History
In early 1960, toward the end of the Eisenhower Republican administration, some American intellectuals, mostly academics or social service professionals, alarmed by the growing danger of nuclear war, began meeting to seek a solution and promote nuclear disarmament. It had become evident that America had no monopoly on nuclear bombs. Academy-based intellectuals had had little contact with policy makers and military officials in the Eisenhower years, and anyone proposing nuclear disarmament to that point had been accused of being Soviet agents or dupes. It was nearly impossible to get discussion of disarmament into America’s consciousness, and the United States was so panicked about Soviet expansionism that all its policy responses to events in Europe, and of course Cuba, were belligerent.
Disarmament was of course actively discussed in pacifist circles, such as the American Friends Service Committee. Stewart Meacham, the Peace Education Secretary for the national AFSC, wanted to involve leading academics not previously identified with pacifism. He kept in touch with Professor David Riesman at Harvard, author of the much-admired 1949 book on American social character, A Lonely Crowd, and was stimulated by a paper Riesman sent written by one of his graduate student assistants named Roger Hagan, entitled “Memo To A Third Party.” To discuss the possibility that it might be necessary to start a new political party to avert nuclear war, Meacham invited Hagan, Riesman, and about forty persons he considered influential or useful to a conference in the West Texas hills at a Friends country retreat.
The meeting did not endorse such a step. However, Meacham and his most active regional AFSC Peace Education Secretaries, especially Robert Gilmore of New York City and Russell Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts, realized that even by gathering a few dozen prominent academics and writers, and bringing into the group leading non-communist pacifist thinkers like Rev. A. J. Muste, they were moving the discussion of nuclear disarmament farther into the national mainstream than it had ever been. So Meacham and Robert Gilmore called another meeting for March 1960, at the Bear Mountain Lodge above the Hudson River near West Point.
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