Nonviolent Challenge to US and Soviet Nuclear Weapons
Despite – or perhaps because of – the presence of two major outposts of the nuclear weapons establishment[1], New Hampshire was not at the center of the rising movement for nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But that doesn’t mean the movement didn’t touch New Hampshire at all.
When the Navy built its fifth nuclear missile-carrying submarine, the USS Abraham Lincoln, at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, it drew the attention of the Committee for Nonviolent Action’s (CNVA) Polaris Action Project. When the ship was commissioned on March 11, 1961, Arthur Harvey and Ed Guerard paddled a canoe across the harbor and tried to board the sub as an act of protest. They were arrested, while 70 anti-nuclear protesters cheered them on amidst a far larger number of people cheering for the sub.
Among the protesters was Robert Kingsley, a UNH grad student, who came to his anti-nuclear sympathies while serving in the Strategic Air Command, the branch of the Air Force trained to drop The Bomb. After 10 years in the Air Force, including service during the Korean War, Kingsley had had enough.
From CNVA Kingsley learned about the Polaris protest, a walk from San Francisco to Moscow promoting unilateral nuclear disarmament, and plans to protest Operation Alert, a civil defense drill which would take place nationwide on April 28. The annual drills had drawn resistance starting in 1955, when Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy, leaders of the Catholic Worker movement, refused to take shelter during the federal government’s first such drill in Manhattan. The nuclear arms race was accelerating, and the Eisenhower administration was promoting fallout shelters to protect government officials and the general population in the event of nuclear war. The protesters maintained that the best course for survival would be to get rid of nuclear weapons, not create a false impression that nuclear war could be survived. Day, Hennacy, Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, and two dozen others were arrested. Operation Alert drills and corresponding demonstrations continued for several years.
By 1961, civil defense protests had spread, especially on college campuses in New York State, but also in Connecticut, New Jersey, and at Dartmouth College in Hanover. At UNH, where he was a grad student in the English Department, Kingsley issued a letter announcing that at the time of the nationwide alert, a group of students and local residents would “commence a non-violent and non-vocal walk up and down the main street of Durham.”
“When the alert sounds we will continue to walk,” Kingsley’s letter said. “We will refuse all orders to take shelter. If we should be arrested we will not resist the arresting officers. The purpose to the demonstration is to point up the inadequacy and insanity of our present nuclear defense policy. We invite others to participate in the protest.”
Knowing that arrests were likely and wanting officials to understand the protesters’ commitment to nonviolence, Kingsley met ahead of time with the local police chief, a judge, and the Associate Dean of Students.
Governor Wesley Powell took notice, too, calling for “complete and adequate compliance” with the civil defense drill. He instructed the state’s civil defense director to take down the names of demonstrators and anyone who encouraged them to disobey the order to take shelter, and sent in the State Police on the afternoon of the drill.
Hundreds joined the peaceful protest in downtown Durham and about twenty reporters showed up to watch. Kingsley and his wife Margo, pregnant and pushing a baby carriage, were at the front. Calling refusal to take shelter “a matter of conscience,” Kingsley submitted to arrest, as did seventeen others. Margo and the Kingsley’s two small children were left on the sidewalk with the reporters.
The eighteen arrestees were charged with violating RSA 107, the Civil Defense Act, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of $100. They were also placed on academic probation by university officials for the remainder of the term.
Three days later, Gov. Powell, an ex officio member of the university’s board of trustees, telegrammed Eldon Johnson, the UNH president, demanding that “the students who participated in the planned and open disobedience on Friday last should be promptly dismissed from the university.” The governor’s call for expulsion was reinforced by coverage in the Manchester Union Leader, which had long been on the watch for leftist activity on campus.
While Cold War tensions remained high, the excesses of the McCarthy era had faded in most of the country. But not in New Hampshire, where Dr. Willard Uphaus, the pacifist director of the World Fellowship Center in the White Mountains, had been sent to jail in late 1959 for refusing to turn over the Center’s guest list to Attorney General Louis Wyman’s inquiry into “subversive activities.” Wyman’s investigation had ended years before, but in the spring of 1961, legislators were debating a bill to establish a permanent “Division of Subversive Investigations” within the Department of Justice. And by chance, Uphaus and his wife had stopped by the home of UNH professor Gwynne Daggett on the eve of the protest. Kingsley and three other students were there for dinner.
Like Uphaus, Daggett had drawn the attention of Attorney General Wyman. Never accused of being a Communist, Daggett had been associated with the Progressive Party, had spoken at World Fellowship, and had even attended a meeting in Weare where Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the guest speaker. The governor wanted to know whether Daggett was really the protest instigator and who else was at the professor’s home for dinner. (Like Uphaus, Daggett had merited substantial coverage in Wyman’s 1955 report on Subversive Activities in New Hampshire.)
William O’Neill, an Assistant Attorney General, sent a letter asking university officials to order Daggett to divulge the names of any students who had been at the dinner. Later in the month, another Assistant AG, Richard Greenhalge, went to campus to interview President Johnson, as well as several protestors and Professor Daggett. His objective, in the words of Gov. Powell’s “formal request,” was to determine whether “the University students who violated the civil law at Durham on Friday, April 28, 1961, were counseled to do so by the University faculty.”
Kingsley said consistently that Daggett and Uphaus had counselled against civil disobedience during the by then infamous dinner. He also pointed out that by informing police ahead of time of his plans for a peaceful protest, it was evident that the dinner was not part of some Daggett-led or Uphaus-inspired conspiracy.
At trial, the 18 Durham protesters were fined $50 each, with $25 suspended. When UNH President Johnson decided against taking further action, Gov. Powell said the university was “pampering” the students. William Loeb, the Union Leader publisher, called the UNH leadership “moral cowards” who were coddling lawbreakers. Loeb gave a blaring front-page headline to the national leader of Veterans for Foreign Wars, who called for professors who advocate civil disobedience to be fired and said, “so-called pacifists are a greater threat than communists.” Berlin’s state senator called for high school students to take a class on the dangers of communism, with a required essay on “American freedom versus communist enslavement.” And Ralph Desmarais, a Portsmouth high school teacher who had attended the civil defense protest but had not been arrested, was forced out of his job.
Prior to the trial, Kingsley announced he had applied to join CNVA’s walk from San Francisco to Moscow, which had left San Francisco the previous December 1 and by May had reached the east coast. The march was inspired by interactions between CNVA members and Polaris submarine workers, who dismissively told them, “Go tell it to the Russians.” CNVA, which had already been calling on the United States to disarm, decided that was a good idea. They would bring their call for unilateral nuclear disarmament all the way to the Kremlin.
Following a May 28 demonstration at the United Nations, the CNVA walkers flew to London, where Kingsley joined them. The walkers planned to cross the English Channel to Le Havre, France, and from there walk through France, Germany, and Poland on their way to Moscow. But the French government, which was at war in Algeria, wanted nothing to do with a group of pacifists and tried to prevent them from landing. Kingsley and four others jumped into the water to swim ashore. The other four were arrested, but Kingsley somehow eluded the police, found a welcome with local peace activists, and traveled to Paris in hopes of convincing Charles De Gaulle to let the peace marchers proceed through the country. When that mission failed, Kingsley returned to England and rejoined the march, which successfully crossed the Channel to Belgium.
The walk proceeded through Belgium, West and East Germany, and Poland, reaching Red Square on October 3. There, they passed out leaflets, talked to reporters (gaining front page coverage in the NY Times), and held a two-hour vigil, thought to be the first such demonstration to be allowed there.
Robert Kingsley was not there at the end, having returned to New Hampshire from Belgium. But among the walkers was David Rich, a native of Center Tuftonboro, New Hampshire and graduate of Plymouth State College Rich had walked every step of the way from San Francisco to Poland, where he was forced to take a break due to illness and fatigue. But he soon recovered, rejoined the walk, and was at the head of the march when the walkers reached Moscow.
Like many acts of conscience, the civil defense protests and the San Francisco to Moscow Walk can appear quixotic. But it’s worth noting that the Defense Department stopped holding Operation Alert drills after 1961. And two years after pacifists walked across two continents urging political leaders to disarm, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty halting atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. The era of arms control had begun.
Sources for this article include interviews with participants in the 1961 civil defense protest; articles in The New Hampshire, Fosters Daily Democrat, and the Manchester Union Leader; CNVA newsletters re-published by the Voluntown Peace Trust; and CNVA archives at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
Another version of this story, with more details on the Durham protest, can be found here.
[1] Pease Air Force Base and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.