By Evan Atchison (Writing Resistance podcast), Sydney Hugdahl (Under the Mushroom Cloud podcast), and Averill Earls (Dig: A History Podcast)

Mother Country Radicals. Crooked Media. Podcast audio. 26 May 2022-17 Nov 2022. https://crooked.com/podcast-series/mother-country-radicals.

In May 1970, Bernardine Dohrn issued the first statement of the Weather Underground – a declaration of war on the American government. At just 28, she was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and the Weathermen joined other far-left organizations like the Black Liberation Army (BLA) in a militant resistance to American imperialism. Mother Country Radicals, a 10-episode podcast series produced by Crooked Media and hosted by Zayd Ayres Dohrn, tells a story of revolutionary optimism and the realities of being fugitives from the law as the radicalized activists of the Weather Underground.

Dohrn and co-creator Thai Jones relay the story of the youthful radicalization of the Weathermen, including their parents: Bernadine Dorhn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones. The podcast is undoubtedly an outgrowth of Jones’ longer career working on labor history and his own family’s story in the American anti-imperialist movement. He published a biography of his parents and the Weather Underground in 2004.^[1]

Part of the appeal of Mother Country Radicals is that it’s not simply a compellingly-told history. It’s a family history as well. Dohrn establishes his connection to the story within the first minute of the first episode. Throughout the season, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayres, Jeff Jones, and countless other Weather Underground figures seem like friends to the listener because, to the host, they’re family. One benefit of these relationships is that Ayres Dohrn can interview almost all living members of the Weather Underground, offering the listener unprecedented insight into this clandestine organization’s actions, thoughts, and stories. This is not your typical history: it matches facts with the emotions resulting from them. As Ayres Dohrn unpacks the history of the Weather Underground, listeners empathize with both narrator and character, because they understand the impacts this history had on people.

Bernardine Dohrn is essentially a protagonist in a story about the Weather Underground. As her story (and, by extension, the Weathermen’s) develops, new characters join the narrative until the listener gets a full picture of the workings of the Weather Underground. The story, which Ayers Dohrn curates through a combination of research and personal interviews, begins in the late 1960s, following the revolutionary journey of a young Bernardine who eventually co-creates the Weatherman faction. The following episodes introduce new faces, who, growing increasingly militant towards the American government, help develop the Weather Underground into a network of groups and individuals who set off bombs in government buildings, free comrades out of prison, and rob banks to fund these operations. But these operations come at a severe cost.

By the middle of the season, the members of the Weathermen and BLA are fugitives, forcing them to go underground. Many are killed or imprisoned. Nevertheless, the Weather Underground continues to fight. But it’s a losing battle, forcing its members to grapple with the reality that their invincibility is withering away — that revolution appears unlikely. Historian Jeremy Varon interprets their mentality as the following: “Weatherman fell prey to the seductive optimism of global voices like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who insisted, in ways both romantic and severe, that revolution was the direction of world history, making victory near certain.”^[2] Historians like Varon use artifacts of the past to freeze that hopeful moment in time. Mother Country Radicals shatters that illusion, because that optimism wasn’t just hunted down and imprisoned by the FBI. It was killed when the surviving members of the Weather Underground realized that the global revolution they believed in would never come to pass. Confronted with the inevitability that their days as political revolutionaries are numbered, the remaining members of the Underground looked to the future: a dark, scary, and uncertain future, and a legacy passed to their children. The last few episodes of the season focus on the complex dynamics of being parents but maintaining a revolutionary zeal, which often created lasting consequences for their children. Whereas Mother Country Radicals begins by highlighting the revolutionary optimism of 1970s American counterculture, it finishes by discussing the consequences of the Weather Underground’s actions, felt by both members and their children.

Dohrn’s work in film production and directing shines, giving the audience a dynamic listening experience. The podcast uses a variety of interviews, news clips, and other archival audio from the Weather Underground. Listeners feel transported in time, able to better understand the experiences and emotions of the people there. Mother Country Radicals is easily accessible, located on all the usual podcatchers. Each episode has a clear synopsis telling the audience what the episode entails. Since this podcast is linear in format, telling one story over the course of a season, each episode has a brief review of the previous episode at the beginning in addition to a preview for the next episode. This recap allows the audience to go at their own pace and listen with gaps between the episodes without becoming confused or lost. While the first few episodes introduced a lot of characters–maybe too many–without clear connections between them at first, the payoff is worth the wait as the threads of the story converge.

At times, Mother Country Radicals fails to devote attention to criticisms about the Weather Underground. Time is, of course, a constraint for the podcast, and, being a family history, Ayres Dohrn has little intention of vilifying the people in this story. Nevertheless, one such critique of the Weathermen that Modern Country Radicals glosses over is its alleged anti-feminist practices, which many 1970s radical feminists voiced their opposition to. Scholars like Lindsey Churchill have highlighted the negative attitudes regarding the Weathermen’s patriarchal and violent tendencies. As Churchill puts it: “A majority of the New Left, including feminist organizations, did not support the Weathermen’s advocacy of violence.”^[3] Its limitations, though, do not outweigh Mother Country Radical’s unique contribution to the scholarship on the Weather Underground. Like Jones’ family biography, which wasn’t reviewed by any major history journals, Mother Country Radicals hasn’t been treated seriously by scholars of the topic. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing.

For those who imagine written history (or narrated, in this case) as apolitical or “objective,” this is probably not the right podcast. Dorhn and Jones deliver a reminder that the personal is political, and further, that the personal is historical (if we may borrow the tagline from gender and medicine history blog Nursing Clio). There’s something compelling about family histories, period; but the most intriguing aspect of this story is the contextualization of their family histories in these larger international struggles. Their parents were radicalized by the conditions of the world in which they lived. The Weather Underground emerged as an extreme faction within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who believed that protesting the war in Vietnam was not enough. Each member of the organization put their lives on the line to fight for what they believed was right. Their radicalization is a central theme of the story, and may be of particular interest to listeners living through seemingly unprecedented political moments.

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Evan Atchison is majoring in History with a concentration in Statistics and Data Science. He is one of the annual Peace Scholars studying in Norway this summer. He is a co-founder of Writing Resistance podcast, and has produced for Back at St. Olaf.

Sydney Hugdahl is a student at St. Olaf College majoring in History and Latin, is a host of Into the Mushroom Cloud, and has produced for Back at St. Olaf. She is belongs to a French bulldog, and has maintained blue hair unironically for five years.

Averill Earls is the executive producer of Dig: A History Podcast, and an Associate Professor of History at St. Olaf College. She is the co-author of Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale, and the author of Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland. She won a white ribbon for ginger honey cookies from the 2024 Minnesota State Fair.

Endnotes:

^[1]  Jeff Jones, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (New York: Free Press, 2004).

^[2] Jeremy Peter Varon, Weatherman, the Red Army Faction, and the Turn to Violence (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004), 54.

^[3] Lindsey Churchill, “Exploring Feminism’s Complex Relationship with Political Violence: An Analysis of the Weathermen, Radical Feminism and the New Left,” Australian Women’s History Network, 16 (2007), 26–41, 33.

Further Reading:

Eckstein, Arthur. Bad moon rising: how the Weather Underground beat the FBI and lost the revolution. Yale University Press, 2016.

Jones, Thai. A radical line: from the labor movement to the Weather Underground, one family’s century of conscience. Free Press, 2004.

McEneaney, Sinead. “Not picketing in front of bra factories”: Marxism, feminism, and the Weather Underground,” in Marxism and America: New appraisals. Manchester University Press, 2021.

The Weather Underground’s student newspaper, Osawatomie, is digitized and available through JSTOR.