Albert S. Bigelow (1906–1993) was just the sort of pacifist that pacifists like to present to skeptics. Born into a prominent Boston family, he went to Harvard, studied architecture at MIT, and then joined the Navy, commanding first a submarine chaser and then a destroyer escort during World War II. After the war he was for a time housing commissioner of Massachusetts; he volunteered as a Massachusetts precinct captain for Eisenhower.
He was on the bridge of the destroyer escort sailing into Pearl Harbor when he learned of the dropping of the atomic bomb; “it was then,” he later wrote, “that I realized for the first time that morally war is impossible.” The consequences of that moment shaped the rest of his life. He resigned his commission in the Naval Reserve in 1952, two months before he would have become eligible for a pension. His wife Sylvia Weld had become a Quaker in 1948, and Bigelow himself later did the same. Through their Quaker connections the couple housed two of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” young Japanese women disfigured by the bomb who were brought to the United States in 1955 for reconstructive surgery. They made a strong impression on Bigelow, partly because of the injuries they had sustained, partly because they were so free of resentment toward him and toward Americans generally. By 1957 Bigelow was working to protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons by any means necessary. He attempted to deliver a petition against nuclear testing to Maxwell Rabb, the secretary to the Cabinet; Rabb refused to meet with him. He was arrested trying to enter the Nevada Test Site shortly before a nuclear detonation.
The Navy man and the antiwar activist came together in the action Bigelow is most often remembered for, his attempt in 1958 to sail the Golden Rule into the Eniwetok Proving Ground, the Atomic Energy Commission’s atmospheric test site in the Marshall Islands. The ketch was intercepted twice by the Coast Guard, and Bigelow and his crew spent sixty days in jail, but their example inspired Earle and Barbara Reynolds to sail their yacht, the Phoenix of Hiroshima, into the test zone at Bikini Atoll, and indirectly inspired the subsequent work of Greenpeace. (His account of the protest appeared in Liberation in February 1958.)
Bigelow remained active in antiwar work after the Golden Rule expedition. He was also a champion of African American civil rights, sitting with John Lewis on a Greyhound bus to New Orleans during the 1961 Freedom Rides. (The two were severely beaten attempting to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina.) Bigelow’s legacy lives on in one quite wonderful way: the Golden Rule was raised from the bottom of Humboldt Bay in 2010, and the group Veterans for Peace undertook to restore and sail it as a symbol and floating classroom. It was relaunched on June 20, 2015.
MY friend Bill Huntington and I are planning to sail a small vessel westward into the Pacific H-bomb test area. By April we expect to reach nuclear testing grounds at Eniwetok. We will remain there as long as the tests of H-bombs continue. With us will be two other volunteers.
Why? Because it is the way I can say to my government, to the British government, and to the Kremlin: “Stop! Stop this madness before it is too late. For God’s sake, turn back!”
How have I come to this conviction? Why do I feel under compulsion, under moral orders, as it were, to do this?
The answer to such questions, at least in part, has to do with my experience as a Naval officer during World War II. The day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, I was at the Navy recruiting offices. I had had a lot of experience in navigating vessels. Life in the Navy would be a glamorous change from the dull mechanism of daily civilian living. My experience assured me of success. All this adventure ahead and the prospect of becoming a hero into the bargain.
I suppose, too, that I had an enormous latent desire to conform, to go along with the rest of my fellows. I was swayed by the age-old psychology of meeting force with force. It did not really occur to me to resist the drag of the institution of war, the pattern of organized violence, which had existed for so many centuries. This psychology prevailed even though I had already reflected on the fantastic wastefulness of war—the German Bismarck hunting the British Hood and sending it to the bottom of the sea, and the British Navy hunting the Bismarck and scuttling it.
I volunteered, but instead of being sent to sea, I was assigned to 90 Church Street in New York and worked in project “plot” establishing the whereabouts of all combat ships in the Atlantic. In a couple of months I escaped from this assignment and was transferred to the Naval Training Station at Northwestern University.
I had not been at Northwestern very long when I sensed that because of my past experience I would be made an instructor there and still not get to sea. So I deliberately flunked an examination in navigation and before long was assigned to a submarine chaser in the Atlantic.
From March to October of 1943 I was in command of a submarine chaser in the Solomon Islands, during the fighting. It was during this period that more than 100 Japanese planes were shot down in one day. This was called “the Turkey Shoot.” The insensitivity which decent men must develop in such situations is appalling. I remember that the corpse of a Japanese airman who had been shot down was floating bolt upright in one of the coves, a position resulting from the structure of the Japanese life belts, which were different from our Mae Wests. Each day as we passed the cove we saw this figure, his face growing blacker under the terrific sun. We laughingly called him Smiling Jack. As a matter of fact, I think I gave him that name myself and felt rather proud of my wit.
Later in World War II, I was Captain of the destroyer escort Dale W. Peterson—DE 337—and I was on her bridge as we came into Pearl Harbor from San Francisco when the first news arrived of the explosion of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Although I had no way of understanding what an atom bomb was I was absolutely awestruck, as I suppose all men were for a moment. Intuitively it was then that I realized for the first time that morally war is impossible.
I don’t suppose I had the same absolute realization with my whole being, so to speak, of the immorality and “impossibility” of nuclear war until the morning of August 7, 1957. On that day, I sat with a score of friends, before dawn, in the Nevada desert just outside the entrance to the Camp Mercury testing grounds. The day before, eleven of us, in protest against the summer-long tests, had tried to enter the restricted area. We had been arrested as we stepped one after another over the boundary line, and had been carried off to a ghost town which stands at the entrance to Death Valley. There we had been given a speedy trial under the charge of trespassing under the Nevada laws. Sentencing had been suspended for a year, and later in the afternoon we had returned to Camp Mercury to continue the Prayer and Conscience Vigil along with others who had remained there during our civil disobedience action.
In the early morning of August 7 an experimental bomb was exploded. We sat with our backs to the explosion site. But when the flash came I felt again the utterly impossible horror of this whole business, the same complete realization that nuclear war must go, that I had felt twelve years before on the bridge of U. S. S. Dale W. Peterson, off Pearl Harbor.
I think also that deep down somewhere in me, and in all men at all times, there is a realization that the pattern of violence meeting violence makes no sense, and that war violates something central in the human heart—“that of God,” as we Quakers sometimes say. For example, when each of us at the trial the afternoon before had told why we were committing civil disobedience against nuclear tests, our attorney, Francis Heisler, said: “There isn’t one of us in this court room who doesn’t wish that he had walked into the testing grounds with these people this morning.” Everybody, including the police and court officers, nodded assent.
However, I am ahead of my story. At the close of the War, in spite of what I had felt on the bridge of that destroyer, I did not break away from my old life. For a time I was Housing Commissioner of Massachusetts. Like many other people who had been through the War, I was seeking some sort of unified life-philosophy or religion. I did a good deal of religious “window-shopping.” I became impressed by the fact that in one way or another the saints, the wise men, those who seemed to me truly experienced, all pointed in one direction—toward nonviolence, truth, love, toward a way and a goal that could not be reconciled with war. For quite a while, to use a phrase of Alan Watts’, I “sucked the finger instead of going where it pointed.” But finally I realized that I did have to move in that direction, and in 1952 I resigned my commission in the Naval Reserve. It was promptly and courteously accepted. I felt a bit proud of doing it a month before I would have come into a pension. Such little things we pride ourselves on!
I came into contact with the Quakers, the Society of Friends. My wife, Sylvia, had already joined the Society in 1948. As late as 1955 I was still fighting off joining the Society, which seemed to me to involve a great, awesome commitment. I suppose I was like the man in one of Shaw’s plays who wanted to be a Christian—but not yet.
Then came the experience of having in our home for some months two of the Hiroshima maidens who had been injured and disfigured in the bombing of August 6, 1945. Norman Cousins and other wonderful people brought them to this country for plastic surgery. There were two things about these girls that hit me very hard and forced me to see that I had no choice but to make the commitment to live, as best I could, a life of nonviolence and reconciliation. One was the fact that when they were bombed in 1945 the two girls in our home were nine and thirteen years old. What earthly thing could they have done to give some semblance of what we call justice to the ordeal inflicted upon them and hundreds like them? What possible good could come out of human action—war—which bore such fruits? Is it not utter blasphemy to think that there is anything moral or Christian about such behavior?
The other thing that struck me was that these young women found it difficult to believe that we, who were not members of their families, could love them. But they loved us; they harbored no resentment against us or other Americans. How are you going to respond to that kind of attitude? The newly-elected president of the National Council of Churches, Edwin T. Dahlberg, said in his inaugural talk that instead of “massive retaliation” the business of Christians is to practice “massive reconciliation.” Well, these Hiroshima girls practiced “massive reconciliation” on us, on me, who had laughed derisively at “Smiling Jack.” What response can one make to this other than to give oneself utterly to destroying the evil, war, that dealt so shamefully with them and try to live in the spirit of sensitivity and reconciliation which they displayed?
As I have said, I think there is that in all men that abhors and rejects war and knows that force and violence can bring no good thing to pass. Yet men are bound by old patterns of feeling, thought and action. The organs of public opinion are almost completely shut against us. It seems practically impossible, moreover, for the ordinary person by ordinary means to speak to, and affect the action of, his government. I have had a recent experience of this which has strengthened my conviction that it is only by such acts as sailing a boat to Eniwetok and thus “speaking” to the government right in the testing area that we can expect to be heard.
I was asked by the New England office of the American Friends Service Committee to take to the White House 17,411 signatures to a petition to cancel the Pacific tests. Ten thousand signatures had previously been sent in. I realize that even a President in good health cannot see personally everyone who has a message for him. Yet the right of petition exists—in theory—and is held to be a key factor in democratic process. And the President presumably has assistants to see to it that all serious petitions are somehow brought to his attention. For matters of this kind, there is Maxwell Rabb, secretary to the cabinet.
Twenty-seven thousand is quite a few people to have signed a somewhat unusual petition. The A. F. S. C. is widely known and recognized as a highly useful agency. I am known to Maxwell Rabb with whom I worked in Republican politics in Massachusetts. I was a precinct captain for Eisenhower in the 1952 primaries. Yet a couple of days’ work on the part of the staff of the Friends Committee on National Legislation failed to secure even an assurance that some time on Tuesday, December 31, the day I would be in Washington, Max Rabb would see me to receive the petitions. On that day I made five calls and talked with his secretary. Each time I was assured that she would call me back within ten minutes. Each time the return call failed to come and I tried again. The last time, early in the afternoon, I held on to the telephone for ten minutes, only to be told finally that the office was about to close for the day.
Each time I telephoned, including the last, I was told I could, of course, leave the petitions with the policeman at the gate. This I refused to do. It seems terrible to me that Americans can no longer speak to or be seen by their government. Has it become their master, not their servant? Can it not listen to their humble and reasonable pleas? This experience may in one sense be a small matter but I am sure it is symptomatic—among other things—of a sort of fear on the part of officials to listen to what in their hearts they feel is right but on which they cannot act without breaking with old patterns of thought. At any rate, the experience has strengthened in me the conviction that we must, at whatever cost, find ways to make our witness and protest heard.
I am going because, as Shakespeare said, “Action is eloquence.” Without some such direct action, ordinary citizens lack the power any longer to be seen or heard by their government.
I am going because it is time to do something about peace, not just talk about peace.
I am going because, like all men, in my heart I know that all nuclear explosions are monstrous, evil, unworthy of human beings.
I am going because war is no longer a feudal jousting match; it is an unthinkable catastrophe for all men.
I am going because it is now the little children, and, most of all, the as yet unborn who are the front line troops. It is my duty to stand between them and this horrible danger.
I am going because it is cowardly and degrading for me to stand by any longer, to consent, and thus to collaborate in atrocities.
I am going because I cannot say that the end justifies the means. A Quaker, William Penn, said “A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.” A Communist, Milovan Djilas, says, “As soon as means which would ensure an end are shown to be evil, the end will show itself as unrealizable.”
I am going because, as Gandhi said, “God sits in the man opposite me; therefore to injure him is to injure God himself.”
I am going to witness to the deep inward truth we all know, “Force can subdue, but love gains.”
I am going because however mistaken, unrighteous, and unrepentant governments may seem, I still believe all men are really good at heart, and that my act will speak to them.
I am going in the hope of helping change the hearts and minds of men in government. If necessary I am willing to give my life to help change a policy of fear, force and destruction to one of trust, kindness, and help.
I am going in order to say, “Quit this waste, this arms race. Turn instead to a disarmament race. Stop competing for evil, compete for good.”
I am going because I have to—if I am to call myself a human being.
When you see something horrible happening, your instinct is to do something about it. You can freeze in fearful apathy or you can even talk yourself into saying that it isn’t horrible. I can’t do that. I have to act. This is too horrible. We know it. Let’s all act.