The Heiress and the Anarchists by Jane Mayer
Last month, when winter sales were at their most inviting, Elaine Broadhead, the heir to a Chicago mail-order fortune, was exactly where she was brought up to be: at Neiman Marcus. But Broadhead, whose brassy auburn hair and black jeans make her appear much younger than her sixty-odd years, was not at Neiman's - the one on Washington's Wisconsin Avenue - to shop. She marched in a circle on the sidewalk and carried a picket sign. Along with a tiny band of animal-rights activists who were protesting the store's decision to stock fur coats, she could be heard shouting, "Compassion - not fashion!"
In an era of centrist politics, when it is sometimes hard to tell the Republicans from the Democrats, it's not easy to be a radical. But Broadhead has not given up. Recently she has embraced a nonviolent guerrilla action group called the Ruckus Society, which is devoted to the concept of "creative confrontation." Broadhead not only helps fund the Ruckus Society; she has transformed Glen-Ora, her hundred-and-fifty-acre Middleburg, Virginia, estate, into a training camp for the Berkeley-based group. It was on the hay fields at Glen-Ora that the Ruckus Society organized the various underground groups who turned the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization two months ago into days of rioting against global corporate hegemony.
One recent afternoon, an hour before Broadhead was to leave on a trip to Cuba (the country's name is stamped on the license plates of her Land Rover), she sat down before a fire in Glen-Ora's panelled library to explain how she came to support an anarchist organization. First, however, she let slip that John and Jacqueline Kennedy had relaxed in this same cozy room in 1961, just after Kennedy was elected President, when they rented Glen-Ora from her mother.
"The Ruckus Society has more imagination than most people in politics," she said."They talk about issues I've been talking about for years, such as the concentration of corporate power." Politics, she thinks, should be full of fun and passion. "The Presidential candidates that I see look like they're sleepwalking!" she complained.
John Sellers, who is now the director of the Ruckus society, first met Broadhead five years ago, when she attended a rally in Washington, D.C., to protest French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Sellers was leading a delegation from Greenpeace and was wearing a white protective jumpsuit and goggles, and Broadhead asked him if he had an extra outfit. "Here was this quirky woman, dressed to the nines," he recalled recently. "She looked as if she should be shopping on Fifth Avenue. The she threw on this radioactive white suit and goggles."
Not long after, Sellers joined the brand-new Ruckus Society as a "trainer," and Broadhead began loaning Glen-Ora to the group for its "spring-break camps." At a training session held there last June, Ruckus's leaders announced tha they were planning a mass protest at the W.T.O. conference and, according to Sellers, began drilling "tons and tons" of activists in the civil-disobedience techniques that they would use there. They learned how to form blockades, how to rappel up the sides of buildings in order to hang protest banners, how to shackle themselves to large objects, and how to get arrested while declaiming well-researched sound bites to the news cameras.
"I love having them here," Broadhead said of the Ruckus members. "They are wonderful, fun, and brave!" Moreover, she added, "they promised to bring me back some rubber bullets from Seattle."
The W.T.O. uprising, Sellers says, was just a beginning. On April 16th and 17th, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will hold their annual spring meeting in Washington, D.C., and he's hoping to stage "a Seattle-style convergence." Sellers sees the irony in accepting support from what he calls "individuals of means" to help tear down the capitalist state. "We do stand for redistributing income," he said. But so does Broadhead: she gives away about half a million dollars a year, mostly to radical leftist groups like Ruckus. "It's nice to be rich," she said as she headed toward the airport to catch her plane. "I would never argue otherwise. But the great think about giving some away is that it makes me feel less guilty about my portfolio."