Rebels in White Gloves

by Miriam Horn

  The “red squad” listened with grave concern as the witnesses testified about a twenty-two-year-old female, Dorothy Devine Gilbarg, who had recently returned to the collective after traveling to Cuba with the Venceremos (“We shall overcome”) Brigade for reasons she subsequently described to the Providence Journal: “We helped break the U.S. information blockade, supported the Vietnamese struggle and advanced the cause of Internationalism.” RAG was devoted, she said, to “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and to the eventual communization of the world.”

  Mrs. Gilbarg’s Cuban sojourn was what “brought the heat on the collective,” she believed. “The ATF told our neighbors we were dangerous, and enjoined them to rent their front bedroom so they could set up cameras to monitor our activities.” The investigators’ pictures—shot with a long lens, they are grainy and gray and clumsily composed—were posted in the Fall River Police Department with a warning that the young woman might be dangerous. Dorothy’s lank hair is tied back in a bandanna. Otherwise, she is much the same soft, shy girl who smiled out of her Wellesley yearbook in a picture taken just twelve months earlier.

  A year and a half had passed since her father had forced her down the aisle; Dorothy was cut off from her parents, but she was still struggling to make her new home. Swept into Dan’s leftist circle, the young bride was repeatedly frustrated in her wish to have time alone with her husband to solidify their new marriage. Though for a time the couple had their own apartment, they never made dinner together at home. Every night they were at someone’s house, “organizing.” Their thorough entanglement of the personal and political greatly enlarged Dorothy’s world, but it also menaced her sense of safety and would eventually sabotage her efforts to create a lasting intimate bond with her husband.

  Dorothy tried to play homemaker for her radical husband, valiantly hanging new Marimekko curtains and laying their breakfast table with Danish-modern flatware. She also dutifully supported her husband’s career, following him to Fall River though she had no work of her own there, and reliably parroting his political ideas. Her husband taught at a community college; he teaches there still. “His idea, ‘our idea,’ was that working-class people would change America, that if the working class wanted blacks to have equal opportunities and they wanted the war to end, then the world would change. We’d find real alienated Vietnam vets and talk to them about how they got used,” says Dorothy, “or try to get street toughs hanging on corners to not just be punks but to want to change their country and their town.” Several of the street kids, she believes, later informed on them to the ATF and FBI.

  There are at least three versions of the life Dorothy lived as Dan’s wife and a member of RAG. The first is that described by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Subversion. Dorothy and her comrades, in the committee’s rendering, were seditious and highly dangerous. The group was out to indoctrinate children: Dorothy and occasional RAG associate Susan Hagedorn (a former member of the Weather Underground) frequented the YMCA to show Boston Newsreal Co. documentaries about the Black Panther party and labor unions and Vietnam. Hagedorn, a youth counselor and teacher at the Fall River junior high, also consulted with Dan on “revolutionary propaganda” with unalarming titles that she might sneak into her class. “She said ‘I cream my jeans when I think of the stuff I can show the kids,’ ” reported Sergeant Andrade, adding that he didn’t much cotton to her “trooper’s language.” Andrade reported further that Dan had distributed leaflets to workers in the garment industry. When a worker he’d recruited at the King Phillip Mill complained that his co-workers called him a Communist, the sergeant said, Dan had snapped back: “Well, what the hell do you think you are?”

  The witnesses described a progressive turn toward violence in the group. “The members of RAG were advised by their Cuban companions as to the best tactics for revolution and informal indoctrination,” the investigators told the Senate. Venceremos Brigadiers “have a propensity toward the use of bombs and incendiaries.” In a New Bedford demonstration in November 1969, the ATF agents said, RAG member Michael Kevin Riley (whom they inaccurately identified as chairman of the Weatherman faction of SDS) burned a live pig. They produced as evidence leaflets they said were being produced by Mike Ansara, “one of the twenty most dangerous white revolutionaries in the U.S.” and distributed by Dorothy. The leaflets advocated violence, condemning the “Amerikan government’s attempts to suppress dissent” and calling for the emulation of Third World revolutions, “where poor people are taking what’s theirs.” “The Man is out to pull a fast one,” reads one of the leaflets reproduced in the report, “accusing us of being duped by outside agitators. We are going to take power back to the people. We are going to drive the cops, politicians and bloodsucking businessmen out. Free Bobby Seale. The black struggle against the rich rulers is white working people’s fight too.”

  The investigators’ account grew increasingly alarming. By the spring of 1970, they testified, just a month after two members of the Weather Underground blew themselves up building bombs in a Greenwich Village town house, the collective began planning a violent May Day demonstration in Fall River. Sergeant Andrade reported that Dorothy and another woman had been caught in the police station and could offer no explanation for their presence. “They are suspected of reconnoitering to take it over or to bomb it on the night of May 1st, 1970.” The police said they had also detected an unusual number of sales of gasoline in small containers and road flares called fusees, exactly like those that had been used to ignite buildings in Harvard Square. An informant who claimed to have infiltrated the collective reported that the group was anticipating “heavy action” on May Day. This was the same group, he claimed, that had organized the “April window-smashing riot” in Cambridge; now they “wanted the Hell’s Angels and the Panthers in their May Day parade, and were not afraid of a shoot-out. David Miller [another RAG member] thought he might die, and Dan Gilbarg said he would take some pigs with him.” Claiming that the group had threatened to kill him if they found him, the informant absconded. The group did not renounce violence, according to the police; the next month, they claimed, Mike Riley bought a semiautomatic gun.

  The second version of those years comes from Dorothy’s ex-husband, Dan Gilbarg, a straightforward, reflective man who still teaches at the community college in Fall River. Dan disputes much of the Senate report. Though there were some in the group who wanted to be “militant,” what that meant was “chanting loudly while we marched, instead of singing folk songs or ‘Give Peace a Chance.’ If there had been anything like bombs, guns, or Molotovs, I would have been gone.” The burned pig, Dan says, was made of papier-mâché and decorated with the names of all the corporations making money in Vietnam. The two women arrested in the police station were strangers to the group. And the informant, Dan says, must have been someone at the fringe of the group, given how wrong most of his information was; alternatively, he may have exaggerated RAG’s violent intentions to curry favor with authorities eager for a rationale for a harsh police response. The Fall River city council president did in fact promise to “take the wraps off of the police,” insisting he would not be bound by the rulings of “a senile kangaroo court [a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court] supporting the radicals.” That promise came despite the fact that RAG had no contact with the Black Panthers at all prior to the May Day march in 1970, according to Dan; it was the police who spread rumors that armed Panthers would be “landing on the beach at Westport,” causing frightened residents to begin buying guns. It was that influx of guns, in turn, that caused RAG to call off the demonstration, fearing someone would get hurt. “The pig power structure tails us and stakes out our home,” RAG announced. “They sent us bomb and death threats, told us they’ll use their clubs and guns.” The event effectively marked the end of RAG, Dan says. Most members decided their efforts to mobilize the workers were hopeless, and turned away from politics to their private lives. Dan sought to recast his appeal: “Rather than expect the locals to get interes
ted by talk of the Panthers, I started to speak to people about their everyday concerns.”

  The third version is Dorothy’s. Early on, she says, she felt a mounting sense of aimlessness in her new life with Dan. She did not have a job or a burning sense of mission of her own, and her attempts at traditional wifeliness fit only awkwardly into the collective’s structure. For the second time, therefore, she left home to experiment with a new kind of family. Without Dan, and with about two hundred fellow travelers, she joined the Venceremos Brigade, violating U.S. law by traveling to Cuba. Though she now calls the Brigade “a propaganda thing” by Castro, she also recalls her months working in the cane fields alongside Cuban comrades as a time of “more energy and sense of direction than I’d ever had.” She was impressed by the free clinics and schools and loved the physical labor and wholesome life. The revolution was like a generous and protective father: “They clothed me and fed me, and insisted we not use drugs.” Castro himself, who visited the Brigade on Christmas Day, seemed “charismatic and kind,” with none of her own father’s tyrannical will. “Fidel doesn’t sit in Batista’s palace and issue decrees,” she told the Providence Journal. “The people have to want a certain thing to happen, then Fidel asks that it happen, and it happens.” Describing the absence of violent crime, she added: “Why should you steal anything? All the essentials are free. Police are not needed. The populace will pursue a thief, because anything he steals belongs to everyone.”

  Dorothy’s parents had not spoken to their daughter in almost a year when the FBI showed up at their door to tell them that she was “Fidel Castro’s guest” and being taught to make explosives. She returned home from Cuba soon thereafter, and though just eleven weeks had passed, she found nearly everything changed. Dan had been evicted from their old apartment for political activities, and though he had found them another place to live, he had let their houseplants die and had not unpacked a single box. He was waiting for Dorothy to do it when she got home. “I walked in the door, and here was this big radical leader acting utterly dependent on me. I guess you could say we were starting to have problems with our roles.”

  Women throughout the New Left were by this time growing impatient with their men; many, like the thwarted abolitionists who became suffragists a century earlier, would become key figures in feminism. Why is it, wondered Mary King of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “that men in communes still gather around five to ask, ‘When’s supper going to be ready?’ ” At meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society, women who demanded to speak were often greeted with ridicule. A June 1967 plea “for our brothers in SDS to root out the male chauvinism within themselves” ended with, “We love you!” It was reprinted in the official SDS newsletter accompanied by a derisive drawing of a young woman wearing a polka-dot baby-doll dress and matching panties. Dan Gilbarg looks back with regret on the movement’s failure to confront its sexism. “There was a lot of macho stuff, and nobody ever bothered to ask why women weren’t in leadership positions. It was also sexist that I set the agenda in our marriage, that I didn’t encourage Dorothy to find a project or job of her own.”

  There was more change awaiting Dorothy when she got home. In her absence, Dan had become involved with another woman—though she was a lesbian, he said, and he had waited to ask his wife’s permission before having sex with her. (He felt licensed to ask, Dan says, when Dorothy told him she’d had an affair of her own in Cuba.) Dorothy wasn’t much surprised. “The collective did not value fidelity or have any regard for marriage,” she says.

  In fact, the experiments in collective living in the late sixties were to a great degree a reaction against traditional marriage and an attempt to craft alternatives that might be less unequal and inhibited and isolating. Many of Hillary’s classmates would spend months or years after Wellesley participating in such experiments, pursuing an ideal first described by Plato in The Republic. Families, Plato wrote, should “live in common houses and meet at common meals. None of them will have anything specially his or her own, [thus ending] the tearing of the city in pieces by differing about mine and not mine.… All will be affected … by the same pleasures and pains … and all tend towards a common end.” Plato’s vision included free love: “They will all be together … and so they will be drawn by a necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each other.” He also championed a radical kind of collective parenting, in which “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.” In 1948, B. F. Skinner had resurrected those ideas in Walden II; in 1961, Stranger in a Strange Land gave the theme a sci-fi spin, and in 1966 the best-selling Harrad Experiment transplanted the idea into Wellesley’s backyard at a fictional New England college (Harvard-Radcliffe). All explored the central question: where the boundary should be between public and private life.

  In Dorothy’s version, her collective viewed marriage as a capitalist effort by one human to own another; fidelity was repressive, and those who insisted on it were uptight. “The Weather Collective actively busted up couples, made them break up and go out with somebody else. Some collectives got rid of individual bedrooms entirely and everyone slept together on a mat on a floor. We all smoked lots of marijuana, which was definitely a sex aid. But I felt completely alienated from Dan, and when he told me he wanted to sleep with the lesbian, I said, ‘I don’t care what you do.’ By that time we’d moved into the collective house on New Boston Road. We lived in separate rooms, and he had a series of affairs. I understood that at that moment I’d lost all my protection. Another big honcho in the movement came to me and said, ‘I’m delighted you’re not into monogamy,’ and I just burst into tears.”

  The Sexual Revolution

  Do It!, Jerry Rubin titled his 1969 Yippie polemic. “Puritanism leads us to Vietnam. Sexual insecurity results in a supermasculinity trip called imperialism. America has a frustrated penis trying to drive itself in Vietnam’s tiny slit to prove it is the man.” For all the heedlessness with which many of the Wellesley women were then leaping into numerous beds, sex was a heavily laden thing in the early 1970s. It was no longer private, a sacred covenant between man and wife, or solely procreative. But it was far more than a recreation to pass the time in hot tubs: With drugs and rock ’n’ roll, it was the path to liberation. Men were sick, said Wilhelm Reich and Norman Mailer and Woody Allen, because they did not have enough or good enough orgasms. Sex was personally liberating: primitive, consciousness-expanding, transcendent. Sex was also politically liberating: transgressive, the last wild freedom in the prison of repressed industrialized society, a tool for world peace (“Make love, not war”). That sexual liberation was politically subversive was a view shared by the establishment: In 1967, J. Edgar Hoover ordered his agents to publicize the “depraved nature and moral looseness of the New Left,” and the deviant sexual behavior at RAG’s collectives described by investigators seemed to Strom Thurmond solid evidence of sedition.

  As an act of social rebellion, the sexual revolution was far more important for women than for men: The public policing of sexual behavior had never been very much focused on men. If loosening their corsets had been for women an act of political defiance, unbuttoning their Levi’s was much more so. Women would claim control of their own bodies—especially their sexual, reproductive bodies. They would demand their freedom to feel pleasure like men. Germaine Greer preached that the denial of female sexuality was “the chief instrument in the deflection of female energy” and urged women to put away their makeup and engagement rings and underpants and “celebrate Cunt.” Nancy Friday cataloged female sexual fantasies in A Secret Garden. For a century, female lust had been dirty, perverse; now young Wellesley alumnae studied The Joy of Sex and The Sensuous Woman by “J” (who called herself “a lady in the living room and a bitch in bed”), committing to memory such techniques as “the butterfly flick” and “the hoover” and the “whipped cream wiggle.” Sweeten and apply, the best-seller instructed, “then lap it all up with your tongue. He’ll wriggle w
ith delight and you’ll have all the fun of an extra dessert. If you have a weight problem, use one of the new artificial whipped creams in an aerosol can. And avoid gnawing.”

  In the consciousness-raising group Cherry Watts, ’69, joined right after Wellesley, she recalls, they talked about little except sex, “about what gave us pleasure, about orgasms and the best way to have one and how it was your right to have one and if he couldn’t pleasure you that you should take matters into your own hands, literally.” Feminist presses churned out papers, rigorously arguing that women should insist on being on top, or championing clitoral orgasms as a means to liberate women from their dependence on the penis.

  The sexual revolution was unquestionably liberating for a woman like Dorothy, who had been made a “ruined woman” and an unwilling bride by the repressive morality it sought to overthrow. Many of her classmates recall fondly those days of what Chris Osborne, ’69, describes as “fucking like bunnies”; they are not anything like the sex-hating banshees of antifeminist lore. But the revolution was also a mixed blessing: Girls raised like hothouse orchids had grown up, often, to be fragile flowers, woefully unprepared for the flood of sex let loose upon the land. “It was the first time we felt we had the right to feel good,” says Dorothy Devine. “We didn’t have to ask, ‘What’s his portfolio?’ or, ‘Does he want the same number of kids?’ At the same time, the idea that a man would invite you out simply for the pleasure of your company was made, overnight, obsolete.”