Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

      At the height of the missile crisis, WSP broke out of the prevailing Cold War framework and appealed directly to Soviet women, with a telegram to three they had met two months earlier: “At this moment of peril, [we] ask in friendship that you plead with your government, as we are pleading with ours, to pull back from the brink of war and to seek just and peaceful solutions to the conflicts that divide our two great countries.” They got prompt replies, which were published in the next issue of La Wisp, including one from the president of the Soviet Women’s Committee: “Share your anxiety at dangerous situation, convinced our government will do its utmost to prevent war. Ready, together with you, to work for peaceful solution to the conflict.”

      After the crisis, WSP held a “symposium” where members reported on peace conferences abroad they had attended over the summer. Indeed, WSP was internationalist from the beginning, framing its argument around the notion that women of all nations shared an interest in a peaceful world in which their children could grow up. The LA organization sent a delegation to Japan in August, where a Mothers’ Congress had brought 20,000 Japanese women to Osaka to discuss the links among “the problems of civil liberties, civil rights, equality for women, and peace,” and then march through the center of the city “with banners flying.” Of the congress, Clarke told her LA colleagues, “to think that such a magnificent movement of women existed in Japan and that we were not aware that it had been in existence for 8 years, made me realize that … we must never allow ourselves to be isolated and to experience the feeling of being alone in our common cause.” Another member reported on the Voice of Women Meeting in September in Montreal, and another on the “World without the Bomb” assembly in Accra, called by President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.¹⁹

      WSP in L.A. had also sent representatives to Moscow in July for the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, with 2,400 attendees from 121 countries. The organizers’ call had a stellar list of signers: Anwar Sadat, Jomo Kenyatta and Che Guevara; Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer; Sartre and Neruda, Shostakovich and Picasso.²⁰ But the congress was also hugely controversial among peace movement activists in the United States and elsewhere. Because the Soviets were hosting, WSP ended up being the only American peace group to send an official delegation; SANE and the rest had declined. At the conference, moreover, WSP declined to join the delegates from eleven countries who signed a minority report that called the Soviet Union “obstructive” for rejecting proposals for inspection of nuclear facilities. Nor did WSP delegates join the twenty-five visitors who defied the Soviet hosts by distributing 10,000 leaflets in Moscow opposing testing by both sides, then marching to Red Square, where they unfurled a banner reading “No Tests East or West.”²¹ In a report that marked the organization’s first anniversary, the L.A. WSP delegates concluded that the congress showed “people from both major camps could work together toward securing the peace.”²²

      The Subpoenas

      As WSP began its second year, subpoenas from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) arrived. Ten of the organization’s leaders in New York were served with charges that the group had been infiltrated, led or controlled by Communists. Despite cracks of light in the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 and ’61, a HUAC subpoena remained a frightening document—unless recipients wanted to inform on friends and colleagues; that is, to be “rats,” “stoolies” or “finks.”

      No one from L.A. WSP received a subpoena, even though the FBI had reported that “eight security index subjects were observed marching” at the first WSP demonstration in L.A.²³ (The “security index” was the FBI’s list of high-level radicals, mostly Communists, to be rounded up and detained in case of a “national emergency.”) But the LA group took the lead in the organization’s public response to the subpoenas. A full-page ad appeared in the New York Times West Coast edition on December 4, 1962, ten days before the scheduled hearing, bearing the title “Gentlemen: What Are You Afraid of?” “The women’s peace movement has struck fear into the hearts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” the ad declared. “We have been criticized for objecting to the contamination of the milk our children drink!”

      To show how fearless they were, WSP members wrote the committee volunteering to testify publicly about their goals and policies—an unprecedented tactic in a world where leftists for more than a decade had done everything they could to avoid appearing before HUAC. During the hearings, seven L.A. WSP activists were interviewed on local and national radio and TV. “The response … was terrific,” La Wisp reported. Donations arrived in the mail “from San Diego to Portland.” One LA woman wrote: “Please add my name to your mailing list. I would be delighted to receive anything with the exception of subpoenas. I can never remember the Fifth Amendment, and the House committee on Un-American Activities evidently cannot remember the First!”²⁴

      Meanwhile in Washington, Dagmar Wilson and other national leaders had gained the upper hand over the committee. The group packed the hearing room with noisy supporters; as leaders were called to testify, members presented them with roses. Wilson testified that in Women Strike for Peace, “nobody is controlled by anybody.” She said there was “absolutely no way” of eliminating Communists from the membership, and that she would not expel them even if she could—this at a time when Reds had been kicked out of other peace groups like SANE, as well as the ACLU. She concluded by remarking that WSP was run by volunteers: “This is something I find very hard to explain to the masculine mind.” The three HUAC members who conducted the hearing, according to New York Times columnist Russell Baker, “spent most of the week looking lonely, badgered and miserable.”²⁵

      The state’s version of HUAC, the state senate’s Burns Committee, tried to get into the act six months later, when they issued a report declaring that “subversives” and “Reds” had “infiltrated” WSP in Los Angeles. They conceded that the group was not a “Communist front,” but claimed that “the infiltration is clear and speaks for itself.” (Apparently the committee did not find out that Clarke had been a member of the CP until 1955.)²⁶ The committee report submitted as evidence one item: the lecture series the group had sponsored in L.A. the previous year. The problem? “Four of the lectures were devoted to a study of Russian communism as compared to … our own system of government.”²⁷ As evidence of Communist infiltration, that was pathetic. Still, it made page two of the LA Times.

      The same page of that day’s paper reported on the WSP response. A member of the group’s local coordinating council, “Mrs. Kay Hardman,” reiterated Dagmar Wilson’s statement before HUAC, had “absolutely no way of eliminating Communists from WSP and would not if she could.” As for that lecture series, it featured “some of our finest scholars—from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara.”²⁸ That was the end of Sacramento’s red-baiting campaign against WSP in Los Angeles.

      To Jakarta and Hanoi

      On the larger issue of nuclear weapons, Khrushchev and Kennedy had been so shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis that they went to work on a treaty banning atmospheric testing. On August 5, 1963, they signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which meant WSP’s first goal had been achieved—less than two years after the group came into existence. On September 24, WSP members traveled from L.A. to Washington to witness the Senate ratification vote. L.A. WSP in particular had made the treaty a top priority, organizing a summer “campaign for 100,000 letters on the Test-Ban.” And the group understood the need to claim victory: the day after the treaty was ratified, WSP organized a celebration at the Federal Building in downtown L.A.

      Kennedy himself gave credit to women for pressing for the Test Ban Treaty. When asked about women’s protest actions in an interview with editors of the top seven US women’s magazines—Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Parents Magazine, Redbook, and Women’s Day—he replied, “I would urge women to get into whatever groups they feel reflect their judgment as to how things ought to be done … it is very helpful to have a significant group of women working for peace in their communities.” Dagmar Wilson commented, “He has not exactly told them to join WSP, but he has told them to join something.”²⁹