbia SDS chapter activity.
In the summer of 1967, Monthly Review published an English translation of Régis Debray
's Revolution In The Revolution?, which argued in support of Che Guevara
's "foci theory of revolution". Near the end of the summer, a New York SDS regional organizer named Halliwell appeared at one meeting to make the case for applying Debray's theory of "mobile tactics" to Columbia University conditions, with Columbia SDS acting as the non-violent equivalent of Che's "guerrilla foci group". According to Halliwell's analogy, the mass of Columbia students, like the mass of Latin American peasants, could only be aroused if Columbia SDS developed the capacity to act on an off-campus level as a mobile non-violent guerrilla foci at anti-war demonstrations. In Halliwell's view, Columbia SDS should continue to use its usual educational methods to persuade future members of the new working-class (the mass of Columbia University student "peasants") to become off-campus mobile demonstrators who pushed the U.S. anti-war movement "from protest to resistance" by their mobile tactics. In July 1967, however, Gold seemed only lukewarm about having Columbia SDS adopt some variant of Halliwell's "Debrayist" New Working-class organizing strategy.
In late July 1967, Gold was still thinking of going to graduate school in London
, following his scheduled June 1968 graduation from Columbia College, in order to please his mother. He thought that he would be able to get a good recommendation from Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver, who was still Gold's favorite professor at Columbia, on a personal level, at this time. In July 1967, Gold had also become romantically involved with a recent Barnard College graduate named Trude Bennett, who was also working during the summer as a "Double Discovery" project counselor.
By the beginning of August 1967, Gold felt that the African-American ghetto rebellions of that summer meant that the mass of African-American people had outgrown Martin Luther King's pacifist political line and were moving more in the direction that Malcolm X
, Stokely Carmichael
and the SNCC had predicted people would move. On WKCR
, the Columbia student radio station, Gold also was invited to do a 15-minute political commentary show each week during the summer of 1967, in which he explained why he felt the black urban rebellions (riots, actually) were justified.
The following month, Gold and another Columbia SDS activist named Mark Rudd
were arrested in midtown Manhattan on November 14, 1967, for chanting through a bullhorn and encouraging anti-war demonstrators to go "block the limousines" in the streets and "block the rush-hour" traffic near the Hilton Hotel to protest the presence of U.S. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk at a Foreign Policy Association gathering that was being held at the hotel. Gold and Rudd were taken to the 100 Centre Street jail and charged with "incitement to riot" but, due to the efforts of the National Lawyers Guild
, they were soon released and the charges were later dropped.
In his 2010 book, "Mohamed's Ghosts," journalist Stephan Salisbury observed that "The FBI began gathering information on" Gold "in earnest in 1967." Gold's FBI files, according to Salisbury, "stacked on a table, stand at least a foot high;" and they are "full of descriptions of meetings, speeches, names of friends, telephone numbers, organizations--all meticulously detailed by Bureau agents, informers, and memos derived from electronic surveillance."
After Mark Rudd was elected as Columbia SDS Chairman in late March 1968, Gold was placed on disciplinary probation by the Columbia Administration, along with five other anti-war students (including Rudd), for demonstrating inside Low Library to protest Columbia University's institutional sponsorship of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses weapons research think-tank. To protest the Columbia Administration's repression of "The IDA Six", on April 23, 1968, Gold joined Rudd in being one of the Columbia SDS activists who helped lead the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, in which five Columbia University buildings were seized by over 700 anti-war Columbia and Barnard students.
Following his suspension for his political activity during his senior year at Columbia in May 1968, Gold enrolled in a summer teachers training course. During the 1968-69 year, he worked as both a teacher in a private school and as a New York Regional SDS organizer of anti-war radical teachers for the newly-formed Teachers for A Democratic Society (TDS) group.
faction of Columbia SDS. Gold had become more militant after a visit to Cuba
, during which he and some other U.S. anti-war activists met with representatives of the Vietnamese people who were also opposed to continued U.S. military intervention in Indochina.
A few months after the Weatherman faction's October 1969 "Days of Rage
" protests in Chicago
, Gold was killed in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
. This occurred, according to Susan Braudy's book Family Circle, after Gold "had just returned to the first floor parlor after his first brief trip to the Strand Book Store
". Braudy's book also revealed that "in front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house's crumbling brick Greek-revival facade" and "since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, [the FBI agent] had been posing as an architectural historian".
After the 1970 bombing, many members of the Weathermen were on the FBI's "most wanted" list
. The Weathermen changed their name to "Weather Underground Organization" as its members went underground, living beyond the reach of the law.
at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village
, New York
. Diana Oughton
and Terry Robbins
also died in this explosion, in which Robbins and Oughton were building a nail bomb
intended for a Fort Dix
military dance event. Kathy Boudin
and Cathy Wilkerson both survived the explosion. John Jacobs
, the other member of the collective, was not present and went underground after the blast.
Weatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...
.
Early years and education
Gold was a red diaper babyRed diaper baby
Red diaper baby describes a child of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims.-History:...
. He was the son of Hyman Gold, a prominent Jewish physician and a mathematics instructor at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
who had both been part of the Old Left. His mother was a statistician who taught at Columbia. His parents lived in an upper-middle-class high-rise apartment on Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
's Upper West Side
Upper West Side
The Upper West Side is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, New York City, that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River and between West 59th Street and West 125th Street...
. While Gold's father had gone to medical school, Gold's parents had experienced economic hardship. But Gold considered his parents affluent and upper-middle-class, although certainly not part of the Establishment
The Establishment
The Establishment is a term used to refer to a visible dominant group or elite that holds power or authority in a nation. The term suggests a closed social group which selects its own members...
or ruling class
Ruling class
The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
.
In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Gold had attended his first civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
demonstration in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red diaper babies at Camp Kinderland
Camp Kinderland
Camp Kinderland is a summer camp located in Tolland, Massachusetts for boys and girls aged nine through sixteen. The camp's motto is summer camp with a conscience since 1923. The main topics of the curriculum are: equality, peace, community, social justice, activism, civil rights, Yiddishkeit,...
, Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
for Children's Land in upstate New York
Upstate New York
Upstate New York is the region of the U.S. state of New York that is located north of the core of the New York metropolitan area.-Definition:There is no clear or official boundary between Upstate New York and Downstate New York...
. From 1959-1961 Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) on 92nd street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue.
Gold attended Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant High School , commonly referred to as Stuy , is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. The school opened in 1904 on Manhattan's East Side and moved to a new building in Battery Park City in 1992. Stuyvesant is noted for its strong academic...
, an elite public high school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the school's cross-country track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society. Arriving at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in Fall 1964, Gold immediately became involved in campus Civil Rights Movement activity. He organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(SNCC) at Columbia as one of the campus's Friends of SNCC coordinators. Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with the activists of any other Civil Rights Movement groups.
During his freshman year at Columbia College
Columbia College of Columbia University
Columbia College is the oldest undergraduate college at Columbia University, situated on the university's main campus in Morningside Heights in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1754 by the Church of England as King's College, receiving a Royal Charter from King George II...
, Gold had lived at home with his parents. At the beginning of his sophomore year, however, he had moved into an 8th floor single dormitory room in Columbia University's Furnald Hall. Initially Gold had planned to major in mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
at Columbia, but by his junior year in Fall 1966 Gold had decided that sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
was a more relevant field for him.
By the Fall of 1966, Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States. If some other campus leftist would argue against a political position of his by stating that "Lenin wrote" or "Marx said" or "Mao says" however, Gold would generally reply by reminding the other leftist that "Marxism is a method and a tool, not a dogma". In November 1966, Gold became very active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
(SDS) at Columbia, saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist and seemed to be, among like-minded activists, one of the most dedicated, intellectual, and politically experienced and knowledgeable activists on Columbia's campus.
Student activism at Columbia University
By March 1967, Gold was the vice-chairman of Columbia SDS and, between late March 1967 and March 1968, Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Gold did most of the basic, menial work that was required to keep Columbia SDS functioning as a multi-issue radical student organizing group on campus. He became the most politically influential leader of Columbia SDS's New LeftNew Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
"Praxis Axis" faction, which emphasized education, rather than confrontational direct action, as its primary campus organizing strategy. They distributed materials, held rap sessions in the dorms, protested recruiters, and held referendums.
Antiwar rally
On April 20, 1967, as Columbia SDS vice-chairman, Gold led 300 anti-war student protesters from a sundial rally into Columbia University's John Jay HallJohn Jay Hall
John Jay Hall is a 15-story building located on the southeastern extremity of the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University in the City of New York, on the northwestern corner of 114th St. and Amsterdam Avenue...
to demand that the Columbia Administration ban the U.S. Marines
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...
from recruiting inside the John Jay Hall lobby. After a group of pro-war right-wing Columbia student athletes violently attacked the non-violent anti-war protesters inside the lobby, Gold quickly urged Columbia SDS people to retreat from John Jay Hall and return to the sundial rallying point in order to avoid further violence.
When the rally following the right-wing student attack on Columbia SDS people had ended, the Columbia SDS steering committee and Columbia Professor of Sociology Vernon Dibble, who was Columbia SDS's strongest faculty supporter, retreated to the back of the West End Bar on Broadway and 114th Street to plan what to do next.
"You let them push you out of John Jay Hall today. You have to go back there again tomorrow to keep your credibility as a radical student group," Professor Dibble insisted.
Gold and other Columbia SDS leaders all then got into a debate. Everyone agreed that Columbia SDS activists had to go back to confront the Marine recruiters the next day. The major point of debate was whether Columbia SDS would gain more politically and win more mass support by stopping campus Marine recruitment and possibly fighting it out with other students, the right-wing protectors of the U.S. Marines, or by having a more mass-based, non-violent anti-war demonstration directed at protesting the policies of its main political enemy, the Columbia Administration.
"The Administration likes nothing better than to have students fighting other students. Then it can portray itself as 'above politics' and as 'a neutral'. We shouldn't fall into the Administration's trap and alienate all our new mass student support by leading students into a violent confrontation, which is what the Administration now wants us to do," Gold argued.
Gold's views were broadly supported by the rest of the Columbia SDS leadership. Its April 21, 1967 demonstration of the next day was going to be non-violent, disciplined, and focused more on protesting against the Columbia Administration's policies than on the jocks. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC was closely associated with its first president, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr...
(SCLC) aide, James Bevel
James Bevel
James L. Bevel was an American minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement who, as the Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference initiated, strategized, directed, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era:...
, would be invited to address the campus rally.
Gold then played a major role in collectively writing the following letter from Columbia SDS to Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
faculty members, which indicates how Columbia SDS's leadership thought politically at that time. A photocopy of this letter was found in the de-classified NYC Police Department
New York City Police Department
The New York City Police Department , established in 1845, is currently the largest municipal police force in the United States, with primary responsibilities in law enforcement and investigation within the five boroughs of New York City...
's Red Squad
Red squad
In the United States, Red Squads were police intelligence units that specialized in infiltrating, conducting counter-measures and gathering intelligence on political and social groups during the twentieth century. Dating as far back as the Haymarket Riot in 1886, Red Squads became common in larger...
organizational file on SDS, in 1987:
Following the April 1967 confrontation with the Marine recruiters, most of the newly politicized and radicalized Columbia SDS supporters returned to their normal academic and hedonistic routines. But Gold and a few other Columbia SDS steering committee "heavies" spent the next few weeks putting together a Columbia SDS publication called New Left Notes: The Journal of Columbia SDS. This SDS newspaper contained articles and columns on the SDS-Marine confrontation, on the 'free speech/freedom to recruit' vs. responsibility to resist Columbia complicity with the war machine controversy, on draft resistance, on the latest Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
escalation and on Columbia's connection to the Pentagon
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
's Institute for Defense Analyses
Institute for Defense Analyses
The Institute for Defense Analyses is a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers to assist the United States government in addressing important national security issues, particularly those requiring scientific and technical expertise...
(IDA). It also included a short poem by Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
. A photocopy of this particular newspaper was found in the de-classified FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
file of Columbia SDS activist Bob Feldman in the late 1970s.
Much of the work of putting out this May 1967 Columbia SDS chapter newspaper was done at the West 115th Street apartment of Teddy Kaptchuk, who was the Columbia SDS chairman between late March 1967 and late March 1968. Nancy Biberman, a Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
student who was active in Columbia SDS, did most of the technical preparation and layout of the 4-page newspaper, following article contributions from members of the Columbia SDS steering committee and editing by Ted "Acapulco" Gold. Because Gold, like many associated with the New Left, was smoking cannabis
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
on a regular basis by this time, people thought it was funny to start calling him by that nickname.
At the end of the Spring 1967 term, Gold decided he wanted to move out of his eighth floor Furnald Hall dormitory room and into an off-campus apartment during his senior year. Columbia SDS founder David Gilbert also needed new living space in September 1967. It was agreed that Gold and Gilbert and another Columbia SDS activist, Bob Feldman, would rent an off-campus apartment together during the 1967-1968 academic year.
After visiting Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
and the West Coast in early June 1967, Gold returned to his Furnald Hall room by July 1967 and, for the second year in a row, worked as a summer group counselor of inner city high school students in Columbia University's "Double Discovery" tutoring program. Gold also organized with other Columbia SDS activists on the Upper West Side a "Vietnam Summer" anti-war off-campus summer organizing project.
Patterned after the Freedom Summer
Freedom Summer
Freedom Summer was a campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi which had historically excluded most blacks from voting...
campaign of 1964, "Vietnam Summer" was a nationwide student anti-war campaign to raise off-campus consciousness about current events in Vietnam. SDS activists around Columbia set up tables on the sidewalks and canvassed Upper West Side apartment buildings.
In late July 1967, Gold and other Columbia SDS steering committee people started to meet in the high-rise apartment on LaSalle Street of the two Columbia SDS activists who were already married, Peter and Linda Schneider, a few blocks from Columbia's campus. Meetings were held in the evening during the week, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Political strategy for the coming 67-68 school year was discussed. At one of the meetings, two Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
SDS activists also participated in the strategic discussion, talking about common experiences in attempting to mobilize students in opposition to both Princeton and Columbia's Institute for Defense Analyses connections and both Princeton and Columbia's performance of Pentagon-sponsored basic research and weapons development activity on campus.
Nearly all the people attending the informal summer Columbia SDS steering with Gold were "Praxis Axis" people. Columbia SDS activist Bob Feldman brought to one of the meetings new research about IDA's involvement in "Project Agile" which directly related to weapons research for Vietnam War operational activity. There was also much theoretical discussion at these informal summer meetings about New Left political strategy and Columbia SDS chapter internal organization and education. Peter Schneider, Columbia SDS Chairman Teddy Kaptchuk and Gold, especially, seemed to feel that too great a gap existed between the political consciousness level of Columbia SDS's leadership and its rank-and-file's political consciousness level. Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups to maximize their participation in Columbia SDS chapter activity.
In the summer of 1967, Monthly Review published an English translation of Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
's Revolution In The Revolution?, which argued in support of Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
's "foci theory of revolution". Near the end of the summer, a New York SDS regional organizer named Halliwell appeared at one meeting to make the case for applying Debray's theory of "mobile tactics" to Columbia University conditions, with Columbia SDS acting as the non-violent equivalent of Che's "guerrilla foci group". According to Halliwell's analogy, the mass of Columbia students, like the mass of Latin American peasants, could only be aroused if Columbia SDS developed the capacity to act on an off-campus level as a mobile non-violent guerrilla foci at anti-war demonstrations. In Halliwell's view, Columbia SDS should continue to use its usual educational methods to persuade future members of the new working-class (the mass of Columbia University student "peasants") to become off-campus mobile demonstrators who pushed the U.S. anti-war movement "from protest to resistance" by their mobile tactics. In July 1967, however, Gold seemed only lukewarm about having Columbia SDS adopt some variant of Halliwell's "Debrayist" New Working-class organizing strategy.
In late July 1967, Gold was still thinking of going to graduate school in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, following his scheduled June 1968 graduation from Columbia College, in order to please his mother. He thought that he would be able to get a good recommendation from Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver, who was still Gold's favorite professor at Columbia, on a personal level, at this time. In July 1967, Gold had also become romantically involved with a recent Barnard College graduate named Trude Bennett, who was also working during the summer as a "Double Discovery" project counselor.
By the beginning of August 1967, Gold felt that the African-American ghetto rebellions of that summer meant that the mass of African-American people had outgrown Martin Luther King's pacifist political line and were moving more in the direction that Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
, Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael
Kwame Ture , also known as Stokely Carmichael, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party...
and the SNCC had predicted people would move. On WKCR
WKCR
WKCR-FM is a radio station. Licensed to New York, New York, USA, it serves the New York area. The station is currently owned by Trustees of Columbia University in New York.-History:...
, the Columbia student radio station, Gold also was invited to do a 15-minute political commentary show each week during the summer of 1967, in which he explained why he felt the black urban rebellions (riots, actually) were justified.
Apartment
In September 1967, Gold moved most of his books and record albums from his parents' apartment to the West 94th Street apartment he now rented with Gilbert and Feldman. But by early October 1967, Gold was mainly living with Bennett in her West 108th Street apartment and by December 1967 he had completely moved out of the West 94th Street apartment and into Bennett's apartment. At the October 21, 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, Gold and Bennett both joined the sit-in at the Pentagon and were arrested, although Gold had previously felt that National SDS's 1967 strategy of emphasizing local organizing, rather than organizing for semi-annual national anti-war marches, made the most strategic sense. In explaining why he decided to participate in the October 21, 1967 non-violent mass sit-in at the Pentagon, Gold observed a few days later: "Sometimes spontaneous events happen that you have to take part in, even if it doesn't fit directly into a local organizing strategy. Being radical means being in the front line when masses of people are in motion."The following month, Gold and another Columbia SDS activist named Mark Rudd
Mark Rudd
Mark William Rudd is a political organizer, mathematics instructor, and anti-war activist, most well known for his involvement with the Weather Underground. Rudd became a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963. By 1968, he had emerged as a leader...
were arrested in midtown Manhattan on November 14, 1967, for chanting through a bullhorn and encouraging anti-war demonstrators to go "block the limousines" in the streets and "block the rush-hour" traffic near the Hilton Hotel to protest the presence of U.S. Secretary of State
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
Dean Rusk at a Foreign Policy Association gathering that was being held at the hotel. Gold and Rudd were taken to the 100 Centre Street jail and charged with "incitement to riot" but, due to the efforts of the National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild
The National Lawyers Guild is an advocacy group in the United States "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system . ....
, they were soon released and the charges were later dropped.
In his 2010 book, "Mohamed's Ghosts," journalist Stephan Salisbury observed that "The FBI began gathering information on" Gold "in earnest in 1967." Gold's FBI files, according to Salisbury, "stacked on a table, stand at least a foot high;" and they are "full of descriptions of meetings, speeches, names of friends, telephone numbers, organizations--all meticulously detailed by Bureau agents, informers, and memos derived from electronic surveillance."
After Mark Rudd was elected as Columbia SDS Chairman in late March 1968, Gold was placed on disciplinary probation by the Columbia Administration, along with five other anti-war students (including Rudd), for demonstrating inside Low Library to protest Columbia University's institutional sponsorship of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses weapons research think-tank. To protest the Columbia Administration's repression of "The IDA Six", on April 23, 1968, Gold joined Rudd in being one of the Columbia SDS activists who helped lead the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, in which five Columbia University buildings were seized by over 700 anti-war Columbia and Barnard students.
Following his suspension for his political activity during his senior year at Columbia in May 1968, Gold enrolled in a summer teachers training course. During the 1968-69 year, he worked as both a teacher in a private school and as a New York Regional SDS organizer of anti-war radical teachers for the newly-formed Teachers for A Democratic Society (TDS) group.
Weatherman
In 1969, Gold joined the WeathermanWeatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...
faction of Columbia SDS. Gold had become more militant after a visit to Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, during which he and some other U.S. anti-war activists met with representatives of the Vietnamese people who were also opposed to continued U.S. military intervention in Indochina.
A few months after the Weatherman faction's October 1969 "Days of Rage
Days of Rage
The Days of Rage demonstrations were a series of direct actions taken over a course of three days in October 1969 in Chicago organized by the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society...
" protests in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Gold was killed in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was the premature detonation of a bomb as it was being assembled by members of the American radical left group, Weatherman – later renamed the Weather Underground – in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street between Fifth Avenue and...
. This occurred, according to Susan Braudy's book Family Circle, after Gold "had just returned to the first floor parlor after his first brief trip to the Strand Book Store
Strand Book Store
The Strand Bookstore is an independent bookstore located at 828 Broadway at the corner of East 12th St) in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, near Union Square...
". Braudy's book also revealed that "in front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house's crumbling brick Greek-revival facade" and "since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, [the FBI agent] had been posing as an architectural historian".
After the 1970 bombing, many members of the Weathermen were on the FBI's "most wanted" list
FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives
The FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list arose from a conversation held in late 1949 between J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, and William Kinsey Hutchinson, International News Service Editor-in-Chief, who were discussing ways to promote capture of the...
. The Weathermen changed their name to "Weather Underground Organization" as its members went underground, living beyond the reach of the law.
Death
Gold died on March 6, 1970 in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosionGreenwich Village townhouse explosion
The Greenwich Village townhouse explosion was the premature detonation of a bomb as it was being assembled by members of the American radical left group, Weatherman – later renamed the Weather Underground – in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street between Fifth Avenue and...
at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
, New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Diana Oughton
Diana Oughton
Diana Oughton was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society Michigan Chapter and later, a member of the 1960s radical group Weatherman. Oughton received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. After graduation, Oughton went to Guatemala with the VISA program to teach the young and older...
and Terry Robbins
Terry Robbins
Terry Robbins was a U.S. leftist radical activist. A key member of the Students for a Democratic Society Ohio chapter, he led Kent State into its first militant student uprising in 1968. Robbins was credited for drawing inspiration from Bob Dylan’s song Subterranean Homesick Blues which later...
also died in this explosion, in which Robbins and Oughton were building a nail bomb
Nail bomb
The nail bomb is an anti-personnel explosive device packed with nails to increase its wounding ability. The nails act as shrapnel, leading almost certainly to greater loss of life and injury in inhabited areas than the explosives alone would. The nail bomb is also a type of flechette weapon...
intended for a Fort Dix
Fort Dix, New Jersey
JB MDL Dix , better known as Fort Dix, is a United States Army base located approximately south-southeast of Trenton, New Jersey. Dix is under the jurisdiction of the United States Army Reserve Command...
military dance event. Kathy Boudin
Kathy Boudin
Kathy Boudin is a former American radical who was convicted in 1984 of felony murder for her participation in an armed robbery that resulted in the killing of three people. She later became a public health expert while in prison...
and Cathy Wilkerson both survived the explosion. John Jacobs
John Jacobs (student leader)
John Gregory Jacobs was an American student and anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a leader in both Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman group, and an advocate of the use of violent force to overthrow the government of the United States...
, the other member of the collective, was not present and went underground after the blast.