Loeb Learns There’s Hope in Hard Times : Author Sees Shift in U.S. Peace Movement

Paul Loeb has written a book on the American peace movement called “Hope in Hard Times.”

Hard times, indeed. But hope? Consider this for example:

On the day that the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament left New York on the final leg of its walk across the continent from Los Angeles to Washington, 2.2 million people turned out in the streets of New York. Not to cheer them, but the Mets, the home team that had just won the World Series. The peace march, having hoped to draw thousands and end up in Washington with a million, ended up instead, on Nov. 15, with perhaps 10 to 15 thousand. Compared to the Mets, they passed unnoticed through the Big Apple in late October and lost money on it besides, expenses having outstripped fund-raising efforts once there.

Questions of planning and logistics aside, is this not an indicator that there is more to be worried about than hopeful with the American peace movement? To say nothing about the tally of nuclear weapons stored around the planet--minutes aways from their targets, seconds away from computer glitches? Isn’t the so-called peace movement just the last gasp of the already converted?

Not to Loeb. On a recent visit from Seattle to to his boyhood Los Angeles, Loeb, 34, described what he sees as nothing short of a shift that has taken place in the country regarding nuclear weapons and the arms race, with a further shift on the way.

A former editor of the late Liberation magazine, he is a writer and lectures on college campuses on nuclear issues. His first book, “Nuclear Culture: Living and Working at the World’s Largest Atomic Complex,” described life around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state--a place that houses a nuclear first cousin to the Soviet Union’s reactor at Chernobyl--was published in 1982 by Putnam. It was not promoted and, as the result of a lawsuit by two workers at the plant who were unhappy with their portrayals in the book, was soon pulled. The lawsuit settled, the book was, by the most disconcerting of coincidences, re-published, by New Society, last April. The disastrous accident at Chernobyl happened the following month. By then Loeb was just finishing up his book on the peace movement.

Loeb did not write about the march, since it happened after his book was drafted. But he warns against using “people in the streets” as a measure of the existence and effectiveness of a movement in the ‘80s, or the Reagan era, which is how he describes the time boundaries of his book. The people are not in the streets, he said. Nor should anyone necessarily try to measure the peace movement on college campuses. This is not a movement that mirrors the anti-Vietnam war movement, he said. More than anyplace else, it will be found in churches and synagogues.

Considering the depth of the issue, and the abstract, out-of-sight and outside-the-daily-business-of-life nature of the threat, that is not surprising. And as he has written of the people involved in this movement, Loeb has endlessly explored the individual thought processes and moral and philosophical frameworks that have led ordinary people, whom he calls a “ordinary heroes” to make this issue their issue.

Their involvement comes out of a moral context, he has found, out of a sense of being part of something larger than one’s self. Ultimately, he said, “the shift of individuals or communities to broader concerns must remain in some sense a mystery,” one which those involved often inadequately describe as “I had no other choice.”

“Hope in Hard Times” chronicles the involvement of ordinary people in the peace movement in various locations around the country, including Los Angeles.

He spent four years criss-crossing the country going to meetings in churches and synagogues, attending demonstrations, marches and witnessing showdowns that resulted in acts of civil disobedience, visiting classrooms in colleges and primary schools. In the process he singled out individual actions and groups, and within them narrowed his focus on certain individuals.

That there were so many actions, groups and ordinary people to choose from is one indicator of the shift Loeb is talking about. By now the numbers of people involved to some extent in the peace movement reach the hundreds of thousands, he said. SANE’s national membership (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) has passed 100,000. And while the movement is not confined to college campuses, it is certainly there. In 1981 there were 50 college peace groups. Today the United Campuses Against Nuclear War has groups on 600 campuses in the United States and Canada.

The 1984-1985 edition of the L.A. Peace Directory lists 104 organizations in the greater Los Angeles area--groups whose orientations run the gamut from narrow, specific political action to deep yet broad, and sometimes vague, forms of spiritual consciousness-raising and changing.

And to those who would ask, if there are so many involved and so much going on, how come they have not been more effective, Loeb’s answer is a reminder:

In determining the movement’s effectiveness, he said, it is important to remember to ask, “Where were we in 1980? What was going on then regarding a dialogue? We take the shift for granted, saying ‘Oh, yes, there’s a peace movement.’ I look at that shift between then and now as a shift from no dialogue to the beginnings of a dialogue.”

Politically, he said, there is some scattered impact of the shift that can be measured, and he cited several Congressional campaigns where the arms race was an issue, among them Sen. Alan Cranston’s Senate campaign. The atmosphere in Congress is now such, as a result of the shift, he said, that “at least they draw some lines. They don’t give Ronald Reagan everything he wants.”

But such measures are not the most important ones to him, he said. “The real question is ‘are these issues going to be dealt with by the citizens or by the Henry Kissingers?’ ”

And that is the shift he sees that gives him hope.

Churches, Civic Groups

“Back in 1980 it would have been unthinkable that the Campfire Girls, the PTAs, Rotary Clubs would have been discussing these issues,” writing letters, circulating and signing petitions, taking actions. Nor, he said, would it have been likely to see the Catholic and Methodist bishops and other religious bodies, drafting the statements that have since been produced on the moral merits of the issue.

Now, while people may question the effect or appropriateness of it, they take it for granted that for such groups to concern themselves with such issues is a common occurence, he said. It is not that all those concerned are of a mind. The important point to him is that the debate has started.

And if there is one incident in the book that stands out to him as illustrative of what is going on in this country, it is a meeting of the Congaree Presbytery in Winnsboro, S.C., in October, 1983.

The Congaree Presbytery is a ruling body of 23 Presbyterian congregations with a combined membership of 13,000. Earlier, the Presbyterian church had produced a national statement on war in a nuclear age and the right of a local peacemaking committee to exist. In Columbia, S.C., Carol Doty, a nurse-practitioner, began a Presbyterian peacemaking group, distributed educational materials, held a peace fair attended by 250 people and encouraged the formation of subsidiary groups in each congregation.

Her own congregation, Eastminster, took her on. Certain members, who otherwise would have ignored the national document, now called it inflammatory, and took the position that church members had no business interfering with government leaders. To such members, the religious mandate to be peacemakers extended only to the self, family and church and not to interfering with the president or world leaders.

The conflict that started in Eastminster resulted in motions brought before an ordinary business meeting of the elders and ministers of the Congaree Presbytery to be placed on the agenda and settled there. And there, amid budget reports, housekeeping details and Roberts Rules of Order, they debated whether the fate of the earth was any of their business.

Ultimately, after months-long debates and discussions brought back to the local congregations, it was decided that the peace groups are here to stay. More important to Loeb than the decision was the debate. He wrote:

“Whatever their theology, churches paralleled other ordinary institutions in their ability to maintain or breach the prevailing silence in which the arms race continued. Debates like (this) embodied this choice. The question was how responsibility got played out among those who filled the pews.”

The shift is a start, and it is taking a circuitous route with sidestepping and backtracking, he said. There is burnout, for some, although he said when he was ready to write after his four years of research, he called people he had interviewed and found most of them still actively involved.

His optimism about the peace movement is not unqualified:

--There is the mistake of adopting too narrow a focus, and placing all of one’s energy on it--such as the 1950s opposition to above-ground testing--only to see the goal achieved and the arms race continue unchecked.

--And the danger of making the issue so lofty and esoteric that much of the populace is either put off by a perceived moral arrogance on the part of the committed or left untouched because the concerns of daily life are too overwhelming and no one has made the connection between those concerns and the cost of the arms race.

--And of course, there is the tendency to turn inward, to form protective enclaves among the already converted, where people feel isolated from and superior to the general populace and hope that the drafting of one last “magic leaflet or speech will make everything fall in to line.”

Everything is not falling into line, but everything is shifting, Loeb is convinced.

“I see the peace movement as a major historical force. At what stage is its development? Probably early. I see it at the point of the early abolitionists when there weren’t that many.”

It will take more people and more time--if there is world enough and time.

“OK, there are certainly people whose minds won’t ever change. Certain people were against the British pulling out of India, the French pulling out of Algeria. But when there are enough, you go ahead anyhow.”