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Diana Oughton

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Diana Oughton
BornJanuary 26, 1942
Chicago, Illinois, USA
DiedMarch 6, 1970
Greenwich Village, New York, USA
Known forStudent Activist
Teacher at Children's Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Member of Students for a Democratic Society
Member of the Jesse James Gang
Member of Weathermen
Greenwich Village, New York Townhouse Explosion 1970

Diana Oughton (January 26 1942 - March 6 1970) was a member of the 1960s radical group The Weathermen. Diana Oughton received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr and after graduating went to Guatemala with the VISA program to work with young adults and older people.[1] After returning she worked at the Children's Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan while getting her Master's degree at the University of Michigan. She became very active in Students for a Democratic Society, eventually becoming a full-time organizer and member of the Jesse James Gang.[2] With the split of SDS in 1969, she joined the Weathermen.

Oughton died in an explosion on March 6, 1970, in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in New York City, when a bomb she was constructing with Terry Robbins accidentally detonated, destroying the building and killing her, Robbins, and Ted Gold.[3]

Early Life and Education

Oughton was born on January 26, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in Dwight, Illinois as a member of a wealthy family who had been prominent in the town for decades. Her mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, her father was James Oughton Jr, vice president of the family bank, and owner of a successful restaurant.[4] One of Diana’s great-grandfathers was the founder of Dwight’s Keeley Institute for alcoholics, and another great-grandfather founded the Boy Scouts of America.[5]

Diana Oughton left Dwight at age 14 to finish school at the Madeira School in Virginia; after graduating, she entered Bryn Mawr in 1959 as a German language major. When she was 19, Oughton went to Germany to spend her junior year at the University of Munich, when she rented a room from the former rector of the university, Gerhard Weber, and his wife. After her study abroad, she returned to Bryn Mawr for her senior year in 1962 and began to tutor black children in the ghettos of Philadelphia.[6]

Guatemala

After receiving her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1963, Diana spent two years in Guatemala with the VISA program. Oughton was assigned to Chichicastenango, at that time an isolated Indian market town. While there, Oughton worked with young adults and older people. Oughton lived like the Indians, in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse.[7]

According to Thomas Powers, who wrote the family-authorized biography Diana: the making of a terrorist, the more Diana learned about the hard life of rural Guatemala, the more she reflected on the affluence of the United States. In Chichicastenango, Americans seemed an alien presence, the fact of their wealth was almost an insult to the impoverished Indians. In her mind, a confusion emerged that lasted the rest of her life: she had rejected affluence (at first almost unconsciously) to work among the poor, but poverty, clearly, was nothing to be envied. She hated poverty, but she hated affluence, too.[8]

Those who knew Diana Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Diana came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being an American.[9] In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers writes that Diana Oughton "had had an abundance of experience in Guatemala, a torrent, almost more than she could endure. She now sometimes suffered the full flood of her experiences".[10] Oughton became much more aware of the U.S. impact on foreign countries, and she did not return to Philadelphia the same Midwest Republican.

Children’s Community School

In 1966, Diana Oughton left Philadelphia for Ann Arbor, Michigan to enroll in the University of Michigan Graduate School of Education, seeking her Master’s degree in teaching. While there, she began to work at the Children’s Community School (CCS), a project founded by a group of students and based on the Summerhill method of education. Children were allowed to do what they liked when they liked, on the premise that both teaching and learning were most successful when most spontaneous.[11] The School also tried to establish complete equality between white and black students and to involve parents in the running of the school, so that it might be a community in the largest sense of the word.[12]

Oughton dedicated herself to the school and teaching and designed a fund-raising button that read, CHILDREN ARE ONLY NEWER PEOPLE.[13] It was at CCS that Diana Oughton met Bill Ayers. The two fell in love and soon began living together. In 1968, when the school ran into severe problems and lost its funding, Oughton and Ayers sought to become active elsewhere in the community. [14]

SDS and The Jesse James Gang

Ayers and Oughton were involved with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) while working at CCS, but it was not until after the closure of the school that they became very involved as full-time organizers. In March 1968, Oughton helped create a women’s liberation group at a time when the issue was just beginning to emerge among radicals.[15] The group met every week or so, wherever it could find room. Most of the talk seemed to center on the subordinate role of women in the radical movement and on the sexual oppression of women by the “macho” tendency of males to regard sex as conquest. [16]

In 1968, Oughton and Ayers became part of the Jesse James Gang,[17], which replaced the University of Michigan SDS chapter. The Gang insisted that action was the only thing likely to create a situation in which radical solutions to American problems would be considered.[18] The Gang offered a tight, validating community within which members could express their rage and frustration about the status quo, and their empathy for suffering.[19]

Weathermen

With the split of SDS in 1969, Oughton and Ayers joined the Weathermen. At this time, protests became more violent and radical than they had been in SDS. Part of this move towards greater violence was seen during the "Days of Rage" in Chicago, taking place on October 8-11 of 1969. One purpose of the "Days of Rage" was to create an image of strength and determination that would win converts to revolutionary violence.[20] Diana Oughton was one of the people arrested in October of 1969 in Chicago; her bail was set at $5,000, which her father came up from Dwight to pay. After she was released, Mr. Oughton dropped his daughter off at a church where she was meeting up with other Weathermen; shortly afterwards, police raided the church and arrested 43 members of the group. Oughton managed to escape by jumping out of a window.[21]

After the "Days of Rage", the group became increasingly more violent. In her book Flying Close to the Sun, former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson describes meeting up with Terry Robbins, also a member of the Jesse James Gang, who told her about a small, semi-clandestine group in New York to which he belonged. He explained briefly that the group had already been active: a firebomb had been thrown at the home of Judge Murtagh, then presiding over the trial of the Panther 21.[22] When Wilkerson joined the collective, the members were in need of a place to stay. Her father had a townhouse in New York but would be away for a couple of weeks, and Terry Robbins wondered whether Wilkerson could get the keys.[23] She did so, and the group arrived at 18 West 11th Street to figure out their next move.

Jonah Raskin, whose wife Eleanor Raskin was part of the Weather Underground Organization, and who was himself a courier for the Underground,[24] recalls the last time he spoke with the members of the collective in New York: "I had talked to them not long before the townhouse blew up and they seemed to have lost touch with reality- and were incapable of making sensible decisions about almost everything."[25]

The Townhouse Explosion

Main article: Greenwich Village townhouse explosion

On Monday, March 2, 1970, in Keene, New Hampshire, a Weatherman purchased two 50-pound cases of dynamite from the New England Explosives Corporation. Sometime that week, the dynamite was moved from Keene to Greenwich Village, New York where it was taken to the house at 18 West Eleventh Street. Diana Oughton left Detroit and joined the group at the house. On Friday of the same week, Oughton and Terry Robbins were in the basement assembling a bomb when it accidentally detonated.[26] Cathy Wilkerson, who was in the townhouse at the time, describes her experience during the explosion, "the idea that Terry and Diana were both in the subbasement overwhelmed everything else. As I forced my attention there and to them, my lungs expanded instantaneously to draw in air and dust so I could call out."[27]

Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, another Weatherman in the townhouse at the time, were the only two to escape. When they ran out into the street, someone asked if there was anyone else in the house. Thinking that Ted Gold, the other Weatherman in the townhouse, had gone to the store, Wilkerson replied that no, there was no one left inside. She knew that Terry and Diana were gone.[28]

Four days after the explosion, detectives found some of Oughton’s remains near a workbench in the rubble-filled basement of the devastated townhouse. At the end of another week, a detective discovered the tip of the little finger from the right hand. A print taken by a police department expert was matched later that day with a set of Oughton’s prints in the Washington files of the F.B.I.[29] The prints they had on file were from Oughton’s arrest in Chicago on October 9, 1969 during the Days of Rage.

It took four days to find Diana Oughton’s remains, not only because of the amount of destruction the bomb had caused -- the townhouse was destroyed -- but also because of the dynamite found in the wreckage. While searching through the rubble, detectives found four lead pipes, each 12 inches in diameter and packed with dynamite. The street was cleared, the bomb-removal truck was summoned, and the search continued with considerably greater caution. Before the day was over, detectives found four cartons containing 57 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps, and some cheap alarm clocks with holes drilled in their faces for the attaching of wires.[30] It was understood later that the bombs were to have been detonated at a non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix. [31]

The doctor who examined Oughton’s remains said she had been standing within a foot or two of the bomb when it exploded. It may, in fact, have gone off in her hands.[32] Diana Oughton was buried at age 28 in Dwight, Illinois on Tuesday, March 24, 1970. Ayers has raised the possibility that Oughton may have intentionally detonated the explosion, it has been reported that a vicious argument occured during all of the previous day and night in which Boudin favored using antipersonnel bombs, and that Oughton had misgivings.[1]

When Brian Flanagan reflects on his time as part of the Weather Underground Organization, he has this to say: "I was regretful over about 5 percent of what we did." He added, "I think 95 percent of what we did was great, and we'd do it again." "And what was the 5 percent? The town house." When pressed, Flanagan said that he regretted "the deaths of the three Weathermen Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins and the plan to bomb the dance at Fort Dix and the library at Columbia, which could have taken lives."[33]

The Townhouse Explosion was the tragic and dramatic culmination of the grim political direction in which Weatherman had been headed.[34] Laura Whitehorn, former member of Weatherman, says, "We were out of touch with what was going on, and we lost sight of the fact that if you’re a revolutionary, the first thing you have to try to do is preserve human life."[35]

Diana after Death

  • A 1975 TV movie, "Katherine", starring Art Carney, Sissy Spacek, Henry Winkler, Julie Kavner, Jane Wyatt, tells the story of "Katherine Alman", who was from a wealthy Denver family, became socially active, served as a teacher of English in South America, then joined a radical "Collective" which had many similarities to the SDS and eventually the Weatherman. The "Collective" protested the Vietnam War, invaded a High School, Held a "War Council" and eventually split into peaceful and violent factions. The story ended with Katherine's death, due to the bombing of a government building that did not go as planned.
  • James Merrill wrote a poem titled “18 West 11th Street“. Merrill had grown up in the townhouse that was sold to Cathy Wilkerson’s father, by whom it was owned at the time of the bombing.
  • Richard M. Pearlstein wrote The Mind of the Political Terrorist, in which he attempted to provide insight into the individual psychological dimensions of political terrorism.[36] Diana Oughton is one of the individuals he uses as a case study.
  • Paul Kantner sang about Diana in Sunfighter (1971), here are some of the lyrics:

How do you feel to shoot down your brother now
And bury us in cages of cement and steel
What do you see when you look at one another now
Who do you see tell me how do you feel

Sing a song for the children who are gone
Sing a song for Diana
Huntress of the moon and a lady of the Earth
Weather woman Diana [37]

Notes

  1. ^ FBI files part 2 page 3
  2. ^ Powers 87
  3. ^ Powers, 183
  4. ^ Powers 11
  5. ^ Powers, 10-11
  6. ^ FBI files part 2 page 3
  7. ^ Ayers, 95
  8. ^ Powers, 35
  9. ^ Powers, 37
  10. ^ Ayers, 94
  11. ^ Powers, 59
  12. ^ Powers, 61
  13. ^ Powers, 69
  14. ^ FBI files part 2 page 3
  15. ^ Powers 73
  16. ^ Powers, 73
  17. ^ Powers, 87
  18. ^ Powers, 89
  19. ^ Wilkerson, 226
  20. ^ Powers, 135
  21. ^ Powers 156
  22. ^ Wilkerson, 324
  23. ^ Wilkerson, 332
  24. ^ Dohrn, 124
  25. ^ Dohrn, 126
  26. ^ Powers, 183
  27. ^ Wilkerson, 346
  28. ^ Wilkerson, 347
  29. ^ FBI files, part 3 page 17
  30. ^ Powers, 3
  31. ^ Wilkerson, 341
  32. ^ FBI files part 3 page 17
  33. ^ Wakin
  34. ^ Berger, 130
  35. ^ Berger, 130
  36. ^ Crenshaw
  37. ^ Kantner

References

  • Ayers, Bill. "Fugitive Days". Boston, Ma: Beacon Press, 2001.
  • Berger, Dan. "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity". Oakland, Ca: AK Press, 2006.
  • Crenshaw, Martha, Reviewed Work(s): The Mind of the Political Terrorist by Richard M. Pearlstein Political Psychology > Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 169-171
  • Dohrn, Bernardine, Ayers, Bill, and Jones, Jeff, editors. "Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground", 1970-1974. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006.
  • Double Feature - The Boy in the Plastic Bubble - Katherine #03877 (PC Treasures, Inc. 2006, 2765 Metamora Rd. Oxford, MI 48371) [Note: 1975 Fictionalized TV Movie "Based on a True Story" - Written and Directed by Jeremy Kagan. The movie mixes drama with documentary style commentaries, and authentic audio/video footage of the period.]
  • F.B.I. files. http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/oughton_diana.htm
  • Kantner, Paul. “Diana.” Sunfighter (1971). Grunt Label. http://www.lyrics007.com/Paul%20Kantner%20Lyrics/Diana%20Lyrics.html
  • Powers, Thomas. "Diana: the making of a terrorist". Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971.
  • Wakin, Daniel J. International Herald Tribune Paris. Aug 28, 2003: 4.
  • Wilkerson, Cathy. "Flying too Close to the Sun". New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

Diana Oughton Gravesite: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5184 Find A Grave

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