Abstract
The attainment of mass public support and a favorable response from political institutions has always been a primary challenge for oppositional social movements. As the nuclear freeze movement took shape in 1979 and 1980, its proponents developed its structure and strategy through an institutional approach. Ballot initiatives, educational outreach, and advertising were conventional strategies that had—freeze organizers anticipated—a solid potential to capture public interest. As such, a variety of anti-nuclear organizations and campaigns devoted their energies to mobilizing public opinion through these strategies. Mobilizing favorable public opinion and attracting institutional support for the nuclear freeze proposal were key aims of this polite movement, whose emphasis on political realism and liberal reform contrasted with the pacifist approach of many traditional peace groups.
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Notes
Douglas C. Waller, Congress and the Nuclear Freeze: An Inside Look at the Politics of a Mass Movement (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 37.
Noteworthy studies on these organizations include Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
and Milton S. Katz, Ban the Bomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1957–1985 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986).
John Lofland, Polite Protesters: The American Peace Movement of the 1980s (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 7.
This narrative is useful in its understanding of the relationship between the freeze movement, mainstream media, and political institutions and how this relationship explains the failure of the movement to directly influence government policy. Examples of this approach include J. Michael Hogan, The Nuclear Freeze Campaign: Rhetoric and Foreign Policy in the Telepolitical Age (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994);
Andrew Rojecki, Silencing the Opposition: Antinuclear Movements and the Media in the Cold War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999);
David S. Meyer, “Peace Movement Demobilization: The Fading of the Nuclear Freeze,” in Peace Action in the Eighties: Social Science Perspectives, ed. John Lofland and Sam Marullo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 53–71;
Charles Chatfield, The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism (New York: Twayne, 1992), Chapter 7;
and Thomas R. Rochon, “Three Faces of the Freeze: Arenas of Success and Failure,” in Coalitions & Political Movements: The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze, ed. Thomas R. Rochon and David S. Meyer (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 1997), 168–77.
Quoted in Gerri Hirshey, “Women and Children First…” Family Circle, May 18, 1982, 6, 70–71.
Helen Caldicott, A Passionate Life (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House, 1996), 343.
See John Walsh, “Nuclear Freeze Candidates Claim Mandate,” Science 218, no. 4574 (1982), 776.
This continued a tradition of similarly styled citizen-led campaigns that erupted in the 1970s, often on environmental issues. For more detailed discussions, see Lettie Wenner and Manfred Wenner, “Nuclear Policy and Public Participation,” American Behavioral Scientist 22, no. 2 (1978), 282–287;
and David D. Schmidt, Citizen Lawmakers: The Ballot Initiative Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), Chapters 4 and 7.
The most nuanced examination of the process of ballot initiatives, although it does not discuss the nuclear freeze initiatives of the 1980s, is Richard Ellis, Democratic Delusions: The Initiative Process in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).
David S. Meyer, A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics (New York: Praeger, 1990), 112.
Kehler interview; Pam Solo, From Protest to Policy: Beyond the Freeze to Common Security (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988), 24; and Randall Forsberg, interview for WGBH (Boston), March 3, 1988, WGBH Media Library and Archives, http://openvault.wgbh.org (accessed Feb. 16, 2011).
Lawrence S. Wittner, Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 77.
Tom Collins to David Cortright, September 23, 1982, SANE Records, Series G, Box 65, Folder 1. The $36 million figure is in 2003 US dollars. See Mal Warwick, Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 40.
David S. Meyer, “Institutionalizing Dissent: The United States Structure of Political Opportunity and the End of the Nuclear Freeze Movement,” Sociological Forum 8, no. 2 (1993), 159.
Pamela Oliver and Gerald Marwell, “Mobilizing Technologies for Collective Action,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and Carol Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 259.
On these differences in organizational style in the 1980s, see Lofland, Polite Protesters, esp. 144–153. On professionalism and bureaucracy in social movement organizations, see Robert Kleidman, “Volunteer Activism and Professionalism in Social Movement Organizations,” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (1994), 257–76.
As Theda Skocpol argues, the massive changes in civic and political engagement in the 1970s and 1980s meant that new models of interest and advocacy groups were being developed. See Theda Skocpol, “Advocates without Members: The Recent Transformation of American Civic Life,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy, ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 487–98.
WAND developed this new style fairly consistently from 1986 onward, although its institutionalization of political strategy had been developed from 1982. See Melissa Haussman, “From Women’s Survival to New Directions: WAND and Anti-Militarism,” in Teamsters and Turtles?: U.S. Progressive Political Movements in the 21st Century, ed. John Berg (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 113–20. Former national board member Bobbie Wrenn Banks also argues that toward the end of the 1980s, WAND began to successfully organize in a much more mainstream style; its efforts in the early to mid-1980s, by contrast, were very grassroots in nature, even at the level of the national body. Interview by the author, October 28, 2011, by telephone.
See Lawrence S. Wittner, “A Short History of Peace Action,” in Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Glen Harold Stassen and Lawrence S. Wittner (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 12.
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Harvey, K. (2014). Building a Mainstream Movement: Advertising, Publicity, and Image. In: American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432841_3
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