Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
of Kennedy for failing to move faster toward banning atmospheric testing and indeed all nuclear weapons.
The front page of the Times’s “Metro” section the next day was emblazoned with a photo of the 2,000 women demonstrators—but the accompanying article was mainly a soapbox for Mayor Yorty to fulminate against Communist deceptions: “Let us not be duped by Communist-inspired groups who try to make us feel a sense of guilt and shame just because we insist on the nation’s interest.” Chief Parker also criticized the marchers: “There undoubtedly were many fine people duped into thinking they were doing something constructive, but this type of revolution against constitutional authority serves the Soviets well.”7
But who were these revolutionaries? That“Who Are We?” leaflet, signed by twenty women, said: “We are just ordinary people—teachers, writers, social workers, artists, secretaries, executives, saleswomen. Most of us are also wives and mothers.” WSP, moreover, had “no board, no officers, no real committees.” They were inspired, they explained, by the heroic civil rights activists in the South: “The sit-in strikers have reminded us, as the suffragettes did long ago, of the tremendous power for good in each single person. We hope you will add your individual strength to ours.” The organizers added that “most of us belong to half a dozen of the usual organizations: the PTA, Hadassah or the church action committee, or SANE, or the United Nations Association, or the WIL.”8
SANE and the WIL—those were clues. SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, was the first mass liberal organization opposed to the arms race and working for an international ban on nuclear testing. Founded in 1957, by 1960 it boasted more than one hundred chapters, including one in Hollywood (led by Steve Allen and Robert Ryan), and counted among its national spokespeople Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther of United Auto Workers, and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. However, after the group was red-baited by members of Congress later that year, most of the leadership capitulated to the Cold War ideology they had been founded to fight. The group never really recovered. And there was one more thing: SANE was now run by men. The lessons of SANE were not lost on the women who left its ranks—not least the importance of noncompliance with the anti-communist requirements of mainstream American politics.
In reality, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WIL), founded by Jane Addams in 1915 to protest the First World War, was hardly one of “the usual organizations.” Indeed, it had opposed US participation in the Second World War, and it was one of the few organizations on the left to have protested the internment of Japanese-Americans. But, despite its female leadership and principled politics, the WIL also seemed part of an older pacifist tradition that was dwindling in significance. In her history of WSP, Amy Swerdlow, who was also an early member, explains that women left the WIL to join WSP because the new organization gave them “the space to initiate and engage in spontaneous direct actions … without interference from a national office.” And, she writes, “we saw ourselves as new, bold, and potentially successful. We believed we would accomplish what the WIL women had failed to do.” WSP appealed to WIL and SANE veterans for many reasons: it was “simple, pragmatic, nonideological, moralistic and emotional.”9 Moreover, she explains, the WSP expressed a deep moral outrage about the Cold War, which it combined with a playful rejection of male leaders’ claims to wisdom and knowledge. It was serious about doing politics in Washington, while also genuinely internationalist.
At that first demonstration in downtown L.A., the marchers were responding to a call from an anonymous small group of women in Washington, DC, led by children’s book illustrator Dagmar Wilson—herself a wife and mother. She had never been an activist, but she “had long been worried about nuclear fallout” and its effect on children’s health.10
If the Los Angeles chapter was a leader in recruitment and activism, it owed much to its remarkable and talented organizer, Mary Clarke. The FBI called her “the guiding force behind the Southern California WSP group,” and they were right about that.11 By the mid Sixties she had traveled to Hanoi, Moscow, Beijing, and Havana as a WSP leader. According to her younger sister, June Solnit Sale, she had not been a political organizer prior to WSP, but was a wife and mother in 1961, just like the leaflet said, with two small children. But “it is not accidental that Mary was destined to be a peace activist,” Sale said. “It comes from our mother and father.” They were poor Jews in the LA ghetto of Boyle Heights; when Mary went to kindergarten, she spoke Yiddish but no English. But their father prospered, moving the family to Sierra Madre, next to Pasadena. “Our father was always active,” Sale recalled. “He was always very pro-union. In the mid-thirties I remember going to him with meetings of the Joint Anti Fascist Refugee Committee. He voted for Socialists. Mary didn’t go, but it was always there. It was in her bones.”12
Vigils and Picket Lines
The stunning debut of L.A. WSP in November 1961 was followed by its steady expansion throughout Southern California in winter and spring 1962. This was recorded in the group’s news bulletin—La Wisp, four mimeographed legal-size pages—edited by Mary Clarke, who also typed and mailed it. That first issue included reports from all over the region: the South Bay chapter was holding a fund-raiser with Black folksinger Odetta; San Fernando Valley had organized a symposium on disarmament at Valley State; Santa Monica was running a “post card a day” campaign to President Kennedy; in the San Gabriel Valley, members were staffing “peace tables” in Monterey Park with literature on the futility of fallout shelters; Whittier had a bake sale; Santa Barbara had opened a Peace Information Center and was planning a demonstration “to coincide with those scheduled in New York and London”; and in San Diego, sixty-five people from WSP had demonstrated downtown for two hours—of which they reported, “public response cool, but interested.”13
The first newsletter also reported that the LA group had sent fourteen women to the state capitol in Sacramento, where they had joined 250 other WSP members from Northern California to protest the state budget allocation for fallout shelters. Plans were underway for a Mother’s Day demonstration with the slogan “Give Me the Gift of Peace.” And the organization was running a “Peace Education Lecture Series,” with weekly sessions: topics included “Communism, Capitalism, Socialism” with economist Stanley Sheinbaum, “Economics of Peace and War,” and “Bias in Mass Media.”14 Clearly the WSP was doing its homework—far beyond what the public expected of “wives and mothers.”
What followed the dramatic debut of WSP in L.A. was a long series of vivid public actions, many of which received coverage in the LA Times. January 1962: “Women Sail Balloons for ‘Peace Race’”—700 women released 4,000 balloons in Hancock Park, each carrying a call to the superpowers to end the arms race. March 1962: “700 Women Stage A-Test Protest”—a silent march from MacArthur Park to the Atomic Energy Commission offices on Wilshire near Vermont Avenue.15 April 1962: the day after Kennedy ordered the resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, L.A. WSP conducted an all-day vigil at the Federal Building in downtown L.A., part of the organization’s nationwide “Milk Strike,” “to guard our children against the ingestion of thyroid-cancer-causing Iodine 131 released by nuclear explosions.” The “strike” was to terminate after the eighth day, “when the half-life of Iodine 131 is spent.”16
Then came July 1962: “Women in Bomb Protest at Las Vegas.” L.A. WSP had sent a bus full of demonstrators to picket the Nevada Test Site. They started, the newsletter reported, at “two of the flossiest, busiest blocks” of casinos in Las Vegas, where they pushed empty baby carriages with signs saying “Empty because of Stillbirth” and “Empty because of Cancer.” The response, according to the Times, was “rather negative,” but “three local women joined in the march.” The next morning they picketed at the gate of the test site for two hours, leafleting people on their way to work—many of whom accepted the leaflet.17 The group then held a vigil at the Nevada Test Site—a national WSP mobilization coordinated by Mary Clarke.
Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the LA schools distributed pamphlets for parents about “Procedures to be Followed in Event of Attack,” WSP quickly mobilized 300 women and children for a march and silent vigil in Pershing Square downtown, carrying signs that read “Peace not