Jim Mellen, an original member of the militant Weathermen, dies at 87
Jim Mellen, a Marxist former college professor and ideological firebrand who in the 1960s became a founding member and philosophical leader of the Weathermen, the headline-grabbing brigade of far-left revolutionaries, died Feb. 17 at his home in Zirahuen, Mexico. He was 87.
His wife, Terry Baumgart, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Mellen's rise within the so-called New Left began when he lost his job teaching political science and international affairs at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, in 1965 after a speech at a teachin in which, he told a television reporter, he “didn't fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam,” adding, “In fact, I welcomed it.”
Taking up the cause of young radicals nationwide, despite the fact that he was a decade older than many of them, he eventually became a vocal supporter of Students for a
Democratic Society, an anti-war activist organization with chapters on college campuses around the country, and one of the original members of the militant SDS faction that came to be known as the Weathermen.
The group took its name from its famous 1969 manifesto, “You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” — the title taken from a line from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It called for White and Black revolutionaries to unite with other insurgent groups to bring about “the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of classless world: world communism.”
Mellen was one of the 11 Weathermen members who signed the manifesto. Bill Ayers, one of the group's principals, said in a phone interview that Mellen was a principal author, although Mellen himself, in a 2016 video interview about his radical activist days, said that he had written only an earlier, less extreme paper that was rejected by the group.
With his grounding in Marx, Lenin and Mao, Mellen became a resident philosopher and historian for the Weathermen. “He brought gravitas, seriousness and Marxism with him, and we didn't have that,” Ayers said. “We brought experience from the streets, but he brought experience from the academy, and from books.”
But the seasoned professor was left behind as the decade turned when Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn (who is now married to Ayers) and other members took a more violent turn, rechristening themselves the Weather Underground.
Operating as furtive cells in safe houses scattered around the country, the members of the Weather Underground did their best to disappear from society, even as they declared war on it. “Our intention is to disrupt the empire” and “to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks,” according to one of its communiques.
The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for 25 bombings,