The Road to Peace : Veteran Anti-War Activists to Hit the Trail Once More in March to Washington

Miriam Newman, who celebrated her 63rd birthday the other day, plans to start out March 1 on a long walk.

With a couple of thousand other people, she intends to march clear across the country, from Los Angeles to Washington, about 3,250 miles.

The occasion is the “Great American Peace March” and the purpose, Newman said, is to “persuade the governments of the world to stop preparing for war.”

Newman said she and other participants--including about 30 from the South Bay--expect more than a million people to eventually join a miles-long column that will wind into the nation’s capital in mid-November.

Peace Network

A retired Social Security worker, Newman is one of a handful of South Bay anti-war activists who work to keep the peace movement’s fires burning. In 1984, they banded together in the South Bay Peace Network, a loose-knit coalition of about 25 local, state and national groups.

They represent senior citizens, feminists, environmentalists, anti-hunger and civil rights organizations, educators, aerospace engineers, political clubs, church groups and other organizations with special interests.

Each group has its own social, economic or political agenda but all share a concern over the threat of nuclear war. Most express resentment over the nation’s huge expenditures for military defense.

“There is so much money going for waste and destruction these days,” said Anne Trojan, a 70-year-old Hawthorne member of the Gray Panthers, which is affiliated with the network. “As a result, the elderly must live in fear because there’s nothing left for things like health and housing and keeping the cost of utilities down.”

Activists say the South Bay network has up to 2,000 members, but they acknowledge that a much smaller number of regulars--their own estimates range from 30 to 200--carry on the basic chores of the coalition.

For key leaders, that means endless hours of attending meetings, organizing petition drives, preparing newsletters, keeping in touch with current members and recruiting new people to replace those who drift away, said Jon Mercant, a 35-year-old Redondo Beach attorney who helped organize the network.

He said most of the recruiting is done through personal contacts and newspaper ads and at special meetings arranged to hear discussions of current issues, such as the nuclear freeze, apartheid in South Africa and U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

Sanctuary Movement

The sanctuary movement, which seeks to shelter illegal immigrants from Central America, generally gets the biggest turnouts at church-affiliated gatherings, Mercant said.

“We believe that all of these things are related to the central issue of preventing a nuclear war,” he said. “A conflict in some small country could be the deadly connection that triggers a fatal confrontation between the superpowers.”

Newman was among half a dozen South Bay activists who joined a monthlong demonstration at the Nevada underground nuclear test site in November. The project, which attracted activists from throughout Southern California, was staged to call attention to demands for a bilateral nuclear weapons freeze before the Reagan-Gorbachev conference in Geneva.

“If we really believe in something, we have to put our bodies where they can do the most good,” said Newman, who lives in Redondo Beach. “I felt it was important for me to join with others in making a statement against continued testing of these weapons.”

Newman reasons that an end to testing would stop the development of bigger and more sophisticated weapons, leaving existing weapons to grow old and unreliable--and thus, she believes, less likely to be used.

She said worries about atmospheric testing in the early 1960s prompted her to become involved in the peace movement. “I’d just had my third child,” she said, “and there were all these articles saying that strontium 90 (from nuclear fallout) was getting into the food chain and preparing a terrible legacy for future generations.”

Anti-War Campaigners

Like Newman, most of the South Bay activists are veterans of campaigns dating back to the heyday of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and earlier. And, inevitably, they are older.

“When I go to a meeting now and look around, I see that most of the people are at least as old as I am,” said Jay Johnson, a 43-year-old Rancho Palos Verdes clothing salesman and a longtime activist in Democratic and peace politics. “We’ve also turned into mostly middle-class, mainstream types.”

To attract more young people to the movement, the network puts up posters in libraries and schools, offers speakers for meetings of youth groups and participates in community fairs. One of the network organizations, the South Bay Interfaith Peace Committee, is sponsoring a World Peace Essay Contest in which grade-school children are asked to reflect on the meaning of war.

“We must do everything we can to reach the young children,” said Ed Hummel, a 57-year-old court mediator who works with the interfaith committee. “It’s primarily their future that’s at stake.”

Saw Devastation

Hummel, of Rancho Palos Verdes, traces his involvement in the peace movement back to postwar Germany, where he served in the U.S. Army occupying that country.

“The devastation I saw everywhere made a lasting impression on me,” he said. “But later I came to realize that even such terrible destruction pales in the imagination when we try to think of what a nuclear war would bring to the world.”

Johnson said network organizations are active on college campuses, but face an uphill battle against the changed mood of many young people.

“In the 1960s, the issues hit young people at a very personal level,” he said. “Students were galvanized by the threat of being drafted into a war in Vietnam that they didn’t believe in.”

Anti-War Rallies

Johnson recalled participating in giant anti-war rallies in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but when the Nixon Administration halted the draft in the early 1970s, he said, “the crowds evaporated overnight.”

On campuses now, Johnson said, “the kids are preoccupied with getting a job, buying a home and raising a family. It’s the flip side of ‘60s, when the big thing was to smoke pot, drop out of society and get into communal living.”

But the “pendulum of social consciousness” is swinging back, Johnson said, and this time the peace movement will be camped squarely in the middle of the American mainstream, instead of at the fringes.

He cited state Assemblyman Tom Hayden as one example of a former anti-war radical who, Johnson said, decided that he could work more effectively as a member of the Establishment.

More Sophisticated

“The vast majority of our work is being done within the system,” Johnson said. “We have become much more sophisticated and realistic, and we have learned the pressure points of society.”

Among the pressure points, he said, are the groups that feel their special interests are being frustrated or threatened by a continuing arms race, along with the legislators who represent them.

Johnson, who helped direct campaigns of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, former Sen. John Tunney, Hayden, U.S. Rep. George E. Brown Jr. and other Democrats, said his primary goal is to “run an effective political movement in the South Bay” that will elect more legislators sympathetic to anti-war goals.

Mercant, the attorney, is among the youngest of the local peace activists, although his involvement goes back to his grade-school years when he distributed anti-war bumper stickers for his father.

He agrees with Johnson that a new goal of the peace movement is to appeal to middle-class interests in war-and-peace issues, rather than to evoke endlessly the images of doomsday in hopes of frightening humanity away from the abyss.

‘Not Pacifism’

“My approach is not pacifism or anything like that,” he said. “I’m not saying we should throw away our weapons and hope for the best. It would be great if we could have Utopia now, but we have to be realistic.”

What the armaments issue comes down to, he said, is that it does not make good economic sense to continue making expensive weapons that nobody intends to use. “They just sit there and rot and then we have to spend more money to dispose of them,” he said.

Mercant, whose legal specialty is corporate finance and planning, said the United States should strike a bargain with the Soviets on a nuclear freeze and then begin diverting defense money into domestic needs.

“One of the myths we have to address is that defense spending bolsters the economy,” he said. “The fact is that the same amount of money would create from two to four times as many jobs if we spent it on things the society really needs, like better transportation, education, housing and health care.”

Gaining Respectability

Mercant said he sees the anti-war movement gaining respectability--and thus more effectiveness--through its new focus on “practical, workable solutions” to the perils and dilemmas of the nuclear age.

“We must put the old ban-the-bomb rhetoric behind us,” he said.

Most of the activists interviewed readily acknowledged that the passage of time has cooled their passions for the radical causes of their youth. For example, Johnson chuckles over the long-ago days when he was active in leftist groups.

“I couldn’t say now that we should do away with the capitalist system or things like that,” he said. “I like making money and I’m pretty good at it.”

But, he added, “I do feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to people who are being hurt by the system. I can’t live my life just for my personal benefit. I must be involved in trying to make life better--and safer--for everyone on this planet.”