Diana Oughton
Encyclopedia
Diana Oughton was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) 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 indigenous Indians. After returning to the U.S, 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 SDS, eventually becoming a full-time organizer and member of the Jesse James Gang. With the split of SDS in 1969, she joined Weatherman.
Oughton died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion
in New York City
, when a nail bomb
she was constructing with Terry Robbins
detonated, destroying the building and killing her, Robbins, and Ted Gold
.
, the eldest of four daughters. She played the piano and the flute as a child, and enjoyed the operas and plays that her parents took her to see in Chicago. As a child, Oughton's father taught her to handle a shotgun to be used during the pheasant
season with her father at the family's shooting preserve, and sometimes in the surrounding countryside of Dwight
. Oughton learned to ride horses and had been a 4-H
member. She grew up in Dwight, where her family had been prominent for decades. Her mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, and her father was James Henry Oughton, Jr., vice-president of the family bank and owner of a successful restaurant. James Oughton was a member of the Republican Party
and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly
, serving from 1964 to 1966. One of Diana’s great-grandfathers (on her father's side) was the founder of Dwight’s Keeley Institute
for Alcoholics, and another great-grandfather, William D. Boyce
, founded the Boy Scouts of America
.
Diana Oughton left Dwight at the age of 14 to finish her high school education at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia
. Madeira provided a conservative education. In her senior year at Madeira, she was accepted by all of the Seven Sisters
colleges. Oughton graduated high school in 1959, entering Bryn Mawr College
in Pennsylvania
as a German-language major. Oughton supported her Republican family's political values by opposing federal banking regulations, social security, and anything associated with big government. When she was 19, Oughton went to West Germany
, under a program sponsored by Wayne State University
of Detroit, to spend her junior year of college at the University of Munich. She rented a room from the former rector of the university, Gerhard Weber. Oughton became close friends with some of the German students. One such student was Peter, with whom she had conversations late into the night. In the family-authorized biography, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, author Thomas Powers
noted Diana's recollection of a conversation with Peter that resonated with her: "He said...Hurrah for Socialism!" After her study abroad, Oughton returned to Bryn Mawr for her senior year. It was during this year that it became apparent to her that America's young people had grown up in the silent fifties as observers and listeners. In the early sixties, young people saw that what they had been taught to believe had fallen short. During this time, Oughton and many other students read and were influenced by the book Black Like Me. The author, John Howard Griffin
, gave an account of what he encountered going to the Southern United States
, disguised as an African American
. The book had a profound effect on Oughton, prompting her to volunteer in 1962 to tutor African American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia. Once, Oughton told her sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who couldn't read.
, at that time an isolated Indian market town. Oughton went to Guatemala as a liberal, believing that the problems could be identified and solutions devised and carried out. Eventually, she became a radical
, and began to feel an urgency to change everything at once. While there, Oughton worked with young adults and older indigenous people to teach them to read. She helped local Catholic priests implement nutritional programs and edited a left-wing Guatemalan newspaper. Oughton lived in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse
. During this time, the questions with which she had struggled with came to a head. Oughton questioned what to do about poverty
, social injustice
, and revolution
in the world. Oughton came to the conclusion that no matter how many hours were spent working to feed and educate, there would always be more people than jobs to earn wages, inadequate food supplies, and never enough shelter to protect people from the elements.
According to Thomas Powers, the author of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, the more Oughton 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, 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. Oughton left Chichicastenango with a new view of the problems that undeveloped countries like Guatemala faced when in struggle with the United States.
Those who knew Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Oughton came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being American. In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers
writes that 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." Oughton became much more aware of the United States' impact on foreign countries, and she did not return to Philadelphia the same Midwest Republican. Oughton's old friends from college noticed upon her return to the United States how she had matured, while also displaying sadness regarding the poverty she encountered in Guatemala in the previous two years.
to enroll in the University of Michigan
Graduate School of Education, seeking her Master of Arts degree in teaching. In Michigan, she began to work part-time at the Children's Community School
(CCS), a project established by Toby Hendon 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. The CCS mission was to treat the children with love and understanding, in hopes that violent thoughts would not consume the child's personality. 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.
Later in 1966 Oughton dropped almost all of her other commitments to work full-time at CCS. She designed a fund-raising button with a smiling face and the words, CHILDREN ARE ONLY NEWER PEOPLE. It was at CCS that Oughton met CCS teacher Bill Ayers
. The two fell in love and soon began living together. In 1968, the school ran into severe problems, such as the fact that few students learned to read, and lost its funding, so Oughton and Ayers sought to become active elsewhere in the community.
while working at CCS, but it was not until after the closure of the school that they became involved as full-time organizers. Their lives became consumed by meetings, organizing, and planning "actions". It was during this time that Ayers and Oughton met Terry Robbins. In March 1968, Oughton helped create a women’s liberation group at a time when the issues were just beginning to emerge among radicals. The group met every week or so, wherever the women 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. During these meetings Oughton often discussed the role that women played in the SDS, which was a combination of being a sexual object, an office clerk, and a housekeeper. Later in 1968 Oughton told a friend that while she was away for five days, Ayers had slept with other women. She told the friend she tried to convince herself that it didn't matter, but it did.
Also in 1968, Oughton and Ayers became part of the Jesse James Gang, which banded together with about 40 others against the moderates. The Jesse James Gang replaced the University of Michigan SDS chapter. Robbins, Oughton, and Ayers worked in partnership with Jim Mellen from the Revolutionary Youth Movement Group. The Vietnam War
entered its third year in the middle of 1968. The early student movement had taken their moral stance from the teachings of Albert Camus
, who taught that thinking men have the responsibility to find a way in the world to be neither a victim or the executioner. Four events in 1968 turned the American student movement into self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries: the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive; the student sit-in at Columbia University
; the near-revolution in France
; and the Democratic National Convention
in Chicago. Each event helped change the way American radicals viewed their own situations.
By the end of 1968, the revolutionaries were tired of waiting for change, and no longer had allegiance to or trust in America's democracy. One of the few actions by the Jesse James Gang occurred on the University of Michigan campus while Robben Fleming, the university president, was speaking to a group of students inside a school building. Oughton spoke outside with a portable address system, while the Jesse James Gang handed out sliced pieces of bread, shouting, "Here's the bread. Get the baloney inside."
The 1968 annual national SDS convention was held at Michigan State University
. Oughton and Ayers were participants sponsored by Eric Chester
, who was a Voice-SDS leader in Ann Arbor. The Gang insisted that action was the only thing likely to create a situation in which radical solutions to American problems would be considered. 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.
faction. Oughton's sense of herself made it more difficult to get along with her father. Her parents' lives in Dwight, Illinois were seen by Oughton as complacent and secure. Oughton saw lives in the impoverished sections of Chicago and Detroit as chaotic. At this time, SDS protests became more violent and radical. Oughton and Ayers had been drifting apart since December 1968. Monogamy
, according to Ayers, would interfere with his political work. Oughton replaced her old friends, and she abandoned teaching, for politics was now Oughton's life. Merrill Rosenberg told Oughton, "Revolution means violence and risk, or it is only talk. The Weathermen's arguments pointed to their conclusion that the time was now to fight."
In August 1969, Oughton participated in an SDS delegation that traveled to Cuba
for the third meeting between Vietnam
ese and American delegates. The Vietnamese called the meeting to discuss progress taken in the peace movement as the war in Vietnam was entering its final stages. Oughton was impressed by Cuba's progress in literacy and medical treatment. The pace of movement toward action within the Weathermen picked up soon after their return from Cuba.
Oughton and seventy-five other Weatherwomen drove to Pittsburgh on September 3, 1969, after attending a caucus in Cleveland to take part in what the Weathermen Group called a practice run of the "Days of Rage
". On the morning of September 4, twenty Weatherwomen entered the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) office and held the office workers captive until the Weatherwomen had run off copies of a leaflet to be handed out to student sympathizers. One of the Weatherwomen told Miss Dodd, who worked in the AFSC office, "We thought until now you were on our side. Now we know you are a member of the enemy." A short time later, all seventy-five Weatherwomen appeared at South Hills High School in Pittsburgh to participate in a "jailbreak"
. The women spray painted anti-war slogans "Ho lives" and "Free Huey" on the school's main entrance doors, and handed out leaflets, urging high school students to "bring the war home," and asking students to leave the school campus. Some Weatherwomen made speeches in the school's play yard about racism, imperialism, and the SDS national action plans. Oughton was able to escape from the Pittsburgh police, but 26 others, including Cathy Wilkerson and Jane Spielman, were arrested at the school. The students at the high school had no idea who the Weatherwomen were, or even why the women chose their school.
Part of this move toward greater violence was seen during the "Days of Rage
" in Chicago
, taking place on October 8-11, 1969. One purpose of the "Days of Rage" was to create an image of strength and determination that would win converts to revolutionary violence. Weathermen gathered at Grant Park
, around a fire made from nearby park benches. They listened to leaders' speeches about Che Guevara
and the world revolution. The last speech spurred the group to head for the Drake Hotel
, which was the home of federal judge Julius Hoffman
. He was the presiding judge at the Chicago 8
trial. Weathermen took their helmets, clubs and chains, and entered into the streets. The group smashed car windshields and store windows. Oughton was one of the people arrested on October 9 in Chicago, when she was spied by police keeping an eye out for other Weathermen who might turn up. Her bail was set at $5,000, which her father came up from Dwight to pay. Until Oughton's arrest, her family did not know who the Weathermen were or what they stood for. After she was released, Mr. Oughton dropped his daughter off at a church where she was meeting up with other Weathermen; shortly afterward, police raided the church and arrested 43 members of the group. Oughton managed to escape by jumping from a ground floor window.
After the "Days of Rage", the group became increasingly violent. Oughton returned home for a short visit around Christmas
Day 1969. She seemed pleased to receive some clothing items and other gifts from her family. Though she appeared thin and fatigued, her family did not press her to stay. Oughton left her parents' home for the last time to go to Flint, Michigan
for the December 27 "War Council" meeting. Oughton made the decision at the meeting to go underground. In her book Flying Close to the Sun, former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson describes meeting 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. When Wilkerson joined the collective, the members were in need of a place to stay. Wilkerson's father had a townhouse in New York but was to be away for a couple of weeks. Terry Robbins wondered whether Wilkerson could get the keys. She did so, and the group arrived at 18 West 11th Street to decide 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, 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."
, 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. Oughton left Detroit and joined the group at the house. On Friday of the same week, Oughton and Robbins were in the basement assembling a nail bomb
when it detonated. 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."
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.
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 FBI. 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 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 (30.5 cm) in diameter and packed with dynamite. The street was cleared, the bomb-removal truck was summoned, and the search continued with considerable caution. Before the day was over, detectives found four cartons containing 57 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting cap
s, and some cheap alarm clock
s with holes drilled in their faces for the attaching of wires. It was understood later that the bombs were to be detonated at a non-commissioned officer
s' dance at Fort Dix.
The doctor who examined Oughton's remains said that 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. Ayers has raised the possibility that Oughton may have intentionally detonated the explosion, and it has been reported that a vicious argument occurred throughout the previous day and night in which Boudin favored using antipersonnel bombs, and that Oughton had misgivings.
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 University, which could have taken lives."
The Townhouse Explosion was the tragic and dramatic culmination of the grim political direction in which Weatherman had been headed. Laura Whitehorn
, a former member of Weatherman, said "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."
Weather Underground Organization dedicated their book Prairie Fire to Oughton.
police force upon confirmation of identity. Mr. Oughton was on a business trip in London
at the time of Oughton's death. He stated in the Detroit Free Press
that he was told on the phone that "his daughter's remains had been identified in a bombed Greenwich Village townhouse. She was a revolutionary terrorist and the bomb, intended for an adjunct of the Establishment
in New York, had killed her by mistake." Mr. Oughton also stated in the article "I knew she had friends in radical politics and that she was traveling around the country organizing teach-ins. But even as late as the (1968) Democratic convention she refused to take part in the violence. I'm sure she did this with a crystal clear conscience. There was nothing egocentric or self-centered about it." On Tuesday, March 24, 1970, Oughton was buried next to her grandparents in the family plot about a mile and a half outside of Dwight. Hundreds attended the funeral services. Some of the children Oughton had worked with at the Children's Community School placed their fund-raising buttons that Oughton had designed and made three years prior, and pinned the buttons to a bouquet of flowers at the explosion site.
A 1975 TV movie, Katherine, starring Art Carney
, Sissy Spacek
, Henry Winkler
, Julie Kavner
, and 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 explosion of the bomb that went off unexpectedly at a government building that was targeted by the violent faction.
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. Diana Oughton is one of the individuals he uses as a case study.
Paul Kantner
in 1971 sang about Oughton on the album Sunfighter
.
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) Michigan Chapter and later, a member of the 1960s radical group Weatherman
Weather Underground (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...
. Oughton received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
. After graduation, Oughton went to Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
with the VISA program to teach the young and older indigenous Indians. After returning to the U.S, she worked at the Children's Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
while getting her Master's degree at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
. She became very active in SDS, eventually becoming a full-time organizer and member of the Jesse James Gang. With the split of SDS in 1969, she joined Weatherman.
Oughton died 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...
in New York City
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...
, when 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...
she was constructing with 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...
detonated, destroying the building and killing her, Robbins, and Ted Gold
Ted Gold
Theodore "Ted" Gold was a member of Weatherman.-Early years and education:Gold was a red diaper baby. 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...
.
Early life and education
Oughton was born in ChicagoChicago
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...
, the eldest of four daughters. She played the piano and the flute as a child, and enjoyed the operas and plays that her parents took her to see in Chicago. As a child, Oughton's father taught her to handle a shotgun to be used during the pheasant
Pheasant
Pheasants refer to some members of the Phasianinae subfamily of Phasianidae in the order Galliformes.Pheasants are characterised by strong sexual dimorphism, males being highly ornate with bright colours and adornments such as wattles and long tails. Males are usually larger than females and have...
season with her father at the family's shooting preserve, and sometimes in the surrounding countryside of Dwight
Dwight, Illinois
Dwight is a village in located mainly in Livingston County, Illinois, with a small portion in Grundy County, Illinois. The population was 4,260 at the 2010 census. Dwight contains an original stretch of the famous U.S. Route 66, and uses a railroad station designed in 1891 by Henry Ives Cobb. It is...
. Oughton learned to ride horses and had been a 4-H
4-H
4-H in the United States is a youth organization administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the United States Department of Agriculture , with the mission of "engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth development." The name represents...
member. She grew up in Dwight, where her family had been prominent for decades. Her mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, and her father was James Henry Oughton, Jr., vice-president of the family bank and owner of a successful restaurant. James Oughton was a member of the Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly
Illinois General Assembly
The Illinois General Assembly is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Illinois and comprises the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois Senate. The General Assembly was created by the first state constitution adopted in 1818. Illinois has 59 legislative districts, with two...
, serving from 1964 to 1966. One of Diana’s great-grandfathers (on her father's side) was the founder of Dwight’s Keeley Institute
Keeley Institute
The Keeley Institute, known for its Keeley Cure, was a commercial medical operation that offered treatment to alcoholics from 1879 to 1965. Though at one time there were more than 200 branches in the United States and Europe, the original institute was founded by Leslie Keeley in Dwight, Illinois,...
for Alcoholics, and another great-grandfather, William D. Boyce
William D. Boyce
William Dickson "W. D." Boyce was an American newspaper man, entrepreneur, magazine publisher, and explorer. He was the founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the short-lived Lone Scouts of America . Born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, he acquired a love for the outdoors early in his life...
, founded the Boy Scouts of America
Boy Scouts of America
The Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States, with over 4.5 million youth members in its age-related divisions...
.
Diana Oughton left Dwight at the age of 14 to finish her high school education at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia
McLean, Virginia
McLean is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia. The community had a total population of 48,115 as of the 2010 census....
. Madeira provided a conservative education. In her senior year at Madeira, she was accepted by all of the Seven Sisters
Seven Sisters (colleges)
The Seven Sisters are seven liberal arts colleges in the Northeastern United States that are historically women's colleges. They are Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, Mount Holyoke College, Radcliffe College, Smith College, Vassar College, and Wellesley College. All were founded between 1837 and...
colleges. Oughton graduated high school in 1959, entering Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
as a German-language major. Oughton supported her Republican family's political values by opposing federal banking regulations, social security, and anything associated with big government. When she was 19, Oughton went to West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
, under a program sponsored by Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Wayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and...
of Detroit, to spend her junior year of college at the University of Munich. She rented a room from the former rector of the university, Gerhard Weber. Oughton became close friends with some of the German students. One such student was Peter, with whom she had conversations late into the night. In the family-authorized biography, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, author Thomas Powers
Thomas Powers
Thomas Powers is an author, and an intelligence expert.He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weatherman member Diana Oughton...
noted Diana's recollection of a conversation with Peter that resonated with her: "He said...Hurrah for Socialism!" After her study abroad, Oughton returned to Bryn Mawr for her senior year. It was during this year that it became apparent to her that America's young people had grown up in the silent fifties as observers and listeners. In the early sixties, young people saw that what they had been taught to believe had fallen short. During this time, Oughton and many other students read and were influenced by the book Black Like Me. The author, John Howard Griffin
John Howard Griffin
John Howard Griffin was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959...
, gave an account of what he encountered going to the Southern United States
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
, disguised as an African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
. The book had a profound effect on Oughton, prompting her to volunteer in 1962 to tutor African American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia. Once, Oughton told her sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who couldn't read.
Guatemala
After receiving her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1963, Oughton spent the next two years in Guatemala with the Voluntary International Service Assignments program (VISA). Nearly half the girls from Oughton's college senior class went on to graduate school. Oughton was assigned to ChichicastenangoChichicastenango
Chichicastenango, also known as Santo Tomás Chichicastenango, is a town in the El Quiché department of Guatemala, known for its traditional K'iche' Maya culture. The Spanish conquistadors gave the town its name from the Nahuatl name used by their soldiers from Tlaxcala: Tzitzicaztenanco, or City...
, at that time an isolated Indian market town. Oughton went to Guatemala as a liberal, believing that the problems could be identified and solutions devised and carried out. Eventually, she became a radical
Radical left
Radical left is a term used in the names of several political movements:* Det Radikale Venstre, a social-liberal party in Denmark* Radical Party of the Left , a social-liberal party in France...
, and began to feel an urgency to change everything at once. While there, Oughton worked with young adults and older indigenous people to teach them to read. She helped local Catholic priests implement nutritional programs and edited a left-wing Guatemalan newspaper. Oughton lived in a small house with a dirt floor and a little outhouse
Outhouse
An outhouse is a small structure separate from a main building which often contained a simple toilet and may possibly also be used for housing animals and storage.- Terminology :...
. During this time, the questions with which she had struggled with came to a head. Oughton questioned what to do about poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
, social injustice
Social injustice
Social injustice is a concept relating to the claimed unfairness or injustice of a society in its divisions of rewards and burdens and other incidental inequalities...
, and revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
in the world. Oughton came to the conclusion that no matter how many hours were spent working to feed and educate, there would always be more people than jobs to earn wages, inadequate food supplies, and never enough shelter to protect people from the elements.
According to Thomas Powers, the author of Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, the more Oughton 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, 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. Oughton left Chichicastenango with a new view of the problems that undeveloped countries like Guatemala faced when in struggle with the United States.
Those who knew Oughton recognized this period as the major turning point in her life; according to Powers, Oughton came to feel something close to a sense of shame at being American. In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers
William Charles "Bill" Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction...
writes that 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." Oughton became much more aware of the United States' impact on foreign countries, and she did not return to Philadelphia the same Midwest Republican. Oughton's old friends from college noticed upon her return to the United States how she had matured, while also displaying sadness regarding the poverty she encountered in Guatemala in the previous two years.
Children’s Community School
In 1966, Oughton left Philadelphia for Ann Arbor, MichiganAnn Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
to enroll in the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
Graduate School of Education, seeking her Master of Arts degree in teaching. In Michigan, she began to work part-time at the Children's Community School
Children's Community School
Children's Community School is an independent progressive elementary school located in Van Nuys , serving students from kindergarten through sixth grade.-External links:***...
(CCS), a project established by Toby Hendon and based on the Summerhill
Summerhill School
Summerhill School is an independent British boarding school that was founded in 1921 by Alexander Sutherland Neill with the belief that the school should be made to fit the child, rather than the other way around...
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. The CCS mission was to treat the children with love and understanding, in hopes that violent thoughts would not consume the child's personality. 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.
Later in 1966 Oughton dropped almost all of her other commitments to work full-time at CCS. She designed a fund-raising button with a smiling face and the words, CHILDREN ARE ONLY NEWER PEOPLE. It was at CCS that Oughton met CCS teacher Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers
William Charles "Bill" Ayers is an American elementary education theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction...
. The two fell in love and soon began living together. In 1968, the school ran into severe problems, such as the fact that few students learned to read, and lost its funding, so Oughton and Ayers sought to become active elsewhere in the community.
SDS and the Jesse James Gang
Ayers and Oughton were involved with Students for a Democratic SocietyStudents 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...
while working at CCS, but it was not until after the closure of the school that they became involved as full-time organizers. Their lives became consumed by meetings, organizing, and planning "actions". It was during this time that Ayers and Oughton met Terry Robbins. In March 1968, Oughton helped create a women’s liberation group at a time when the issues were just beginning to emerge among radicals. The group met every week or so, wherever the women 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. During these meetings Oughton often discussed the role that women played in the SDS, which was a combination of being a sexual object, an office clerk, and a housekeeper. Later in 1968 Oughton told a friend that while she was away for five days, Ayers had slept with other women. She told the friend she tried to convince herself that it didn't matter, but it did.
Also in 1968, Oughton and Ayers became part of the Jesse James Gang, which banded together with about 40 others against the moderates. The Jesse James Gang replaced the University of Michigan SDS chapter. Robbins, Oughton, and Ayers worked in partnership with Jim Mellen from the Revolutionary Youth Movement Group. The 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...
entered its third year in the middle of 1968. The early student movement had taken their moral stance from the teachings of Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, who taught that thinking men have the responsibility to find a way in the world to be neither a victim or the executioner. Four events in 1968 turned the American student movement into self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries: the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive; the student sit-in 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...
; the near-revolution in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
; and the Democratic National Convention
1968 Democratic National Convention
The 1968 Democratic National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968. Because Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek a second term, the purpose of the convention was to...
in Chicago. Each event helped change the way American radicals viewed their own situations.
By the end of 1968, the revolutionaries were tired of waiting for change, and no longer had allegiance to or trust in America's democracy. One of the few actions by the Jesse James Gang occurred on the University of Michigan campus while Robben Fleming, the university president, was speaking to a group of students inside a school building. Oughton spoke outside with a portable address system, while the Jesse James Gang handed out sliced pieces of bread, shouting, "Here's the bread. Get the baloney inside."
The 1968 annual national SDS convention was held at Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...
. Oughton and Ayers were participants sponsored by Eric Chester
Eric Chester
Eric Thomas Chester is an American author, socialist political activist, and former economics professor.Born in New York City, he is the son of Harry and Alice Chester...
, who was a Voice-SDS leader in Ann Arbor. The Gang insisted that action was the only thing likely to create a situation in which radical solutions to American problems would be considered. The Gang offered a tight, validating community within which members could express their rage and frustration about the status quo
Status quo
Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...
, and their empathy for suffering.
Weatherman
With the split of SDS in 1969, Oughton and Ayers joined the WeathermanWeather Underground (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. Oughton's sense of herself made it more difficult to get along with her father. Her parents' lives in Dwight, Illinois were seen by Oughton as complacent and secure. Oughton saw lives in the impoverished sections of Chicago and Detroit as chaotic. At this time, SDS protests became more violent and radical. Oughton and Ayers had been drifting apart since December 1968. Monogamy
Monogamy
Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...
, according to Ayers, would interfere with his political work. Oughton replaced her old friends, and she abandoned teaching, for politics was now Oughton's life. Merrill Rosenberg told Oughton, "Revolution means violence and risk, or it is only talk. The Weathermen's arguments pointed to their conclusion that the time was now to fight."
In August 1969, Oughton participated in an SDS delegation that traveled 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...
for the third meeting between Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
ese and American delegates. The Vietnamese called the meeting to discuss progress taken in the peace movement as the war in Vietnam was entering its final stages. Oughton was impressed by Cuba's progress in literacy and medical treatment. The pace of movement toward action within the Weathermen picked up soon after their return from Cuba.
Oughton and seventy-five other Weatherwomen drove to Pittsburgh on September 3, 1969, after attending a caucus in Cleveland to take part in what the Weathermen Group called a practice run of the "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...
". On the morning of September 4, twenty Weatherwomen entered the American Friends Service Committee
American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee is a Religious Society of Friends affiliated organization which works for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world...
(AFSC) office and held the office workers captive until the Weatherwomen had run off copies of a leaflet to be handed out to student sympathizers. One of the Weatherwomen told Miss Dodd, who worked in the AFSC office, "We thought until now you were on our side. Now we know you are a member of the enemy." A short time later, all seventy-five Weatherwomen appeared at South Hills High School in Pittsburgh to participate in a "jailbreak"
Weather High School Jailbreaks
Jailbreaks were demonstrations staged by members of Weatherman during the summer and fall of 1969 in an effort to recruit high school and community college students to join their movement against the United States government and its policies.-Purpose:...
. The women spray painted anti-war slogans "Ho lives" and "Free Huey" on the school's main entrance doors, and handed out leaflets, urging high school students to "bring the war home," and asking students to leave the school campus. Some Weatherwomen made speeches in the school's play yard about racism, imperialism, and the SDS national action plans. Oughton was able to escape from the Pittsburgh police, but 26 others, including Cathy Wilkerson and Jane Spielman, were arrested at the school. The students at the high school had no idea who the Weatherwomen were, or even why the women chose their school.
Part of this move toward greater violence was seen during the "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...
" 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...
, taking place on October 8-11, 1969. One purpose of the "Days of Rage" was to create an image of strength and determination that would win converts to revolutionary violence. Weathermen gathered at Grant Park
Grant Park (Chicago)
Grant Park, with between the downtown Chicago Loop and Lake Michigan, offers many different attractions in its large open space. The park is generally flat. It is also crossed by large boulevards and even a bed of sunken railroad tracks...
, around a fire made from nearby park benches. They listened to leaders' speeches about 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...
and the world revolution. The last speech spurred the group to head for the Drake Hotel
Drake Hotel (Chicago)
The Drake Hotel, 140 East Walton Place, Chicago, Illinois, is a luxury full-service hotel, located downtown on the lake side of Michigan Avenue two blocks north of the John Hancock Center and a block south of Oak Street Beach at the top of the Magnificent Mile.Overlooking Lake Michigan, it was...
, which was the home of federal judge Julius Hoffman
Julius Hoffman
Julius J. Hoffman was a Chicago, Illinois, attorney and judge and former law partner of Richard J. Daley who achieved notoriety for his role in the Chicago Seven trial.-Early life:...
. He was the presiding judge at the Chicago 8
Chicago Seven
The Chicago Seven were seven defendants—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to protests that took place in Chicago, Illinois on the occasion of the 1968...
trial. Weathermen took their helmets, clubs and chains, and entered into the streets. The group smashed car windshields and store windows. Oughton was one of the people arrested on October 9 in Chicago, when she was spied by police keeping an eye out for other Weathermen who might turn up. Her bail was set at $5,000, which her father came up from Dwight to pay. Until Oughton's arrest, her family did not know who the Weathermen were or what they stood for. After she was released, Mr. Oughton dropped his daughter off at a church where she was meeting up with other Weathermen; shortly afterward, police raided the church and arrested 43 members of the group. Oughton managed to escape by jumping from a ground floor window.
After the "Days of Rage", the group became increasingly violent. Oughton returned home for a short visit around Christmas
Christmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
Day 1969. She seemed pleased to receive some clothing items and other gifts from her family. Though she appeared thin and fatigued, her family did not press her to stay. Oughton left her parents' home for the last time to go to Flint, Michigan
Flint, Michigan
Flint is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and is located along the Flint River, northwest of Detroit. The U.S. Census Bureau reports the 2010 population to be placed at 102,434, making Flint the seventh largest city in Michigan. It is the county seat of Genesee County which lies in the...
for the December 27 "War Council" meeting. Oughton made the decision at the meeting to go underground. In her book Flying Close to the Sun, former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson describes meeting with 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 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
Incendiary device
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices or incendiary bombs are bombs designed to start fires or destroy sensitive equipment using materials such as napalm, thermite, chlorine trifluoride, or white phosphorus....
had been thrown at the home of Judge Murtagh, then presiding over the trial of the Panther 21. When Wilkerson joined the collective, the members were in need of a place to stay. Wilkerson's father had a townhouse in New York but was to be away for a couple of weeks. Terry Robbins wondered whether Wilkerson could get the keys. She did so, and the group arrived at 18 West 11th Street to decide their next move.
Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of...
, whose wife Eleanor Raskin
Eleanor Raskin
Eleanor E. Raskin née Stein; was a member of Weatherman. She is currently an associate professor at Albany Law School, teaching transnational environmental law with a focus on catastrophic climate change.- Early life :Eleanor E...
was part of the Weather Underground
Weather Underground (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...
organization, and who was himself a courier for the Underground, 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."
The Townhouse Explosion
On Monday, March 2, 1970, in Keene, New HampshireKeene, New Hampshire
Keene is a city in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 23,409 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Cheshire County.Keene is home to Keene State College and Antioch University New England, and hosts the annual Pumpkin Fest...
, a Weatherman purchased two 50-pound cases of dynamite
Dynamite
Dynamite is an explosive material based on nitroglycerin, initially using diatomaceous earth , or another absorbent substance such as powdered shells, clay, sawdust, or wood pulp. Dynamites using organic materials such as sawdust are less stable and such use has been generally discontinued...
from the New England Explosives Corporation. Sometime that week, the dynamite was moved from Keene to 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, where it was taken to the house at 18 West Eleventh Street. Oughton left Detroit and joined the group at the house. On Friday of the same week, Oughton and Robbins were in the basement assembling 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...
when it detonated. 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."
Wilkerson and 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...
, 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
Ted Gold
Theodore "Ted" Gold was a member of Weatherman.-Early years and education:Gold was a red diaper baby. 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...
, 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.
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 FBI. The prints they had on file were from Oughton’s arrest in Chicago on October 9, 1969 during the "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...
".
It took four days to find 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 (30.5 cm) in diameter and packed with dynamite. The street was cleared, the bomb-removal truck was summoned, and the search continued with considerable caution. Before the day was over, detectives found four cartons containing 57 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting cap
Blasting cap
A blasting cap is a small sensitive primary explosive device generally used to detonate a larger, more powerful and less sensitive secondary explosive such as TNT, dynamite, or plastic explosive....
s, and some cheap alarm clock
Alarm clock
An alarm clock is a clock that is designed to make a loud sound at a specific time. The primary use of these clocks is to awaken people from their night's sleep or short naps; they are sometimes used for other reminders as well. To stop the sound, a button or handle on the clock is pressed; but...
s with holes drilled in their faces for the attaching of wires. It was understood later that the bombs were to be detonated at a non-commissioned officer
Non-commissioned officer
A non-commissioned officer , called a sub-officer in some countries, is a military officer who has not been given a commission...
s' dance at Fort Dix.
The doctor who examined Oughton's remains said that 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. Ayers has raised the possibility that Oughton may have intentionally detonated the explosion, and it has been reported that a vicious argument occurred throughout the previous day and night in which Boudin favored using antipersonnel bombs, and that Oughton had misgivings.
When Brian Flanagan
Brian Flanagan
Brian Flanagan is a former member of the American radical left organizations Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground Organization .-Early life:...
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
Ted Gold
Theodore "Ted" Gold was a member of Weatherman.-Early years and education:Gold was a red diaper baby. 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...
, Diana Oughton 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...
and the plan to bomb the dance at Fort Dix and the library at Columbia University, which could have taken lives."
The Townhouse Explosion was the tragic and dramatic culmination of the grim political direction in which Weatherman had been headed. Laura Whitehorn
Laura Whitehorn
Laura Jane Whitehorn was born in April 1945 to Lenore and Nathaniel Whitehorn of Brooklyn, New York. As a college student in the 1960s, she organized and participated in civil rights and anti-war movements. as well as involvement in a series of revolutionary bombings and armed robberies...
, a former member of Weatherman, said "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."
Weather Underground Organization dedicated their book Prairie Fire to Oughton.
Oughton after death
Diana Oughton's mother was notified at the Oughton home by a member of the DwightDwight, Illinois
Dwight is a village in located mainly in Livingston County, Illinois, with a small portion in Grundy County, Illinois. The population was 4,260 at the 2010 census. Dwight contains an original stretch of the famous U.S. Route 66, and uses a railroad station designed in 1891 by Henry Ives Cobb. It is...
police force upon confirmation of identity. Mr. Oughton was on a business trip 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...
at the time of Oughton's death. He stated in the Detroit Free Press
Detroit Free Press
The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The Sunday edition is entitled the Sunday Free Press. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "Freep"...
that he was told on the phone that "his daughter's remains had been identified in a bombed Greenwich Village townhouse. She was a revolutionary terrorist and the bomb, intended for an adjunct 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...
in New York, had killed her by mistake." Mr. Oughton also stated in the article "I knew she had friends in radical politics and that she was traveling around the country organizing teach-ins. But even as late as the (1968) Democratic convention she refused to take part in the violence. I'm sure she did this with a crystal clear conscience. There was nothing egocentric or self-centered about it." On Tuesday, March 24, 1970, Oughton was buried next to her grandparents in the family plot about a mile and a half outside of Dwight. Hundreds attended the funeral services. Some of the children Oughton had worked with at the Children's Community School placed their fund-raising buttons that Oughton had designed and made three years prior, and pinned the buttons to a bouquet of flowers at the explosion site.
A 1975 TV movie, Katherine, starring Art Carney
Art Carney
Arthur William Matthew “Art” Carney was an American actor in film, stage, television and radio. He is best known for playing Ed Norton, opposite Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the situation comedy The Honeymooners....
, Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek
Sissy Spacek is an American actress and singer. She came to international prominence for her for role as Carrie White in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination...
, Henry Winkler
Henry Winkler
Henry Franklin Winkler, OBE is an American actor, director, producer, and author.Winkler is best known for his role as Fonzie on the 1970s American sitcom Happy Days...
, Julie Kavner
Julie Kavner
Julie Deborah Kavner is an American film and television actress, comedian and voice artist. Noted for her role as Marge Simpson on the animated television series The Simpsons, she also voices other characters for the show, including Jacqueline Bouvier, and Patty and Selma Bouvier.Born in Los...
, and Jane Wyatt
Jane Wyatt
Jane Waddington Wyatt was an American actress perhaps best known for her role as the housewife and mother on the television comedy Father Knows Best, and as Amanda Grayson, the human mother of Spock on the science fiction television series Star Trek...
, 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
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, 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 explosion of the bomb that went off unexpectedly at a government building that was targeted by the violent faction.
James Merrill
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
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. Diana Oughton is one of the individuals he uses as a case study.
Paul Kantner
Paul Kantner
Paul Lorin Kantner is an American rock musician, known for co-founding the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane and its spin-off band Jefferson Starship.- Overview :...
in 1971 sang about Oughton on the album Sunfighter
Sunfighter
-Personnel:*Paul Kantner – vocals, rhythm guitar*Grace Slick – vocals, piano*Jack Traylor – guitar on "Earth Mother", vocals on "Earth Mother"*Jerry Garcia – guitar on "When I Was a Boy I Watched the Wolves", "Million", and "Holding Together"...
.
Further reading
- Eager, Paige Whaley. From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists. England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008 (See pages 49–51 regarding Diana Oughton).
- Lynn, Cendra. The Compassionate Life and Terrible Death of Diana Oughton. "Ann Arbor Observer" March, 2010. Pp 21-23.