Patty Hearst, SLA, and Present Day Revolutionaries
May 6, 2026
by William P. Meyers

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50 years later, or 100 years later

On September 18, 2025 there were some news articles noting is was the 50th anniversary of the Capture of Patty (Patricia) Hearst and one of her Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) comrades by the FBI. That piqued my curiosity. I checked Wikipedia for basic facts. Patty Hearst, the wealthy heiress to right-wing newspaper capitalist William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the SLA on February 4, 1974. On that day I was in college and had just turned 19. Patty was also in college, but was 20.

I had not paid much attention to the events back then. I was working 20 hours a week and had a heavy class load. I did not watch TV or listen to the radio. I probably heard about it because other students were talking about it, or maybe I saw a newspaper in the library. Friends would have been discussing it since I was majoring in Political Science.

I found that Patty had written about her time with the SLA, so I bought a used copy from Abe Books. Every Secret Thingby Patricia Campbell Hearst (with Alvin Moscow) was published in 1982. I found it to be a very interesting read. 1982 was about the time my flirting with revolutionary politics got serious. More importantly, reading it, I sympathized with Patty. Even though she was a rich, privileged young woman. I was certainly still trying to figure out what was true and what was lies in 1974. Even with a few political science courses under my belt, I was not clear about how to make the world a better place. The Vietnam War was just about over, but I was clear on one thing: there were a lot of evil people in the world. Some of them ran America.

Further, I had just finished reading Every Secret Thing when I went down to the May Day event in Seattle. There several groups with the word revolutionary in their names were out selling their (printed paper!) newspapers or sitting behind tables. Mostly Trotskyists (I'll come back to that. The SLA would have hated Trotskyists).

Is it idiotic to belong to a self-styled revolutionary, likely Marxist and Leninist, group today? It is a fair question. On the surface yes. But history can change quickly. It is hard to predict how Americans would react to a new economic depression, but they could turn left. More likely they would turn fascist, or just muddle around happy with some national reforms, as they did during the New Deal of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

What more specificly can be learned from Ms. Hearst and the SLA? There are several areas that warrant examination: timing, decision making, and strategy will be the focus of this brief essay.

I lived through the era, but being alive does not guarantee you understand what is going on. In the deep background was the industrial revolution and capitalism. Then the rebellion against capitalism (while mostly accepting industrialism) by Carl Marx and others. Then the Russian Revolution, which ended with Joseph Stalin in power, and the National Socialist revolution, which put Hitler in Power in Germany starting in 1933. Then World War II and the Cold War. The Beatniks and old-style Stalinists in the USA in the 1950s gave way to the youth rebellion and a multi-headed anti-capitalist, sometimes revolutionary culture in the 1960s. The Vietnam War, and particularly the military draft, and the Civil Rights movement, Feminism, and Gay rights all led to the hope for a true leftist revolution after about 1968.

The SLA argued that the main problem with the left in the U.S. was that it was insufficiently militant and violent. After all, the Russian Revolution and Chinese revolution would never have happened if Marxists had confined themselves to debate or civil disobedience. It was not an unreasonable argument. Also, the global Communist movement was doing quite well in 1972. Capitalists were mostly on the defensive.

For the SLA, however, their timing was bad. By 1974 the Vietnam War was mostly over, young men were no longer afraid of being drafted, and rock and roll was giving way to Disco. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 had allowed non-white Americans to vote and many had started moving up economically and socially, though there was still racism and economic inequality. The revolutionary tide was going out, but the SLA were in a subset of the population that had been radicalized earlier and disdained the changes all around.

The Fundamental mistake the SLA made was choosing an inappropriate leader, Donald DeFreeze (General Cinque). Most of the members of the SLA (there were never more than about 10) were college educated, white, and from middle class, even upper middle class families. They came to believe that only a black American could lead the revolution, because the most oppressed were the most natural leaders. Several worked in programs providing education for prisoners. Now, keep in mind that traditional Marxism-Leninism glorifies the proletariat, factory workers, though neither Marx nor Lenin, nor Mao, had ever themselves worked in a factory. So a black factory worker who believed in Leninism would have made sense. But, as far as I can tell, DeFreeze had never had a legal job or done factory work. He had always been a criminal. Perhaps that is why he believed that violence was the key to the revolution, rather than organizing the working class.

Maoism made sense in China, in the 1930s, lumping landless peasants into the proletariat. Violence made sense then too, but Mao and his party were great at organizing people. DeFreeze and the SLA were not great organizers. They were lousy organizers. So they substituted violence for organizing. In addition they, and DeFreeze in particular, saw the police (the pigs) as the primary enemy, in practice.

So bad strategy led to bad decisions, when the tide of revolution was ebbing rapidly. From our more modern perspective this does not seem to come as a surprise, given the makeup of the SLA. The first of their astonishingly bad decisions was the assassination of Marcus Foster, the black school superintendent of Oakland. The SLA thought the black people of Oakland saw public schools and Foster as oppressive. Probably a few did. But the backlash against the SLA was severe. Even other radical leftist groups (there were still plenty around, like the Weather Underground and an alphabet soup of Marxist-Leninist groups) denounced the SLA and its action.

Trying to recover, the SLA had another brilliant idea, kidnapping Patty Hearst. They did manage to kidnap and brainwash her. Afraid for her life, she decided to join the group.

Even after DeFreeze and most of the group died in a shoot out with the police in Los Angeles, Patty, Emily Harris, and William Harris continued to make bad decisions. Instead of using their fame to help them organize a following, they tried, ineptly, to kill police with homemade bombs. They also robbed banks, ineptly, to support themselves.

I believe that revolution is possible in the U.S., but unlikely. Cuba, Russia, and China were all essentially dictatorships, so revolution was the only way to gain power. In the U.S. anyone can run for office, although those in the power structure are pretty good at keeping a lid on things. Still, occasionally there is a reform, or even a period of reform like the New Deal and the Great Society programs.

I also think that the main problem caused by capitalism has shifted. The destruction of the environment by the fossil fuel industry, human overpopulation, and other effects of industrialism is the primary problem of our era. Sure, workers may not get a fair deal. But what deal the workers get will not matter if the earth continues to die.

Looking back to the SLA era, 1972 to 1975, I see myself as a dazed and confused young man, good at academics and multiple choice tests. Had the SLA kidnapped me, or tried to recruit me, I probably would have joined. I was already angry, I was poor, hungry, and feeling empathy with others who were even more oppressed. I later learned that there were leftist groups far larger than the SLA that trained for warfare, should a revolutionary situation arise. I think their leaderships were smart in doing that training, but in never engaging in violence. I did become a Marxist-Leninist from about 1981 to 1985, but it was clear then the conditions for revolution were not ripe (Ronald Reagan was President). Also the leaders of the groups I tried to work with, while not as delusional as DeFreeze, were clearly not up to the task.

Finally, a word on Trotskyism, a version of Marxism-Leninism. Because its leaders have always focussed on recruiting college students rather than industrial workers, it is the prominent Leninist trend in Seattle, and I believe in the U.S., today. Most Stalinists, if alive, are in nursing homes. Maoists have mostly disappeared. The funny thing about Leon Trotsky and his followers is that they have never successfully led a revolution. Trotsky reinvented himself after fleeing the Soviet Union, and his followers, even their leaders, seem too dim to examine why his fellow communists hated him so much. They are mostly harmless, they believe in social justice, and might have done a better job recruiting Patty Hearst if the SLA had not gotten to her first.

Patricia Hearst is now 72 years old. She is rich, so no ordinary nursing home for her. She even had a role in an episode in one of my favorite TV series, Veronica Mars.

I like to imagine what would have happened to Donald Trump if the SLA had kidnapped him in 1974, instead of his mind being captured by Roy Cohn. He probably would have become its leader, and due to his astute skills of human manipulation, we would be living in a Marxist-Leninist-Trumpist society today.