John Gregory Jacobs (September 30, 1947 – October 20, 1997) was an American student and anti-war activist in the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a leader in both Students for a Democratic Society and the Weatherman group, and an advocate of the use of violent force to overthrow the government of the United States. A fugitive after 1970, he died in 1997 in Canada.
Early life John Jacobs was born to Douglas and Lucille Jacobs, a prominent leftist Jewish couple, in New York State in 1947. He had an older brother, Robert. His father was a well-known leftist journalist who had been one of the first Americans to report on the Spanish Civil War. His parents later moved to Connecticut, where his father owned a bookstore. His childhood appeared to have been happy, and he was close to his parents.
In high school, Jacobs began to read Marxist philosophy heavily, and was deeply interested in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He also admired Che Guevara.
Jacobs graduated from high school in 1965 and enrolled at Columbia College of Columbia University. During the summer between high school and college, he lived in New York City and worked for a left-wing newspaper. Politically active in leftist political circles, Jacobs became acquainted with a large number of progressive intellectuals who further stimulated growth in his political ideology. For a brief time, he belonged to the Progressive Labor Party (PL), at the time a Maoist communist party.Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground, 1997.Jones, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience, 2004.Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, 2004. His first semester at Columbia, Jacobs met fellow freshman Mark Rudd, and the two became friends.
Rise and role in Students for a Democratic Society J.J., as most people at Columbia called him, soon joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Columbia University chapter of SDS had been founded in the 1950s as part of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth arm of the League for Industrial Democracy (a social democratic organization co-founded by Jack London, Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair and others). The chapter had sputtered for years, but became active in 1965 when it became known as SDS.Sale, SDS, 1973. Jacobs became very active in the group. A series of protests against on-campus military, CIA and corporate recruitment and ROTC induction ceremonies rocked Columbia's campus for the next two years.Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, 2001. Jacobs organized a protest in February 1967 against CIA recruiting at Columbia. Initially, the SDS chapter disavowed the action. But when Jacobs' sit-in proved popular among Columbia students, SDS claimed J.J. as one of their own. The CIA protest led to Jacobs' rapid rise within the chapter. The protests led Columbia President Grayson L. Kirk to ban indoor protests at Columbia beginning in September 1967.
In March 1967, SDS member Bob Feldman accidentally discovered documents in a campus library detailing Columbia's affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons research think-tank affiliated with the Department of Defense. Jacobs participated in the protests against the IDA, and was put on academic probation for violating President Kirk's ban on indoor protests.McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University, 2003. Despite its growing influence on campus, the SDS chapter was deeply divided. One group of SDSers, called the "Praxis Axis," advocated more organizing and nonviolence. A second group, the "Action Faction," called for more aggressive action. In the early spring 1968, the Action Faction took control of Columbia University's SDS chapter. Jacobs was an active member of the Action Faction, and soon became one of its leaders.Rudd, "Columbia," Movement, March 1969.Wilkerson, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman, 2007. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, riots broke out in many American cities. Jacobs wandered the streets of Harlem alone for most of the night, thrilled by the violence and inability of the police to maintain order. He adopted Georges Danton's dictum of "Audacity, audacity, and more audacity!" as his own motto.
Columbia protests of 1968
The opportunity for Jacobs to participate more fully in direct action came just days after King's death. Columbia University officials were planning to build a new gymnasium on the south side of the campus. The building, which would have straddled a hill, would have two entrances—one on the north, upper side for students and one on the south, lower side for residents of Morningside Heights, a mostly African-American neighborhood. To many students and local residents, it seemed as if Columbia were permitting blacks to use the gym, but only if they entered through the back door. On April 23, 1968, Rudd, Jacobs, and other members of Columbia's SDS chapter led a group of about 500 people in a protest against the gymnasium at the university Sundial. Part of the crowd attempted to take over Low Memorial Library, but were repulsed by a counter-demonstration of conservative students. Some students tore down the fence surrounding the construction site, and were arrested by New York City police. Rudd then shouted that the crowd should seize Hamilton Hall. The mob took over the building, taking a dean hostage. A number of militant young African Americans from Harlem (rumored to be carrying guns) entered the building throughout the night and ordered the white students out. The Caucasian students seized Low Memorial Library. Over the next week, more than 1,000 Columbia students joined the protest and seized three more buildings. Jacobs led the seizure of Mathematics Hall. Among the protesters was Tom Hayden, who arrived from Newark, New Jersey, where he had been organizing poor inner-city residents. Rudd, Jacobs, Hayden and others organized communes inside the buildings, and educated the students in the theories of Marxism, racism, and imperialism. Columbia University refused to grant the protesters' demands regarding the gymnasium or amnesty for those who had seized the buildings. When the police were sent in to clear the buildings after a week, they brutally beat and clubbed hundreds of students. Jacobs suggested putting Columbia's rare Ming Dynasty vases in the windows to prevent sniper attacks, and pushing police out of windows. Black students in Hamilton Hall had contacted civil rights lawyers, who had arranged to be on-site during the arrests and for the students to leave Hamilton Hall peacefully. Angered by the lack of police violence, Jacobs set fire to a professor's office in Hamilton, an incident later blamed on the police.Castellucci, John. "The Night They Burned Ranum's Papers", Chronicle of Higher Education. February 14, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2011. Thousands of students went on strike the next week, refusing to attend classes, and the university canceled final exams. The events catapulted Rudd into national prominence, and Rudd and Jacobs became national leaders in SDS.Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s, 1984.Avorn, Up Against the Ivy Wall, 1968; Kahn, The Battle for Morningside Heights: Why Students Rebel, 1970; Collier and Horowitz, "Doing It: The Inside Story of the Rise and Fall of the Weather Underground," Rolling Stone, September 30, 1982.Rudd, "Organizing vs. Activism in 1968," speech given at Drew University, November 4, 2006. Jacobs began using the phrase "bring the war home," and it was widely adopted within the anti-war movement.
As college students across America began demanding "two, three, many Columbias,"The chant began at Columbia during the protests, and was modeled on Che Guevara's slogan of "two, three, many Vietnams." See: Sale, SDS, 1973. Jacobs became a recognized national leader of SDS and looked to by those who saw violence as the only way to respond to the governing political and economic system of the day. Jacobs began to look the part of a counterculture leader as well. In the middle of 1968, he began wearing tight jeans, a leather jacket, and a gold chain with a lion's tooth, and slicked his hair back 1950s-style to purposefully distinguish himself from the clean-cut, middle-class students who attended most anti-war protests.Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History, 2000. He became one of SDS' earliest and most prominent ideological thinkers,Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground And the Politics of Solidarity, 2006. and was widely recognized as a charismatic persuasive speaker.
At the SDS national convention in East Lansing, Michigan, in June 1968, Jacobs' thinking began to become even more radical. The East Lansing convention is best known for the interminable debates and ferocious parliamentary battles between the SDS National Office leadership (led by Michael Klonsky and Bernardine Dohrn) and the delegates from PL-controlled SDS chapters around the country.
Robin Palmer, an ex-Yippie had drifted into SDS.Varon, "Between Revolution 9 and Thesis 11: Or, Will We Learn (Again) to Start Worrying and Change the World?", in The New Left Revisited: Critical Perspectives on the Past, 2002. Palmer argued, contrary to current SDS thinking, that President Richard Nixon's "silent majority" did exist. Most Americans, Palmer said, wouldn't oppose imperialism, militarism and capitalism if they were only shown the truth. Rather, most Americans knew the truth, and supported these ideologies actively and whole-heartedly. One of the Old Left's slogans had been "Serve the People." Convinced Palmer was correct, Jacobs proposed at the June 1968 convention that SDS adopt the slogan "Serve the People Shit" to reflect the public's support for greed and war.
Role in Weatherman SDS had opposed the call for mass demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The group felt that mass demonstrations and electoral politics were not effective as a means of influencing national policy. But when the demonstrations proved popular and provoked a heavy-handed police response (as SDS predicted), the organization moved quickly to take credit for the protests.
But SDS itself was suffering from extreme factionalism. Since 1963, the Progressive Labor Party (PL) had been infiltrating its members into SDS in the hopes of convincing SDSers to join the party. Although only a tiny minority of SDS membership nationwide, PL supporters (with the support of the national party) often constituted a quarter or more of the delegates to national SDS conventions. Strongly disciplined and skilled at 'entryism' and using parliamentary procedure, the PL supporters sought to seize control of SDS and turn the organization to the party's goals.Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, 2002.Alexander, Maoism in the Developed World, 2001; Sprinzak, "The Student Movement: Marxism as Symbolic Action," in Varieties of Marxism, 1977.