tracks leading into the construction site for the Seabrook Nuclear Station, located within an ecologically fragile tidal marsh on the New Hampshire coast. Earlier that summer, despite vocal public opposition throughout New England, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had issued a permit for the Seabrook facility. In response, several dozen anti-nuclear campaigners, assisted by two seasoned organizers from the Boston-area office of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the Quaker pacifist organization, met and decided to push their fight to a new level. The time had come, they felt, for “direct, nonviolent action such as one-to-one dialogue, public prayer and fasting, public demonstrations, site occupation and other means which put life before property.” In an allusion to the mollusks that environmental researchers said would be harmed by the Seabrook nuclear plant, they named their new organization the Clamshell Alliance.21
The founders of the Clam (as the group was colloquially known) took much of their inspiration from an extraordinary anti-nuclear direct action that had taken place the previous year in Wyhl, West Germany. After police brutally evicted a modest encampment of 150 protesters from a nuclear construction site there, some 28,000 people, ranging from conservative local farmers to counterculture radicals, swarmed the site and took it over. Thousands stayed and held the space for nearly a year, ultimately forcing the German government to abandon the project. The Wyhl encampment, and the West German anti-nuclear movement more generally, would repeatedly serve as touchstones for direct-action organizers in the United States.22
The eighteen people who marched to the Seabrook plant had no illusions that their small group could replicate the Wyhl experience, but the items they carried onto the site gestured toward the ideal of permanently reclaiming the site. They brought the young trees in “a symbolic attempt to reforest the area there,” explained one of the protesters, Rennie Cushing, in an interview just before the action; the corn was “a symbol of the native people that once inhabited this land.” There was a Native American burial ground on the nuclear site, testimony to that historic habitation, which inspired a small but significant Native American presence in anti-Seabrook organizing. Cushing continued, “Also, the corn shows our intention to be here in the fall to harvest it and the trees show our intention to be here at a later date and view them at maturity with our children and our grandchildren.”23
The group of eighteen barely managed to get the corn and saplings into the ground before they were arrested for trespassing and hauled away by the police. But they achieved what they wanted: their act of civil disobedience was prominently covered by the local media. Three weeks later, in an escalation that had been carefully planned from the start, 180 people were arrested in an even more widely publicized second occupation attempt. Though activists around the country had long rallied, gathered petitions, attended hearings, and lobbied politicians in opposition to nuclear power, nobody working on the issue had organized anything remotely like civil disobedience on this scale before. “This is the shot heard round the world for the anti-nuclear movement,” declared author and activist Harvey Wasserman at the pre-action rally, which drew more than 600 participants. “[We] are moving from the stage of debate into the stage of direct action.”24
Clamshell Alliance direct-action manual (designer unknown; courtesy Ed Hedemann)
The Seabrook campaign was a historical watershed in several respects. As its organizers hoped, it inspired people throughout the country to form their own groups and engage in direct action against nuclear power plants in their area. This wave of protest, which swelled still further after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, contributed greatly to curtailing the spread of nuclear power in the United States for decades to come; over 100 planned projects were canceled over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. The Seabrook activists ultimately lost their fight—the Seabrook Nuclear Plant did eventually begin operation, although not until 1990—but ground was not broken on another new nuclear reactor in the United States until 2013.
As important as the Clamshell Alliance was in helping forestall nuclear plant construction in the United States, its most striking legacy was in consolidating and promoting what became the dominant model for large-scale direct-action organizing for the next forty years, used to powerful effect time and time again. From Seabrook, the prefigurative direct-action model first spread to other anti-nuclear groups around the country, including the Abalone Alliance, which organized a series of large actions against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. It was picked up by the Livermore Action Group, a California group working against nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, and by the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of groups organizing against US policy in Central America throughout the decade. Some 1,500 protesters used the Clamshell model in an effort to shut down the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the spring of 1987, in protest against US policy in both Central America and South Africa; hundreds more employed it that fall in a civil disobedience action to protest the Supreme Court’s anti-gay Bowers v. Hardwick sodomy decision. The AIDS activist group ACT UP used a version of this model when it organized bold takeovers of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in 1988 and the National Institutes of Health in 1990, to pressure both institutions to take swifter action toward approving experimental AIDS medications. The radical environmental group Earth First! used it for its 1990 Redwood Summer, a Northern California mobilization to protect old-growth forests from logging. The model was carried forward by the global justice movement to blockade the meetings of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, and for a series of subsequent trade summit protests. Having been used by anti-nuclear activists seeking to shut down the Stock Exchange in 1979 and radical environmentalists seeking to reclaim Earth Day in 1990, a version of the model was also adopted by Occupy Wall Street and the many Occupy groups that sprang up around the country in 2011.
It’s worth pausing a moment to consider the cultural context in which this influential blueprint for action arose, for it would shape the ways it was adopted, modified, and critiqued over the decades to come. The Clamshell Alliance was about as white as it was possible for an American movement to be, bringing together white rural New Hampshire Seacoast residents with white radicals from around New England, advised by white Quakers. The AFSC of course had a longstanding commitment to racial justice and many within the organization had significant direct experience with multiracial organizing; the same was true of some other seasoned activists within the Clam. But many, maybe most, of the people who participated in the direct actions at Seabrook were white people with little or no background in dealing with race, and the Clamshell Alliance devoted little time or energy to addressing the question. The group’s manuals and other organizing materials made little or no mention of race, racism, or people of color. “In principle, the common denominator of nuclear protest should attract support from diverse groups of people,” wrote longtime activist Marty Jezer in the midst of the Seabrook fight, “for the dangers of nuclear power cut across class, race, sex and ethnic lines, but in practice Clamshell politics and style of organizing excludes people.”25
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