You probably think the country is more divided now than it has ever been. It feels like we're vibrating on the edge of something genuinely scary. But if you look back at the 1970s—specifically the period often called the American Years of Lead—the current chaos looks almost quiet. We're talking about a decade where thousands of bombs went off on American soil. Not dozens. Thousands.
The term "Years of Lead" (Anni di piombo) usually refers to the bloody period of social and political upheaval in Italy. But historians and political analysts have increasingly reclaimed the phrase to describe the United States between roughly 1969 and 1981. It was a time of radicalization. It was a time of fire. It was a time when the FBI was tracking so many underground domestic terrorist groups they literally couldn't keep up with the paperwork.
What Most People Get Wrong About the American Years of Lead
When people talk about the seventies, they usually think of disco, bell bottoms, and maybe the gas lines. They forget the "Days of Rage." They forget that in 1972 alone, there were nearly 2,000 bombings in the United States. Think about that for a second. That is more than five bombings a day.
Most were small, sure. Pipe bombs in trash cans or "symbolic" blasts at government buildings in the middle of the night. But some weren't. Some were deadly. And they weren't all coming from one side of the political spectrum.
The narrative we've built is that it was just a few hippies gone rogue. That’s wrong. It was a complex, multi-front war involving the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), the New World Liberation Front, and on the other side, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups like the National Socialist White People's Party. It was a chaotic mess of ideologies that all shared one common belief: the system was broken, and only violence could fix it.
The Rise of the Underground
The Weather Underground is the name everyone remembers. They grew out of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) because they felt peaceful protest was a dead end. They wanted to "bring the war home" to stop the Vietnam War. They bombed the Pentagon. They bombed the Capitol. They bombed the State Department.
But here’s a weird detail people miss: they were surprisingly good at not killing people, at least on purpose, during their later years. They would call in warnings to clear buildings. They saw themselves as "armed propaganda."
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Contrast that with the Black Liberation Army. The BLA wasn't interested in symbolic gestures. They were in a shooting war with the police. Between 1970 and 1976, the BLA was involved in dozens of shootouts. They targeted officers in New York, San Francisco, and beyond. It was a brutal cycle of retaliation. The government’s response—COINTELPRO—was just as radical, involving illegal surveillance, infiltration, and the active disruption of domestic political groups. The rule of law basically took a vacation.
Why the "Years of Lead" Concept Matters Today
We're seeing a weird sort of "nostalgia" for this kind of political violence in certain corners of the internet today. You've got people talking about "national divorce" or "civil war 2.0." Understanding the American Years of Lead is the best antidote to that kind of talk.
Back then, the violence didn't achieve the utopias anyone wanted. It just exhausted the public. It led to a massive crackdown on civil liberties and helped usher in an era of mass incarceration. The violence was a fever. And while the fever eventually broke, it left the body politic scarred in ways we’re still dealing with.
Bryan Burrough, who wrote Days of Rage, spent years digging through the FBI files and interviewing the survivors of these radical groups. His research shows a pattern: violence starts as a tactic, becomes an identity, and eventually turns into a death cult. Groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army (the ones who kidnapped Patty Hearst) were basically living in a fever dream of their own making. They were disconnected from reality, convinced that a "proletarian revolution" was just one bank robbery away.
The Statistics of Chaos
Let's look at the sheer scale of the disruption. It’s hard to wrap your head around without the numbers.
According to FBI records and university databases like the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the peak was around 1970-1975. In a single eighteen-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported 2,500 bombings. People just... lived with it. You'd go to work, hear a boom a few blocks away, and just keep walking. It became the background noise of American life.
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There was also a massive wave of skyjackings. Before the TSA, before X-ray machines at airports, people were hijacking planes like they were catching an Uber. Between 1968 and 1972, there was a hijacking nearly every week in the U.S. Sometimes more. Most were people wanting to go to Cuba, but some were political statements. This forced the government to completely rethink public security, leading to the first real "security state" measures we now take for granted.
The Forgotten Right-Wing Violence
While the media often focuses on the "New Left" radicals, the right-wing violence during the American Years of Lead was equally terrifying and often more lethal. While the Weathermen were blowing up toilets in government buildings, groups like the KKK were bombing houses and churches.
In 1971, members of the KKK bombed ten school buses in Pontiac, Michigan, to protest integration. In 1975, the "New World Liberation Front" (which was technically left-wing but acted like a gang) engaged in a bombing campaign against utilities. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi groups were quietly organizing in the Pacific Northwest, laying the groundwork for what would become the "Order" in the 1980s.
It wasn't a clean fight. It was a four-dimensional chess game of bombs and bullets where the bystanders were usually the ones who paid the price.
The Role of the Media
The media in the 70s handled this differently than today. There was no 24-hour news cycle. No Twitter. If a bomb went off, you saw it on the 6:00 PM news, and then you read about it in the paper the next morning.
This created a strange delay in the public’s fear. It also allowed these groups to create a "myth" around themselves. They could send "communiqués" to newspapers that would be printed in full. They had a platform. Today, a domestic terrorist group would be de-platformed within minutes, but back then, they were almost like dark celebrities.
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Assessing the Fallout: What Did It Actually Change?
Honestly, not much of what the radicals wanted. The "revolution" never happened. Instead, the public got tired. People wanted law and order. This fatigue is largely what propelled the rise of conservative politics in the late 70s and 80s.
The American Years of Lead ended not with a bang, but with a whimper of exhaustion. The radicals either went to prison, died in shootouts, or—in a surprisingly high number of cases—became suburbanites and academics.
The legacy is found in our policing. SWAT teams became a thing during this era. The militarization of police started here, as a direct response to groups like the BLA and the Black Panthers being better armed than the average beat cop. We also got the first real domestic surveillance state. If you wonder why the government is so good at tracking people now, it’s because they practiced on the radicals of 1974.
The Realities of Domestic Insurgency
If you're looking for a takeaway, it's this: domestic terrorism in America is historically cyclical. We are currently in a period that mirrors the late 1960s. The rhetoric is escalating. The "lone wolf" attacks are increasing.
But the 1970s show that these movements usually collapse under their own weight. They are built on a "vanguard" mentality—the idea that a small group of committed people can force the rest of the country to change. It never works. It just alienates the very people they claim to be fighting for.
Actionable Steps for Understanding Our Current Era
To navigate the current political climate without losing your mind, you need to put the present in context. Here is how to actually use the history of the American Years of Lead to stay grounded:
- Study the "Cycle of Radicalization": Read Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough or The Way the Wind Blew by Ron Jacobs. You’ll start to see the same patterns of language used by modern extremists. Recognizing the script makes the current news feel less like an existential crisis and more like a repeating historical trope.
- Audit Your Information Diet: The radicals of the 70s lived in "affinity groups" where they only talked to each other. This is exactly what an algorithmic echo chamber does today. If you find yourself thinking that violence is the "only" way left, you are likely in an informational affinity group. Break out of it.
- Focus on Local Stability: The 1970s were survived by people who focused on their immediate communities. While the national news was full of bombings, most people were busy building local institutions, food banks, and neighborhood watches. That’s where real resilience lives.
- Recognize the "Performance" of Violence: Most of the "Years of Lead" was about theater. Understanding that political violence is often a desperate plea for attention rather than a viable military strategy helps you de-escalate your own internal alarm.
- Demand Transparency in Counter-Terrorism: One of the biggest mistakes of the 70s was allowing the government to fight radicalism with illegal radicalism (COINTELPRO). Support oversight. We shouldn't repeat the mistake of destroying democracy to "save" it.
The American Years of Lead proved that the country is surprisingly resilient to internal fire. We’ve been through the bombings, the skyjackings, and the street battles before. The goal is to learn the lessons of the 1970s so we don't have to repeat the body count of the 2020s. History doesn't have to repeat itself, but it usually does when we forget the names of the people who already tried—and failed—to burn it all down.