Reflections

...On August 16, Ellanor Calkins drove out from Chicago to join him...

...So the visitors did what two of them had done the day before...

...Calkins refused to pay, electing to serve out the fine in jail at the rate of one dollar a day...

...The last to be arrested was Kenneth Calkins, who was charged upon his release from the hospital ten days after being hit by the truck...

...I'm doing this to illustrate a method the world needs to learn about: nonviolence...

...After an interminable interval, the shaken driver got his vehicle into reverse, backed off, and climbed down from his cab to find the injured man writhing on the ground...

...Unable to accomplish their mission, and for lack of a better idea, Ellanor and Kenneth Calkins simply sat down in the gateway, initiating the chain of events that led to the next day's confrontation...

...The truck's right front wheel had come to rest against Calkins's hip, crushing his left pelvis...

...The couple returned to the gate, conferred briefly with Arthur Springer, then attempted to re-enter the site...

...Two others—Erica Enzer and John White—were arrested a week later after repeatedly attempting to enter Site A to talk to construction workers...

...In a thirty-eight-page analysis of the Appeal to Cheyenne, disseminated among peace activists many years ago, Ted Olson and Arthur Springer wrote that nonviolent resistance can be judged successful if the action conveys a clear message: "I know I can't stop the base from being built...

...Ellanor and John White have drifted away from direct involvement in the peace movement, but he looks back on the Cheyenne project as an early phase of an organic growth that helped stop the war in Southeast Asia and is still at work in human affairs...

...By that time, all the other activists had dispersed, the other five trespassers having bought their way out after brief stints behind bars...

...The gathering—Judgment at Cheyenne this time—will feature songs and speeches, an "MX pork-barrel roast," a funeral procession to an MX silo, and nonviolent civil disobedience at another missile site...

...In Cheyenne, "as in the South," wrote Olson and Springer in a subsequent report, "most of the 'good people' kept quiet...

...cried Ellanor Calkins...

...is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...

...Motioning to the next vehicle, a loaded gravel truck, he ordered it forward...

...If he does not stop, I hope my sacrifice will change him and others...

...That was when the visitors decided the time had come for direct action...

...This fall, not far from the spot where Calkins and Olson faced down the heavy gravel trucks, the Air Force will activate the first of its ten-warhead MX missiles, a strategic weapon more accurate and destructive than any of its antecedents...

...The Pentagon's nuclear arsenal did not again attract the attention of exponents of civil disobedience until the late 1970s...

...The Air Police blocked their path, put hard-hats on their heads, escorted them to a construction shack, held them for five hours, and then unceremoniously dumped them outside the gate...

...They set up camp in a city park and later rented a small apartment...

...The two pacifists did not move...

...The embryonic Atlas base challenged with handbills by Ellanor and Kenneth Calkins and their friends had grown into a network of 200 Minuteman launch sites scattered across seven states of the Midwest and Great Plains...

...After his brief brush with fame at Cheyenne, Calkins went on to campus peace education work with the AFSC, a Ph.D...

...He describes himself now as a "moderate leftist...

...intercontinental ballistic missiles...

...If its purpose was to blunt or slow the relentless buildup of the Pentagon's strategic missile program, the Appeal to Cheyenne was a failure by any objective measurement...

...Atlas had given way to Titan I and Titan II, and Titan had been succeeded by three generations of Minuteman, a rocket system poised for launching from a thousand underground silos...

...If I'm simply interested in 'stopping' construction...

...On the superintendent's command, he inched the heavy vehicle forward once more...

...They were in a quandary...

...Jailed that day were Theodore Olson and Arthur Springer, a fellow activist from Brooklyn who had stayed outside the gate to take photographs...

...at the University of Chicago, and his current job at Kent State...

...Kenneth Calkins wrote letters to the Air Force and the base contractors announcing his intention of going to Site A to speak with workers about laying down their tools...

...Most of them were new to the political scene, and the nuclear-arms buildup had progressed beyond recognition...

...He was motioned forward again but stopped about Samuel H. Day Jr...

...Not long ago, she spent three weeks in jail for trespassing at the ICBM flight-test facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California...

...Drivers and other workers kicked and dragged the protesters out of the way...

...But for some reason they weren't prepared to arrest us...

...Organized by a Philadelphia-based pacifist coalition called the Committee for Nonviolent Action, with Olson and Springer as its prime movers, Appeal to Cheyenne was one of the earliest attempts in this country to confront the budding nuclear arms buildup with nonviolent direct action at the scene—a step beyond the traditional techniques of electioneering, lobbying, and writing letters and articles...

...Twenty-eight years have passed since Kenneth and Ellanor Calkins, Theodore Olson, and about fifty others mounted their summer-long Appeal to Cheyenne...

...To Kenneth Calkins, the man run over by the truck, the Appeal to Cheyenne was an event that helped spur other Americans to action and taught lessons later put to good use in the 1960s...

...Watching in horror as others sat down in the path of the advancing soldiers, the one-time re-sister of Site A found himself dragging and carrying one of the students to safety...

...Atlas was set to make its debut at Cheyenne on the site of a Nineteenth Century cavalry post converted into an Air Force base, and its selection was an economic and psychological boost for the Wyoming capital, which had, only a few months before, faced the impending shutdown of the base...

...If he stops, only to drag me out of the way, he shows me and himself that he does not wish to kill...

...A cry of pain was followed by stunned silence...

...A volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), she had sat in the gateway with her husband the day before...

...But I don't dismiss either as quixotic...

...They sat down...

...But I have spoken with as many of the participants as I can find, and none shares that assessment...

...Erica Enzer, the woman arrested with White, still keeps her hand in at nonviolent direct action...

...Calkins's wife, Ellanor, stood at the side of the road passing out handbills that listed "Six Reasons Why We Ask You to Stop Work on the Missile Base...

...By the early 1960s, though, the energy and fervor of nonviolent direct action turned elsewhere—to the civil rights movement in the South and to the movement to halt the war in Vietnam...

...For the next two-and-a-half hours, commotion and tension reigned at Site A. Truck after truck arrived at the gate, stopped, then inched its way into the missile base...

...Noon arrived and the standoff continued...

...It was an effort to mobilize public opinion against deployment of the first generation of U.S...

...I do not know if he will stop and in one sense I'm not asking him to stop...

...I am standing in front of a truck being driven by a man who does not know he is doing wrong...

...In ensuing years, the Committee for Nonviolent Action and like-minded groups, including many participants in the Appeal to Cheyenne, turned their attention elsewhere...

...They couldn't seem to figure out what to do with us," recalls Calkins, who is now a history professor at Kent State University...

...When it stopped to let out three passengers, the Air Police assigned to guard the gate exchanged looks: It was those people with leaflets again...

...For the next six weeks they tried to take their message to the city that calls itself America's Cowboy Capital, printing leaflets, standing on street corners, knocking on doors, going to churches, speaking to reporters, and chatting on radio talk shows...

...I call them seedbeds for social change...

...Come on ahead—they're just bluffing," the crew chiefs and Air Police yelled, motioning to the trucks to advance through the gate...

...Enzer, who teaches school in Ukiah, California, sees the quiet Quakerism that infused the Appeal to Cheyenne and other early nonviolent direct actions as a setting of the moral stage now peopled with Catholics, Methodists, and adherents of other mainline Christian denominations confronting U.S...

...policy...

...Everything has to have a beginning, and Cheyenne was part of that beginning," says Ellanor, who is now married to John White, the friend arrested at Site A a few days after she and Calkins sat down at the gate...

...On August 18, they arrived at Site A, talked at length with a welder they found working at the gate, gave him a copy of "Six Reasons," and walked up the hill toward the construction area...

...Their own poll of 411 Cheyenne households showed 85 per cent in favor of building the missile base...

...Of the remaining 15 per cent, not one person would take a position of leadership in the Appeal...

...The driver stopped several yards short of the two men sitting in the road...

...In the summer of 1959, an Atlas construction site in eastern Nebraska was the scene of more protest and arrests...

...Ellanor gave him a "Six Reasons" leaflet...

...This, then, was the setting for the Appeal to Cheyenne in the summer of 1958...

...Can't you see you've run over him...

...Wyoming itself was to be the proving ground for MX, the latest and most deadly intercontinental missile...

...a foot away...

...The Appeal to Cheyenne ended officially on December 23, 1958, when Theodore Olson, who refused to pay a penny of his $104 fine, was released from jail...

...Tired of pushing and pulling the two demonstrators and angered by the disruption, the frustrated construction superintendents tried a different tactic...

...One driver, taking the hint, stepped on the gas and then slammed on the brakes, his front bumper coming to a stop just inches from Olson's nose...

...Sitting in the road facing oncoming traffic were Theodore Olson, a Baptist preacher from Wisconsin, and Kenneth Calkins, a graduate student from Chicago, both pacifists...

...Calkins was present on the morning of May 4, 1970, wearing an arm band as a faculty marshal, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators and killed four students...

...On a hot, dry, dusty August morning at the big Air Force construction project in the rolling flatlands of southeastern Wyoming, a car approached on the dirt road from Cheyenne...

...Air Police waiting there presented them with a formal letter from the base commander informing them they were not welcome...

...Will Judgment at Cheyenne stop MX...

...Instead, they look back on the Appeal as an important step in the process of touching the American conscience about nuclear war...

...On August 31, peace activists plan to return to Cheyenne to oppose deployment of the new ICBMs, fifty of which are assigned for placement in southeastern Wyoming...

...We assumed we would be arrested...

...The ambulance that took Kenneth and Ellanor Calkins to the hospital in Cheyenne met and passed the sheriff of Laramie County, who was heading out to Site A to arrest the demonstrators for trespassing...

...dynamite would be much more effective...

...At about 12:30, one of the superintendents decided he'd had enough...

...They hoped to inspire a nucleus of local opposition to the missile base...

...In any case, the result will be good whether or not the base is built...

...The first contingent, mainly from the East and Midwest, arrived in two cars in late June...

...To Bradford Lyttle, a former field secretary of the AFSC who helped plan and execute the Appeal to Cheyenne and who now edits a newsletter called The Midwest Pacifist Commentator from his Chicago home, the project was "a good thing to do," although he thought sitting down in front of trucks was too dangerous and confrontational...

...The Pentagon's announcement in late 1957 of plans for Atlas, the first rocket system capable of reaching the Soviet Union from bases in the continental United States, was an ominous new development...

...When Ellanor Calkins appeared at their hearing the next day, she too was arrested...

...The previous Sunday, only one of thirteen Cheyenne ministers had acted on their suggestion to say something from the pulpit about the nuclear arms race...

...the following summer there were illegal boardings of newly launched Polaris nuclear submarines—the Navy's answer to the Air Force's Atlas program...

...That afternoon he received, in absentia, a master's degree in history from the University of Chicago...

...This mighty spear of the nuclear age makes Atlas seem like a toothpick...

...When I saw those nuns on television sitting down in front of tanks in the Philippines I remembered Cheyenne," White says...

...The Air Force was well on its way to completing Site A and three other Atlas missile bases ringing Cheyenne...

...But here I stand, trusting in my beliefs and in him...

...I might as well ask, "Did Appeal to Cheyenne stop Atlas...

...On August 10, the day after the thirteenth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the campaigners took stock...

...Standing shoulder to shoulder in a human chain, the guards blocked the entrance to Site A, the place slated to be a base for a battery of intercontinental ballistic missiles...

...Whether directed against missile silos, submarine bases, or other implements of nuclear war, many of today's actions are tactically reminiscent of the Appeal to Cheyenne and explicitly rooted in Christian biblical teachings...

...We went there to distribute leaflets...

...In my mind, I knew this was dangerous," Calkins recalls, "but at the time I never felt the threat...