Anti- nuke activist memories
by David Slesinger
The most significant anti-nuclear contribution of Clamshell’s activity was that when TMI happened there were grassroots antinuclear groups throughout the US ready to escalate their activity. The 77 action was on national TV every night for 2 weeks. Meldrim Thompson made us.
The most significant organizational contribution of Clamshell’s activity was the paradigm of nonviolence training, affinity groups and consensus decision making for large civil disobedience protests.
The most amazing part of Clamshell was that the massive turnout was not in response to some public disaster. It was based on vision. Though I was not part of the regionwide organizing for the action, I understood there were actually 2500 people trained to do civil disobedience on 5/1/77, but the authorities bamboozled the rest into going home. I believe the vision was aided by the fact that the Vietnam War ended 2 years to the day before the ‘77 arrests.
While the faction fight as I witnessed in Boston was intense, ugly and detrimental to the cause, it needs be given credit for being based on principled differences rather than the self promotion more common to mainstream politics.
One of the greatest experiences of my life was a meeting in 1980 of CDAS (Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook). I had become totally isolated as an advocate of classical nonviolence, at least until the Californians arrived a week before the action. I had formed a committee to prepare a leaflet for police and National Guard. The meeting was considering whether the leaflet would be allowed to have the CDAS imprimatur. I spoke for it and Stephe Prieston of the Hard Rain AG spoke against it. Another fellow agreed with Stephe, but on the basis of some factual error. Stephe didn’t want the meeting to agree with him on the basis of a misunderstanding and corrected the brother. I can’t imagine that integrity being seen in mainstream politics. While I was in CDAS, no one lied about me. No one told stories behind my back. The worst thing they would do is tell me to shut up in the middle of a meeting.
Ironically, as action day arrived, I discovered that someone had stolen all the leaflets. Then Bob Green, a member of the committee which helped designed the leaflet, told me that he and his sweetheart visited with the head of the NH guard, who was happy to post the leaflet on the central bulletin board. I laughed so hard that I fell to the ground and continued to laugh as I rolled in the grass.
Eventually, my affinity group, Young and in the Way, was doing the bunny hop down route 1 dressed as clowns on the Tuesday after the big weekend. My college friend and fellow deadhead Bob Spiegelman (who was not an antinuclear activist) had made up bumperstickers with the words,”Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile”. We cut off the Steal Your Face logos and wore the slogan on our backs. We would turn into the center of the road and the National Guard would push us out of the way.. The biggest of the guardsman said to me as he was pushing me with his baton, “My heart’s not in it, my heart’s not in it”.
One of the biggest debates with CDAS was its assertion that it favored direct action over symbolic action. ( If you haven’t seen David Stoff’s cartoon strip lampooning the PPRF’s concept of a” soft blockade”, you haven’t lived.) My friend, who lived in Maine during these years, now lives in Tennessee, and chooses to live without a name was the person who changed my thinking on this point. The main value of any protest is its symbolic value. When we held up the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 in Seattle, the main value was the symbolic nature of the action. The main value of that action was not that the plutocrats had to wait to make a decision, it’s that the rest of the world knew it. Ultimately, the value of any political activity is the amount of support that it generates among the public. A display of strength is valuable if it is honorable enough to generate support without frightening too many people. Thus the actions of a small group can be valuable and the actions of a large group can be detrimental… The opposite is also true, but that is more obvious.
One of the saddest moments of my life was the meeting in Boston the Wednesday after the 78 action was called of by the Clamshell coordinating committee. 250 people were present in the beginning. A normal meeting would have 100. It lasted till somewhere between 3 and 5AM. There was another meeting before the rally, and that lasted also until the wee hours. Steve Hilgartner, Frank Bove, Dick Bell, and Howie Shrobe and one other brother whose name escapes me stood with the folks from New Hampshire who had favored the emergency decision. Howie made the following statement to culminate the meeting,” My great uncle… who was a member of the CP until the day he died…always said…when it comes to politics…the hardest…ass……wins…………let’s go home.” Whenever I ever want to bring tears to my eyes, it is still the surest way I know to do this.
The lessons I learned while fighting Seabrook were the most important of my life in that they led to a deepening commitment to nonviolent resistance. I am currently the primary advocate of nonviolence in the 911 truth movement. This is not so much a boast as a description of how isolated I am as such an advocate. It’s quite a challenge to convince many “truthers” that being vicious to anyone who disagrees with them is counterproductive. My website is 911courage.org.
It is common to hear the factions of Clam described as the nonviolent faction and the violent faction. I prefer different terms. I prefer respectively to label them as the pragmatic public relations faction PPRF and the angry direct action faction ADAF. Steve Hilgartner, the bright young(19) staffer in Boston saw value in the existence of affinity groups only in that they could be used to keep activists from embarrassing the larger movement. The chance AG’s could empower individuals who might otherwise feel lost in a large action meant little to him. The difference between nonviolence and what the PPRF stood for can be summed up in a comment from my nonviolence mentor, Arthur Harvey. He reported Rennie Cushing saying after the emergency coordinating committee decision to call of the occupation,”We just didn’t have the strength.” The 78 CD, with 5000 people trained to come, could have been the largest CD in US history if it hadn’t been cancelled. Even though I wish it had not been cancelled, it might have been the right decision. This is because the state threatened violence, not to mention legal and financial threats against landowners who had offered staging. The lesson for me was that Americans too often think nonviolence means no one gets hurt. It really means WE the activists don’t hurt anyone. Arthur used to say to me that Gandhi felt that the power on nonviolence had something to do with actually MAKING a personal sacrifice. This is distinguished from just RISKING making a sacrifice. I am still almost completely isolated among advocates of nonviolence in this country on this point. There are, of course, religiously based nonviolence practioners in this country who I often feel unworthy to associate with. They go to jail for much longer than the 4 months I did from 2/26/82 to 6/26/82 over Seabrook. They do their actions as a form of prayer to God and rarely speak of the power dimension. Most secular practitioners of nonviolence think the power is in the media attention to the number of arrests. While American activists thankfully eschew many pitfalls of our superficial American culture, we as a whole remain superficial on this crucial point.
The PPRF destroyed the organization internally, but the ADAF destroyed the willingness of the public to associate with public protest against the nuke. In a way this was surprising, because the anti-nuke local ‘brookers’ (who voted against the nuke I think 9 different ways) most common solution to the problem was,”I’ll donate $100, if 9 others will donate $100 and we’ll hire someone to go blow it up.” They would also regularly say,” Why do you have to tell them when you’re going to come?” My response was always,” How many people would it take to overrun the nuke?” Various thousands would be suggested. Then I would ask,” What is the chance that none of those thousands would be police?” The answer, of course, is an infinitesimal chance. This same misunderstanding of secrecy was an issue I was completely isolated from CDAS on. To paraphrase Gene Sharp’s opposition to secrecy,” The mass of activists will be in the dark, but the state will know everything. The important thing is for activists to know that they are unafraid of what the state knows.” I remember thinking that the leadership of CDAS (who some in CDAS referred to as the “hard liners”) didn’t like it when new people showed up because they might disagree with the group’s finely tuned positions. Ultimately both factions were prone to flights of fancy. The 78 CD was supposed to be an occupation/restoration. CDAS fancied its goal of taking over the site. (Sue Bob’s 1980 AG was appropriately called “Fat Chance”) In their defense, the CDAS leadership who made such claims went back to the fence and was maced repeatedly. The inspiration had been the 26,000 occupiers in Whyl, Germany who held a proposed nuke site for months. The German court decision did have the effect of canceling the construction. They did so because the modern state of West Germany had been taken by surprise. That same state was fully prepared for 100,000 people at Brokdorf soon afterwards. There were barbed wire fences and a moat and modern tanks. The 900 defenders of the Seabrook nuke may have complained that the 1300 participants had almost overwhelmed them in 1980, but with the worst weapon being a grappling hook, I think the authorities could have had their way.
Gene Sharp, currently referred to as the Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare, was a very busy man, even in 1980. He was mainly a scholar and rarely spoke to activist groups. He visited Boston Clamshell at our Central Square office in Cambridge exactly a month before the action. When asked about bolt cutters he told the group that the goal should be to” pit their big evil technology against our vulnerable humanity instead of their big evil technology against our little evil technology.” Then someone asked about grappling hooks. He responded ”You don’t understand, grappling hooks can hurt people.” Ironically or not, during the action a NH National Guardsman was knock out cold when hit in the head with a grappling hook. My friend Brian Feigenbaum was charged but was not the one who threw it, and was correctly found not guilty. I wonder if the charges against him had anything to do with the name of his affinity group,” Felons for Safe Energy.”
When was living at Sadie Felch’s in Seabrook, the issue of legitimizing the construction of the nuke through Probabilistic Risk Analysis arose. The cost was a couple million dollars. The debate was whether the utility should do it or the State of NH should do it. There were committee hearings at the statehouse. I was the last person to speak. Everyone had left the room except the half dozen state reps on the committee. I said,” My name is David Slesinger, and I live a hundred yards from the north gate. Now I understand why you folks as elected officials are concerned about what people think. That’s your job. But I’d rather you be concerned about the truth.”
After I was released from 4 months at the Rockingham County House of Correction in Goffstown, NH in June of 1982, I returned to my room with Mrs. Sadie Felch 100 yards from the north gate. She notified me that the NH State Police had visited her while I was the guest of the state. She used that as an excuse to ask me to leave. She was kind enough to suggest that I check with a woman in her 90’s who had a house that had been a nursing home. The woman, whose name I forget, lived there with a mentally challenged former client in her 70’s. The reason I tell this story is because the house had been purchased by the nuclear plant’s owner, Public Service of NH.( affectionately known to anti-nukers as “pissco”) Not only that, but in order to get to my new residence I had to get out of my car and open a gate which held a sign which read, ”No trespassing by order of PSNH “ The 4 months I had just served, of course, had been for trespassing at PSNH(at a different location). Within a few days PSNH contacted me to tell me I was not welcome. I readily agreed that I didn’t want to live where I wasn’t wanted. They were nice enough send three people, including their attorney, to help carry my possessions out of the building.
The story about being clowns in the blockade is only one example of the guerilla theater I practiced extensively while fighting the nuke.
1) My affinity group, Chatauqua, did a mutants for nukes march through Boston on Halloween day 1978. It ended with me pretending to be WASH-700 and WASH-1400 study chair MIT Prof Norman Rasmussen. I went into his MIT office in Cambridge, and his staff was actually helpful to me as I got out of my mutant costume including a green jacket with a third arm. I took several minutes to prepare to step back outside into the hall as their boss. Almost as soon as I finished, the MIT campus cops showed up to ask us to leave. We readily agreed and did so. Here was one of our parodies:
We are mutants,
We are mutants,
So are you,
So are you.
Wanna start a new fad
Radiate your gonads
Pituitary,too
Pituitary, too.
2) We did a Reindeer Alliance action on Christmas Day 1978. Four of us dressed as Santa Claus and got arrested at the Pilgrim Nuke in Plymouth, Mass. The lesson is that if you get arrested on Christmas, they’ve got to cover it. There’s nothing else happening. One of the 3(pre-cable) Boston TV stations showed right as I was offering the station manager a huge lollipop with my comment, ”In honor of the fact that Boston Edison thinks their ratepayers are a bunch of suckers, I offer you this Christmas present” He refused. I then said, ”If went to cogeneration and reactivated Edgar Station, we’d have enough capacity to last til 1990 and we wouldn’t need Pilgrim II.” The next day a lawyer from the town of Weymouth, the home of Edgar Station, contacted associates of fellow clam Barry Feldman, who gave me the line to say in the first place. While on the way over to jail in the police car, the elderly officer said, ”You know I’m not in favor of nuclear power, but with you guys doing this, I might just be in favor of it.” I said,” I would hope you would judge the issue on its merits.” H e replied,” Thing is, most kids like cops; but if they see a cop arresting Santa Claus, they might not like cops any more. “ I thought of all my friends who would roar with laughter at hearing such a statement, but I was mainly impressed that a policeman would speak from his heart. I said, ”I’m sorry you have to be the one to have to be embarrassed, but we feel the issue is so important that we need to do this.” While at the jail the photographer remarked,” You guys are the most cooperative subjects I’ve ever had. If you ever decide to get arrested again, please come back to Plymouth.”
There was a matron called in to attend to my girlfriend Linda Kitch, one of the 4 arrestees. She was unhappy she had been called away from her family on Christmas Day. I said, “I’m sorry we’ve disrupted your Christmas, but we’re almost done, so I hope you can make the best of it.” I was surprised when she actually lightened up.
3) The next Reindeer Alliance action was at the Somerset Club, the oldest and most elite private social club in Boston at the occasion of their Christmas Party in 1979. This was the year of the second “oil crisis”. At least 5 of the members of the Somerset Club were on the boards of directors of major Boston corporations which profited from nuclear power and oil during the previous year. I was the lone Santa. We took a refrigerator box from the Cambridge Food Coop and cut it out to resemble a sleigh and spray painted it red. We made antlers out of coat hangers and the most amazing thing is that we arrived on time. 2 of the 3 TV stations were there. I knocked on the door, a policeman answered and said,” You can’t come in.” I said ,” I’ll bet you each one of these people makes more money in a day than you make in a year.” He said,” You’re probably right and you still can’t come in.” Harvey Halpern stood in the door yelling ”Dead Babies in South Africa.” A couple walked by and one of our group approached them saying,” I’ll bet for the price of that coat we could heat half of Roxbury.” The husband grabbed him by the collar and pushed him against the wall, but it went no further.
An employee of the club exited the other door. (This was beacon Street near Charles St. where there is no back door. The east door was the employee’s entrance) as they exited they gave the choke sign of their finger from one side of their throat to the other. A young woman entered the party with a full length fur coat exclaiming, ”It’s rented. It’s rented!.” I offered charcoal briquettes for the stockings of partygoers because they had been such bad boys and girls that year. One elderly woman entering asked the policeman standing near me ”Officer, can’t you do something about this?” He replied, Why no m’am, they’re not breaking the law.” He also had a smirk on his face. This is the first of two times in my life I’ve been able to achieve what I consider the pinnacle of guerilla theater, making the police smile.
4) When the NRC held hearings in downtown DC on evacuation planning for nukes, I wore a kangaroo(as in Kangaroo court) outfit under my clothes. I forget the year. After I took of the clothes I wore over the Kangaroo outfit and pulled the head out of a bag and put it on, I didn’t have the heart to interrupt even SenatorAl D’Amato(R-NY). He was taking a laudable position. The security came back and ejected me without hesitation. “I said,” I wasn’t even saying anything,”
5) The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (I Think) came to Durham, NH to hold a hearing on the firing up of the Seabrook nuke. The utility was at a table stage right and the ASLB was at a table stage left. Near the end of the hear I came down and stood between the 2 tables wearing a Howdy Doody mask, a judge’s black robe, and carrying a gavel. I did a very energetic and distracting dance without making a sound. The chair of the ASLG said to me. “ I respectfully request that you sit down.” I replied, I respectfully request that you not irradiate the Seacoast.” I’m told there was 2 minutes of my dancing on Boston TV the next day.
6) The last Clamshell protest at Seabrook was the occasion of a skit at the South Gate written by the incomparable Vermin Supreme. I played a company shill in a lab coat and hard hat. I had a line which went” Nuclear power ids so safe that I can stand at the edge of the station fence and get no more radiation than six chest x-rays to the head!” I kept cracking up at this line during rehearsal. Becky, vermin’s sweetie warned me,” If you screw this up, we won’t help you again.”
7) On the fifth anniversary of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, we did a Simpson’s theater piece at the Pilgrim Nuke in Plymouth, Mass. I had read the previous December that Sam Simon, the co-producer of the Simpsons had toured the San Onofre Nuclear Station near San Diego and had remarked that nuclear power wasn’t that bad. I vowed he wouldn’t get away with this remark. I wrote a 20 minute skit using the characters Bart, Lisa, Monte Burns and Sam Simon. I wore a rented “yellow boy” (BART) costume and a talented artist friend made Lisa and Monte masks of paper mache. Debbie Augustine had taped the first 2 years of the show. I reviewed the whole 2 years. At one point there’s an episode where Bart deals with “snow days”. My favorite line became,” Nuclear power’s not so bad. You could have snow days and…..Glow Days!”
Lisa, the mature child we know her to be, convinces nuclear plant owner Monty Burns(played by Billy Donovan) to become anti-nuke. We took advantage of a recent report that the workers at Pilgrim had patched up a leak with Saran Wrap…industrial strength Saran Wrap I’ll have you. Monty led the march onto the site with all trespassers carrying tubes of Saran Wrap high over their heads. The Old Colony Memorial, the local weekly covered it on the front page. Someone sent a copy out to Fox in California. They called and requested OCM’s pictures to put in their Simpson’s Illustrated Comic Book. OCM bargained for an interview with Simpson’s creator Matt Groening. They had to speak to 6 people, but finally got the interview. Thus, we were on the front page of the OCM 2 weeks in a row. The action was covered in the second edition of Simpson’s Illustrated.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health had promulgated radiation release standards that we considered to say the least, weak. I wore a Bart Simpson’ outfit and placed a set of chattering teeth on the table in front of the man chairing the hearing. I told him ”We want regulation with REAL TEETH.” The chairman actually smiled.
9) The NRC held some type of public hearing we were allowed to attend. I bought a half dozen laugh boxes which 6 of us separately carried into the audience. At one point we set them off at the same time.
10) I wore our Monty Burns mask to another Massachusetts hearing. I forget the angle I used.
11) The NRC had decided a certain hearing for Pilgrim was to be held at their region One offices in King of Prussia, Pa, near Philly. This, of course, could be seen as an attempt to discourage comments from locals. The next time they held a hearing in Plymouth, Mass, I rented a king costume and testified to the effect that I , as King of Prussia, had certain divine rights not subject to influence by pretenders who live close to the nuke.