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As late as spring 1971, when radical activists organized the Mayday direct action against the Vietnam War, it remained possible to believe—without too much self-delusion—that the United States was on the verge of a revolution and “the System” was nearing collapse. What collapsed instead, with stunning speed, was any sense that a grand transformation of the existing political and economic order was possible. “I don’t know whether it happened in 1969 or 1972, but somewhere along the line the 1960s ended and the 1970s began,” mused Roberta Lynch, a longtime feminist and left-labor organizer, in 1977. “When the activists of the ’60s perceived that the system was not infinitely elastic and that there was often massive indifference to their goals, naiveté gave way to cynicism.”¹

To be sure, small insurrectionary pockets remained active across the decade of the 1970s, still trumpeting the goal of revolution; but the ways they pursued it only confirmed—and increased—their political isolation. The remnants of the Weather Underground continued to bomb corporate and military targets, using “Hard Times Are Fighting Times” as the slogan for their 1976 organizing conference, and groups including the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the May 19 Communist Organization embraced the idea of armed struggle, adopting tactics like kidnapping and bank robbery and the goal of overthrowing the government by force. As they claimed the mantle of revolution, these groups—and their unarmed counterparts in the “party-building” left of the 1970s and 1980s, that squabbling world of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist grouplets, shrill and dreary in tone and obsessed with refining a correct political line—mostly just discredited it for everyone else.²

The massive economic crisis that began in 1973, combining deep recession with steep inflation, undercut even middle-class activists’ ability to devote most or all of their energies to organizing: it was simply no longer possible, as it had been throughout the sixties, to comfortably skate by with minimal income. Many drifted away from organizing altogether to raise a family, pursue a career, or continue their education. Some of these people shifted rightward in their political views, but more simply scaled back or ceased political action. “The Los Angeles Times recently cited the figure of 2 to 3 million erstwhile activists who retain their radical allegiance, though they may lack a cause to which they can pledge it,” wrote onetime Weather Underground militant and Ramparts editor Bo Burlingham in 1976. “Even if the numbers are accurate, I told myself, there is a difference between 3 million former activists with radical notions, and radical activity. The former is just a statistic; the latter is a political force. And political force, at least for most of my friends and myself, hasn’t been a compelling preoccupation in the last couple of years.”³

The end of the Vietnam War demobilized the ranks of protesters and activists as surely as it did the ranks of the armed forces. The last US troops pulled out in 1973, and the war was finally over in 1975, when the North Vietnamese overtook the capital of South Vietnam. Just ten days after the fall of Saigon, the War Resisters League and other groups organized a celebration in New York’s Central Park, featuring performances by such movement luminaries as Pete Seeger and Odetta; some 50,000 people attended. But however much grassroots activism had hastened the conflict’s end, too many people had died—combatants and civilians, Americans and Vietnamese—to make it feel like the movement had prevailed in any meaningful way, and the jubilation was tinged with melancholy. “I’d say we won,” reflected WRL organizer Ed Hedemann in a 1999 interview, “but not in the cleanest, nicest, best sense, because it just wasn’t a simple victory. There was a lot of pain and agony.”⁴

For those who had hoped for a more profound change in the existing order, there was disappointment, too, at the movement’s lost momentum, a realization that a time of retrenchment was setting in. “There was a tremendous sense of not only relief that the war was ending but also [pride] that we had made some contribution to ending it,” remembered veteran organizer Leslie Cagan. “But there was also a tremendous frustration: seeing how quickly any kind of antiwar movement collapsed, disappeared, just wasn’t there any more … Somehow we weren’t able to translate it into an ongoing movement beyond the crisis of the war.”⁵

The temptation was to look inward when searching for the causes of this collapse—to blame infighting, bad strategic decisions, flawed organizational structures, rhetorical excesses, or any of the other faults that the movements of the sixties might have had. But a series of dramatic revelations across the decade of the 1970s showed that the government had also very actively done its part to bring the movements down. A small group of antiwar activists who suspected their movements were being infiltrated broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania in March of 1971, stealing all the files. The documents they released to the press revealed a huge network of paid informants and a concerted plan, in the FBI’s words, to “enhance the paranoia endemic in [activist] circles.” Over the next few years, Congressional hearings, journalistic investigations, and activist lawsuits filled out these disclosures, revealing vast FBI efforts under its COINTELPRO program to “expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activists of the ‘New Left’ by counterintelligence methods,” to quote one memo from the Bureau. These and similar inquiries also uncovered a massive and illegal parallel program of domestic surveillance and infiltration by the CIA known as MH/CHAOS.⁶

How much of the left’s shrinkage was due to its own failings, or to changing political winds, and how much to government disruption? It would never be possible to say. Certainly the FBI operations against black movements in the 1960s had been especially vicious and far-reaching, with J. Edgar Hoover naming them “hate groups” across the board, targeting them for systematic disruption, and going so far as to sanction the murder of black leaders. The FBI notoriously tried to hound Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself, and helped the Chicago police assassinate nineteen-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in a middle-of-the-night 1969 raid, supplying the police with a map showing where Hampton would be sleeping and having an informant drug him with secobarbital to ensure he wouldn’t wake up before being shot point-blank in the head. Files released in 2012 by the FBI in response to a lawsuit by scholar Seth Rosenfeld strongly suggest that the man who first supplied guns to the Panthers, Bay Area radical Richard Aoki, was a longtime FBI informant. But the disclosure raised as many questions as it answered: Was it Aoki’s idea to arm the Panthers, or the FBI’s? Was the FBI guiding Aoki’s actions, or was he merely providing them with reports? Might the Panthers have embraced armed self-defense anyway, even without the initial arsenal provided by Aoki? Barring some huge new release of documents from the FBI, no one will likely ever know.⁷

Many of the efforts to investigate grassroots activists, though, were stunningly inept. Despite all its illegal wiretaps and hundreds of break-ins to activist homes and offices, the FBI never tracked down the peace activists who had burgled its offices in 1971, even after these activists directly thumbed their noses at the Bureau. (While the investigation was in its most intense phase, burglary ringleader William Davidon helped organize a “Your FBI in Action” street fair in his Philadelphia neighborhood, where he posed with a large cut-out of Hoover and local children assembled puzzles with photos of the FBI agents assigned to the case.) Nor did the FBI ever solve any of the dozens of Weather Underground bombing cases, though there may of course have been reasons why they didn’t want to solve those. Much of the so-called intelligence the FBI gathered through its vast network of informants was routine information with no special strategic value. Overall, though, COINTELPRO and MH/CHAOS played a significant role in amplifying divisions within movements—especially black radical movements, which were targeted the most heavily, followed by the militant wings of other movements of color, including the American Indian Movement, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. Government operatives also clearly pushed radicals to adopt more extreme tactics and rhetoric than they would have without paid provocateurs within their midst, which in turn marginalized and destabilized their movements.⁸

Learning about the extent of this political sabotage, however, didn’t make dealing with the diminished present any easier. The alternative press was filled with the introspective writings of activists trying to adjust to the changed reality. In the radical feminist newspaper off our backs, organizer Carol Anne Douglas entitled her 1977 reflections, “What If the Revolution Isn’t Tomorrow?” Activists, she wrote, “need to appreciate that resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the corner … The struggle is going to take all of our lives, not just a few exciting, hectic years.”⁹

Many American radicals responded to the new political climate by focusing on the small, on what affected them immediately: the local and the particular, single issues, questions of identity, politics on a manageable scale. This tendency built upon the critique of the mass—and the move toward affinity groups, collectives, and communes—that had shaped activism in the earliest years of the 1970s. It also reflected the feminist embrace of the small group, as a way of safeguarding radical ideals of participation, egalitarianism, and self-expression. The identity-politics exhortation to “organize around your own oppression” and the emerging logic of radical ecology, with its small-is-beautiful search for sustainability, further reinforced radicals’ inclination to pursue their broadly transformative goals on a modest and manageable scale.

The catch-phrase for this approach, now something of a cliché, was “think globally, act locally.” The slogan was coined by the scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer René Dubos, on the occasion of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. By it, Dubos meant to convey that uniform solutions to global environmental problems were unworkable; policymakers needed to take the cultural and ecological characteristics of distinct locales into account. But as the phrase gained in popularity, adorning bumper stickers and buttons or working its way into newsletters and speeches, its meanings multiplied, as so often happens. To some activists in groups like Citizen Action (founded in 1979), it was a call to neighborhood organizing, canvassing door-to-door for financial and political support (a technique first developed in the early 1970s). Other activists understood the slogan as advocating radical municipalism: taking over the local government in sympathetic cities, as the Progressive Coalition did in Burlington, Vermont in 1980, electing socialist Bernie Sanders as mayor the next year. For still others, the exhortation to think globally and act locally implied using community organizing to grapple with far-reaching problems that had arrived in their backyards, as did, for example, the member organizations of the Citizens’ Clearinghouse on Hazardous Wastes, founded in 1981.¹⁰

Substantial numbers of former radicals began to work inside or alongside the institutions of power during this period. A significant number of African-American organizers, for example, shifted to the mainstream electoral arena. While blacks remained dramatically underrepresented in elective offices, the number of black elected officials tripled between 1969 and 1977.¹¹ Other activists chose to ally themselves with large liberal organizations, pursuing a species of legislative and electoral politics that tied their fate to the simultaneously declining and rightward-drifting Democratic Party. These groups included the National Organization for Women, which devoted much of its energies throughout the 1970s and early 1980s in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution; the National Gay Task Force, founded in 1973 (and later renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force), which worked to abolish sodomy laws, establish legal protections for gays and lesbians, and support gay-friendly candidates; and environmental organizations such as the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, which combined lobbying with litigation to promote an environmental agenda. Circumscribed though their political vision might have been from a radical perspective, many of these organizations thrived in the seventies and eighties, expanding their membership, mastering the art of direct-mail fundraising, and honing their Beltway-insider skills.

Other progressives established alternative educational institutions, from independent Chicano colleges on the West Coast to a school for Marxist education in New York City. Many moved into the academy, where from within established colleges and universities they promoted ethnic and women’s studies: roughly 600 college and universities offered black studies courses by 1972; five years later, when the National Women’s Studies Association was created, there were 276 women’s studies programs in the country.

But above all, the sense of hunkering down for the long haul prompted many to turn their energies toward building alternative, community-based, and counter-institutions, acting to create change at a more modest scale in their immediate surroundings. Environmentalists opened local ecology centers, set up recycling projects, and organized food cooperatives, some of which still exist to this day, such as the Park Slope Food Coop (founded in 1973). Feminists, and especially lesbian-feminists, built a nationwide network of cultural institutions including women’s cafes and bookstores and events like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which ran annually from 1976 to 2015; they also created battered women’s shelters, feminist health clinics, and self-defense classes with a feminist bent. The period from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s could be called the age of progressive institution-building: it saw the founding of long-lived, influential infrastructure, such as a movement-oriented advertising agency (the Public Media Center, 1974–2009), a radical philanthropic network (the Funding Exchange, operating between 1979–2013), a training institute for activists of color (the Center for Third World Organizing, founded in 1980), and an annual gathering of left intellectuals (the Socialist Scholars Conference, founded in 1983, renamed the Left Forum in 2005).¹²

A whole wave of activists, particularly from the identity-based movements, focused on the production and distribution of alternative media during this period. “There was this passion for getting information out,” recalled Carol Seajay, one of the founders of the Feminist Bookstore Network and the longtime publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, which remained in operation until 2000. Most of the underground papers of the sixties had died by the mid seventies, but new publications took their place—along with new publishing houses, and new bookstores to disseminate it all. A certain number of these media institutions were left or broadly radical: Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco and Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica (both founded in 1971; Midnight Special closed in 2004); Mother Jones magazine and the socialist weekly In These Times (both founded in 1976); the Center for Investigative Reporting (founded in 1977); the book publishers South End Press (1977–2014) and New Society Publishers (founded in 1982). But the biggest areas of growth were within the identity-based subcultures, most notably the feminist and gay movements. By 1976, there were enough gay newspapers to hold a gay press convention: staff members from nine East Coast papers, with a combined circulation of over 100,000, gathered at the offices of Gay Community News (1973–1992) in Boston to discuss common concerns. Later that year, more than 125 women—representing eighty feminist bookstores, periodicals, and publishing houses—gathered at a Camp Fire Girls Camp in Omaha, Nebraska for the first Women in Print Conference; by that point, there were an estimated 150 feminist presses and periodicals in existence.¹³

These institutions prided themselves on their independence, and saw their mission as explicitly political. “Control of our own voices and words is just as important as control of our bodies,” explained June Arnold, co-founder of the feminist publishing house Daughters, Inc., in 1976. Ed Hermance, the manager of Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, which opened in 1973 as one of the country’s first gay bookstores, offered a similar rationale. “When the store first opened, there were fewer than 100 titles that anybody could identify that might possibly be of interest to gays and lesbians,” he recalled. “The store was just about the only public space that people could go to. That’s what it did, was be a public space for lesbians and gay men.”¹⁴

Much about the radical/progressive political landscape in the United States was slowly but decisively shifting in this period of activist introspection. Movements might be smaller and weaker than they had been a decade earlier, but there were more of them, speaking in a greater array of voices. The idea of a single, unitary “left” was always more myth than reality, but that myth was becoming increasingly out of line with reality on the ground. First and foremost, the radical identity-based movements were here to stay; with the late sixties’ flush of street militancy behind them, some were turned inward, focused on self-exploration and cultural work, but they would remain fiercely committed to autonomy and self-representation. Issue-based movements and activist projects multiplied alongside them. “We’ve had a tremendous increase in both the number of demonstrations and the spectrum of issues,” the director of Washington, DC’s Mayoral Command Center noted in 1978. Where a handful of large mobilizations might have taken place in the nation’s capital in any given year a decade or so before, now there was a constant stream of protests, by groups that, in the Washington Post’s lively tally, included “farmers, American Indians, religious fundamentalists, Marxists, Maoists, anarchists, anti-abortionists, pro-abortionists, women’s libbers, anti–women’s libbers, gays, senior citizens, marijuana advocates [and] ban-the-bombers.”¹⁵

Not everyone on the left celebrated this growing diversity of causes and voices, feeling that some sense of shared political purpose had been lost amid the new radical cacophony. Journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote with sadness of “the sense of isolation that pervades the American left since the disappearance of a cohesive movement sensibility,” in a 1978 essay entitled, “What to Do Till the Movement Arrives.” He continued, “Some important social movements built around specific issues—minority rights, nuclear power, and sexual liberation—have deepened in recent years, but by and large they exclude those who deviate from the narrow genetic, preferential, or topical definitions of the movements, and provide little day-to-day work for … activists of a leftist or socialist cast.” This characterization of the new movements as “narrow,” and the related claim that they were fragmenting rather than augmenting the larger radical project, would be a recurring refrain for the next forty years. “The left”—the broad more-or-less socialist political tendency that saw economic relations as fundamental—might now be only one radical subculture among many, and one whose appeal was dwindling rather than expanding, but it would too often continue to view itself as broader and more universal than all the rest. (“When many people think of leftists,” quipped Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza in a 2014 interview with journalist Julia Wong, “they think of white men selling newspapers who are going to tell you what you should think and how you should make revolution happen now.”)¹⁶

There were interesting efforts to bridge the traditional left and what some were now calling the “new social movements,” including the journal Socialist Revolution (founded in 1970, renamed Socialist Review in 1978, folded in 2006) and the multi-issue New American Movement (founded in 1971), which merged with another left formation in 1982 to create Democratic Socialists of America, but none of these had wide impact or electrified a large following. That part of the left that called itself “the left” too often preferred to stay stubbornly unreconstructed, particularly in regard to gender. Well into the new millennium, many institutions of the socialist left, from conferences to publishing houses, remained overwhelmingly male-dominated, lagging far behind mainstream society. This dramatic underrepresentation of women—over decades in which women organizers, and the theory and practice of identity politics, were steadily reshaping much of the radical activist landscape—only served to give an anachronistic feel to certain segments of the socialist left and limit their relevance to movements on the ground. There was a nice irony in the fact that the biggest revival for socialist ideas after the sixties came through the Occupy movement of 2011, whose organizing practices were profoundly shaped by feminism and anarchism: political traditions are, after all, often renewed from the outside.¹⁷

And indeed, the closer one looks at the more radical of the “single-issue” movements of the early 1970s onward, the less single-minded or narrow they appear. Some or even many of the people who attended a given movement’s mass rallies or marches might be interested only in the issue at hand, but the core organizers invariably had a broader vision and critique. Anti-nuclear activists, for instance, weren’t simply concerned with the health and safety risks posed by nuclear power plants; they viewed the push toward nuclear power as an outgrowth of a toxic ideology of “progress” and “growth”—one which the traditional left too often shared. The committed organizers who most shaped the new wave of movements tended, moreover, to migrate from one movement to the next, creating deep political, tactical, and strategic continuities between what superficially appeared as disconnected issue-oriented campaigns.

The charges of narrowness and fragmentation were lodged most frequently against the identity-based movements. But during this same period, some were laying the foundation for a new critical approach to structures of power, one that focused heavily on the relations between different systems of domination and in the process fundamentally challenged older views of what was “universal” and what was “particular.” The group most often credited with coining the phrase “identity politics,” the Boston-based black lesbian and feminist Combahee River Collective (founded in 1974) paved the way. The collective was anchored by the writer and activist Barbara Smith, whose work throughout the 1980s as publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press would be enormously influential, and her twin sister Beverly, a public health specialist who had been part of the early staff of Ms. magazine. It also included acclaimed poets Audre Lorde and Cheryl Clarke within its shifting membership, as well as the writer and political activist Chirlane McCray, who became the first lady of New York City in 2014. The Smith sisters had both been active in CORE in Cleveland during the 1960s, and the civil rights movement had a deep influence on both their theoretical and organizing work. “I always say that’s the movement that shaped my politics, because it was the first movement I was involved in, but also because of the values of the civil rights movement, particularly the nonviolence,” Barbara Smith recalled in a 2016 interview. That embrace of the civil rights tradition was one factor that set her and her collaborators apart from many black nationalist contemporaries in the seventies; gender politics divided them even more dramatically. “Black women were supposed to walk seven steps behind and have babies for the nation,” Smith explained. “I’m not saying that everybody who was a black nationalist had those reductive, misogynistic views of women, but there was enough that it definitely affected people like me.”¹⁸

Combahee tackled an array of local organizing projects that involved questions of race, gender, and sexuality, such as mobilizing support for Kenneth Edelin, a black doctor who was charged and convicted of manslaughter after performing a legal abortion, and defending Ella Mae Ellison, a black woman who was falsely convicted of first-degree murder of a police officer. They organized a major feminist response to a series of murders of black women in Boston that had been largely ignored by authorities and the mainstream media. Some black community leaders—male leaders—had viewed the murders in strictly racial terms and suggested that women should protect themselves by only going out accompanied by male companions. “It’s true that the victims were all Black and that Black people have always been targets of racist violence in this society, but they were also all women,” explained a pamphlet that the Combahee Collective produced about the murders. “Our sisters died because they were women just as surely as they died because they were Black.” The pamphlet, originally entitled “Six Black Women, Why Did They Die?” offered self-protection tips and lists of both organizing projects and resources for support, and went into printing after printing as the number of murders grew; according to Barbara Smith, who drafted the initial text, the collective distributed some 40,000 copies.¹⁹

It was the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 manifesto, though, that had the greatest and most lasting political impact. “We believe that the most profound and potentially the most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,” the Combahee River Collective statement read. “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.” This analysis offered a profound shift in perspective. Rather than viewing those, like black lesbians, who simultaneously experienced multiple forms of oppression as representing a narrow constituency, as classic interest-group politics might do, the collective argued that their unique vantage point gave them a broader, deeper, and more nuanced view of the complex workings of power and domination. This vision of identity was rooted in a socialist-feminist framework: “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses,” the Collective wrote, with the manifesto first appearing in a collection entitled Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.” This influence, all too rarely acknowledged, provided the liveliest and most consequential legacy of the socialist tradition in this period. The women of color feminism created by the Combahee River Collective and others in the late 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for what would later be termed intersectionality, a focus on the ways systems of power and domination combine and overlap that has been a defining influence on the Movement for Black Lives and the activism of the Millennial generation more broadly.²⁰

Combahee River Collective leaflet, circa 1979 (designer: Urban Planning Aid; courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives)

But while the charges of narrowness and fragmentation lodged against identity politics rather missed the point, there was undoubtedly a general tendency toward localism, introspection, and small-scale organizing throughout this period of contraction and restructuring. With all the focus on community-based projects and institution-building, large mobilizations with large ambitions were few. There was great pragmatism in this shift but a sense of resignation as well—a recognition that acting on a scale larger than the local had become very difficult indeed. Rudy Perkins, an activist with the Clamshell Alliance and later the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, remembers reading in an anarchist journal of the time a “lovely little poem drawing an analogy of tidal pools on the beach, that the wave had receded and now all that was left was little bits of active life in little pools scattered around. And that’s how it felt.” It was a far cry from the revolutionary dreams of just a few years before. But in some of those little pools Perkins spoke of, activists would experiment—with varying degrees of success—with making their ambitions larger, and direct action would be their primary method.

On August 1, 1976, fourteen men and four women carrying sleeping bags, oak and sugar maple saplings, and small corn plants marched down the railroad tracks leading into the construction site for the Seabrook Nuclear Station, located within an ecologically fragile tidal marsh on the New Hampshire coast. Earlier that summer, despite vocal public opposition throughout New England, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued a permit for the Seabrook facility. In response, several dozen anti-nuclear campaigners, assisted by two seasoned organizers from the Boston-area office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Quaker pacifist organization, met and decided to push their fight to a new level. The time had come, they felt, for “direct, nonviolent action such as one-to-one dialogue, public prayer and fasting, public demonstrations, site occupation and other means which put life before property.” In an allusion to the mollusks that environmental researchers said would be harmed by the Seabrook nuclear plant, they named their new organization the Clamshell Alliance.²¹

The founders of the Clam (as the group was colloquially known) took much of their inspiration from an extraordinary anti-nuclear direct action that had taken place the previous year in Wyhl, West Germany. After police brutally evicted a modest encampment of 150 protesters from a nuclear construction site there, some 28,000 people, ranging from conservative local farmers to counterculture radicals, swarmed the site and took it over. Thousands stayed and held the space for nearly a year, ultimately forcing the German government to abandon the project. The Wyhl encampment, and the West German anti-nuclear movement more generally, would repeatedly serve as touchstones for direct-action organizers in the United States.²²

The eighteen people who marched to the Seabrook plant had no illusions that their small group could replicate the Wyhl experience, but the items they carried onto the site gestured toward the ideal of permanently reclaiming the site. They brought the young trees in “a symbolic attempt to reforest the area there,” explained one of the protesters, Rennie Cushing, in an interview just before the action; the corn was “a symbol of the native people that once inhabited this land.” There was a Native American burial ground on the nuclear site, testimony to that historic habitation, which inspired a small but significant Native American presence in anti-Seabrook organizing. Cushing continued, “Also, the corn shows our intention to be here in the fall to harvest it and the trees show our intention to be here at a later date and view them at maturity with our children and our grandchildren.”²³

The group of eighteen barely managed to get the corn and saplings into the ground before they were arrested for trespassing and hauled away by the police. But they achieved what they wanted: their act of civil disobedience was prominently covered by the local media. Three weeks later, in an escalation that had been carefully planned from the start, 180 people were arrested in an even more widely publicized second occupation attempt. Though activists around the country had long rallied, gathered petitions, attended hearings, and lobbied politicians in opposition to nuclear power, nobody working on the issue had organized anything remotely like civil disobedience on this scale before. “This is the shot heard round the world for the anti-nuclear movement,” declared author and activist Harvey Wasserman at the pre-action rally, which drew more than 600 participants. “[We] are moving from the stage of debate into the stage of direct action.”²⁴

Clamshell Alliance direct-action manual (designer unknown; courtesy Ed Hedemann)

The Seabrook campaign was a historical watershed in several respects. As its organizers hoped, it inspired people throughout the country to form their own groups and engage in direct action against nuclear power plants in their area. This wave of protest, which swelled still further after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, contributed greatly to curtailing the spread of nuclear power in the United States for decades to come; over 100 planned projects were canceled over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. The Seabrook activists ultimately lost their fight—the Seabrook Nuclear Plant did eventually begin operation, although not until 1990—but ground was not broken on another new nuclear reactor in the United States until 2013.

As important as the Clamshell Alliance was in helping forestall nuclear plant construction in the United States, its most striking legacy was in consolidating and promoting what became the dominant model for large-scale direct-action organizing for the next forty years, used to powerful effect time and time again. From Seabrook, the prefigurative direct-action model first spread to other anti-nuclear groups around the country, including the Abalone Alliance, which organized a series of large actions against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. It was picked up by the Livermore Action Group, a California group working against nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, and by the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of groups organizing against US policy in Central America throughout the decade. Some 1,500 protesters used the Clamshell model in an effort to shut down the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the spring of 1987, in protest against US policy in both Central America and South Africa; hundreds more employed it that fall in a civil disobedience action to protest the Supreme Court’s anti-gay Bowers v. Hardwick sodomy decision. The AIDS activist group ACT UP used a version of this model when it organized bold takeovers of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in 1988 and the National Institutes of Health in 1990, to pressure both institutions to take swifter action toward approving experimental AIDS medications. The radical environmental group Earth First! used it for its 1990 Redwood Summer, a Northern California mobilization to protect old-growth forests from logging. The model was carried forward by the global justice movement to blockade the meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, and for a series of subsequent trade summit protests. Having been used by anti-nuclear activists seeking to shut down the Stock Exchange in 1979 and radical environmentalists seeking to reclaim Earth Day in 1990, a version of the model was also adopted by Occupy Wall Street and the many Occupy groups that sprang up around the country in 2011.

It’s worth pausing a moment to consider the cultural context in which this influential blueprint for action arose, for it would shape the ways it was adopted, modified, and critiqued over the decades to come. The Clamshell Alliance was about as white as it was possible for an American movement to be, bringing together white rural New Hampshire Seacoast residents with white radicals from around New England, advised by white Quakers. The AFSC of course had a longstanding commitment to racial justice and many within the organization had significant direct experience with multiracial organizing; the same was true of some other seasoned activists within the Clam. But many, maybe most, of the people who participated in the direct actions at Seabrook were white people with little or no background in dealing with race, and the Clamshell Alliance devoted little time or energy to addressing the question. The group’s manuals and other organizing materials made little or no mention of race, racism, or people of color. “In principle, the common denominator of nuclear protest should attract support from diverse groups of people,” wrote longtime activist Marty Jezer in the midst of the Seabrook fight, “for the dangers of nuclear power cut across class, race, sex and ethnic lines, but in practice Clamshell politics and style of organizing excludes people.”²⁵