For the bi-centennial celebration of the American Revolution in 1976, we took up a call to join in protest in Philadelphia.  Our organization offered the slogan, “We’ve carried the rich for 200 years.  Let’s get them off our backs!”  The Milwaukee Worker promoted the event.  We put together a contingent that included several of the meat cutter strikers and some guys from other rank-and-file caucuses.

We joined forces in Philly with groups from other cities that had “Worker” newspapers.  It wasn’t George Washington’s encampment on the Delaware, but it was a lot of fun meeting and camping with these other activists.  Jon Melrod met his first wife here.  We rode around in the backs of pickup trucks, chanting our slogan and getting applause from the African American neighborhoods.  The march came off without any busts or incidents.

Not far away from our march there was a People’s Bicentennial protest.  It was much larger and sponsored by a broad coalition led by the Puerto Rican Socialist Party.   As I look back on it, I can’t but wonder why we didn’t join in with them.  Probably we wanted to focus more on the “revolution” that we were calling for.  Probably we wanted to have an event that appeared to be more from the working class.  We could have joined in with a more mainstream protest coalition and still behaved as a contingent.  We could have raised the chant to get the rich off our backs.  But in those days we thought we were special and we didn’t need the good people who didn’t subscribe to our full program.

Going it alone sprang from the concept that we were the party of workers and minorities in making revolution.   Our separate march was a choreographed representation of that concept.  It projected us as much more than we were.  We didn’t look closely at the objective situation.  As it turned out there were still many possibilities for a rejuvenation of capitalism.  Instead we were subjective, seeing and thinking only what we wanted to see and think – that a revolution was a near-term possibility.