part to bring the movements down. A small group of antiwar activists who suspected their movements were being infiltrated broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania in March of 1971, stealing all the files. The documents they released to the press revealed a huge network of paid informants and a concerted plan, in the FBI’s words, to “enhance the paranoia endemic in [activist] circles.” Over the next few years, Congressional hearings, journalistic investigations, and activist lawsuits filled out these disclosures, revealing vast FBI efforts under its COINTELPRO program to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activists of the ‘New Left’ by counterintelligence methods,” to quote one memo from the Bureau. These and similar inquiries also uncovered a massive and illegal parallel program of domestic surveillance and infiltration by the CIA known as MH/CHAOS.6
How much of the left’s shrinkage was due to its own failings, or to changing political winds, and how much to government disruption? It would never be possible to say. Certainly the FBI operations against black movements in the 1960s had been especially vicious and far-reaching, with J. Edgar Hoover naming them “hate groups” across the board, targeting them for systematic disruption, and going so far as to sanction the murder of black leaders. The FBI notoriously tried to hound Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself, and helped the Chicago police assassinate nineteen-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in a middle-of-the-night 1969 raid, supplying the police with a map showing where Hampton would be sleeping and having an informant drug him with secobarbital to ensure he wouldn’t wake up before being shot point-blank in the head. Files released in 2012 by the FBI in response to a lawsuit by scholar Seth Rosenfeld strongly suggest that the man who first supplied guns to the Panthers, Bay Area radical Richard Aoki, was a longtime FBI informant. But the disclosure raised as many questions as it answered: Was it Aoki’s idea to arm the Panthers, or the FBI’s? Was the FBI guiding Aoki’s actions, or was he merely providing them with reports? Might the Panthers have embraced armed self-defense anyway, even without the initial arsenal provided by Aoki? Barring some huge new release of documents from the FBI, no one will likely ever know.7
Many of the efforts to investigate grassroots activists, though, were stunningly inept. Despite all its illegal wiretaps and hundreds of break-ins to activist homes and offices, the FBI never tracked down the peace activists who had burgled its offices in 1971, even after these activists directly thumbed their noses at the Bureau. (While the investigation was in its most intense phase, burglary ringleader William Davidon helped organize a “Your FBI in Action” street fair in his Philadelphia neighborhood, where he posed with a large cut-out of Hoover and local children assembled puzzles with photos of the FBI agents assigned to the case.) Nor did the FBI ever solve any of the dozens of Weather Underground bombing cases, though there may of course have been reasons why they didn’t want to solve those. Much of the so-called intelligence the FBI gathered through its vast network of informants was routine information with no special strategic value. Overall, though, COINTELPRO and MH/CHAOS played a significant role in amplifying divisions within movements—especially black radical movements, which were targeted the most heavily, followed by the militant wings of other movements of color, including the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Government operatives also clearly pushed radicals to adopt more extreme tactics and rhetoric than they would have without paid provocateurs within their midst, which in turn marginalized and destabilized their movements.8
Learning about the extent of this political sabotage, however, didn’t make dealing with the diminished present any easier. The alternative press was filled with the introspective writings of activists trying to adjust to the changed reality. In the radical feminist newspaper off our backs, organizer Carol Anne Douglas entitled her 1977 reflections, “What If the Revolution Isn’t Tomorrow?” Activists, she wrote, “need to appreciate that resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the corner … The struggle is going to take all of our lives, not just a few exciting, hectic years.”9
Many American radicals responded to the new political climate by focusing on the small, on what affected them immediately: the local and the particular, single issues, questions of identity, politics on a manageable scale. This tendency built upon the critique of the mass—and the move toward affinity groups, collectives, and communes—that had shaped activism in the earliest years of the 1970s. It also reflected the feminist embrace of the small group, as a way of safeguarding radical ideals of participation, egalitarianism, and self-expression. The identity-politics exhortation to “organize around your own oppression” and the emerging logic of radical ecology, with its small-is-beautiful search for sustainability, further reinforced radicals’ inclination to pursue their broadly transformative goals on a modest and manageable scale.
The catch-phrase for this approach, now something of a cliché, was “think globally, act locally.” The slogan was coined by the scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer René Dubos, on the occasion of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. By it, Dubos meant to convey that uniform solutions to global environmental problems were unworkable; policymakers needed to take the cultural and ecological characteristics of distinct locales into account. But as the phrase gained in popularity, adorning bumper stickers and buttons or working its way into newsletters and speeches, its meanings multiplied, as so often happens. To some activists in groups like Citizen Action (founded in 1979), it was a call to neighborhood organizing, canvassing door-to-door for financial and political support (a technique first developed in the early 1970s). Other activists understood the slogan as advocating radical municipalism: taking over the local government in sympathetic cities, as the Progressive Coalition did in Burlington, Vermont in 1980, electing socialist Bernie Sanders as mayor the next year. For still others, the exhortation to think globally and act locally implied using community organizing to grapple with far-reaching problems that had arrived in their backyards, as did, for example, the member organizations of the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Wastes, founded in 1981.10
Substantial numbers of former radicals began to work inside or alongside the institutions of power during this period. A significant number of African-American organizers, for example, shifted to the mainstream electoral arena. While blacks remained dramatically underrepresented in elective offices, the number of black elected officials tripled between 1969 and 1977.11 Other activists chose to ally themselves with large liberal organizations, pursuing a species of legislative and electoral politics that tied their fate to the simultaneously declining and rightward-drifting Democratic Party. These groups included the National Organization for Women, which devoted much of its energies throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution; the National Gay Task Force, founded in 1973 (and later renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force), which worked to abolish sodomy laws, establish legal protections for gays and lesbians, and support gay-friendly candidates; and environmental organizations such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, which combined lobbying with litigation to promote an environmental agenda. Circumscribed though their political vision might have been from a radical perspective, many of these organizations thrived in the seventies and eighties, expanding their membership, mastering the art of direct-mail fundraising, and honing their Beltway-insider skills.
Other progressives established alternative educational institutions, from independent Chicano colleges on the West Coast to a school for Marxist education in New York City. Many moved into the academy, where from within established colleges and universities they promoted ethnic and women’s studies: roughly 600 college and universities offered black studies courses by 1972; five years later, when the National Women’s Studies Association was created, there were 276 women’s studies programs in the country.
But above all, the sense of hunkering down for the long haul prompted many to turn their energies toward building alternative, community-based, and counter-institutions, acting to create change at a more modest scale in their immediate surroundings. Environmentalists opened local ecology centers, set up recycling projects, and organized food cooperatives, some of which still exist to this day, such as the Park Slope Food Coop (founded in 1973). Feminists, and especially lesbian-feminists, built a nationwide network of cultural institutions including