Literary	Mad Bomber Melville, Part Two by Leslie James Pickering

Sam Melville grew up in Tonawanda in the 1930s and 1940s and was killed in the famed 1971 Attica prison uprising. In between, Melville waged an urban guerrilla war in Manhattan against government agencies and corporations driving the Vietnam War effort, inspiring a flood of similar revolutionary activity in the 1970s. The following is an excerpt, the second of four to be published here, from Leslie James Pickering’s new biography of Melville, Mad Bomber Melville.

Leslie James Pickering is a Buffalo native with a master’s degree in history and journalism and a strong background in radical social justice. Pickering’s book will be available in mid June at www.arissamediagroup.com. Look for it locally at Rust Belt Books and Talking Leaves.

It’s 1969. The Vietnam War has been raging for years and the news flashes images of the carnage while tallying the mounting death tolls. The kids you knew that signed up back in ’65 either come home dead or something maybe even worse than dead. It seems that every day you hear about friends getting called down for their physicals, and you’re stressing over tomorrow’s mail.

The whole atmosphere in America has changed in the last few years. Protest, dissent and resistance are everywhere now. The opposition to the war has grown so much it’s taken for granted. Even the Beatles have gone from writing songs about having nothing but love eight days a week to singing about people who say they want a revolution. The cultural gap between American youth and the people in government who are drafting them off to be killed has widened so much that the kids relate more to the Viet Cong.

It’s not hard to imagine why so many young Americans were against the war in Vietnam. It was killing them. A movement against the war could save their lives. The biggest threat to American youth was their own government. If you hadn’t progressed from being against the war to being a revolutionary, you were a liberal. If you weren’t itching for something bigger than another protest, you weren’t down.

Jane put it in context saying, “The continuing involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War remained the essential condition for all our bombings. Nixon, since taking office in January 1969, had reneged on virtually every promise he made in the campaign. He produced no ‘Secret Plan’ for peace; he had widened rather than called a halt to the war; and instead of withdrawing troops, he had instituted the paper-stuffing tactic of lowering troop ceilings. Photographs of children on fire from American napalm and adults shot down in cold blood by American soldiers had become part of the steady diet of news programs and part of our political assumptions as well. While public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed the war, reports of atrocities multiplied—all of them officially denied by the administration. We in the radical left believed that we were facing a situation similar to that which had prevailed in Nazi Germany. If we could only manage to interfere materially with the work of the U.S. Army, we believed we would have widespread support, and the destruction we caused would be its own justification.”

As Richard Nixon was talking “peace” at the U.N. on Thursday, Sept. 18, and his masters of war were relentlessly dealing out death and destruction throughout the world, a time bomb was placed in the Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza.

The specific targets of this action were the Dept. of the Army, located on the 40th floor (which also houses the Dept. of Commerce) and the Selective Service System, located directly below the Army office.

As in previous bombings, a warning was phoned to the building’s security number, the police bomb squad and the police emergency number in ample time to clear the building. Although the police bomb squad did not respond, there were no injuries to personnel when the bomb exploded on schedule at 2 a.m.

This was an act of solidarity with our brother and sister revolutionaries all over the world and with black and brown communities in this country who are fighting to rid the world of American domination and exploitation.

Forget about Marine Midland. The Federal Building at Foley Square in Manhattan was the tallest federal structure in the United States, and second in square footage only to the Pentagon. The explosion destroyed the offices of the U.S. Army that was fighting the ground war in Vietnam, and the Selective Service that was drafting young Americans into the war. This time there would be no questions about the motive, because the bomb spoke for itself.

To prevent the kind of injuries that happened at the 10:47 p.m. Marine Midland explosion, the Federal Building timer was set to detonate at two in the morning. But to repeat the amount of damage, the bomb was placed in a transformer room near a bank of elevators and the men’s room, where water lines ran. The communiqué was done smarter too. It was sent out directly to the major media, and it was in the mail early so it would arrive when news of the explosion was still hot on the presses. The papers reported the damages in detail.

“The north end of the 40th floor was covered with debris,” wrote the New York Times. “A six-foot-square hole had been ripped in a wall opposite the shaftway that contained circuit breakers, electric panels, ducts and utility wires. File cabinets and furniture had been smashed by flying pieces of concrete. A 25-by-40-foot section of the ceiling had been ripped out and the floor on the 41st floor was damaged. Ceiling tiles fell onto the floor, desks and files of the selective service offices that are on the 39th floor of the Federal Office building…the 41-story building, housing some 60 Federal agencies, was closed yesterday to the general public and to most of the 6,000 employees…All water and electrical systems were out of order. A New York Telephone Company spokesman said 4,000 telephones had been rendered inoperable.”

The New York Post said, “the explosion occurred in a 10-by-12-foot utility shaft on the 40th floor…the blast broke a five-inch water pipe which flooded much of the northeast section of the building, severed electrical wiring, phone lines and gas pipes, and halted elevator service to many of the floors…Water damage was evident as far down as the 27th floor, but some minor damage was reported as low as the 2nd floor. The building was closed to the 6,000 workers [due to the] ‘non-safe’ condition in the building, no fire protection because of the broken water pipe, no air conditioning, no elevators and weakened floors in the blast area.”

According to Jane’s memoirs, the Federal Building bombing was the collective’s first action. It was planned and executed by the group, dividing the duties of casing the building, wiring the dynamite, planting the bomb, calling in the warnings, and writing, typing and mailing the communiqué between the members.

In the presence of all of us Sam assembled a bomb from a Westclox wind-up alarm clock, a blasting cap and fifteen sticks of dynamite he’d brought over earlier from the McCurdy apartment. He placed the device in a large purse I had stolen from a midtown department store. Carefully I slid the strap over my right shoulder. The other five wished me luck. I felt very solemn, acutely conscious that I might never come back home. I saluted them and left…

I boarded a bus heading downtown. I was wearing a white A-line dress, kid gloves (to avoid leaving fingerprints), and a touch of make-up. I looked as if I were going to a business lunch or a matinee. I felt as I imagined I would on my wedding day, if I ever married. A kind of agitation coursed through my body, heightening all my faculties. I cushioned my purse on my lap, protecting it from the bus’s sudden jolts…

I got off at Foley Square and walked to 26 Federal Plaza. The Federal Building, some sixty stories of tinted glass and steel, dominated the landscape at the foot of Foley Square. Sam and I had sat outside the building every night for the past week, watching until the last light went out on the thirty-ninth and fortieth floors. Near quitting time on this Thursday afternoon, the lobby bustled with civil servants, secretaries, managers, clerks, maintenance men and women. Tonight at 2:00 A.M., when the bomb exploded, the halls would be dark and deserted, the people who worked here safe in their beds­—or so we hoped. I found the right bank of elevators and rode up to the fortieth floor, occupied entirely by the department of the Army…

I made sure no one was around before I opened the door. I found a space for the purse behind a bulky piece of machinery, pushed the straps out of sight, and closed the door behind me as I left. I rode the elevator down to the lobby alone and emerged again into the swirling crowd. A guard stared at me as I went out the glass doors. Had he noticed that I came in with a pocketbook and left without one? I turned my head to avoid giving him a good look at my face.

An hour before the bomb was due to explode, the collective regrouped on the roof of an apartment building with a telescope focused on Foley Square. The clock ticked down to the moment when they would be hunted by the government and idolized by the movement. They watched in awe as, at two a.m., the lights on the Federal Building all went black.

“In a moment everyone was talking at once,” Jane remembered. “I didn’t know what the other five were feeling, but at that moment my joy was undiluted. I had shown Sam he didn’t have to act alone; I had caused real injury to the work of the U.S. Army; and I had, perhaps, brought revolution an inch or two closer. An hour later the radio news confirmed our success. The explosive had been massive but had injured no one. For a few hours that night I wanted no more happiness.”

Going by Jane’s accounts, Sam learned everything he could from the F.L.Q. fugitives, pulled together the collective to rob and maintain the dynamite, got another group together to bomb United Fruit, and hit Marine Midland on his own, in part, to inspire the collective to action. Finally the collective moved on the Federal Building. “The other group” bombed Whitehall and was already moving on to their next action with minimal participation from Sam.

Meanwhile, Sam was working on another bombing with a member of the collective who had been one of the Explo robbers, and yet another bombing with a new recruit. Not only was Sam working with the members of the collective, the members of the “other group,” a new recruit, and taking action on his own, but Jane wrote that Sam was out of town so much because he was at underground guerilla camps. These training camps, Jane said, were led by famed black militant of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party, H. Rap Brown. There, she said, Sam met a Puerto Rican man and on September 24, 1969, they planted bombs in the Chicago Civic Center, the R.O.T.C. building at the University of Wisconsin and the National Guard office in Milwaukee’s Federal Building.

Sam wasted no time. He was at war.

Next week: Melville on trial.