
THE BLUE GUITAR

By

LISA REDFIELD PEATTIE

Copyright 2014 by Lisa Redfield Peattie

Smashwords Edition
PLAYING THE BLUE GUITAR

This book reports on a personal voyage of discovery. When I got to be sixty, I took early retirement from a university teaching job in order to work in the peace movement. I wanted to change the world. But I knew that I didn't know how. I didn't know how to coordinate a meeting, to organize a demonstration, to ask for money, to set up a press conference: these were skills I would have to learn. But I also knew that I needed in a deeper and more general sense an understanding of how to change the world. What does a social movement move and how does it do it? So I tried to learn from the experiences of others. When I was in England I slept under plastic at Greenham Common among the other women of the peace camp outside the missile base. Then I went to Wales to talk with Welsh nationalists. On a visit to Australia I tried to learn something about the movement for aboriginal land rights. As a visiting professor in Los Angeles, I interviewed Gay activists. On a trip to Tokyo, I met with some of the young radicals whose fierce opposition has so far made it impossible for the airport construction to complete more than one runway. Meanwhile, of course, being irrevocably professorial, I read a lot. I read not only about the particular movements I was trying to understand as examples of attempts to change the world but about the theory of social movements in general.

Although there is rather a lot of such academic theorizing about social movements, I found it less than helpful in my search for understanding. A basic difficulty was that the social movements in the literature seemed to have little resemblance to the world I was experiencing, whether in the Greenham Common peace encampment or door-to-door canvassing in Los Angeles.

On the page, movements appeared as orderly and bounded and to be organized around defined goals. On the ground they seemed more serendipitous, disorderly, subject to opportunistic alliances and furious confrontations about issues that—if one thought of a movement as unified around a single purpose—were quite diversionary. But if movements seemed on the ground to be less orderly and less programmatically unified than they appeared in the books, they were also more energetic and energizing, more creative, more fun.

Seen at the ground level a social movement was not organization for social change; it was not an entity at all. A movement seemed to be simply various groups of people more or less aware of each other interacting passionately and creatively with the complex history of which they were part.

The staging of protest could be seen as a kind of dramatic art, no less gorgeous for being out of the control of any single author or director. Movements themselves seemed most like a kind of untidy theatre of improvisation or collective story-telling. Only as stories were movements unified by purpose and characterized by plots with heroes and villains; out there was a world of uncertain struggle and coping in which the effort to re-define the meaning of things was as much reality as the struggles over budgets, rules, and territory.

Once I saw the world of social movements in this way, the rest of the social scenery began to look different to me too. The official institutions did not seem quite so substantial. Where one might have thought there was coherent policy and powerful bureaucracy there appeared to be struggles for legitimacy, acting at cross purposes, trying to put the best spin on events.

"The system" could be seen as a kind of theatre itself. I came to see the world of institutions as a world of presentation and enactment, no less theatrical than the movements that threaten their control of the stage and script.

In the chapters that follow, I try to show what it is like in the world of social movement action by using each of the movements I have been exploring to bring out a particular point. Airport protests show how purposes emerge from action. Welsh nationalism shows how problematic it is to organize around collective identity since both boundaries of the collectivity and the meaning of identity shift with circumstances. Gay politics shows the importance of some degree of extremism in "making a space" for those closer to the mainstream. The Australian aboriginal rights movement seemed to me to be a perfect illustration of the way in which movement symbolism is able to make one group's struggle that of many others. The dilemmas of the peace movement are an acute version of the movement problem of working against existing forces that, at the same time, are needed for support.

Each of these paradoxes can be found everywhere through the world of social movement activity. But it seemed helpful to focus on each in a particular context.

Nor are these points, taken together, all that could be said about the problems of social movement activity. But I think they do help in understanding what goes on, and in seeing certain failures as inherent in the nature of the terrain of struggle.

Finally, I try to say something of what I think I learned about social protest as dramatic art. To say that social protests are dramatic productions, theatrical in nature, is not to render them less consequential than "real" politics. In a world of presentation and enactment they are real politics. They are politics adapted to a terrain of struggle where what is at issue is not simply rules and resources but the agenda of collective life and the meaning of what we do. I have the deepest respect for those who practice with skill and integrity this most difficult of arts. Their work deserves closer attention and better review than it usually gets — ("Police estimated that 75,000 demonstrators...")

The material world is real. But our beliefs and feelings about the material are equally real. It is perfectly reasonable to have a politics which enacts, dramatizes, prefigures because the world to be shaped is one which consists of facts-as-interpreted.

I would like to take as our motto for the inquiry into social movements a little poem by Wallace Stevens.

They said,

"You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are." The man replied "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar."

What is the nature of the blue guitar? How does it change things as they are?

What do we mean by things as they are, anyway?
CHAPTER ONE:

A MOVEMENT IS NOT A THING

For scholarly people who write about trying to change the world, the unit of analysis is generally the "social movement." There are histories of the peace movement and the civil rights movement and of the gay liberation movement: there are discussions of how a category of "new social movements" differ from older social movements; there are theories of what circumstances bring social movements into being. There is a huge literature of this sort.

I will make no attempt to do a proper review of this literature. [1] It would make me act more scholarly than I feel or want to be. But I will review in a rather general way the major issues that appear in the social movement literature. Then I will call attention to some serious problems that arise in the concept of social movement itself, in using it as the unit of analysis.

It is a simplification but perhaps a helpful one to point out that in the social movement literature there is a kind of great trans-Atlantic divide between the Europeans and the Americans. The difference does not seem to lie so much in the movements themselves as in the mental set of the analysts.

The European intellectuals are shaped by a broadly Marxist tradition that in the United States has been seen as either cranky or exotic but in Europe has been much more respectable. In the Marxist-shaped intellectual tradition, the interests around which movements coalesced were those of classes, the pre-eminent movement was the labor movement, and what was at stake was nothing less than the shaping of society through struggle. Now, as the historical role of the labor movement seems to decline, as evolving class structure seems less and less to be that predicted in the nineteenth century and as "non-economic" issues like feminism and ecology have come to the fore, the Europeans have moved to adapt this train of thought to an altered terrain. Perhaps women may be looked at as a sort of oppressed class. Perhaps struggles over housing and urban services represent the twentieth century form of struggles over the renumeration of labor, this time via the social wage. But the major contribution of European re-thinking has been the theory of "New Social Movements" [2] that in effect tries to preserve the broad scale of the traditional style of analysis while adapting it to changing circumstances. It is argued that the spread of controls over private life ("the colonization of the lifespace") [3] creates a new terrain for resistance and struggle, as also that society-wide issues like militarism or the use of the environment have burst the boundaries of old-fashioned class struggle. New Social Movement theory breaks decisively with the Marxist tradition in its focus on identity and on the social construction of meaning. But the questions asked are still broad ones. Particular movements are looked at as manifestations of and as clues to the great underlying societal trends.

On the other side of the Atlantic there tends to be less use of grand theory for making sense of particular movements, but rather a concern with the circumstances leading to the emergence of one or another mobilization around some issue, whether racial segregation, fluoridation of drinking water, or sex education in the schools. There are a variety of theories, both supply and demand versions, that do not so much compete as supplement each other. Deprivation theories arose as a response to an earlier sociological tradition that saw protest mobilization as essentially irrational crowd behavior. [4] They see social movements as arising out of need. For example, Reagan's buildup of the nuclear arsenal, particularly as combined with bellicose Cold War rhetoric, terrified those who could understand what was happening and led them to join together in a vast peace movement that tried to outlaw nuclear testing, keep from stationing missiles in Europe, and generally check the further building of the "baroque arsenal." Breakdown theories call attention to the constraints on mobilization; it is argued that there was just as much arms buildup and imperiling of survival under Kennedy, but Kennedy, unlike Reagan, incorporated the arms-limitation faction in government in advisory roles; and thus drew their oppositional sting; when Reagan left them outside, they went into opposition. Political space/visibility theories look at the world in which movements take shape as one of multiple issues and causes competing with each other for public attention. The "space" taken by the peace movement in the early days of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was subsequently pre-empted by the Vietnam War and the opposition to that; the ending of that war, in turn, was an important part of the conditions that made the nuclear Freeze movement possible. [5] Similarly, it is argued that Reagan's bellicose rhetoric and his "enough shovels" civil defense man gave visibility to a process that was equally dangerous although relatively unnoticed before. Resource mobilization theories see movements as arising not so much out of need as out of capacity. Grievances are always with us, it is argued: what counts is capacity to act on them. The grand-daddy of resource mobilization theories is, of course, the Marxist analysis that sees the massing of workers in factories as a precondition for labor militancy. Similarly, John D'Emilio, writing on the emergence of Gay politics, [6] sees as a precondition the wartime population movements that shifted Gays and lesbians out of their communities into the military and into the war-booming cities, making possible the Gay bars that were the substrate of much Gay collective sense. Similarly, Parkins' Middle Class Radicalism [7] sees the growing social category of teachers and social service providers as a natural social base within which a peace movement could take root; the involvement of scientists becomes another resource.

A "framing" approach to movements tries to join social structure and social resources with elements of motivation and aspiration. Movement organizers are seen as shaping meaning into specific issue frames or more encompassing master frames of collective meaning for action. [8]

These theories are very helpful in explaining the rise and fall of social mobilization over time. What made it possible for Gays to parade pridefully after so many years "in the closet"? Whatever happened to the Freeze movement? We need theories that help us to make sense of all this. Or we want to make comparisons: How was the peace movement in the United States like that in Europe and in what ways different? How is the feminist movement of the 80s like the women's movement in the latter half of the 19th century?

All of these questions demand that we deal with social movements as entities, as Things. When we see social movements as entities, we have to see them as bounded. We see them as being bounded in time, as having each a beginning and an end. We see them as bounded in social space; their components are sets of organizations—Greenpeace, the Audubon Society, Earth First, or CORE, SNCC, and SCLC. We identify each of these entities by its purpose: the Ecological Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. Using such bounded entities as our units of analysis, we can fairly readily make comparisons and generalizations. Like a nurse in a hospital ward reading the condition of her patients by the data on blood pressure and temperature provided in their charts, we will appraise the vigor of our various movements via some relatively simple indicators: mentions in the media, attendance at demonstrations, organizational affiliates.

There is nothing wrong with this so far as it goes, and for some kinds of questions it seems to be the only way to go. But for other questions, it is not helpful at all. If we mean by "whatever happened to the Freeze movement?" Why did it not go on from success to success but rather dropped out of sight? The social movement theories are quite helpful indeed. But if we mean by the question more literally, what happened to it? These theories are on altogether the wrong level. To answer this question, we would have to trace the evolution of the organizations that formed during the Freeze to pursue its objectives (and many of these persist in my own peace-movement environment although with re-focused objectives) of the persons who played a part of the movement at that time—and Randy Forsberg has certainly gotten herself an institutional base and is pursuing new strategies—and of the analytic and organizing ideas that were part of the Freeze intellectual world.

To someone who sees the true and proper units of analysis as being Things called movements this sort of enquiry is not particularly exciting. The movement was extremely alive, and now it is dead. what we have here is a post-mortem.

But we might take a much more slippery and provisional view of the phenomena. We might see what has been identified as "movement" as a provisional, essentially unbounded, coalescence of miscellaneous groups, forces and ideas. In this view, there is no Constitution, no roll of members, no program that is definitive. A social movement displays its form over time like a piece of music, and its components are heterogeneous: themes and ideas, organizations, persons for whom the movement is a real and continuing set of ideas grounding action, and persons whose attachment is partial and transitory.

Indeed, there is in academic theorizing a beginning on this approach in micromobilization theory, dealing with what happens in such encounters as meetings and demonstrations, and in the broader attempt by Gamson and others to link the emergence of collective identities and the framing of issues to what goes on at the level of organizational activity. [9]

This view is much more helpful in understanding the movement world as it appears to the organizer. Abbie Hoffman, living "underground" as Barry Freed in the Thousand Islands section of the St. Lawrence River, decided that he was the only person in the area with the skill to defeat a scheme by the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the river for winter navigation and oil tankers. In the Sixties, as Abbie Hoffman, he had specialized brilliantly in the politics of outrageous confrontation. Now he set out to build a coalition around saving the river involving local sportsmen and the ecology-focused liberals, service clubs, veterans, groups, summer people and locals. He knew how to do things with dash, starting with a zippy name for the movement—Save the River—and involving river cruises for potential allies in an antique paddle wheeler, rowdy dances, and a "River Appreciation Day." But he also taught amateurs to read and de-mystify the Corps` reports, campaigned in the newspapers and in leaflets, collected petitions and ran hearings. The enterprise defeated an enormously powerful body that had never before lost to community action. That community and its action was created. Abbie Hoffman had created a local movement, one with national connection. [10]

He had not created the materials; he used what was there. Environmentalism was in the intellectual atmosphere. The "river rats" had their valued way of life. The policy standing of toxic waste hazards was there to be appealed to. He brought them together.

The view of social movements as provisional groupings of elements also helps us to understand how themes and goals can emerge out of interest and action. The Things of social movement theory are collective enterprises directed at particular purposes. But in the great airport controversies described in the next chapter we will see how, rather than action being directed at purposes, we can see purpose emerging from action. In Germany, in Japan, in the United States groups of residents began to protest against large airports because of the noise, the land-taking affecting them personally. But finding it impossible to oppose publicly a project of consummate importance to the progress of the whole society simply on the basis of its inconvenience to a relatively small group, the airport opponents were shortly led to question the very validity of the idea of progress. Fighting the airport, in case after case, has become a metaphor for modern Luddism—and in so doing, has tapped into a deep anti-modernist strain of questioning the value of economic growth and of "progress" as so interpreted, and has become a terrain for not only ventilating but mobilizing the resistance to progress.

This more slippery account of social movements directs attention to the way that the interest of one group can become the symbolic vehicle for other different interests and themes. The Aboriginal Rights movement in Australia represented directly a group of people who were a tiny fraction of the Australian population, with no critical role in the economic system, and thus, one would imagine, little political leverage. But the movement took Aboriginal interests a long way legally and politically because, we can see in retrospect, the movement became the vehicle for white Australians to re-think and re-orient their own national identity. The Aboriginal claim to a sacralized relationship to the desert land of the interior drew from the growing ecology movement and became, in effect, the claim of a nation of migrants to belonging to the land.

So, too, the meaning of a movement may shift over time. Welsh nationalism has been a conservative movement for small farmers and shopkeepers, tied to French neo-fascism; it has been part of a Celtic revival and it has stood as one of a family of peoples' struggles against colonialism and capitalism.

When the British Raj sponsored heavy cutting of forests, in large part to provide sleepers for the railway system, villagers mobilized to defend the woodlands that were the source of fuel and water for them and vegetation for their animals. When Gandhian organizers came to the villages and helped in this resistance, the struggle became redefined as part of Gandhi's "positive program" to supplant the rule of the Raj. More recently the movement to defend the forests, as the Chipko or tree-hugging movement, has been redefined again as part of the ecological movement, and in the process has generated a proposal to re-think economic process as involving, besides production for use and production for sale, a third sector: Nature, itself productive.

Multiple meanings not only succeed each other in time. They often, perhaps even more frequently, coexist. Caesar Chavez once said of the farm workers movement: "See, everybody interprets our work in a different way. Some people interpret us as a union, some people interpret our work as an ethnic issue, some people interpret our work as peace, some people see it as a religious movement." [11]

In a view that focuses on movement activities rather than movements as entities, coalitions form and fall apart; ideas and themes from diverse sources become welded together in struggle. The Narita airport struggle joined the themes of persecuted Christians to that of peasant rebellions with anti-capitalism and pacifism. American protestors against nuclear weapons, sitting at the entrance to the nuclear test site in Nevada, sing "Gandhi's our example. We shall not be moved..." to a melody which I believe was first a Protestant hymn, then taken up with different words for labor organizing, then appropriated by the peace mobilizers. When the pioneer Gay organizer Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society in the 1950s, a major intellectual innovation was the conceptualization of homosexuals as a minority group. It seems clear that this structure of thought came directly from the Communist Party—of which Hay was a member—even though the Party, deeply homophobic, would most certainly have disavowed such a connection .[12]

Techniques are deliberately borrowed, as the Aboriginal Rights movement leaders in Australia went to the U.S. to learn protest techniques from American black militants. American feminists adapted the Maoist technique of "speaking bitterness" to feminist consciousness-raising groups. Myles Horton studied the Danish folk high schools as the model for a labor training school in the Appalachians.

Organizations form and dissolve, movements rise to attention and disappear again, but the persons who formed the organizations and the movements continue and appear in new movement contexts. No doubt few movement activists have had the broad span of Victorian England's Annie Besant, a socialist and feminist, who went from organizing match girls and getting arrested for promoting birth control to leadership of the Home Rule League in India, with a stop-off in Ceylon to figure in the Senhalese nationalist movement, and on into Theosophy and promotion of the Indian guru Krishnamurti. But one of the board members in a peace group in which I am involved—the group's program focuses on cutting the military budget and funding human needs—during the sixties received an award from the Congress for Racial Equality as an organizer of black cooperatives, was marshal at the Yuppie protest event in Chicago in 1968, and now gives out free food in public places and works with the homeless. Movements are not bounded by membership: persons move from movement to movement.

When we think of a social movement as an entity, we look for it to be bounded in time as well as in thematic content and in membership. "The movement began when...." The story of the Civil Rights Movement usually begins when Rosa Parks, riding the bus home at the end of her working day in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, refused to get up to give her seat to a white man. The act certainly set in train a set of extraordinary events. But the act and the events had their earlier background. Martin Luther King wrote that Rosa Parks' refusal was "an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom. She was not 'planted' there by the NAACP or any other organization... " [13] This was true, but it was not all that was true. Rosa Parks had been the secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recruited by E.D. Nixon, president of the Alabama branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; [14] its leader, A. Philip Randolph, had been so central to black political action in the 40s that it was said that the union offices "became the political head quarters of black America." [15] The connection to Gandhian non-violent Resistence had over a half a century of development. In the first instance, the interest of American blacks in the Indian freedom struggle was part of a sense of solidarity with oppressed people everywhere, a central theme in the mass movement led by Garvey before the First World War. In addition, the Indians were dark-skinned; Gandhi was often referred to as "that little brown man." Comparisons between Gandhi and Jesus—made both by Afro-Americans and by the Gandhians themselves—helped to bring the Indian struggle into the U.S. context. These linkages soon led into interest in, and extensive discussion of, the potential of Gandhi's non-violent methods for Afro-Americans in the United States. The March on Washington Movement, a mass protest movement founded in 1941 by A. Philip Randolph to end racial discrimination in the armed services and war industries, made explicit these connections to Gandhi's struggle and to his methods. What remained for Martin Luther King Jr., when he discovered non-violent struggle via a sermon by a black university president who had been to India, "was not in the application of Gandhism to the Negro struggle, but in the transmuting of Gandhism by grafting it onto the only thing that could give it relevance and force in the Negro community, the Negro religious tradition."[16]

Even bus boycotts had a background. Over a half-century earlier the Negro citizens of Montgomery had conducted a two-year boycott of trolley cars, part of a substantial movement, affecting twenty-five southern cities between 1900 and 1906, in protest against the imposition of Jim Crow regulations.[17] Indeed, one of the leaders of the 1955 Montgomery boycott had himself led a bus boycott in Baton Rouge during the summer of 1953. [18]

Suppose that Rosa Parks had decided at that moment, now historic, that she didn't really feel up to all that today. Would the Civil Rights Movement then have had no beginning? No, I suppose the story would begin with some other heroic step forward, most likely a few weeks later when a freshman student at a Negro college in Greensboro, North Carolina said to three friends "We might as well go now," and all four went down to the downtown Woolworth's and slipped into seats at the whites-only lunch counter. Three days later, there were eighty people sitting-in in Greensboro, and the sit-ins spread.

As a starter, this action raises the same issues as the bus boycott. As one historian says, "In the previous three years, similar demonstrations had occurred in at least sixteen other cities. Few of them made the news, all faded quickly from public notice, and none had the slightest catalytic effect anywhere else."[19]

Where did the movement begin? With the sit-in that had the catalytic effect, or those that constituted its precedent? With Rosa Parks or with the actions and organization-building that made its context?

If we turn to the standard text Principles of Sociology (Barnes and Noble College Outline Series), we will find that Herbert Blumer's authoritative essay on "social movements" at once introduces ambiguity in the form of a dual definition. A "general social movement" is the response to "cultural drift" that has brought about new values and ideas not adequately satisfied by prevailing arrangements; such a social movement takes "the form of groping and uncoordinated efforts" by "many unknown and obscure people who struggle in different areas." But "A specific social movement is one which has a well-defined objective or goal which it seeks to reach and in this effort ...develops an organization and structure." [20]

This dual definition may help to clarify our thought, but it hardly helps us in our empirical understanding when we confront a world which is not dual. In the world in which we play the blue guitar, cultural change is part instigated, although surely not controlled, by deliberate action and organized action uses and claims cultural and social phenomena outside its span of management. Thus the phenomena of Definition one and those of Definition Two are thoroughly inter-penetrated.

Rosa Parks' refusal and the Greensboro sit-in were catalytic when those actions met with the appropriate social context: when movement activity, in the Definition Two sense, intersected with cumulative social change, social movement in the Definition one sense. Yet cumulative social change and deliberate social action are not discrete; the earlier sit-ins and the earlier transportation boycotts were quite as purposeful as the ones with which we usually begin the Civil Rights Movement, and as part of social memory and organizing tradition as much a part of it.

Let us consider the inter-penetration of both kinds of social movement over space as well as over time. Let us consider, for example, that people speak of a "New Right" that seems to include abortion pro-lifers in Fargo, North Dakota, school board candidates in opposition to sex education curricula in Oregon, conservative economists in Eastern think-tanks. Do all these fall under the goal-oriented and structured character of Definition Two? Surely not. But do they constitute examples of "cultural drift" as in Definition One? Not exactly, either, for to a considerable degree they monitor each other's activities, are stimulated by each other's ideas and programs. The Chipko activists in northern India who surround trees and block logging trucks and the Brazilian defenders of forest rubber-tappers have never met and would probably be doing what they do exactly the same whether or not the other was active in forest defense. But to the extent that they hear of each other, have in each case an international audience of people who think of themselves as members of an ecological movement, their work may take a deeper meaning and draw commitment from that meaning. Some day indeed leaders of these several struggles may meet at an international conference and come to define themselves as members of this world movement to defend the planet. How much of a difference will that make to their respective rank-and-file members? This is an empirical question.

A movement is only metaphorically an entity in much the same way that a period in history—the Renaissance, say—is a definitionally troubling pseudo-entity. But in the case of social movements, much more than in entities like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the idea of the entity is plot-like, built around leaders and action. For a social movement is a kind of collective story, a story that people tell for and about themselves, a story which is in itself a major part of the phenomenon. For it is this collective story-telling that can come to link action and organizations with diverse and widely separated origins into instances or parts of some broad movement. Myles Horton, the great organizer who started Highlander as a teaching center for organizers in the south, distinguished movement times from periods of normal organization and said: "It's only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly because there's something explosive going on." [21] "During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another." [22]

Thus even though a social movement has no proper boundaries, no definite beginning and no definite end, and although its components are varied, often constituting a "part of the movement" only to some observer or other, it is quite different from a concept like "the Renaissance" in some critical ways. The Renaissance is told about from the outside. The stakes in the telling are relatively limited. The story can re-arrange the facts about organizations and events but cannot create new ones. But the social movement story telling is ongoing with the phenomenon itself, and constitutes itself a critical part of it. A movement idea like "ecology" or "the defense of the Earth" can link rubber tappers in Amazonas with tree-huggers in the Himalayas via a set of internationalized intellectuals into a single conversation or story-telling.

This mutually responsive many-voiced story telling that we call a social movement is not, of course, simply formed by words. It is dramatically enacted in actions—marches, assemblies, physical resistance; it is told in gesture and in style. (In this respect the pseudo-entity of "a movement" much resembles an historic epoch like "the Renaissance.") Movements are rich in dramatic politics, and the symbols of one time and place borrow resonance from the symbols of the past, as in Chavez' fruit pickers marching with banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe or the airport protestors at Narita imagining their tunnels as the catacombs of the early Christians. It is the rich ambivalence and multiple resonance of symbol and gesture that make it possible for movement process to link diverse themes and constituencies. Because movement process demands the symbolism of imagery and action as well as arguments and slogans, movement processes become place-linked; they need concreteness.

In the 1960s, I was a member of a small group of intellectuals who offered to provide technical assistance to low income communities that needed help in confronting one or another planning scheme. One of our clients was a community group in an urban renewal neighborhood that found housing disappearing rapidly, but replacement housing slow in coming. Thinking of this as a problem of argument, as in the controversies of the courtroom, we drew up for our client group a report in a red cover presenting the data to substantiate their complaint. The development agency expressed interest, but the project continued. Then the citizenry invaded a vacant lot in the area, put up a tent city, invited supporters, and called the press. Demolition stopped. The tent city had made the problem of displacement dramatically present, had provided a way for supporters to enact their distress and their will to resist. The tent city eventually was dismantled, but the episode became part of the myth-laden history of citizen action and the "tent city site" an entity in the ensuing reorganization of the neighborhood, a site so sacralized by struggle that it was recognized by all participants that it required some sort of community-based development.

So those who organize to protest homelessness and the institutions to which it is linked find it necessary to organize sleep-outs in public places, and the authorities in whose interest it is to defuse such protests have a motive besides the active discomfort of the well-to-do in getting homeless persons out of public places and out of sight. In a later section I shall review the way in which the abortion issue has been defined by physical placement and by action as well as by slogan and argument.

For some purposes, it will always be useful to think of social movements as Things. I have found myself writing about named movements—Welsh nationalism, Gay liberation, the Aboriginal Rights movements. But we might try to think of movements as simplifying stories about complex realities. We might think more generally of movements as provisional, essentially unbounded coalescences of various groups, forces and ideas, and wonder how these come to coalesce. What would be the consequence of taking this view?

One consequence would be that instead of asking, why don't they get together? we would ask: What are the connections? Instead of deploring the differences between different groups in the Civil Rights Movement, and between civil rights groups and Black Power groups, we would see it as remarkable that heroic reformers working to register Black voters in Mississippi, Baptist ministers, and Muslim organizers in the penitentiaries ever came to occupy, as we might say, the same broad stage in history. Are we, the audience, also writing the play? What was it in the idea of a nuclear Freeze, and in the historic context when it was put forward, that made it capture so much social energy for a space of time?

We would think more about the relationship between movement organizations, movement activities, and movement strategy. What are the consequences of basing action in churches, as in the southern Civil Rights Movement? What does it do to a movement organization to focus on a strategy of legislation, vis-a-vis direct action? [23]

We might, like a historian, use biography to trace connections. What were the social linkages, the social pathways, that made it possible for Annie Besant to go from organizing match girls to Indian Independence? What were the processes that led some persons who were actively organizing against a nuclear war buildup to re-define their goals as the defense of the earth? We could look, through biography, at questions like: What made the alliance at Narita between the Left and the small farmers? and compare these processes to the alliance between Left groups and small property owners in the community action activities that Boyte calls a "backyard revolution."

This way of looking at movement phenomena could also help us to a more productive way of looking at the relationship between movements and media coverage than we get if we treat movements as Things that we must try to measure and compare. If we want to compare one movement with another or to contrast the state of a single movement at various points in time, practically speaking, about the only way to do this is by looking at media coverage. We go to the New York Times Index. But we then tend to take the media coverage as representing the character of the activities out there. It is undeniably true that, as Todd Gitlin argued some time ago, [24] the media are critical in shaping any social movement; to some substantial degree the things that get covered are what, perforce, will come to be the things that get done, and will thus come to shape the things that get thought and demanded. But within a research strategy dominated by media coverage, there is no way to test the limits of this proposition. We lose the interesting questions about the relationship between movement and media. If we were to look at the social movement as a description of common tendencies and interrelationships between a number of phenomena as historians do when they talk about the Renaissance, we could struggle with the inherent methodological dilemma in a somewhat more constructive way. We could look, as Faye Ginsburg does, [25]at the difference the media made to the abortion wars in Fargo when the papers covered only the small militant group of outsiders and ignored the quiet vigil of the local women. We could ask not only why do the newspapers fail to cover the mass arrests of nuclear protestors at the test site in Nevada, but also, then, why do the protestors keep coming?

As a research proposition, this way of looking at movements seems to guarantee the kind of untidy research that anyone looking to build a track record of grants and publications has every right to distrust. But it ought to be interesting. Its analytic models can draw not only on historiography but on current chaos theory as in weather forecasting, where the aim is to identify and track recurrent patterns rather than to trade long lines of causality and to develop long-term predictions. [26]But we are not good at these predictions anyway; even the Shah of Iran's intelligence service, certainly well-staffed and funded, seems to have quite missed what was going on in the mosques and the bootleg cassettes.

This way of looking at the world also seems more congenial to people in movements, the organizers, whose task it is to invent the symbols, the activities, the organizational structures that re-shape the world, most, indeed, think in this way. And this slippy, provisional view of what is going on may in the end console the rest of us, who have to realize that joining a movement is not like buying a ticket to Trenton and then boarding the appropriate train. It's more like falling in love or having a baby—the beginning of a long, complex human enterprise in which passion and possibility interact to shape purpose.
CHAPTER TWO:

THE WORLD IS PRESENTATION AND ENACTMENT: THE CASE OF ABORTION POLITICS

The history of the abortion issue provides a number of splendid examples of the way in which policy is shaped dramatically, and of the variety of particular interests, which use dramatic enactment to further their position.

The legal establishment of abortion as a crime was in the first instance the outcome of a campaign led by the doctors, which also constituted a central element in the establishment of medicine as a profession. Until approximately the first third of the 19th century, abortion was almost totally unregulated by legislation. When legal action was sought, it was under a common law tradition that distinguished the period when the infant could be felt moving ("quickening") from the earlier months; this distinction seems to have owed less to some conviction as to when life begins, as to a view as to when, in the absence of pregnancy testing, an abortion could be said with any certitude to have taken place. The means to abortion were clumsy: poisonous draughts, as likely to kill the mother as to abort the foetus, or various forms of over-exertion and physical assault, generally the resort of the desperate, and part of a scenario of "seduced and abandoned." [27]

By the mid 1840s, Americans saw the practice of abortion as changing. It had become commercialized and therefore visible, via advertisements for abortifacients like "Restell's Female Monthly Pills" and for services to cure "female irregularity." The abortionist "Madame Restell" lived in a notable mansion. It was believed that the practice of abortion was growing, and that its practitioners were more and more "supposedly respectable" married women whose resort to abortion was felt as a threat to the social and moral order quite different from the actions of prostitutes or of the hapless servant-girl.

It was in the context of this increasing visibility, that for the first time state legislation criminalizing abortion came into existence. Whatever the role of the social context, it is clear that the criminalizing of abortion was largely at the initiative of a moralizing crusade by doctors. The crusade as it evolved was to change not only the situation with respect to abortion, but to constitute also a notable component in the professionalization of medicine itself, for the campaign took place within a world of practice very different from the tightly organized and bounded profession of a hundred years later.

Medical practice was diverse, unregulated, easy of entry, of relatively low status and low remuneration. The stock of scientific knowledge and of specialized technology to be commanded were themselves very limited. Herbalists, midwives, bonesetters, homeopaths, lay practitioners competed freely for the custom of the sick and ailing. Neither graduation from particular medical schools, membership in medical societies, or licensing conferred any particular advantage to the aspiring practitioner. In the early decades of the century, in a political culture distrustful of expertise, incipient attempts to build such distinctions had actually suffered some attrition. [28]

Horatio Storer, whose crusade against abortion was to play an important role in changing this situation, was a young physician with an intense sense of moral mission. He began by soliciting the support for anti-abortion legislation from key physicians around the country, and opened the crusade publicly in 1857 by introducing to the Suffolk County Medical Society a resolution calling for the formation of a committee that should study the means "for the suppression of this abominable, unnatural and yet common crime." He went on to produce articles on abortion for medical journals, and to induce the various state medical associations to "press the subject on the Legislative bodies of their respective states." [29]In addition, he wrote and published several books, both for "every woman" and "every man" and for policy-makers.

The doctors' campaign helped stimulate a wave of antiabortion reporting in the papers. It also led to a re-writing of home medical texts in a way much more negative about abortion.

But its major consequence was a wave of anti-abortion legislation.

The single "scientific" argument put forward in this crusade was that the concept of a single point ("quickening") at which the foetus became a human being, and thus deserved protection as one was simply folklore. Otherwise, the campaign drew to a degree on the social eugenics of those who felt that the "infinitely more frequent" use of abortion by Protestant women compared to Catholic would soon lead to the old-American stock being outnumbered by Catholic immigrants. The fact that "most regular physicians were white, native-born Protestants of British and North European stock, [30]made this argument congenial to the doctors. Similarly, the campaign drew on conservative views of women's proper role. Storer, for example, fought the entry of women into the ranks of medicine and the liberalization of divorce laws because "the very foundation of all society and civil government would be uprooted. "[31] In general, however, in the physician's crusade the doctors came forward to claim a moral mandate over the abortion issue: it was killing.

At the same time, the assertion of this moral mandate helped strengthen the drive for professionalism. By attributing the practice of abortion to irregulars, it was possible to claim the "unrestricted practice of medicine as the main cause for the existence of professional abortionists" [32] and to call on the state to regulate professional membership. Similarly, "an antiabortion law would lend public sanction to the professionals' efforts at disciplining their own organization." [33]

Nevertheless, the ambiguities about abortion and its practice that were present at an earlier time, as represented in the discussions around early versus late, extenuating circumstances and the relative roles of courts, doctors, and women's networks continued to pervade an area of practice that however abhorred, prohibited, or regulated refused to go away. When the crusading doctors tried to elicit the support of organized religion the Old School branch of the Presbyterians was the only denomination that at a national level joined in blanket condemnation; others seemed to have adopted the view that, as one minister put it, to do so "would be to turn the pulpit and church into a place that many people would not like to visit." [34]

The establishment of the medical profession as the arbiter over the abortion issue put doctors into the center of the ambiguities of the practice and its social definition.

"Ironically, what the physicians did, in effect, was to simultaneously claim both an absolute right to life for the embryo (by claiming that abortion is always murder) and a conditional one (by claiming that doctors have a right to declare some abortions "necessary"). [35]

The ambiguities and internal contradictions of the position could not be resolved by argument and definition. Instead, they were managed through the forms of practice.

"Most physicians socialized in medical school regarded abortion as both dangerous and unethical." [36]Nevertheless, hospitals felt obliged, by the rules of their own profession to do a certain number of abortions for women endangered by childbearing. The abortion committee system freed the hospital practicing physician from responsibility and limited the caseload. "Committees often performed a dual role: they screened cases that included requests for therapeutic abortions as well as "requests" for physician-recommended or patient-elective sterilization. In time, the sterilization procedure came to be inevitably linked with hospital abortions, especially in metropolitan and teaching hospitals. By requiring sterilization as the "price" for abortion, especially for poor women or for those who had had multiple pregnancies, committees drastically eliminated most appeals. In addition, committees (a) regulated the number of women admitted to abortion service to fit available resources - operating room, gynecological staff, anesthesiologist, and so on; (b) served as a check on overly "liberal" physicians; and (c) presented a united front that protected participating physicians."[37] The system also kept the clientele subordinated to the doctors. Nanette Davis describes a hospital saline abortion as a "degradation ceremony" in which "women and their family and friends stood or milled about in a tiny, sparsely furnished waiting room that lacked adequate chairs, patients were given pelvic examinations in rooms with doors left open and sometimes without a cloth or paper drapery to cover themselves," and in which the patient, unprepared by information, delivered a "mummified-like foetus" in a room without privacy. [38]

But any abortion in a hospital setting had the potential for trauma. "Patients actually had little or no contact with the operating physician and often learned, only well after the fact, that the abortion had included sterilization. Because abortion patients were viewed as "psychotic," "hysterical," "depressed," "neurotic," or "guilt-laden," ... the patient was considered to be in an unfit mental state to evaluate her own treatment. Early supporters of the psychiatric route believed that the aborting woman not only lost her baby, but rejected her own womanhood as well. The belief in woman-as-childbearer, a paramount function, undergirded the entire therapeutic abortion structure. No studies documented the psychic costs for women. Emotional symptomatology included depression, crying spells, anxious feelings, sleeplessness, excessive worry, and guilt. By focusing on patients' problems, especially emotional disturbances after abortion, psychiatrization succeeded in masking its elaborate control order and its structured helplessness for abortion clients. This is substantiated by Jansson (1965), who states that "emotional problems were strikingly more pervasive after legal abortions than after other abortions or deliveries." [39]

The physician's crusade did not, therefore, result in stamping out the practice of abortion; rather, it was the basis of a complex system of abortion provision governed less by explicit public policy than by the practices of medical practitioners operating both legally and illegally. The hospital committee screened patients, presented a legitimizing facade for a certain number of abortions, and by very much restricting the legal abortion supply left a large market to be served by illegal practitioners of varying degrees of respectability and expertise-often using referrals from legally practicing doctors. While only a trickle of women could come in to the hospital through the front door, the legal and illegal sectors of the business were linked not only by referrals but by the hospital emergency room, since it fell to the emergency room to deal with botched and incomplete abortions done by outsiders or by the woman herself. By 1969 there was an "Abortion Handbook" that taught women how to look psychotic to a review committee or how to get a hospital emergency room to do a D & C with a fake "roaring hemorrhage" created by packing the vagina with blood from mashed beef liver. [40]

The complexity of the abortion system, including especially the illegality of much of it, meant that it came to include a variety of referral and guidance systems. The "Abortion Handbook" was part of the feminist initiatives in this direction in the context of a rising women's movement - of which more will be said later. At this point, however, it seems appropriate to give a brief account of an attempt to move into the field in pursuit of a very different agenda.

In 1967 a group of Protestant clergy organized a clergy consultation service for abortion counseling and reform, which by 1973 included 300 members in 15 states. Their covenant for mutual support read:  
"We are dedicated to action for modifying and changing attitudes and laws on contraception information and medical procedures, prenatal care and adoptive services for unwed mothers, and all aspects of abortion, including abolition and/or reform of existing laws." [41]

The doctors had promoted moral absolutism about abortion in the physicians' crusade. Now clergymen promoted moral relativism. For these clergymen, the abortion issue was part of a much broader attempt to find ways of working through a "new theology." "The focus of this secular theology is not only in debunking traditional doctrine, but also in a positive concern for the pluralization of culture and theology.... In this analysis, abortion is a spiritual crisis, not a matter of doctrinal right and wrong."[42] Furthermore, "a new breed of socially conscious clergy, generated from a decade of civil rights involvements, community planning and other citizen action groups ...found their social niche shrinking....The search for a meaningful role was a significant catalyst for involvement in extra-institutional functions." [43]

As Nanette Davis tells her story, the clergy consultation service had its problems. Clergymen found themselves struggling long hours to counsel women who often were not part of their congregation, and whose motives often seemed questionable to the clergymen. The clergy were committed to counseling that would help women in "crisis" take moral responsibility for choice. "For many counselees going through the broker system, clergy counseling was reported to be one more hurdle before they could secure a name, address, and code number, necessary information for contacting an abortion clinic." [44] The clergy counseling format was thus neither wholly satisfactory as a working practice for the new theology, nor as a service for women, whose immediate needs and viewpoints were subordinated by a paternalistic structure with its own agenda. However, the practice was important in re-shaping the abortion issue. "Without the clergy movement," Davis summarizes, "any resemblance of legitimation of abortion would have been unlikely." [45]

The clergyman's counseling service went out of existence when the decriminalization of abortion, first at the state level and eventually nationally via the Supreme Court, removed the practical problem that had supported demand for moral counseling. The construction of abortion as a moral crisis did not, however, disappear altogether as the counseling format "remains the preferred method in family-planning centers and free-standing abortion clinics."[46] Abortion as moral crisis was also the framework for a study of abortion decisions that constituted the basis of Carol Gilligan's enormously influential book In a Different Voice, identifying a specifically female "ethic of responsibility." [47]

Pressure for legal reform that would legitimate more abortion practice now came to arise within the medical profession itself. The institutional system was no longer able to contain the conflicts inherent in the system of practice. For many years, the hospital committee and general professional solidarity ensured that the system itself, and individual practitioners in particular, would rarely come to public attention. But for the system to function, practice needed to be free of outside monitoring.

A notable breach, illustrating the role of the newspaper and its "human interest story" technique in defining social issues, was the Sherri Finkbine case of 1962. Finkbine was a married professional woman expecting her fifth child when she discovered that the sleeping pill she had been taking, Thalidomide, had been found to cause serious foetal deformities. On the advice of her doctor, she applied for a hospital abortion. Evidently this would all have gone smoothly but for the fact that, worrying about other pregnant women and Thalidomide, she took it on herself to tell her story to the local newspaper. The hospital now refused to abort her, and in a blaze of publicity, other hospitals followed suit. She tried to go to Japan, was refused entrance, and finally got to Sweden. Just as for a later generation a barge of garbage, going vainly from port to port seeking a place to dump, dramatized for the general newspaper readership the issue of solid-waste disposal, so Sherri Finkbine's headlined search for an abortionist brought the problem forward to many readers as one which any reasonable woman might experience and for which the medical system offered inadequate remedy. The response to the Finkbine stories were not, however, wholly comprised by this interpretation. Because Finkbine's abortion request was based on presumed abnormality of the foetus, rather than danger to the mother's life, its visibility surfaced the deep cleavages in viewpoint that the diverse and medically managed abortion system had kept hidden. It had been possible for the strict constructionists to believe that the physicians' boards were permitting abortions only to save the life of the mother. It had been possible for those who believed in a broader construction to imagine that the women who really needed abortions were getting them.

"Before Finkbine, both sides could assume that they shared the same basic values and were only debating questions of implementation. After Finkbine, it was clear that fundamental differences existed, and neither side could expect the opposition to trust the assertion that if left unregulated, abortions would be done 'correctly'. [48]There came to be an active constituency seeking a new legislative-legal compromise which would protect physicians doing abortions on grounds other than a narrowly defined protection of the woman's life, and simultaneously satisfy abortion opponents by maintaining the principle of protecting foetal life. The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade was simply the highest-level version of the newly necessary compromise.

Even as professionals and politicians were negotiating new rules for the management of abortion, however, some new groups were forming undisciplined by participation in the mainstream political process, and making claims on the issue very difficult to accommodate within the received ideas and established institutions.

First of these were the feminists for whom the right to abortion was simply one, and a particularly important one, within a broader spectrum of claims by women to control their lives and their bodies. The women's health movement was a movement both for women's rights and one of the groups of anti-professionalism movements of the Sixties. Something of its flavor may be given by the account of a participant in a women's self-help health clinic at a bookstore in Los Angeles:

"Carol said she had something really exciting to show us and that it had all kinds of ramifications as far as the direction of any work we would want to do. She said "Follow me" and took us into the next little adjoining room where there was a large desk, and she pushed everything off the desk and took her pants off and climbed up on the desk and showed us the speculum and immediately demonstrated how she could, herself, insert this plastic vaginal speculum into her own vagina, and with the use of a flashlight, a simple flashlight, and a hand mirror, she was able to see that portion of her body that been inaccessible...

Carol showed us this plastic flexible straw-like device called the cannula, and said she had seen this used to do suction abortion in an illegal clinic in Los Angeles ...everyone was really excited about how simple this was. Of course!" [49]

This women's movement of the sixties was not a movement for liberalizing the process by which abortions would be made available by doctors and hospitals. It was a do-it-yourself movement for bypassing the doctors. Members of the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws gave widespread publicity to classes on self-induced abortion, courting arrest in the effort to have state laws declared unconstitutional. They leafleted and demonstrated. In Hyde Park, Chicago, a feminist group with the code name of "Jane" gave 11,000 illegal abortions over a four-year period for an average fee of $50 for a first trimester abortion.

Starting as a supportive, feminist referral service, it evolved into a classic women's health collective. "Seizing the means of reproduction" was the theme. "All members shared tasks in a revolving fashion; an administrator this week could act as an abortionist next week with additional training."[50] As one of the group put it: "We wanted to create an atmosphere that was empowering in a situation that was normally very disempowering.... We don't have to beg anybody else to please do this for us. We can go ahead and we can do it for ourselves." [51]

This perspective did not easily fold into a movement for liberal reform of abortion laws. "In 1970 a group of New York area feminists distributed a copy of a 'model abortion law': a blank piece of paper." [52]Nor did the reformers rush to bring in the women's groups. "At first people who were already in the abortion movement, who'd worked on reform were somewhat leery to bring it up - believe it or not - as a woman's issue .... They'd say, 'That will scare the legislators...' But what is it, you know? It is a public health issue, it is a doctor's rights issue, it is a population control issue, it is all those other things, but finally it's this damn woman who is pregnant and who doesn't want to be pregnant and she's going to do something about it.... So pretty soon it became obvious that saying, 'Hey it's the woman's right' was a very powerful, American democratic libertarian argument that appealed to a lot of people. [53]

In the process of using this appeal, however, the issue became re-defined. "Pro-Abortion" became "Pro-Choice."

Nevertheless, while participation in abortion reform modified the feminist position, the feminists, and their social movement tactics, moved in to re-define the issue once controlled by doctors as part of their sphere of practice.

However much women as a group may have wanted to seek control over abortion, they were largely without influence until they took up the new tactics ...civil disobedience, public speaking to any group that would listen, and, most important, use of the rhetoric that women had a right to abortion. These tactics transformed the debate. Now women who wanted abortions were no longer victims, a less-than-legitimate group of rule breakers who wanted the rules changed simply because they had "gotten caught." Rather, they were women who were crusading for a basic civil right - the right of a woman to "own the flesh she stands in," as one of them had put it. [54]

Part of the context for these diverse movements for abortion reform in the late sixties was a transformation of the institutional system of abortion practice. It was no longer the case that abortion practice was kept out of sight by the combination of illegality and physician-hospital impression management. The 1967 Therapeutic Abortion Law in California was not thought of, either by its advocates or its proponents, as much more than a legalization of current physician-hospital practice. But "'both pro-life and pro-choice forces had underestimated the willingness of doctors to perform abortions and the eagerness of women to seek them. Consequently, by 1971 almost everyone who applied for an abortion was granted one." Within four years, the number of abortions performed in the state had risen by 2,000 percent. "Blue Cross began to cover therapeutic abortion as a routine part of medical care, and Kaiser-Permanente, the state's largest health maintenance organization, did likewise. By the end of the 1960s, abortion was officially covered as a routine medical procedure under Medi-Cal, the state of California's program of medical services for those on welfare. " [55]In 1970, when both Hawaii and New York de-criminalized abortion, the visibility of legal abortion increased still more. However, it was the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 that really galvanized an anti-abortion movement by making explicit a middle way that could satisfy neither of the growing groups at the extremes.

The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade took its turn at trying to establish a working compromise via the legal system. To do so, the abortion issue had to be translated into the language of constitutional law. Here it appeared as conflicting rights: the rights of the woman, the rights of the foetus, and the interest of the state in protection of both woman and foetus. Avoiding the potentially divisive issues of gender equality that might have emanated from basing the decision on equal protection, the High Court departed from a right to privacy found to exist in the "liberty" category of the Constitution, and previously cited in connection with contraceptive use. The protected zone, which the 19th century had found in the absence of reliable pregnancy tests and the associated doctrine of "quickening," and the earlier years of the 20th century had found under the institutional cloak of the hospital committee, the Court now established under a constitutional right to privacy declared to be policy for the first three months, dominant under some medical management for the second three, and subordinate to the rights of the foetus after the time of foetal viability.

While this must certainly fail to satisfy the feminists, it enraged those who believed, like the physicians of the 19th century moral crusade, that abortion was murder. Kristin Luker's interviews with pro-life activists show how housewives who had never done anything political before were galvanized into action when they read about the Supreme Court's decision. For them, it revealed a world of practice of which they had been unaware, and which violated their deepest structures of meaning. Comparing the "pro-life" activists with the "pro-choice" activists, Luker shows that the two represent very different versions of women's experience. The pro-lifers were much less likely to work outside the home; if they did, their earnings were relatively low. They had more children on the average. They were women whose lives were shaped around traditional womanly roles. For them, the idea that a foetus could be treated as undeserving of legal protection violated their most profound sense of the right. The earlier leaders of pro-life thought - most religiously based, mostly men - now had an army of new recruits. This new wave of anti-abortion militancy was to intersect with changes in the institutions of practice in a new landscape of political confrontation.

With the legalization of first-trimester abortions, the way was opened for moving abortion practice out of the hospitals and into freestanding clinics. The hospitals had never sought abortion practice: unpleasant, unremunerative, uninteresting medically. The pro-choice forces saw the freestanding clinic as a way to get abortion practice free from the restrictive, even punitive, hospital environment. A clinic that did only abortions could make the procedure cheap and routine, almost like dentistry. By 1988, 86 percent of abortions were performed in clinics and only 10 percent in hospitals. [56]But these freestanding clinics were perfect targets for the mobilized pro-life movement. As one Planned Parenthood spokeswoman said: "The clinic movement has ghettoized abortion services and created easy targets to picket and bomb." [57]The very routinization of abortion that was the rationale for the freestanding clinic made the clinics inherently obnoxious to pro-lifers. Thus while one rhetorical tool used by the movement was the visual materials - posters, the film The Silent Scream - depicting foetuses looking as much as possible like a newborn infants, and detached from its pregnant-woman environment [58]\- the major tool became clinic-blocking group actions. "The area around the clinic was no longer simply a sidewalk, law and entryway, but became a highly charged battleground for the interpretation of abortion. Unable to make abortion illegal, LIFE activists were attempting to redefine it, through their words and actions, as 'unnatural'.[59] The use of physical resistance - lying down, blocking doors - to keep patients out of the clinics and in interposing their own bodies, even deliberately courting arrest, dramatized the claim that abortion was baby-murder. The clinic blockades were not only a way of restricting abortion practice; they were in themselves movement-consolidating, as well as a way of dramatizing the Right to Life movement as a political actor that magnified numbers via media visibility.[60]

Meanwhile, the abortion issue became a key element in a new political strategy by a group of conservative Republicans. Galvanized in the first instance not by Roe vs. Wade but by President Ford's appointment of Nelson Rockefeller - "high-flying, wild-spending leader of the Eastern Liberal Establishment" [61] to the vice-presidency, this group set out to shift the Republican Party to the right, and to forge a new winning coalition between the economic conservatives who were the traditional backbone of the Party, conservative southern whites, and the suburbanizing and newly well-off working class. The way to troll for the votes [62] of the latter was via the "social issues," for which abortion was a prime candidate. Direct mailing techniques, based on the newly available computer technology, made it possible to efficiently target specific interests for fund-raising and voter activism. The collaboration of Jerry Falwell and other "televangelists" provided another new channel for political organizing, and despite some problems with liberal dicta by the Bishops, the Catholic Church's anti-abortion crusade provided another powerful collaboration.

During the Reagan years, the conservatives continued unrelenting pressure on several fronts. For Reagan himself, it would appear that the abortion issue was less critical than lowering taxes and strengthening the military [63] (a set of objectives that would produce budgetary problems later). His administration was, however, a permissive environment for the pro-lifers to push for de-funding family planning at home and abroad and for the appointment in the bureaucracy or in the courts of persons with anti-abortion positions.

By the last decade of the century, abortion was less a settled issue than ever. The rise of the women's movement and the liberalization of abortion laws had stimulated a set of conservative movements opposing not only abortion but changes in family structure and in the roles of men and women; these movements had shown themselves potent politically; and they had become a political tool in the shaping of the American political system. Legislation put in place restrictive regulations to abortion access, and conservative action took away government funding, for abortion by needy women. But these moves had themselves generated a counter-movement; the central role of conservatives in the Republican convention was widely credited with losing an election to the Democrats, and states were passing legislation to protect clinics from protestors. In 1993, A Woman's Book of Choices"[64] even revived the self-help abortion techniques that feminists had promoted in the heady days of the sixties.

I have tried to tell the story of abortion rights as a terrain of struggle for definition and for "ownership." The struggle for ownership involved a number of groups and interests, and the struggle for definition was not simply one of "pro-life" and "pro-choice." The various groups and interests related to each other and to groups "outside - the medical profession, churches, political movements, of both Right and Left - in complex ways. Thus the struggle for definition was both over ownership and over alliances. For some participants in the struggle, the abortion issue was central; for others, it was one among a number of elements in a broader agenda, as, for example, the redefinition of the nature of the Republican Party, or the status of women. Within the groups "Republican" and "women" there were those who took antithetical positions on abortion, and the relationship of abortion to the reference group's agenda.

The complexity and ambiguity of these struggles for ownership and definition was managed as much through symbol and performance as through argument and disputation. The Right to Life demonstrator lying down in front of the clinic entrance, or the feminist peeling off her pants to demonstrate self-examination on a convenient table are seen to be dramatically breaking the conventions of behavior. But the hospital review committee deliberating an abort on request over the woman's head, or the doctor exposing a pregnant woman to his colleagues or the black-robed Supreme Court justices interrogating the testifying lawyer may all be seen as equal attempts to own and define the issue via dramatic performance.

It might be argued that the abortion issue, a "social" and "moral" issue engaging some very basic passions around sex, around professionalism, and around the relations between men and women is one that more than others attracts dramaturgy. But I believe that the same analysis could be made of practically any other issue engaging a substantial number of individuals and social institutions. In the field of city planning, I myself once analyzed some urban renewal struggles as competing "theatrical fictions" of "community groups" counterposed to planning bodies, themselves scripting the dramatic performance of the public hearing. [65] Herbert Gans' classic study of an American suburb declares that "The government with which the decision-makers confront the citizens is a performing government; its actions are performances that follow altruistic democratic theory. The stage, designed according to this theory and legitimated by state and local statutes, is the public meeting of the governing body, where decision-makers listen to citizens, opinions and then appear to vote on a final decision on the basis of what they have heard. But this is only a performance, for the decision has already been made "back stage" in the secret deliberations of the actual government. In Levittown, its major components are the caucus and the political party. [66]

In a recent book, Peter Marris describes how a group of young people actively trying to change their world were impeded by the metaphor of "structure." "The structural representation of society emphasizes the interlocking, mutually reinforcing constraints which direct behavior..." Everything connects with everything else, and every element helps to reinforce the others. The only path to change appears to be to take down the whole "structure," and build a new one. Furthermore, the structure is seen as abstract, distant, out of reach. However, says Marris, "while the structure of power seems remote and abstract - an interlocking regulation of vast resources by a few unknown men in private meetings - the process by which that power is reproduced is immediately accessible. It exists only so long as each of us does what is expected of us - buys what we are supposed to buy, wants what we are supposed to want, votes for the politicians whose claims are expected to appeal to us, fears the punishments of nonconformity and values the rewards of going along .... The structure of power is at bottom a psychological structure - a set of assumptions, hopes, fears, and needs which the members of society have been induced to incorporate. [67]

For those who want to change the world, this way of looking at the existing seems to offer some purchase, some way of taking hold. It is the quality of perpetual enactment in the institutions as they stand that gives us some way of engaging with them. We can stand up in the hearing; we can block the doorway; we can teach medical self-help techniques; we can bring children to work. We can deviate from the usual script and produce another.
CHAPTER THREE:

ACTION SHAPES ENDS: EMERGENT MEANINGS IN AIRPORT STRUGGLES

Social movements are usually identified with particular goals of reform: the civil rights movement, the ecological movement, the peace movement. Movement organizations - the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the National Organization for Women -are thought to be formed as means to achieve the general purposes of the movements. Themes, ideas, and symbols are seen as ways of interpreting the issue around which the movement is formed, and as linking members and organizations into coherent common purpose.

But we get a different view of social movements if we start with action.

The unfolding and development of a social movement when it is growing moves, or perhaps better lurches, from action to action, as when it is announced that "There will be an action at the Rocky Flats nuclear plant on July 4." It is in these actions that circumstances and possibility most clearly shape themes and ideas. It is in actions that movements test the potential for militance and adherence. It is in action that the passions which, in the world of politics, are usually focused on rather narrowly defined issues come to be generalized. And finally, it is in action that social movements most clearly break from policy-making and formal politics as a mode of changing the world.

The cases around which I shall develop this perspective are cases of protest against the building of airports. In the airport struggles we can see how action drives ideas. There is no general social movement "'against airports." Instead in a number of widely separated places there have been a number of extraordinary struggles over airport planning in each of which, starting with arguments over mundane issues like location and compensation, the controversy has escalated into issues calling into question the very basis of modern life. Airport planning has become the occasion for a sort of movement against Progress, as conventionally defined.

The airport struggles I shall be describing were extremely intense and long-lasting; in both Japan and Germany there have been struggles which lasted for twenty years, and which engaged many thousands of people. In Germany, the Frankfurt airport eventually got built; that at Narita, the main airport for the capital city, has never been completed because of the continuing opposition. In each of the airport struggles in this story, the opposition raised issues which were so wide in their implications, so deep in their relationship to underlying values, as to be essentially non-negotiable, unmanageable within the political system. This is why, of course, the struggles went on so long, and involved so many.

In every case it is possible to look back and to guess that if the airport planners had been more cautious, had managed their planning process with more craft, had been quicker to satisfy the local opponents in one way or another, the struggles could have been prevented. Yet that is not the lesson I wish to draw. I think we should look at those unmanageable issues with the respect that their wide implications and deep meaning warrant. We should be able to ask together: If these are real questions, and the most important questions at that, how can we, collectively, ask and answer them? We should accept the airport struggles as a particularly noisy and disruptive form of symbolic speech, and to at least entertain the possibility that for some questions, some issues, the appropriate mode of expression is one which appears, at first sight, completely mad.

Just so as to give you the dimensions of all this, I will start with a longish text, taken from the book by David Apter and Sagayo Sawa on the greatest of these airport struggles, that surrounding the building of Tokyo's international airport at Narita.

First, a word on the setting seems appropriate. The Japanese government began, in the early 1960s to build a new metropolitan airport. Construction was to begin in 1964 and end by 1971. The airport was to have five runways. Early on, land acquisition ran into trouble over the organized opposition of local farmers to being expropriated. There were physical confrontations, in some of which old ladies were knocked senseless. Militant leftists joined in, as well as peace groups and Christian organizations. There were large pitched battles involving stones and bamboo spears, tear gas and riot sticks. A group of elders prepared to commit ceremonial suicide. Children were buried under a roadway; earth movers rolled over them. The children survived, but everyone involved was thoroughly shaken. The opposition built towers and tunnels; the latter they likened to the catacombs of early Christians. In one episode, militants climbed to the top of a tower and held out for forty hours in below-freezing weather; when water cannons and tear gas were trained on the protestors in their eyrie, the water hoses froze. However, by 1978 the government had succeeded in building a first runway and prepared to open the airport. Here is what happened. The Hantai Domei in the story is the local Anti-Airport League.

"During the week of March 26 to April 2, 1978, the Hantai Domei made a last-ditch effort to prevent the airport from opening on schedule and called on supporters to come from all over Japan. An attack on the main control tower was planned, mainly by the Fourth International, with Hantai Domei support. The heavily guarded control tower was, of course, the electronic and operational center of the airport. The airport itself seemed sealed. Fences and patrol areas were manned by riot police. There were barracks for reserves both inside and outside the barricades. The leadership of the Fourth International obtained detailed plans of the airport showing the main cable lines and all the net-works of conduits - sewers, electricity, and so on - both above and below the ground. (Such information was quite easily available.) They studied the location of all the rooms and memorized the precise layout of the corridors, stairways, doors, and elevators in the main buildings. Of course they also had detailed maps showing the roads leading to the area, the airport's inside arrangements, and the location of the main police details.

The government mobilized some fourteen thousand riot police and put the airport under martial law, and the violence began. The Hantai Domei had reconstructed one of the destroyed fortresses, re-building its cement base and adding a sixteen-meter tower. About three thousand police were sent to attack it with water cannons and cranes. In fact, rebuilding the tower was a diversionary tactic by the Hantai Domei, intended to divide and draw off the police. Kitahara, the secretary general of the Hantai Domei, led a group of about fifty to the front of the tower. Stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown at the police. Giant slingshots and bows with steel arrows were employed; while the fighting continued other supporters were arriving from all over the country. Anti-pollution, anti-nuclear, Christian, and women's groups, some ten thousand strong, rallied in Sanrizuka Park, under the surveillance of helicopters and police. As yet another diversion, almost four thousand militants wearing red helmets (the Fourth International) gathered near the second fortress. Breaking into smaller groups, they dispersed in several directions, police contingents following them. One group smashed through the main gate of the airport, using a fortified flatbed truck to break through the barricades. The truck carried steel drums filled with burning fuel. Hundreds of people followed the truck through the gate. Even gunfire from the police did not stop them.

The diversions were successful, for the main point of the attack went largely unnoticed. Some fourteen militants, almost all of them from the Fourth International, had eluded the guards and entered the airport through the sewer system the night before. When the diversionary attacks began, they emerged through a manhole near the control tower. Ten of them managed to get inside the control tower, despite being fired upon by police revolvers. Six made it to the sixteenth floor by elevator and into the control room, where they smashed the sophisticated electronic equipment with sledgehammers and dumped equipment and documents out the windows. They hung a huge red flag from the control tower as the Hantai Domei and militants broke into the airport in fourteen places. At the rally in Sanrizuka Park, a great shout arose."[68]

Of course, the authorities eventually replaced the control tower equipment and opened the airport. But they have yet to build a second runway, and "the airport is 40 percent over capacity and has reached the limit on its ability to schedule more flights. " [69]

When I spent the day at Narita in 1989, I spoke with militants who were living next to the airport in two headquarters houses; they had taken up organic gardening with the few remaining farmers. At the time of my visit, the militants were euphoric from a major victory. To expropriate eight diehard landowners the government required the assent of an appointed citizen board. The militants had succeeded in forcing the resignation of all board members, some through persuasion, some through means which the Quakers would find less appropriate. One board member was beaten rather badly.

Whatever one thinks of such tactics, one must note with some sort of admiration the capacity of the opposition to not only persist, but to exert control locally. Among the militants with whom I spoke was one who has spent seventeen years, practically his whole adult life fighting the airport. Apter estimates that something like a million Japanese have been involved in the Narita struggle at one time or another. [70]Most recently what is identified in the report as "an anti-growth sect of Japanese leftists" set fire to the residence of the chairman of a large construction company "apparently to protest his firm's involvement in the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport at Narita."[71]

How did things get to this state? How did the opponents of the Narita airport get to acting so wild and crazy?

The answer, as you may have guessed, is not altogether simple. There are two main questions. The first, which turns out to be easiest, is: How did protest arise? The second, which is much more complex, is: How did the issues of the airport come to be defined in such far-reaching ways, at levels which made them essentially non-negotiable by any conceivable public discussion? This second question, in turn, may be divided into two: what were the inducements for the original group of protesters to broaden the issue? (or, as I'm sure the authorities said more than once, "drag in this other stuff? ") And second, how was it possible for this single project to carry the weight of the deepest questions about the role of the state and about the future of Japanese society?

The first question, as to the origins of protest, is as I have said, pretty easy: The citizens were not included in the planning discussions. It is not easy to site an airport in a country as densely inhabited as Japan. The site at Narita was selected because it was more thinly populated than an earlier proposed site which had aroused a great deal of protest, and because 200 acres at Narita already were in government ownership as an old Imperial estate. In the acquisition process, the government had learned from its earlier failure; it simply moved ahead preemptively without hearings or advance notification. Officials thought of themselves as showing flexibility by shifting from the site proposed earlier. The Narita farmers naturally did not see things that way. They saw it as an outrageous land grab without consultation.

So why didn't the farmers stick to the issue of expropriation without due process? It's simple, really. To frame the issue that way would be to confront a very big issue with a very small one. Here was the biggest single project ever undertaken by the Japanese government, both an important means to and a symbol of the nation's determination to become a great modern industrial power; confronting it was the particular interest of a small group of farmers. As Apter puts it, the fact that the farmers represented a minority view was "all the more reason that as a protest army it marched up the hill of principle so quickly. And once confrontations occurred, and violence (in which a few were killed, thousands wounded, and more thousands arrested) it became virtually impossible for the government to convince people to pack those principles up and march right down again to the practical world of bargaining and negotiation."[72]

What, now, were the larger issues for which the airport project became a symbol?

First, the airport project with its expropriation of land came to constitute, for the opposition, not only an appropriation of territory, but a despoliation of landscape, a rupture with, and a violation of tradition. The farmers were seen as representing not simply an occupation, an economic interest, but a way of life, rooted in Japanese cultural tradition. The siting of the airport on lands which were, in part, an Imperial estate was, for the authorities an advantage; for the opposition, it both exemplified and compounded the violation of culture. On the Imperial estate was a large and famous grove of cherry trees, some dating back to Tokugawa times, their fragile blossoms in the spring snow a symbol of values central to traditional Japanese life. The earth movers were seen as attacking culture. It was the destruction of the cherry trees which led the elders to threaten mass suicide.

The program within which the airport planners legitimized the enterprise was, in itself obnoxious to the opposition. The airport was both part and symbol of a government development strategy referred to by the Japanese as "income doubling." "In line with its industrialization policy the government] wanted to drive small farmers off the land and into the industrial labor force in order to raise incomes, something the government regarded as a self-evident benefit to all. However, both militants and farmers alike interpreted this as an example of how state-capitalism negates democracy, generates a surplus by means of primitive accumulation, creates an industrial reserve army, and generates a class struggle between capitalists and farmers. Hence, what was a confrontation over competing interests from the perspective of the government became a class struggle from the standpoint of the movement. " [[73]

So an alliance which might have seemed to the political purist more than a little odd - one between commercial farmers and militant New Left sects - came to be integrated in a system of ideas which linked cherry trees with class struggle.

There was more. The airport was planned in part with reference to the requirements of commercial travel, but also, in part, with reference to the requirements of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The struggle over the airport thus also became a struggle against militarism, against nuclearism, against U.S. domination of Japanese soil. One of the groups early invited in by the farmers, and important in the teaching of tactics of opposition, was a group which had carried on an earlier struggle against a U.S. military base on the sacred Mount Fuji.

The movement also was able to evoke imagery from the past, joining in its historical symbolism the uprisings of poor Japanese peasants against their rulers with the struggles of early Christians against the Roman state. The farmers' leader, a Christian, "...with remarkable skill translated farmers' interests into principles reminiscent of radical Christianity. He used early Christian symbols and parables as his guide and the Bible as a source for many of his ideas. He endowed the movement with dignity. The humbleness of the farmers became, in his vision, a restatement of the virtues of traditional Japanese life.... He retrieved old themes of peasant rebellion and the old ideal of the radical peasant-warrior, but stripped of earlier nationalist overtones, his vision of a new and more communitarian society was not very different from the thinking of early Christian utopians and perhaps Tolstoy, whom he had read." [74]

In the intensity of struggle, these themes came to color the terrain around the airport into a kind of semiotic landscape.

"In this battle of the two crossroads, hamlets and villages, solidarity huts and fortresses, towers and underground bunkers came to represent a moral architecture, the hamlets and villages representing a superior moral existence based on nurture and cultivation in contrast to the careless ruthlessness of the runways and buildings of an airport and the industrialization, pollution, ecological disaster they represented. The solidarity huts and fortresses were the defense points against all this. The bunkers burrowed into the land as sacred soil, the defenders going underground while the towers claimed the sky, the rain, the weather, against not only airplanes but against the monopoly of the sky held by the American armed forces that controlled the air lines. The battle between the Sanrizuka crossroads and the airport was thus a battle between civility and ruthlessness, peace and war. Farmers in their headbands, women in their baggy pants and straw hats, militants in their helmets peopled those constructions and arrayed themselves against the glass, steel, and concrete of the airport itself. It is in this explicit physical sense that Sanrizuka constructed a moral architecture, all the more compelling because the airport was ringed with double-linked chain fences, topped with barbed wire and electrified, a dry moat between, and guard towers constructed with electronic surveillance equipment while nearby were barracks for thousands of riot police, all to be attacked by staves, spears, sticks, stones, Molotov cocktails, excrement, and other instruments of a people's war. "[75]

The issues that the militants were dramatizing with the mass mobilizations, and their moral architecture, were real issues, not fanciful ones, and they were far from trivial.

The course on which the Japanese leadership had set their society was clearly one calculated to deviate as rapidly and as radically as possible from Japanese cultural tradition. The meticulously gardened Japanese landscape, the disciplined simplicity of the traditional Japanese room, the garden with its gravel and moss representation of nature, all speak of endless patient care, attention to detail, and appreciation of the simple and ephemeral. Such an esthetic, and the social arrangements and values which went with it, constituted the opposite extreme from the values of economic growth, high technology, consumerism, which were the legitimating context of the new airport. Perhaps Japanese in general would prefer the new - but had they had a chance to consider the matter and make such a choice?

To suggest the feelings that are about there I will simply note that one Japanese prefecture has taken to raising fireflies. Fireflies, it seems, can no longer survive in the polluted Japanese air. The prefectural government raises them in cages, and on one evening a year lets them fly out into the summer night, while the residents ooh and aah.

It was certainly true that the "income doubling" strategy was to force farmers into becoming industrial workers. It may be that their incomes would rise in the process, but would their real wellbeing? And in the meantime, it was obviously a fact that the process would enhance the profits and the wealth of the managers of those industries; was not this the force which drove the strategy, rather than some general consideration of social welfare? The radical analysis was at least not off the wall.

It was certainly true that the airport was intended to be of service to the Americans in prosecuting their war in Vietnam. Even in the United States there were many citizens who saw the war as wholly immoral. For the Japanese, it had additional resonances: first, via the Leftists' repudiation of Japan's own militaristic tradition, and what it had meant in recent history, second, via the relationship to the American occupation, and third, via the powerful sentiment in Japan - grounded in experience - against nuclear arms on Japanese soil.

What would be the alternative ways for raising these issues in Japanese society?

We can look at this question in two ways, first in terms of the characteristics of the Japanese political system, second, in terms of the nature of the issues which are, of course, not unique to Japan.

One study of protest movements in Japan points out that the Japanese political system is, compared to our own, a very difficult one for dissent to penetrate. During the 50s and 60s, and even tor a substantial extent today, the major political party, a strongly conservative one, collaborated with business leaders and with the elite bureaucrats to drive forward policies of economic growth which admitted for very little questioning.

"Much of the system's] success was undoubtedly due to a lack of an alternative to economic growth as a focus for a national consensus — both the military and nationalism had been discredited by world war II, and the left-wing parties and unions were unable to present an effective alternative to the conservatives' program of industrialization and growth — but the lack of effective opposition was also due in part to Japan's failure to develop legal or political channels for challenging specific government policies or decisions. The legislative process is effectively dominated by the bureaucracy; the legal system has not historically provided a forum for disputing official policies; and local politics have been dominated by particularistic loyalties to the yuryokusha ("the powerful people"'), that is, heads of neighboring associations, merchants' groups, or the support networks of national LDP politicians. Opposition by the minority parties was abstract and ideological, and issue-oriented interest groups such as those characterizing American politics were virtually nonexistent. The result was a "conservatives' paradise," where an occasional expressive and emotional protest like the Security treaty riots maintained the appearance of vigorous opposition but where actual decisions on both broad policies and particular issues remained within conservative control." [[76]

In the 1960s, the high-growth consensus \- or the political arrangements that passed for consensus - were shaken by a series of movements against pollution. In the early 1950s it was first noticed that the fishermen and their families in Minamata were being stricken with a disease involving disturbances of vision, movement and speech, followed by wild fits of thrashing and senseless shouting, and eventual death. By 1958 the Ministry of Health had identified chemicals from a fertilizer plant as the cause, but it was not until ten years later that these findings were made public. By this time, other similar cases had come to light. In 1967, the first lawsuits were filed. By 1970, these citizen movements had achieved such political standing that the Japanese Diet held an extraordinary session to pass innovative environmental legislation.

Citizen movements against life-threatening pollution thus, eventually, brought a response from the political system. But not only did the response take many years; it was also specific to the pollution issue. The Minamata struggle and citizen movements like it constituted a model that others might follow, but did not open up any essentially new channel into the still personalistic and enclosed Japanese political system. Indeed, even as I was in Tokyo visiting the militants at Narita the Recruit bribery scandal was beginning to unfold and to display the degree to which the political leaders who are to represent the interest of all Japanese citizens are, in very substantial part, in the pay of those who can afford to buy them.

But in any existing political system, the issues raised at Narita raise special problems. The issues seem to be too big and too basic to be managed through political horse-trading. Even at Minamata there were problems of this sort; it seemed inappropriate, to many of the fishermen, to settle on monetary compensation for the loss of a wife or parents. But in the pollution controversies it was a least possible to organize the issue around particular damaged individuals, and eventually to come to a more general legislative solution which would limit the discharge of particularly toxic chemicals. But how does politics deal with questions of the meaning and purpose of social action in general?

The discussions that are said to characterize the sphere of public policy seem to presuppose some basic structure of agreement as to the terms of reference, the concepts to be employed, the values which drive action and therefore make discussion relevant or irrelevant. A discussion works very well when it's a question of means. It works, also, for a choice of goals, when the choice does not cut too deeply against what are, at bottom, different views of what is important in human life. When it is a question of forming and transforming culture at this more basic level, " discussion", "choice", " trade-offs " hardly seem like the right language. To make statements about the purpose of collective life, the language of traffic projections and cost benefit is not appropriate. Because the process of establishing social institutions, ways of behaving, passions and ideas -in sum, working culture -is both intellectual and emotional, the process demands drama at least as much as discussion. It is not only by the coercion represented by mass demands, but also by dramatizing and heightening perception that, the actions of social movements re-shape the terms of reference for policy and politics. It is the passionate Utopianism that starts outside politics that gives such new terms of reference their place in politics.

The twenty year struggle over the Narita airport with its massed protestors and its semiotic landscape of towers and tunnels might be attributed to some peculiarity of the Japanese setting, perhaps, let us propose, the rapidity of Japanese transformation from a world of peasants and samurai to major industrial power. But there is a not dissimilar example in Germany, in the struggle over the Frankfurt airport which was one of the formative elements in the emergence of Green politics. The struggle lasted for nearly twenty years. Here, too, there was the construction of a symbolic space, a semiotic landscape. Here, too, trees served as a rallying point, along with resistance to the American military presence and the disruption of the immediate area caused by the airport. Here too, the airport became a mobilization space which attracted a variety of groups departing from a variety of issues, from city radicals, fresh from struggles over urban squatting and the defense of the countercultural "scene", to housewives concerned about noise pollution and the loss of open space. As at Narita, the tactics used borrowed from other struggles; the village of resistance erected at Frankfurt echoed that built a few years earlier at the proposed nuclear power site of Wyhl and in 1980 at the site for a reprocessing plant in Gorleben.

"The proposed site for the new west Runway, necessitated in part because almost one third of the airport's existing capacity was taken up by the US Air Force's military Aircraft Command, was a large woodland area which, as well as being of considerable research interest to biologists, served as a leisure park for the half million inhabitants of Frankfurt's nearby industrial estates. In 1965 the protestant clergyman Kurt Oeser founded the group Action Against Aircraft Noise, one of the very first [citizen initiatives] which, by challenging the planning decision in the courts, succeeded, in 1969 and again in 1972, in gaining a postponement of the construction date and in alerting the communities in the vicinity of the airport to the social and environmental consequences of the planned runway. Undaunted, the regional government proceeded in 1978 with the sale of woods to the airport authorities, a decision which initiated the formation of local action groups throughout the area. At the peak of the conflict there existed fifty such groups ...and by August 1979 they had won sufficient support to be able to organize the first public demonstrations against the project.

On May 3, 1980 eighty protesters built a log cabin in the middle of the woods which was to serve as their action center and subsequently became a symbol of resistance. At the same time this act signaled a departure from the path of legal protest and, as such, a new stage in the campaign that from now on was increasingly to be guided by obstructionists tactics. On 20 October, following the rejection of the action groups' appeal by the Administrative Court in Kassel, the first trees were felled, but a night-time invasion of the woods by 600 inhabitants of Morfelden brought the work to an abrupt halt.

Their number swelled to some 3000 as news circulated that the runway construction site had been occupied by the police who, however, could only stand by helplessly when faced with the passive resistance of angry housewives, pensioners, schoolchildren, students, trade unionists, churchmen and local politicians. To avoid being taken by surprise again the protesters established permanent occupation and within three months the solidarity cabin had become the centre for a veritable 'village of resistance' complete with kitchen, sleeping quarters, first aid facilities and children's playground." [77]

Even while direct protest action continued, the citizen groups continued to pursue legal channels of opposition. In particular, they began collecting signatures to bring about a plebiscite as sanctioned by the state constitution. But by the time the number of signatures collected reached 300,000, "the route of direct democracy had already been blocked off by the regional government's refusal to allow a plebiscite on the grounds that the project was ultimately subject to federal legislation (i.e. the Federal Aviation Law) and thus lay outside the purview of the state] constitution. On 6 October the order was given to clear the protesters' woodland village but when, the following day, the tractors and excavators arrived under massive police protection, they found the village defended by an occupation force of some 10,000, who could barely conceal their jubilation when the hapless chief of police ordered his men to retreat. This was, however, to be the protesters' last victory and merely foreshadowed the final phase of a conflict that was now played out amidst regular scenes of open violence. A wire fence was erected around the construction site and the first in a series of bloody encounters ensued. Equipped with tear gas and water cannon the police returned on 2 November and the occupants' village was razed to the ground. Two weeks later 150,000 demonstrators assembled in Wiesbaden, but this, the largest rally in Hesse's history, was eclipsed by events the next day, when thousands of protestors clashed yet again with armed police along the perimeter of the concrete wall that by now partly surrounded the site of the runway. This same battle was re-enacted at the end of January 1982 when, in the last concerted action of the campaign, 20,000 demonstrators intent on re-occupying the site were repulsed by some 8,000 police, with this defeat of direct action coming shortly after the ruling by the Supreme Court of Hesse that the regional government was within its rights to refuse to carry out a plebiscite, the back of the resistance to the project was finally broken. The bellicose chants of 10,000 demonstrators on 14 April 1984, two days after the 'Runway 18 West, had been officially opened, merely served as the protest movement's epitaph. [[78]

But the building of the airport did not mean the end of the politics of its building. In September 1982 for the first time the Greens entered the regional parliament and with eight percent of the vote held the balance of power between the major parties. And with the Greens, a new set of issues had entered politics: not just airports versus woods, but ecology against industry; not simply policies for managing economic growth, but the desirability of growth itself.

Two features of the movements against the Frankfurt airport that have impressed its commentators are 1) the broad social base of opposition, and 2) the broad quality of life themes which came to characterize the movement.

"The protest encompassed all layers of the population. At the Opel car factory around one third of the workforce, out of a total of 30,000, took part in some form of protest activity ... The works council sent a letter to Holger Boerner about the excessive use of force by the police against the demonstrators. Many Social Democrats and trade unionists were also highly dissatisfied with the Social Democrat Administration in Hesse. According to a survey carried out by Frankfurt University, 86 percent of the population in Morfelden-Waldorf was opposed to the project; 50 percent took part in demonstrations; 80 percent took part in general campaign activities; 94 percent were in favor of non-violent opposition; and 70 percent were in favor of a spontaneous occupation of the site to prevent the felling of trees." [79]

Opponents of the project felt that the official enquiry process both failed to give the citizen equal hearing, and failed to deal with "the fundamental question as to what people need and the questions of living and quality of life. [80]

As one writer puts it, "conflict around Frankfurt Airport was not simply related to a rational calculation of the actual level of environmental destruction but to a deep yearning for a change in life-style. The search for meaningful relationships in a communal context, for the warmth and friendship of a group of similarly-minded people was a common feature of the campaign against nuclear power in Borkdorf, the ecological village in Gorleben and the squatting and alternative movements in Berlin. " [81]

A colleague who read an earlier draft of this story asked at this point, whether the protestors were seeking realistically for a more bucolic environment, or were rather engaged in a "'nostalgic search for a habits-of-the-heart primary community." One might ask, equally sensibly, whether the activities of the protestors were primarily a means to changing the policy-planning outcome or, rather, constituted in themselves the creation of the beloved community that they were seeking. In the same way, one can ask: Were the radicals in their Berlin squats, playing at community no longer attainable in "real life"' or were they trying to bring it about in society at large?

It is inherently hard to answer these questions. Is it necessarily unrealistic to engage in a "nostalgic search for a habits-of-the-heart primary community"? How would we know without the search? And in a social movement, do not the activities of community-building through protest, and as a means to protest, also constitute a form of institution-creating which might turn out to re-shape the larger society in their image? Certainly movements for radical reform have often included the effort to build "alternative" institutions and community structures. Some have dropped into history as failed experiments; some have been actively repressed, as in the case of the utopian experiments of the early Soviet revolution when Stalin came into power; and some have continued on as persisting variants, like the communities of the Amish. It is often said of protest movements like the great airport struggles that they are troublingly negative; they can only say No, rather than spelling out a "positive alternative."' I believe that we should understand the make-shift "village"' of the Frankfurt airport protestors as both an activity of organized resistance to the present, and as a groping attempt, no doubt romantic, but with hope for real-world outcome, to model a positive alternative.

We turn now to France, the home of rationalism. Here I draw on a study of six French airport opposition movements. As in Germany, the existence of certain mechanisms within formal politics for the expression of opposition did not obviate what Apter called "the march up the hill of principle"' and. the author of the French study calls "globalizing" of the issues, nor the resort to extra-institutional protest and dramaturgic politics. There were newspaper articles, billboards along the roads, flyers, bumper stickers, and demonstrations. In one case, involving the proposal to enlarge a small local airport in the Alps so that it could receive charter planes, the militants invoked regional cultural tradition by marching on the existing airport two thousand strong to the melody of a song of the Revolution in regional patois, dumping dirt on the tarmac, and planting springs of thyme, the traditional plant of the region. They declared that "since they're paving the agricultural land, the peasants will bury the paving with earth." [82]

The author of the monograph I am citing gives three reasons for the need to "globalize." First, he says, "globalization" is the only means to attack the State and the dominant strata on their own ground, that is to say, the legitimizing frame of the decision. It is necessary to show that the opposition movements have a real global conception - a conception which takes everything into account - while the State is practicing a formal rationality limited in its grasp of reality. Second, only the recourse to "globalization" offers a guarantee that what is being defended is the "true interests" of the population. The militants must adopt a practice which is applied to the "true problems." Third, it is necessary to establish credibility with the publics the opposition must establish a superior technical analytic ability; it does this by re-framing the issue at a large scale. [83]

The opponents of the airport, for example, presented an analysis that took a broader view of the issues of location; they argued that the airport project was part of a policy of industrialization tending to overconcentration in some areas and under-development in others. More broadly still, they saw it as "the project of a society which stakes all on the production of merchandise, on profitability, on 'economic overbidding', on 'progress', even if it is at the 'risk of death' ... This would be the project finally of a system of flight to the future (fuite en avant) which drives to go ever faster, so as to privilege means of transport like aviation, even if this speed contributes nothing in fact to that society."

"Thus," says the author, "the opposition movements cannot be other than movements which campaign for another direction for society, for a society decentralized, de-concentrated, in which power can be exercised locally, in which rational solutions can be found to meet the needs of all: collective transport, de-urbanization, creation of activities in rural zones... etc. A society in which new practices can be created, with other links between individuals, links of solidarity, mutual aid etc... [84] The theme of preservation of a quality environment recurs strongly in these airport controversies, along with themes of a more urbanistic character: prevention of galloping urbanization, "collective transport, more reliance on rail, rather less on air... " More generally still there is reference to a new "mutant fraction of the population, absolutely determined to react against the excesses of modern life." [85]

The insertion of such themes into political life, even if carried on by mass rallies and other dramatic activities outside the realm of normal politics, nevertheless, we are told, has tended to change politics. To the author of the monograph quoted, normal politics presents itself not so much as a system of rules and regulations as "in the form of a corps of 'personalities' whose role consists in playing the permanent intermediary between the State and the population." [86] "While institutionalized, the system rests less on the texts of the laws, the written rules, than on the implicit rules which can only be grasped within the practice of the local administration and its representatives.: In the intermediary role, the local officials are both supposed to represent the population, using their political pressure as a source of leverage for adapting the rules to their needs and be able to deal effectively with the State. Demands from the opposition, which re-frame the issue as drastically as those that have just been identified, stretch the intermediary role beyond its capability. The result is has been both the extra-institutional politics of march and demonstration and the appearance within the sphere of regular politics of "technical" issues of transportation and land policy, and of persons technically trained enough to deal with them credibly.

Finally, we turn to Boston. Here there have been, so far, no pitched battles. But we find many of the elements of the great airport struggles represented at a somewhat reduced scale.

In 1945 the governor of Massachusetts told the state legislature that "if Boston were to keep pace with progress" it would need a modern air transportation facility. This, he claimed, required control by a public authority 'whose sole responsibility is to bring the project to a speedy conclusion' ".[87]

In due course, such an authority was created "not subject to the supervision or regulation of...any department commission, board, bureau or agency of the commonwealth." [88] By the end of the 60s, the expansion of the airport had become a major political issue. The immediately presenting problems had to do with noise of aircraft taking off and landing over a working-class residential neighborhood, and the taking of land, particularly a small park regarded by the planners as run-down and undistinguished, but by the nearby residents as a traditional place to gather and play. However, as the residents struggled to get their grievances heard by planners and consultants and by the powerful public authority itself, power and democratic accountability because an issue itself.

The airport and its politically unaccountable public authority came to confront the adjacent neighborhood in a manner loaded with symbolism. As Dorothy Nelkin describes it in her little book onto airport controversy: the airport's "stark, spacious modern architecture is striking in its densely populated urban setting full of old triple-decker wood-frame homes. The contrast is symbolic and important in understanding the intensity of community opposition. The airport is a sort of city within a city; a subculture of mobile, middle-class citizens who thrive on the conveniences of a facility that is devastating to a community that shares few of its benefits." The airport contributes many jobs to Boston, but those in the local community are relatively few and very low-paid; "its jets release some 84,000 pounds of contaminants each day, and the negative impact of noise affects some 100,000 people." [89]

In the neighborhood, housewives with baby buggies have blocked the airport trucks at rush hour. Most intemperate language is used.

"'Authority is called an 'octopus,' 'a sand sucker,' 'a monster with cancerous tentacles, out to 'strangle' the community. It is one thing to know a monster exists, but quite another to hear its roar and breathe its excrement.' The images are sinister and suggest an all-pervasive, impenetrable force that grabs and totally dominates its victims. Confronted by this force East Bostonians use the language of total war:'devastation', 'battles,' 'jeopardy', 'blitzkrieg,' 'physical destruction' and 'moral annihilation.' They call Massport's donations to their sports club 'pacification by a dictator,' and they hope to 'reclaim land' and to survive totalitarian control." [90]

As in the other controversies, the issues became "globalized" from land-taking and due process to ends, broadly conceived.

"There are more important things in the life of the people in greater Boston than just economic growth. The Boston airport was built to serve the people. It was not constructed to make people, neighbors, schools, churches, or hospitals its servants. Our concern is not with mortar or machines. It is for the people of East Boston ...when we have reached the point when our creations are more important than the creators, it is time to call a stop, and we then must not go on just because we call it progress." [91]

In looking at the anti-airport movements in Japan, Germany, France, and the United States we have focused, so far, on the magnitude of the movements. They are astonishingly serious, by any measure: the passionate language and confrontational actions employed; the numbers of people involved; the tenacity of the militants, in some cases, through decades of struggle.

Let us now for a moment concentrate on the content of the movements, once they escalate and "globalize" from some initiating resistance to land-taking, resentment at lack of consultation, and anger at airport noise. There seem to be common themes, across the diverse national settings. The Japanese saw the airport project as an assault on traditional culture, both in displacing small farmers, and in violating the rural landscape. The destruction of the cherry trees on the imperial estate was enough to lead the rural elders to prepare for ceremonial suicide. In the opposition to enlarging the Frankfurt airport, it was the forest and the resistance village within the forest that came to stand symbolically for community and culture against the modern state, high technology and the military. In France, because the airport proposed to pave over the fields of the Alpine farmers, the militants covered the airport with earth and planted thyme. In Boston, the housewives came out with baby buggies to block the trucks, mourned for their wooded park, and spoke of "more important things in the life of the people in greater Boston than just economic growth."

In all these cases, the airport struggles have become, at some level, struggles against the current idea of progress. This is the natural consequence of globalizing the issues. To legitimate a very large project that substantially inconveniences the people living in the area, the project planners must claim an over-riding general interest. In the case of airports, this general interest is bound to be seen in terms of a set of ideas which we have together called "progress": economic growth, speed, technical efficiency. When the opponents of the airport re-frame the issue so as to define their view of the situation as more inclusive, it is this very idea of progress that comes into question. So it comes about that the airport opposition in Boston declares: "When we have reached the point when our creations are more important than our creators, then it is time to call a stop, and we must not go on just because we call it progress."

Now of the many projects and activities for which the idea of progress has served as ideological umbrella, airports are surely not the most noxious. Why, then, have they become, in so many instances, the occasion for raising these intractable issues about the purpose of it all?

In the first place, they are very big and very visible, and the very nature of their construction can readily stand for the experience of the traditional being superseded, rolled over by, the new. (Compare "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.") They are also an elitist form of transportation, one that serves the affluent few, to the inconvenience and disadvantage of the less affluent in their environs. In 1987, in the rich and exceptionally airline dependent United States, thirty percent of all citizens used the airlines. The French anti-airline militants liked to point out that the lines were serving only four percent of the citizens. In their blending of state power and private profit, the airport projects seem to epitomize the institutional basis of the modernist project. Finally, the airports, and air travel more generally, have a symbolic loading on the idea of the modern. One has only to look at the glass and metal of the terminals to recognize the idealization of the new. Or one might think of the British, in the midst of an energy crisis-induced three-day week declaring the Concorde of such over-riding national interest as to be exempt from energy-use restrictions. It must mean something that the great 1960 text on economic progress, Walter Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth, which went through thirteen printings in the first year, imaged progress in a perfectly aeronautical metaphor: the "take-off into self sustaining economic growth." [92] So powerful was the metaphor at the time that it was used everywhere among economic planners and indeed still persists. No one then asked how these flights were to sustain themselves indefinitely in mid-air, nor where they were going, nor why it was worth taking off at all. Now these questions are being asked. Airports are a particularly appropriate arena for raising the questions.

But airport struggles are not unique. An old friend who, from her state's public facilities commission, has been making decisions about projects such as electric and gas transmission lines and solid waste disposal, writes me that what she finds interesting in the airport stories is that they are "different only in degree from the whole genera of not in my backyard controversies" [93]Even a fight over siting the dump can now surface deep passions about ecology and the meaning of progress.

Each of the airport controversies we have described has had a somewhat different outcome with respect to the political and policy system within which it took place. In France, we are told, the airport controversies have somewhat changed the content, and therefore also the personnel, of local politics. In order to deal with such technical issues, the political system had to incorporate persons who could argue and negotiate on a technical level; the representatives no longer were able to manage issues in an essentially personalistic way. Meanwhile, organized bodies of constituents have become prepared to argue issues of regional planning and transportation policy, and are by no means diffident in taking the field to do so. The politicians no longer control politics, and the planners no longer control planning.

In Boston, after a period of noisy political struggle, reports, and re-studies, the system adjusted largely by replacement of persons in key posts. Especially important and symbolic was the entry into the position of Commissioner of Transportation, of a Boston Italian, with both ethnic and political ties to the working-class community next to the airport, and a history of participation in community-based opposition to planning projects. A more sympathetic local government has calmed the opposition by checking noise and disruption via regulation. "'The neighborhoods" versus "the downtown financial interests" has recently been the theme organizing mayoral elections in Boston, and there is a lively environmental movement, but the airport controversy itself has not played an important role in either of these. The victories are real, but if the local political climate were to change, the community would have to be re-mobilized all over again if it were to have an effective means to affect airport policy.

However, the last decades have seen the establishment in the United States of a large number of issue-oriented groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, formed around other environmental struggles, which have become an important component of our political system.

In Japan, the Narita opposition has been whittled down but never pacified. The airport opponents have established themselves as a permanent force in two houses next to the airport; the militants have in a couple of cases married local farmers; the farmers have become radicalized; and the radicals have developed a more "populist" tinge to their ideology. The radicals from time to time engage in oppositional activities in Tokyo; a couple of years ago, they shut down the subway at rush hour, and more recently they set a fire to the house of a contractor engaged in work at the airport. Meanwhile, the authorities have adjusted by learning to move more slowly to reduce the direct confrontations, and to buy off the farmers one by one. They have not made modifications in the policy-making structures.

The most interesting outcome, in many ways, was that of Germany. The airport got built, but the Greens entered politics with a program not only to restrict environmental degradation, but to limit economic growth. By June 1989 there were Green parties in the twelve member states of the European Community; they ran on a common program calling for a "sustainable economy, international solidarity, better environmental protection, an end to civil and military nuclear technology, ecological transport, debate and control over biotechnology; ecological agriculture; equality for women; reorganization of work/employment; a number of human rights measures; disarmament and demilitarization. [94]The Frankfurt Airport NIMBY has come very far.

But the history of the German Greens shows clearly how difficult it is to deal with the really big issues in the framework of normal politics. The German Greens have had, in effect, to maintain two channels of action: one of political action - the Greens in the Bundestag - and one of social movement. They know that the part of the movement that works on legislation needs the agitators outside to give them, a very small minority party, any leverage in the legislature. With that leverage they have been able to move the major parties towards environmental protection, women's rights, backing out of nuclear power. One former Green parliamentarian says: "I think that one of the direct achievements of the Greens in many fields is to slow down what some people call progress, but other people call a blind rush forward in these areas. Sometimes I think the Greens go beyond reasonable demands ...but then you have other groups, parties taking up these issues in a more moderate way...It's the role of the Greens to be the hardliners, to push the other ones. It is not the role of the Greens to draft the majority viewpoint." [95]

In summary, the airport struggles have been characterized by passionate collective actions: thousands of protestors, threats of group suicide, women and children blocking roads.

But they have been anything but mindless; indeed, they have raised and made explicit the very deepest of issues. These issues, and their formulation, were emergent. More local and concrete issues galvanized action; action and the need to mobilize participation in action drove interpretation; interpretation converted the local and particular into an instance of a much more general issue that could, in turn, mobilize still more general participation. As action and interpretation evolved together, the airport movements came to frame the issues not as technical ones but as essentially moral choice - the terrain which we have traditionally relegated to religion. This re-framing of issues in struggle is indeed what we recognize as a social movement.
CHAPTER FOUR:

WIDER MEANING OF THE LOCAL: VARIETIES OF WELSHNESS

As the Peoples have risen up assertively, even bloodily, from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union - the Latvians, the Croats, the Serbs, the Uzbeks, the Kazaks - it is easy to forget that there are not wholly dissimilar nationalisms in the more stabilized Western European countries - Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Scots, Irish, Welsh. These, too, seem reluctant to be ushered off the stage of history; although the last native Manx and Cornish speakers died some years ago, Cornish at least is now being taught in Britain. These are categories of localized social identity, but they are also identity as being created, identity as social movement.

In looking at Welsh Nationalism, I shall focus less on the theories of internal colonialism, regional competition, or even cultural persistence which try to set forth the bases for a Welsh movement, and look more at the way in which these local interests and shared culture have been shaped politically and transformed into social movement.

Two themes seem to emerge.

1.The conversion of local interest and shared culture into social movement requires an activist leadership prepared to break the institutional conventions by dramatic action. Culture must not just be practiced, taken for granted: it must be observed.

2. Self interest, while arguably the necessary basis for a social movement, is not enough to propel it forward. Building a movement needs a sense of moral mission which puts the experience and needs of the particular local group into broader context.

In the development of Welsh nationalism, no single individual has been more important to both these tasks than Saunders Lewis, for many years the leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru and the father, as well, of its younger and more radical offshoot, the Welsh Language Party. In trying to understand the process of framing the local in the general, it seems relevant to grasp the fact that for Saunders Lewis, it was the wider meaning that in the first instance engaged his passion for the local. Lewis himself was not born in Wales but in Liverpool among the relatively prosperous Welsh community there. "It was through Yeats, Synge, Colum and other writers belonging to the Irish literary revival that he first came to understand the meaning of nationhood and the experience of patriotism. " [96]His major conversion experience came later, and also via reading and analogy; Lewis was in the trenches at Loos in Belgium and there reading a book by his favourite French author, Maurice Barres. "One of these books by Barres relates the story of a brilliant sophisticated artist, completely surfeited by the shallow pretentiousness of the world around him. One day he revisits his old home in Alsace-Lorraine where for the first time in his life, his eyes are opened to the quiet dignity and the modest, natural, self-assured ways of his fellow-countrymen. This insight so surprises and overwhelms him that his whole philosophy of life and of human existence is changed..." He learned that "He who cuts himself off from his own past, his own land, is starving his soul and frustrating his whole being." Saunders Lewis came to Wales via Barres on Alsace-Lorraine. "It was through him that I discovered Wales, and the hedonism of my youth was completely transformed." [97]"He resolved to acquire a mastery of the Welsh language and to read extensively in its literature."  [98]For some ten years Lewis was then engaged in constructing a philosophy and a program for the Welsh Nationalist Party.

In 1936 he turned to a dramatic piece of direct action. On Tuesday, September 8, 1936, at two-thirty in the morning, Lewis and two friends, a minister and a schoolmaster, drove up to the police station in a small town in Wales and handed in a written statement, taking responsibility for setting fire to a building at an RAF camp nearby. In the notorious "bombing school" trial which followed, Saunders Lewis addressed the jury as follows:

"On the desk before me is an anthology of the works of the Welsh poets of Lleyn. On page 176 of this book there is a poem, a cywydd, written in Penyberth farmhouse in the middle of the sixteenth century. That house was one of the most historic in Lleyn. It was a resting place for the Welsh pilgrims to the Isle of Saints.... in the middle Ages. It had associations with Owen Glyn Dwr. It belonged to the story of Welsh literature. It was a thing of hallowed and secular majesty. It was taken down and utterly destroyed, and I claim that, if the moral law counts for anything, the people who ought to be in this dock are the people responsible for the destruction of Penyberth farmhouse."

At this, applause was heard in the court, and the Judge ordered everyone to be quiet, and the officers to take anyone who made such a commotion again outside. Mr. Lewis continued: "moreover, the destruction of Penyberth House is, in the view of the most competent of Welsh observers, typical and symbolic. The development of the bombing range in Lleyn into the inevitable arsenal it will become will destroy this essential home of Welsh culture, idiom and literature. It will shatter the spiritual basis of the Welsh nation... " [99]

The nationalists got a hung jury, so the case was transferred to the old Bailey. There the three men were found guilty and sentenced to nine months in jail each. When they got out, a tumultuous crowd received them as heroes. But the "bombing school", went on building and some 7,000 people came, perhaps less tumultuously, to its opening.

In the end it was defeated by the weather of the British Isles, for the area proved to be too cloudy to be an efficient air force training site.

Welsh nationalism has not, by and large, focused on sacred places. It has been the Welsh language which has served as its rallying point. But as the tone of Saunders Lewis' defense might suggest, there are surprising resemblances to the aboriginal rights movement. Part of Welsh nationalism has been in the idiom of fairly conventional politics: Welsh interests within the British system; parliamentary politics; the Plan for Wales, which the nationalists produced to counter the plan produced for them from Whitehall: a movement for separate government institutions. But it is also something else: a movement to preserve a culture and a language and "the assertion of a set of values that has been developed in a history of resistance first to landlordism and capitalism and now to the bureaucratic modern state .... The issue is whether a small community with its own language and culture and values, its literary and intellectual traditions, its own way of seeing the world, its own ways of being human, can go on existing in these islands." [100]Welsh nationalism is a political movement, and it is also a social movement, an anti-politics.

At the beginning, this latter vision clearly dominated. The Saunders Lewis version of Welsh nationalism focused on maintenance of tradition. Its principal concerns were the Welsh language, the Welsh identity and Christianity in Wales. Saunders Lewis did not believe that the Welsh nationalist should engage in parliamentary politics - standing for election, lobbying for legislation. The aim of Welsh nationalism would not be to substitute a Welsh government for a government from Whitehall; it was "To fight not for Welsh independence, but for the civilization of Wales." Saunders Lewis saw the position of the 'English state' with respect to bombing range as "the denial of God, of God's law." [101]Welsh nationalism, Lewis saw as "the defense of the individual soul against the oppression of the centralist, imperialist state, and against economic materialism that denies or ignores the spiritual nature of man." The Welsh Nationalist Party was defending "the right of man to his freedom, the right of man to his own property, the right of man to his family and his nation, the right of man to the language of his fathers, the right of man to inherit the traditions of his country." [102]In 1962 Lewis asserted again that a campaign for the Welsh language was "the only political matter which it is worth a Welshman's while to trouble himself about today. "[103]

But even within the Plaid Cynru, the Welsh nationalist party Lewis founded - for many years a tiny organization of politically conservative North Welsh idealists - Lewis' anti-politics was challenged by an alternative view. The first Plaid Cymru parliamentary candidate stood for election in 1929. By the end of the Second World War, Lewis declared that "the essentials of Welsh life cannot be peacefully defended without a Welsh National Party in the House of Commons." [104] Thus the Plaid Cymru has been both a political organization and a social movement, or something between the two, and one of the issues in Welsh nationalism has been the interaction between conventional politics and alternative or anti-politics.

Along with the interplay between politics and social movement has gone a set of issues around style and strategy. There are nationalists who have gone to jail for blocking bridges and pulling down English-language road signs. The leader of the Nationalist Party threatened to fast to the death for a Welsh television channel - and got his channel. There are people - no one seems sure of their organizational affiliation - who have taken to burning out summer cottages in North Wales to try to keep the English from filtering into Welsh Wales. Meanwhile, there is the Welsh office and there are the Parliamentary representatives who debate in London and contemplate the measures to be introduced if the Welsh and Scottish nationalists were to hold the balance of power after the next election.

Overlaying the differences between Parliamentary politics and social movement and interacting with both are contrasting visions of the wider meanings of Wales. There are Welsh cultural traditionalists, the most extreme of whom (Adfer) want to develop Welshness in the northern Welsh speaking heartland of the culture and ignore the rest of Wales as irretrievably lost to authenticity. Sharply contrasting are those who see Wales predominantly as a region with its own economic interests, to be advanced through a combination of Parliamentary politics and decentralized planning institutions. There have been and probably still are Welsh nationalists of great political conservatism: Saunders Lewis was a convert to Catholicism who had a great respect for decorous authority, and some of his associates had connections to the French Fascistic Accion Francaise. There are Welsh Marxists whose analytic framework is internal colonialism; the publication Radical Wales publishes Gramsci in translation and urges solidarity with the peoples of the Western Pacific. Finally, there are those for whom Wales and the Welsh are the expression and the vehicle of a pluralist decentralist political philosophy which holds that sovereignty rests with the people in their natural communities. For them, "Regionalism is ...a political and cultural movement as well as an exercise in administration and economics. "[105] "Man needs an anchor in a particular community. It is the source of that moral power which enables him to resist the monolithic State."[106]

Thus, multiple visions of Welshness and of the mission of Wales overlap, conflict, and interact. Complicating and underlying all these intellectual crosscurrents is the variety of Welshness actually practiced within Wales.

It has been said that there are "Three Wales."[107] There is a Wales, especially around the periphery of the territory, of English speakers who think of themselves as English, or British. On the hilly farms and in the little towns of the northeast, there is a Wales of people who think of themselves as Welsh, and speak the Welsh language. There is also a Wales in the South, the Wales of the coal mining valleys, of people who see themselves as Welsh, but speak English. This is the historic legacy of the part played by Wales in the Industrial Revolution. The first consequence of the development of coal mining was a great efflorescence of Welsh culture, as people moved into the coal towns with their chapels and their singing; the second consequence was a swamping of the Welsh by English-speakers who came into the mines. In the absence of a politicization of the language issue, which could have made it possible to school the immigrants in Welsh (this was not Israel!), English came to be the language of the coalfields.

But these "Three Wales" are states of mind, and states of mind shift with circumstance. A Gallup poll carried out in 1979 asked respondents in Wales: Do you think of yourself as Welsh, British, English, or other? In response, 57 percent of the sample gave a Welsh identity, 34 percent British, and 8 percent English.[108] But there are occasions on which a sort of latent British allegiance definitely dominates. One of these is war. In both world wars, the Welsh nationalist leaders urged the Welsh to abstain. Like the socialists, they failed. "Proportionately more men from Wales than from any other part of the United Kingdom" fought in the First World War. As one Welshman puts it: "They fought for the freedom of all small countries except their own; even the Peace settlement at Versailles, which allowed the Germans to pay their reparations in coal, proved as disastrous to the Welsh economy as to the German."[109] In 1938, the Wales Neutral Manifesto announced: "The Nationalist Party declares that there is no just case for war in Europe at present...The Nationalist Party in its Governing Conference has declared that it will not take part in England's wars. Therefore, no Welsh Nationalist may join in this war nor agree to work in armaments factories nor help the war in any way. "[110] But opposition quickly evaporated under the pressure of mobilization and patriotic rhetoric: Hitler made an even clearer target than the Huns of the first war, and "England's wars" became those of the Welsh as well.

Another standing British institution which it does not do well to attack, even in Wales, is apparently the Royal Family. When the young activists of the Welsh Language Society ridiculed and tried to disrupt the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon (he gave a speech, a sort of Bar Mitzvah in Welsh), their actions were almost universally condemned by their compatriots.

Those who would represent the Welsh have to work within the complexities of all this: Welsh speakers and English speakers; the coal mining valleys of the South and the slate quarrying and sheep farms of North Wales; commitments to the British Crown and the government it stands for, versus commitments to Wales; class versus culture.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the issues around which Welshness was defined grew out of Protestant nonconformism. This was because church versus chapel constituted a natural dividing line in society: above, in the Anglican Church, the landlords, and the English language; below, the chapels were the meeting place of the Welsh - a mix of professionals with farmers and craftsmen. The chapels had their own system of popular education and entertainment, and a popular press, thirty journals strong. Since "the local power bases of the] Welsh nonconformist elite were the highly sectarian nonconformist chapels ...their nationalism was affected by this dependency. Although they did support Welsh culture, and their campaign was conducted naturally enough in the Welsh language as the only language the bulk of the population understood, they made no attempt to formulate a broad national political appeal based on the Welsh language or on Welsh national history and aspirations. Predictably, their concern was almost exclusively with nonconformist-related issues, such as disestablishment, Sunday opening, and education. "[[111]

It was a bill - passed in 1881 - to close the pubs on Sunday which set the precedent of separate legislation for Wales. The climax of this early period of Welsh nationalism was the passing in 1914 of an act to disestablish, in Wales, the Church of England. This same movement for Welsh culture produced for Wales a national university, a national library, and a national museum which, like its Danish counterparts, represents an affirmation of folk culture through its artifacts.

It was the Liberal party which was the organizational vehicle in the parliamentary political system for the Welshness of the period. When a leading nonconformist was elected to Parliament in 1868 as the Liberal Member for Merthyr, he was known as "the member for Wales." The Young Wales movement, founded in 1886 in response to the various national movements (Young Italy, etc.) on the European continent, became closely linked with the Liberal Party group, which in 1888 took almost all the new County Councils and organized themselves in Parliament as the Welsh Parliamentary Party. When Lloyd George was elected to Parliament in 1890, at the age of 27, he took to organizing Young Wales as a political force, with self-government for Wales as its objective.

But it didn't happen. Lloyd George was howled down at a meeting of the South Wales Liberal Federation, and "took to heart the famous words of a Cardiff alderman... the cosmopolitan towns of South Wales will newer submit to Welsh domination."[112] It seems that even Two Wales', one English-speaking and one Welsh-speaking, were too many to fit into self-government. Lloyd George went on to become a most distinguished politician, and at his most patriotically Welsh to urge on his Welsh compatriots into participation in the 1914-18 War.

The other major party which has been important in representing Welsh interests is, of course, Labour, with its base in the coal-mining villages.

There may be some lessons for the student of social movements, in looking briefly at the historic evolution of the role which the Labour Party has played with respect to Welshness and Welsh nationalism. At the outset there seemed to be no conflict between an affirmation of Welsh nationalism, even in the form of a demand for "home rule," and the perspective of Labour. Before the First World War, the Labour Party was generally anti-statist. Anti-statist ideas were quite prevalent in socialist circles as they were also in nineteenth century liberalism. It was easy to be both affirmatively Welsh and pro-Labour, the more so since the industrial wing of the Labour movement in Wales had a strong distrust of bureaucratic centralism and saw nationalization as switching one set of bosses for another. But "the anti-statist tradition within the Labour Party which had made it receptive to the concept of home rule was one of the casualties of the First World War."[113] and moving towards power in the midst of economic depression urged a central commitment to planning. "The party could not afford the luxury of competing doctrines of the state and the growing ascendancy of the Webbs insured that the party's prevailing doctrine would be centralist in the cause of economic planning, social equity, efficiency and economy.[114] As the Labour Party evolved to its current form, its doctrine of the class struggle and economic materialism emphasized the ties linking the working class and socialist movement throughout the British Isles and defined interest in Welsh culture and language as divisive nationalism.

While the very large Welsh constituency within Wales has insured that the interplay between centralism and devolution should be recurrent themes \- most recently, of course, in the 1999 Referendum - Nye Bevan and the majority in Labour has taken the position that nationalism divides and enslaves. Thus Labour socialism and the working class solidarity of the coal mining villages have represented an alternative vision of identity and social idealism to that of Plaid Cymru with its emphasis on Welsh language and cultural tradition.

The Welsh Nationalist Party was founded in 1925 at a time of raging unemployment leading up to a bitter general strike in the coalfields in 1926 and the consolidation of Labour support in both south and north Wales. The new Nationalist Party was seen by its founders as breaking quite new political ground from either of the major parliamentary parties. They thought of Liberalism as placing too much emphasis on the individual rather than the civilization and the nation. On the other hand, they said: "the aim of the Labour party is to provide men with an object for their loyalty in place of the nation, that is, their own class. Such an aim uproots civilization and destroys tradition.[115] The Welsh Nationalists would have quite different aims: to defend the cultural identity of the Welsh people and bring about a more truly Welsh Wales. The degree to which this would mean a struggle for self-government, or an attempt to bring nationalists into Parliament, were both, at the outset, issues left for later resolution. What was clear almost from the beginning, however, was that the nationalist party's activities would center around a politics of language.

But given the Three Wales, the use of language as the symbol and touchstone of a more generally Welsh way of being human has its organizing problems. For example, in the 1979 survey already cited, 62 percent of those who identified themselves as Welsh did not speak the language. Already in 1926 a nationalist leader warned that the Nationalist party "will not be sufficiently strong to liberate Wales if it goes only to Welsh Wales" and asked "Are you leaving thousands of young people (i.e. in the South) in the hands of the enemies of your country?"[116]

One response to the problem of language politics has been a politics of regional interests in which candidates of the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, have down-played issues of language and culture in favor of social and economic issues which they perceived as more politically rewarding.

"Since Plaid Cymru has aspired to conventional political power, the party has had to recognize that the center of such power in Wales lies in the southeast, particularly in the populous county of Mid-Glamorgan, which contains twenty percent of the total population of Wales. The electorate in this area is, for the most part, non-Welsh speaking and politically sophisticated, with a long tradition of trade union organization. In spite of having 'lost the culture' in the traditional sense of having little strong feeling for the Welsh literary heritage and little popular awareness of Welsh national history, the populace is very strongly Welsh in its self-identity."[117] But in trying to attract this constituency the nationalists find themselves, like Labour before them, talking a language of material issues. In 1977, when this approach dominated the Plaid, a researcher who interviewed nineteen of twenty candidates supported by the nationalists found that only two of them spoke of the need to "educate people about nationalism."[118]

An important force pulling the Plaid towards social and economic issues was the formation, in 1966, of a "Research Group" composed of young professionals "formed in response to a need for professionalism."[119] This group constituted a kind of Brain Trust for the nationalist elected to Parliament in 1966, and among the most active members of the group were those who wrote An Economic Plan for Wales in 1970. The Plan for Wales took as its objective the creation of jobs for the Welsh within Wales by means of local development poles. In its generally-admired professionalism it constituted a kind of intellectual landmark for the nationalists. One of its consequences was an intellectual climate dominated by planning, in which cultural issues receded from prominence. Talk of workers' control and co-operative socialism almost vanished and was substituted by talk of planning.

In a sense, the high water mark of this kind of politics was the campaign in the late 1970's for a Welsh Assembly with limited powers. When the Assembly proposal finally came to a vote in 1979, it churned up a massive lack of interest; it seemed in many ways too little and too late. Neither in the Labour Party or among the nationalists was there real enthusiasm, and the voters rejected it by four to one. One nationalist writer sees the results as a recognition of the substantial amount of devolution which had already taken place; for there was already a Welsh division of the Trade Union movement, and the Secretary of State for Wales was already in charge of Welsh health services and education. The Welsh Office in Cardiff, created in 1964, was expanding rapidly in budget, personnel, and functions. Its role in economic planning was confirmed in 1976 with the creation of a Welsh Development Agency, the Development Board for Rural Wales, and the Land Authority for Wales. "Most leaders of public opinion in Wales were already accommodated by these bodies, and their position was threatened by a democratic Assembly...As the results of the Referendum came in, senior civil servants at the Welsh Office broke open bottles of champagne in an impromptu party to celebrate. But the opposition was not a rejection of a Welsh dimension or identity. Rather, it was an assertion of the Wales that already existed."[120]

On the other hand, for those for whom Wales meant a way of life, the Referendum had a different meaning: a political enterprise at the wrong level to be meaningful. Some nationalists saw the referendum as the end not only of the idea of devolution but also of the kind of politics which engaged the Plaid Cymru with the Labour Party at Westminster; they saw nationalism as moving to a position rather resembling the early vision of grassroots change: "actually controlling the economy and society of Wales from within by the people who live and work there" via "'community socialism."[121] Since 1985, the term self-government has been followed in Plaid Cymru's aims by mention of the creation of a "Democratic Socialist State"'. "'Welsh Socialism" differs radically from Labour's socialism in that "we oppose placing economic and political power in the hands of faceless and remote government bureaucrats."[122] In this vision, political change is seen as a means to social transformation.

An alternative response to the organizing issues presented by language has been not only to try to maintain Welsh-speaking in the areas where it now exists, but to promote the learning of Welsh. In this kind of activity, the Plaid Cymru has been able to rely on a newer nationalist organization, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, formed in 1962 as a response to a radio lecture by Saunders Lewis on "The Fate of the Language." The leaders of the Welsh Language Society have tended to be young and militant and to employ civil disobedience tactics like blocking roads and disrupting public events. They have had some substantial success; not only are there now bilingual road signs and public notices in Wales, but a Welsh-language television channel and some new schools where teaching is in Welsh outside the areas where Welsh is the language of ordinary speech.

These schools, and their constituencies, are an interesting phenomenon. Because the Welsh-medium schools are special schools, both the teachers who teach there and the parents who send their children there tend to be persons of more than average education, social status, and commitment. Thus, these tend to be better-than-average schools. In addition, since as a result of the militant activities of the Welsh Language Society the public services have been bilingualized, if one wants one's child to be a teacher or a social worker, it is practically necessary to make sure that they can speak Welsh. Thus persons who have never spoken Welsh are putting their children into Welsh-medium schools and even paying out of their pockets for Welsh-medium kindergartens in preparation.

Welsh as a language of common, naturally-learned speech is continually losing ground against the flood of English-language mass communications, the migration of Welsh out of Wales, and the migration of English speakers into Wales. When schools are full of English-speaking children, the teacher teaches in English, unless the school is a special Welsh-medium school. The fact that there is a Welsh television channel does not spread Welsh to English speakers. In some sense, the officially-sponsored, or BBC Welsh may even create some problems for native speakers if it is true, as I was told, that Neil Kinnock's wife Glynys, whose native language is Welsh, will not speak it on a public platform for fear of making mistakes. But at the same time, English speakers in some numbers are learning Welsh, either as a political act, as with English speakers involved in the nationalist party, or as a social mobility strategy, as in the special schools. A national curriculum recently made the teaching of Welsh compulsory in the schools, and public nursery schools currently introduce to the language some 12,000 pre-schoolers, mostly from non-Welsh-speaking homes.

(The development of language by political activity has its peculiarities, but to put things in context, the Welsh language movement is by no means unique in European history. Gaelic, Macedonian, and Serbo-Croation are examples of languages shaped by political will. A German linguist was astonished in 1925 to discover that standard Lithuanian, first written in 1883, was already in full use.[123] Passions still rage in Norway over what kind of Norwegian should be spoken.)

The Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Language Society have managed to divide the political turf in a way quite beneficial to both. The young people of the Welsh Language Society could employ direct action tactics which the Plaid would not; and the Plaid, while perhaps at times embarrassed, seems by and large to have benefited by the visibility given to issues of Welshness. Meanwhile, "the Welsh Schools Movement has revived the language as a medium of education and made it respectable in the anglicized areas, making Plaid Cymru's image as the party that stands for restoration of the Welsh language seem more responsible and realistic in the non-Welsh-speaking parts of Wales."[124]

The issue of direct action versus electoral and legislative politics has been with the Plaid Cymru since the beginning, when some founders wanted to embark on tax resistance or a leafleting action at the House of Commons, but were cooled out by the others. The "bombing school" action was an attempt to produce greater militance and commitment by the direct action example, but it always appears to be questionable whether direct action will help or hinder a movement which wishes also to gain its way by electoral politics.

An example is the Welsh response to the announcement in December 1955 that the Liverpool Corporation proposed to flood 830 acres of a large valley, including a culturally "Welsh" area with important historical and literary associations. Within the area to be flooded was a small but thriving, entirely Welsh hamlet. The reservoir would supply water for new industrial development in Liverpool. It seemed a classic issue: English officialdom destroying a helpless Welsh community and plundering Welsh resources in the service of the politics of productivity in England. Plaid Cymru managed to mount a publicity campaign which was in some respects highly effective; it was ultimately supported overwhelmingly by local governments, trade unions, churches, and political and cultural movements. But Liverpool's bill won hands-down.

Feelings in Wales ran very high, even outside the nationalist groups. There were calls for direct action; but the Plaid Cymru leadership rejected a call for direct action and curtailed any further demonstrations. The executives were afraid of alienating public support. Also, they couldn't see just the right action to take. The 1959 General Election was on the horizon; they had been increasing their vote, and hoped that the reservoir issue would bring them over the top. There was energetic campaigning, including the use of a pirate radio transmitter borrowed from the Scots; but although the Plaid did increase its vote, it did not sweep the polls. People were depressed.

Within the nationalist movement, there was an agonizing reappraisal: how was the Plaid to combine the functions of party and movement? But in the end, it was interaction between the "Old Guard" in the party and the newcomers who came in now, in the context of changing social and political environment, that transformed the Plaid into the organization with the professionalism to produce the 1970 Plan for Wales.

In Pierre Clavel's interesting book on counter-planning in Wales and Appalachia,[125] the Plan for Wales sounds like a resolution of the conflict between party and movement in favor of planning within the system. Since the defeat of the referendum of 1979, this is no longer so clear. On the one hand, the collapse of coal has opened up a piece of politics once wholly controlled by Labour for other parties, including - although in a quite minor role - the Plaid Cymru. Another theme within nationalism is supplied by those who are looking forward to a Labour Government in Britain in which the Scottish and Welsh nationalists would together hold decisive political leverage. There is also a new domain of politics created by Britain's entrance into the European community. One of the major creators of the Plan for Wales now believes that the Plaid should have put all its resources into the elections for the European Parliament.

On the other hand, movement politics has made a place for itself in the world of planning and public administration. When I went to talk to the County Executive in Gwynedd about his agency's attempts to keep out the English by refusing to grant building permits for schemes which seem directed at "outsiders," I found that not only did this gentleman, in every aspect a model white-haired civil servant, speak with a degree of sympathy of those who were burning down cottages, but that he had one wall of his waiting room decorated with a large poster showing the areas of Catalan speech. On the other hand, planning and normal politics have entered the social movement world. In the cluttered basement office of the Welsh Language Society in Aberyswith, a group of tremendously zealous young people told me that they had called a truce, for the time, on direct action, since they are in the middle of a campaign for a new Welsh Language Act in Parliament. One of its provisions would be that "Every district would have to draw up a language policy and consider the Welsh language as a planning factor."

It would be hard to make, out of all of this, a story of great success. One of the major students of Welsh nationalism has summed it up recently: "if the objective of Plaid Cymru has been to mobilize the Welsh nation as a political force, its 20-year venture in serious party-building must be termed a failure. Examination of Plaid Cymru's history, along with a perusal of election statistics, would seem to oblige the observer to conclude that the party of Welsh nationalism had reached the limits of its potential."[126]

Or, if we look at Welsh nationalism as an attempt to preserve one ancient culture in one corner of the British Isles, the verdict cannot be sanguine either. The County Executive of Gwynedd, with whom I discussed the problem of the infiltering English with their retirement cottages, said bitterly: "The Nature Conservancy wants to establish a huge conservancy district within which cultivation will be limited so as to protect some kind of tufted owl which needs a very large area as its habitat; that seems to be legitimate, but where it's a case of trying to preserve the Welsh language, it's not. This is the only part of the world where Welsh is spoken; if it dies here, it will die out."[127] Gwyn Williams, an important Nationalist, speaks bitterly of preservation itself: "Some, looking ahead, see nothing but a nightmare vision of a depersonalized Wales which has shriveled up into a Costa Bureaucratica in the south and a Costa Geriatrica in the north; in between, sheep, holiday homes burning merrily away, and fifty folk museums where there used to be communities."[128]

But turning it the other way, the analysts of Welsh party politics just quoted goes on to say that to see the outcome as failure "is to lose sight of a fundamental assumption: that the only route to power is through electoral politics."[129] If Plaid Cymru works at parliamentary process, the most it can hope for is a modest corner in the house of power, in exchange for legitimizing the major parties. "If Welsh nationalism stands aside from the political consensus, it offers a far greater threat to the existing power structure-as an established oppositional political force at a time of economic breakdown, social disruption and political disillusionment."[130]

We will recognize here the debates that have characterized Green politics in Germany, and to a lesser degree other social movements such as the peace movement and feminism. Is it easier to change the system by working within it, or by pushing it from outside? What are the tradeoffs between adaptation and confrontation? These questions of strategy tap even deeper questions as to the nature of power. What is it? Is it to be thought of as seized, or collected, or perhaps as created?

The Welsh case also shares with the case of the aboriginal rights movement another set of issues around the politicizing of culture. What is authenticity, when culture comes to be claimed, enacted, and preserved? This issue, too, it shares with many other movements of our time: in the front rank, the other European minority nations - the Breton, the Basque, the Catalans, the Irish, but also the primitives of Australia or the Amazon.

In looking at how the Welsh have handled these references and connections, it is very clear that the assertion of the particular leads soon to generalizing. Welshness has come to represent not only the defense of a particular cultural tradition, but to stand for the defense of all particular cultures against the managerial controls of the national state and the homogenizing tendencies of growth politics and consumer culture. It contains, within a particular regional and ethnic politics, a Welsh critique of politics.

It is a very Welsh view of politics, in which the son of a coal miner writes that he left the Labour Party not simply in disenchantment with its commitment to a British-dominated national state, but in distaste for the model of society which its programmatic objectives implied. "The Left, having accepted the western materialist ethic, was seduced by it into accepting the mores and objectives of capitalist society. Thus the political institutions sustaining that society were also the institutions of the new socialist society, with the nation-state in particular playing its decisive role. This antinomy at the heart of socialist ideology is, in the Labour Party's case, strongly accentuated by English chauvinism, ultimately a consequence of the total acceptance of the 'politics of productivity,' the validity of which the nineteenth century saw as self-evident and exclusive."[131] The Welsh perspective here becomes the basis of criticism not only of an English-dominated British state, but of the nation state in general, "that modern social abstraction created essentially to serve the cause of technique," not only of the powerful national state, but of the economic model for which it appears as the supporting institutional framework. For this critique, Welsh nationalism does not have as its aim either regionalism within the British framework or the capture of the commanding heights for Wales; it points towards a system in which "social pluralism becomes obligatory; social self determination becomes possible: the politics of productivity are transformed into the politics of people; and how things are done becomes less important than why they are done."[132]

Such a vision is difficult to implement programmatically. Take the use of planning controls as a way of preserving the language and traditional culture: it runs against the market. The people who are moving into Wales are moving from more economically prosperous parts of Britain; they have capital which local people lack. The County executive officer in Gwynedd told me about a case in which the Welsh office had countermanded their decision to deny a building permission to a developer who wanted to make elegant apartments out of a disused chapel in a totally Welsh hamlet; only outsiders would buy such apartments. But, resenting the Welsh office veto of his act, he still had to admit that it is very difficult to produce a demand among local people for any use of the building, which will surely never be a chapel again. Take the program of decentralized socialism and worker control. Dafyd Iwan, a nationalist leader who is also a rock singer, told me that he was unable to get the majority of employees in his record business at all interested in transforming the enterprise into one of worker control; I was also told that although Plaid Cymru may pass resolutions proposing that enterprises in Wales be required to be worker-controlled, the area is so in need of new investment that no one is likely to hold any potential investor to this sort of requirement. A view of the British government as "'the centralist enemy", (in the words of a John Osmond) coexists with an interest in extracting resources from the enemy camp.

Nevertheless, having said this, we still have to recognize that both the planning and politics in and about Wales are continually shaped by the vision which extracts from the Welsh experience an alternative vision of the desirable: the small-scale, the culturally specific. This view puts forward the Welsh experience - like that of the Basque or the Breton - as an exemplar of a universal principle: the value of the local and particular, the authentically cultural. But to put this view forward, culture had to become cause, the objective of a social movement.
CHAPTER FIVE:

NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE EXCESS: EXTREMISM IN GAY POLITICS

No sociologist and no politician in the Fifties predicted the vivid, stage-seizing, affirmative gay movement that would appear less than two decades later. That there might be organized groups of homosexuals—that was not surprising. There already were such groups in the Fifties; indeed, homosexual organizations had appeared sporadically in England, Germany, and the United States from the end of the Nineteenth Century. But such organizations were all rather small, rather decorous, and nonmilitant—aimed at giving mutual support to a group of people who were stigmatized and penalized by society in general, and at doing what appeared to be possible to bring about a greater degree of acceptance by others. One would hardly have guessed that people in this position would have come out as an assertive, even confrontational, social movement, making deviance a center for solidarity, and using the scandalous as banner.

Acceptance in the context of the Fifties meant limited toleration. The constraints were very tight. To give an example, we could take the response of the Florida Civil Liberties Union to a sensationalistic investigation of homosexuality at the state university mounted by a committee of the Florida legislature in 1958. The state branch of the Civil Liberties Union clearly opposed the investigation which they saw—not unrealistically, as things turned out—as an attempt to intimidate the developing civil rights movement. Nevertheless, with the American Civil Liberties Union on record as supporting the constitutionality of sanctions against homosexual behavior, the most its Florida chapter could muster in protest was the "tremendous and permanent damage your inquest will bring to the reputation of professors and students who are innocent of any participation in homosexual activity." [133] By implication, those accurately identified as homosexuals were getting what was coming to them.

The homosexual organizations of the period saw themselves as having a constituency in the homosexuals who, "in the closet" or not, were striving for acceptance and career mobility in the straight world. When such groups became more active and public, as indeed they did in the Fifties, their activities tended to be an extension of the theme of acceptance and acceptability.

An organization newsletter declared: "We must assume our responsibilities. We have no special privileges because we are homosexuals. Our public behavior cannot be offensive to others if we are to earn acceptance." [134] In 1958, "a woman who had been living pretty much as a transvestite most of her life was persuaded, for the purpose of attending a (lesbian organization) convention to don female garb, to deck herself out in as 'feminine' a manner as she could, given that female clothes were total alien to her. Everybody rejoiced over this."[135]

In the quest for legitimacy, the homosexual and lesbian organizations of the period tended to invite as speakers "experts" and "persons of influence'", whose perspective on homosexuality was that of social deviance and psychopathology; however sympathetic such contacts might be (and at times their speeches were remarkably denigrating), the actions proposed by the experts were always ones which involved effort by homosexuals to bring their behavior and character into line with the dominant heterosexuality. It was deemed to be a social advance that although homosexuals were subject to arrest, they were no longer being executed; the "medical model" which treated homosexuality as a disease without any clear cause or clear cure was thought to be a reasonable position for the liberal sympathizer. Pity, at least, was offered.

Let's take a single event to calibrate the dimensions of the social change that took place within a couple of decades. In the second Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles in 1972, there appeared a giant human "cockapillar," a "22-foot long penis," which went "'weaving its way down Hollywood Boulevard, seemingly in search of an anxious alley but willing to settle instead for a bit of friction with a parked police car." It was accompanied by a Vaseline jar float.[136] What are we to make of a politics which can produce a 22-foot "cockapillar" in a parade?

There is a way of approaching this not-very-focused astonishment via a question, which it is at least possible to answer in a general sort of way: What happened to make this possible?

In answering this question, one prior point is necessary. We need not account for a massive change in public opinion, the doctrines of science, the enforcement policies of city police, or the political climate. No such total and massive change took place by 1972 or has taken place since. Although the law enforcement authorities in Los Angeles made no move to interfere, there is no evidence that the personal views of the police chief had altered from the year before, when he declared that he would not grant a permit for a homosexual parade any more than he would grant one to "robbers, liars, thieves, and muggers." [137] Even in the immediate social setting of the "cockapillar," enthusiasm was far from universal. Response was extremely mixed, varying through "amused, appreciative, appalled and disgusted."[138] Those organizing Gay Pride events on the East Coast saw the very idea of a parade as excessively Southern California: on the East Coast, it was "marches."[139]

Although it is not particularly controversial now to apply for a permit for a Gay Pride parade, the climate of opinion within which such a parade is held has not been transformed, and although the cockapillar seems not to have spawned imitators, the parade organizers will confront similar arguments around the presentation of transvestites and transsexuals.

Decades later, police harassment of homosexuals still occurs; politicians think more than twice before declaring that they are gay, or even affirming support for gay rights. In 1994, the organizers of a beloved Boston institution, the Saint Patrick's Day parade, chose to eliminate the parade altogether rather than admit into it a group of Irish gays and lesbians. Nevertheless, in 1972 an event which would have been hardly thinkable a decade before was not only thought of but implemented, and every year now in many cities there are Gay Pride parades complete with Dykes and Bikes and men in drag. What has made this possible? And what has made the affirmation of sexual diversity a positive movement strategy?

Gay politics must be thought of both as a way of managing the social identity of homosexuals, but also as a way of constructing and defining that very identity. Whatever the biological basis of gender, as a social phenomenon it is socially constructed. Nature and culture interact in homosexual behavior. We know that in institutions where a single sex is available for the forming of erotic attachments—prisons, private schools—such attachments are formed by people who, outside the institution, turn to the opposite sex. On the other hand, when powerful social institutions demand heterosexuality, people will adapt; a century ago, upper class Englishmen, whose preference was clearly homosexual, generally married. Lesbianism as a social practice has been even more overlaid and rendered invisible by the dominance of marriage. In some cultures, same-sex eroticism has been treated as part of the normal range of behavior. Others have stylized some kind of "third sex" like the Plains Indian berdache, who dressed in women's clothes and stayed out of the fighting and hunting which were the center of masculine identity. For our Western cultures, which neither accept homosexuality as normal, nor provide it a definite social role like the berdache, concentrations are probably particularly important as a basis for identity. It has been the work of gay politics to construct a sharply-marked group identity for homosexuality, but this politics, in turn, demanded not only a basis in individuals but a basis in society, which made it possible for these individuals to recognize in each other a common destiny and a common cause.

Harry Hay, a pioneer of the modern gay movement, told me in an interview that as a nine-year-old, he knew that he was "different" and that other children recognized him as different. "You throw a ball like a sissy." And tears came to his eyes when he told of finding in the library at eleven, in Carpenter's book on "Intermediate Types," the word "homosexual." "I know that it's me," he said. "I'm not alone. I'm not sick. I'm not. There are others like me, and someday I'll meet them." [140] It was decades before this discovery took organizational form, but that recognition has been the dominant theme in Hay's strongly-centered life.

One change which made gay politics possible was demographic; there simply were larger concentrations of homosexuals. This was an inevitable consequence of the movement of population into cities. It is also possible, of course, that the social changes which went along with urbanization produced a higher incidence of homosexuality than in the more rural America of earlier times.

But even if we were to adopt the extreme nature-not-nurture view that a given proportion of the population at all times and places is born gay or lesbian, the demographic change involved in movement to cities is important. Cities make possible the formation of all kinds of specialized group identities. Urbanization made the basic demographic situation for gay liberation. There came to be, in the larger cities, neighborhoods where homosexuals concentrated. On the fringes of normal society, semi-tolerated by officialdom, subject to police harassment and social opprobrium, these nevertheless provided a sense of community. One participant in such a homosexual ghetto described San Francisco as "a refugee camp for homosexuals. We have fled here from every part of the nation," he said, "not because it is so great here, but because it was so bad there. By the tens of thousands, we fled small towns where to be ourselves would endanger our jobs and any hope of a decent life; we have fled from blackmailing cops, from families who disowned or 'tolerated' us; we have been drummed out of the armed services, thrown out of schools, fired from jobs, beaten by punks and policemen." [141] The other alternative for the homosexual seemed to be to "live a double life in secrecy and fear that somehow his true nature will be discovered." [142] In addition, World War II helped make the movement possible by shifting people around in a way that shook people loose from the constraints of traditional family and community life. JohnD'Emilio writes:

"In releasing large numbers of Americans from their homes and neighborhoods, World War II created a substantially new 'erotic situation' conducive both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay subculture. For some gay men and women, the war years simply strengthened a way of living they had previously chosen. People who had already come to a self-definition as homosexual or lesbian found greater opportunities during the war to meet others like themselves. At the same time those who experience strong same-sex attraction but felt inhibited from acting upon it suddenly possessed relatively more freedom to enter into homosexual relationships ...For many gay Americans, World War II created something of a nationwide coming out experience..." [143]

Just as modern feminism is hardly conceivable without the movement of women into the labor market which was part of the World War II experience, so also "the military played an especially prominent role in fostering a lesbian identity and creating friendship networks among gay women."[144]

The demographics of urbanization and the movement of people brought about by the war combined to make possible the spread of the gay bar. Of this critically important institution, D'Emilio says:

"Of all the changes set in motion by the war, the spread of the gay bar contained the greatest potential for reshaping the consciousness of homosexuals and lesbians. Alone among the expressions of gay life, the bar fostered an identity that was both public and collective. ...It offered an all-gay environment where patrons dropped the pretensions of heterosexuality, socializing with friends as well as searching for a sexual partner. When trouble struck, as it often did in the form of a police raid, the crowd suffered as a group, enduring the penalties together. The bars were seedbeds for a collective consciousness that might one day flower politically."[145]

Paradoxically, another of the elements which seem to have created the gay movement was the official repression of homosexuality. The heightened visibility of homosexuals in the cities stimulated police arrests of homosexuals and raids on gay bars. As in the case of Blacks, gay group identity coalesced around police attacks. In the Fifties, there was an additional factor: a series of highly visible campaigns against "perverts" in state and national politics. Anti-Communism in American politics carried anti-homosexuality along with it.

Like the Jews before them, homosexuals were seen as foreign bodies to be "ferreted out." The discovery that they were not readily identifiable by appearance or behavior made them even more dangerous. "One homosexual can pollute a government office." declared a congressional committee report. [146] Prejudice and persecution encouraged homosexuals to hide; but at the same it built a sharp sense of group identity, which under the appropriate circumstances could flower into highly visible collective action.

When those circumstances came about, another element that made action possible was prior example. The various movements of the Sixties and Seventies borrowed from each other.

Black Power was a model for many other affirmations of identity. As another gay activist puts it: "Long before Watts and the big city riots, gays began to realize that Blacks were making progress. And they were making progress by being militant; by standing up and screaming."[147] The gays who asserted that "Blatant was Beautiful" were making a point of the precedent. Another sort of example were the Beats and their successors, the hippies. Morris Kight, founder of the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles, told an interviewer that in 1967 "A very wise man I know ... called me and said, 'Whatever you're doing, drop it and come see what's happening in Haight-Ashbury'...he said, 'The hippies are going to give the queers freedom.' That is politically true. The fact that they were able to confront, actively or passively, every value, has affected us very favorably. They were a genuine behavioral minority, they kept love up front. We, too, are a behavioral minority."[148]

But in looking at the context for gay liberation, we must also see the hippies and the "summer of love"' in San Francisco as particularly vivid expressions of a more general trend in American culture, which had its wider theoretical expressions, and no doubt its deeper social and economic bases. Sensual expression was becoming respectable. "Self-realization," rather than self-denial, was being defined as the proper goal of the economically-established American. A variety of touchy-feely therapies were percolating from the trend-setters in California into the ranks of the broader middle class. The pursuit of pleasure had a new respectability, and "gay sensibility" became a recognized element in the world of the arts.[149]

In addition, there came to be a widespread questioning and reinterpretation of traditional gender roles. Feminism not only constituted a strong social movement which gave lesbians backing for self-affirmation and separate identity, but also called into question traditional images of masculinity. In popular culture, starting with the Beatles, the clear masculine-feminine dichotomy of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald has been gradually joined by the androgynous imagery of Boy George and Michael Jackson. [150]

Along with all this came research, which took both a more empirical and a more "open" view of the varieties of human sexuality, and specifically, of homosexuality. Of these pieces of research, the Kinsey reports on male and female sexual behavior published in 1948 and 1953, clearly constitute together a major cultural landmark. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male [151] sold almost a quarter of a million copies, stimulated hundreds of professional synposia, and a clutch of follow-up publications; and became a household word. The Kinsey Report brought sexuality into the open; "Of all Kinsey's statistics, none challenged conventional wisdom as much as his data on homosexuality. He uncovered an incidence of homosexual behavior that dwarfed all previous estimates of its prevalence .... The data disputed the common assumption that all adults were permanently and exclusively either homosexual or heterosexual, and revealed instead a fluidity that belied medical theories about fixed orientations. [152] Psychologist Evelyn Hooker created a sensation when she first presented in 1957 a paper showing that a sample of homosexuals showed no greater psychic abnormality than a comparable sample of heterosexuals on the Rorschach test read blind,[153] and in 1967 the National Institute of Mental Health appointed Hooker to chair a committee investigating homosexuality which, in its 1969 report, endorsed a basically liberal position of tolerance towards homosexuality and homosexuals.

This reinterpretation of homosexuality can be seen in a broader context in sociology. What had been thought of as "social pathology" became reinterpreted in a more relativistic framework of deviance theory. "Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender'." [154] Labeling theory made the topic power: who gets to set the rules. Howard Becker, whose 1963 book Outsiders was the landmark text for this perspective, saw the implications; he predicted that sex should be the "politics of the Sixties," and that in time, sexual expression would be seen as an "inalienable right."[155]

Look at the timing of these events. They do not suggest a division into cultural "periods." Kinsey ante-dates the government purges of the McCarthy period, and Hooker published her research in the late 1950s. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the intellectual trends represented in these new approaches within sociology and psychology both reflected and contributed to social changes outside the university, including, in all probability, some very general consequences of the growth of an urbanized, affluent, "post-industrial" society. The changes that made possible a Gay Pride parade with a 20-foot "cockapillar" did not constitute processes of cultural replacement, but rather a lumpy process in which new possibilities opened up, were expressed in organization and ideology, stimulated counter-reaction, and in turn stimulated subsequent organizational and intellectual developments.

Before summarizing this complex history, it is necessary to identify a major theme which will not be discussed here: the relationship between male homosexuals and lesbians in the politics of homosexuality. This has been interesting. Historically, the social positions of lesbians and homosexuals have been so different that, in some respects, the two groups may be said to have little in common. Men were mobile and had a life outside the home and the financial wherewithal to support it; this was not generally available to women. Differing cultural patterns evolved. Although there have been lesbian bars as well as gay bars, and although members of each group have, to some extent, patronized places dominated by the other, in general these meeting places have been much less characteristic of the lesbian group. Cruising is less characteristic of lesbians; indeed, heterosexual women are more likely to cruise than lesbians. Lesbians, although by no means free from police or public harassment, have been very much less liable to harassment than male homosexuals. All this has made the situation of the two groups quite different. Finally, an important dividing force has been modern feminism, which not only has focused politically on themes not congenial to gay liberation (particularly anti-pornography), but has proposed a pattern of allegiances in which lesbians would become cadres in the general women's movement, rather than half—and perhaps, given male dominance, an under-appreciated half—of a gay-lesbian movement. Nevertheless, the alliance has survived and has even grown. It is notable that when the AIDS crisis struck, affecting directly homosexual men rather than women, lesbian groups rallied in support and have even enlarged their role in AIDS activism as time went on.

Histories of the modern gay movement generally set its organizational beginnings with the founding of the Mattachine Society in 1951 in Los Angeles. Harry Hay, the founder, was a Communist, for some years teacher in a Labor school; of the four he recruited as founders, three were also Party members. In several respects, the Society took its patterns both organizationally and conceptually from the Communist Party. The Mattachine was run by a central steering committee which coordinated the associated "guilds" and discussion groups by personal contact; there were no membership lists. Hay's vision of homosexuals as an oppressed minority which could only win equality by militant, collective action reflected the Party's current analysis of the situation of cultural minorities—even though, of course, the Party was itself not at all inclined to transfer the same approach to homosexuals.

On first consideration, it seems altogether implausible that in the chilly political climate of the Fifties, anyone should even dream of founding a radical homosexual organization; even more implausible is it that the organization succeeded. Discussing the Mattachine thirty-five years later, Jim Kepner, archivist of the movement, was asked why it happened."It was the coincidence of finding more than two people at one time who had a philosophy in common.... It probably took people from a Marxist background who had this concept of community and minority culture. All these were absolute horror words to most gays. The founders spoke a common language—had common attitudes."[156]

In addition, the organizing format worked for that time and place. There was no need to become a member, to get on anyone's list. The various discussion groups each had a distinctive social base and took a particular coloring from it. "It was enormously liberating for most people who came out then. It was the first time people could say: I'm gay, and what does this mean for my life?"[157]

As Mattachine discussion groups proliferated, it gradually became clear that almost none of the new participants shared the founders' original vision. Nor did other groups comply with it. "Most of us oversimplified the job of dealing with society.... We thought we were marching to Armageddon. The final battle was only a few miles of .... we didn't know yet that the others didn't carry this .... We thought that we would march together in unity with Blacks and peace advocates and the labor movement and women and all sorts of progressive causes."[158] What happened, in fact, was that Hay left the Communist Party to prevent its having to deal with the issue of homosexuality, and that as growing McCarthyism was reflected in a demand for loyalty oaths within Mattachine, the original founders all resigned from that organization to protect it from accusations of Communist leadership. The Mattachine Society became a membership organization dedicated to the proposition that "the sex variant is no different from anyone else except in the object of his sexual expression." [159] The new leadership turned from the vision of mobilizing a militant gay constituency to one of assisting the work of professionals in studying and educating with respect to sex variation problems. One offshoot of this transformation was a new publication, ONE, edited by a member of the original Mattachine leadership, which for years served as an important vehicle of communication in the incipient movement.

In the mid-Fifties in San Francisco, a lesbian couple founded the Daughters of Bilitis as a kind of social club, "a safe place where we could meet other women and dance ...an alternative to the gay bar scene." However, before long the two founders were inspired by the example of the Mattachine Society to broaden its objectives to "encourage the women to take an ever-increasing part in the...fight for understanding of the homophile minority."[160]

Thus there came to be, from the mid-Fifties on through the Sixties, a "homophile movement" constituted, organizationally, by the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and ONE. All shared the goals of helping homosexuals and lesbians to gain a sense of support from intercommunication, and working with outsiders to develop greater tolerance of homosexuality and lesbianism. ONE's position was, of the three, rather the most militant, since it tended to take the position that only gays could speak for gays, and to publicize, and aggressively comment on, instances of police harassment. However, the movement was, taken as a whole, tiny, non-aggressive, and sharply separate, in its very respectable style, from the evolving gay subculture of the big cities. This subculture around the bars was dominated by the queens. "Queens didn't talk.They would throw a challenge. But they didn't hold a discussion."[161] The organized homophile movement was a movement of discussions and publications. "You not only didn't make pickups at meetings, you didn't look as if you were interested in making pickups at meetings."[162]

However, the publications of all three groups were, as D'Emilio points out, performing an important function. "Despite the limited circulation of the magazines, they played a part in creating a common vocabulary. In evolving a shared language to articulate their experiences, gay men and women came a step closer to emerging as a self-conscious minority."[163]

In the early Sixties, militance came to the gay movement via the efforts of a couple of energetic organizers in Washington, DC and in New York. The Washington Mattachine, under the aggressive leadership of Franklin Kameny, took on the Federal government, and in particular the discriminatory hiring policies of the Civil Service Commission. The group managed to enlist the local affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and to bring successful legal action against disqualification for federal employment on the basis of homosexuality. In New York, Randy wicker successfully launched a one-man media campaign for homosexual rights. The formation in 1963 of a coalition called the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO) provided an organizational format within which militants could coordinate strategy and attract adherents. In the spring and summer of 1965, ECHO sponsored picket lines at the Civil Service Commission, the State House, the Pentagon, the White House, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia. By the spring of 1965, the militants had enough support to field a slate in the Mattachine elections in New York. The militants demanded adherence to the view that "homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology ...but merely a preference, orientation or propensity, on a par with, and not different in kind from heterosexuality," and pledged a program of struggle for the civil rights of homosexuals; the old guard focused its campaign on "helping the individual homosexual adjust to society." [164] In the balloting, the militants captured two-thirds of the votes. Within the Daughters of Bilitis, a similar struggle between militants and traditionalists had a somewhat different outcome; here the conservatives managed to remain in control, despite the dissent of the majority of the rank and file. The shift towards militance is represented in the fact that after all this, the Mattachine membership had expanded four-fold from 1963, while that of the Daughters of Bilitis seems to have stood still.

The absolute numbers were still tiny; the expanded Mattachine still comprised only 445 members. But the movement was beginning to percolate into organizations and institutions with other primary foci. In 1967, the American Civil Liberties Union, basing its stand on the Supreme Court's finding of a "right to privacy" in sexual behavior two years earlier in Griswold vs. Connecticut, reversed its prior stand on gay rights and began to take cases of police harassment, job discrimination, and unequal enforcement of the law. Meanwhile, as in the Civil Rights Movement, some of the churches began to work with and advocate for homosexuals as another oppressed minority. The Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco had a Black minister and a militant approach to racial justice; in 1962, the church brought in a young minister/social worker from Kansas City to work with teenage runaways; and this project brought the new minister to an interest in homosexuals. In 1964, the church sponsored a four-day meeting between gay activists and the ministers from several denominations, which a few months later resulted in the formation of a Council on Religion and the Homosexual. Then, when this group sponsored a dance and the police surrounded and harassed guests at the occasion, the ministers became enraged advocates for the homosexual community vis-a-vis the press and in court.

The social space created by such developments, in turn, facilitated the development of specialized institutions serving the homosexual community: bars, bookstores, publications. In 1968 in Los Angeles, two important institutions of this sort came into being: the Advocate, an aggressive newspaper addressed to gay concerns, and the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay church founded by the Southern Evangelical minister Troy Perry, which by now has over 267 congregations in eleven countries.

All this time, let us recall, there was a world of homosexual activity, of collective life, of sense of community, which was quite outside the organizational world of members and- advocates. This was the world of the bars and baths. Both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis took great pains to disassociate the organizations from "them." The militants of the Sixties opposed police harassment around the bars, but in the mode of organizational advocacy on behalf of the bar patrons.

In 1962, San Francisco owners and employees organized the Tavern Guild to coordinate defenses against the police and regulatory commission, but this was a specialized businessmen's association. In New York and Los Angeles in the early Sixties, organizers of homosexual-rights groups distributed organizational literature in the bars. The owner of the Black Cat in San Francisco, an open homosexual and drag queen, built solidarity through collective ritual. "'He used to put on crazy women's hats and do Carmen—you know, the opera Carmen—using these crazy outfits, and he had a pianist who'd play ...And then he would do Carmen with this crazy hat, dancing around the stage trying to hide from the vice squad who were in the bushes trying to capture Carmen. The best thing was that he did it very deliberately, with a spirit of unity. There used to be maybe two-hundred people who would fill this bar, and they would all cheer his satire, which was basically the beginning of gay liberation ...YOU must realize that the vice squad was there ...But Jose would make these political comments about our rights as homosexuals and at the end of them—at the end of every concert—he would have everybody in the room stand, and we would put our arms around each other and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens'."[165]

But the social life in and around the bars, the single central collective activity for homosexuals, was generally personal, not political. When the bars finally entered directly into gay politics it was, reasonably enough, neither through organizational activity nor through electoral politics, but via spontaneous action. The event, a founding episode in gay history, and indeed, the date being commemorated by the parade at which the "cockapillar" made its memorable appearance, was the Stonewall Riot.

On June 29, 1969, a group of New York police set off to make what promised to be a routine raid on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. This time, as the police tried to drag patrons into the patrol car, the patrons fought back. One of the queens in the paddy wagon kicked a cop with her high heels; several of the arrested queens made their escape. A crowd gathered, shouting epithets at the police, and as the numbers increased, the crowd began throwing things—bottles, bricks, coins. The police retreated inside the bar. The doorman uprooted a loose parking meter and offered it as a battering ram against the front door. Someone threw lighter fluid and a match through a broken window. By the time the tactical patrol force arrived, matters had gone quite out of control. "The TPF would disperse the jeering mob only to have it re-form behind them, yelling taunts, tossing bottles and bricks, setting fires in trash cans. When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one point, they found themselves face to face with their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style, and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices:

'We are the Stonewall girls  
We wear our hair in curls  
We wear no underwear  
We show our pubic hair...  
We wear our dungarees  
Above our nelly knees'"[166]

Rioting continued through the night and sporadically in the streets over the next several days, with cries of "Gay Power," and the police swinging their billy clubs at queens camping it up with chorus-line kicks in the middle of the street. "Not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall," and the New York Mattachine Society saw the episode as "horrible," leading people to think of homosexuals as a "bunch of drag queens in the village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap." [167] But Craig Rodwell, the proprietor of a Gay bookstore who was at the scene immediately, called the papers and proceeded to issue flyers urging pressure on the mayor to "Get the Mafia and the cops out of Gay bars. " [168] Within a few days, men and women in New York had formed the Gay Liberation Front in the style of New Left personalized politics, and Gay Liberation Fronts soon sprang up across the country, including even Billings, Montana, Gainsville, Florida and Lawrence, Kansas. The "respectability drive" was eclipsed by a politics of visibility and confrontation. "The 'zap' was invented, a strategy of invading offices and meetings to angrily confront homophobes."[169] The new Gay militant organizations, in turn, entered the world of New Left politics, sponsoring workshops at student meetings and women's liberation groups, taking part in anti-war protests, and in 1970, contributing a speaker to a rally in support of imprisoned Black Panther leaders.

As gay politics took its place on the stage of the rather theatrical politics of the late Sixties, the heady mix brought events which overshadowed the "cockapillar." At the 1970 meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations in San Francisco, a group of "gay revolutionaries," barred from the meeting for lack of credentials, "surged into the meeting hall, shouting 'Power to the People,' and waving 'Gay Power' posters and banners. [170]At a dinner for delegates, "divided rather evenly between reformist and radical elements," the Bishop-Abbot of the Syro-Chaldean Eastern Orthodoxy "exploded in a fit of self-realization, ripped off his three-point gold cross and flowing black capes and cassocks until completely nude, grabbed up already-stripped John Singer of New York's Homosexuals Intransigent, plus two bewildered local members of the Gay Liberation Front, leaped up onto the head table, and proceeded to lead the incongruous foursome in a wildly outrageous can-can to the beat of emergency acting moderator Tom Erwin's gavel, who was desperately trying to restore order. [171]

Gays had become part of the New Left politics of sexual liberation and cultural self-assertion by minority groups. Harry Hay's vision on founding the Mattachine Society back in the 1950s had, in fact, been partially realized. It was the complex stream of events leading up to this point, in part institutional change, in part organization-building, in part cultural transformation, which made possible the giant human "cockapillar" of the 1972 Gay Pride parade in Los Angeles, as well as a national movement asserting a Gay identity and Gay community.

Then in 1981 came the identification of AIDS, considered at first as a Gay disease. AIDS struck heavily at Gay politics. A disease spread by sexual contact, slow to develop, invariably fatal, seemed to give a material form to dread and stigma around homosexuality in the straight world. As the disease developed its seemingly inexorable course through a population dominated by groups already socially vulnerable (homosexuals, drug users, Haitians, other Blacks and Hispanics) in the context of the increasingly conservative political and social climate of the Eighties, it almost seemed as if, like an accident-prone person, the age had found its symbolically appropriate sickness. In the homosexual community, it generated grief at loss and anxiety around intimacy—not a good state of mind for political activism. At the level of practical organizational politics, it meant the decimation of leadership; lesbian women moved forward to pick up work which men had dropped in death. By striking at patronage of the bars and baths, the disease undercut the economic base of the big-city gay community. Finally, it struck directly at the sexual activity that had been, all along, the great social sub-stratum of gay organizational politics. The drive for "safe sex" seemed very far away from the imagery of freedom evoked by the "cockapillar." There were attempts to organize "masturbation circles" and to libidinize improved condoms—but the party certainly seemed to have come to an end. A more "straight" or "macho" image seemed to be supplanting a more playful style of dress and self-presentation. [172] Summing up the situation in San Francisco's Gay community, Frances Fitzgerald wrote in 1986:"An era was over ...The crowds had gone, political enthusiasms had abated, and personal relations—friendships—had come to the fore. "[173]

Yet Gay politics proved remarkably resilient. The summation just quoted was premature. The AIDS crisis brought Gay organizing into closer relationship with grassroots organizing by feminists—"the health centers and battered women's service groups and rape crisis centers of second-wave feminism"—and with activists among Blacks and Latinos." [174] But while in this aspect of the crisis, Gay organizations were being drawn into traditional forms of coalition politics around service delivery, the AIDS crisis also was the occasion for the emergence of a new highly visible and confrontational vehicle of protest politics: the "AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power" or ACT-UP.

ACT-UP, which began in New York, then spread to San Francisco and subsequently to other cities, was anything but decorous. Self-defined as "a nonpartisan group of diverse individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis," ACT-UP specialized in direct action and "zaps". These were aimed, first, at getting greater access to treatment and drugs for AIDS-related diseases, culturally sensitive and explicit safe-sex education, and research accountable to the communities affected. But a student of the movement points out: "ACT-UP is also often involved in actions ...whose primary principle is expressive.

They focus inward on 'building a unified community' ... and on the ' need to express the anger and rage that is righteous and justified."[175] Even the AIDS crisis was not able to shift the movement back to one for simple toleration.

It was in the context of the AIDS crisis that Gays and lesbians were able to organize the large Washington march for Gay and lesbian rights of October 1987. It was not only the numbers here which represented a dramatic achievement, although this was important, especially for a group still feeling its way to public emergence. It was also the persisting sense of distinctive style, which had certainly evolved substantially since the Gay Rights march drawing 75,000 participants in 1979. There was the theatrical militance of participants—a large sit-in at the Department of Justice, focused on legal rights, and a mass "wedding" or demonstration by homosexual couples, focused on treatment of social ties in the tax and legal systems. The AIDS epidemic was the basis for not only mourning and assertion of need but for celebration of community.

To represent, to call attention to, the dreadful casualties of the epidemic, the organizers mobilized the creation of a vast guilt, a square for each person dead of AIDS, which they laid out on the Mall. Walking around the quilt, the participants could personally touch and feel the roster of the dead, each square made by some person who cared, each death that of a person irreplaceable to some group of others. And then, after the march, as high-visibility organizing continued, the Quilt was a continuing project and presence, with sections periodically on display in various parts of the country.

A Boston journalist summarized the effects of AIDS on gay politics as both positive and negative: "AIDS is politicizing people it otherwise wouldn't have...... Boston gay and lesbian leaders point to the recent public announcement of U.S. representative Barney Frank that he is gay, and the passage of the Gay Rights Bill in the Massachusetts House ...They also note a growing mobilization around such issues as AIDS education, safe sex, medical care, and civil rights.

Still some question whether AIDS has hindered the gay and lesbian community both politically and socially and reinforced dangerous bias within the heterosexual population. Some say AIDS has made it harder for many gay men to 'come out, for fear of losing jobs, homes, and health insurance.'

'Others, however, say the deadly disease and its profound effect on the gay community have been the impetus behind a surge of aggressive political activism ...But all agree that AIDS has created a sense of community never experienced before among this diverse group'."[176]

I believe that the history of gay politics shows that organizing is quite dependent on its cultural and social context-but that organization has its independent life, too. This is true in several senses.

In the first place, organizations that come into existence in a time of fluidity in institutions and cultural receptivity to the new can continue, when those times pass, to represent points of consolidation for the programs and visions which in an earlier time seemed to flow from the very stream of events. Movements—and this one is no exception—seem to move in bursts; each appears to erupt from some concatenation of circumstance in which, for a time, possibilities open up and each new breakthrough of traditional forms and institutions becomes a source of support from others. Then it is as if the movement had exhausted the possibility of the situation, resistance holds its own, and the movement comes to a stop. But something remains, both in the vision of the possible, in the experience of persons who enacted that vision, and in the organizational and institutional structures which have been created. There are the organizations; there are the legal precedents; there are the aggregations of resources. For example, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, a political action committee that provides funds to political candidates in support of gay and lesbian rights, has become a thoroughly established institution with a large and prestigious annual fund-raising dinner, a recognized force in state politics. Gay politics has brought out of the closet, and established as advocates for homosexual rights, persons like Sheldon Andelson of Los Angeles, a Democratic Party power broker, a philanthropist, and a Regent of the University of California.

In the second place, organizational activity has its own requirements. Movements have visions—indeed, this one had several—but vision in itself does not make a movement. There must be patterns of organization that work for the setting. The Mattachine Society worked as an organization because, in a wholly hostile time, it could be run by a very small group of courageous men, and because participation did not involve commitment to and identification with any group of members. Men could come together and talk about being gay without so listing themselves.

Troy Perry could start a church for gay and lesbian people because he came from a religious tradition—the Southern Evangelical--which relies heavily on the personal inspiration of its ministers (Perry himself began preaching as a teenager), and does not require permission from the central denominational leadership to start a church. Perry could simply put an advertisement in the Advocate, fluff up the pillows in his living room, put on his robe, and hope that people would come. And they did.

Although several activists had at various times tried to circulate literature and sponsor discussion in the gay bars, the bars were really not very susceptible to this form of organizing. Until the Stonewall Riot—and one or two less vivid episodes of the same kind—the only successful political organizing in the bars was that by Jose Sarria in the Black Cat in San Francisco, who in 1962 conducted a symbolic campaign for city supervisior from a base in the bar world.

The two contrasting visions which divided the movement when Hay and his friends divided the Mattachine Society divide it still. On the one hand, there is the view that gays are just like everyone else except for sexual preference. As Troy Perry put it, "Your love object is a female; mine is a man. Outside of that I'm just like you are."[177] The other view is that gays are inherently different. Harry Hay now sees gays as a "Separate People," a "species variant with a particular characteristic adaptation-in-consciousness Whose Time Has Come." [178] For others, with a less cosmic version of the same perspective, gays simply represent a strongly-marked cultural variant.

Each of these visions has political implications which in practice interact in a way which can be terribly competitive but can also be mutually supporting. "Just like you are" suggests an approach via equal rights and equal protection of the laws, and a focus on political coalitions which aim to defend the rights of individuals in diverse categories of oppression. The politics of equal rights can often gain by militance; gay leadership, as has been pointed out, had learned by watching Blacks that rights are not established through the generosity of the privileged, but through the self-assertion of the deprived. But the approach indicates a certain decorum and regard for social reputability to enlist the support both of potential coalition partners and of persons in power (judges, legislators, bureaucrats) who must in the end codify and institutionalize the claimed rights. But on the other hand, cultural self-assertion builds movement solidarity and unleashes political energy.

The leadership of the pioneer organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were anxious indeed to disassociate their organizations from the more raffish world of the bars. But they can have had no idea of the potential for a politics of militant disreputability that would appear in the heady world of the Sixties. Certainly for the conservative end of the movement, at the time that the bishop and his two fellow delegates danced naked at the NACHO convention, it must have appeared that the gay movement was on the steep path to self-destruction. But it has not self-destructed, and it has not established and institutionalized itself by settling into the reformism of the early Fifties or by shaping its demands exclusively around civil liberties and equal protection. If equality of rights demands militance in claiming, the solidarity of separatism and difference may be an indispensable social base for that assertion. "Black is Beautiful" was connected with the campaign for "Black Power" which in turn helped drive the Civil Rights Movement past its first limited liberal base. But Black organizing has at least an advantage in the visibility of group membership. Homosexuality is not inherently visible. Gay liberation, even in, and perhaps especially in, its more flamboyant manifestations, could establish the presence in society of a community outside the individual closet.

A lesbian who had the experience of travelling around small towns in California in 1978 to build opposition to an anti-gay initiative at the state level makes a comment about the role of the drag queens that deserves thinking about. "What I noticed very quickly was that the parts of lesbian and gay life that were sustained in rural California were the most visible parts, the ones that are most despised by the more mainstream lesbian and gay movement. The drag queens, the butch women .... They were the social organization for homosexuality in small towns; they sustained and saved lesbian and gay youth; they built networks which took care of people in times of grief; and they were the ones that confronted homophobia because they represented everyone's fear of homosexuality and were oppressed because they were visible."[179]

Extremism has a role in all kinds of social movements - in producing visibility, in making a political space for the less extreme, in establishing the sense of possibility, and building courage. But in the gay movement the extremes have a special role, as people who do not have the option of passing, and thus make an opening out of the closet for the others who do.

Every substantial social movement has to deal with diversity of interests and of conflicting programmatic ideas, since it is the essence of movement growth that themes enlarge to draw in a wider range of participants. But gay politics has had to deal with the issue of extremes at a particularly deep level. Jim Kepner, curator of the Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, points out that his movement has had all the divisions of any complex movement, with the added dimension of a movement about sexuality.

"There were those who were convinced we must get non-gays to front for us, while a few big-shot gays play power brokers. This strategy was regularly subverted by the closet's pervasiveness. Some would throw all our problems on Jesus—happily, few religious gays are so naive. Logically similar were those convinced that a Marxist revolution would end all our oppression (as in China, Cuba, Russia?). Some saw gay liberation as just a sex freedom issue, as in John Rechy's Sexual Outlaw. And for a few years, many felt sure if we all dropped out, smoked pot and joined the New Left or counter culture (never quite the same) the Establishment would collapse and all our troubles would end. Many hoped to build a minority united front or rainbow coalition (always half negated by rampant prejudice and respectabilism in our own and other minorities)..."

But that is not all: "Finally, there are those special interests, minorities within our minority: boy lovers, lesbian separatists, drags, transsexuals, ethnic groups, tearoom cruisers, leather and kinky sex sets, punks, dopers; who each scandalize or scare many mainline gays. One assortment or another of these groups are often excluded from parades or clubs, but if we exclude them today, we discard large parts of our history. We become guilty of the same discrimination we've so long suffered..."[180]

As Kepner suggests in the comments just quoted, these issues come to the fore especially in the Gay Pride parades that annually, on the last Sunday in June, memorialize the Stonewall Rebellion as the founding event of the modern Gay movement. A parade is, par excellence, a piece of symbolic action—for the participants, for the onlookers—and one which, for a group of people who for many years tried to avoid being noticed as distinctive, a consequential piece of symbolic action.

A sociological analysis of Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade, as it has evolved through the years, calls attention to changes. "In the 1970's, the parade aimed to establish the presence of gay people, to try to overcome invisibility.... In the 1979 parade, "Although in the minority, leather and drag and beefcake were everywhere.'We are different from you,' the parade said .... The Stonewall uprising became a creation myth of the new gay community, of a new way to be gay. Sex was the revolution. The private was aggressively identified as public, and the parade celebrated precisely the sexual difference between gay and nongay."[181]

"By 1987, the parade exhibited the changed context of a Chicago that had elected its first woman and first black mayors" and. changes, as well, in Gay politics. "Gay politics has become mainstream, and so have the messages of the parade .... The goals are not confrontation but assimilation."[182] The Pride Day Parade has thus found its place not as a citywide statement for gay and lesbian Chicagoans but as one more of Chicago's neighborhood celebrations" like the annual parades of the Irish, Mexicans, and Puerto-Ricans.

But wait. The author of this paper adds a postscript. "I am revising this paper on the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Since I first wrote this analysis, there has been a marked increase in activism nationally .... The zap has been reborn .... Outrageous camp humor also returned to the Chicago parade in 1988 ... "[183]

The real conclusion of the sociological analysis is a failure to conclude. "What it is to be gay itself is being argued about—is contested—in the mix of ways and discourse about how the gay community defines itself in a Chicago parade."[184] Gay politics cannot afford to reject the extremes, either of action or of social type, without losing much of the energy that makes the parade move. The controversy that attended the "cockapiller" in 1972 is still there, but so, too, is the assertive camp humor and what Kepner calls the "special interests" that have moved the boundaries of possibility.
CHAPTER SIX:

APPROPRIATING CULTURE: THE ABORIGINAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF AUSTRALIA

Ayers Rock is a great mass of red stone that rises out of the desert in the very center of Australia. It is a fine rock, to be sure, but is this not a rather odd item, inconveniently sited, to be a mecca for tourists? But there is a very handsome Sheraton resort nearby and places for camping. The tourist buses draw up in front of the rock and the tour guide points out where, according to the Aborigines, various mythic figures like the Carpet Snake people marked the rock with their being; the tourists dismount and take photos. Some then climb the Rock using handholds provided. The annual flow of admission-paying tourists is in the hundreds of thousands.

Ayers Rock is, in fact, a sacred place, the center of two overlapping cults: the Dreamtime belief and practice of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the area, and the cult and patriotic practice of Australian nationhood. At the Rock these are partly fused in the tour guide spiel, just as the management of the area has come to fuse Aboriginal ownership and fenced protection of their sacred sites with a lease-back to the Australian National Park and Wildlife Service, government to share fees with the Traditional Owners. Ayers Rock is thus the material embodiment of a kind of movement miracle, an achievement of the Aboriginal Rights Movement. This movement in itself is a splendid example of the capacity of social movements to transform the world by the power of ideas.

In the Aborigines of Australia, one would have said that there was a group with almost no power or capacity to get hold of power. These were people at the economic margins of modern Australian society of which they constitute only one percent of the population. The Aborigines lived traditionally by hunting and gathering in small groups knit by kinship and by the rituals which connected them to their physical environment. They not only lacked ideas of representative government, but the very concept of politics as separate from personal connection. On the other side there are the governing institutions of a society which has seen itself as an outpost of British civilization with the addition of a particularly macho frontiersman tone.

Into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century, Aborigines were recurrently hunted and killed by Whites who found their catching of cattle an annoyance. Fifty years ago, under the government's legal guardianship of all Aboriginals, half Aboriginal children were rounded up and taken away from their parents to be placed in orphanages to save them from their native culture. It was not unusual for the parents to follow and camp somewhere nearby, hoping to catch a glimpse of their children.

Furthermore, Aborigines were thought to have no legal rights whatsoever to the territory of Australia. In North America, as you may recall, the European settlers thought of themselves as dealing with Indian nations. When they met a group of Indians they looked for a chief, got out the beads and trinkets, and made a treaty. The Indian land claims in the United States revolve around treaty rights. The settlement of Australia took place under a different doctrine, that of terra nullius: the doctrine of uninhabited space. For the White settlers of Australia, there was literally nobody else there.

The Aborigines did very much have a presence in the literature of anthropology but the flavor may be suggested by the words of Baldwin Spencer, the founder of Australian anthropology and an authority on Aboriginal life, who wrote patronizingly in 1927: "Australia is the present home and refuge of creatures, often crude and quaint, that have elsewhere passed away and given place to higher forms. This applies equally to the Aboriginal as to the platypus and the kangaroo." [185] "A social anthropologist hurries hither and tither to piece together the last shreds of a tribe's culture"[186] says another.

The learned anthropologists definitely underestimated the power of two kinds of cultural processes. The first was the capacity of the Aboriginal people themselves to adapt culture in such a way as to make traditional beliefs and practices a positive aid to living under contemporary conditions. The second was the capacity of social movement processes to build support for the Aborigines and for their way of life. What we call the Aboriginal Rights Movement is a movement of both Aborigines and non-Aborigines, a joining of forces that has been less a process of coalition-building than a process of fusion in the realm of ideas. Although Aborigines are still much poorer than other Australians, when one considers the starting positions of the Whites and the Aborigines, the achievements of the Aboriginal Rights Movement are perfectly astonishing. Groups of Aborigines have acquired legal title to very large tracts of land in the Australian outback. There is an official set of procedures for establishing protection of Aboriginal sacred sites, and there exist signs which say, to take one example: REGISTERED SACRED SITE. THIS PLACE IS A SACRED SITE FOR THE AYPARINYA CATERPILLAR DREAMING. PLEASE HELP US TO PROTECT IT. ENTRY BY MOTOR VEHICLE IS PROHIBITED. Penalty $2,000. A large number of organizations, somewhat reminiscent of the American anti-poverty organizations, have come into existence for the aid, protection, and representation of Aborigines. There are the Land Councils, the Aboriginal legal services, the Aboriginal medical services, the Pitjantjatjara Council and the Tanjentjere Council. Aboriginal art is fashionable, sells in the galleries, and goes on international tours.

In the process of bringing about these changes, all kinds of peculiar things had to happen. Justices looked at genealogies drawn by anthropologists and representing ideas of kinship and descent quite alien and mysterious to White Australians; transcripts were presented on rain stones and brush potato dreaming. Aboriginals learned to use loudspeakers and to testify at hearings. A tent embassy was put up on the lawn in front of the Australian legislature in Canberra. An Aboriginal flag was designed and came to be used.

How can such a small group come to achieve its purposes despite the opposition of a much larger one? One kind of explanation is by way of the distribution of costs and benefits in social action. The argument is roughly as follows: since groups form to pursue shared interests, and since the pursuit of such interests has costs as well as benefits, the cost-benefit relationship can produce what is surely a counter-intuitive or perverse relationship between group size and social efficacy. In a very large group, every individual must consider that his own individual efforts will add relatively little to potential success and he may reasonably leave the work to others while the gain itself will also be widely shared. Thus a small group, confronting a much larger group of potential opponents may well carry the day.[187] This explanation has some value in looking at the history of Aboriginal rights; the Aborigines were claiming land in the center of Australia which appeared to have no great value to other Australians until valuable minerals were found there and small, highly-interested groups of miners appeared to contest the Aborigines.

Another way in which a small group can gain leverage over events is by carrying out disruptive actions.[188] The Luddites failed to arrest the progress of industrialization by breaking machinery, but British suffragettes breaking windows and demonstrators against the Vietnam war probably (although in the nature of things not provably) helped to make major changes in government policy. Such prior examples were not lost on the leaders of the Aboriginal Rights Movement; they solicited advice on tactics from Black militants in the United States, and there was civil disobedience at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane and elsewhere, and a "Tent Embassy" in front of the Houses of Parliament.

But in the case of the Aboriginal Rights Movement a third process seems to have dominated: playing the blue guitar of symbols and ideas. Because White Australia was itself searching for a distinctive identity, the defense of Aboriginal culture came to seem of importance to other Australians. The movement could be owned by both Whites and Aborigines.

A historian of Australian beginnings points out that for the convict settlements the open spaces of Australia meant not opportunity but jail: "The flowering of Australian nature as a cultural emblem could not occur until the stereotype of the 'melancholy bush' born in convict perceptions of Nature-asprison, had been expunged."[189] In the search for roots of a national identity, the movement among white Australians to romanticize Aboriginal Dreamtime attachment to nature must have played a role in this transformation.

The Aboriginal Rights movement also joined with those ideas of the defense of nature and in criticism of conventional ideas of progress that have been so important in the airport struggles. For the Whites, Aboriginal culture came to stand both for Australian-ness and for a kind of ecological, anti-commercial strain of thought that was a critique of mainstream Australian-ness. Aboriginal rights came to be connected with feminism, ecology, the peace movement, the movement for self-determination among the peoples of the Pacific, much as the United States, Native American spirituality was "adopted" by ecologists and New Age anti-materialists. Ayers Rock, with its hotel and its Aboriginal presence, shows traces of both sides of the vision: on one hand, the campers and the rock climbers; on the other, the Dreamtime stories and the sacred sites.

In the political struggles around Aboriginal rights and Aboriginal cultural identity, both white Australia and the culture of the Aborigines provided a central role for issues around land and place. But the relationship to land in each group was absolutely different from that of the other. The white settlers brought into the vast, thinly-populated, often semidesert lands of Australia a body of land laws developed in the densely-populated British Isles with their careful tillage and richly-productive agriculture. Land was property and the capital basis of wealth, and the protection of property rights was, as Adam Smith had stated clearly, one of the primary functions of government. The Aborigines, on the other hand, did not own land in the British sense, but were intensely linked to territory. All during the year they moved slowly about within intimatelyexperienced territories. The places where the edible roots were to be dug, the place where one might expect to find wichittygrubs; the soaks where you might slake your own and your children's thirst; these were the basis of their life. This intimate relationship to places had been sacralized, honored in myth and ritual. The Aborigines could see everywhere around them the evidences of the Dreamtime in which the world had been shaped and marked by the beings of that time. That rock marks the place where, in the Dreamtime, a dingo gave birth to its pups; this quartz outcrop represents the eggs of the ancestral caterpillar; those marks in the rock were made by the spears of the Poison Snake people.

But the Dreamtime is not wholly in the past; living persons inherit connections to these sacred sites and with the connections the obligation to perform the rituals which maintain the natural world. Translating the Aboriginal conceptions into English, Aborigines speak of "growing up the country," of the rituals themselves as "business," and of the whole body of knowledge and belief as the Law. Both White Australians and Aborigines could speak of "our" territory, but the meaning of the possessive was absolutely different. For the Whites, "ours" means ownership to reserve to oneself, to exploit, and to alienate at will. For the Aborigines, "ours" was a relationship more like that of a clergyman to "his" parish than that of property ownership; it was a connection, an obligation with mutuality to it. Land was not property; it was part of a world still enchanted, and people were not linked to it as owners of a capital resource, but through sharing the same enchanted world.

Well into the Sixties the dominant view of the Aboriginal future among White Australians seems to have been that the Aborigines would disappear as a distinct population, being assimilated into the rest of Australian society. It was possible, of course, that a few Aborigines might persist as tribal people on isolated reserves. But obviously as the Aborigines came to work on cattle stations and in the cities and towns, the cultural traditions connected with hunting and gathering and the sacred places would gradually fade from current practice into historic memory. Those in government or outside it who took an interest in the welfare of the Aborigines saw it as their mission to help the process of assimilation along.

The projected assimilation has not happened. Indeed, one can argue that a distinctive Aboriginal identity has become more, rather than less, characteristic of the Aboriginal population.

This is not to say that the Aborigines have clung to traditional culture in all its aspects. Aborigines flocked into pastoral settlements, townships, and mission stations, to telegraph posts and police stations—wherever Whites had entrenched themselves. Some were directly recruited, even coercively, as laborers; others came because they saw resources; others, still, because they wanted to be with the first comers. Cattle-raising has created a new ecology for the desert country which has cut off a return into living by hunting and gathering, and although Aborigines still go out for "bush tucker," it would be thought quite eccentric to go into the country on foot instead of via a jeep, or to hunt with a spear instead of a rifle. There has been no resistance to White technology; the anthropologist Diane Bell tells of being with Aboriginal women preparing headbands for a sacred ritual when one "held the headbands she had been cleaning next to the feathers, and declared, "I use White King. It gets them whiter."[190]

Assimilation does not necessarily follow. Indeed, there has been in the last decade a growing number of small "outstations" in the desert which depend on the technology of the drilled well and the wheeled vehicle to support all-Aboriginal communities.

Even more interesting is the issue of religion. The religious practices associated with sacred sites have turned out to be not only resilient but adaptable. They have accommodated even to what one would think would have been most problematic: basic changes in territoriality. "Aborigines of quite different linguistic and subcultural origin have gathered together on the settlements .... Thus, units like the Derby-mob, the Livering-mob and so forth have come into being.[191] But ritual adjustments could be, and have been, made. Because one is descended from more than one person, and because the place where one is conceived is also a source of inheritance of ritual obligation, there is potentially a choice of inheritance claims. Ritual connections also involve learning, and over time, Aborigines who have moved into a different area develop appropriately-modified relationships to sacred sites. New and larger groupings of people on the land made new kinds of social linkages appropriate, and the technology of the jeep made connections over larger areas possible. The idea of the Dreamtime paths of the ancestors gave a basis for linking these connections to religious practice.

Aboriginal religion has not disappeared. On the contrary, the material resources of modern life have given its practice new potential. While its cosmic significance as the vehicle of humankind's relationship to the universe is no doubt waning, it is becoming more important as a means to ethnic identity in the wider Australian society.

In the cities, of course, things are different: but not diametrically different. When Diane Barwick studied Aboriginals in Melbourne at the beginning of the sixties, she found people who were "entirely detribalized and most ...of partly European ancestry"; except for "painted boomerangs, carved emu eggs, or framed verses commemorating deceased Aboriginal personalities, as well as numerous colored photographs of their kin, their house furnishings are otherwise distinguishable from those of whites only by their sparseness." But "voluntary migration to Melbourne has in fact increased contact among Aborigines who were formerly isolated in rural camps," and the very conditions of urban life which separate the city-dweller from hunting and gathering and the rituals of sacred sites constitute the basis for a new sort of group identity. "Some Aborigines in Victoria are apathetic, resigned to their low ascribed status, insensitive to disapproval of their habits; they find alternative satisfactions within their membership groups and care only for the approval of their own kind. Some others may wish to dissociate themselves completely and 'pass' as members of the dominant majority." This option is only open, of course, to those who are very light-skinned. "An increasing number of people in Melbourne choose in fact a third alternative; to re-affirm the value of Aboriginal identity. In their dances, parties, concerts, work bees and other public activities they try to reassure themselves, as well as the Whites, that dark people can equal the whites' standards of dress, behavior, and organizing ability. These separate activities are specifically intended to 'keep our people together' and to 'show those gabas what dark people can do." "They recruit acquaintances from all regions to take part in concerts, pageants, parties, barbecues, church suppers and dances to raise funds for one project or another. They sponsor youth clubs, protest meetings, choirs and concert parties, and work bees for special projects. All of these separate activities help to maintain a self-conscious sense of identity among Aborigines throughout the State."[192] In 1962 and 1963 a number of otherwise competing spokesmen from the Melbourne Aboriginal community began to work together to protest the dispersal of Aborigines from the nearby Lake Tyers reserve, the last sizeable Aboriginal reserve in the State. Thus, while the conditions of urban life tended to erode, even to obliterate, the practices and beliefs which made up traditional Aboriginal culture, they simultaneously tended to develop an attachment to Aboriginal identity which would extend to Aborigines in the whole range of ways of living.

While the enveloping social context of White Australia provided a basis for new, more encompassing forms of identification as Aboriginals, it also provided the occasions for protest; and these protests, and the processes which were necessary to carry them out, in turn built collective consciousness.

Earliest were labor disputes around the sheep and cattle stations. Here a paternalistic tradition of payment largely in food or via particularly low wages applicable only to Aboriginals came to collide with rising expectations, particularly on the part of Aborigines who had been in the military forces during the war. In 1946 a white man with extensive trade union experience organized a strike by hundreds of Aborigines in Western Australia. Much to the astonishment of the Whites, the natives not only conducted a successful strike but went on to organize a mining and cattle-raising cooperative. This group seems to have addressed the problem of new and old with considerable ingenuity; it had both secular and ceremonial or "Law" leaders, and tried to develop a corps of technical experts. In 1966, another group of two-hundred Aboriginal stockmen went on strike, and an elder led his people right off the station to set up a camp on their ancestral land; the strike thus escalated into a claim for land.

But it was mining which really set off the land-rights movement which had dominated issues of Aboriginal rights and Aboriginal identity over the last couple of decades. Cattleraising changed the conditions of Aboriginal life, and produced conflict over the terms of White/Aboriginal interaction. Mining attacked the land and its sacred places directly.

Accounts of the land-rights movement often begin in 1963 with the "Bark Petition." This protest by a group of Aborigines in Arnhem Land combined a clear issue with a vivid sense of presentation. The grievance was the Government's excision of 140 square miles from the Aboriginal reserve for bauxite mining, and the Aborigines sent their objections to Canberra in a document in their own language (with translation) attached to a bark painting. The issue of government's overriding of Aboriginal interests in favor of mining attracted a good deal of public attention and a Select Committee which eventually produced some mining royalties for the Aborigines. But the basic issue remained unresolved, and eventually went to court, pitting Milirrpum and Others vs. Nabalco and the Commonwealth of Australia. The Aborigines lost. Judge Blackburn, citing the doctrine of terra nullius, found that Aborigines had no claims to land at settlement, and while expressing great admiration for the "subtle and elaborate system" of Aboriginal custom, found that this included ideas of land at such sharp variance with British concepts of property as to have no application in the case.

It was a case of losing the battle and forwarding the war. This legal case, with the organizing and publicizing around it, helped to develop land rights into a national issue and a public cause with broad and politically sophisticated support. An immediate consequence was the setting up, by the Labor Government, of the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission (1973) under Mr. Justice Woodward, who had been, before his elevation to the bench, the chief legal representative of the Aborigines in the case just described. After a good deal of consultation with Aborigines, anthropologists, and others, the Commission issued a report which eventually became the basis of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, which, although prepared under Labor, was enacted into law by a Liberals in 1976.

This Act constituted a very large breakthrough in the legal situation of Aborigines. It enabled Aboriginal "traditional owners" to make claims to unoccupied and unalienated Crown Land in the Northern Territory. An Aboriginal Land Commissioner was appointed to hear such claims. Title to land successfully claimed would be vested in Aboriginal land trusts; such land could not be sold.

The Act also provided for setting up land councils to manage and control the land vested in the land trusts. The councils (at present there are three of them) have played an important role in preparing claims and identifying "traditional owners." Eventually 28% of the Northern Territory was transferred to Aboriginals.

A good deal has been said and written about the limitations, as well as the opportunities, provided by this legislation. There are obviously inherent and irreducible problems in converting the "subtle and elaborate" ideas of Aboriginal custom into British law on real property. Aborigines have moved around and been moved and are not always in places where "traditional ownership" has application. What of the town dwellers? And what of the issue of need, or the claim of reparations, under this system? But most conspicuously, the Law applied only to the Northern Territory, an area with a relatively high proportion of Aborigines in the population, with a relatively large amount of thinly-occupied and little-exploited land, and in which the national government has never had to share jurisdiction with a State government.

Another Aboriginal Rights movement in the sixties was the passing, in 1967, of a national referendum empowering the national government to legislate with respect to Aborigines within the several states, which had previously had exclusive dominion in this area, and providing that Aborigines be counted as citizens. A similar referendum had been introduced in 1948 and had failed miserably at the pools; now, with broad support from Aboriginal Rights groups, churches, labor and various liberal reform groups, it passed with as close to unanimity as Australia has ever achieved.

The background of the 1967 Referendum is as good a place as any to see the way in which the particular protests of striking Aboriginal stockmen and of Aboriginal groups whose territory was being invaded by mining were intersecting with events and processes in wider Australian society. The international system was changing. Britain was on its way to re-aligning itself to the European Common Market and Australia—to this day, I must say, under an odd illusion of being somewhat offshore from Britain-was beginning to re-align itself to Asia in a world of new nations just emerging from the Nineteenth Century colonial system. In the mid-sixties, the Australian Labor Party gave up the "White Australia" plank in its platform. Aboriginal Rights became a part of the new international currents. In 1961, Sukarno invited the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to the Afro-Asian conference at Bandung. The Prime Minister of India raised the question of Aboriginal citizenship at a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. A Labor Prime minister stated the implications clearly: "Let us never forget this: Australia's real test as far as the rest of the world, and particularly our region, is concerned in the role we create for our own Aborigines. In this sense, and it is a very real sense, the Aborigines are our true link with our region." [193]

Another thing which was going on at the same time was, of course, the sixties—meaning the social movements of the period, and especially the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the United States. White Australians joined with Aboriginal leaders in Freedom Rides through the outback of New South Wales. Leaders of the Aboriginal Rights Movement met with Black Power leaders in the United States and some of the latter visited Australia. I do not know exactly where the idea came from of pitching a "Tent Embassy" on the lawn in front of Parliament in Canberra in 1972, or of organizing massive civil disobedience by Aborigines at the Commonwealth Games a decade later, but it seems likely that this kind of dramatic and media-conscious political action owned a good deal to the U.S. example. In 1981 the Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act was passed by the South Australian government after over a decade of impassioned struggle over how much control Aboriginals would have over mining and petroleum development in the territory set aside for their occupancy. Among the vivid events of this long campaign was an Aboriginal encampment on the grounds of the South Australian Jockey Club in Adelaide.

Aboriginal Rights struggles have always owed a great deal to outside supporters and to active participants from the outside. The 1946 strike and cooperative was in great part the work of a gifted and tenacious labor organizer. A Methodist minister helped with the "Bark Petition." The first major advocacy organization for Aborigines, the Federated Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, included both Aboriginal organizations and an even larger number of associate member organizations such as churches, trade unions and university bodies. In due course, in the 1970s, these arrangements were loudly called into question by a new Black Power leadership; the result was a factional split that in effect immobilized the organization. Meanwhile, White lawyers, white doctors, and White anthropologists appeared to be indispensable to the various land councils, Aboriginal health services, and Aboriginal legal services which had appeared as the institutionalization of Aboriginal Rights claims.

If there is an issue here, it is one that is not easily resolved by inserting Black leadership into these institutions.

Australian Aborigines, in order to defend their culture within something other than the Australian polity, have had to become something other than representatives of traditional culture. They have had to become a political movement. The forms of which this implies are nothing like those within the traditional repertoire. Aborigines who could be considered powerful orators within their own kinship group lacked the skills for articulating demands at a protest meeting or those for negotiating with government representatives. "Cultural brokers," even if Aborigines themselves, could easily be seen as so atypical as to be "not really representative."[194] Entry into a political campaign required that the Aboriginal candidate build a wide base of support within a social group traditionally organized in terms of personal close-kin relationships. Besides learning the skills of speaking and self-assertion necessary to carry out politics in the white sense, Aboriginal leaders are confronted with the task of combining this kind of role with the need to be a good kinsman in the traditional society—not an easy thing to do. To defend Aboriginal life was thus, in various ways, to depart from it.[195]

But the change required goes further than that. To be part of an Aboriginal Rights Movement is to change the meaning of being an Aboriginal. It is to link daily life to larger movements and wider meanings. Years ago, for example, Aboriginals in Melbourne were thrilled to meet Canadian Indians on a Moral Rearmament tour. A group of Aboriginal women marched with White Australians protesting nuclear weapons in Australia. In 1985 the National Federation of Land Councils submitted a statement to the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Daily life under such conditions acquires new context and new meaning. It is no longer the same traditional culture

In many ways, the Aboriginal Rights Movement has been remarkably successful. But it appears that the movement for Aboriginal rights has run up against a set of limits. The states which have not granted land to Aborigines do not appear to be about to, and the federal government seems disinclined to push. Mining seems more important than ever in the Australian economy, and the mining industry has become a potent political lobby. There is uranium and oil on Aboriginal lands. Support for Aboriginal interests competes with the politics of development. As development of the outback proceeds, the balance of voter interests shifts away from Aboriginal Rights. Moreover, the politicizing of Aboriginal needs has made the Aborigines one of a number of groups within Australia competing for social resources.

A Government-commissioned public-opinion survey found that among white Australians, "less than 20% had strong feelings of support for Aboriginal people and their aspirations. Most saw the range of special Government programs as largely a waste of money, and there was a widespread view that 'everyone should be equally treated,' and that somehow Aborigines were getting something to which they were not entitled." There is grumbling about Aborigines living on "sitting down money" from the government. A tattooed construction worker told me indignantly: "They won't work. Just take money from the government. Government was going to give them houses—they didn't want them, wanted Toyotas and gas. Get together with their checks and buy a car. Dirty, thieving, rape white women. If you took everything away here—the stores, the bars and all that—they wouldn't stay. If you went away and left everything here it would just take 'til all the cars were smashed up, everything was smashed up; they'd go off." [196]

In the words of the anthropologist Diane Bell, "By a number of indices Aborigines remain a disadvantaged group within Australian society. Their infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world; few have access to secondary or tertiary education; their imprisonment rate is probably the highest in the world; their standard of living is one of the lowest; employment and underemployment are endemic." moreover, she goes on to says "While Aboriginal affairs is a growth industry, Aborigines themselves are being moved to the periphery of Australian society, a special class, an underclass, the recipients of welfare. 'Welfare colonialism' is an apt characterization of the relationship." [197]

Aborigines, like other hunting and gathering peoples at the fringes of modern society, have a serious problem with alcohol. In their traditional culture, consumption was rationed by circumstance. Nothing in their way of life made for thrift and restraint in the face of availability, and nothing in modern Aboriginal life at the fringes of a town like Alice Springs makes for thrift and restraint either. Everyone with a concern for the Aborigines agrees that nothing much can be done until the Aborigines themselves develop new sources of morale.

A tourist trip to Ayers Rock exposes all the basic elements. The bus draws up at the Rock, and the tourists get out their cameras. The guide gives his talk. There is a little geology and a great deal of Dreamtime. The track of the hare wallaby and the battle between the Carpet Snake people and the Poison Snake people is part of the mystique of the Rock. The Rock is a central symbol of the search for Australian national identity, but lacking a vocabulary of the sacred place, tourism has appropriated that of the Aborigines. The tourists climb the Rock, helped by chains which have been fixed in it; their rituals are more assertive and less collaborative than those of the Aborigines. Then the bus goes to the Aboriginal settlement with its souvenir shop on which is hung the magnificent Aboriginal flag, with its golden disk on bands of red and black. The same guide takes pains to point out the litter lying around and, as he puts it, "the Aborigines lying around too." On the way back to Alice Springs, we stop at a bar full of sunburnt men, drinking beer. Prominently displayed on the wall is the mining industry's map, showing land threatened by Aboriginal claims.

In a time which the systems seems to be yielding less than it was, militance may appear less rewarding. A conservative group has appeared among Aborigines, arguing against special rights and programs. An Aboriginal group, which got title to land after a long struggle and immediately signed an agreement with the miners on the basis of royalty payments, was criticized by the purists; their argument was that government was, in any case, going to see that the companies got their way. I heard—but have not been able to investigate—that there are Aborigines who think that a good strategy would be to use their land as a vast, profit-making dump for nuclear waste.

It has been pointed out that to speak of an Aboriginal land rights movement is in a large sense misleading: "Since the loose coalition of interests—of both Aborigines and white sympathizers—centered upon the land rights issue does not constitute a coherent and well-defined movement with a clearly formulated policy and plan of action .... Australian Aborigines have never formed a unified "nation" in any real sense ...there are deep differences between those Aborigines who live in a more or less traditional situation in contact with their own country and those who live on reserves and mission stations, in fringe camps, or in towns and cities .... The objectives of the various groups involved in the land rights issue in fact vary widely... "[198]A broad view of this social movement would surely have to include also outsider sympathizers and enthusiasts, from the White man who organized the 1946 strike by Aborigines in western Australia to those collectors who have been promoting modern art by Aborigines.

But a broad and diverse social movement with multiple and diverse participants gives rise to controversies of its own. The spokespersons of the movement are competing story-tellers. Their various framings of the issue are themselves competing for legitimacy. Every story has its own real-world consequence for particular persons. Those who are unsympathetic to Aboriginal protest have been quick to discern "Communist agitators" and a Communist agenda in strikes and in protest generally. On the other hand, Aborigines may declare that their Whitefella supporters are moving in on territory that does not belong to them. "The Aborigines who attended the Bicentennial History conference of February 1981 questioned whether it was proper or feasible for non-Aborigines to write Aboriginal history, and claimed that academic standards of historiography were inappropriate to Aboriginal history." [199]

Even in the arts "This infiltration of set spaces, journals, forums, and institutions has not been untroubled. Some commentators see the whole process as a continuation of European-Australian colonization and appropriation of the other."[200] The Australian debates about the appropriation of Aboriginal issues and culture by outsiders will seem quite familiar to Americans. Indeed, in the United States the appropriation of culture has in some ways gone further than in Australia. Non-Indians in search of a more spiritual life have adopted Indian rituals like sweat lodge purification, vision quests and drumming and chanting for power. There is a flourishing business in moccasins, ceremonial pipes, "dream catchers" and elk bones. In the United States, as in Australia, this is resented. "Many Indian tribes and organizations, far from being flattered by the imitators, have denounced the movements as cultural robbery" and the National Congress of American Indians recently approved a "declaration of war" against "non-Indian 'wannabees,' hucksters, cultists, commercial profiteers, and self-styled New Age shamans."[201]

It is easy to laugh at middle-class White Americans drumming and invoking the Great Spirit, and one may well smile a little at the Ayers Rock tourists solemnly listening to the Dreamtime story of the Carpet Snake people. But these appropriations of culture in the context of social movement process are not essentially different from the ways in which social movement process appropriates and interprets other pieces of daily life. An airport becomes for the planners and sponsoring politicians the symbol of all that is desirable in Progress and the role of the state in bringing about such progress; for its opponents, the same airport project becomes emblematic of all that renders progress as conventionally defined undesirable-noisy, intrusive, destructive of tradition and local culture. A movement grows in adherence and in resonance to the degree that the particular event or particular practice can become part of an inclusive story, inclusive not only in the pieces that are included, but also in the variety of variants that are practiced and tolerated simultaneously.
CHAPTER SEVEN:

DIGGING UP THE GROUND WE STAND ON: POLITICS AND ANTI-POLITICS IN THE PEACE MOVEMENT

Attempts to change the world generally encounter a set of choices and dilemmas usually identified with "working within the system" versus "system confrontation."' Should Welsh nationalists collaborate with British planners to promote Welsh regional interests? Should feminists assert abortion as women's right, or should the demand be a "right to choice"? What are the respective roles of litigation and group protest? Should the demonstration planners negotiate with the police in advance? Such issues are recurrent and troubling since social movements need both sorts of strategy-confrontation extremism to stretch the conventional bounds of issue framing, adaptive negotiation to maintain a resource base, a contact with the real world situation, and a sprinkling of real victories. But the two strategies conflict; confrontation indeed attracts attention, but at the cost of losing respectability; working within the system may make real changes, but at the cost of appearing to accept a glacial pace to progress and the legitimacy of the underlying presuppositions of the existent. And this particular dilemma may have to do with the very survival of the institutions that are to be reformed; industrial strikers may be told that the firm cannot survive their demands; shall they believe this, and draw back?

In the case of the peace movement, these dilemmas run very deep. At its pacifist edge, there is a movement for the most profound social and moral change at the level of the individual, society as a whole, and internationally. These demands, once taken from the realm of wholly symbolic practice, come almost immediately to confront a set of institutions that are very central to and pervasive in society.

Because the weapons industry is a major industry, many people have an interest in its continuation, while the military constitute also a set of institutions critical to the functioning of the State.

Historically, there is a close link between war-making and the formation of national states. Paradoxically, the state as a civilian system was shaped by the needs of warfare. As the technology of war-making developed and became more costly (muskets and cannons replacing bows and spears, for instance) and as the evolving technique of warfare made for larger territorial units of rule and therefore bigger armies, the financing of the military apparatus drove war leaders to bargain with bankers, capitalists, and the owners of private armies ("nobles"). The definition of rights of citizens, the capacity to make war, and the capacity of the state to appropriate thus developed in tandem. "'The process of establishing access to the wherewithal of war...built up the state's apparatus for extraction and domestic sharpened the division between managers of the military and segments of the apparatus, enhanced disproportionately the those who operated the civilian segment, and surrounded the nearly impenetrable barrier of civilian power-holders. War civilianized the national state."[202] The efforts of the state were driven primarily not by concern for the welfare of citizens, but by concern for having available the resources for war-making. [203] But, of course, the drive for growth has also paid off to civilians: this is an essential part of the political economy story, especially as it has come to affect electoral politics and the labor movement.

Seymour Melman, who has written most extensively on this, points out: that "war making is the single largest industry in the American economy, indeed in the economies of all the industrialized states, and even in the main developing nations. More than six million people in the United States (including more than a third of the nation's engineers and scientists) and the largest single block of the nation's capital resources are directly engaged in the military economy. War-making institutions now dominate the governments and the economies of the main nation-states—certainly of the United States." [204]

The process has never worked without a hitch, and the military drive of the state apparatus has tended to exceed the capacity of the state to appropriate the necessary resources. The French Revolution, for example, began via a problem which we would find familiar. The French government intervened on the side of the American colonials in their quarrel with George III on the principle (also familiar) that the enemy of my enemy (in this case England) is my friend. The American intervention was the forward defense of its time. But the French government had difficulty in raising the necessary taxes. The economy in theory could have supported them, but it is always hard to tax the people with money and the French government couldn't manage to do so. They resorted to borrowing. Eventually it was impossible to go forward through more borrowing, and the King had to call the Estates General to pass taxes. From there on out, things began to unravel and eventually there was a revolution, and the King lost his head.'[205]

In general, the historian Paul Kennedy has found a pattern by which Great Powers, striving to keep on being Great, are unable to appropriate an adequate level of resources, distort the civilian economy, and fall behind in the Greatness competition.'[206] Military spending has unique political implications. The management system installed under the Secretary of Defense to manage military procurement and production is, as Melman pointed out more than a decade ago, by far "the largest and most important single management in the United States',' and "combines peak economic, political, and military decision-making." [207] The products and goals of this military-industrial system of state capitalism are set by the Defense establishment in substantial interaction—one could reasonably say collusion—with the corporate suppliers. Planners who have seen the capacity of comprehensive planning backed by heavy funding to create alliances between diverse interests should have no difficulty in understanding how the corporate producers become increasingly teamed into the production of the ornate weapons systems of the "baroque arsenal, " [208] and how the managers of the complex become responsive to corporate interests.

Meanwhile, in an electoral politics more and more dominated by large expenditures for media coverage, the contributions made by the defense contractors to their legislators become a critical element in the functioning of the political system. At the sane time, military jobs bind both individual citizens and their unions to the system. The military contracts are an immense system of political patronage, and can be deployed to create an economic environment in which conservative candidates can get elected. The B-1 Bomber, out of favor and believed to be "'dead,"' was revived so the Republicans could carry California."[209]

This institutionalization of what Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" into a kind of state capitalism dominated by the institutions of weapons production is what John Kenneth Galbraith calls the "warfare state."

Finally, like any developed political economic system, this one goes along with a set of intellectual devices for rendering it tolerable to those who live subject to its penalties. These include not only the ideas of natural "adversaries," but also a technical discourse which renders the struggle in its three-dimensional human reality into a flattened language of "game plans","countervalue attacks", "enhanced radiation", "collateral damage", and "acceptable losses".[210]

Given the centrality and pervasiveness of military institutions and the increasing destructiveness of modern warfare when it is waged, it is not remarkable that movements of opposition have recurrently arisen; the same circumstances also help to explain the relative ineffectuality of such movements in altering the situation.

The conservative peace movement of the turn of the century, which has left as its legacy the International Court of Justice, did not so much intend to get rid of the military as to manage and regulate its use. The genteel reformers of the American Peace Society saw no conflict between support for United States power across the world and a general anti-war position; it was the extension of American power worldwide that would extend the rule of international law. This position is represented in the present by George Bush's demand that other nations—like Japan—should be made to "share the burden" carried by the U.S. in policing the world, as well as by the support given by Randall Forsherg founder of the nuclear freeze movement, to the Gulf War to "stop aggression" by Iraq.

There has also recurrently been opposition, more or less organized, to particular wars as misuse of power. We remember that Thoreau, in jail for refusal to pay his taxes, was not in the first instance denying the right of government to tax in general, or to warfare at all times, but was refusing coerced support of the Mexican War. There was a lively movement in opposition to U.S. entry into the First World War and for staying out of the second.

Some movements against war have centered on the unequal distribution of costs and benefits. Angry Irishmen, who in the Draft Riots of 1863 attacked Blacks because of being forced into Civil War military service while the better off could pay for substitutes, have their counterparts in those critics who recently pointed out the very high proportion of Blacks serving in the Gulf.

Pacifism as a general position has been and is a continuing if minority position. As such it has been institutionalized in the peace churches, such as the Mennonites and Friends. In this form, pacifism has, over substantial periods of time, achieved a stable detente with the dominant institutions as a sort of moral specialization, like the choice of Sabbath days or keeping Kosher. In wartime, things became more complicated, especially around the issue of military service. Here the attempt was made with partial success to continue the peacetime detente through the arrangements for religiously-based conscientious objector status, and alternative service.

The peace movements of the last decades draw on all the past peace movements—the moral pacifism of the Hutterites and Quakers, the opposition to military "folly", the struggle against militarism as a form of class domination—but it is discontinuous from all these in new central theme: that of human survival. This peace movement has centered around the capacity of nuclear weapons to annihilate human beings on a scale heretofore unimaginable.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost immediately generated widespread feelings of horror and dread, and a sense that sort of basic threshold had been crossed. Those very men who had created the two experimental models which we dropped on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost immediately began telling everybody that it was a terrible mistake. However, it was thought, there was a kind of silver lining after all; nuclear weaponry would make war impossible. Oppenheimer had just as good a time testifying in Congress along these lines as he had creating the bomb. Scientists around the University of Chicago in a somewhat less optimistic state of mind of the founded the Bulletin Atomic Scientists with its ten-minutes-to-midnight Doomsday clock on the cover. Drawing off the same intellectual climate, Robert Hutchins assembled a group of big thinkers to frame a world constitution for discussion purposes. This was, then, an elite movement dominated by men in the scientific community, and focusing on educating the generally literate liberal public and about the implications of nuclear weaponry.

It was largely women who organized and manned (womanned?) protests against civil defense drills and later, at the beginning of the sixties, against atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Here, in addition to mass (although rather small mass) demonstrations, they used the motif that has become so familiar: motherhood. It was strontium-90 in milk that was the rallying cry. The organization was Women's Strike for Peace. At the time, it was quite exciting to march in a torrential downpour in front of the White House and to have atmospheric testing come to an end. Looking back, however, it all seems rather peculiar. How could it be that the weapons of total war were being resisted as a source of environmental pollution? The peculiarity of this framing of the issue seems to me to lend support to an interpretation, hard to prove, but to me inherently plausible: that the passionate struggles against nuclear power have had as their root not only a perfectly reasonable distrust of expensive and hazardous technology pushed by powerful institutions with a vested interest in its production but an unacknowledged fear of nuclear war. In this interpretation, the opposition to nuclear power functioned, as in Freudian theory as screen memory functions, to serve in lieu of an idea so deeply disturbing that it is repressed from consciousness. And these interpretations, in turn, tend to support the view of a recent historian of the early movement against nuclear weapons: that the scientists' scare tactics, instead of frightening people into rationality, instead constituted a "fertile psychological soil for the ideology of American nuclear superiority and an all-out crusade against communism."[211] In any event, a concern with the growth of the nuclear arsenal soon had an even bigger screen before it: the Vietnam War. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War drew from the same kind of distrust of the militarized state, and of government secrecy and opinion manipulation, the same horror at warfare waged against civilians, the same sense of very high technology used against human bodies, which was implied in the opposition to nuclear armaments. But it did so in the context of a "present evil" rather than one in the future, and it was not Armageddon yet, but simply one more military intervention in a distant peasant country. It was thinkable. Furthermore, as the opposition grew, and as the war went on with the light perpetually at the end of a very long tunnel, the opposition began to appear more winnable than the war. Stopping the war did not mean reorganizing major social institutions; it was a limited project; one could simply render impossible the commitment of more American troops, and force the government to withdraw. Even this, as we all remember, was not easy or effortless to achieve; but it was do-able, and it was done.

In the meantime, the buildup of the nuclear arsenal and the consolidation of the institutions for its production and management continued through one presidency after another, unaffected in any perceptible way by party politics or the election results. There was same protest against the decision to MIRV—to build multiple re-entry warheads on each missile—but with the rank and file of critics off fighting against Vietnam, the decision—soon followed by the Soviets, of course—went through with very little dissent.

The end of the Vietnam War certainly opened a "political space" for peace movements, but it really took the Reagan presidency, with its fateful combination of conservative domestic policies and aggressive—not to say jingoistic—foreign-policy rhetoric, to turn public attention to what had been going on in the way of the nuclear arms race. The Reagan administration combined steep rises in military spending with savage cuts in domestic programs. The exclusion of arms-control thinkers from the administration encouraged extra-institutional protest. Meanwhile "The provocative nature of the administration's military and arms control policies was emphasized by the administration's rhetoric and style. Extreme anti-Soviet barbs were accompanied by an apparently cavalier attitude toward the dangers of nuclear war and nuclear weapons." [212] The result was a peace movement of extraordinary scope. It was, in the first place, extremely visible. Huge demonstrations against missile placement were mobilized by the peace movements in Britain and Germany. In June 1982, the largest mass demonstration in American history, estimated at 800,000 people, marched from the United Nations to Central Park to protest the nuclear arms race. Organizations proliferated. In 1986 there was published a directory the size of a small-city telephone book, listing peace organizations in the United States. The movement attracted an extraordinary number of adherents, both among private citizens and within local governments. This is most easily measured by looking at support for the "Freeze." the demand that the United States and the Soviet Union "should adopt a mutual freeze on the testing, production, and development of nuclear weapons and of missiles and new aircraft designed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons."' The Freeze manifesto has been endorsed by 156 national and international organizations, adopted by legislatures in 15 states, supported by 370 city councils, 91 country councils, and 446 New England town meetings, voted in by a popular majority in 9 state-wide referenda, and supported by the U.S. House of Representatives. In connection with the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in New York in 1982, 2,300,000 signatures on Freeze resolutions were presented to the U.S. and Soviet United Nations missions.

The mass media featured articles on the dangers of nuclear war. Even television came along with its feature, "'The Day After," and later, with somewhat less hoopla, the much more horrific British television film on the same topic. A movie took as its plot a couple of high-school innocents pitted against missile designers who have no compunctions against trying to murder them to defend their enterprise. Another film shows near war by computer malfunction. The media blitz and the thousands of speakers at churches and civic organizations seemed to have done the work of building awareness. By 1984, over half the Americans polled in a survey on the nuclear war issue reported that they were thinking more about the possibility of nuclear war than they had done five years before; more joltingly, 89% of those polled agreed that "'There can be no winner in an all out nuclear war; both the U.S. and the Soviet Union would be completely destroyed."

Comparing the peace movement to other new social movements, it is obvious that this one is quite unique in some ways. The goals are broader, in some sense universal. The self-evident reasonableness of such goals is aptly summarized in the cartoon in which an adult is asking a child what he'd like to be when he grows up. The answer is: "Alive, if it's not too much trouble." Looking at matters this way-and I think some people in the peace movement have looked at matters in exactly this way—one could imagine that it would only be necessary to state this goal, for everyone to assent to the peace movement's purposes and enlist.

But such broad goals are a disadvantage to a movement, too. The British Conservative Lord Home, repudiating the suggestion that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament might have any importance in Britain, testily commented: "I should have thought that all of us were morally anxious to disarm in any way we could... the politicians of the day...were actually up to their necks in the business of disarmament anyhow. [213] Ronald Reagan, I think, sincerely (if fuzzily) believed in SDI as the technological breakthrough which would bring peace. Thus asserting the broad goals does little, in itself, for convincing persons and groups that they should engage in joint activity for change.

David Meyer's recent history of the Freeze movement gives a convincing account of the way in which the vast expansion of freeze support was also a process in which the implications of such support became blurred to the point in which congressmen could declare themselves for the freeze as a sort of general expression of distaste for nuclear war and immediately thereafter vote appropriation for the MX missile. In part, this dilution of meaning was deliberate, as when the campaign early on tried to downplay the support of the old peace groups for fear that the campaign might be identified with a "pacifist-vegetarian anti-corporate value system" [214] and in part by the success that made support for the proposal appear as a rather unexceptional position: that of adherence to a "relatively wholesome fad." [215]

The peace movement also raises peculiar problems with respect to its relationship to the state. There are strong anti-statist elements in Welsh nationalism; environmental activists see themselves as defending nature against greedy human institutions; feminists distrust power as a masculine ego-trip; the Greens have never wholly made their peace with parliamentary politics. But each of these movements has learned to use the national state for certain purposes, as in decentralization of planning, environmental regulation, and affirmative action. But the peace movement has to confront the national state directly, and the changes it requires are not as marginal, not as easy to produce, as affirmative action regulations. It is the national state which prepares for war, and war preparation is a central business of the state. This would propose for the peace movement, one might think, a generally anarchist approach to politics.

But the social composition of the peace movement is predominantly white, middle-class, and conventional: an unlikely bunch for anarchism. A study of the social bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) found that the participants in this movement were not simply middle-class, but from a particularly highly educated segment of the middle class. Furthermore, the study found that CND members came preponderantly from a category of occupations characterized as "the welfare and creative professions; for example, social work, medical services, teaching, the church, journalism, art, architecture, scientific research, and so on." These, the study goes on to say, "are occupations in which there is a primary emphasis upon either the notion of service to the community human betterment or welfare and the like or upon self-expression and creativity."[216] In becoming active in the peace movement, such persons were not so much rebelling or breaking away from normal practice, as extending it, building it, carrying it forward.

Furthermore, the study found that CND members were joiners of other formal organizations; indeed, "45 percent held or had recently held an elected post or position of responsibility of some kind within organizations .... The overall impression of CND respondents is that they appear well integrated into a broad range of social activities and institutions." [217] Even more striking is the data in this study on the attitudes of CND supporters about their capacity to bring about desirable social change. "They appear to have a strikingly high degree of optimism about the possibilities of human betterment and their personal political effectiveness." [218]

All the evidence we have would suggest that the American peace movement is rather similar. It has often been commented upon that one of the leading organizations in mobilizing opinion against the nuclear arms race is a group drawn from what is generally thought of as a very conservative profession, the doctors. Physicians for Social Responsibility no doubt owes much of its high visibility and capacity to attract members to the organizational dedication of Helen Caldicott, under whose leadership it went in three years from a tiny group to one of 18,000 members in 45 local chapters. However, the doctors, however conservative in their ordinary politics, certainly fit very nicely into the category of welfare professions identified in the British study. The organizational success of the Physicians has inspired a number of other professionally-based peace groups, such as Educators for Social Responsibility, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, High Technology Professionals for Peace, Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, Business Alert to Nuclear War, Musicians Against Nuclear Arms, Communicators for Nuclear Disarmament, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility.

These professional groups are, of course, only a part of a movement that also draws from dissident groups such as feminist activism, and from the Left. However, one can certainly generalize to the point that the participants in the American peace movement are not, by and large, hapless, alienated social deviants or "outsiders", but rather, in large part, persons of established status, usually highly educated, and experienced in organizational life and in personal and social reform.

Prominent in the peace movement, for example, have been many mainstream churches. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians both established peace commissions to study American military policy and the links between the arms race and domestic, social, and economic problems. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1983 issued pastoral letter condemning the arms race. Even the conservative Southern Baptists have passed strong peace resolutions.

To summarize: The peace movement consists largely of mainstream sorts of people grappling with a set of arrangements central to Remember Pogo's great line: We have met the enemy, and they are us? What happens then? The movement, at one extreme, makes demands for social reform so far-reaching as to constitute criticism of the very utility and legitimacy of existing institutions. At the same time, it demands response by those institutions which can, of course, only respond in their own terms. One can treat being part of the system as an advantage and try to work within, or one can try to stand outside to demand an alternative. And to go out from everything which makes up the ordinary machinery of society can be to go very far out.

The situation makes for a very deep division within the peace movement, between those activities that try to work with and modify the existing governmental system, and those which have, in effect, written it off. The peace movement is not simply a loose confederation of different groups; it contains two peace movements, which contrast both in style and in content. What might be called the disarmament movement takes the political institutions seriously as worth working with. Its style is that of rational analysis and expertise. To the degree that it tries to exert pressure on government by the numbers of adherents it is able to muster, it still tries to gain adherence by information and argument. It builds by publications, speech-making, teach-ins, film showings; it supports political action groups and legislative hot lines. Its motto is: Don't make a point; make a difference.

But then there is that other peace movement: Helen Caldicott holding up a baby and telling women they have thirty days to save the world; declarations that some area is a "nuclear free zone;" women joining embroidered strips together to wrap around the Pentagon a ribbon of images of "what I would not want to lose in a nuclear war." The other peace movement holds vigils, demonstrations, civil disobedience actions. People sit on train tracks to block the passage of nuclear weapons; one was run over; the next blocking action was bigger. A mother of eleven received an 18-year sentence for taking a jackhammer to a missile silo cover. Many hundreds of people have been arrested for trespassing on the nuclear test site in Nevada, as a way of mobilizing pressure against the continuation of weapons testing. My daughter can supply any demonstration with banners of skeletons and of flowers, as well as a set of Guernica-like screaming faces on poles.

At a couple of demonstrations—a Trident launch, and a missile manufacturer—we set the participants to screaming in furious rage, like the mourners at a funeral in rural Greece. Hugh Gusterson, describing the activities of the protestors at the Livermore Weapons Laboratory—the masks of death, the die-ins, the protestors dragged by the hair—as a means of creating "an alternative regime of truth." [219]

This peace movement is the expression of an ultimate moral revulsion, and it makes a demand which no state is prepared to grant: a world free of the threat of nuclear war.

It is worth noting that the first, or practical-politics disarmament movement, is dominated by men; the second, more Utopian movement, is dominated by women. Two contrasting images should suggest how the view of men as an in-group of societal managers, "'White men in ties, discussing missile size,", contributes to a feminist revulsion against the world of official policy-making. And here are the women—let's not forget, the kind of people you might meet in a school of social work—dancing like witches on the missile silos at Greenham Common.

It is usual to attribute the affinity of women for the peace movement to their traditional role—some would argue natural affinity for—caring and nurturing. Certainly it is not necessary to believe that there is anything inherently caring and life-supporting about women to find a woman with a baby in her arms the perfect emblem of a movement for the defense of ordinary life at the human scale, as against the concerns of generals and politicians who seem ready to blow us up for reasons which seem more and more distant from common sense. When Helen Caldicott was at the height of her extraordinary campaign to raise people's consciousness about the danger of nuclear war, toward the end she would always seem to notice a baby being held conveniently within reach behind her, and hold it up to her audience: What national project could possibly justify annihilating this child?

But there is more to it than that. The feminism of the seventies has brought into the peace movement quite another set of women than the nurturing mothers of Caldicott's vision. I happened to attend a planning meeting, called by Caldicott's group to organize a demonstration in Washington at which the summons to East Coast women's groups had produced a sizable contingent—perhaps a third of those present—of radical Lesbians in combat boots. Told that they should appear in stockings and respectable clothing, and appeal to the "heart of Middle America" via woman's "mothering instinct," these women were properly outraged. Women who had resisted a lifetime of pressure to conform to role stereotypes were not about to give up their authenticity in the cause of peace, however important. In the end, at the demonstration there were a number of women wearing lavender triangles in affirmation of, or sympathy with, the Lesbian cause. The peace movement has given feminists of all gender varieties a cause to which they could contribute their far-from-negligible energy and organizing abilities, and any major demonstration now is likely to have a clearly identified and very visible Lesbian contingent.

Besides the cultural symbolism of women as life-nurturing and the force of feminism and its organizations, there are probably other reasons for the preponderance of women in the social movement for peace. One is just being outside; it is White men in ties who are up in those offices discussing missile size. Women are less integrated into the system. Finally, for somewhat the same reasons, women can give the time; they're busy, but their time in the way we measure time is less valuable. It's opportunity cost.

But one could certainly make too much of gender differences between the two peace movements. Men court arrest by entering prohibited nuclear test sites; women lobby and manage large peace organizations. There is a still more basic point: we should not imagine that these two kinds of activities, these two movements, are carried forward by quite distinct sorts of people. On the contrary: middle-class social workers have lived under scraps of plastic at Greenham Common for years at a time. A recent study comparing pacifist peace groups with non-pacific peace groups found far less difference "in organizational characteristics, constituencies and activities" than had been expected: "To state it more accurately, the variability of these attributes for both the pacifist and nonpacifist groups was so large and their overlap so great that they could not be adequately distinguished."[220] Both sorts of groups rallied and lobbied; the distinguishing activities were only in the willingness of one category of groups to undertake nonviolent direct actions. Thus the "two movements" are not so much based on preexisting social groups and intellectual positions as they are in the inherent dilemmas of struggling against institutions which are both very dominant, very pervasive, and very dangerous to human life.

The vast surge of issue visibility, both in the form of movement protest and in the form of Congressional activity, seemed to do little to check the nuclear arms race. As a major participant in organized protest summarizes ruefully: "Despite the massive peace campaigns of the 1990s, the Reagan administration was successful in bolstering the war system and reinforcing the power of military institutions. It not only enlarged the military budget but also strengthened the CIA and other national security agencies and enhanced the legitimacy of military force as an instrument of foreign policy. The peace movement was unable to prevent the largest peacetime military spending increase in U.S. history. [221]

Varying interpretations are possible, and are proffered. The movement, it is said, is inefficient, with so many essentially autonomous groups competing for resources and lacking the mechanisms of coordinated action. Or the problem is said to be the "scare tactics" of portraying the consequences of nuclear war; anxiety leads to repression. Or with the collapse of the Soviet Union it is felt that the danger of nuclear was has so receded that reformers can well shift their attention elsewhere. The effects of the ecology movement in drawing activists from the peace movement may be seen as a particular example of the problem mentioned earlier: the issues become generalized and widened to the point that an earlier target is left behind.

I believe each of these interpretations has some truth to it, but I would like to offer another, which sees the popular response to the growing awareness campaign not as resistance to understanding, but as understanding all too well. Perhaps in teaching about the consequences of a nuclear war, the citizens were made aware not only of how totally destructive such a war would be, but of the entrenched character of the institutions for its preparation.

Paradoxically, by being present everywhere, the forces preparing for nuclear war offer no bounded arena for organizing, and no single target on which opposition can readily agree to focus. Joel Kovel points out a "fact peculiar to the nuclear threat which has to be taken into account: although it threatens life in the most absolute and ultimate sense, at the immediate level it scarcely involves our lives at all. In other words, there are, generally speaking, no institutions of everyday life which can be organized in an antinuclear way...where economic injustice is concerned, the oppressed have the possibility of organizing at the workplace, or by consumer boycott; similarly, the feminist movement has at its disposal a host of spontaneously existing settings in which women can gather and organize; while oppressed national or cultural groups have their own specific institutions on which to build. Obviously nothing of the sort exists for the antinuclear movement. The only analog to the other cases (with the exceptions of weapons workers or soldiers) is the state itself. But this is by definition remote from everyday life; the development of the nuclear state apparatus has seen to that." [222]

The peace movement, like other social movements, needs both ends of its spectrum. Movements need their wild wings for a number of reasons: to call attention to the issues, to build allegiance through participatory activity, to dramatize alternative framings of the problem, to endow each particular target of support or opposition with the symbolic meaning that can link the particular and the momentary into the general and the longer-term. But the peace movement especially needs its Utopian politics and its dramatic actions.

To put an end to the nuclear arms race requires very deep changes in society. Therefore, in a certain sense, for this issue the Utopian approach is the only appropriate one. As the French said in their May Days: Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible. George Konrad, in his book Antipolitics, makes a similar argument for the wild wing of the peace movement; only Utopianism is in touch with reality.

Antipolitics is the ethos of civil society, and civil society is the antithesis of military society. There are more or less militarized societies—societies under the sway of nation-states whose officials consider total war one of the possible moves in the game. Thus military society is the reality, civil society is a utopia.

Antipolitics means refusing to consider nuclear war a satisfactory answer in any way. Antipolitics regards it as impossible in principle that any historical misfortune could be worse than the death of one to two billion people. Antipolitics bases politics on the conscious fear of death. It recognizes that we are a homicidal and suicidal species, capable of thinking up innumerable moral explanations to justify our homicidal and suicidal tendencies.

"Only antipolitics," he says, "offers a radical alternative to the philosophy of a nuclear ultima ratio."[223]

But in the world that movements inhabit, not only does ordinary political change need the wild fringe of anti-politics; anti-politics and protest need an appropriate political environment. The collapse of the Soviet Union and. the end of the Cold war collapsed the peace movement as well, not because the issues it had addressed were gone-nuclear arms were still present, and according to some analysts, even more likely to be used; the military interest was still a central element in society—but because it took away the sense of crisis that had legitimized anti-politics. without anti-politics, the peace organizations were left to confront the daunting task of demilitarizing in the middle of a recession. Womens Action for Nuclear Disarmament became Womens Action for New Directions; the Social Workers for Peace became the Social Workers for Peace and Justice; white suburban peace workers tried to make alliances with Black community groups around local needs; and cutting the military budget to fund human needs was the agenda of the day for peace groups from the old War Resisters League to the descendants of the Freeze.

But economic conversion as the central issue does not lend itself readily to movement politics. It is not that there are no movement resources out there to be tapped; the return to economic and social justice issues draws on an old tradition of Left politics, as does the potential for working with labor groups. The contrast between military spending and unmet needs at the local level suggests coalition-building between Black and Hispanic community groups and White middle-class peace workers.

But there was a serious obstacle to building a movement out of these issues and these resources. This was that the target of action seemed to be the very bread-and-butter of community life. In the long run, as many a pamphlet took pains to point out, military spending was not a good creator of jobs; the building of mass transit, housing or even more clearly healthcare or educational services produced far more jobs for the investment. But those jobs were hypothetical jobs, an abstraction of the bar graphs; the jobs in military production were real jobs held by real voters. During the Cold War, regular politics had used the menace of the Evil Empire to justify military appropriations; with the Evil Empire gone, the bedrock political issue of jobs seemed justification enough. Lobbyists from industry and the military services struggled to keep the contracts coming, and political candidates—to wild local applause—promised to extend funding for job-creating weapons systems, even some rejected by the Pentagon. A particularly peculiar example was the osprey aircraft, declared by the Pentagon to be both unreliable and unaffordable, which was then strongly supported by both candidates in the 1992 election. Cutting the military budget as a general program definitely lacked mass appeal, while each nuclear submarine launch in Connecticut still brought its group of protestors, in a county where military jobs were 81% of the total payroll they were bound to attract little local support.

Because movements need victories, the peace movement has to find specific victories it can win: defeat the MX; pass the referendum. To do this, it has to temper both ideas and practice with political realism. But the political space for peace politics is currently very small; and to enlarge it requires the Utopian program and the unconventional action, like praying in the lobby of the weapons lab, or having at a missile cone with hammers. The Freeze movement was a brilliant invention, for it sounded like arms control, and at the same time, had enough absolutism in it to tap the Utopian branch of the movement; having taken that one so far, it will be hard to find a new program which can make the same bridge.

So this movement struggles on, locked into a confrontational interaction with a State which depends on the ideology and institutions of war-making for its stance in the world, and by its struggle against the weapons industry, threatening to undercut the livelihood of those who might otherwise give it their sympathetic support. It must be "realistic," but it must also demand the kinds of changes which appear impractical.
CHAPTER EIGHT

THE ART OF SOCIAL PROTEST

Movements to change the world seem to come in two forms. There are organizations with specified objectives, membership lists, fund-raising plans; such organizations often take part in legislative lobbying and produce problem analyses and publications. The goals may be new, but the means follow the convention of established political process. But social movements also appear in the form of what we call "social protest"; marches, rallies, disruptions. Feminists protesting the under-representation of woman artists in the gallery world have marched through exhibitions in gorilla suits. Welsh nationalists have switched all the road signs over broad areas, and sat down to block traffic at major intersections. Abortion protestors have chained themselves to clinic entrances. Peace groups trying to stop the production of nuclear arms have marched in the hundreds on to the nuclear test site in Nevada; they have staged "die-ins" in public places; they have stood screaming in front of the administration building of a weapons contractor. They have camped under scraps of plastic next to a military base.

How should we think about such activities of social protest? One way is to contrast two ways of acting on the world—that of protest, and that of planning and policy-making—and to understand this contrast in terms of two contrasting aspects of the human psyche: passion and reason. On the one hand, we seem to see "social disturbances" and "disorderly protestors," on the other, "studies," "plans," and decorous "policy controversies."

The framework once the standard one, but no longer universally accepted, was given perhaps its clearest expression in the work of Robert Park, the founder of the so-called "Chicago School" of sociology and author of a text in sociology much used by earlier generations of students. His contribution to the field that sociologists call "collective behavior" was very much organized in terms of a sharp distinction between two kinds of behavior: that of the "mass" or "crowd" and that of what he called a "public." This distinction and contrast was the central theme of Park's doctoral dissertation, written at Heidelberg in 1904, and he cribbed from the thesis practically verbatim for his 1921 textbook. It is from this work that I now quote: "In the public, interaction takes the form of discussion. Individuals tend to act upon one another critically; issues are raised and parties form. Opinions clash and thus modify and moderate one another. The crowd does not discuss and hence it does not reflect. It simply "mills." Out of this milling process a collective impulse is formed which dominates all members of the crowd. Crowds, when they act, do so impulsively."[224]

But while Park saw the crowd in the imagery of transiency, he did see it as having the possibility of enduring consequences.

"The sect, religious or political, may be regarded as a perpetuation and permanent form of the orgiastic (ecstatic) or expressive crowd" and "all great mass movements tend to display, to a greater or less extent, the characteristics that Le Bon attributes to crowds. [225]

A positive historic role of the "crowd" is also sketched in Park's doctoral dissertation.

It is seen that the great crowd movements of the middle Ages, the Crusades and the smaller movements which preceded and accompanied the Reformation arose at a time when social ties were weakened and a feeling of common identity had disappeared from society. But it was through these very crowd movements that a new collective spirit developed. Crowd movements played a double role here—they were the forces which dealt the final blow to old existing institutions, and they introduced the spirit of new ones.[226]

In Park's textbook both "mass" and "public" are seen as having consequences, as being ways of changing society, perhaps in both cases for the better. But they are given very different standing as ways of making claims. The "crowd" or mass is thought of as essentially irrational, emotional. It mills, shouts, threatens suicide, throws stones. The "public" appears as reasonable. Opinions are stated; arguments made; data and evidence brought forward.

For many years, the distinction between "mass" and "public" implicitly underlay most study of social movements. Since the "public" was thought of as an arena of rational discussion, it seemed natural to believe that the arguments that went on in that arena could and should be argued on their merits, by bringing up various batteries of factual data; it did not seem particularly appropriate to give historical or sociological explanation for the positions taken. Here we had, it was thought, a set of technical problems to be addressed via planning and policy research. On the other hand, those topics which were associated with Park's "crowd"—mass behavior, social movements, religious sects, public opinion in the polling sense - continued to be part of the sociological agenda but as topics for study. They were not to be debated with, but to be explained via history or social psychology. Disconnected from important political implications, crowd and mass behavior were seen as epiphenomena of the social scene, rather than as central arenas for understanding the nature of society and social purposes. The understanding of political life, meanwhile, took place on quite different terms. The basis for understanding the nature of politics came to be thought of as the identification of material interests, a concept conspicuously lacking from Park's discussion of mass and public.

Most recently, the intellectual traditions which sharply separated "mass" and "public" have been giving way in the social sciences, and politics and its representation of interests appears now to cross-cut both.

In the first place, there is a great deal of interest in what is being referred to as "new social movements"—movements which are expressive, dramatic, quasi-religious in character, but also clearly based in group interests and important components of politics.[227] (As I have noted earlier, it is not that this kind of politics is so new-think of the great religious struggles that characterized European history, as well as the nativistic movements that accompanied colonialism—but that it was generally thought some decades ago that such politics had become obsolete.)

The new social movements are both passionate and purposeful. The direct action of intense moral commitment is paralleled by more traditional forms of political action: the tree-huggers blocking lumber companies have their counterparts in environmental protection legislation. Those who engage in civil disobedience at the missile sites are one end of a movement that spans Congressional lobbying and the politics of international arms control. The abortion clinic protestors have at their other wing legislative and legal activity. But it is not simply that the social movements include both "ordinary politics" and social protest activities: it is also clear that the protest activities are an important element in political change. They are the sort of phenomena that an older generation of sociologists would clearly have studied as "crowd" behavior, but at the same time, their purposes and demands and their assertion of alternative values restructures the public discussion, and is understood as an important element in modern politics. Those who try to understand change see protest as purposeful and often as effective.

On the other hand, the rationality of "planning" and "policy research" is more easily questioned today than some decades ago. The struggles over urban renewal and the highway programs in the sixties brought the interests out into the open, and discourse will never again be able to use the technocratic frame of the "general welfare." In the words of Paul Starr, "The dream of reason did not take power into account."[228] Nor did the dream of reason take into account the material interests which suggest conceptualization, render explanation plausible, and animate the arguments within the realm of public discussion. I have myself tried to show how the standard techniques by which urban designers and economists represent reality tend to privilege state power and the large economic entities above the interests of ordinary citizens and small enterprises. [229] Some intellectuals see interpretation as Clausewitz saw war: "The continuation of politics by other means."[230] Thus, we no longer see a clear distinction between "mass" and "public," passion and reason.

To understand the political process in this way is to take up current ideas about policy-making which center on the concept of the "framing" of issues.[231] What is at stake is not so much who gets when, where, and how, but the very social construction of the issues and the interests. The question is less that of particular allocations or design, but rather the forces at work in shaping definition and permitting or denying access to the policy process. "Decision making" gets replaced by "framing" as the central focus.

The new political movements dramatize for us how little are material interest "given" by the order of nature; interests must be seen and felt before they can be organized around and defended in the arena of politics. "community," "the environment," "Welsh culture," become interests, but they must be made so. The symbolizations which make this possible are partly forms of action: the marching thousands with their banners. But they are also the verbal and numerical explanations which make discussion possible: the plan, the analytic study. The social construction of reality is via both mass and public and for us mass and public represent a continuum of modalities, not antithetical phenomena.

More generally still, current social theory is also providing us with some tools for understanding the activities of the movement participants via a "post modernist" conception of power associated with the work of Foucault. In a series of works dealing with issues generally seen as outside politics—sexuality, crime, madness—Foucault came to develop an approach to power that is particularly appropriate for the new social movements and the dramaturgic politics associated with them in focusing on the re-framing of issues, interests, and the re-definition of reality.

This power which operates in the modern era, what is it like? It is positive and constitutive; it works through meticulous and careful rituals; it focuses especially upon the body; it is a microphysics working in the very minutiae of the social world; it is everywhere, dispersed and tolerated because it is hidden; finally, it is inextricably tied up with claims to truth.[232]

To those who are out to radically transform the world in the new social movements we have been discussing, power appears much more as it does to Foucault than as it did to the revolutionaries who used to speak of "seizing the commanding heights." For these movements, power is not in any single place or institution. Foucault 'works' for understanding protest politics because, like Foucault, the participants in the new movements do not see power as a centralized phenomenon to be influenced, captured, or overturned; rather, power is inherent in the institutions of society. We see the workings of power in the planning report or in the treatment of patients in a hospital, or in the wording of road signs. Associated with this post-modernist conception of power and of politics is an interest in the political role of dramatic performance, as legitimizing new political regimes,[233] entrenching an existing social order,[234] or de-stabilizing that which exists.[235] If we turn back to the airport struggles with this newer view, and try to understand both the airport planners and their opponents in a single framework of interpretation, we will find that these stories give us a somewhat deeper insight into the contrasting styles of "mass" and "public."

If we ask why the protestors are milling and shouting and waving flamboyant banners while the planners refer to analyses of costs and benefits, common sense, and a little not-too-sophisticated reflection on the circumstances of our common life suggest one answer. "Protestors" and "policy-makers", have different relationship to power. It is true that, as we all know, planners do not necessarily have the world on a string. Plans may be ignored, remain "on paper." But the position of planning, as a profession, is that of being attached to power. The traffic projections, the cost-benefit analyses, have been brought into existence by the order of some authoritative body and paid for, usually, by the tax money offered up by citizens to finance enterprises for the common good, dispensed by persons authorized to determine the proper spending of these funds. These circumstances legitimize the planning effort. The planners will probably think a good deal about how to present their findings so that they will be taken seriously. But they do not need to shout, to assemble a crowd of demonstrators, to sit down in front of the bulldozers to get the attention of the rest of society. The radical opposition, however, needs to do just those things. They must show numbers; they must be attention-grabbing; they must demonstrate a strong collective will for those who manage society to notice their views and see them as worth taking into account in decision-making. The planners persuade not simply through persuasiveness, but also by the interests they represent. On the other hand, the kind of decorous discussion that characterizes the world of policy analysis and that sounds so attractive in the early sociology text will get social dissenters nowhere fast. Should the "mass" movement then, try to behave like a "public," we will find that it will be unable to play the social role sketched by Park when he suggested that the "crowd movements ...dealt the final blow to old existing institutions and ...introduced the spirit of new ones," because nobody will pay them any attention.

On another level we see that the struggle to halt the airport led to raising issues of a broader nature, and that this re-framing required dramatic protest.

The discussions that are said to characterize the sphere of "the public" seem to presuppose some basic structure of agreement as to the terms of reference, the concepts to be employed, the values that drive action—and therefore make discussion relevant or irrelevant. A discussion works very well when it's a question of means. It works, also, for a choice of goals, when the choice does not cut too deeply against what are, at bottom, different views of what is important in human life. As the philosopher Alasdair Maclntyre argues, there is no way to engage in rational argument and justification except within the presuppositions of one or another socially embodied historically contingent tradition. when the controversy breaks the bounds of such a set of intellectual conventions, "rival appeals to accounts of the human good or of justice necessarily assume a rhetorical form such that it is as assertion on and counterassertion rather than as argument and counterargument that rival standpoints confront one another. Nonrational persuasion displaces rational argument. "[236]

The resort to mass struggle and to dramaturgic forms of protest - planting thyme over the tarmac, a "village" in the woodland site near Frankfurt—are induced also by the need to re-frame the issues so as to take them out of the sphere of technical rationality in which the authorities have the advantage. The protestors in the big airport controversies may have begun with opposing specific proposals via specific complaints about noise or land-taking, but as building a movement of opposition led the protestors to "globalizing" the issues, they soon came to intend nothing less than changing the grounds of policy debate. This drastic re-framing required a language of movement and metaphor and the appeal to symbols with deep emotional resonance. In the south of France, the airport is physically effaced by earth and wild thyme. The way in which the Narita struggle combined references to early Christians, to traditional Japanese farm culture, and to class struggle suggests how the power of such symbolic concentrations of meaning may outweigh consistency in the struggle to re-frame.

I have argued that the airport protestors began with self interest and mowed through protest politics into questioning the social trajectory of "progress." The dramaturgic politics of march, mass mobilization, and confrontation began in the expediencies of resistance to power that was both resourceful and legitimated. But people who participate in mass mobilizations and confrontations are changed thereby, and movements that confront officialdom instead of bargaining with it change the shape of their ideas. The principles that came to be enunciated were not ones that could be accommodated in normal political bargaining. Nor could they, by the same token, be pursued through the normal political means. Their proponents thus come to appear to the straight world as extremists and their collective activities as disturbances. Among the airport opponents, protest became movement.

In the passion of violent confrontation, the bonding of common struggle, the transcendent experience of mass direct action, the issues at stake came to be ones that politics in the normal sense could hardly engage. The die-hards at Narita now will not bargain with the state. Plowshares activists striking at missiles with hammers and pouring their blood on military files refuse to engage in the language of effectiveness. At this point, protest is moral or religious commitment: one acts because one must.

But the participants in these extraordinary struggles with their pitched battles and symbolic fortifications were apparently for the most part not cranks, and their demands, however impractical, were not unreasonable. These movements are most appropriately understood not as peculiar "mass behavior" but as part of politics and policy-making. We must then understand politics in the broader, post-modernist sense as the perpetual shaping and re-shaping of social reality.

We will understand "protest" as carried by reason as much as emotion. On the other hand, we take note of the element of dramatic performance in the official version. The forms of courtroom behavior sustain legal rule: the political campaign is a dramatic sequence that sustains legislation; the public hearing and the press conference presenting some report are equally pieces of drama. We may see the dramatic performances that we call ritual as "necessary to secure assent to the framework of debate .... Since reason can relate different views only if shared premises already exist, ritual may be a necessary condition of reason's effectiveness. Further, the debate itself may be more significant for its ritual reinforcement of the favoured framework (boundaries of relevance and possibility) than for specific conclusions."[237] It becomes possible to see the world as one of various performances which compete for attention and as claims on the presentation of reality.[238]

When we look at the world in this way, we no longer see, when protest confronts established institutions, a confrontation between passion and reason. Rather, we see the enactment of ideology confronting the enactment of utopia.[239] Of course they look very different. The difference in form, in style, is essential to the difference in message.

At the very basic level, the work of protest politics is to "upset certain conventional silences that are crucial to the stability and dignity of the existing economic and political order."[240] The author of these words gives as an example the pouring of blood into draft files. In the words of Daniel Berrigan: The [draft] files were, in fact, off limits to moral scrutiny. They were an immoral fact masked, in the manner of Auschwitz, as an objective "fact of nature"'; a fact, more accurately, in culture. For what, in the modern sensibility, is more opaquely innocent than a file cabinet?

But now behold, on a November morning, the cabinet, a veritable sanctuary, stood void, violated. A photo shows Philip, his white poll and black overcoat: he is intently pouring blood into the dark maw.[241]

The analysis goes on to develop the associations of blood that make it especially appropriate for marking files. "The pouring of blood can arouse very strong feelings of disgust and horror and can render the marked object socially polluted."[242] There is "a deep antagonism between blood and property; blood is natural and it is connected with the sacred. When blood is splashed on property, it brings the judgment of nature against culture and the judgment of the sacred against the profane."[243]

Gene Sharp has classified the methods of nonviolent action in a way that distinguishes symbolic public acts such as wearing of symbols, marches, and parades from such forms of economic noncooperation as strikes and boycotts and of political noncooperation like civil disobedience and alternative institutions. But this is not to say, and indeed Sharp does not intend to imply, that the symbolic and the actual or material are discrete; a strike and a sit-in are two ways of dramatizing, as well as two ways of exerting pressure, and the "symbolic" march or picket hopes to exert real pressure. So he quotes with approval George Lakey's statement that "communication of images is an important part of any conflict."[244]

If we now think of the events at Narita or Frankfurt as not only expressive or "mass" actions, but as ways of communicating ideas, we must ask: What is the nature of this communication?

I once made a try at this myself in a Florida courtroom. I was on trial. The cited offense was trespass. I had climbed over a high fence into the Cape Canaveral area on the occasion of testing a Trident missile. I tried to persuade the judge and jury to look at the action in another way. (I would have taken the trespass charge as given and tried to show that the offense was justified by the circumstances but that I was prohibited from bringing evidence about any of the extenuating circumstances—mention was forbidden of nuclear war, nuclear weapons, opinions of scientists, church doctrine, and international law.) Trying a different tack, I said: This is not properly thought of as a trespass. It's a particular American social form called a protest. It was not a case of the police "catching" us in an illegal activity; on the contrary, the event had all been arranged with the guards at the base beforehand, and they stood there as we climbed, waiting to arrest us when we got down. We made it clear in the prior negotiations, at the time, and subsequently that our purpose in courting arrest was to protest the development of first-strike nuclear weapons. The arresting officers who testified at my trial never spoke of "trespassers" but rather of "protestors." As a "protest" not a "trespass" I thought the action must be protected under the First Amendment.

This argument did not impress the court in my case, but it still seems to me to have some merit. Thus I was pleased to see recent court decisions involving odd treatment of American flags recognizing these actions as "expressive conduct" falling under the constitutional protection extended to speech, indeed referred to as "symbolic speech."[245]

Suzanne Langer addressed the issue of expressive conduct at general level in her Philosophy in a New Key, where she found, in philosophy, the same distinction that has made trouble for us in the sociological categories of "mass and public." For the logicians, Langer complains, only what can be stated in discursive language is really knowable; "outside this domain is the inexpressible realm of feeling, of formless desires and satisfactions, immediate experience, forever incognito and incommunicado... This logical 'beyond' which Wiltgenstein calls the 'unspeakable' both Russell and Carnap regard as the sphere of subjective experience, emotion, feeling and wish, from which our symptoms come to us in the form of metaphysical and artistic fancies. "[246] It is this view that Langer wholeheartedly rejected seeing thought as having both discursive and presentational forms. Language, ritual, myth and music represented for Langer various modes of symbolisms and significations.

In placing "expressive conduct" with that category denominated within the Constitution as "speech," the Supreme court, whether it knows it or not, is adopting Langer's view of the significance of protest. But the categorization fails to address the special characteristics of communication by 'protest' that make it different from speaking and writing, in ways that Langer also addresses.

There are problems in the "symbolic speech" formula. It is one thing to rule that conduct like burning a flag in front of City Hall may be "sufficiently imbued with elements of communication to fall under the scope of the First and Fourteenth Amendments."[247] It is another step, and I believe a misleading one, to use the term "symbolic speech." A protest is, I would argue, a serious mode of expressing ideas, certainly as serious as a written manifesto. As serious expressive conduct, it seems reasonable to put it under the protections of a Constitution that refers to "speech." Just as one may hold out a hand instead of saying "please give me," the protestors are miming a declaration as to a state of danger, emergency, or injustice, and demanding remediation. The Chartists brought their petition with them when they marched to London in 1848; the Cape Canaveral protest was its own petition.

This way of thinking about protest is do-able, and gives us at least one way of classifying protest events by issue. (We may count the "civil rights protests" and compare the total to "anti-war protests.") But it hardly seems to do justice to the form itself. We would not think much of a theatre review which confined its analysis to summaries of the plot and the general "message" of each play.

Neither displaying the American flag in a parade nor burning it on the steps of City Hall closely resembles speech in its representational properties. A "protest" falls into that general category of presentational symbolism that Suzanne Langer contrasts to the discursive modes of language and mathematics, and while it may employ specific symbols, the basic mode is dramatic. The medium is not all there is of message: style connects with substance. But medium and style are basic to the nature of communication.

A protest has its own potential for signification, a potential that in some ways exceeds that of speech. The form is not at all well adapted to logical argument. But it has the possibility of great psychological impact.

The protest makes contact via direct visual experience. As the paleontologist Robert Jay Gould says, "Words are our favorite means of enforcing consensus" but "Primates are visual animals par excellence, and the iconography of persuasion strikes even closer than words to the core of our being."[248]

As presentational symbolism, a protest speaks in images and metaphors. It can evoke multiple associations simultaneously and ambiguously; it can overlap and condense symbols. So the tunnels and towers at Narita could simultaneously evoke the catacombs of early Christianity and the guerrilla underground of armed class warfare.

A few examples from very different sorts of protest activity may suggest the potential of presentational expression to gain in evocative and definitive power what it misses in the power of specification and argument.

When gay activists wanted to elicit a greater degree of public attention to the problem of AIDS, they might have displayed its ravages in statistics on the numbers of deaths. Instead, they produced a vast "quilt," made up of panels memorializing particular persons who had died, and laid the "quilt" out on the Washington Mall. The dead were converted from numbers to persons, particular, individual, each beloved by some other person or persons who had cared enough to make a panel; the Gays were meanwhile related to a mainstream context of family and tradition (quilt-making).

When the women at Greenham Common in England, having broken into the American Cruise missile base, danced on top of the missile silos they were asserting a world of the personal, the female, even the magical, against a vision of male-dominated technological rationalism, and by dramatizing the vitality of that world through dance claiming it as the embodiment of life as against a military security re-defined as the pursuit of death.

The nearly a million persons who marched in New York for international nuclear disarmament could have sent written statements or signed a petition: indeed, probably most of the participants had done these things, and probably several times. But their participation in the great march made manifest the commitment and the energy of the peace movement, and tried to define it as a vast group of committed individuals who would have to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, they carried with them symbols of the Earth, of children, as well as of organizational membership.

Furthermore, the constituent elements of the protest presentation are people. We are so constituted as to respond more intensely to others of our species than to words or things. People attract; people fascinate; people elicit pity; people enrage. And people, physically present, demand of their fellow-humans an attention that would be lacking if their wants were made known in written statement.

I have come to believe that the use of human bodies to cross official lines, sit down in roadways, block police and the like is not simply a tactic for citizens opposing the state with its monopoly of the legal use of force; it also a way of dramatizing the primacy of human lives against the domain of official rules and government and commercial interests. Indeed, in talking with the Narita militants I was fascinated to find that they attributed to their use of force exactly the same moral power that American peace activists attribute to non-violence; in both, the basic element was the willingness of ordinary persons to put themselves on the line.

In an extraordinary account of the experience of civil disobedience Peter Marin writes "It is the body itself, the living flesh, which is asserted in protest as the alternative to both power and violence. The body becomes a voice; its presence is a form of speech; its assertion clears a space in the world, a path, into which conscience and understanding can follow."[249]

But to characterize protest as dramatic performance is to simplify. There is of course a substantial literature in the history and theory of theatre. It transfers to protest actions hardly at all. Western theatre has been substantially centered on the development of character. It has operated in terms of the physical framework of the stage, and a formal separation between actors and audience. Dialogue has been the major means of thematic development. And even if we take the experiments of Brecht, Artaud, and Beckett into account, in a protest action or mobilization there are a number of important issues that make the form quite different not only from written statement but from theatre in the ordinary sense.

In the first place, while the theatrical impresario may have to contend with backers, with acoustics, and with temperamental actors, his position is indeed enviable compared to that of the protest organizer with respect to the capacity to direct the event. A demonstration is a form of collective drama that is peculiarly difficult to bring off. The medium is to the highest degree uncontrollable and unpredictable; it is crowds of people, mainly unrehearsed in their parts, with varying goals and conceptions of the situation, perhaps not highly congruent with those of the organizers. An example is given by David Dellinger in his account of the difficult 'creative synthesis' between Ghandian non-violence and guerilla aggressiveness in the 1967 anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon.[250] many of the basic rules of action are set by agents—like police—whose major interest it is to prevent the drama from unfolding as the organizers of the demonstration would like to have it. It may rain (as it did in 1848 on the Chartists).

The serendipity inherent in demonstrations can sometimes work out wonderfully well. I was myself present at a "counter Bicentennial" event at which the President of the United States made his entrance to stage center surrounded by all the paraphernalia of power to place himself with a crowd of neatly dressed people on the side of Concord Bridge where the British had stood two-hundred years before, confronting across the stream on the Minutemen's side a hillside covered with demonstrators. When some of the demonstrators sloshed across the shallow water they were met by a force of mounted police in red raincoats, so that for a few minutes the staged musketry fire between the "Redcoats" and the "Minutemen" on the bridge was mirrored by the confrontation between police and demonstrators below. But the delightful fittingness of it all brought out again how different are the circumstances of protest action from even the most modern theatre performance! If the organizers had planned this little sub-drama they would have been very lucky to have brought it off.

And a protest is not and cannot be "just" theatre. The participants are not and cannot feel themselves to be actors. They require the sense of authenticity. A protest is, in this aspect, much more like a religious ritual than it is like a play, and the participants more like a congregation, than like either a cast or an audience. As in attending a mass or going on a pilgrimage, the action should strengthen individual commitment and contribute to the sense of being part of a community of faith. The action has to do with personal transformation. The "march" and "peace camp"' have their analogues in religious procession and initiation Camp.[251] It is not for nothing that protestors so often link arms before the police and join hands in human chains. They are evoking by touch the most basic forms of human connection. The singing in the holding cell after a mass arrest can be exhilarating.

A participant in the Women's Pentagon Action in 1982 describes how the ritualized protest gripped her emotionally: "I certainly didn't expect to cry. I didn't expect to scream. After all, I was an initiator of the action. I had been imagining women encircling the Pentagon for months, I knew exactly what was going to happen and I had the whole thing pretty well intellectualized. But as I watched the gravestones placed one by one—the unknown women, Karen Silkwood, Yolanda Ward, victims of illegal abortions, rage, war, racism and as I stood observing the other women mourning and interpreting the action for mostly male reporters, I felt as if I was being torn in two. So much for intellectualizing. Finally I tore off the little card I was wearing that said 'Press.'... "Then the drum tempo changed, and the majestic rage puppet, in red, moved to the centre. The next stage of the action began and we raged and chanted 'We won't take it,' 'No more war,' Take the toys away from the boys.' Women railed at the Pentagon. And the crescendo built up ...By then I wasn't talking to the press at all. I was gripped in the experience and totally incapable of interpreting it to people outside of it. I was learning something about the power of ritual, the power of women together, and the depth of my own sorrow and rage...

...I wasn't prepared for how I was transformed by that ritual. I felt as if something reached down inside me as I was playing my interpretive role, grabbed my tears and pulled them out of me. The feelings inside these other women touched the feelings in me and our rage built together."[252]

Let us remember, also, that ritual, for believers, does not simply celebrate, memorialize, or connect; it also affects. The devout Catholic who lights a candle and prays for a sick child is acting on the child's behalf. The Hopi corn dancers, with rattles and moccasined feet, are compelling the clouds. Peace movement organizers speak of "actions," and they think of the events as action, not simply as ceremony.

The women who danced on the missile silos at Greenham were dancing more for themselves than for any audience. What had begun in Cardiff as a typical "peace march" had evolved at the march terminus at the Cruise missile base in England into a women's peace encampment and this, in turn, had tapped images and rituals from deep ecology and feminism to create a culture of dissent rather than one of "public protest"' in the usual sense. The encampment at Greenham came to play a role in the peace movement something like that of Pendle Hill among the Quakers: a center for spiritual growth to which persons may repair for spiritual refreshment.

The protest action that is shaped for presentation to the wider public or the media may fail to serve the needs of the participants for community and emotional release. A too-loud microphone and directed chanting on the day a war began drove some of us protestors away to grieve together. One protestor writes more generally "When I go to an action or a political meeting.. I want to hear and sing songs that remind me of who I am. I want to hear vulnerability expressed. I want to see despair transformed by faith and long-suffering love. I want an opportunity to look into the faces of those I am gathered with, perhaps be guided by the leadership to say 'Hello' to a stranger and thank that person for caring enough to show up that day. I want our gatherings to assist us in building community."[253] Too much dramatic staging can take away from the shared risk that even more than common struggle build solidarity. "When we went to block the streets," one woman said to me, "it was the feeling of not knowing what would happen and trusting each other in that situation." Finally, a protest demonstration must function as a political tool. It should have an effect on historical outcome, either by altering a general climate of public opinion, by attracting other participants, or by altering the political support for particular political actors or particular actions, or by some combination of these. Interestingly, there is very little evidence on the effects of protest in shaping the course of history. We do know from polls taken at the time that both the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the Sixties were exceedingly unpopular with the general public; [254]nevertheless, it is generally believed that the protests contributed to bringing about desegregation and the end of the war in Vietnam. But some persons whose opinions are entitled to respect believe that the anti-war protests lengthened the war by creating backlash.[255] What is the evidence? Those whose religious commitments lead them to action like pouring blood on nuclear missiles sometimes do so on the basis of a moral absolutism that seems to stand outside politics. Helen Woodson, sentenced to eighteen years in prison for attacking a hardened missile silo with a hammer, has refused to give interviews, merely stating that on release she will do it again. But in these acts of witness there is some claim to be recognized, not simply by God, but also by Man. And for the most part, those who are involved in protest either as organizers or as participants must do so on the basis of some political analysis which proposes forms of effectiveness hard to predict beforehand and hard to test retroactively.

There is the additional difficulty, that, once we see all politics as having a dramatic element, we lack a clear distinction between the "symbolic" protest and such direct actions as strikes and occupations.

"Shutting it down" is not thought, really, to eradicate the institution from social life. When the Narita protestors destroyed the control equipment of the airport they knew that the government was quite capable of restoring it—as they did. The action was both material and symbolic. On the other hand, those who march or block streets hope to effect, eventually, actual institutional changes. Effectiveness is important, and essentially indeterminate.

A protest action should, therefore, convey a message both coherently and powerfully. It should build the movement community. It should be timed and formed for effectiveness. Each of these goals is in its own terms difficult to attain and the three goals tend to conflict with each other.

These conflicts come to discussion most commonly around the role of media coverage in protest politics. Media coverage appears to be almost indispensable to protest politics.

First, media coverage can expand the scope of the conflict .... By receiving media coverage, social movements make others aware of their struggle and of the issues under contention. The aim from the point of view of these movements is to encourage new actors to enter the "fight"' as allies....

Second, media coverage can help movements to attract resources and supporters, especially elites.... Third, in addition to directly generating legislative, financial, and other support from elites, media coverage of a social movement can also aid in education and recruitment efforts .... Since underfunded social movements cannot afford to advertise to a large audience, they are dependent upon free publicity from the news media...

Fourth, media coverage that widens the scope of conflict tends to escalate the cost to authorities of using overtly repressive measures in combating rebellious groups. Extra-legal violence on the part of authorities becomes almost suicidal when carried out under the glare of television cameras and under the observation of reporters from major media outlets.

Fifth, media coverage can sometimes aid in both enhancing the sense of a movement's accomplishments and effectiveness and, by publicizing dissent, can delegitimize an authority's position .... Such legitimization can be a boost to the sense of efficacy felt by movement participants. This last point is wellknown to movement fundraisers who often use media clippings as "proof" of an organization's significance.[256]

But "'playing to the media" brings with it a number of problems. There is, first, that protest, to be politically effective, needs to convey a message that the issue is broad and generally supported. But "news" is in the exceptional. It makes good sense for a newspaper to see man biting dog as news and the reverse as hardly worthy of notice.

But a group interested in promoting leash laws will have the reverse focus. As an example, let us take a protest mounted against the cutting of day care subsidy in the State of Massachusetts during a period of retrenchment. The protest was large, appropriately located in front of the State House, and exceedingly photogenic since it involved many little tots dressed in their best. The organizers were indignant to find that the leading Boston newspaper gave them not a single line of coverage. When they complained to the paper, the spokesman said that the editors had killed the story on the basis that "since everybody is protesting these days, one more isn't news."'

Another set of problems lie in the feedback between a search for media coverage and the internal character of the movement itself.

"Playing to the media" leads to designating movement "spokespersons"; for groups that would otherwise like to be collective in structure, this can be a problem. "Playing to the media" is more easily done via the confrontational and the unusual; meanwhile, the movement seems to be getting further away from any potential for integrating its beliefs and program into the mainstream. "Playing to the media" leads to a focus on single "actions" rather than on the day to day toil of organizing.

The media is an institution which depends on symbols and images. Its importance in our culture has influenced movements to move away from concrete actions—whether constructive campaigns, noncooperation efforts, or intervention efforts—in favor of symbolic efforts which meet news needs for "drama" with a "good picture." The pursuit of concrete actions, that is, actions which not only attempt to educate or publicize but which take actual concrete steps at contributing to the solution of problem, has taken on a secondary role in many movements. Instead, symbolic actions, that is, actions whose purpose is to dramatize an issue in the hopes of influencing elite or public opinion (usually through the media) have been the primary tactic of many movements."[257]

But even if there were no problem of relationship to the media, protest would be an art of representation far more complex than any other. Context is all-important, but context is maximally beyond control. Presentation to outsiders is critical, but their attention cannot be either commanded or counted on: it must be elicited in some way. To convey a complicated and differentiated message—something with a bit of analysis—something more than "We're against it."— seems to require sophisticated planning and performance. But sophisticated planning and performance takes away from the moral outrage that drives movement, and focusing on audience takes away from the sense of authenticity and of belonging to a beloved community. As to the decision-makers up there: Is anybody listening? Nevertheless, the protestors struggle on, and as their sense of the issues evolves, with it evolves new kinds of symbolism. Airport protestors bury the tarmac in soil and plant wild thyme. Women at Greenham crawl out from their plastic rain shelters to weave yarn against the fence, or to cut it and dance on the missile silos. Aboriginal groups in Australia build a shanty in front of the house of Parliament and hoist the aboriginal flag over it. American peace marchers carry giant white birds and include Buddhists with drums. With their varying issues, organizational resources and contexts the protestors are groping towards a developing art of political statement through presentational symbolism.
INSIDE THE SYSTEM

The act of protest can feel marvelously liberating. In Florida, as the buses began to move, carrying us demonstrators from the "peace train" to the rally and civil disobedience in protest against testing a new first-strike missile, the man next to me on the seat—a stranger—turned to me and sighed a sigh of pure pleasure. "Here we are again," he said, "and the buses are moving."

The moment felt something like that when, as children, we jumped from the big beam into the hayloft. It hit you in the pit of the stomach, a mixture of fear and pure elation. In civil disobedience, the centeredness of acting on conviction and the moral solidarity with others are powerful pulls; but there is something else: a liberation from normality. It feels like a leap of faith, soaring trustfully into the future. It feels like freedom.

We carried some of that along with us into arrest. Going down the long halls of the Brevard County Jail, someone began to whistle the march song from The Bridge on the River Kwai, and fifteen women fell into step, captive, indeed required to appear in handcuffs, but still feeling jaunty and free in our solidarity and our ability to say "No."

It was in this frame of mind that we passed the time in the cell outside the courtroom, waiting for arraignment. Our talk became a kind of seminar on working within and working outside the system. Someone pointed out that it was Martin Luther King's birthday. Someone said that King had been arrested forty times. We contemplated that piece of information. We thought of how liberated we felt there, under arrest.

Then I was moved to tell a story which I had told before to my colleagues at MIT and had, indeed, put into print in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Although the story has elements of the fantastic, I did not invent it. It is true, and told at some length in a book by Jean Francois Steiner called Treblinka. The story is that of the normalizing of atrocity.

Most of the German concentration camps had both an element of forced labor and a set of provisions for killing people; but there were five camps which were nothing other than factories for killing. Of these, the largest was Treblinka, which was built to exterminate the Jews of Warsaw and environs.

At first, the work of extermination was carried on piecemeal. Jews were loaded into vans, driven outside of town, shot, and tossed into a ditch. After a while, the process was made more effective by piping exhaust fumes into the vans so most of the occupants would arrive dead, or nearly so. But still the batches were small. Then the Germans invented the gas chamber and industrialized the process. At Treblinka, a railway siding brought Jews in by the trainload. From the siding they were hustled into the gas chambers. At the other end of the chambers, the bodies were removed, to be stripped of valuables and gold teeth and disposed of, first by burial, later by burning.

There was too much work in all this for the Germans themselves; so they used Jews from the transports. At first they would pull a few able-bodied men from the train and put them to work, then push them into the gas chambers after the others. But this way, the Germans were always working with unskilled labor; and labor, we may imagine, liable to unpredictable behavior and fits of derangement. Very soon the Germans took to selecting a semi-permanent labor force comprised of Jews from the transports, who would eventually go to the gas chamber. But in the meantime, they could settle into their jobs.

Although these prisoner-workers were not, strictly speaking, permanent, there was enough permanence in the system to change the way the camp ran quite radically. Germans and Jews began to develop regular patterns of collaboration. People developed their little specialties and arrangements. Treblinka came to function as a normal institution, and even to look like one in parts. There was a band, and musicians were selected for it from the transports. There were boxing matches, for which pugilists were also held out from the gas chamber. A cafe came into existence.

The Jews knew it was only a question of time before they, too, would go into the gas chambers and the Germans knew—apparently—that they were losing the war. But day by day, Jews and Germans collaborated in processing the people from the transports, disposing of the bodies, serving the bread and soup, sorting the valuables, and maintaining the institution of Treblinka. In the analysis of how this collaboration was accomplished, we see that the social devices called into play were not so very different from those in any institution; your company, say, or my university. They were:

The division of labor, which makes no one person responsible, while everyone shares complicity;

The individual rewards of participation, both material incentives and social prestige;

The satisfaction of technical expertise and problem-solving, even in a bad cause;

The pleasure of doing little bits of good; helping one's friends, for example, in a bad setting.

There was another side to the process of normalizing. The Jews, now living not simply from minute to minute, began to be able to plan an uprising, and this they did. One prisoner, at enormous personal risk, took it as his task to get from the outer side of the gas chambers, where Jews were brought from the railroad line, to the back side, where the bodies were processed, so as to enlist the worker Jews there in a coordinated act of uprising.

But what is most painful in Steiner's account of it is how hard it was to start. The Jews knew that their time was running out. They knew how many Jews there had been in Warsaw. They knew how many had run through the death factory. They knew that it could only be a matter of weeks before their turn would come. But no moment, no day, ever seemed quite right to start. They were caught in the machinery of daily life.

Finally, almost by accident, the revolt was set off. One of the gas chambers was destroyed. Six hundred prisoners escaped, of whom thirty survived. It is to these survivors that we owe the existence of the stories which Steiner has gathered and retold in his book.

In thinking, at my university, about the Treblinka story, I came to see more clearly why it was hard to organize my colleagues against the arms race; even those who saw it as dangerous. Thinking about the analogy led me to retire to work in the peace movement. It led me, indeed, to the holding cell in the Brevard County Jail on Martin Luther King Day, where I told the story as an argument against working within the system, and met the response of other women who felt they had finally escaped the tyranny of the normal.

We had risen up. We were moving at last.

But thinking it over later, I see that this was too simple. It is a wonderful moment in Steiner's story when the Jews at Treblinka finally blow up the gas chamber and run off into the forest. Finally, at last, they take the appropriate action. But what is appropriate for them is not so appropriate for us, the protestors against the Trident D-2 missile, the planning for nuclear war, and the militarized state. It is the Pentagon planners who seem prepared to blow things up and run off to their deep shelters. For us, this is not an option. We hope to keep on living in the system for a good, long time.

For us therefore, it has to be working within the system. The moments of solidarity in protest, in the freedom of dissent, are wonderful for us. But what we do has to work to change the system. Our disengagement, our dissent, are separations from which we hope to gain leverage, as the wrestler throws his weight one way to shift that of his opponent.

In this, too, we could feel a continuity with the work of Martin Luther King, who, of course—it was both a limitation and his strength—never saw himself as outside the system. In an early speech, he said: "If we are wrong, then the Constitution is wrong. If we are wrong, then God is wrong." He felt himself at the center of the system.

When we march, cross the line, sit down in the road, we are asserting that the center is elsewhere than where the spokesmen of the State say it is. We claim it for caring, for solidarity, and for hope. We think we can change the arrangements of our common life.

In so doing, indeed, we repudiate the very metaphor of "system" as something mechanical, built of solid, fixed parts. The world we live in is a world of human beings capable of imagination and passion, able to be altered and to alter themselves in response to a vision of possibility. Our metaphor is not "system" but "society."

That is why, even in the holding cell and in handcuffs, we felt more free than the prison system functionaries who sometimes expressed regret at "having to" do what they did. We are not required to do what they did. When the buses move, we experience our freedom.

### References

* * *

[1] For some helpful reviews of this literature see: David S. Meyer. "Nuclear Weapons Protest and Social Movements." A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics. Praeger, 1990.

William A. Gamson. The Strategy of Social Protest. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1975.

John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory." American Journal of S ociology, Vol, 82, 1977, pp. 1212-41. Social Research Vol. 52 (Winter), (issue on social movements), 1985

[2] Alan Touraine. The voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

[3] Jurgen Habermas. Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970.

[4] Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology, 3rd Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. 869.

[5] See Meyer, op. cit.

[6] John D'Emilio. Sexual Politics: Sexual Communities: The Making of a Sexual Minority in the United States: 1940-1970. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

[7] Frank Parkin. Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Manchester University Press, 1968.

[8] David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford. "Master Frames and Cycles of Protest," in Morris and Mueller (op. cit ) . ) , pp. 133-155.

[9] William A. Gamson. "The Social Psychology of Collective Action." In Aldon Moms and Carol Mueller (Eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

[10] Marty Jezer. Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

[11] Catherine Ingram. In the Footsteps of Gandhi: Conversations with Spiritual Social Activists. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990, p. 114

[12] Stuart Timmons. The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the American Gay Movement. Boston, MA: Alyson, 1990.

[13] Martin Luther King. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper, 1958.

[14] Branch Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years. 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

[15] Sudarshan Kapur. Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, p. 118.

[16] Kapur, op. cit., pp. 163-164.

[17] August Meier and Elliott Rudwich. "The Boycott Movement against Jim Crow Streetcars in the South." In Meier and Rudwick (eds.), Along the Color Line. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976, pp. 267-289.

[18] Taylor, op. cit. p. 145.

[19] Ibid, p. 272

[20] Herbert Blumer. "Social Movements." In Alfred McClung Lee (Ed.), Principles of Sociology. Barnes and Noble College Outline Series, 1969, pp. 199-202.

[21] Myles Horton. The Long Haul: An Autobiography. Anchor Press, 1991, p. 114.

[22] Ibid, p. 84.

[23] For an interesting example of this sort of analysis, see Frank K. Upham, Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan. Harvard University Press, 1987.

[24] Todd Gitlin. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. University of California Press, 1980

[25] Faye D. Ginsburg. Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. University of California Press, 1989.

[26] James Gleick. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York, NY: Viking, 1987.

[27] Marvin Olasky, Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1992.

[28] Paul Starr. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

[29] James C. Mohr. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900. Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 156.

[30] Ibid, pp. 166-67.

[31] Ibid, p. 159.

[32] Ibid, p. 160.

[33] Ibid, p. 162.

[34] Ibid, p. 184.

[35] Kristin Luker. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. University of California Press, 1984, p. 32.

[36] Nanette J. Davis. From Crime to Choice: The Transformation of Abortion in America. Greenwood Press, 1985, p. 68.

[37] Ibid, P. 69.

[38] Ibid, pp. 204-205.

[39] Ibid, p. 73.

[40] Nina Baehr. Abortion without Apology: A Radical History for the 1990s. South End Press, 1990, p. 19.

[41] Davis, op. cit., p. 131.

[42] Davis, op. cit., p. 154.

[43] Davis, op. cit., p. 140.

[44] Davis, op. cit., p. 138.

[45] Davis, op. cit., p. 129.

[46] Davis, op. cit., p. 129.

[47] Carol Gilligan. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory of Women's Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

[48] Luker, p. 80.

[49] Baehr, p. 22.

[50] Davis, op. cit., p. 181.

[51] Baehr, op. cit., p. 29.

[52] Baehr, op. cit., A. 47.

[53] Baehr, op. cit., p. 43.

[54] Luker, op. cit., p. 110.

[55] Luker, op. cit., p. 134.

[56] Tamar Lewis. "An Abortion Rights Idea that Backfired." New York Times (March 22), 1992, p. 35.

[57] Ibid.

[58] See "Constructing Visions of the Foetus and Freedom: Rhetoric and Image" in Celeste Michelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change.

[59] Faye D. Ginsburg. Contested Llves: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. University of California Press, 1989, p. 97.

[60] For a vivid account of the role of the media, see Ginsburg, op. cit.

[61] Michele McKeegan. Abortion Politics: Mutiny in the Ranks of the Right. New York and Toronto: The Free Press, 1992, p. 4.

[62] The phrase is McKeegan's.

[63] McKeegan, op. cit., p. 46.

[64] Rebecca Chalher and Carol Downer. A Woman's Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RV-486. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

[65] Lisa R. Peattie. "Advocacy Planning and Community Drama." Journal of the American Institute of Planners (January), 1969.

[66] Herbert S. Gans. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Colombia University Press, 1967, p. 309.

[67] Peter Marris. Meaning and Action: Community Planning and Conceptions of Change. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 146-147.

[68] David Apter and Nagayo Sawa. Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan. Harvard University Press, pp. 106-7.

[69] Jane Steingold."Narita Journal: An Airport is Being Strangled by Relentless Foes."' New York Times, September, 1989.

[70] David Apter. Personal communication.

[71] Engineering News Record (E.N.R.), March 8, 1990, p. 5.

[72] David Apter. Rethinking Development: modernization, Dependency, and Postmodern Politics. Sage Publications, 1987, p. 233.

[73] Ibid, p. 236.

[74] Apter and Sawa, pp. 87-88.

[75] Apter, Rethinking Development, pp. 242-43.

[76] Frank K. Upham. Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan. Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 29.

[77] Rob Burns and Wilfried van der will. Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda. New York: Martin's Press, 1988. p. 189.

St.

[78] Ibid, p. 190.

[79] Elim Papadakis. The Green Movement in West Germany. London, Croom Helm and New York:St. Martin's Press, 1984, p. 184.

[80] Ibid, p. 83.

[81] Ibid, p. 87.

[82] Jean-Marie Charon. Les Movements d'Opposants aux Decisions d'Implantation d'Aeroports et d'Aligne Nouvelle de T.G.V. Association Pour la recherche et le Developpement en Uurbanisme, Mars 1979, p 6.

[83] Ibid, p. 38.

[84] Ibid, p. 102.

[85] Ibid, p. 103.

[86] Ibid, p. 70.

[87] Dorothy Nelkin. Jetport: The Boston Airport Controversy. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books 1974, p. 166.

[88] Ibid, p. 49.

[89] Ibid, p. 52.

[90] Ibid, p. 166.

[91] Ibid, P. 167.

[92] Walter Rostow. The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunists Manifesto. Cambridge, England: University Press, 1960.

[93] Mary Lou Munts. Personal correspondence.

[94] Anna Gyorgy."'Report from Bonn on Green Politics at the Close of the 1980s: Europe Needs Green.'"' The Nonviolent Activist, vol. 6, No. 7 (October-November), 1989, p. 3.

[95] Ibid, P. 5.

[96] Bruce Griffiths. "Aspects of His Work." In Alan R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas (eds.), Presenting Saunders Lewis. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, p 23.

[97] D.J. Williame. "Saunders Lewis - A Man of Destiny." In Jones and Thomas, Presenting Saunders Lewis. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 3-4.

[98] Bruce Griffiths. "Aspects of His Work." In Alan R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas (eds.). Presenting Saunders Lewis. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, p. 23

[99] Saunders Lewis. "The Caernarfon Court Speech, 1936." In Jones and Thomas (1983), p. 118.

[100] Ned Thomas. The Welsh Extremist: A Culture in Crisis. London: Victor Gollancz (1971), pp. 12-13.

[101] Quoted from Saunders Lewis. Eqwyddorion Cenedlaetholdeb (The Principles of Nationalism, 1926). In Jones and Thomas, op. cit., p. 29.

[102] Quoted from Saunders Lewis. Y Frwydr Dros Ryddid (1935). In D. Nywel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party, 1925-1945: A Call to Nationhood. Cardiff: University of Wales Press (19$3), pp. 102, 124.

[103] Saunders Lewis. "The Fate of the Language." In Jones and Thomas, op. cit. (1962), p. 141.

[104] Davies (1983), p. 242.

[105] John Osmond. Creative Conflict: The Politics of Welsh Devolution. Dyfed Gomer Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul (1979), p. 240.

[106] Ibid, p. 251

[107] Denis Balsom. "The Three Wales Model." In John Osmond (Ed.), The National Question Again: Welsh Political Identity in the 1980s. Llandysul: Dyfed Gomer Press (1985).

[108] Ibid.

[109] Gwynfor Evans and Iowan Rhys. "Wales."' In Owen Dudley Edwards, Gwynfor Evans, Ioan Rhys, and Hugh MacDiarmid, Celtic Nationalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1968), p. 242.

[110] Davies (1983), p. 115.

[111] Charlotte Aull Davies. "Welsh Nationalism and the British State." In Glynn Williams (Ed.), Crisis of Economy and Ideology: Essays on Welsh Society, 1840-1980. Society of Wales Study Group (1983), p. 203.

[112] Evans and Rhys (1968), p. 241.

[113] J. Barry Jones. "Labour Party Doctrine and Devolution: The Welsh Experience." In Anthony H. Richmond (Ed.), After the Referenda: The Future of Ethnic Nationalism in Britain and Canada. Dowrnsview: Ontario Institute for Behavioural Research, York University (1981), p. 159.

[114] Ibid.

[115] Davies (1983), pp. 29-30.

[116] Davies (1983), p. 181.

[117] Charlotte Holmes Aull. Ethnic Nationalism in Wales: An Analysis of the Factors Governing the Politicization of Ethnic Identity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University (1987), p. 69.

[118] Ibid, p. 67.

[119] Ibid. Interview quoted in Auel, p. 208.

[120] John Osmond. "Coping with a Dual Identity." In John Osmond (Ed.) (1985), p. xxxvi.

[121] Interview in H.M. Williams. Devolution and Other Issues in Welsh Nationalist Politics Between 1966 and 1986 with Special Reference to North Wales. Master's Thesis, University of Wales (July 1986), p. 229.

[122] Plaid Cymru Aims. Plain Cymru (undated).

[123] "Disunity in the Kingdom." Buzzword, Vol. IV, No. 3 (May/June), 1992.

[124] Einar Haugen. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1966), p. 15.

[125] Aull (1978), p. 128

[126] Pierre Clavel. Opposition Planning in Wales and Appalachia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press (1983).

[127] Philip Rawkins. "Nationalist Parties and the Political System: The Problems of Leadership and Legitimation." In Richmond (Ed.) (1981), p. 45.

[128] Interview with Ioann Bowen Rees (July 1985).

[129] Gwyn A. Williams. When Was Wales? London: Penguin Books (1985), p. 303.

[130] Rawkins, Ibid.

[131] Rawkins, Ibid.

[132] Tom Ellis. "From Labour to Social Democrat." In Osmond (Ed.) (1985), p. 264.

[133] John D'Emilio. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Sexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970. Chicago and London University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 48.

[134] Mattachine Midwest Newsletter (Chicago), April, 1967. Quoted in Laud Humphrey's Out of the Closet: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972, p. 110.

[135] D'Einilio, p. 106.

[136] Greg Carnack. "A Salute to Christopher Street West," Frontiers, June 11-18, 1986, p. 25.

[137] Ibid.,p24.

[138] Ibid., p. 2s.

[139] Ibid.

[140] Interview with Harry Hay. 1986. See also Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston, MA: Alyson Publications, 1990.

[141] D'Emilio, p. 13.

[142] Ibid., p. 30.

[143] Ibid., p. 24.

[144] Ibid., p. 27.

[145] Ibid., p. 33.

[146] U.S. Senate 81st Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government. Washington, 1950; quoted in D'Emilio, p. 42

[147] Interview with Jim Kepner. 1986.

[148] John Francis Hunter. the Gay Insider USA. Stonehill Publishing.

[149] Michael Bronski. 1984. Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility. Boston, MA: South End Press.

[150] Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs. 1986. Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.

[151] Alfred C. Kinsey. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Co., 1948.

[152] D'Emilio, p. 35.

[153] Evelyn Hooker. "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual." Journal of Projective Techniques, 1957, pp. 21, 18-31.

[154] Howard S. Becker. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York, NY: The Free Press, p. 9.

[155] Howard S. Becker. "Deviance and Deviates." Nation, September 20, 1965, pp. 115-119.

[156] Interview with Jim Kepner, 1986.

[157] bid.

[158] bid.

[159] D'Emilio, p. 81.

[160] Ibid., p. 102.

[161] Interview with Jim Kepner.

[162] Ibid.

[163] D'Emilio, p. 14.

[164] Ibid., p. 164.

[165] "George." 1978. In Nancy Adair and Casey Adair (Eds.), Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco, CA: New glide Publications, pp. 72-73.

[166] Martin Duberman. 1993. Stonewall. Dutton, 1993, pp. 200-201. 35. Ibid., p. 207.

[167] 35. Ibid., p. 207.

[168] Ibid.

[169] Jim Kepner. 1985. "Gay Movement History and Goals" pamphlet. 198, 206

[170] Land Humphreys. 1972. Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 108.

[171] Letter to the Editor of Vector (San Francisco), November, 1970, p. 9; quoted in Humphreys, p. 106.

[172] Michael Muston. 1987. "Mandatory Macho: Butching Up is Not a Liberated Act." Voice, June 30, p. 30.

[173] Frances Fitzgerald. 1986. "The Castro." The New Yorker, J uly 28, p. 63.

[174] Sue Hyde. 1990. "Outliving the AIDS Crisis: Gay and Lesbian Organizing for the '90s." Nonviolent Activist, July-August, pp. 7-8.

[175] Josh Gamson. 1989. "Silence, Death, and the Invisible Enemy: AIDS Activism and Social Movement 'Newness'." Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 4, October, pp. 351-367, 354-355.

[176] Anne Kinnane. 1987. "Aiding the Cause." TAB, Vol. 7, No. 40, June 9, p. 1.

[177] Interview with Troy Perry, 1986.

[178] Harry Hay. "A Separate People Whose Time Has Come." The 1983 Gay Pride Festival, Souvenir Program Feel the Pride: Share the Magic, quoted in Humphreys, p. 108.

[179] Amber Hollibaugh. "Building a Movement Beyond Anti-Gay Referenda." Resist Newsletter #227, June 1990, p. 5.

[180] Jim Kepner. 1985. "A Brief Essay on Gay Movement, History, and Goals." Pamphlet.

[181] Richard K. Herrell. "Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Pride Day Parade." In Gilbert Herdt (Ed.), Gay Culture in America: Essays from the Field. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 231232.

[182] Ibid., p. 232.

[183] Ibid., p. 243.

[184] Ibid., p. 246.

[185] Sir Baldwin Spencer and F.S. Gillen. The Arunta: A Study of A Stone Age People. London: Macmillan and Co.,

1927, p. vii.

[186] A.P. Elkin. "Before It Is Too Late." In Roland M. Berndt (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines. Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1970, p. 19.

[187] Mancur Olson, Jr. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.

[188] See Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail. Vintage Books, 1979.

[189] Robert Hughes. The Fatal Shore. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, p. 596-7.

[190] Diane Bell. Daughters of the Dreaming. Melbourne, Australia: McPhee Gribble; N. Sidney, Allen and Unwin, 1983, p. 125.

[191] Erich Kolig. The Silent Revolution: The Effects of modernization on Australian Aboriginal Religion. Philadelia, PA: Philadelphia Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981, p. 70.

[192] Diane E. Barwvick. A Little More than Kin: Regional Affiliation and Group Identity Among Aboriginal Migrants in Melbourne. Thesis, Australian National University, August, 1963.

[193] Gough Whitlam. Quoted in Gough Whitlam, The Whitlam Government: 1973-1975, November 13, 1972. Penguin Books.

[194] Colin Tatz, "Aborigines: Political Options and Strategies" and Michael Howard, "Aboriginal Political Change in an Urban Setting: The N.A.C.C. Election in Perth." In R.M. Berndt (ed.) Aborigines and Change: Australia in the '70s. New Jersey: Canberra Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and Humanities Press, Inc., 1977.

[195] Clyde Holding. "Directions in Aboriginal Affairs." Address to the National Press Club Canberra by the Honorable Clyde Holding, MP Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, September 13, 1985 (mimeo).

[196] Interview in Alice Springs, January, 1986.

[197] Diane Bell. Unpublished.

[198] Max Charlesworth. "The Aboriginal Land Rights movement." Unpublished edition.

[199] G.C. Bolton. "Aboriginals in Social History: An Overview." Paper the for Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Symposium, 1981.

[200] Contemporary Aboriginal Art from the Robert Holmes Court Collection. Perth, Australia: Heytesbury Holdings, 1990.

[201] Dirk Johnson. "Spiritual Seekers Borrow Indians' Ways." New York Times, December 27, 1993, p. 1 and A-15

[202] Charles Tilly. "How War Made States and Vice-Versa. "' New School for Social Research Working Paper Series No. 42, June, 1987.

[203] W.W. Rostow. How it All Began: The Origins of the Modern Economy. McGraw Hill, 1975, and H.W1. Arndt. Economic Development: The History of an Idea. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

[204] Seymour Melman. "A Road Map, Not a STOP Sign: Politics of Peace"' (mimeo), September 5, 1986, p. 5.

[205] Simon Schama. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Knopf, 1989.

[206] Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 200. Random, 1989.

[207] Seymour Melman. Pentagon Capitalism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.

[208] Mary Kaldor. The Baroque Arsenal. London: Andre Deutsch, 1981.

[209] Nick Kotz. Wild Blue Yonder: Money, Politics, and the B-1 Bomber. Pantheon Books, 1988.

[210] Carol Cohn.

[211] Paul Boyer. By the Bomb's Early Light. Pantheon, 1985, p. 106

[212] David S. Meyer. A Winter of Discontent: The Nuclear Freeze and American Politics. Praeger, 1990, p. 71

[213] Quoted in Christopher Driver. The Disarmers: A Study in Protest. London: Hodder and Stuoghton, 1964, p. 92.

[214] Meyer, p. 163.

[215] Meyer, p. 130.

[216] Frank Parkin. Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Manchester University Press, 1968, p. 180.

[217] Ibid, p. 16.

[218] Ibid, p. 21.

[219] Hugh Gusterson. Alternative Regime of Truth. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California, 1991.

[220] Sam Marullo, Alexandra Chute, Mary Anna Colwell, Pacifist and Nonpacifist Groups in the U.S. Peace & Change, Vol. 16, No. 3, July, 1991, p. 215.

[221] David Cortright. Peace Works: The Citizens' Role in Ending the Cold War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.

[222] Joel Kovel. Against the State of Nuclear Terror. Boston: South End Press, 1984, p. 169.

[223] George Konrad. Antipolitics: An Essay (translated from the Hungarian by Richard E. Allen). London: Quartet Brooks, 1984, p. 92.

[224] Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, published in 1921; Third Edition, 1969, p. 869.

[225] Ibid, p 871.

[226] Robert E. Park. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays, edited and with an introduction by Henry Eisner Jr. Translated by Carlotte Eisner. Note on "The Crowd and the Public"' by Donald N. Levine. Chicago, IL, and London, England: University of Chicago Press, 1972, p. 48.

[227] Carl Boggs. Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986.

[228] Paul Starr. The Social Transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1982, p 3.

[229] Lisa Peattie. Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987.

[230] "Introduction" to W.J.T. Mitchell (Ed.). The Politics of Interpretation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 1983.

[231] Donald A. Schon and Martin Rein. "Problem Setting Policy Research." In Using Social Research for Public Policy Making, Carol Weiss (ed.). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977.

[232] S.F. Bird. "Foucault: Power and Politics." In Politics and Social Theory. Peter Lassman (Ed.). London, England: Routledge, 1989, p. 87.

[233] Simon Schama. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Knopf, 1989.

[234] David Glassberg. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

[235] Vaclav Havel. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

[236] Alastair MacIntyre. Whose Justice? Which rationality?. Duckworth, 1988, p. 343.

[237] Brian Wynn. Rationality and Ritual: the Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain. British Society for the History o f Science, 1982, p. 4.

[238] Lisa Peattie. "Drama and Advocacy Planning.'"' Journal of the American Institute of Planners, Vol. XXXV, N0. 6 (November, 1970), pp. 405410.   
See broad discussion in Clifford Geertz. "Blurred Genres."' In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983.

[239] Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986.

[240] Graeme MacQueen. "Marking and Binding: An Interpretation of the Pouring of Blood in Nonviolent Direct Action." Peace and Change, 17:1 (January), 1992, pp. 60-81

[241] Daniel Berrigan. To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1987, p. 209.

[242] Graeme, p. 70.

[243] Graeme, p. 71.

[244] Gene Sharp. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Porter Sargent, 1973, p. 47'7.

[245] S. Brennan. "Texas vs. Johnson." In 190 Supreme Court Reporter, pp. 2538-2540.

[246] Suzanne Langer. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960, p. 87.

[247]J. Brennan. Op cit.

[248] Stephen J. Gould. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale of History, 1989. p. 28.

[249] Peter Marin. "Body Politic." Harper's, Vol. 271, (December), 1985, pp. 15-16. No. 1627

[250] Dave Dellinger. "'Ghandi and Guerrilla: The Protest at the Pentagon."' In Revolutionary Nonviolence. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971.

[251] Victor Turner. Drama, Fields and Metaphors and Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

[252] "'All is Connectedness: Scenes from the Women's Pentagon Action USA by Ynestra King. " In Lynn Jones (ed. ) , Keeping the Peace: A Women's Peace Handbook. London, England: The Women's Press, 1983, pp. 4649.

[253] Silva Boston de Sylva. "Bringing Spirit to Political Action." Traprock, January 1991.

[254] Anitai Elzioni. Demonstration Democracy. NY: Gordon and Branch.

[255] Conversation with David Reisman. 1990.

[256] David Croteau. "'An Uneasy Alliance: Nonviolent Movements and the Mass Media."' Nonviolent Activist, Vol. 8, No. 2 (March 1991), p. 13.

[257]Ibid.
