Introduction

INTRODUCTION What do all these protests mean? Well my friend, Time Magazine Explains they’re vaguely reminiscent of the sixties. They’re anachronistic fossils, atavistic apostles, They can’t hustle, they’re still twisting with the sixties. I hear people singing songs, About what’s right and what is wrong, Their song is painfully reminiscent of the sixties. How the hell can they play music, When their guitars are acoustic? I can’t use it, I had to lose it in the sixties. As the curly-headed, turban-topped king of rolling thunder, I build my castle on the hill, to evangelize in wonder At the peasants of the eighties, in the valleys, going under. And as I watched them go, amazed they do not know, They could learn so much from Barry Manilow. But they’re so vaguely reminiscent of the sixties.1 Folk singer Charlie King’s song “Vaguely Reminiscent of the Sixties” is part satire, part serious.2 His introduction, spoken at a concert and recorded for release on his 1982 album Vaguely Reminiscent, speaks to the disappointment that many on the left felt about how their actions in the 1970s and 1980s had been represented and re-imagined in American politics and culture in the period since the 1960s. For those involved in activist movements, countercultural endeavors, or some other iteration of alternative political or cultural expression, such representations of activism (or “metaphors” as Charlie King called them) were not only slightly insulting, they misread alternative politics and culture in the post-sixties era, identifying the New Left, the counterculture, and the anti-Vietnam War movement as singular entities confined to a specific context – the 1960s – and a unique time of change and challenge in American life. Whilst King’s ideas are firstly a condemnation of how popular media reported oppositional culture in the early 1980s, 1 Charlie King, Vaguely Reminiscent (Greenfield, MA: Rainbow Snake Records, 1982). 2 To accentuate the connection between activists of the early 1980s and the popular memory of the 1960s, King sung much of the song in a mock Bob Dylan voice. 1 they also shed important light on how the memories of the 1960s are inextricably linked to the actions of the left in the 1970s and 1980s. In the wake of “the sixties” and the oppositional and countercultural movements on the left that form so much of this problematic periodization and popular memory, activists on the left attempted to apply themselves and their progressive politics to new issues.3 Movements emerged around such issues as animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights, hunger and poverty, abortion, as well as issues tied to U.S. foreign policy, such as intervention in Central America, and the system of apartheid in South Africa.4 Whilst such efforts were often unique to their historical and political contexts, their roots often lay in the oppositional social movement culture of the 1960s, and as Charlie King suggested, the popular image of social activism in the late 1970s and early 1980s was of activists clinging to their past. Such a culture, according to many historians, owes much to the New Left, whose role in the political and cultural landscape of 1960s social movements is significant.5 How and why these movements emerged in this style has much to do with the 1960s, and this thesis argues that negotiation of the legacy of the 1960s is the best lens through which to view social movement activism in the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis charts a variety of forms of anti-nuclear activity in the United States between the years 1976 and 1987. It begins with the rise of visible acts of protest against the 3 In this thesis I use the phrase “the sixties” sparingly, to refer to the popular idea of the era rather than its timeframe. On the periodization and definition of “the sixties,” Andrew Hunt has commented that ““the sixties” has become synonymous with “the movement,” a vague yet frequently used expression used to describe a cluster of mass protests, on local and national levels, typically originating from Civil Rights or Black Power struggles, the antiwar movement, the New Left, student power groups, feminism, and other political, cultural or minority activists.” Andrew Hunt, “‘When Did the Sixties Happen?’ Searching for New Directions,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (1999), p. 147. A classic example of this conflagration of “movement” and “sixties” is Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 4 An illuminating edited volume examining a variety of such movements, and their nature as social movements in the wake of the 1960s, is Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, eds., Waves of Protest: Social Movements since the Sixties (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 5 Whilst some scholars have equated the New Left with its flagship organization, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), others have examined it as a more fluid assemblage of actors and interests. Debate amongst historians as to the constitution and meaning of the New Left also contributes to its somewhat messy status in the historiography of the 1960s. The three most famous examples of such traditional interpretations as they emerged in the late 1980s are, Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987). For an excellent historiographical critique, see Winifred Breines, “Whose New Left?,” Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (1988), pp. 528-545. 2 nuclear arms race, and the building of nationwide coalitions organized against all forms of nuclear dangers in 1976. The thesis then charts the development of different models of anti-nuclear activism over the following 11 years, emphasizing that differing types of protest, their ideas, strategies, and tactics maintained an ambivalent relationship with the legacies of the 1960s. This diversity of protest activity is central to this thesis, and as such, national membership-based organizations will be examined alongside decentralized protest collectives and other smaller communities of resistance. It is through an examination of these very different forms of protest that a clearer picture of the scope of anti-nuclear sentiment and activity can be gleaned, and one that sheds additional light on the legacies of the 1960s and their impact on the left in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the organization of this thesis might seem to place an emphasis on the decentralized nature of anti-nuclear protest in the 1970s and 1980s, and the fact that it appeared as a “movement of movements,” its intention is not so.6 I seek to evaluate the extent to which activists in this era envisaged a national movement, and how activity in their individual contexts – local, regional, institutional, electoral, legislative, gendered, or religious – comprised a movement of disparate voices. How these voices interacted, how they perceived their role as activists, and how they operated in the context of the wider movement against nuclear dangers, tells a different story to existing accounts of the anti- nuclear movement as it has hitherto been examined by scholars. Of course, neither major campaigns such as the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, nor mass mobilizations, such as the massive rally in New York City on 12 June 1982 that drew over 750,000 demonstrators, can tell us the whole story of the anti-nuclear movement. What helps us better understand the movement, and how it existed in the context of a post-1960s mobilization of activism on the left, are the diverse and decentralized strands of anti- nuclear activity around the nation. This assemblage of social movements, countercultural communities, and radical and liberal activists that existed in the 1970s and 1980s can be described in similar ways to their 1960s antecedents. Whilst some scholars have looked at the explosion in diversity of social movement activism in the 1970s, on both left and right, this variety owes much 6 On a “movement of movements,” see Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of the New Left,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 277-302. I return to this idea below. 3 to the proliferation of social movement mobilization that occurred during the 1960s.7 Long-lasting organizations committed to peace, social justice, women’s rights, and a host of other concerns had even longer histories, and drew from a rich twentieth-century heritage of organization and mobilization.8 In the 1970s and 1980s, moves toward local political mobilizations in neighborhood organizing, the promise of self-sufficiency and alternative living in the back-to-the-land movement, and the multiplicity of movements based on identity politics all demonstrated the success of what Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson call the “legitimization of dissent.” This enabled Americans to respond collectively to perceived problems in public life, whether on small, communal scales, on local and regional scales, or nationally, in coalitional mobilizations of networked citizens.9 These developments in social organizing show us that there is more to the story of activism in the 1970s and 1980s than the popular narrative of “leftovers” from the movements of the 1960s. They also give us insight into how social movements and their participants on the left navigated the wake of the 1960s, and more specifically how they dealt with their prospects for success in the midst of the conservative revival that began in earnest in the 1970s.10 Against a political climate that increasingly rejected the liberal 7 Notable examples include Freeman and Johnson, eds., Waves of Protest; Robert Surbrug, Beyond Vietnam: The Politics of Protest in Massachusetts, 1974-1990 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); and Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011).

Load more