Canon John Collins and philosopher Bertrand Russell marched in the lead, catching the limelight. But the woman with the bullhorn, cigarette dangling from her lips, was the real brains of the Ban the Bomb movement.

Peggy Duff “would have qualified for the general’s rank in any army,” one founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said. From 1959 to 1963, she organized the largest protests Great Britain had ever seen: Every Easter weekend, 40,000 to 150,000 marched four days from the UK’s nuclear bomb making facility in Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. She twisted arms, mobilized unions, and lined up churches and schools to provide food and lodging along the 52-mile route.

It was not Duff’s first protest movement nor her last. Over the course of her career, she rounded up aid for civilian casualties of World War II, worked to eliminate capital punishment in Britain, led an international peace movement, protested the Vietnam War, and supported the Palestinian claim to an independent homeland. Uphill battles all.

And though today the Atomic Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it has ever been, activists still march on the path she blazed. Nothing symbolizes her impact more than the CND logo: Fashioned after the semaphores for the letters N and D, it remains today the international symbol of peace.

Duff’s husband, a fellow journalist, was killed while covering World War II. She showed compassion for all victims of that war, including those in vanquished Germany. She joined Save Europe Now, which sent food and clothing to starving civilians in Germany and Austria and advocated for the repatriation of POWs. A widow raising three young children, “Campaigning seemed as good a way as any other of earning a living, and better than most,” she later said.

Even though the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was abhorrent to many, the United Kingdom leadership felt compelled to develop its own nuclear bombs. The British public was aroused in 1957 as the UK tested its weapons over Christmas Island, a coral atoll in the Pacific.

During some of the tests, islanders were taken out to sea to watch a Disney film. In others, they were huddled under a tarp. “We were just told to assemble, sit down and to put our fists in our eyes,” one woman told a researcher from Manchester Metropolitan University. “The officers were not with us, they had protective clothing and bunkers elsewhere.”

Author J.B. Priestley, whose radio broadcasts had rallied Brits during World War II, struck a chord when he wrote in the New Statesman, “Alone we defied Hitler; and alone we can defy this nuclear madness.” Catching the wave, Canon Collins, an activist Anglican priest, and Russell, a pacifist philosopher, formed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to “renounce unconditionally the use or production of nuclear weapons.” They named Duff their Organizing Secretary.

“Organizers, since they are usually women or very young men, are expected, I suppose, to have husbands and parents to supplement their income,” anti-nuclear activist Mary Kaldor later wrote. “Peggy was a widow and was always very hard up. She lived very modestly in a tiny two-room flat in Albert Street. … The plastic bag which she used to carry her things when traveling is legendary.”

While she was busy organizing the Aldermaston Marches, Collins and Russell were busy quarreling over tactics. Russell argued for more visible, confrontational civil disobedience, and eventually broke from CND to form the Committee of 100. Thousands were arrested in sit-ins at military bases and throughout London. The Ban the Bomb movement gained traction. The Labour Party took a unilateral disarmament stand in 1960.

Ironically, the Cuban Missile Crisis took the wind out of the movement’s sails. The crisis was defused without nuclear war, and the public seemed to conclude that the arms race could be safely managed. A Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and growing concern over the Vietnam War also bled support.

Duff joined the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace and traveled the world, speaking for unification of Vietnam, humane treatment of prisoners of war, and American concessions at the Paris Peace Talks.

In 1978, she compiled and contributed to essays proposing peaceful solutions to the Middle East conflict. In her “No More Blank Cheques” essay, she argued that the West’s unquestioning military support of Israel will “encourage and feed Israel intransigence, (and) is a major obstacle to a reasonable and durable settlement.”

A plan to position nuclear missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviets reawakened the anti-nuclear movement in the ’80s. In the year before she died of breast cancer in 1981, she recruited 10,000 to the revived CND. She did not live to see some of the biggest protests the movement had ever seen: 250,000 in London and 3 million across Europe.

The cruise missiles were deployed anyway. “Peace through strength,” Ronald Reagan declared, and Europe fell in line.

Duff titled her book recounting her campaigns Left, Left, Left. While she saw initial successes, they always were followed by wrong turns to the right, right, right. Despite that, she saw long-term gains. “Many of the young people who inspired and organized the Vietnam campaigns in the mid-60s moved from a passionate opposition to the war to an examination of the societies which created and condoned the war.”

In a back-cover endorsement of her book, Noam Chomsky noted that her accomplishments “would easily merit the Nobel Peace Prize.”

But they didn’t.

Today, the Atomic Doomsday Clock shows 85 seconds to midnight. Nine countries have nuclear bombs and about 10,000 warheads lurk around the world. “Leaders of the United States, Russia, and China greatly vary in their autocratic leanings, but they all have approaches to international relations that favor grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation,” declared the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the keepers of the clock. “The rise of autocracies is not in itself an existential threat, but an us-versus-them, zero-sum approach increases the risk of global catastrophe.”

This year Duff’s organization, the CND, condemned the U.S. war on Iran. “Whilst Iran negotiated in good faith over its nuclear programme, the nuclear armed states of Israel and the US sabotaged these diplomatic efforts. It is US and Israel that are the nuclear threats.”

“I think we made people, and that includes statesmen, aware of the horror of nuclear war,” Duff said in 1971. “Nuclear weapons have not been used again since 1945, and there has not been a nuclear war so far.”

Fifty-five years on, Duff’s assessment seems more ominous than optimistic.

Sources

A U.S. nuclear bomb test on Amchitka Island, Alaska, in 1971 is a pivotal event in my historical fiction novel, Mission: Butterfly. My research led me to the Ban the Bomb movement and the little-known force behind that movement, Peggy Duff. Because Duff worked mostly behind the scenes, I had to search scattered sources, including The Radical Tea Towel, The Guardian, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament website, Wikipedia, and Newspapers.com.

The Bertrand Russell Foundation’s website provided historical context for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, including Duff’s introduction to the book War or Peace in the Middle East?

The UK’s above-ground blasts over Christmas Island are starkly described by islanders in an article by Becky Alexis-Martin, a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, in The Conversation.

As a teen, I proudly decorated my guitar case with a peace sign. In researching this essay, I discovered on Wikipedia its origin: English artist Gerald Holtom, who designed it for the Aldermaston Marches.

Hundreds of caribou bounded across the marshy valley bottom, perhaps spooked by a wolf pack. The treeless tundra was a mottled green canvas splashed with dabs of vivid purples and blues. Spring flowers had awakened, and the migrating herd stopped their stampede to graze on the new growth along the glacial waters of the Ogotoruk. The hunters had no difficulty bagging several.

For centuries, Howard Rock’s Inupiat people came here after the long winter, hankering for something other than whale meat. He looked forward to tonight’s feast, though he carried not a rifle, but a sketchbook.

He had not walked the tundra in decades. Not since being sent away to boarding school, an extra mouth to feed. The bookish boy went on to travel the world with the Army, go to college, marry and divorce a white woman, and make a living carving ivory for the Seattle tourist trade. Life in the Lower 48 filled his bank account, but drained his soul. He had returned to Point Hope to regain his muse, but the village still didn’t know what to make of him.

“Maybe so much of your brain was devoted to painting there wasn’t room for the usual Eskimo instincts,” his brother, Allen, had said while admiring a dynamic whale hunt scene Howard had painted. He invited Howard on the hunt.

Where Ogotoruk Creek flowed into the Arctic Ocean, the hunting party passed by rows of military huts awaiting the summer crew from the Atomic Energy Commission. The villagers had heard disturbing rumors about what was going on there.

--

In 1852, the U.S. Senate secretly rejected 18 treaties with 134 Indigenous California tribes. It hid the terms of the agreements, giving free rein to land grabbers. It was more than 100 years before the Pit River Nation proved that 3.5 million acres had been stolen. The government offered 47 cents an acre; the Pit Rivers said no thanks. It wasn’t about the money.

The Inupiat people did not need to mark their territory. They ranged as far as they needed. But Rock’s father put in a claim with the U.S. government for the Ogotoruk Valley when miners and real estate men started staking claims in the ‘50s. He thought it better safe than sorry.

But the Bureau of Land Management did not recognize hunting and fishing as proof of occupancy. Farms hadn’t been staked out. Nothing had been built there. So it considered the valley available when H-bomb inventor Edward Teller went looking for a place to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Teller wanted badly to prove peaceful uses for his bombs. Blasting out a deep-water port was one idea. No one wanted or needed one in Northwest Alaska, but it had “the fewest people and the most reasonable people,” Teller told the media in Juneau in 1959. He neglected to clue in the “reasonable people” in Point Hope.

Now, two years later, an Atomic Energy Commission team was digging holes and taking readings at the mouth of the Ogotoruk. The village learned the truth from a skeptical sociologist from the University of Alaska: Teller’s Project Chariot would bury a bomb just 30 miles from their village. It would be 14 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Radiation warnings were ignored. State government was lulled by promises of money and jobs.

Now Point Hope discovered Rock’s worth. Families had sent their kids to boarding school out of desperation, but they returned wise to the ways of whites. Rock wrote a letter opposing Project Chariot to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. When an emissary was sent to Barrow, he found village chiefs who had savvy, English-speaking advisers.

The fledgling confederation of tribes helped kill Project Chariot. Power in unity was awakened. The Alaska Federation of Natives was formed, and Rock was tasked with starting a newspaper to be its herald.

By October 1962, Rock reluctantly stowed his paintbrushes and moved to Fairbanks to start a biweekly newspaper. Mail planes dropped the Tundra Times in remote villages, where boarding school graduates translated for their parents. Alaska Natives coalesced around common problems and developed joint solutions.

Just in time to meet the greatest threat to their way of life: The discovery in 1968 of oil on Alaska’s North Slope.

--

Congress in 1877 reneged on a treaty signed only nine years earlier and took the Black Hills from the Lakota (Sioux) Nation. More than 100 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the maneuver the most “ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing” in American history. The government offered $106 million; the Lakota rejected it. It wasn’t about the money.

The first Congress of the United States promised that Indigenous lands “shall never be taken from them without their consent.” In 1884, Congress said whatever claims Natives had on land in Alaska would not be “disturbed,” but left final settlement of claims to a future Congress. Final determination of the Natives’ land claims was punted again when Congress accepted Alaska as the 49^th state in 1958.

The question could no longer be avoided when ARCO and Humble Oil proposed drilling in the far north in the midst of a national “energy shortage.” Oilmen were tossing money around. The state was itching to claim resource-rich land. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall chose the Tundra Times’ annual fundraising banquet in 1968 to announce a freeze on any further land claims until Congress settled Native rights.

It all came to a head in the Congressional session of 1971. Rock wrote in a New Year’s editorial titled “Air of Expectancy” that Natives “above all else, want a good settlement knowing they are about to give up forever great expanses of land they have lived on through the ages in the past. There is no rejoicing in the impending event.”

The Alaska Federation of Natives entered the stuffy Washington hearing rooms speaking the language of legacy and place: thousands of years in harmony with boundless nature. They were forced to speak the language of capitalism: boundary lines and dollar signs.

It was only about the money. The Alaska Natives were forced to take the wrong turn.

Native negotiators were not excited about the deal, but said it was the best they could get. AFN President Don Wright sounded like a CEO as he tried to justify it to his people: “Each individual will be a stockholder in a corporation on the village level.”

Some in Congress thought the Natives made out like bandits. But at least the nagging issue had been settled once and for all. As Section 4(b) of the Act states: “All aboriginal titles, if any, and claims of aboriginal title in Alaska based on use and occupancy... are hereby extinguished.”

--

In 1737, the William Penn family announced that a Lanape (Delaware) chief had long ago given them land that extended “as far as a man could walk in a day and a half.” They enlisted the colony’s three fastest runners and sent them out on a cleared trail, with aid stations along the route. One covered 70 miles in the allotted time, and the Lanape were forced to give up 1.2 million acres.

The devil had a heyday with the details in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Details such as which 40 million acres Natives could choose, how they could spend the $1 billion, and who counted as a Native.

The North Slope Natives weren’t allowed to claim the land around their villages. The oil companies got that. Weeks after President Nixon signed the deal, 5 million acres along the path of the proposed pipeline were put off-limits to Native claims.

Natives were given short timelines to fill out paperwork proving their heritage and to select their 40 million acres. Their villages had to form “corporations,” and those villages were organized into 12 “regional corporations.”

“Natives who were housewives, fishermen, state and federal employees, construction workers, and other laymen that lacked business experience came forward to organize and set up our corporation,” wrote Robert Rude, who was involved in launching the Cook Inlet regional corporation. They had to figure out who was entitled to shares in the corporation, help set up village-level investment corporations, claim land, and choose investments in banks, businesses, and real estate. “A flood of carpetbaggers appeared on the Alaska scene to ‘help Natives invest their ANCSA moneys.’”

Rock’s editorials during the rocky implementation were restrained. “I’ve been able to get things pretty well done by being truthful and firm, rather than shouting,” he told the Anchorage Daily News.

But he published a series of letters that carried a biting critique of the ANCSA.

Fred Bigjim, an Alaskan Native who was a graduate student at Harvard, assumed the persona of an old Eskimo living in a remote village in his letters. “I have to learn about corporations out of self-defense, not because I am necessarily interested in them,” he wrote.

He wondered what happened to the Natives who didn’t fill out the enrollment forms and draw out their family trees: “Did they become Lost Natives?”

So much land was set aside to protect endangered species, “maybe we Natives should apply to the Federal Government for protection as an ‘endangered species.’”

Why did the ANCSA prohibit Natives from using their money to influence politics when the oil industry had hundreds of lobbyists? “Were they so afraid that we Natives might learn how to use their system for ourselves?”

“The irony of this whole thing, Howard, is that in the past we were able to provide for ourselves. But our land has been taken, the fish and game destroyed, our children stolen from us, and our culture put on display for the tourists and museum. (The ANCSA) will not bring true self-determination, it is really one more step in the plan for termination of the Native way of life in Alaska.”

--

Rock never picked up a paintbrush again, too busy keeping the Tundra Times afloat and on mission. He died of cancer in 1976, and would not live to see his people squabble among themselves over boundary lines, profit-and-loss statements, expense accounts, insider trading, and land swaps.

“By the 1980’s, many Natives were not satisfied with ANCSA, and they were not satisfied with their corporations,” Rude wrote. “Some of the Native corporations were close to bankruptcy, there were few dividends being paid and the stockholders did not get the land they expected.” The regional corporation he helped found had traded more than half its land away for federal properties outside Alaska.

“ANCSA did not provide wealth, land, or improvement in the lifestyles of Alaska Natives,” Rude concludes. “It instead divided Alaska Natives, placed their lands and cultures in jeopardy, and only brought worthwhile wealth and benefit to corporate managers, directors, employees, consultants and lawyers…. ANCSA was an Act of Deception designed to assimilate Alaska Natives into the mainstream of American society.”

Bigjim, writing in 1973, made this conclusion: “It all makes me wonder if we shouldn’t at least begin to listen to those persons who have been trying to warn us Natives about the great danger—‘the dehumanizing effects’--of trying to follow the White man’s ways…”

“Maybe the description of the White man’s culture as a ‘machine civilization’ is right after all. And we should think about that. Is it a way of life in which the machine rules and men have to adjust and conform to its needs and demands? Do we really want that?”

--

Sources

My novel, Mission: Butterfly, imagines a different settlement of Alaska Native land claims, one that honors their expertise in land management. The research led me to Howard Rock. I could relate to a journalist trying to make a difference. The biography written by Lael Morgan, Art and Eskimo Power, portrays an extraordinary man living through pivotal times in Alaska Native history.

Robert Rude’s ANCSA: Powerbrokers goes into the seamy process and politics of the deal’s implementation.

I found some issues of Tundra Times at Newspapers.com. Rock tapped all sorts of financial sources to keep it afloat and was able to expand it to a weekly schedule. It outlived him by 21 years, closing in 1997.

NOTE: I boycott Amazon and all things Bezos. Book links will take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of your purchase is shared with independent bookstores.

Originally published at SteveKrimanAuthor.com

https://books.stevekrizmanauthor.com/pzl8jtsg5h

“Captain Jones” waved the newspaper clipping and glared into the face of the new man on the chain gang. “You’re the one who thinks he’s smart. Ain’t got no respect. Tries to be uppity. Well, we’ll learn you. You’ll learn that you got to respect us down here. You ain’t in Yankeeland now.” Then he thrust a pick into the Black man’s hands and punched the prisoner next to him.

For 22 days in 1949, Bayard Rustin shoveled ditches and patched North Carolina’s roads, shackled to other prisoners 10 hours a day, six days a week. He saw men hung by their wrists for days, left in holes with nothing but crackers and water.

How would a Quaker trained in Gandhian nonviolence respond?

He would talk to Captain Jones about how to “improve relations on the job.”

“He’ll kick you square in the ass,” one inmate warned. The gang held their breath as Rustin asked for a moment of the Captain’s time.

“I suggested that perhaps I was really the one who deserved to be beaten in the face, if anyone did,” Rustin later wrote. “I said that I was willing to work as hard as I could and that if I failed again at my work I hoped he would speak to me about it and I would try to improve.”

The Captain stared at Rustin a few moments, then turned to a guard and muttered, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Turning back to the anxious men, he shouted: “Talk ain’t gonna git that dirt on the truck. Fill her up.”

But as the work day ended, the Captain called the chain gang together. “This Yankee boy ain’t so bad. They just ruined him up there ‘cause they don’t know how to train you-all. But I think he’ll be all right and if you all will help him I think we can learn him.”

Rustin did learn. He learned that the first thing prison does is strip men of their self-respect. They were shaved bald and given caps to protect them from the sun. Then told to tip the caps when addressing the guards. Rustin modeled nonviolent resistance by refusing to wear a cap rather than debase himself. When the men followed his lead, the Captain could only sputter.

Rustin learned that when you treat men like animals, they act like animals. They turn on each other, steal from each other. When stamps and writing paper were stolen from his lockbox, he set it out, opened, and said the food and supplies he received from supporters on the outside were available to those who needed them most. Soon, others contributed treats, cigarettes, and other surplus items to the “community kit.” Theft declined overall.

In a farewell letter to the Captain, Rustin wrote: “Never having done similar work before, I am afraid I was not very apt, so all the more I want to thank you for all the help you gave me on the job. I feel that I learned a great deal.”

“Well, we can all learn something,” the Captain said in parting.

In what universe do you respond to abuse with empathy, to thievery with generosity, to bigotry with equanimity?

In Bayard Rustin’s universe, which he occupied with Henry David Thoreau, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. Raised a Quaker by his grandmother, Julia Rustin, a member of the NAACP, his home in West Chester, Pennsylvania, was visited by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois. As a young adult, he went down the road to the Quaker retreat center, Pendle Hill, for training in building community through consensus.

Young Rustin went to New York to find his people. He threw in with the Communist Party when it was fighting racism, but left it when it began to advocate for American involvement in World War II. He joined labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to demand integration of federal jobs, but left him when he compromised with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He cofounded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). But they drew the ire of Thurgood Marshall, then legal director of the NAACP, when they sent whites and Blacks on buses in the South in what they called the Journey of Reconciliation. The stunt “would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved,” Marshall said.

There was no slaughter, but Rustin and another Black protester got 30 days on a chain gang. His report on his experience resulted in suspension of the worst abuses at Roxboro Prison, and chain gangs ultimately were eliminated in North Carolina.

In Rustin’s universe, a just society emerges through dialogue, requiring engagement in politics and reform of institutions. He would find it difficult to get the civil rights movement on board.

Shortly before his assassination, Mahatma Gandhi invited Rustin to a conference in India on nonviolent direct action. The conference went on as planned in 1949. “He sang spirituals that won everybody’s heart,” one Indian participant recalled. “The Martin Luther King phenomenon had not yet started, but we got the very profound impression that Bayard was doing Gandhi’s work in North America.”

He was doing it so well that A.J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation sent him to Ghana and Nigeria to help build nonviolent coalitions among the independence movements there. He was doing it so well that the Quakers enlisted him to help write a manifesto called “Speak Truth to Power,” which concluded that “military power in today’s world is incompatible with freedom, incapable of providing security, and ineffective in dealing with evil.” He was doing it so well that Randolph sent him to help a preacher in Montgomery, Alabama, lead a boycott of the city’s bus company.

When Rustin arrived at the home of Martin Luther King in 1956, he found it surrounded by armed guards. He had to remove a gun from a chair before sitting down. Ever since Rosa Parks had refused to give up a seat on the bus a few months before, Montgomery was a powder keg.

“I think it’s fair to say that Dr. King’s view of nonviolent tactics was almost nonexistent,” Rustin later said. He taught King the Gandhian ideal of Satyagraha, “love force,” and convinced him that there was no room for guns in a movement based on nonviolence.

But Rustin had baggage. King was willing to overlook it in favor of Rustin’s savvy and his connection to financial backers in the North. But other organizers of the boycott could not. When a reporter threatened to expose Rustin’s arrest in California for homosexual acts, he was smuggled out of town in the trunk of a car.

Rustin’s dalliance with the Communist Party and his homosexuality dogged him throughout his career. But it’s a testament to his skill and to his effectiveness that civil rights leaders turned to him again and again.

The year-long Montgomery bus boycott came to an end when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation of the city buses unconstitutional. With a win under his belt, MLK faced the daunting task of replicating it across the South. He called Rustin. Together, they built a coalition of ministers who would “redeem the soul of America,” and do it under the motto: “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.”

They called it the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King asked him to lead the organization, but Rustin declined. He had his sights on broader, systemic issues, such as school desegregation and tenant protection. He advised from afar as the SCLC desegregated lunch counters, intercity buses, water fountains, and store dressing rooms.

Rustin came to see employment as key to equality. In that, he was in sync with Randolph. The old warhorse earned his stripes in 1925 by organizing the first major Black-led union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The two proposed an Emancipation March for Jobs in 1963, the 100^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The fractious civil rights organizations were invited to participate. And they had issues, among them Rustin’s sexuality.

Rustin’s plan was too confrontational, the civil rights leaders said. It wasn’t black enough, with its call for “emancipation of all labor, regardless of color, race, or creed.” And for some, his past dalliance with Communism and his homosexuality were embarrassing.

J. Edgar Hoover had them all under surveillance, and had already leaked rumors of King’s heterosexual affairs. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond called Rustin a “Communist, draft dodger, and homosexual,” and had his arrest for lewd behavior read into the record.

Mass Congressional lobbying and sit-ins were cut from the plan. Bowing to King’s assertion that civil rights were more important than unemployment, the event’s name was changed to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

But Randolph refused to remove Rustin as the event organizer. “Twenty-two arrests in the fight for civil rights attests, in my mind, to Mr. Rustin’s dedication to high human ideals,” he said. “There are those who contend that this incident…voids or overwhelms Mr. Rustin’s ongoing contribution to the struggle for human rights. I hold otherwise.”

The civil rights leaders agreed to let Randolph keep Rustin on as his “deputy.” John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said, “This was going to be a massively complex undertaking, and there was no one more able to pull it together than Bayard Rustin.”

Under Rustin’s leadership, a multi-racial crowd of 250,000 gathered peacefully at the Lincoln Memorial. Leaders of all the civil rights groups had a turn at the mic (no women were invited). None wanted to speak after MLK, so he was last, delivering his seminal “I Have a Dream” speech.

The march “made Americans feel for the first time that we were capable of being truly a nation, that we were capable of moving beyond division and bigotry,” Rustin said. He and Randolph made the cover of Life magazine, which proclaimed: “For all the dissension that has split Negro organizations, the march was an astonishingly well-executed product of leadership.”

An FBI wiretap caught King wondering whether Rustin could now be given a role at the SCLC, “inasmuch as he has now received good press publicity as a result of the March on Washington.”

But Rustin would not sign on with the SCLC or any other civil rights organization. They were trying to solve the wrong problem.

In a 1965 essay on the future of the civil rights movement, Rustin argued for a turn in strategy. Efforts to date made segregation illegal. But “In a highly industrialized twentieth-century civilization, we hit Jim Crow precisely where it was most anachronistic, dispensable, and vulnerable—in hotels, lunch counters, terminals, libraries, swimming pools, and the like.”

“The Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation.”

Those obstacles transcend race, he wrote in a later essay, leaving a civil rights leader with a choice: “If he defines the problem as primarily one of race, he will inevitably find himself the ally of the white capitalist against the white worker. But if... he defines the problem as one of poverty, he will be aligned with the white worker against management.”

He saw glimmers of the movement making the right turn. In Birmingham, Alabama, marches and retail boycotts forced business owners to sit down and negotiate “advances in employment, housing, school integration, police protection, and so forth.”

But Black civil rights warriors, bearing scars from billy clubs and police dogs, were reluctant to lay down arms in what they saw as a race war. James Farmer, who cofounded CORE with Rustin, wondered “how Bayard could go to the length he did in saying that the fight against race problems was now secondary to the fight against economic problems.”

Stokely Carmichael, now leader of SNCC, rejected the notion that whites and Blacks were in the same fight. “The white man is irrelevant to blacks, except as an oppressive force,” he said.

In 1967, MLK was showing signs of making the right turn. He began talking about an “Economic Bill of Rights” to encompass fair labor, housing, education, and health care. He saw the value in tapping into emerging activism among Latinos/Latinas and Indigenous peoples. He began to plan a Poor People’s Campaign, a multi-racial march on Washington in 1968.

First, though, he joined Rustin in Memphis, Tennessee, where sanitation workers were striking for higher pay and safer working conditions. On April 3, in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, King spoke of Black economic power and about fairness on the job and in banking and commerce. The next day, he was shot dead on a motel balcony.

The Poor People’s Campaign arrived in Washington six weeks later. Before King’s death, Rustin failed to convince him to keep opposition to the Vietnam War out of it. King saw the war as another example of Blacks paying the price for freedom without getting the benefits. Rustin said the economic message needed to stand on its own. The war divided the Democratic Party, and he worried about the consequences of Richard Nixon winning the presidential election that fall.

King’s grieving lieutenants welcomed the anti-war crowd under the event’s umbrella. They put Rustin in charge of the final day’s march to the Lincoln Memorial. But when Rustin did not include the war in his messaging, they forced him out. The Solidarity Day event went on without him.

While the mainstream movement headed down the wrong turn, Don Slaiman at the AFL-CIO understood the assignment. He believed Black-Jewish labor solidarity was the antidote to systemic inequality. As head of the union’s Civil Rights Department, he funded the A. Philip Randolph Institute to build the union’s representation of Black workers. Rustin was put in charge.

Organized labor was then as segregated as society. A spate of corruption charges clouded public perception of unions. But at their heart, “Unions organize workers on the basis of common economic interests, not by virtue of racial affinity,” he wrote in 1970. “Labor’s legislative program for full employment, housing, urban reconstruction, tax reform, improved health care, and expanded educational opportunities is designed specifically to aid both whites and blacks in the lower and lower-middle classes.”

The “Black Power” movement served only to heighten the separation of the races, to no purpose, he argued. Their demonstrations were performative and served “as outlets for radical energy but which in no way further the achievement of radical social goals.”

He called out Harvard students who protested the appointment of a civil rights attorney to teach a course on race and legal issues because he was white. “Civil rights is an issue of universal significance and, as such, should be important to all Americans,” he wrote. “Civil rights, moreover, is an area in which progress cannot be attained without the building of a strong and wide-ranging coalition of blacks and whites, Christians and Jews.”

Having spent most of his life sublimating his sexuality in service to the cause, Rustin brought gay rights into the cause. “The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people,” he told the Philadelphia chapter of Black and White Men Together in 1986. “We cannot fight for the rights of gays unless we are ready to fight for a new mood in the United States, unless we are ready to fight for a radicalization of this society.”

His contrarian opinions—in opposition to Black Studies programs and to reparations, for example—rankled so much that critics started to question his motives. The AFL-CIO signed his paychecks. He had been coopted by the Democratic Party elites, they said.

Ultimately, though, facts on the ground were on his side.

Writing on the 20^th anniversary of the March on Washington and MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, Rustin noted, “the economic status of black Americans is deteriorating.” What’s more, “there are ever-increasing numbers of white poor.”

Factors at play included a decline in unskilled jobs, globalization, the breakdown of family units, and the shrinking of government. All were systemic problems that Americans of all races had no choice but to address.

He called for a national “commitment to excellence in education, federal programs in vocational training, increased federal aid for higher education, and a national industrial policy in which government plays an active role in fueling the growth of expanding industries, easing the transition of workers displaced by the changing economy.”

Now 71, four years before his death, Rustin reminded us what collaboration could accomplish:

“Only such a coalition can help attain the goals that twenty years ago brought 250,000 of us to the edges of Washington’s reflecting pool on a scorching August Saturday. Only such a coalition can help us achieve our centuries-long dream of ‘Jobs and Freedom.’”

SOURCES

I discovered that Rustin was Quaker while reading Personality and Place: The Life and Times of Pendle Hill, by Douglas Gwyn. Pendle Hill, a Quaker learning community outside Philadelphia, has attracted and trained peace-loving leaders since 1930. I have attended Quaker meetings on occasion, so I was proud to include Rustin and a few other Quakers (including Richard Nixon) in my novel.

Most of Rustin’s quotes in this essay come from a posthumous compilation of his writings, Time on Two Crosses. The introduction by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise provides a comprehensive account of Rustin’s life and evolving philosophy.

Rustin’s report on the Roxboro Prison chain gang is a fascinating distillation of nonviolent direct action in situ.

As always, I credit Wikipedia for helping me find primary sources and Newspapers.com for serving up contemporary accounts of historical events.

NOTE: I boycott Amazon and all things Bezos, so links to books will take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of your purchase supports independent bookstores.

It’s pouring again, as it had been for days. But even in this gray light, the white marble steps to the Supreme Court building seem to glow.

“We want justice! We want justice!” Tillie Walker pauses, lets the crowd carry on, and raises her eyes toward Lady Justice, high atop the building pediment, flanked by marble men in armor and robes. Symbols of Order, Authority, and Justice. European. Not a headdress, ceremonial pipe, or talking stick among them.

She drops her gaze to the mud-caked cuffs of her jeans and the streaks of brown water puddling around her boots. It was a muddy mess back at Resurrection City, the Poor People’s Campaign shantytown clustered around the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King Jr. had asked her to rally Indigenous people to this cause, and she readily agreed. “The poor know no color,” she said.

The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been passed, but King felt it was not enough that Blacks could now sit at lunch counters and freely cast their votes. It was time for an Economic Bill of Rights that guaranteed no one in the richest nation on earth lived in poverty—Black, brown, red, or white. But he would not live to see this unprecedented alliance of races. He was felled by an assassin just weeks before caravans started rolling into D.C. For days now, it seemed the skies themselves wept for his loss.

They were building boardwalks at Resurrection City, shoveling muck to keep the plywood shanties dry. “Mayor” Jesse Jackson presided at a “City Hall.” Quakers staffed a dining hall and medical clinic. Capitol police stationed a lookout atop the Washington Monument to keep an eye on the demonstrators and their marches to the Department of Agriculture to demand fair distribution of food; to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to demand equal education and healthcare; and to the Department of Labor to demand living wages.

Today is “Indian Day,” and Tillie Walker mounts the steps along with 300 Indigenous and Latino/Latina protesters demanding justice from the highest court in the land.

Born in 1928, Walker grew up in a log house built by her father, who farmed the fertile bottomlands along the Missouri River in North Dakota. Stone circles dotted the land where their ancestors had built earthen lodges over the centuries, relocating to follow game or the dictates of the wild Missouri. When European settlers with odd notions about drawing lines in the Earth came, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes signed the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851, and were given reign over 12.5 million acres between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. Railroads, miners, and farmers kept pressing at their borders, so by the time Walker was born, the Fort Berthold Reservation had dwindled to 640,000 acres.

The settlers erected their fences and built their homes downstream of the reservation. Property lines meant nothing to the Missouri, though, and it occasionally flooded the settlers’ land. So they called in the Army Corps of Engineers to tame it. The Corps’ job, written in its charter, was to ensure “the fullest necessary use of resources by the present generation”—antithetical to the Indigenous culture of stewarding the land for seven generations.

By the time Tillie Walker was off at college—her parents were early believers in education for their girls and boys—the Army Corps had mounded one of the largest earthen dams in the world, and the swelling waters of the Missouri threatened their family home, farm fields, and the bountiful kitchen garden that had first been planted by her great-grandmother.

With the Corps’ engineering project a fait accompli, the Affiliated Tribes were forced to sell their fertile bottomlands, the timber, the wild fruits, their shrines, and their hospital for $50 an acre, treaty rights be damned. Their Council Chairman, George Gillette, wept at the signing.

Ninety percent of the families on the reservation were moved to the arid prairie in the 1950s. Families were called up in alphabetical order to select their parcels. Clans and neighbors were scattered, and resentments were seeded. They weren’t allowed access to the shoreline of the new lake, which the Corps leased to boating and recreation concerns. At the behest of a group of church ladies, the lake was named Sakakawea, to honor the Hidatsa woman who had been enslaved by a French trapper and became a guide on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

“It just destroyed us,” Walker said. “It’s going to take a long time to recover. Our tribes were located along the Missouri River for thousands of years. We had permanent villages there and a very structured society.”

Tillie Walker mounts the Supreme Court steps with Mattie Grinnell, 101 years old and the last full-blooded Mandan, and Rosie Crow Flies High, a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes Council. Many traditional leaders had refused to join the Poor People’s Campaign. “Indians don’t do things like that,” some leaders had said. Vine Deloria Jr., an influential advocate for Indigenous sovereignty, rejected MLK’s grouping of all minority communities based on their economic status. The Indigenous nations wanted autonomy. “Blacks seem to be saying that white society was bad, but they wanted it anyway.”

Walker and the protesters with her today disagree. She sees atop the courthouse steps one of her mentees, Hank Adams, a young Assiniboine from Washington state. He carries a petition to the court, decrying its recent decision to allow his state to dictate when, where, and how fish can be harvested. There was room in this movement for Indigenous sovereignty and economic reform.

Days earlier, as one of the Poor People’s Campaign’s “Committee of 100,” she stood before Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and declared that Indians were not a “problem” to be solved by whites.

“We are sick and tired of the ‘Lo, the poor Indian’ attitude,” she said. A proud people should not be required to give up their culture to thrive on their own continent. The history of forced assimilation efforts needed to be countered with education, she said. She ran a college scholarship program, collaborated with the National Indian Youth Council on its Red Power publication, America Before Columbus, and helped organize seminars on activism.

Tillie Walker reaches the top of the Supreme Court steps and strides to the massive bronze doors that court staff had closed to the rabble. Eight bas-relief panels tell the story of Greek, Roman, British, and American law. On the street below, a gaggle of lawyers, shut out from their daily routine, watches in bemusement.

And Rosie Crow Flies High steps forward and pounds on the bronze face of a long-dead Roman solicitor.

“Let Us In! Let Us In!” She shouts. And the crowd joins in.

Hank Adams and a small delegation are eventually allowed in to present the petition to the court’s clerk. The next day’s New York Times article on the “noisy demonstration” will lead with the arrest of three young protesters who broke some windows.

A week or so later, Robert Kennedy’s coffin rolled through Resurrection City, on its way to Arlington. A somber Washington establishment tolerated several more weeks of demonstrations. Vague promises were made, then the last inhabitants of Resurrection City were arrested, the shanties torn down, and the park re-sodded. It was an election year, and a country divided by the Vietnam War didn’t have the spirit for an “Economic Bill of Rights.” The whole affair was judged by the New York Times editorial board a “chaotic striving for unattainable, even undefined, goals.”

And so the country took a wrong turn. A million jobs, six million houses, collective bargaining for farmworkers, fair distribution of food—these demands weren’t “defined” enough; they were “unattainable.” In reality, they were a threat to the status quo.

But a nation isn’t conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground, a Cheyenne proverb says. Tillie Walker returned to the West with fight still left in her. And though you will find very little of her exploits in newspaper clippings, her niece, historian Angela K. Parker, interviewed plenty of contemporaries who gave credit where it is due:

She participated in the occupation of a Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Littleton, Colorado, and steered a lawsuit that ultimately ended the agency’s discrimination against its Indigenous employees.

She sued the state of Colorado when it refused to live up to its promise to provide free tuition to Indigenous students at Fort Lewis College. She won.

She returned to the Fort Berthold Reservation and helped win $149 million in compensation from the federal government for the devastation caused by the Garrison Dam. But Congress would trust the tribes only with annual interest disbursements from that payout.

In 2001, when Tillie Walker was 73, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs came to the reservation to check on how the money was being spent. The hearing was held in a casino on the reservation because the community building that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had promised 45 years earlier was not yet built.

“Fifty years have passed since the moving out of the Missouri River Valley, and we have not recovered from the upheaval,” Walker testified. The Equitable Compensation Act was supposed to give the tribes money on top of usual Bureau of Indian Affairs projects, but BIA funding had fallen, and the tribes were forced to use the compensation to fill in the gaps.

In a report to her people, Walker wrote: “We know money will never bring back our way of life along the Missouri River Valley, but the reality is we must plan together and decide to revive our tribal cultures and recreate healthy self-sufficient tribal communities. No one can do this for us.”

Money cannot bring back a way of life, especially when that way of life lies forever underwater. But ironically, the MHA Nation came into unexpected cash. There was oil under that scrubland they were moved to in the 1950s. The tribes had to fight the state of North Dakota to get their fair share of the royalties, and now they fight among themselves over how to spend it.

And irony of ironies: The state says that under the principle that gives states the right to minerals beneath navigable waterways, they own the rights to the oil under Lake Sakakawea. Seventy-five years after that lake claimed their homes, the MHA Nation is fighting that—and their rights to the shoreline--in court.

Sources

Tillie Walker was notoriously modest. She was content behind the scenes, and the media were prone to spotlighting male activists. I learned this much from the excellent book, Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold by Angela K. Parker, PhD, a history professor at the University of Denver. Dr. Parker is a niece of Tillie Walker, knew her, and interviewed many of her contemporaries. Her book is engaging without sacrificing scholarly depth. I highly recommend the book for a complete account of the devious dealings and long-term impact of the Garrison Dam project.

In Custer Died For Your Sins, Vine Deloria Jr. illuminates the stark cultural difference between European and Indigenous worldviews. Written in 1969, it also provides insight into the Native activist scene. His recollections of Tillie Walker support Parker’s contention that she was an unsung hero.

The article For the Taking: The Garrison Dam and the Tribal Taking Area by Terri Berman in Cultural Survival Magazine filled in some of the historical details. You can read it here.

The documentary film about the Poor People’s Campaign On The Case by Edward Scherer. It was never distributed, but can be found in the C-SPAN archives here.

Credit for finding a lot of the material goes to Wikipedia. Many newspaper articles were found in Newspapers.com and the New York Times Machine.

Note: I boycott Amazon, so book links will take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of your purchase supports independent bookstores.

The dozen bearded, unbathed men argued furiously in the cramped galley of the halibut boat. The debate that had brewed for days came to a head, and each man lunged for the tape recorder microphone and the Wakefield King Crab hat that conferred the right to speak. Do they turn back for home, or do they brave stormy seas to anchor off an Aleutian Island, where a five megaton nuke awaited?

A poster of Richard Nixon, darts in his nose, looked on as Robert Hunter donned the Wakefield King Crab hat and argued to forge ahead. In the month the ill-equipped old boat had tossed in the North Pacific, he and other journalists aboard had raised international alarm over the U.S.’s plan to detonate the bomb on Amchitka Island, sitting on one of the most geologically unstable faults on the planet. (Just seven years earlier, Alaska had been devastated by the Good Friday Earthquake.)

They had to do more than raise awareness. They had to raise the collective consciousness, Hunter argued. They could anchor just outside the buffer zone, maybe motor a skiff ashore and put their bodies on the line. Whether they force America to back down or die in the trying, they would have set a “mind bomb” that would awaken humanity to the damage it was doing to the planet.

Hunter tended to frame the mission in New Age, almost mystic terms. He ordained shipmates ministers in the “Church of Ecology” all “in the spirit of Merry Prankster-type mindfuck, you understand.” He christened them “Warriors of the Rainbow.”

It might have been too much for the others around the table. To most, this was a PR battle they had won: look at the TV coverage. Even a few Coast Guard crew were moved to smuggle a supportive note to them. Besides, the U.S. kept delaying the blast and winter was coming. The boat turned back for Vancouver.

Hunter was crushed. Had he clowned around too much? Failed to make his point?

The underground nuclear bomb detonated a few weeks later, November 6, 1971. The worst fears were not realized: There were no leaks; the Earth’s tectonic plates held.

But a thousand otters washed ashore, their eardrums burst.

Hunter recalled that in the planning of the Amchitka voyage, “Somebody flashed two fingers as we were leaving the church basement and said, ‘Peace!” (Canadian ecologist) Bill (Darnell) said, ‘Let’s make it a Green Peace.’ And we all went Ommmmmmmm.” The chartered halibut boat, the Phyllis Cormack, was christened Greenpeace.

Hunter, who had worked his way up from copy boy to columnist at the Vancouver Sun, won a spot on the boat on the strength of his recently published book, Storming of the Mind. It called on ecologists “to heed Marshall McLuhan’s advice: take over the control towers of the mass communications system and deliver new images that will liberate people from their primitive tribal mindsets, creating a new global consciousness.”

He invented the term “mind-bombing”: “Instead of storming the Bastille, we’re storming the minds of millions of people. Instead of lobbing bullets and bombs, we’re lobbing mind bombs, revolutionary images that will explode in people’s heads.”

The Phyllis Cormack/Greenpeace was a Canadian vessel, so all the U.S. could do was monitor its voyage (the U.S. observed maritime law in those days). Hunter described a morning in which a Coast Guard Hercules surveillance plane buzzed them and a side door opened for a cameraman to shoot. The journalists aboard the boat returned fire.

“They took pictures of us for the record and we took pictures of them for the record, and it was a war between two motion picture studios making two completely different movies with completely different bad guys. It was a McLuhan-type war, a war of the icons, a public relations struggle,” Hunter recounted.

The voyage was mind-altering for Hunter, and he sought to bring his crewmates along on the trip. He read them passages from a book of purported indigenous legends compiled by a California naturalist and an Alaskan native, Warriors of the Rainbow.

“In it was a core legend that predicted a time when the Natives would be almost completely wiped out by the white man, and the forests would be chopped down and the water and the skies poisoned. At that time the Natives would rediscover their spirits and teach the white man how to live in the world without wrecking it. They would become Warriors of the Rainbow,” he wrote.

He thought he was making progress with his crewmates. “In a leaping flash of Group Mind understanding, we all connect with the idea that all life is interwoven, including us. We are all one. It is pure Zen thought coming out of pure Western technological thought – ecology is just the latest surge of science. For one moment, East and West come into phase, the great dichotomies breaking down, the void coming alive like an all-creating flame.”

But then the decision to abort. On its way home, the moody crew received an invitation from the Kwakiutl tribe to stop at Alert Bay, British Columbia. In a ceremony in the tribe’s Big House, under the “great wooden wings of the totems” that held the roof, they danced a dance to free them of their egos and were made honorary Brothers of the Kwakiutl. “Here I was … fresh (so to speak) from having seen abandoned whaling stations on the bone-strewn shores of the North Pacific islands, the ocean and sky almost empty, nuclear bombs being tested whose shock waves killed mammals en masse. … I was a changeling.”

He saw in his mates’ faces that, “’There might be something to this Rainbow Warrior thing after all.’ Maybe, if nothing else, we white-folk environmentalists and anti-nukers needed a defining myth.”

Greenpeace ships ever since have sailed under a Kwakiutl symbol of the Rainbow Warrior—graciously blessed by the tribe years later, after Hunter became aware he had appropriated it without permission.

“Bob Hunter and I find a seal 20 feet before the monstrous scarlet bow of the Arctic Endeavor. We hold our position with our backs to the ship.

A crewman yells, ‘You better move, boys, the old man isn’t one to think twice about running you into the ice.’ Bob yells back, ‘Tell the old bastard to do what he likes.’

The ship backs away. We think we’ve won this round. Then the Arctic Endeavor plunges forward, picking up speed. Still we look ahead. We feel her coming. We hear her coming. The vibrations tingle the soles of our feet. The ice trembles and cracks. Blocks of chunky ice tumble forward before the bow and nudge our feet.

The crewman on the ice screams to the ship’s bridge, ‘Stop her, cap, stop her. The stupid asses ain’t moving.’

The engines are cut and reversed. The ship slowly grinds to a halt, five feet behind our backs. I pick up the baby whitecoat to move it to safety.”

— Paul Watson interview in the Toronto Star, March 4, 1977

By the mid-‘70s, Hunter and Paul Watson had become TV icons of the Greenpeace movement, known for zipping a Zodiac inflatable boat between whales and explosive harpoons. They teamed up again to harass Norwegian and Canadian hunters who clubbed baby harp seals to harvest their white coats.

Daring an ice cutter was, “the sort of thing only done in combat, the kind of thing that binds guys together for life, long after the war is over,” Hunter later wrote. “At one point, we clasped hands, which is how we would have died if the ship hadn’t stopped.”

But whereas Watson wanted to save whales and baby seals, Hunter wanted to raise global consciousness.

Hunter, as leader of Greenpeace, preached nonviolent resistance. As he wrote in his book, The Enemies of Anarchy, violence, “diverts us from the real struggle, which is to attain a higher level of consciousness.”

But Watson chafed at the limitations. “I saw plenty of whales die when I was with Greenpeace,” he said. “And I was forced to watch frustrated and helpless as the whales screamed in agony and died in their own blood.”

Watson’s criticism of Greenpeace tactics wore thin. The board voted him out of the organization. In protest, Hunter resigned.

It is a testament to their friendship that Hunter mortgaged his house to help Watson buy a minesweeper he could ram into Pacific whaling vessels. It was the first in a line of Sea Shepherds that would be the scourge of whalers, gill netters, and poachers around the world.

After leaving Greenpeace, Hunter returned to journalism and his cabin in the woods outside Vancouver, “brooding darkly over my failings as a leader, a man, and a sentient being.”

But Watson lured him back into the fray.

In the summer of 1990, Hunter lashed himself to a winch on the bow of Watson’s Sea Shepherd II, Sony Handy Cam aimed at a Japanese drift netting ship that Watson intended to ram.

“All along, in the Olden Days, I had bought into passivism. It was a tactical thing, to be honest: outnumbered and outgunned, what are you going to do?

“But Paul had gone ahead and armed himself. And rather than agonizing any longer (as I had for years) over the correctness, over the moral and political correctness, of putting a big steel-tipped boot to some mass-biocide jerk’s head, I was savouring every second, urging Watson on.

“Fuck Gandhi! Let’s clobber these bastards.”

— Bob Hunter, Red Blood: One (Mostly) White guy’s Encounters With the Native World

Net-hauling equipment was damaged on two ships, and the third ship in the fleet fled, leaving its 40-mile-long net drifting in the Pacific, north of Hawaii. The “curtain of death” would entangle and kill any creature that tried to swim through it. Watson’s crew tied heavy metal machine parts to the net and sank it.

The captain of one of the Japanese drift netters demanded over the radio why “Greenpeace” had rammed his ship. “Because you’re killing too many dolphins, whales, and birds, and you’re taking too many fish. And you insulted us by calling us Greenpeace.”

Mind-bombing had doused consumers’ desire for white seal fur coats, and had forced a moratorium on whaling and drift-netting. Governments quit detonating nukes, passed environmental protection laws, and designated a day a year as Earth Day.

But consciousness had not been raised. It still was OK to exploit the planet, but be more careful. And if you leave the exploitation door ajar, the next thing you know baby seals are clubbed after their white fur begins to molt; drift nets are replaced with bottom-trawling nets that scrape the seabed bare; whale hunting is illegal except within territorial waters; greenhouse gas permits are traded like baseball cards.

We made the wrong turn.

Hunter had envisioned an all-encompassing change, a global consciousness, “that can think in terms of wholes instead of parts, that can see the world as a single life system vibrant in the vastness of the cosmos.” A world in which the divine is perceived “in every drop of rain,” in which death was seen as a process “of going back into the Earth to nourish Her and to go on being, in however transmuted form.”

Maybe his life story made him especially attuned to interconnectedness. The Warriors of the Rainbow book that “fell off the shelf” as he packed for the Amchitka voyage had been given him by an “Orthodox Jewish gypsy dulcimer maker” who said, “Here. This is for you. It will reveal a path that will affect your life.”

As a teenager, a Huron stranger saved him from freezing to death on a solo camping trip. Upon his mother’s death, his uncle revealed that her grandmother was Huron.

After he left Greenpeace, a member of the Kwakiutl tribe called him out of the blue and gave him a PR job for a different tribe. The two would team up to write an indigenous view of Canadian history, called Occupied Canada.

He found himself one night in the Canadian Rockies at a powwow, in deep conversation with a Metís “Earth Healer.”

“Alice’s eyes glint redly as she reminded me that all life is part of the one Life Force, grown from the same shift in chemistry during the planet’s infancy.” Even the rocks of the Earth are alive; “we can learn to soak up energy from them.”

“And I think how my Huron saviour showed me how to put my sleeping bag down in the ashes of a fire on the glacial moraine, and that’s what kept me alive as the temperature dropped. And that’s why I am here.”

They were participating in a powwow at a critical juncture in Canada’s reckoning with the legacy of colonization. The Charlottetown Accords, a bureaucratic marriage of indigenous and colonizer governments, were up for a vote. For the men who debated whether to join or fight, Alice reframed the issue: “the Earth is in trouble, the land is in trouble, and what needs to happen here on Turtle Island is a balancing.” Aggressive development and worry-about-it-later mentality had to be balanced by a “receptive, allowing, surrendering energy.”

The medicine man moderator shut her down: “Those who want to learn about feminist issues can attend the workshop.”

The powwow ended without resolution. The accords went down in defeat, and Canada’s reckoning continues to this day. And Hunter drew a dismal lesson from the experience: “We came to the pass on the Sacred Mountain, a place where we were supposed to meet our destinies, and there was nothing there except new and ancient struggles of power, strategic interests, ideologies, cabals, decadence, lust.”

This summer, Paul Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are protesting renewed whaling in Icelandic waters. The owner of the last commercial whaling company in Iceland wants to kill 400 whales, even though he no longer has a market in Japan for them; even though Iceland’s veterinarians say the whales suffer for minutes or hours after being harpooned.

Iceland’s lawmakers have a plan: a whaling ban. But it can’t go into effect until the whaling company’s license expires in 2029.

Bob Hunter died of cancer in 2005. As inventive as he was in dreaming up mind bombs—spraying green dye on whitecoat seals, for example—it was his message of interconnectedness we should absorb. It’s not a question of saving “the environment,” but one of joining with the ecology of Earth.

Even in his teens, that is what Bob Hunter tried to do—commune with nature. Having survived that solo camping trip in the Ontario woods, thanks to the Huron stranger, he hiked back to the road: “Except for this strange frozen canal of asphalt winding through the forest, this could be any moment in the last few million years. That’s what I sought! To get out of my moment in time. To feel timelessness, or at least get a sense of what it might be like to experience existence in terms of epochs and eras and ages, instead of insignificant hours and days.”

SOURCES:

I discovered Robert Hunter while researching my novel Mission: Butterfly. I admired a hippie gonzo journalist who found a way to break out of the mainstream and make a difference. He plays a small role in the novel. I read The Greenpeace to Amchitka, his account of the first “Greenpeace” voyage that his editor rejected but was published 30 years later.

It’s too bad that Red Blood: One (Mostly) White Guy’s Encounters With the Native World is out of print. I read a library copy, then broke my Bezos boycott to buy a used copy. It is a funny, classic gonzo journalism account of his escapades that resonates today.

Warriors of the Rainbow, the compilation of indigenous legends, and Hunter’s The Enemies of Anarchy are available on Internet Archive.

A video of Watson’s and Hunter’s ramming of Japanese drift netters is posted on the Sea Shepherd Society’s website.

Photos and information were gleaned from the Greenpeace website, especially from a remembrance of Hunter by journalist Rex Weyler.

Every couple of weeks, I’m reminded why I keep my subscription to Newspapers.com up to date.

NOTE: I boycott Amazon, so all book links take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of every purchase is shared with independent bookstores.

On the morning of March 17, 1973, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales took the Denver police chief through his Crusade For Justice headquarters. See? No guns. No bombs.

They walked outside, past the blood-stained concrete where a Crusade member had been shot and killed by police. Down the block to survey the massive hole blown in one of the Crusade’s buildings. City officials kept everyone away. Too dangerous. It was torn down before the cause of the blast was determined.

“Suspected cache of dynamite” would be the phrase used by newspaper accounts that day and forevermore.

Gonzales said he was manhandled by police when he arrived early that morning. The shooting had stopped, but an angry crowd had gathered. He learned quickly that Luis “Junior” Martinez was dead. He was devastated. He’d known Junior since the boy started bringing his North High Black Berets to all the Crusade marches. He grew into a gifted dancer and taught students in the Crusade’s Ballet Chicano Aztlán. He was only 20.

Another rising young leader, Ernesto Vigil, was shot in the back. He should be in the hospital, but the cops hauled him to jail from the ER, accusing him of firing on officers. Did Ernesto know Junior was dead? They were buddies, had survived that god-awful riot in LA together.

A young man somehow survived the blast that took out the wall and roof of his apartment. Police said they “smelled” dynamite, but wouldn’t let him or anyone else close enough to investigate.

I was finishing my junior year in high school that spring, licensed to drive, and free to party. There was a night when the police chased us from house to house, park to field in what we came to call the “Mobile Kegger.” Just white Catholic boy hijinks.

I don’t remember taking much notice of the St. Patrick’s Day shootout at the Crusade for Justice. If I did, I’m sure I didn’t have much sympathy for the Crusade’s side of the story. The media had made clear they were a dangerous, militant bunch. I have an early memory of being stomach-churningly scared while helping my Auntie Joyce set up chairs for an event in the Crusade meeting hall. The frightening media narrative had wormed all the way down to 10-year-old me.

I certainly don’t recall reading that three of the four Crusade members accused of assaulting police that night were acquitted at trial.

Corky Gonzales wasn’t always the villain. He got good press when he was a rising star in the pro boxing ring in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and then when he delivered brown votes to Democratic candidates in the ‘50s and ‘60s. It began to sour when he broke from the Democratic Party because a mayor reneged on his promise to create an independent police review board. The mayor fired him from his city post in 1965, and 1,000 people showed up at City Hall to protest. “This meeting is only the spark of a crusade for justice, which we are going to carry into every city in Colorado,” Gonzales told them.

His speeches fired people up, especially the young, who were fed up with schools that belittled their culture, with police who harassed them, with a Vietnam draft that seemed rigged against them, and with a Civil Rights movement that paid them little attention. Gonzales bottled all that frustration, put it in context of a centuries-old struggle, and issued a stirring call to action in—of all things—a poem.

“There are no revolutions without poets,” Corky Gonzales once wrote. His epic poem “Yo Soy Joaquín” was a revolution starter. When he published it in 1967, it was reprinted in Chicano media across the country. It was tacked to telephone poles in the barrio. It was performed dramatically in film and on stage.

Yo soy Joaquín,

perdido en un mundo de confusión:

I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,

caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,

confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,

suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.

My fathers have lost the economic battle

and won the struggle of cultural survival.

And now! I must choose between the paradox of

victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,

or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,

sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.

The poem has the sweat, the punch, and the howl of the boxing ring. It packs tight, vivid scenes to speed through the history of the Aztecs, the Conquistadors, the mestizo, and the Mexican freedom fighter.

Juaquín is a reflection of Gonzales himself, a man who knew he and his people deserved more than the Anglos were dishing out. A man who worked through the system, found it corrupt, and set out on a principled path. A man who had seen too many police beatings and vowed to make it stop.

Gonzales’ villainous portrayal began with his arrest on the steps of Denver West High School in 1969.

About 150 Chicano students, including one of his daughters, Nita, gathered at the door to demand a sit-down with the principal to discuss bias in curriculum and school policy, and a social studies teacher who disparaged what Chicanos ate and how they dressed. Gonzales was there to egg them on or guide them, depending on your point of view.

He became enraged when a phalanx of cops shoved the kids down the steps, one dragging Nita by the arm. Gonzales pulled Nita away from the cop, and then he was swarmed and cuffed. The West High Blowout had begun.

“I saw young people running in all directions and people screaming,” Gonzales testified later. “Little girls slammed against cars and dragged by the hair.” A police helicopter hovered overhead. Helmeted cops sprayed Mace liberally, even into the paddy wagon where teens sat cuffed.

The police asked the City Council for authority to make more arrests in such protests. The Denver Post editorial board accused Gonzales of “Hispanic racism.” The school district vowed to update its history curriculum and transfer the racist teacher to another school.

The affair receded to the back pages, and there was little fanfare months later when Gonzales and all but one of the other protesters were acquitted by juries. TV news footage shown at trial contradicted the police story.

The week after the blowout, Gonzales held the first of his annual Chicano Youth Liberation Conferences, each attracting thousands of high school students and young adults from throughout the Southwest. Here, they learned that American history did not begin at Jamestown. They learned to dance, sing, and play the music of their people. This is where Gonzales’ Plan Espiritual de Aztlán was born.

Aztlán was a place on the map: The Mexican border before it lost the war with the United States in 1848. Gonzales made it a metaphor for the culture that was lost to European conquest, one that must be reasserted. A “nation” of Aztlán might include the unlikely reclamation of land stolen in violation of a treaty, but mostly it envisioned a unified people who return to the ideals of family and communal sharing of resources.

Gonzales put 21-year-old Manuel Martinez in front of the media to explain. Martinez, one of those arrested and acquitted in the West High Blowout, had become notorious for the brilliant portrayals of Aztlán he painted on walls throughout the city. “Our people are as deeply rooted in this land as any tree … Nationalism is humanism and all these things lead to liberation.”

A Denver Post editorial columnist marveled at young Chicanos’ embrace of Gonzales’ “Yo Soy Joaquín” and his vision of a nation of Aztlán. “His heroes in the poem tend to be warlike, hence it is doubtful whether contemporary Hispanos can draw many lessons of practical value,” he sniffed.

The media covered--and the FBI fretted--over Gonzales’ support of activists in New Mexico who occupied federal lands, asserting rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Little was written about the daily work of “nation building” going on at Crusade headquarters in Denver: providing assistance in housing, jobs, and social services; supporting performance groups, and running a bookstore and art gallery.

Of the Crusade’s many projects, the one that consumed the most resources and would last the longest was its K-12 school, Escuela Tlatelolco. Classes were taught in Spanish and English, with a Chicano-influenced curriculum heavy on the arts.

As the public portrayal of Gonzales grew more sinister, J. Edgar Hoover put him on his Rabble Rousers Index. “There seems to be no question that his activities pose a threat to the internal security of the United States,” a Feb. 9, 1968, memo states. A foot-thick stack of redacted FBI reports reveals a years-long push from Washington to keep tabs on Gonzales and the Crusade, even though the Denver office often reported back that there was no there there.

The FBI memos acquired under the Freedom of Information Act also show that two days before the St. Patrick’s Day shootout, the FBI issued a bulletin to its Western field offices to be on the lookout for activists traveling to support the Native American occupation of Wounded Knee. The Crusade was mentioned in the memo, which concluded: “The object is to make lawful arrests as far from Wounded Knee, South Dakota, as possible.”

Crusade members had a feeling they were being watched when Gonzales was arrested in 1970 at the Chicano Moratorium Against the War in Los Angeles. Three were killed in that melee, including a Chicano reporter for the Los Angeles Times who was shot in the head by a teargas cannister fired from a launcher.

Gonzales was scheduled to speak to the 30,000 in attendance when the LA Sheriff declared an unlawful assembly and started lobbing teargas at the stage and then into the buses that protesters tried to flee in. The Crusade delegation piled onto a flatbed truck to escape. A police helicopter tracked them until they were stopped at a roadblock.

“Look for Corky. He’s the one with the mustache,” they heard the cops say. That description scarcely narrowed the field of suspects, but they finally found Gonzales in the cab. There was a gun under the seat and $370 in cash in his pocket. The money was for the group’s travel expenses, but police suspected robbery.

Gonzales was convicted of a gun violation and served 29 days in jail. It was the only time Gonzales was ever convicted of a crime, despite his many arrests by the Denver police.

The Crusade was ever on the Denver police’s prime suspect list, especially when several bombs turned up in the early ‘70s. Thirty-eight Denver school buses were destroyed. Dynamite was tossed or mailed to businesses, politicians, and police. White supremacists were emergent, opposed to busing and the Civil Rights movement. But still, the Crusade was the first thing police thought of. Ironically, the only bombs that actually exploded killed Chicanos.

Two Crusade members faced bombing charges and won acquittals at trial. A third was acquitted of state charges when the defense cut the police informant’s story to shreds, but was convicted of a federal explosives charge.

The bombings and attempted bombings have never been solved, including two car bombs that killed six Chicano activists in Boulder in 1974. In that case, the authorities figured there was nothing to solve. Denver District Attorney Dale Tooley summed up their thinking: “The gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” he wrote in his memoir, “apparently could not tell red wires from green ones.”

Gonzales fought against the narrative when the Connecticut State Police and the FBI issued all points bulletins in 1976, claiming he and the American Indian Movement were armed with M16s and rocket launchers and planned to “kill a cop a day.” The report was fabricated, as documents released under the Freedom of Information Act would later reveal.

Gonzales, whose Crusade was bleeding money to fend off the bombing charges, sued the Connecticut police for damages. “I believe we are sliding backwards,” he said in a deposition. “I don’t think (the memo) was used so much to stop, to stop my credibility, but I think it was used to have me assassinated, in a sense, murdered by proxy.”

The judge threw the case out, saying the defendants had governmental immunity.

With its image in tatters, the Crusade lost human and financial support to a growing list of government and nonprofit groups that were taking on Chicano causes. Gonzales took to criticizing Chicano leaders—even Federico Peña, the city’s first Chicano mayor—as being sellouts, “Tied to the umbilical cord of the establishment, capitalism, and the two-party system.”

Refusing to take grants from the government, the Crusade struggled to keep its day care center, ballet, legal defense, newspaper, social services, and prisoner rights programs afloat. Newspapers began to refer to him as the “militant civil rights leader of the ‘60s,” even as he led efforts in the ‘80s to build health and recreation centers in the Chicano community, to rename city parks to reflect their neighborhood culture, to allow Spanish to be spoken in schools and the public, and to demilitarize the police.

In the end, Escuela Tlatelolco was all that survived, with Gonzales’ daughter Nita Gonzales as principal. Even that fell prey to the “umbilical cord of the establishment.” In a last-gasp effort to keep it afloat, Nita Gonzales accepted Denver Public Schools’ money in 2004 and “almost lost our soul.” When the district pulled the funds in 2016, they lost the school. It closed the next year.

The police, the FBI, and the mainstream media made the wrong turn. They propagated a narrative of violence that buried the vision of Aztlán. Culture became a battlefield. Spanish deemed un-American. Sixty-one percent of Coloradans voted in 1988 to make English the state’s “official language.” Police brutality continues, with the city paying millions in settlements in the George Floyd protests alone. The Denver school district in 2024 admitted that Chicano students are not getting an equal education.

But now that I understand it, I see sprouts of Aztlán today.

Mia Martinez Lopez is the principal of Denver’s West High School, where Spanish is freely spoken these days. Her father was among those arrested and acquitted of police assault charges at the 1969 West High School blowout. Now, Emanuel Martinez’s murals are commissioned by councils, featured in Chamber brochures, and hang in the Smithsonian.

Serena Gonzales Guttierez, Corky’s granddaughter, is a Denver City Councilwoman, currently leading an effort to decriminalize poverty.

Each summer, high schoolers from around the country come to Denver for arts and culture education, an echo of the original Chicano Youth Liberation Conference.

Gonzales told an interviewer in 1985: “I would say the movement’s not dead. I might say it’s resting. And the emergencies that come about will bring us together. And there will be a resurgence, a new renaissance in the Chicano movement.”

Gonzales remained in fighting shape until he suffered a heart attack while driving in 1987. A brain injury slowed him down. Diagnosed with congestive heart failure in 2005, he checked himself out of the hospital and died days later, as he wished, among his friends and family.

SOURCES

Ernesto Vigil wrote a meticulously sourced and footnoted history, The Crusade For Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent. He also entrusted boxes full of FBI memos acquired under the Freedom of Information Act to the Denver Public Library. I spent many hours in the library’s Special Collections and Archives Department. He acknowledges in the book’s foreword that a grant from the Gonzales family enabled him to devote time to the research. His point of view as a participant in the Crusade’s history is obvious, but he provides documentation to support his facts.

Juan Haro, another Crusade leader, wrote The Ultimate Betrayal: An Autobiography, also found in DPL’s Special Collections and Archives Department. He was acquitted of one of the bombing attempts but convicted of a federal charge of possessing an explosive device. His lawyer, Stan Marks, told me he would have beaten the federal charge if the cops hadn’t hidden their informant’s rap sheet. Haro returned to Denver from prison, angry that the Crusade did not pay his legal bills. Marks said, “all I got was a tank of gas once a week at Haro’s gas station.” In his book, Haro says Gonzales had begun running the Crusade for his personal enrichment and that he was the one who set him up in the bomb plot. The book in DPL’s Special Collections includes an exchange of letters between lawyers for the Gonzales family and the book publisher. I could not tell whether the publisher acceded to demands to cease printing the book.

I’ve read “Yo Soy Joaquín” four or five times. It’s brilliant. I spent hours looking up Gonzales’ historical references, filling in the gaps in my education.

In 2000, Corky Gonzales compiled his essays, speeches, poems, and plays in Message to Aztlán. There, I found the depth of his vision, a welcome contrast to the combative quotes that made the newspapers.

I read hundreds of articles in DPL’s Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post archives. What wasn’t covered was interesting. For example, the papers did not cover testimony in the first three St. Patrick’s Day assault cases. But when Vigil’s case came, and the police were down 2 cases to 1, both newspapers covered every day of the trial to see if it would be a tie or a blowout. “Jury Acquits Vigil In 30 Seconds” was the Rocky Mountain News’ front page headline.

Daniel Salazar created a documentary, After Juaquín, which aired on local public television in 1985 and has since been uploaded to YouTube here. His interview with Gonzales at the end of the Crusade’s run portrays a man aware of his early impatience and at peace with what was accomplished.

I consulted The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.

Public domain / Office of Strategic Services

General Võ Nguyên Giáp was misty-eyed as his ragtag military band played the final bars of the Star Spangled Banner. He cast a sidelong glance at the Army officer standing next to him. The officer stood at rigid attention, saluting. He seemed suitably impressed.

Grinning broadly, he shook the American’s hand and said, “This is the first time in the history of Vietnam that our flag has been displayed in an international ceremony, and our national anthem played in honor of a foreign guest,” Giáp told Patti. “I will long remember this occasion.”

Army Major Archimedes Patti would long remember this day, too. With regret.

Patti had orders to keep his nose out of politics. That was a tall order here in Japanese-occupied Vietnam, August 1945. Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been leveled by atomic bombs just weeks earlier. The emperor had surrendered, but terms had not been settled. Patti’s small team landed in Hanoi to secure the release of Japanese-held POWs.

Several other agents of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) were conducting similar “mercy missions.” The one in China had gone badly. Patti’s counterpart had gotten mouthy with a communist patrol and was bayonetted and shot to death. He would someday be called the “first casualty of the Cold War” and a right-wing organization formed in his name, the John Birch Society.

Patti’s orders to stay out of politics were complicated by … politics. The French wanted in on this mission, but they were despised by the Vietnamese and barely tolerated by the Japanese. They forced the son-in-law of a former prime minister onto his team. And just as he got off the plane, the entitled Frenchman started to make trouble. He demanded a car. He wanted to be driven to the radio station to make an announcement of liberation. The Japanese commander, who was still making sense of Patti’s request to surrender, was irritated.

The whole thing got settled when the Frenchman was offered the opportunity to stay at the former French governor’s “palace.” Once there, the Japanese set a guard, and he hadn’t been seen around town since.

Patti and his team were given a villa formerly occupied by the French finance minister. It was at the gates that General Giáp had brought his welcoming committee.

A color guard marched by, bearing the flags of the United States, Soviet Union, China, and the new flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It was a symbol. A wish.

Giáp’s men had received a hero’s welcome when they marched uncontested into the city a few days earlier. The Japanese retreated to their camp, and a joyful citizenry banged pots, stripped the air-raid covers off streetlamps, and hung banners praising the Viet Minh. Many in Saigon had secretly supported the resistance guerrillas during the war and now counted on them to evict the French.

Patti met the Viet Minh’s leader, Hô Chì Minh, in a café on the China/Vietnam border four months earlier. The OSS’s French contacts within Vietnam were not reliable. Hô’s people had rescued and smuggled downed Allied pilots out of the country. They were communists, but as long as they provided good intel, Patti didn’t mind.

The 55-year-old Hô was deathly pale, emaciated, and smoked like a chimney. He spoke fluent English and French, having spent years working kitchens in Paris and New York. And he spoke a lot: About the famine that claimed a million or more lives, which he blamed on Japanese neglect; about French absentee landowners and merchants who improverished and mistreated laborers, and about onerous quotas on purchase of French alcohol and its licensing of the opium trade.

“Besides the freedom to get drugged, to get drunk, and to pay taxes, the Indo-Chinese have no other freedom,” he said. “Are the Allies really fighting for world freedom and democracy as they solemnly said in their official declarations? Or do they fight simply to save French selfish colonial interests?”

Patti, speaking for himself, was fighting for freedom and democracy. But he couldn’t speak for those at higher pay grades. His OSS dossier indicated Hô had been pitching independence as far back as the end of World War II, to no avail. Will things be much different at the end of this world war?

The history lesson over, Hô quickly agreed to help the Allies. He hated the Japanese. A million or more Vietnamese starved to death under their occupation. He hated the French more, but first things first.

The deal was made, and the Allied brass were happy. The communists’ intelligence helped the Allies disrupt Japanese communication and supply lines in the final months of the war.

Patti noted that the marching honor guard wore mismatched uniforms, and many bore swords, axes, and the odd stolen Japanese rifle. But a few carried American M16s acquired from the special forces team that had trained them over the last few months.

He took stock of their general. Giáp was about his age, thirties. Small and swimming in a cream-colored suit with a loud plaid tie. Probably “liberated” from a French haberdashery during his troops’ marauding reclamation of the city. He looked affable today, but Patti had heard he could be fierce. “Snow-covered volcano,” the French called him. They had created him: His wife and her sister were killed in their prisons.

The French colonials in Hanoi irritated Patti. They insisted on calling Vietnamese “Annamites,” a pejorative that offended the Vietnamese. They blamed him for delaying the release of French POWs. But Hô held the keys and was understandably reluctant to unleash French soldiers onto the streets of Hanoi. His caution proved warranted: When Patti’s counterpart in Saigon, a British officer, released the French POWs there, they sacked the city.

Patti’s sympathies tilted toward the Viet Minh. His dispatches to OSS headquarters advocated for Vietnamese independence on a moral level: Hô’s demands were “few and simple[:] Namely limited independence, freedom from French rule, [and the] right to live as free people within [the] family of nations.” On a practical level: “From what I have seen, these people mean business. The French will have to deal with them. For that matter, we all will have to deal with them.”

On Sept. 2, he joined a throng in Ba Đình Square, where chants of “Độc lập! Độc lập!” (Independence! Independence!) stilled when Hô Chì Minh mounted the dais. He read the country’s Declaration of Independence, which began: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When Lieutenant Dan Phelan parachuted behind the lines to help train Giáp’s troops the previous May, he met Hô, “an awfully sweet guy.” Hô pestered Phelan for the exact words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. “I was a normal American. I couldn’t … but all he really wanted was the flavor of the thing. The more we discussed it, the more he actually seemed to know about it than I did.”

In August, Hô pressed Patti for the wording, then read his draft of the Vietnamese Declaration. He clearly had the wording down pat. “I was becoming uncomfortably aware that I was participating—however slightly—in the formulation of a political entity and did not want to create an impression of participation.”

Hô Chì Minh was playing his last cards.

The echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s words were not meant for the cheering crowd in Hanoi. Historians speculate they were meant to signal to Washington that there was common ground to explore.

But it was for naught. On the same day Hô was reading the Declaration in Ba Đình Square, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur was accepting the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay and giving French General Philippe Leclerc the green light to invade Vietnam.

“Bring in troops, more troops, as many as you can.”

America had made the wrong turn.

On his last night in Hanoi, Patti had dinner with Giáp and Hô. He was moved by the emotion in their thanks and farewell. “At the same time, I knew they were taking advantage of this last evening to put themselves and their cause in the best possible light,” Patti wrote later. “They were isolated from the communist world, they were surrounded by self-interested powers, and the few Americans within their view were the only ones with whom there was a rapport. Americans were the ones who understood the difficulty of achieving and maintaining independence.”

Hô had written eight letters to President Truman, asking him to honor the promise of self-determination made in the Atlantic Charter. But the charter was not a treaty; just some principles jotted down by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was dead, and Truman was more concerned about rising communism than declining imperialism.

France was left to fight it out with the Viet Minh, though the United States footed 78 percent of the bill. When Giáp defeated the French, the hot potato was tossed to the United States. Having driven Hô into the arms of the Chinese and Soviet Union, the U.S. no longer saw Vietnam as a seeker of self-determination, but as a communist domino about to fall.

Thirty years and 2 million deaths after Giáp brought an honor guard to the Americans, he defeated them and won independence for Vietnam. The CIA finally allowed Patti to write his memoirs. He had spent the rest of his government service in emergency preparedness, out of the loop as the Vietnam War raged. So much so that the consultants who researched the Pentagon Papers didn’t interview him.

“Ho Chi Minh was on a silver platter in 1945,” he said in an interview. “We had him. He was willing to be a democratic republic, if nothing else. Socialist yes, but a democratic republic.”

Patti went looking to see what happened to the dozen or so reports he had sent to Washington. The OSS Chief of Registry, Julia McWilliams (better known as Julia Child), assured him she had forwarded them.

He found them in a dusty cabinet at the CIA.

Unopened.

Sources

It was agony to cut Archimedes Patti from my novel to true up the timeline. A World War II spy. A confidant of Hô Chì Minh. What if he and Robert McNamara had gotten together? This amputation is what gave me the idea to write this series of essays; his story had to be told. I don’t remember how I first heard about him, but I do know my first source was unedited interview footage from a 1981 PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television Story.” You can find an edited interview done for the Vietnam Reconsidered conference in 1983 here.

I have always admired Robert McNamara’s forthright acknowledgment of error in Vietnam. I re-read his In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

That sent me down some rabbit holes, but the most fruitful was The OSS and Hô Chì Minh: Unexpected Allies in the War Against Japan by Dixee Bartholomew-Feis.

I got a glimpse of Vietnamese life in that time period through the excellent memoir The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family by Mai Elliott. She immigrated from Vietnam and became one of the researchers for the Pentagon Papers. Speaking of which, even though I was greatly incensed by Nixon’s attempted censorship, I never read the Pentagon Papers until now.

The wrong turns this series describes are all of a piece to me, and their contribution to the climate crisis is at the crux of my novel, Mission: Butterfly. Rubber and the Making of Vietnam by Michitake Aso recounts how rubber trees were transplanted from Brazil to Southeast Asia, and how damaging plantation agriculture and monoculture is to the earth.

Sheldon Tsu, an agricultural economist, was one of the few non-military members of the American mission in the ‘50s. When I read his report on launching co-op farms in Vietnam, I was cheered to know there were some Americans truly helping the Vietnamese. I made him a fictionalized character in my novel.

If you want to follow me further down rabbit holes, here are some excellent books: Vietnam: Lotus In A Sea Of Fire was written by Thích Nhat Hanh in 1967 (he is a character in my novel). The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation is a gruesome account by Tran Bu Binh, who became a member of the Viet Minh. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon is 60 years old, but the techniques and scars of colonialism remain depressingly salient.

Articles in Scientific American gave me a sense of the excitement surrounding wartime technological innovation. Articles in The New York Times gave me a sense of how little Americans cared about what was happening in “Indo-China.”

NOTE: I boycott Amazon, so all book links take you to Bookshop.org, where a portion of every purchase is shared with independent bookstores.

More at SteveKrizmanAuthor.com

The Wrong Turn is an essay series about the people who saw it coming and said so. All of them were right. The essays grew out of my research for Mission: Butterfly, a climate-fiction novel set in mid-century America. New essays every other Tuesday.

Thomas Brosnihan, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

She chose to make this last farewell at low tide. Their “fairy cave” would have emerged, the tidepools within waiting to be explored.

Poor Rachel, Dorothy thought. She had so wanted to comb this beach one last time.

She choked back a sob and hefted the plain cardboard box. Rachel’s brother had carelessly mailed it to her here in Maine. No note. Stepping carefully over the mossy rocks at the fairy cave’s opening, she dipped her hand into the ashes.

One last caress. Gritty and chalky.

Rachel Carson grew up on a farm in western Pennsylvania, but was drawn to the sea. The farm provided little income, but her mother made it a fertile laboratory for a curious girl. She sent her children out on the 64 acres to examine God’s creation and discover man’s “divine obligation” to conserve it.

Perhaps the seashell fossil young Rachel dug from a riverbank sparked the first question that would lead her to the ocean and its mysteries. But writing is what truly floated her boat. She was 10 when she published her first article in the St. Nicholas children’s magazine (joining F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.B. White among the magazine’s writing contest winners). She was 14 when she received her first check from the magazine. And she would pitch stories to newspapers, magazines, and book publishers ever after.

She had to hustle. Due to death and desertion, she became the primary provider for her mother and two nieces just as she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a master’s degree in zoology. It was 1932, the depths of the Great Depression.

She got a day job at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and earned $20 here and there selling articles to the Baltimore Sun. Fisheries’ news releases, government reports, brochures, and guides never read more clearly or sang more beautifully.

Her boss said one piece was too good for a fisheries brochure. “Send this one to the Atlantic,” he said. When the Atlantic Monthly published her essay “Undersea” in September 1937, the world was introduced to a whole new universe under the waves and to a writer of remarkable talent.

In the article, Carson pulled readers off the beach, through the shallow reefs, and out to the continental shelf and the yawning abyss. Along the way, she described peculiar creatures eating, living, and dying in bizarre ways. Scientific details were served up in delightfully digestible bites.

Readers in their armchairs had “seen” nothing like it. Jacques Cousteau had not yet invented the Aqua-Lung nor begun making underwater documentaries. Carson opened new territory to the popular imagination and awakened her readers to the interdependence of man and nature.

“Thus we see the parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them up until the gathering energy of the spring sun wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic activity,” she wrote. “Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.”

A scientist with a poet’s pen. A woman breaking barriers. She would move the world.

Dorothy Freeman remembered Rachel’s delight upon discovering their fairy cave, its opening obscured by a curtain of roots and fern. Within, sea stars clung to rocks. Hermit crabs skittered between pools. A seafoam-green anemone’s tentacles waved in a gentle current from the cave’s dripping ceiling.

Rachel had her bucket and carefully lifted specimens for closer inspection back at her cottage. She returned them to the sea, of course. Dorothy chuckled at the memory of Rachel rescuing a lightning bug that kept diving into breaking waves, mistaking bioluminescence for a swarm of compatriots.

Dorothy turned from the cave and stepped carefully across slick, weathered rocks toward the lapping waves. The first handful of ashes scattered across Rachel’s precious tidepools; some appeared to melt into the rock as they soaked up seawater; others lingered a bit on the tidepool’s surface, before settling into the salt-and-pepper pebbles of the pool’s floor.

This is what Rachel wanted and what her brother tried to prevent. He had relented, burying half her ashes with their mother and sending the other half to her in the mail. Perhaps he was jealous of their relationship. Or perhaps he felt he knew better what was good for his sister.

Men.

The Atlantic Monthly article appeared under the byline “R. L. Carson,” at Carson’s insistence. As one of only two women scientists in the Bureau of Fisheries, she found that her reports were given more weight if the writer was presumed to be male. Her instinct would be confirmed over and over again, even when her books topped bestseller lists.

The “Undersea” article led to a trilogy of books about the ecosystems of the shore, the sea, and its depths. The Sea Around Us was a breakout hit, and reviewers routinely marveled that such a deep and serious book had been written by a “petite and pretty” woman. One who was unmarried, no less.

“She sometimes envied male writers who married because they had wives to take care of them, provide meals, and spare them from unnecessary interruptions,” her biographer, Linda Lear, wrote. Perhaps she never married precisely because no husband could see himself in that role.

Her books about the sea raised issues that were uncomfortable in an era when men blasted Pacific atolls to test the power of atomic bombs, when “progress” was marching faster and faster, heedless of consequences.

But her books also gave her a platform. At awards banquets and society luncheons, she spoke up for nature, becoming more and more vocal about man’s negative influences on it. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was a time of fearsome revelations: Of radioactive fallout, of harmful food additives, and of medications that caused hideous birth defects.

“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind—that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done,” she wrote to a friend.

An avid birdwatcher, Carson became alarmed by reports of disappearing bird species in the South, where post-war America was waging “war” on fire ants. DDT, developed during World War II to fight lice and insect-borne diseases among the troops, was declared a “miracle” chemical. The Department of Agriculture was mixing the stuff in oil and dumping it on entire neighborhoods from airplanes and roadside sprayers. The extermination of the “relentless rival of man” was hyped in a USDA video titled Fire Ant On Trial.

Carson, the scientist, dove into the research and interviewed chemists and physicians. Carson, the former government interpreter, worked her sources in the Department of Agriculture. Carson, the emerging celebrity, enlisted the powerful, including Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

The result was her magnum opus, Silent Spring, published in 1962. It opens:

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.

Indiscriminate spraying stilled the birds, poisoned the water, and probably caused cancer, Carson wrote. She connected dots as no one had before. She uncovered the seamy side of unchecked progress.

The intensity of the chemical industry’s criticism betrayed its vulnerability. A lawyer for the Velsicol Chemical Company threatened the publishers with a lawsuit. Carson, he wrote, might be part of “sinister forces” trying to “create the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral.” Former Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson wondered, “Why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.” His conclusion: “probably a communist.”

Scientists on the payroll of DuPont, Monsanto, and the National Agricultural Chemicals Association belittled her master’s degree in zoology. They went on television to explain that modern food production was too important and complex to be addressed in a mass-market book. Public relations teams put together mass mailings, including a brochure for county agricultural extension agents titled “How To Answer Rachel Carson.”

But Silent Spring landed on a public that was becoming wary of “the notion that chemists are the possessors of divine wisdom,” as a New York Times editorial put it. There were congressional hearings and studies. Congress amended the law to prohibit use of insecticides before their safety had been tested.

But by then, Rachel Carson was dead.

Dorothy Freeman was one of the very few who knew that Rachel wrote Silent Spring in a race against cancer. In the 10 years she had known her, cancer had spread from her breast to her neck, to her bones, and to her liver. Massive doses of radiation weakened her. She went blind for a while. Her writing hand went numb.

But she kept her condition secret, even as she endured radio interviews, Congressional testimony, and banquet speeches. She feared her detractors would twist her illness into some kind of ulterior motive.

She had so much more to say. But her heart gave out on April 14, 1964, just eighteen months after Silent Spring was published.

Dorothy knew why it was so important to Rachel that her ashes be spread here at Sheepscot Bay, where they had spent summers together. Rachel had given her life, and now she would give her body to nature. As she had written in that Atlantic article long ago: “There descends into the depths a gentle, never-ending rain of the disintegrating particles of what once were living creatures of the sunlit surface.”

She no longer walked the sunlit surface, but Carson’s words lived on. The public was awakened to the link between “progress” and the brown clouds over cities, the polluted rivers catching fire, and the seabirds dying in oil slicks. The Ecology Movement was born. The first Earth Day was held in 1970, ushering in what became known as the “environmental decade.”

Carson’s friends in Congress, pushed by the growing environmental movement, strengthened restrictions on pesticides, passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter signed them into law.

In signing the bill that created the Environmental Protection Agency, Nixon proclaimed: “Each of us all across this great land has a stake in maintaining and improving environmental quality, clean air, and clean water. These are part of the birthright of every American.”

But an economic downturn came—as they do—and industry saw its chance. Rising gas prices, high interest rates, stagnant wages: These were the result of government regulation. A former actor gave them the perfect line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and the country took a hard wrong turn.

The Superfund toxic waste cleanup program was the last environmental measure to pass before Reagan came to town. The measure required petroleum, chemical, and manufacturing companies to pay into a fund to clean up thousands of dumps that industries had used and abandoned over the previous decades.

Chemicals from the worst such dump in California, the Stringfellow Acid Pit, were oozing into waterways in the town of Glen Avon. Kids made toxic beards out of the frothy storm runoff. Then they started seeing double. The eager young scientists who hired on to the new Superfund program to solve such problems ran into an obstacle: Their new leader, Rita Lavelle, appointed to the job by Reagan. Lavelle, a former spokeswoman for Aerojet, one of the Stringfellow Pit’s toxic dumpers, thought it unfair that companies be held accountable for messes made by companies long ago. She made some calls to her old colleagues at Aerojet.

Lavelle’s boss was Reagan’s EPA Director Anne Gorsuch, a former Colorado state legislator who belonged to a group that called themselves the “House Crazies.” She supposedly walked into a petroleum industry luncheon once, lit up a Marlboro, and said, “I’m from EPA, and I’m here to help.”

She had a like-minded partner on the Cabinet, Interior Secretary James Watt. He opened the country’s coastal waters to oil drilling, eased restrictions on strip-mining, and opened federal lands to the coal companies.

It’s a testament to the ecology movement’s enduring power that Gorsuch’s collusion with industry and gutting of EPA staff got her into hot water with Congress. Similarly, Lavelle’s mishandling of Superfund landed her in jail for perjury before Congress.

Reagan cut them loose, but kept Watt. Until Watt described the diversity on his coal leasing review panel: “I have a Black. I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” Such language was politically fatal back then.

The Reagan Revolution changed government. Reagan had required all federal regulations to go through a “cost-benefit analysis.” That meant running everything by David Stockman, his budget director, who didn’t see much benefit in anything the government did. The scales have been tilted in industry’s favor ever since.

Reagan’s environmental legacy was entrenched in the courts. His judicial nominees were screened for their fealty to free enterprise. John Roberts, a young lawyer on the White House staff, would go on to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And in that role, he would author West Virginia v. EPA, a ruling that undercuts the EPA’s ability to fight climate change. Concurring in that ruling was Justice Neil Gorsuch, Anne’s son.

Dorothy Freeman, empty box in her hand, watched the waves carry her friend’s ashes out to sea. Chemistry and the divine had conspired to create life in those waters, Rachel had said. And it would forever do so, despite the “senseless, brutish things” man has done.

The question is, will we be there to enjoy it?

Sources

I read Carson’s Silent Spring just recently. It still resonates. The enemies of nature are the same, still short-sighted, still making the same justifications.

“Undersea,” her first article in the Atlantic Monthly, is truly beautiful. The Atlantic’s digital archive serves it up with the byline “Rachel Carson.” But a PDF of the original print version verifies it was published under the byline “R.L. Carson.” You can see it here.

Linda Lear’s Rachel Carson: Witness For Nature helped me grasp the roots of Carson’s passion, the obstacles she had to overcome, and the full depth of her influence on mid-century society and politics. As a writer, I found the publishing back stories fascinating.

I am old enough to see history repeating. As a newspaper reporter, I covered the “House Crazies” in the Colorado Legislature, and got out the popcorn when Anne Gorsuch was named to head the EPA. I refreshed my memory about the Reagan Administration’s DOGE-ing of the EPA by listening to a series on the topic broadcast in 2022 by the excellent NPR/WBUR program “Here & Now.” The series can be found here.