[65 years ago, the Golden Rule ignited protests that led to a
partial ban on nuclear weapons testing. Now it’s back to fight for
nothing short of abolition. ]
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THE GOLDEN RULE SETS SAIL TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS  
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Arnie Alpert
May 1, 2023
Waging Nonviolence
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_ 65 years ago, the Golden Rule ignited protests that led to a
partial ban on nuclear weapons testing. Now it’s back to fight for
nothing short of abolition. _

The Golden Rule off the coast of Diamond Head in Honolulu in 2019.,
Facebook/Veterans for Peace

 

Fredy Champagne has been a peace activist ever since he returned from
combat in Vietnam. He’s been kicked out of college, where he was
accused of starting a riot. He’s opened health clinics in Vietnam.
He’s delivered school buses to Cuba. But in 2010, he received a call
that opened his eyes to a story of resistance he had never heard
before.

The call was from one of Champagne’s fellow members of Veterans for
Peace, or VFP, asking him to go check out a boat that had been hauled
out of the water in Humboldt Bay, California — only an hour’s
drive north from his home in Garberville, where he was serving as the
president of the local VFP chapter.

The boat — named the Golden Rule — wasn’t much to look at. It
was far from seaworthy, and those who had already looked it over
thought it was better suited for firewood than seafaring. “A lot of
the side planking was gone,” Champagne said. “There was absolutely
no interior. It was all rotten. And there was no steering mechanism,
no mast, no motor, no nothing.”

But there was more to this broken-down old ship than what the eye
could see. This vessel was a piece of history — having once played a
consequential role in making the world safe from above-ground nuclear
weapons testing. In 1958, the Golden Rule’s former owners, a group
of peace activists, tried to sail it into the American nuclear weapons
testing zone in the Pacific as a form of protest. While the
authorities cut their voyage short, the Golden Rule still managed to
spark an upsurge of opposition to nuclear testing, leading five years
later to the adoption of the Partial Test Ban Treaty.

When Champagne learned this history, he was shook. “I was standing
there. It was real quiet at the shipyard… And I felt the boat was
talking to me. I felt the boat’s spirit. And you know what it said?
I sensed that the boat was telling me, ‘Get off your ass and do
something.’”

So, do something he did. Champagne set about restoring the boat along
with a small team of several other VFP members. Five years later, the
Golden Rule was sailing down the West Coast to the 2015 VFP National
Convention in San Diego.

Now, in the midst of its Great Loop Tour circling the entirety of the
eastern United States, the 21st century Golden Rule
[[link removed]] aims to be more than a history
lesson. Veterans for Peace and the project’s many supporters are
working for nothing less than igniting a new movement to abolish
nuclear weapons altogether.

[Fredy Champagne inspecting the damage to the Golden Rule in 2012.]

Fredy Champagne inspecting the damage to the Golden Rule in 2012.
(Courtesy Fredy Champagne)

NUCLEAR DREAD INSPIRES NONVIOLENT ACTION

The story of the Golden Rule begins, in a sense, with the explosion of
the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945.

Writing in the February 1958 issue of the radical pacifist journal
_Liberation_, former U.S. Navy Commander Albert Bigelow recalled that
he was “absolutely awestruck,” even though he “had no way of
understanding what an atom bomb was.” In that moment, he said he
intuitively “realized for the first time that, morally, war is
impossible.”

With his wife, Sylvia, he joined the Religious Society of Friends —
becoming Quakers and turning toward the kind of activism that would
eventually lead him to the Golden Rule. One of his first actions,
however, was to host two “Hiroshima Maidens,” young women
disfigured by radiation who came to the United States for plastic
surgery in the mid-1950s.

Nonviolent direct action against the nuclear threat was only just
beginning to take shape. In 1955, activists in New York and other
cities began to engage in non-cooperation with civil defense drills.
Outcries grew even louder when the Soviet Union and Britain joined the
nuclear club — and the introduction of the hydrogen bomb greatly
expanded the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Military
leaders such as Gen. Omar Bradley and public intellectual Lewis
Mumford were trying to alert the public by November 1957.

The health impact of atmospheric testing had drawn special concern,
including that of prominent physicists and public health experts who
warned that radioactive fallout would spread cancer far from the
testing sites. As Bigelow put it, “The overwhelming weight of
scientific opinion said any nuclear explosion was dangerous.” The
point was evident from an anti-testing petition circulated by Nobel
Prize winner Linus Pauling, which attracted more than 2,000 signatures
in just a couple weeks. Even scientists from the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, or AEC, recognized that fallout would cause hundreds of
thousands of deaths worldwide.

Nuclear dread had even made its way into popular culture with, for
example, the 1954 release of the Japanese monster film,
“Godzilla,” based on the mutating effects of radiation.

While concern spread, it wasn’t until a May 29, 1957 meeting among
representatives of the era’s leading pacifist groups that a movement
propelling popular action began to form. The War Resisters League,
Catholic Worker, Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends
Service Committee and the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom all agreed to form the ad hoc committee Non-Violent Action
Against Nuclear Weapons, known to its members as NVA. [SANE, the
National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, was formed at the same
time, with an explicit intention to involve non-pacifists and to leave
direct action to others.]

The power of nonviolence was already in the air, following the
successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which made its
potential apparent to many people who had not given it serious
consideration. Moreover, there were already close connections between
the Black freedom movement and pacifist leaders such as Bayard Rustin
of WRL and Glenn Smiley of FOR, both of whom advised the Montgomery
movement. (Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out publicly in favor of
banning the bomb and abolishing war as early as December 1957.) Jim
Peck, who later joined the Golden Rule crew, had organized for
desegregation inside the federal prison where he was jailed for draft
resistance during World War II. He had also participated with Rustin
and others on the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom
Ride.

NVA’s first action was at the site of atomic testing in Nevada on
Aug. 6, 1957, the 12th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. As
Bigelow wrote, about three dozen people began a prayerful vigil in the
early morning hours, then, “Eleven of us, in twos and threes, rose
from the prayer vigil at intervals, approached the main gate, talked
to the 40 or more armed men there, and crossed the line into the
project as an act of protest.” Those who crossed the line, including
Bigelow, Peck and Lillian Willoughby, were arrested, tried and given
suspended sentences in time to rejoin the vigil the next morning,
during an atomic test. “At dawn,” Bigelow said, “we experienced,
from a distance of about 25 miles, a nuclear explosion. This was proof
that our intuition, our feeling, and our senses were right. We knew
that we could never rest while such forces of evil were loose in
God’s world.”

The actual inspiration for sailing a ship in the testing zone came
from England, where pacifists were talking about forming a “Peace
Navy” and sailing into the British test zone at Christmas Island in
February 1957. By April, they had formed the Emergency Committee for
Direct Action Against Nuclear War. Harold Steele, a member, began
making plans to sail into the test zone after trips to India and
Japan.

Although Steele’s Pacific trip never took place, the concept crossed
the Atlantic. Bigelow and Bill Huntington began shopping for a
suitable boat in December 1957, with Huntington eventually finding the
ketch that would be named the Golden Rule in Los Angeles. Their sights
were set on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where the United
States had been testing nuclear weapons since 1946.

[Albert Bigelow (right) in front of the Golden Rule.]

Albert Bigelow (right) in front of the Golden Rule. (Swarthmore
College Peace Collection/Albert Bigelow Photo Collection)

THE VOYAGE OF THE GOLDEN RULE

Since there were no laws barring a sailboat from the open Pacific, the
original voyage had not been envisioned as an act of civil
disobedience. In a Jan. 9, 1958 letter to President Eisenhower,
Bigelow, Huntington, George Willoughby and NVA Coordinator Lawrence
Scott, all Quakers, said in a plain fashion, “We write to tell you
of our intended action regarding the announced spring test explosions
of American nuclear weapons.”

“Four of us,” the letter continued, “with the support of many
others plan to sail a small vessel into the designated area in the
Pacific by April 1. We intend, come what may, to remain there during
the test period in an effort to halt what we feel is the monstrous
delinquency of our government in continuing actions which threaten the
well-being of all men.”

On behalf of the American Friends Service Committee, Bigelow had
already tried to deliver to the White House a stack of more than
17,000 petitions calling for an end to nuclear testing. Hoping for a
meeting with a staff person he knew, Bigelow was told instead to leave
them with a police officer at the White House gate. As he wrote in the
February 1958 issue of _Liberation_, “The experience has
strengthened my conviction that we must, at whatever cost, find ways
to make our witness and protest heard.”

The Golden Rule set off from San Pedro, California that spring, but
turned back due to bad weather and to replace a seasick crew member
with Orion Sherwood, who had been teaching at a Quaker school in New
York. Sherwood, who now lives in Salt Lake City, said when he found
out about the need for another crew member, he quickly sent a letter
expressing interest. 

Sherwood’s brother had been a B-29 pilot in the Pacific, dropping
incendiary bombs on Japan and flying over Hiroshima. “One of the
crew at least was taking pictures of the results of the atom bomb. And
he did the same for the second bombing of Nagasaki,” Sherwood said.
“I certainly was hopeful that somehow we would get beyond the
testing and have an agreement that we would not continue.” Soon
after expressing interest, he was on a plane to Los Angeles to meet up
with the others in time for a March 25 re-launch.

It was three weeks into the voyage that the Atomic Energy Commission,
or AEC, issued a rule making it illegal for U.S. citizens to enter the
bomb explosion area. The commission’s intent was obvious. The
Associated Press called it “a legal barrier against the plan by four
Americans to sail a small boat into the Eniwetok area as a protest
against forthcoming U.S. nuclear tests.” For Bigelow, writing in his
1959 memoir, “The Voyage of the Golden Rule,” “it meant our
protest was effective,” and the government’s immorality lay
exposed to view. Only then did the crew accept that not only were they
sailing into a radiation zone, they were also violating federal law.
They decided to go ahead.

An hour after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction ordering
them not to sail, the crew set off from Honolulu and were quickly
placed under arrest and sent to Honolulu’s city jail for a week.
With an appeal working its way through the federal courts,
communication with NVA back on the mainland, and even a visit from
prominent pacifist leader A.J. Muste, the crew pondered deeply over
the relationship between their legal argument that the AEC rule was
unconstitutional and their original plan. When the U.S. attorney said
he’d drop all the charges if the Golden Rule would give up its
plans, they declined the offer and decided to sail again. “It is the
government who should be restrained and not us,” they said.

Just before taking off on June 4, Bigelow was rearrested on the dock.
As he was taken back to jail, Huntington — who had just been
replaced by NVA member Jim Peck — rejoined the crew and took on the
role of captain. The Golden Rule didn’t get far this time, either.
Soon all five were in jail, this time for 60 days.

As the story captured global attention, it touched off ripples of
activism focused on ending atmospheric testing and eliminating nuclear
weapons. “Back on the mainland hundreds of people felt that they
were involved,” Bigelow wrote, describing the outcry during the
first jailing. “Picket lines had formed around federal buildings and
AEC offices across the nation.” In Boston, Philadelphia, New York,
Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and smaller cities,
protesters were carrying signs with messages such as, “Stop the
tests, not the Golden Rule” and “Stop the bomb tests – U.S.,
Russia, Britain.”

[Golden Rule supporters in Hawaii protesting the crew's jailing in
1958. ]

Golden Rule supporters in Hawaii protesting the crew’s jailing in
1958. (Facebook/VFP)

“Most of these people had never been in a public demonstration or
picket line before,” Bigelow wrote. “In San Francisco alone, 432
persons petitioned the U.S. attorney to take action against them. They
said that if the crew of Golden Rule were guilty, so were they!”

Another group tried to communicate directly with AEC officials at
their Germantown, Maryland office. Denied a meeting, they began a
vigil and fast inside the office. Alan Willoughby, George and Lillian
Willoughby’s 8-year-old son, was there. “Initially, there was sort
of a cold reception,” he recalled, but said the AEC staff
“eventually warmed up” to their pacifist visitors. One of the
guards even took a few kids on an outing to keep them entertained
while their parents maintained their fast.

For the young Willoughby, it was just another normal family
experience. “We spent our weekends and summer holidays on picket
lines, vigil lines, peace marches,” remembers his older sister,
Sally. “I think I even got on national television, or at least in
the national news,” Alan said. The main difference this time, he
recalled, was that their dad had “gone off on his own” and was in
jail a few thousand miles away.

Yet another ripple occurred when another boat arrived in Honolulu
while the Golden Rule crew was still in jail. Earle Reynolds, who had
studied the impact of radiation on the people of Hiroshima, was
circling the globe in a boat called The Phoenix
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Moved deeply by the Golden Rule’s example, Reynolds and his crew —
which included his wife Barbara and children — decided they, too,
would sail into the testing zone on their way back to Japan. The
Phoenix was within a hundred miles of the test zone when, like the
Golden Rule, it was boarded by Coast Guard and forced to end its
voyage.

“The courage of Albert Bigelow, the Golden Rule’s crew, and the
Reynolds family triggered massive national protests and actions that
contributed to the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty which
endures to this day,” said Joseph Gerson, author of “With
Hiroshima Eyes” and several other books on nuclear weapons policy.

A RENEWED MISSION

When the Golden Rule crew left Honolulu Jail and agreed they no longer
had need for the boat, they put it up for sale — netting $14,600,
which they applied to the project’s expenses. Details of its travels
in the decades after its historic voyage are a bit murky. But when the
Golden Rule was hauled out of the water some 52 year later in Humboldt
Bay, it was only about 650 miles north of the San Pedro shipyard from
which it had embarked for the Marshall Islands. Boatyard owner Leroy
Zurlang agreed to let members of Veterans for Peace take ownership of
the boat with plans to make it once again seaworthy.

With Fredy Champagne and his wife, Sherry, handling publicity,
fundraising and volunteer recruitment, and Chuck DeWitt, another VFP
member, serving as restoration coordinator, VFP worked to put the
Golden Rule back on the water — and to carry a message that the need
to abolish nuclear weapons was as urgent as ever.

VFP Golden Rule Project Manager Helen Jaccard first learned about the
project in 2011 at a Northern California VFP regional conference. She
and her partner — longtime VFP member and former president Gerry
Condon — then drove to Eureka in their RV to take a look. With two
big holes in the side, Jaccard was not impressed. “I was like, ‘I
don’t think that’s a good idea to take this boat out
somewhere,’” she said.

When she visited again a couple years later, “Things were starting
to look a lot more like a feasible boat. And then in February 2015,
Veterans for Peace put out the call to have people come and finish her
in time to get her down to the VFP National Convention in August that
year.” That’s when Jaccard and Condon, who had already been living
full time in their RV, decided to move into the boat yard.

When VFP asked her to get involved, Jaccard said she was “just about
in tears.” She had read Bigelow’s 1959 book about the voyage and
found it thoroughly inspiring. “To think that we could do something
like that,” she said, “I was blown away.”

Since 2015, the Golden Rule has been up and down the West Coast. A
trip to the Marshall Islands was halted by the COVID pandemic, but the
boat has been to Cuba. It’s now traveling up the East Coast from the
Washington, D.C. area toward New England — an example of active
nonviolence and a vessel for educating the public about the Treaty on
the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Last fall it sailed from Minneapolis down the Mississippi to Cairo,
Illinois, then via the Ohio, Tennessee, and Tombigbee River system to
Mobile, Alabama. Along the way, the Golden Rule made several stops in
Iowa, including in Dubuque, home to a significant community of
Marshall Islanders. As reported in the project’s Fall 2022
newsletter, “Sailboats escorted the Golden Rule into the harbor for
a grand entrance. Marshallese women, in traditional dress, sang sweet
harmonies of welcome.” The experience left the crew and observers in
tears, moved by the reaction of a community whose homeland had been
used 67 times as a nuclear testing site, leaving some islands poisoned
and a trail of cancer.

Sally Willowbee [who spells her last name differently than her
parents, George and Lillian], traveled to Iowa from her New Jersey
home to support the boat’s renewed mission. The Marshallese people
she met “didn’t know about what the Golden Rule had done in
’58,” she said, but she found them deeply appreciative. “It kind
of felt like the Golden Rule finally got there.”

HISTORY THAT INSPIRES

Currently, the Golden Rule is in Baltimore, Maryland headed for
Philadelphia, New York and New England
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“I’m thrilled to be able to bring the boat to all of the eastern
state supporters that have been kind of pushing for that all these
years,” Jaccard said.

When it arrives in New London, Connecticut during the second week of
June, Joanne Sheehan will be among the greeting party. Since the late
1970s, Sheehan has been an anti-nuclear organizer in southeastern
Connecticut, home to a nuclear submarine base at New London and the
nearby General Dynamics shipyard in Groton, where the Navy’s latest
omnicidal submarine, the Columbia class, is under construction. The
region was also the focus of NVA’s successor, the Committee for
Nonviolent Action and its Polaris Action Project, which led years of
anti-nuclear protest in the early 1960s.

Sheehan, who runs the War Resisters League’s New England office in
Norwich, has been exploring WRL’s archives the past several years,
looking for the stories of radical pacifists who sought to apply
Gandhian principles to campaigns against segregation and nuclear
weapons in the mid-20th century. “Anytime we look at movement
history, there are lessons there to be learned,” she said. In the
story of the Golden Rule and NVA, she finds an interconnection of
issues, an interconnection of people even across international
borders, and a deep commitment to nonviolence among people who
understood “that the only way we win is to work together.”

Sheehan also identifies ripples sent out from the Golden Rule,
starting with the Reynolds family and the voyages of The Phoenix,
which not only protested nuclear testing in the Pacific and Russia,
but later defied the U.S. government by delivering humanitarian
assistance in Vietnam.

Greenpeace, which began its life with sea-based protests against
nuclear testing, is another child of the Golden Rule. Both Albert
Bigelow and Jim Peck were among the participants in the 1961 Freedom
Rides to desegregate inter-state bus transportation in the deep South.
Bigelow, in fact, was injured when he interposed his body between the
young John Lewis and members of a racist mob in Rock Hill, South
Carolina. Meanwhile, Barbara Reynolds spent the rest of her life
working actively for peace, including starting the World Friendship
Center in Hiroshima and aiding Cambodian refugees in California.

To Sheehan, “this boat is “a wonderful symbol of all of that”
— a piece of history that can inspire a new generation of activists
to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons and harness the power of
nonviolence.

“With all of the nuclear weapons states ‘modernizing’ or
expanding their nuclear arsenals … courageous actions of civil
disobedience and other imaginative initiatives and organizing to
reduce and eliminate the existential threat of nuclear weapons are
needed more critically than ever,” said Joseph Gerson, who heads the
Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security. “The current
voyage of the Golden Rule certainly contributes to that awakening.”

Will Thomas, a VFP member from Auburn, New Hampshire — who once
patrolled the Caribbean aboard the USS Okinawa during the Cuban
Missile Crisis — believes the Golden Rule still has a story to tell,
particularly as the threat of a nuclear exchange between Russia, the
U.S. and NATO grows amid current fighting in Ukraine.

“I think the new voyage of the Golden Rule is needed to remind
citizens that the ‘Doomsday Clock’ is now ticking and set at 90
seconds to midnight,” he said. “As a Veteran for Peace, I support
the mission of today’s Golden Rule, which is to inform and educate
people and to ‘sound the alarm’ that we must act now to protect
our planet and humanity.”

Arnie Alpert [[link removed]]
Arnie Alpert is a longtime nonviolent action trainer in New Hampshire.
He blogs at inzanetimes.wordpress.com
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