Converting America: Three community efforts to end the Cold War, 1956-1973

The Syracuse Peace Council (SPC), the New Jersey Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (NJSANE), and the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) were three of the most important peace groups in Cold War America. Far more than just local groups, the SPC, NJSANE, and CNI also belonged to three distinct national political communities committed respectively, to religious witness, socialist principles, and scientific ideals. The study of those three communities through the lens of their strongest local affiliates reveals a broader, more radical, and more enduring peace movement. This more complex social movement belies accounts that have emphasized the importance of radioactive fallout in generating a renewed peace movement. Although all peace activists believed fallout was a serious health hazard, most concerned themselves with the issue of nuclear testing primarily to communicate their ideas about altering international relations and transforming American society, in effect, ending the Cold War at home and abroad. This campaign assailed the bipartisan consensus of the Republican and Democratic Parties and linked peace and social change in an optimistic fashion absent since the 1930s. This study also contests the view that male pacifists dominated the peace movement. Many peace activists came from the Communist Party. Their continued activism must be included in any account of the Old Left. In addition, the presence of a large number of female peace activists in an era that trumpeted domestic female roles indicates the need to continue rethinking women's roles during the Cold War. All three groups began before, and survived after, the 1960s, a fact that refutes efforts to isolate radicalism to a single decade. The enduring efforts of older peace activists to oppose the Cold War challenges the notion the 1960s student movement spawned the New Left. Social change started earlier within a far wider segment of American society. The continued activism of the SPC, NJSANE, and CNI into the 1970s also extends the legacy of this broader New Left. The peace movement, while never successfully creating a sustained mass constituency for an alternative to the Cold War, did alter American society in important ways.