With all the debates and controversies that surrounded Murray Bookchin’s many years of active political engagement, few commentators have addressed the lasting influence he had on the social and environmental movements of the past four decades. Participants in those movements, however, will always remember his compelling presence and his inspiring words. The earliest radical ecologists…
Public education was the glue that held the Worcester-based Central Massachusetts Citizens Against Nuclear Power together well into the 1980s. Because we were a local Clamshell Alliance chapter, from time to time many members organized for and joined nonviolent direct actions, spending time in armories and jail. But we were always planning the next radio…
“What’s a nuke?” “What’s a nuke?” was a common question in 1976 when “No Nukes!” bumper stickers began appearing in New Hampshire. By 1978 — thanks largely to the Clamshell Alliance and the media focus it generated — most people knew what nukes were, not only in New England, but across the nation. The struggle…
A Puppeteer’s Perspective on the Origins of the Clamshell Alliance I landed a job as a puppeteer fresh out of college because I could talk like a duck. “You see, an anthropology degree did prepare me for the real world,” I explained to my mother. She cried for joy. Well, anyway, she cried. The duck…
It’s baaaaaack. The fifty-year multi-trillion dollar failure of atomic energy has resumed its lemming-like march to madness. Why? Isn’t the definition of insanity the belief that if you do the same thing again and again you’ll somehow get a different result? The first commercial reactor opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. America was promised electricity…
In the early spring of 1977 I went to one of the events about nuclear power held around New England to educate the public and recruit for the occupation. I sat on a metal chair in a church basement with 20 or so strangers crowded round Judy Rubenstein as she told the terrifying story of…
Peter Kellman went to work at the Laconia Shoe Company in Sanford, Maine on the morning of September 18, 1980. Peter was a machine operator at the factory and the president of the local shoe workers union. He was also an anti-nuclear activist with the Clamshell Alliance. That morning he posted a notice on the…
In April 1976 Linda LeClair (the AFSC staff person in Concord) called and asked me to come up and do a n-v workshop with some folks who were considering some actions against building the S. nukes. I did so and we had an evening of discussion and role-playing at a neat vegetarian restaurant. There were…
“The socialists were there…” Meanwhile, The Manchester Union-Leader, the state’s largest, most powerful and most conservative newspaper, launched a relentless “Red Tide” campaign, trying to paint the Clamshell Alliance as a communist and terrorist organization. Rather than fuming about the paper’s hysteria and half-truths, we found creative ways to respond. For example, Union-Leader coverage of…
CIVIL LIBERTIES VIOLATED YELLOW JOURNALISM, 1970s STYLE Corporate and government surveillance of the Clamshell Alliance began with the inception of the organization in 1976, intensified in the weeks before the April 1977 occupation, and continued for the next several years. Fear mongering by right wing organizations and media, fed by the surveillance and infiltration, were…
