He joined The Weatherman movement for a brief time before going underground after planting a bomb at the University of Washington's ROTC building.

Silas’ mother, Hillary Nelle Rarden, was a Marxist-civil rights activist and encouraged her son to be the same.

When Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated and activists stormed Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Silas and Judith joined a Seattle draft resistance group.

[2] Because they were a married couple in a movement that perceived the practice of monogamy as bourgeois, the Bissells were challenged by the members of Weatherman to prove their dedication.

Traveling by bus and train, they relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, but were now shunned by fellow Weathermen.

In 1993, he founded the Campaign for Labor Rights, a nationwide organization fighting sweatshop conditions in factories around the globe, and was the national director for many years.

Even when he became semi-paralyzed after special chemotherapy for the cancer that was diagnosed in 2000, Bissell never stopped his work as an artist up until his death.

Silas Trim Bissell died at age 60 in Eugene of cancer of the brain on June 15, 2002.