HISTORY SHOWS, PEOPLE POWER MAKES THE DIFFERENCE. by D. E. Gibson ©

HISTORY SHOWS, PEOPLE POWER MAKES THE DIFFERENCE.

APRIL 27, 2014 PEACEHOMECAMPAIGNS

By D. E. Gibson ©

Power comes down to two things. Money and People. When they have the money, we need the people!

It was dusty, hot, and the air and the ground around us, seemed yellow. It was sandy, rocky, sage brush with a few stunted trees all around. On one side of US 95, was a steel chain link fence some 10 feet high or more, which stretched for miles in both directions, topped with concertina razor wire. On the other, about 3,000 individuals from all over the country were lining up to support hundreds who were illegally entering the gates on this side of the fence. Beyond this throng, just a mile north, organized in a sand pit past some small hills on Bureau of Land Management property were a collection of tents, small and large, pitched as I recall, about 100 yards from the road. White ones. Bright yellow and orange ones, blue ones. Olive… There were a number of vehicles as well. Support vehicles, generators, water trucks, and personal transportation of a wide variety. Some of the tents were individual one and two person affairs. Some were much larger canopies, and house size structures used for kitchens, dining halls and communal meeting spaces. I remember flags on poles. Peace flags. Rainbow flags, even American Flags. (I will have plenty more to say about the American Flag in later posts)

I have been told that you could hear the sound of the drums in the back ground. I do not remember this myself but do remember drums and other musical instruments there, so … why not? Sounds like something we would have been doing then. Playing drums and clanging cymbals and making noise in celebration of life and resistance to oppression. And if we were not, we should have been. Like the Canadian activists who have come out recently banging their pots and their pans during their protest marches! How cool.
Here was the layout:

In 1988, in the Nevada desert, I was part of an event involving civil disobedience where about 3,000 people were arrested over the course of 10 days. I have read that this was the largest civil disobedience action in US history with a record of arrests.

We were protesting underground nuclear weapons explosions to test and develop new and more dangerous bombs and missiles about 1,000 of which, could destroy most life on Earth. (There were about 70,000 in the world then, ready to launch) The demonstration was named “Reclaim the Test Site.” I had trained and prepared for this event for months. I had flown out here all the way from Montclair NJ to meet my crew. They had driven out earlier, caravan style, meeting up with other caravans and rolling into “Peace Camp” within hours of many others that I had spontaneously coordinated by phone and fax back in our office in Montclair before driving to Newark Airport and boarding a plane to join the fun. (This was all before cell phones… Members of other caravans from the South and the North East and the East, and the North West called in to their headquarters by pay phone… Does anyone reading this remember those?) I spoke with their home offices. They, in turn, would let their folks — who would call in from time to time – know how far in miles they were from some other group of fellow travelers and on what particular route some other caravan from some other part of the country might be. Some joined up en-route thanks to this. Some joined up outside of Peace Camp. Others aimed to roll into peace camp as close to a common arrival time that we organized in an impromptu fashion over the phone. Me with my map spread out on my cluttered desk with my speaker phone in front of me… No google maps in them days … Most of the travelers arrived on the same day within hours of each other… an intermittent procession of caravans arriving from all over the country. I imagined cheering campers greeting them, which indeed is what I was told later actually happened. This helped build solidarity and gain us some local media attention too.

I was up most of the night alternately on the phone and at our brand spanking new copy machine, my back pack and travel gear stored on the floor by the door, as I was running off materials for a professional door-to-door canvass we had organized as one of our contributions to this effort. While the protest was set for Nye County, the canvass was in Las Vegas, which was the next county over. Since none of the money we collected was for the protest, but to set up a group in Vegas of locals who would call for conversion of the test site to peaceful purposes, we were completely legal,– much to the chagrin of Las Vegas police who wanted to arrest us, like their Nye County Compadres, but were unable to. So… Ha!

My crew, all experienced professional canvassers, had caravanned out to meet some other canvassers from other canvass offices — most from SANE/FREEZE, (The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy merged with the Nuclear Weapons FREEZE Campaign.) Some were committed to the canvass, and others were committed to the action and planning arrest. We were well represented.

When I arrived just hours after most of the caravans got there, I disembarked at Las Vegas Airport. As I got off the plane the very first thing I saw drove home what we were really resisting. I saw a line of Slot Machines. “Yes” I thought to myself with a wry smile. “Makes sense”.

I was up and animated when I got to Vegas thanks to the excitement of the occasion and adrenaline in my system, despite my tired state due to a night of little sleep. (Exacerbated by the little plastic bottles of bourbon I drank on the plane.) I made my way to the temporary office for the American Peace Test in Las Vegas. The American Peace test was, in a way, a splinter group of sorts, breaking off of the larger FREEZE Campaign to mount increasingly militant, disciplined, civil disobedience against the US nuclear weapons program, and the US’s overall policy of militarism. They coordinated with groups protesting in Greenham Common in England and at the test sites in, what then was still, the Soviet Union as well… making this a truly global organizing campaign. Most Americans would have been shocked and in denial of the fact that there was a robust peace movement in the USSR in those days.

The office certainly felt temporary. It was located in the rear of, some sort of commercial, newly and cheaply constructed mini-mall sort of thing, though it didn’t appear to have any retail outlets. It had small offices of the kind where you might find a moving company, a machine shop, or a fly-by-night furniture warehouse. Lots of white and silver and aluminum, and no trees to mention in the parking lot except for the small, spindly newly planted variety. The kind held in place by some cable tied to the ground and supported by fresh pine one by twos. Even the doors seemed to be made of a hollow aluminum frame. The office was located across from the rear parking lot of one of the smaller casinos… (Casinos were everywhere. So were more slot machines. They seemed to be in every commercial location one entered, including super markets.)

Some of the canvassers took what they made canvassing and leveraged it at the gaming tables. One guy won enough money to buy an airplane ticket back to Los Angeles, which was fortunate as he did not have a return plan when he got there. All of us took advantage of the very cheap food, steak dinners and the like, and cheap booze that the Casinos made available to attract out-of-towners to come in and lose their savings. What a racket! But it was, after all, Vegas! Back at the office there was a kitchenette kind of deal, with a sink a very small refrigerator, and a microwave.

We lived on peanut butter, bagels and bread, and some whole wheat pasta which I would cover with tahini sauce. At Peace Camp there was a communal kitchen with lots of … well… chili and salad I imagine… I never ate there myself. We ate pretty well off of the money we canvassed. Which was also OK because the contract called for paying us from revenues that we raised while signing people up. Not a bad system.

The whole operation was run on consensus, which immediately ended my role in the canvass as a leader as soon as we had our first meeting. It stung my ego but enriched my soul. I was suddenly no longer the architect of this unique first ever organizing model, but simply the driver and another canvasser. It was kind of liberating in a way and immensely satisfying seeing everyone step up and take responsibility. My ego healed quickly.

Upon arrival I met with an organizer or two. The details are a bit hazy, but we arranged, from previous contact, to have access to either one of the two rental vans that were around to bring people to and from the office to Peace Camp and back.

We also arranged whose couch I would sleep on as I did not have a tent at Peace Camp. I don’t remember getting much sleep anyway. As I remember I moved around a lot, staying on the weekend with other canvassers and activists at some out of town lawyer’s home for a night and a day. I was charged with going to the grocery to pick up food for a large group meal, and since I had not yet gotten my paycheck, I was to do most of the labor for my part of the meal. When I got to the super market, I dropped a few quarters (all I had left) into one of the slot machines up front and won enough to cover my share of the groceries and a little extra, saving me from a night of indentured servitude at the whim of my fellow activists… WHAT a relief. Capitalism came through for me that time.

We would have access to the van at around 2:00 PM each day to bring people to the City and then, after meeting and preparing for the field at about 3:00, we would drive canvassers to their neighborhood and drop them off. Then I would drive back to the office, and pick up whoever needed a ride back to Peace Camp. Then I would turn around, and head back into the city giving anyone who needed it, a ride and drop them off. If I had time, I would go out and canvass. If not I would just go and pick up the crew. Then drive back to Peace Camp. To get around during the day or on the weekend, I used the little red Mazda owned by one of my crew, a young man with blond dread locks.

I found myself going back and forth to the city for various reasons during the day while some members of my crew joined hundreds of others crossing the line and being abducted by Wackenhut Security on the test site grounds and put in a large metal “pen” in the desert until they could be loaded on buses and driven to the town of Tonopah, some 65 miles from the vicinity. We called it “The Cage”. It was a 28,800 square foot chain link fence built in the shape of a square near the South Entrance not too far from the road. As activists crossed the cattle guard at the gate’s entrance, or scaled the fence, they were picked up by security guards, some on foot, some driving souped up dune buggies. Once herded into the “cage” they were taken, as a group, to the buses.

On March 13, 1988, the Los Angeles times had this to say about it: “Orchestrating the arrests were about 100 sheriff’s deputies, 50 Nevada Highway Patrol officers and an unknown number of Department of Energy security officials, who used helicopters, motorcycles and camouflaged dune buggies to track down the hundreds of trespassers who managed to evade a wall of guards manning the area near the entrance.”

The first time this happened, on the first day of the action, it was not expected… Organizers scrambled to find all manner of vehicles and gave chase. After about a day or two, we got really good at following the buses and retrieving our folks and getting them back to the scene of the demonstration pretty quickly thereby effectively thwarting the Nye County Sheriff’s office in their plan to break the civil disobedience.

The reasons they cited for this strategy, to bus our people far away, showed our evident effectiveness at gumming up the system, which, at its root, is one of the reasons for civil disobedience to begin with.
Also in the LA Times was this:

“Activist Jessie Cox was one of many who chastised authorities for using “the cage.” “This cage that has been built in the desert appears to be a detainment camp for nonviolent protesters,” Cox said. “We are not only concerned about its use, but about the historic precedent that the image of a stalag-like structure conjures up.”

But Chris West, a spokesman for the Department of Energy, which manages the test site, said the enclosure, which cost $35,000, was needed to control ever-increasing numbers of protesters here.
There have been 3,610 people arrested here since the first demonstration was held in 1957, authorities said. But 3,217 of those arrests were made in 1986 and 1987.

“We are sorry this is happening,” West said, “but we can’t just let people go haphazardly anywhere they want on the test site.”

Still, Nye County prosecutors stopped filing charges against most trespassers here a year ago in an effort to ease the county’s mounting court load.
“They are trying to use the Nye County criminal system as a forum and we are not going to waste taxpayers’ money by giving them that recognition,” said Nye County Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Morrison. Instead, he said, “the complaint is routinely dismissed and they go on their merry way.”

So it was obvious that all of that work, demonstration after demonstration, was paying off from a tactical point of view at least.

But was it paying off strategically? A most important question. While the department of energy denied any effect on operations, which was true at the time, the effect on political policy was another matter.

Representative Pat Schroeder, a Congressional ally from Colorado introduced HR 3442, mandating the cessation of US nuclear testing (and thereby British tests, since they used our test site for their own nuclear tests… stopping the US would stop the Brits… A twofer) so long as the USSR maintained their moratorium on testing. The bill eventually gained over 100 co-sponsors, but was never voted on. Schroeder claimed its support was influenced by the civil disobedience at the test site.

The Soviets ended their unilateral moratorium on February 5, 1987, but the last US test explosion was 4 years after Reclaim “The Test Site”, in 1992, though the amount of tests were vastly reduced before that time.

However, later in 1988 the US and the USSR began the Joint Verification Experiment, where technical personnel from both countries traveled to each other’s testing facility to begin the actual monitoring program that would allow each to verify that the other side was not testing. So this, then, was the beginning of the end of nuclear test explosions by all countries to this day with the exception of North Korea, and it looks like possibly Pakistan (and then maybe India?) again soon. We have to organize to stop this if we can!

In 1992 the US Congress passed the Hatfield-Exon amendment, cutting funds to achieve a nine month nuclear testing moratorium. This cancelled the last three scheduled tests for 1993. The ban has held ever since despite our Senate’s refusal to verify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed by Bill Clinton in ‘96.

My own belief is that what finally ended nuclear explosions was civil disobedience, like this action and the threat of continued demonstrations, along with millions of petitions, tons of letters and phone calls, and simply ongoing unrelenting pressure of ALL kinds from many, many regular folks from all over the place.

There was also the largest single demonstration in US history to end the nuclear arms race, earlier in Central Park in 1982, which can be seen as the start of the final grass-roots push to end all nuclear testing. Protests had been going on since the beginning of nuclear testing.

The nuclear weapons freeze referendum passed in many states across the country before being defeated in Congress… which helped change tactics to a more militant variety culminating in the mass arrests at the test site.

Who knows? The increasing acts of civil disobedience (CD) HAD to worry policy makers. As the protests and CDs grew in frequency and numbers I am sure, it is only common sense, that despite official denials, it had to worry those in power that this kind of thing might continue to grow until it got unmanageable.

Back in the late 80’s a one judge, Judge Sullivan, after listening to an emotional appeal from a family member who was in court on his trespass charge (which they received at the Test Site) stopped the proceedings and told the court and everyone there that “I just want you to know I think you are making progress through your efforts.” according to a personal account in a book entitled “A Family Says No to Violence: Personal Empowerment through Nonviolent Civil Disobedience.” by Sally A. Mack.

We must never underestimate our own power… It is, after all, all we can count on in the end… and when united with others, we can multiply that power to make real, and often lasting change.

But our power is not like the power we resist. The power of greed, suicidal greed, when one thinks of the polices that give us realities like 70,000 nuclear weapons, “Shock and Awe”, addictive use of fossil fuels resulting in increasing average global temperatures, and the very real and staggering threat of a possible runaway greenhouse effect.

Their power is massive, it seems to be everywhere, but it isn’t. It is pervasive, and it is coercive. Ours is different and, when planning to resist and work for change it is always, in my opinion and that of many experienced organizers, best to organize from a place of your own power. As a matter of fact, Saul Alinsky, one of my early organizing role models, had set down some principles for us to use when developing strategy. He said, we need three things to give an organizing campaign a decent chance of success.

1 – Give your people a sense of their own power. You do this by organizing from your own experience and outside your opponent’s experience. Mass CD is often a good case of this, but not always. It is good to assess the degree to which your target understands and knows how to respond to CD.
2 – Alter the relations of Power. Doing things outside their experience can win you a seat at the table.
3 – Win concrete improvements in your people’s lives…
The Anti-Nuclear Arms Movement has succeeded at all of these…

What’s next?

There are still dangers to be sure, and nuclear weapons still need to be abolished because they still pose a very real threat to each of us and all life on the planet, though we ARE in an undoubtedly safer position than we were in 1988.

But in terms of the goal of the campaign for the Anti-Nuclear Arms movement, I would say that if we can succeed in achieving a ratification of the Test Ban Treaty in the Senate, then we have won and we should have one hell of a very public and audacious party to celebrate because we need to, for our own psyches, reward ourselves for a hard-fought campaign that many of us sacrificed much for. But as importantly, we need to organize that celebration as a national event. We need to put some resources into it to give notice to those in power that – yes — we DID win. We went up against the most powerful death machine in history and we pushed it back from the brink and saved us all from annihilation.

ANNIHALATION!

That IS something to celebrate. And we want them to know that we will not take whatever else they have in store for us without a fight. We need not be violent. That is their way of playing the game. We will NOT let them reduce us to their level. We WILL overcome… That is the message a large victory celebration would send. Stand by, next chapter in the saga is coming up and we are prepared to win again…

We have no choice if we want to live. Because as soon as the hangover wears off, we will be planning our strategy for our next campaign to make this world we live in a better place to live the kinds of lives we want to live and that we all deserve.  So, to spell it out, what I am proposing is a national celebration as a campaign strategy.

The powers we resist threaten to do us all in, globally and in our own neighborhoods. All to serve a system which more and more people have witnessed serves a very few at the expense of an increasing number of people at the bottom. A growing, and REQUIRED underclass that must exist for this system to operate.

This is what we resist: A war around the planet, and one in communities of poor and African-American people and other people of color and people who are divergent from the main stream life style.

We resist a system which pits us each against each other to purposely keep us divided so that we never learn our power. The power of our numbers. The power of the many, the power of people, the power that has been seen throughout history to eventually overthrow the tyrants that have oppressed them time and time again. The Power of unity. The power of love!

A power we can realize when we break down the barriers and differences that divide us and when we learn that everything IS connected.

Like the power of 3,000 people from all walks of life and an amalgam of backgrounds that came together in the hot Nevada Sun to stand up to the nuclear nightmare that had been created to threaten us all just to profit a few.

It is the same power that we use when we reclaim our streets by building community and sharing the burden to make the streets safe to walk again. The power to change how we raise our children so that they suffer less trauma than we have, and can grow with understanding of, and compassion for others. Nothing else will do… There is no other way for us to survive, otherwise, as things progress and resources dwindle and new ways of organizing society are called for, we won’t be competing and killing each other to eat, but feeding each other to prosper.

We ARE all in this together. So far, there is no other planet we can go to and the world as we know it keeps getting smaller. We must choose to run our own lives, personally and as a community. Power structures HAVE to change. Patriarchy, and yes, Capitalism, at least in its current form, must become a thing of the past. We must evolve or perish.
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19988. 1992AMERICAN PEACE TESTCOMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN. COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATYNUCLEAT TEST SITEORGANIZINGPAT SCHROEDERPEACEPEOPLE POWERPOWER TO THE PEOPLERESISTING ECONOMIC CONVERSIONSANE/FREEZESURVIVAL

Interview with Peter Bergel

"Ballot Measures, Protests and Satire Groups" 

Interview with Peter Bergel
Conducted by Lawrence Wittner (State University of New York at Albany) Salem, OR, August 3, 1999
> View as PDF


Introduction

Peter Bergel is a long-time peace activist, who played a central role in the peace and anti-nuclear power movement in Oregon and beyond. He already opposed nuclear testing as a college student in the 1960s and a decade later began working with a satire group called Dr. Atomic’s Medicine Show, which illuminated the problem of nuclear power – an issue Bergel always deemed “winnable.”  The group later spoofed many other issues as well.

Working in Oregon he became an expert on ballot measures, passing one in 1980 that banned new nuclear power developments statewide. At the same time Bergel co-founded a peace group called Citizen Action for Lasting Security (CALS), organized large-scale protests and acts of civil disobedience and played a role in the national nuclear freeze campaign from its inception. Disillusioned by the bureaucratization of the national movement, he returned to work primarily at the grassroots level, for example as an editor of the PeaceWorker, the organ of Oregon PeaceWorks (OPW).

Despite his belief that peace activism is most effective when pursued locally, Bergel emphasizes the importance of transnational connections, such as he observed between American and Russian peace groups in the late 1980s. Drawing strength from the international implications of the peace movement, he came to view “the linkages between the U.S. movement and the movements in other countries as constantly more important.”  Today, Bergel continues his lifelong commitment to peace activism as the editor-in-chief of the PeaceWorker and OPW’s Executive Director.


Interview Transcript

"I returned to nuclear issues in 1974, when I started finding out what was wrong with nuclear power plants.  I worked with a group that set up a political satire group -- theater group -- called Dr. Atomic's Medicine Show, which is still in existence, actually, and which I am still a member of. . . .  That started out being about nuclear power and then, later, broadened its mandate. . . .  I became pretty concerned about nuclear power and, also, deemed it to be a winnable issue, which was one of the things I liked about it at that time.  And got involved in a couple of ballot measure campaigns that were unsuccessful and made it to the top leadership of one of those -- became the chairman of the executive committee of that one.  The time, I guess, wasn't quite right yet and the strategic decisions we made that time weren't quite right, either.  So I went to work in the legislature after that -- that was where I met Chuck [Johnson].  Actually, we did some civil disobedience up at the Trojan nuclear plant and, then, went to the legislature and tried to get some legislative stuff happening.  We came very close . . . didn't quite make it.  So then he and I wrote a ballot measure in 1979, which went to the ballot in 1980 and stopped nuclear power development in the state of Oregon, and I was overall director of that ballot measure campaign.  He was our field director.

So, after that, we had a pretty good organization together.  And we gathered to decide whether we ought to head off into the direction of working on alternative energy or whether we ought to head off in the direction of the Nuclear Freeze, which was just beginning to catch fire in 1981.  Chuck took about a third of the people and went in the direction of alternative energy and nuclear free zones and that kind of thing.  The other two-thirds or so went with me and formed an organization called Citizen Action for Lasting Security.  And we were in on the founding of the national Nuclear Freeze campaign in that meeting . . . on the East coast.  And I became quite active in the national Nuclear Freeze politics and also headed the Freeze campaign at the state level pretty much, with the exception of the Nuclear Freeze ballot measure, in 1982.  I was in the leadership of that, as well, but under protest, because I didn't think we ought to be actually doing that.  But I thought, as long as we are doing it, since I know more about ballot measures than any of the people who were working on it at the time, I thought I'd better be involved lest they screw it up and lose it, which would have really been disastrous to everything that we were trying to do.  We did win.  It wasn't too difficult to do that, fortunately," although "the campaign was rather poorly organized.

And then we continued to work on the Freeze at the national level.  But the Freeze leadership, at the national level, developed into a more and more and more conservative group, from the point of view of what they were willing to undertake.  And they became much less activists and much more peace bureaucrats, the more focused on Washington they became.  And many of us at the grassroots were very disillusioned by that. 

In 1985, when the Soviets declared their moratorium on nuclear testing, the peace movement basically did nothing.  The national peace movement didn't react to that.  And a group of us who had been talking -- `How can we do a better Freeze strategy?' -- for some time, just flipped out, said:  `Wait a minute!  We've been trying to get this to happen now for four or five years, and here the leader of one of the two power blocs decides to actually do it and we don't have a reaction, because we're too busy collecting petition signatures or some stupid thing.  We can't allow this.'  So three people -- Jim Driscoll . . . and Jesse Cox . . . and Nancy Hale met at the Nevada Desert Witness, Hiroshima Day demonstration in 1985, and they all knew each other from the Freeze campaign.  And they got together and said:  `We really have to do something about this.  And maybe this gives us an idea of what we ought to do.  Maybe we ought to call people down to the Nevada test site and do civil disobedience down here and really raise hell until the Reykjavik summit.'  And then Nancy came back from that meeting with those two guys and said to me and my partner, Ted Coran, who was at that time the other co-director of Citizen Action for Lasting Security.  Well, we'd been talking with Nancy and her partner, Tom Lynch, for a long time about what should we do, and we'd thought about taking people to the test site, but we hadn't figured a way to do it.  And so she came back and said:  `Well, I've seen how this can be done now.  And it can be done in a way that isn't so horribly risk-involved that people just won't do it.'  So we went down and had a talk with her and we basically laid out an action plan that night for how we might do this. . . .  For the 50 days leading up to the Reykjavik summit, we would have people coming down from a different state every day and getting arrested at the test site and making as big a media splash as possible, and demanding that Reagan halt nuclear testing as well at Reykjavik, do an initial moratorium on nuclear weapons testing.  So that was the plan when we came away from talking to Nancy that night.  And she said that Jim was already looking for money for the project and Jesse was already working on folks through the East Coast national Freeze network that she was hooked into also at that time.

So that weekend Ted and Chuck and I went off to the coast and went camping for a couple of days, and we sat up on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and basically laid out the whole plan as to how this was going to be operationally done. . . .  And then we thought . . . especially Ted and I looked at each other and said:  `You know, we've done this before.'  We used to call it a `Ted and Peter Show,' when we would get all hyped up on an idea that we thought was really a good one, and we'd just go out all cylinders firing with this great idea, and just go charging off into the distance, tooting the horn and making great speed and so forth like that, and turn and look around and there was nobody there.  So we thought:  `Well, maybe we better make sure that we're not doing a "Ted and Peter Show" here.'  So what we did was we came back and we called up all the peace groups that we knew and said:  `When's the next time that you're meeting?  Are you meeting any time in the next week and a half?'  And [to] all the ones that were, we said:  `Would you give us 15 minutes to make a really exciting presentation to your group?'  And they all said `Yes' -- all the groups in the vicinity here. . . .  So we put together a pretty punchy 15-minute presentation and went running around to all these groups and saying:  `Here's the plan.  What do you think?'  Not only was the response really enthusiastic -- like `How many people want to go?' `Me, me, me!' -- but we were passing the hat at the end of the presentations, saying:  `Well, if you can't come, maybe you could throw a little money in.’ And these are just regular little peace meetings, with maybe 15 or 20 people attending, at the most.  And they're kicking in 100 and 150 bucks into the hat. . . .  And this is happening over and over and over again.  So we're thinking:  `. . . We're on to something here!

Then we think:  `Well, we'll go ahead with the plan . . . that we did out at the beach.'  And that plan was to cut it down to 30 days as being a little more manageable, and doubling up some of the states.  So we pretty arbitrarily just sat down and started saying:  `OK, here's the day and here's the state.'  And then we were going through our lists of contacts and, basically, calling people cold.  Many of them didn't know us at all, some of them knew us but only through contact through the Freeze campaign.  So we're picking up the phone and we're saying:  `Hello, this is Peter Bergel, of Citizen Action for Lasting Security out in Salem, Oregon, and we're going to bring all these people down to the test site, and what we'd like you to do is bring a bunch of people from your state down to the test site to get arrested on the 25th of October.  What do you say?'  Well, you can imagine picking up the phone and having this said into your ear.  Like:  `You've got to be kidding!  I've got nothing else to do?'

The surprising thing was that it worked.  We didn't turn out huge numbers of people, but we turned out enough people to have civil disobedience practically every day for 30 days leading up to the summit, and we brought in people from all across the country -- practically every state was represented.  We thought that was pretty remarkable.  So we went down there, we had all these people arrested . . . -- I'd say there were at least 150 people arrested over those 30 days -- which, considering . . . it was the first time, we thought was pretty good. . . .

We went right from the 30 days of doing that right over to the national Freeze Campaign conference . . . and we said:  `Wow!  This is it!  This is where we have to go!'  And . . . all the bureaucrats are saying:  `No. This is going to alienate our base of support.  The people won't like this.'  And so:  `Well, you know, I don't think that's your decision to make.  I think that's the conference's decision to make.'  So they said:  `Well, OK.  You can make a presentation to the conference.'  Well, over the course of the conference, they kept changing when we were going to get to do it, and they kept shortening the time we were going to be allowed, and they kept engineering things so that, by the time they actually allowed the vote to take place, they had splintered things and messed things up and interfered with our presentation so much that we hadn't yet made a really good presentation.  And, as a result, we lost by about 10 votes out of 400 or so.  And we were furious, because we didn't think it was because people had had a really clear picture of what they were voting on; it was because things had been. . . .  We would expect to be treated like that by the Congress, but we wouldn't expect to be treated like that by the peace movement. . . .  We said:  `This has got to be part of the mix, bringing people down to the test site.  This is the first new thing that the Freeze campaign's done in three years.  Let's go for it!  This is a great success.'  We came in saying:  `Not only did we get some media, and we got a lot of arrests, but the main thing that we did was to get a whole lot of people really fired up, and they went back to their home communities really determined to do something.'  Which had not been happening for a while.  The Freeze campaign did a real good job of that for the first couple of years, and then it started to ssssss [sound of air going out of a balloon] because of no new ideas.  So we said:  `Well, we've got new ideas now, and we're seeing that same energy going back up again.  So we have to do this.'  `Well no, we don't have to do it.'  So about 20 or 30 people gathered in a room, at the conference, and said:  `Let's spin off.  Let's get out of here.  If we can't do it within the Freeze campaign, we need to do it, so let's just go ahead and do it.'  Most of us had gotten arrested and needed to go back in January, anyway, and go to court.  So we said:  `Well, we'll meet in Vegas when we go back there anyway.' 

And so again we had about . . . 25 people or so at a meeting in Vegas.  Jim had gone out and gotten a few thousand dollars to fund this thing, so we'd have a place to be and we could have some facilitation, and if people needed their plane fares paid, we'd be able to cover that.  He did a great job. . . .  So we had a big meeting for a few days in January of 1986, founded the American Peace Test, and at the core of that were Ted, and me, and Jesse, and Jim, and Nancy Hale, and one other woman who had been on the Freeze executive committee whose name was Nancy Heskitt.  So that was the American Peace Test leadership at that point. . . .  Over the next three years, we brought tens of thousands of people down there.  We had 5,000 people out there twice. . . .  And it had quite an impact on the peace movement for a while.  Then there was an internal coup in the American Peace Test.  It was a really disgusting thing, and all the staff were fired, and a new board seized control, ran the organization $80,000 in debt, and then they split.  And the organization never recovered from that.  It was very, very distressing to me.

I came back to Oregon after that very upset that that had happened. . . and kind of looked around to see what was happening.  Meanwhile, some people had picked up the pieces of Citizen Action for Lasting Security, which was beginning to run out of gas when Ted and I got sort of focused on the American Peace Test.  A guy named Don Skinner picked up the pieces of that and founded what is now Oregon PeaceWorks.  I was slightly involved with that, but not much.  Ted was a little bit more involved, but not much.  Kind of a new crew came in and put that together. . . .  I . . . began to notice that this group was doing quite a bit of good stuff that nobody knew about because they didn't have any kind of a mouthpiece.  So I made a proposal to the board:  `How would you like me to put together a newspaper for you?'  It was a bit of a hard sell, actually, but it did happen.  And that became the Oregon Peaceworker, which I've been doing since then.  And we've taken a very strong leadership role in terms of getting important information about peace, justice, and environmental affairs out to the community in Oregon.  I think that everybody would now agree that the Peaceworker's probably the most vital part of the PeaceWorks program."

The Freeze campaign's activities in Oregon:  "The first really successful one was a big petition campaign.  And then they had that huge demonstration in New York.  People organized pretty actively to get people to go to that.  Then there was the Citizen Train, which involved . . . getting people to go on a train across country and lobby and talk to people along the way and eventually wind up in Washington and go visit Congressional representatives and that sort of thing.  We also brought lobbying delegations from Oregon on designated lobby days for the Freeze for several years in a row.  We put a memorial through the 1981 legislature putting the Oregon legislature on record as being in favor of the Nuclear Freeze and instructing the Oregon Congressional delegation to do all they could to promote a Nuclear Freeze.  Of course, Hatfield and Kennedy became very active -- and Hatfield was our senior Senator at the time.  And Jim Weaver, who was a Congressman from the fourth district and Les O'Coin, who was a Congressman from the first district -- without, actually, asking us whether we thought it was a good idea -- filed a ballot measure for the Freeze campaign here which . . . kind of forced me to become active in that, although I had already discouraged about 3 or 4 other people from doing that, saying that:  `I know how much work it is to pass a ballot measure . . . and we have more effective things to do, I think, than to engage in that kind of thing here.'  But they didn't ask me, so they did it.  And I thought I'd better get involved."

The bureaucratization of the national Freeze leadership:  "They kept acting as though the main thrust of what was going on was happening in Washington.  My experience is that Washington is kind of the last place where anything happens, and that you have to make it happen in all parts of the country first, and then it happens in Washington. . . .  They began by having offices in St. Louis, and Randy Kehler -- who was an old friend of mine from my earlier peace days . . . -- was heading the Freeze campaign at that time, and at that point, the idea of the Freeze campaign seemed to be to assist local Freeze campaigns in coming up with ideas, funding, supplying good information, that sort of thing.  So we were very supportive of that kind of an approach -- keeping the leadership of the Freeze campaign at the grassroots level.  Then a decision was made, in a very high-handed manner, to move the campaign to Washington, DC.  This decision was made about 10 days after the question had come up in a hotly debated national Freeze conference, where the vote was something like 426 to 25 in favor of keeping the focus on the grassroots, not moving the campaign to Washington, DC.  The leadership then met, not two weeks after that vote had been taken, and moved the campaign to Washington, which just outraged the grassroots, of course.  And it took a while for the Freeze campaign to rebuild its funding base because so many people lost confidence at that point.

One of the things that we did a lot of here was put together what we called Freeze Backgrounders.  Ted and I did a lot of work on those, and then we got a huge amount of support from the local group that we headed, the CALS group here.  CALS (Citizen Action for Lasting Security) had a number of chapters, and that was sort of all built around the county groups that had been active in the ballot measure campaign in 1980. . . .  And they were very supportive of that -- helping us with research and helping us with typing. . . .  So we put together these packets, which we would then make available at a nominal charge to other Freeze groups.  The idea was to upgrade the level of education that people had about all the Freeze topics, such as:  What's testing for?  What's it all about?  How many nuclear weapons are there?  What would happen in case of a nuclear war?  What kinds of delivery vehicles do we have that would deliver these things?  How much money does this cost?  What is the economic effect of devoting this much money to the nuclear arms race?  And on and on and on.  Then, as new things came up, we would jump into them.  Like Star Wars -- we did a whole mini-packet on Star Wars.  We'd bundle these things together and sell them.  So that kind of thing was very popular.

We also had a speakers' bureau here, as did many groups around the country.  Education was a very big part of what we were trying to do. 

The success of it, I think, was shown by the fact that Reagan came to office talking about nuclear war being winnable and, by 1983, he was not able to say that kind of thing any more.  He was not able to make those kinds of statements anywhere in the country.  Another level of the success of the approach that we had was that, from the second year . . . , from 1982, through probably the rest of the decade, you could poll people on whether they wanted a verifiable halt on the testing, deployment, and production of nuclear weapons, and you would get somewhere between the high 60s and the low 80s . . . depending on how you worded it.  Any time.  That was always available.  Yet we couldn't get that to happen in the Congress.  That always used to amaze me.  I used to write letters to the editor all the time about this.  Because people would say:  `Well, at least in this country, we have some control over our government.  If you looked at Russia, you couldn't control the government.'  And I would say:  `Well, what about this, then?  Here's a clear case, on a very, very important issue where we have . . . super majorities in the country in favor of this. . . .'  So any way the people were allowed to speak on this issue, they spoke with a pretty unified voice -- a lot more unified than they ever expressed in electing a President, by a damned sight, or most Congresspeople.  `So here we have this situation, and yet we can't make it happen.  So how are we better off than the Russians!  We don't control our government either.'"

Why the Freeze couldn't secure Congressional approval:  "Too much lobby power on the other side. . . .  The whole peace movement had about 25 lobbyists at that time.  They used to get together in a room and have lunch together once a week, or something like that. . . .  At that time, the Pentagon had thousands of lobbyists.  And that's not even counting all of the companies that were doing it. . . .  We know that money plays a fairly substantial role in how these decisions come down, and they had it and we didn't, in spades!  I don't think there's a lot of mystery about that.

There's a story here, though, about the testing stuff. . . .  In 1988, we put together our largest demonstration at the test site.  That was the big 5,000 person one, in March.  And, by that time, . . . Ted Coran . . . had decided that he had had enough of the American Peace Test and was going to devote his attention instead to getting a change in Congressional representation in this district.  We had been represented for four terms at that point by Denny Smith, who was really a disaster. . . .  We had been trying to get rid of him.  The Freeze campaign would sort of swing into electoral mode every two years, CALS was always involved in that.  We tried lots of things, lots of creative strategies, including running a Republican against him in the primary, to bump him off.  And we hadn't been able to do it.  And Ted felt really strongly that . . . the best thing a person from this district could do for the Freeze would be to get rid of Denny Smith and replace him with somebody who would vote right.  So there arose in 1988 a guy named Mike Kopetski, who had actually approached us in the early eighties with a run for Congress, and we had sort of put him off. . . .  He got into the legislature and had two or three sessions there . . . and now wanted to run for Congress.  So Ted, who was kind of my protégé and . . . then had gone quite a bit beyond that on his own said to Mike:  `You know, I'd like to come to work for you.' And Mike said:  `I'd love to have you, as a field director.'  And Ted said:  `Well, that's great.  Let's do it.  But the quid pro quo is that you need to come down to the demonstration in March of 1988, because once we get you elected, I'm going to want you to do something about this, and that's the reason I'm coming to work for you.  And I want you to know what this is about.'  So Kopetski came down to the test site in 1988, and had the experience . . . that practically everybody does when they go there, which is . . . a visceral reaction to being in the presence of a place where these bombs are being set off, just a few miles away. . . .  It's so beautiful, and yet it's so horrible.  That juxtaposition really gets to people.  So he went down and went through this, and he failed to be elected that time by 707 votes in this district, which is not much. . . .  And he ran again -- and the next time Ted was his overall campaign manager -- and he won.

. . . The director of PeaceWorks . . . was at that time a woman named Susan Gordon.  PeaceWorks had been very active in his campaign, and it continued to turn people out, get them going door to door, and so forth, putting up lawn signs and the whole thing.  Helping raise money.  So she went to Kopetski as soon as he was elected and said:  `OK, Mike.  Now we want to meet with you every month about peace-related things.'  And he sort of balked at that, and said:  `Well, what about every 3 months or 6 months.'  `No, no.  It's going to be every month.'  She got intense with him about it . . . and he agreed to it.  So we had a group of people meeting with him about every month. . . .  Susan came back from the first of those meetings, called up the main SANE/Freeze lobbyist . . . and said:  `We've got a guy who will do what we ask him to do in the area of nuclear weapons, especially testing.  What would you like us to do?'  And the guy didn't believe her, and kind of blew her off.  But she kept at it, and he finally said:  `Well, get him to put a moratorium bill in.'  She said:  `OK.'

So we went to Kopetski and said:  `We want you to put a moratorium bill in.'  And he said:  `OK, I'll do it.'  So he did that. . . .  He was a freshman [in 1991], no clout. . . .  But then, because he had this experience of having actually become viscerally involved in this issue, he really put some attention on this bill he was sponsoring.  He didn't just drop it and walk away from it. . . .  He goes to Gephardt and says:  `Would you sign on to this?  And, if you do, we won't call it the Kopetski bill, we'll call it the Gephardt bill.' . . .  Gephardt's signing on essentially meant that the Ds were going to get on board, and if the Ds got on board there were enough votes right there. . . .  Mike went around and really did a job on selling that thing.  And passed it in the House. . . .  At that point, Mike went to Hatfield and said:  `Mark, you've been on this all your political career.  Will you do it once again?'  And Hatfield said:  `Of course.  I will shepherd this thing in the Senate.'  Well . . . Hatfield's name on a peace bill in the Senate -- so what else is new?  But what Hatfield did was, taking a page out of Kopetski's book, he recruited Jim Exon, a very unlikely recruitment.  Well, that was what it took to get it to pass in the Senate.

So this whole thing, to some extent, stemmed from Kopetski going down to the test site, which wouldn't have happened if we hadn't had these big demonstrations and so forth and so on.  So did we have an effect?  I think so. . . .

That group that Susan Gordon put together included Andy Harris, who was always the big PSR guy around here and who later went on to be national president of PSR.  And when Andy throws his weight behind something, it helps a lot.  So Musil's right that PSR was deeply involved, and the staff person up in Portland -- Del Greenfield -- I'm sure was also a significant player on this, too.  But the reason that all this worked so well was because Kopetski had been there -- a fact that Susan knew, because she'd been there several times, too, and was there when he was. . . .  Sitting on that bluff in 1985, and figuring out the first American Peace Test action, we hoped that we would have some kind of an effect.  We had no idea what the twists and turns were going to be.

Another thing that I know that we really had an impact with . . .  -- and this I consider the most important legacy of the American Peace Test -- was that there was something about going down there and having that experience that we created for people that made them want to go back and do something in their home communities.  And so basically the mission was to get people to come down there, do civil disobedience, and get themselves set on fire, and then go back and do something in their community, whatever that something ought to be.  And we didn't need to tell them what that was.  Sometimes they came up with very good ideas, sometimes I thought they were less good.  But they were doing what they thought was the best thing to do in their situations, and I know of a lot of communities where people came down and then came back and let us know that they were doing stuff.  So, in terms of something that was keeping the pot boiling through the middle and the late `80s, that was important. . . .  Typically somewhere between a quarter and a third would actually get arrested.  But, if there's 5,000 people there, we had 1,200 people arrested in one day.  That was one of the largest arrest demonstrations ever to take place in the country.  That was the day Kopetski was there, as a matter of fact.  I think only Seabrook was bigger than that.

I will tell you another story. . . .  The Russians got together behind a poet named Suleimenov . . . and put together a movement that shut down the test site in Kazakhstan.  And they called it the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement.  And the reason that they called it that was because they were inspired by what we did.  And they were considerably more effective in reaching their objectives in the short term than we were.  That, I felt, was quite remarkable.  And then, of course, they reinspired us when they did that, and so that was very good.  They told us that they had been inspired by what we did, and that's why they called it the Nevada movement.  Sulyamenov was at the test site.  He came over one time.  And there were other ones [connections]. . . .  There's a little logo that shows a guy in an Indian headdress sitting down with a guy dressed as a Kazakh, and they're sitting around smoking a peace pipe.  And that was the logo of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement -- that was kind of a coalition that linked both countries. . . .  My guess is that it would have been [begun] in 1989. . . .  I wasn't there when he was there, but I heard about it."

Importance of being part of a transnational movement:  "Toward the end of my time with American Peace Test, I viewed it as increasingly important.  I viewed the linkages between the U.S. movement and the movements in other countries as constantly more important.  Two hobbyhorses became really important to me in the last year of my activity there.  One of them was that one.

And the other one was that we should focus more on the weapons labs, because I thought that . . . the thing that's really driving testing is the weapons labs.  I think it was in 1991, when I went back to the test site for the first time [since the internal coup in APT], one of the things that drew me back to the area . . . was that . . . I think it might have been PSR that was holding a seminar in a big hotel in Las Vegas about testing.  And they had a lot of very interesting people there, so I wanted to attend and I wanted to cover it for the Peaceworker.  One of the people who was there was Ted Taylor. . . .  He used to be a weapons designer, and later decided that he had made a mistake and got out of it and began speaking against it. . . .  So he was down there talking, and he was using the analogy of the U.S. being addicted to nuclear weapons.  That has been an analogy that's always appealed to me a lot.  We used it as far back as in the `70s, in the Dr. Atomic Show. . . .  In fact, several times at several different places we portrayed Uncle Sam as a drug dealer, dealing drugs, which are like brown bombers and that kind of thing.  So I figured that I knew what he was talking about and I was intrigued with this.  So I went up to him afterwards and shook his hand, introduced myself, and said I had been intrigued by that because I used that often myself, and I was sort of rattling on to him about this.  And he interrupted me and said:  `I don't think you understood what I was talking about.  What I was talking about was an addiction to setting off big bombs.  This is something like kids that like to play with fireworks, grown way big.'  He says:  `Virtually all of us who were out there doing that kind of thing are into that.  I was into it myself.  So this whole business is being driven by people who are addicted to setting off large explosions. . . .  We have to put up with the damned nuclear arms race because these guys want to set off big bombs.'  It's like playing, but it's more like shooting up. . . .  He said:  `I remember a time, back in the fifties, when we were doing above-ground testing.  We were all out there in a trench, waiting for the bomb and then we were going to look out over the top and see afterwards.'  He said:  `I brought down a parabolic mirror that I stuck on the end of a stick, and I set it up there so that I could focus the blast down into the trench and light a cigarette off of it.' . . .  He had that same [drug/alcohol abuser] sense about him:  `I'm telling you about my debauchery here.  Isn't it incredible, and isn't it awful?' . . .  It was just like:  `You've got to be kidding.  This is why we're doing this?'  So that made me think:  We've got to cut this business of the weapons labs off.  Because, when you get right down to it, the weapons contractors are not pushing so hard for testing.  They don't really care if we test. . . .  The ones who are really driving testing are the weapons labs.  When I first started noticing that the weapons labs were behind this in a very big way, I thought they were protecting their jobs.  But they're not!  They can get jobs other places.  They don't care about that.  They're protecting their big bangs!"

On the power of nonviolent resistance:  "At the end of the first year of the American Peace Test, I was the major organizer of a demonstration which was the first time that we had tried a blockade at the test site.  I didn't get arrested that day, because I was sort of the overall coordinator, but I was eventually cited for `conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor,' which is more serious than a misdemeanor.  So I was looking at . . . either six months or a year in jail, and there was some fine also that was possible.  They dragged it on and dragged it on and dragged it on.  It was a whole year before this was finally coming to trial.  Our lawyers . . . didn't really understand us, so they kept trying to plea-bargain this thing with the DA.  The DA was pretty happy to do it.  He said:  `Sure, tell `em that if they stay away from the test site for the next six months and something-or-other else . . . we'll drop the charges.'  And they come back and they say:  `Great news!'  And we say:  `No.  You don't get it.  This is what we do.  Number one, I'm not going to do that.  Number two, I'm not even going to admit wrongdoing.  I'm not going to plea-bargain because . . . I think that they're the ones who are in the wrong or I wouldn't be doing it!'"  More plea-bargaining followed on the part of the attorneys and the DA, always rejected by the defendants.  "I just had to tell them:  `I'm not going to admit that I did anything wrong, because I don't believe that I did.'  So Jim Driscoll puts together this tour, for me and Jesse to go around and tell people, and we're going to get celebrities, and we're going to talk about the testing thing, and basically the bait is:  `Come to a nice place that's owned by a rich person and we're inviting rich people to come down and actually be in the presence of these martyrs who are going to go to jail. . . and also be in the presence of these other celebrities who have agreed to come.'  So we're doing these big fundraising things in various cities. . . .  Well, we're in Los Angeles, and we're just about ready to go on . . . and Martin Sheen, who's been very involved with this stuff and whom we knew from a number of protests there, comes running in and says:  `Oh, I've got to tell you something.'  And, at that point, they had just decided to drop the charges.  We're still doing this tour, but they've just decided to drop the charges.  And we don't know why.  All we've heard is that they've dropped the charges.  So he comes running in and he says:  `I've got to tell you.'  I said:  `What's that?'  And he says:  `Well, I just saw Merlino.'  Now Jim Merlino was the Nye County sheriff down there.  And he had been a guy that we had been cultivating ever since we started going down there -- talking to him about nonviolence, making a friend of him, lots of people had pictures of him hugging either Jesse or Nancy Hale across the fence. . . .  Really, a sweet guy in a lot of ways.  Serious about doing his job.  Clearer that he disagreed with us.  But a real human being.  So Martin Sheen comes in and says:  `I just saw Merlino.  I had to go down there for a case of my own.  And he said:  "Well, tell Jesse and Peter what happened about this dropping of the charges."  And I said:  `What did he tell you?'  And he says:  `Well, they came and did a deposition. . . .  And . . . they said:  "Do you know Peter Bergel and Jesse Cox."  And he says:  "Oh, yeah, I know `em."  And he says:  "I would never have been able to keep these demonstrations so peaceful if it hadn't been for them.  Those people, they do the greatest work, they go out there and they tell us all about what they're gonna do before they go and do it, so we know how many people are gonna be there.  And we know what their plans are.  And we don't have to play guessing games. . . .  And they do terrific work."  And he says:  "I don't know how I'd be able to do my job if it weren't for Peter and Jesse."  So this is going to be the chief witness for the prosecution in a conspiracy case!  I guess when the DA learned that, he decided it wasn't going to fly too well. . . .  That was probably the main reason why the charges got dropped. . . .  That was an example of . . . where doing the Gandhian, nonviolence thing really paid off in the end.  He didn't want to put it to us.  He really didn't.  He thought that whole business of a conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor was really Mickey Mouse, and he was annoyed about it.  So he torpedoed it when he had the chance.  But if it hadn't been for the human relationship, he wouldn't have done that."
 

Peace Camp Nevada

Originally Published by Indian Voices
(Author not cited. If you know let em know and I will correct this!)

The Peace Camp Nevada was formed, so that the Small Group of Folks, who lived across from the
Nevada Test Site & Formed a group of dedicated Activists.(Could communicate about the Actions in Which we empowered & help hundreds of Folks, commit acts of Civil Nonviolent Disobedience. It was formed from the Actions of

Art Casey of the Nevada Desert Experience.

It was formed during the period of time, in which American Peace Test was doing Civil Disobedience.

It was a separate entity, completed.

American Peace Test often used our daily vigils & Civil Disobedience, for their fundraising. But there was no connection, between the two groups. We all were friends, but did not received any funds they raised, using our name.

The actions of peace camp reached the people of the Russians. Through the Action of a Russia Activist. Who was often on Russian TV, as a Respectively National Poet & Artist. One day he announced the actions of a small dedicated group of about 20 people, who were daily committing civil disobedience at the

Nevada Test Site. He raised the country's moral belief, that nuclear disarmament was an available option.

The Russia people formed a group of 40,000+ people, who incorporated the name of Nevada into their name. Because of the actions of dedicated actions of the Ongoing Nevada Peace Group ( This was the true name, of the Nevada Peace Camp)

40,000 Russian People, committed a massive act of civil disobedience, which shocked the Russian authority. Who responded by closing one of the eight nuclear test sites, which they had established? More information of Art Casey & his actions, which lead to the formation of the Nevada Peace Camp, at his blog.

These are the memories of a 67-year original member (who has PTSD) all errors in the above statement, are my fault.

Other original members of the original Ongoing Nevada Peace Camp are encouraged to provide
corrected details.

Corbin Harney the Western Shoshone Spirituality Leader ( RIP 2007) who is often cited as one of the founding members, actual was brought to the Nevada Peace Camp by Bill Rosse, the Western Shoshone Environmental Director, after the passing of his wife. The Ongoing Peace Camp was established prior to his arrival.

Polite Protesters: The American Peace Movement of the 1980s By John Lofland

Syracuse University Press, 1993 - History - 321 pages - $18.00 on Amazon

In the early 1980s sociologist John Lofland became actively involved in the American peace movement. He took part in numerous peace campaigns for nuclear disarmament, the test ban, and SANE/Freeze in Europe and the United States. He has served on a variety of organizing boards and was arrested for civil resistance activities. In his latest book Lofland puts this experience to excellent use. Polite Protesters blends a unique personal perspective with his professional ability to assess the importance, and, long-lasting effect of the American peace movement of the 1980s and to present it in a cogent and compelling manner. Lofland brings his wealth of knowledge about social movements and collective behavior to this sociological study. His analyses reveal a peace movement with organization, culture, and tactics quite different from those of the 1960s and 1970s. The radicals of the 1980s were "polite protesters, " more likely to turn to the politics of interest groups and lobbyists than to that of involved demonstrations and flag burnings. Telling how this movement was both similar to and different from other movements, Lofland explores the dynamics of its dramatic surge and decline, why it both grew and withered with great rapidity. But Polite Protesters is not simply about the American peace movement as genteel protesters. The detailed analysis Lofland offers is developed with a strong concern for the comparative study of social movements and conceived with that aim in mind. In learning about the peace movement, the reader also learns a great deal about all movements, especially those that practice civil protest, a pattern that is becoming more common among the movements of our time.

• Series: Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution
• Paperback: 321 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr (Sd) (March 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815626053
• ISBN-13: 978-0815626053
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Putting it on the Line, from the John E Mack Institute

Putting it on the Line

by Cathy Cevoli

Test site arrests reach new high

John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard psychiatrist, was the first member of his family to hear of the Nevada Test Site demonstration. After consulting with his wife, Sally, the couple called their three sons – Ken, Dan and Tony, all in their 20s – and following discussions that lasted “every night for two weeks,” decided to head west from Massachusetts together. “We thought it was important to take a stand as a family,” explained Sally, a social worker. They also knew their joint appearance would make good media copy.

But it was the boys who first decided to get arrested. Introducing themselves to their affinity group on the eve of the June 2 civil disobedience (CD) action at the test site, both parents paused and said they were there “for support” only.

Mack admitted that one reason for his indecision was professional. Author of one of the first surveys of children’s fears of nuclear war, Mack is academic director of Cambridge Hospital’s Nuclear Psychology Program. “There is a danger of getting identified as too much of an advocate, one of those people who gets arrested,” Mack said. “It could make me seem subjective or isolate me from people I work with.”

Sally Mack faced a different struggle. “I realize that my fear of thinking about the nuclear threat is behind my fear of civil disobedience, “ she explained. For Sally, doing CD would mean admitting once and for all that nuclear war was really possible, a psychological seep that seemed more frightening than getting arrested.

FIRST-TIME OFFENDERS

Held from May 31 to June 2, the action was the first national event organized by the American Peace Test (APT) since its formation in January. Saturday’s event, a demonstration held at the test site, was co-sponsored by the national Freeze Campaign (APT’s founders were formerly Freeze Campaign organizers). Staffers of the fledgling group hope to spark a nationwide CD campaign, one that will attract new participants from “mainstream” peace groups. Economist Lester Thurow, who donated $2000 to APT last year to help it get started, has written a direct-mail appeal calling on others to help him raise $50,000 for the group.

Almost everyone at the action seemed to have both political and personal reasons for coming. Many activists mentioned the imperative of the Soviet testing moratorium, and the conviction that CD needed to start playing as large a role in the test ban fight as it did in the civil rights movement. “We need to be more militant,” said teacher and Freeze volunteer Russell Storll, who spent two-and-a-half days on a bus en route to Nevada. ‘‘I’m so damn tired of feeling I’m not doing enough. “ Like Storll, many in the largely middle class crowd, which ranged greatly in age and included several parents with grown children, had never been involved in CD before.

“I’m sick of yelling at the TV,” said television writer and producer Annie Druyan. “I’ve been studying this issue for five years, and I haven’t done enough to stop what I think is evil.” Druyan was arrested for the first rime, with her husband Carl Sagan, who did not get arrested, accompanying her as a support person. (The couple spent their wedding anniversary on the site.)

Another first-time offender was Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, a leading writer on nuclear psychology. Since getting arrested to stop the arms race hasn’t acquired the legitimacy that it has for issues like apartheid, many newcomers were taking a giant step. “My colleagues will probably say I’m acting out again,” Grinspoon said, half-joking.

“People in the past have viewed CD as a radical step that only the fringe of any movement takes,” said APT national coordinator Jessie Cocks. “But more people are realizing that we can’t achieve our goals without it. Lots of people came here who’d been afraid of getting arrested, or who said ‘I never thought it would have to come to this.’”

These first-timers joined such CD veterans as Daniel Ellsberg, Harvard psychiatrist Margaret Brenman-Gibson – who had encouraged her colleagues Mack and Grinspoon to join the action – and 77-year-old Lawrence Scott, one of 11 people arrested at the first test site action in 1957.

Since the demonstration site is 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, not the least of APT’s accomplishments was attracting so many to a remote location in the middle of the desert. Over 700 people from 35 states (and six countries) attended Saturday’s demonstration, and 149 were arrested on Monday, setting a test site CD record.

Saturday’s crowd gathered on Camp Desert Rock, the place where soldiers involved in above-ground rests were once rained on with radiation, and heard speeches by Ellsberg, Sagan, and Freeze Executive Director Jane Gruenebaum, among others. Oregon Representative Jim Weaver seemed to impress the crowd with his almost religious condemnation of nuclear tests – as well as for facing the 100° weather in a suit.

After the rally, while a third of the group stayed to camp just outside the sire, the rest faced the culture shock of returning to hotels in the capital of psychic numbing. But Mae Gautier of New York City was delighted to find that the paper crane she had given her hotel clerk after her first arrest was still pinned co the hotel’s bulletin board a year later.

CROSSING THE LINE

For much of Sunday, during an all-day strategy session in preparation for civil disobedience, debate centered on what form the action should take. Most activists wanted to cross the DOE’s arbitrary white line and surrender peacefully to the authorities, but others favored options that would make the demonstration more difficult for the police and/or allow people to venture further onto the site. After several hours of overtime discussion, consensus was finally reached on the first, more cooperative action.

Despite – or because of – this ordeal, a growing sense of unity and purpose was palpable on Monday morning. After a long early-morning drive, the group of about 300 activists (both those intending to do CD and their “support people”) gathered along Highway 95 at 6:00a.m. to “vigil” arriving test site workers.

For many activists, the real meaning of the location of this action had been hard to grasp. While everyone knew what goes on at the site, it nonetheless looked eerily benign. “The beauty of the desert gives you a sense of serenity,” said Helga Moore, a New York activist, “but then there’s the horror and the hell underneath.” Less than two months earlier a faulty test in an underground tunnel had vented radiation, causing millions of dollars in damage and contaminating three workers. The recognition of hidden menace seemed to hit home as the activists – many clearly emotional – approached the white line.

Holding hands, small groups of protesters crossed the painted line and were led away, sometimes amid the cheers of friends, to waiting busses to be “processed.” (Nye County Court Judge William Sullivan, popular among activists for his temperate demeanor, has stiffened his sentences in the last two years, due to – APT suspects – federal pressure and his own frustration at dealing with escalating arrests.) First-time offenders faced six days in jail or a $150 fine.

RIPPLE EFFECTS

Since APT organizers view the event as only the beginning of a long-term campaign, they are reluctant to gauge its effectiveness. Locally, the events received good media coverage, due perhaps to growing antinuclear sentiment in Nevada, where stories of waste-dump selection have helped create what APT feels is a growing dislike of the DOE. But with the exception of USA Today, the Chicago Tribune and a small blurb hidden in the Boston Globe, the national media ignored the event. Still, it’s difficult to ignore the number of people who came to Nevada because of someone else’s example. “This has an effect on people’s lives,” said Ed McClain of Corvallis, Oregon, who was warmly welcomed back by workers he’d met doing community service for his last arrest.

Cocks believes that nonviolent CD needs to be more integrated, along with lobbying and other tactics, into movement strategy. Already, the ongoing actions at the test site have raised the visibility of the test ban issue as a critical time in congressional deliberations, according to one key Capitol Hill aide. And, Cocks added, “each of these people will go back to their communities and organize with that much more passion. I have incredible faith in the experience. It can’t not work.”

In the end, it “worked” for John and Sally Mack, who finally decided on Sunday night to get arrested on Monday. “I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing,” Mack admitted an hour before he crossed the line. “I may regret it. But there just don’t seem to be any considerations more important.” Besides, he added, “it just seems the height of parental irresponsibility to watch my sons get arrested and wave at them from the other side of the line.” The Macks were arrested – and later faced Judge Suillivan – en famille.

One week later, John Mack described the process as liberating. “I feel like I’ve crossed an important line within myself,” Mack reported. Since returning from Nevada he has written an article on CD and read a lot of Thoreau. “We have a barrier about breaking the law which seems formidable,” said Mack. “But when times become desperate, it’s essential that people say ‘no’. I wouldn’t just recommend this to my colleagues,” he added. “I’d tell them it’s absolutely critical to take every opportunity to do this.”

© 1986 Cathy Cevoli
Nuclear Times, July/Aug 1986 pp.36-37

Related:

Original Press Release

 Date of original publication (may be approx.) July 1, 1986 • Subject Area: Political Worldviews