Order of Battle

PROTEST Order of Battle

With its latticework of bridges, boulevards and traffic circles, Washington, D.C., is a vulnerable target, and Mayday Organizer Rennie Davis and his radicals have had the city squarely in their sights for a long time. Determined to bring the Government to a halt for at least one day, they are bent on carrying out a meticulous plan that is a model of guerrilla ingenuity. The theme: stop the blood and you stop the heart. Stop the heart and the "monster"--the war machine--dies. The means: block the city's bridges and roads with thousands of protesters.

The idea of shutting down Washington grew out of outrage over Cambodia and the tragedies at Kent and Jackson State. Davis and Jerry Coffin, an organizer for the War Resisters League, met last June and discussed the possibility of large-scale civil disobedience. Last summer Davis honed their plans still further during a Berkeley meeting that included Mike Lerner, a leading New Left strategist and a defendant in the Seattle Seven trial. By then a model existed: the tie-up of Seattle's freeways by University of Washington students last May.

In September, the newly formed National Coalition Against War, Racism and Repression (now known as The People's Coalition for Peace and Justice) endorsed the idea of strangling the capital. Davis meanwhile flew to Paris and won the encouragement of the North Vietnamese delegation. As he recalled: "The Vietnamese were saying that now was a time to act, that it might be possible to set off a chain of events that would end the war." Davis then hit the circuit, appealing to college audiences with the slogan: "Unless the Government of the U.S. stops the war in Viet Nam, we will stop the Government of the U.S."

Davis, 30, who is a veteran of the peace wars and one of the Chicago Seven, met with some resistance as he gathered his cadres. He wanted to carry out a nonviolent demonstration, and many hard-core radicals considered nonviolence a romantic relic of the past. Others were reluctant to participate because, as one organizer put it, "Mayday looked like an engraved invitation to a conspiracy trial." Still, Davis gathered an impressive file of 3-in.-by-5-in. cards listing potential organizers; by November he had established a nuclear staff of four or five that was to expand and become known as the Mayday Collective. They set up temporary headquarters in a rundown three-story house in Northwest Washington.

Running Out. As usual, money was a problem, even though some surprisingly large sums came from individual donors. To cut costs, as well as keep the operation on a grass-roots level, Davis set up 14 regional offices for recruitment and training. Much of the meager treasury was expended on an ambitious propaganda project, a 30-minute color film titled Time Is Running Out, narrated by Folk Singer Joni Mitchell. The film was shown from campus to campus, accompanied by the distribution of thousands of leaflets.

To give the project a sound revolutionary imprimatur, as well as a psychological lift, student leaders traveled to Saigon and Hanoi to hammer out joint peace proposals with local student groups. Davis visited the Hanoi delegation in Paris again; when he returned, a conference of some 2,000 students was held in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the scenario for Mayday was approved.

But Embraced. The Washington staff took great pains to ensure that regional organizations complied with the nonviolence pledge. One recalcitrant office was told to shut down, and all potential participants were warned that any violence, even trashing, would earn them the dread label of "pig provocateur." The theme was driven home with a 135-page, multicolored manual, one of the most thorough guerrilla guide books in the U.S. today. Still another manual gave regional leaders a step-by-step guide to Mayday tactics. Instructions on how to choke some 21 key sites read: "The regional groups will be broken into units of 10-25 people. The units will move in waves, one unit in each wave, onto the road. They will sit down in a circle, and pass the pipe and play music until arrested. The next wave will then move to the road." As for the police, the manual said that "resistance from authorities is expected to be very rough, although it will be difficult to execute without a general disruption of traffic, which achieves our potential goal." Despite their pacific aims, Davis and his confederates were understandably worried that passionate protesters could get out of hand.

The entrances to Washington and its internal traffic system were studied with a thoroughness that would do credit to a West Point classroom. Above all, participants were cautioned, Washington's black community must be disturbed as little as possible, and the Government employees denied access to their offices must not be alienated, but embraced. The soft-spoken Davis seems clearly bent on instruction rather than intimidation of Government workers. But the potential for intimidation is there. Said he: "If there are still people in this town who don't feel they are guilty, who can get up and put on their coats and ties and go to work, we are going to stop those people on the streets and find out what is in their heads."

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