Anti-Nuclear Protest : Faith Leads Mother of 12 Into Prison

Jean Gump commemorated the Crucifixion of Christ atop a missile silo near Holden, Mo., in the vast prairies that are America’s nuclear heartland. It was Good Friday, which also seemed to her a good day to die. She half expected helicopters to plunge from the sky, the crew mistaking a dowdy suburban grandmother for an Arab terrorist. The gods of metal again would have defied the God of Moses who long ago said: Thou shalt not kill.

As it was, blood was spilled that sunny spring morning, Jean herself pouring it in the shape of a cross from three baby bottles she had carried onto the site. She hung two banners on the chain-link fence. One had photos of her children and grandchildren borrowed from the refrigerator door at home. The other referred to Isaiah’s scriptural admonition: They shall beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more.

Missile Waits Underground

The Air Force calls this silo Mike 10, and inside is a Minuteman 2. Like America’s other land-based nuclear missiles, it waits underground in a womb of concrete. From the highway it appears to be nothing more than an unattended squat of stone in the endless farmland. But on launch its 110-ton cover slides open, freeing a weapon powerful enough to destroy 80 Hiroshimas.

Two young friends of Jean pounded away at the huge lid. Then they all sat down, held hands and prayed.

Thirty-five minutes after the entry, a team of airmen arrived. They ordered the three to come out and keep their hands up. This was hard for a grandmother, whose fingers began to tingle. Her palms flopped to her sides. You can’t put them down! one airman commanded. He had an M-16 at his hip. What do you mean, I can’t? Jean Gump asked: They’re tired, I have bad circulation. No, you cannot, he insisted.

OK, she said, we’ll take turns, I’ll put them up for a while, then I’ll put them down for a while. He said no to that too. So then shoot me, she dared him. And the airman didn’t quite know what to do. He was just 20 or 22, about the age of Jean’s youngest child.

Damage to the silo amounted to $1,273.43, or a little more than $100 for each of the 11 years it would cost Jean Gump in prison time. That was fine with her; she wanted prison--and why didn’t other decent people feel the same? “Governments are living by the bomb . . . but they’re not going to do it in my name,� she declared at her trial.

Such a dramatic gesture--so eccentric amid the peacetime of 1986--was a curiosity, though not a shock, to those who knew her from St. Martha’s Catholic Church in the placid Chicago suburb of Morton Grove. After all, Jean always had her nose into something.

But when her husband, Joe, did much the same thing a year later, that was more of a jolt. Joe was the level-headed one, a chemical engineer. “Him you could talk to, he wasn’t so far out in left field,� said parishioner Bob Draths.

And the stuff that now came out of their mouths! The Gumps from over on Linder Avenue, the ones with the 12 kids, made it sound as if America was the world’s great bully and the church its cowardly helpmate. They were fixated on the bomb, like people who had stared into some hot light and now could see nothing before them but firestorms.

What had gone wrong? Most others know enough to look away from the mushroom cloud in the mind’s distant eye. They trust in God’s will or man’s fate or elections that place able hands by the button. The prospect of nuclear war is just a dull hum, easy to ignore.

Saw History’s Face

But with the Gumps--both now 61--the flash and drone somehow penetrated deep inside. They saw the blood-stained face of history at every window. They imagined the shatter of the glass, the blast, the whoosh, the slow drift of radiation, a thousand years of darkness.

The unthinkable was always in their thoughts. And everything they had always been--good Americans and good Catholics--told them they had to do something about it.

Jean was already dating Joe when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and they cheered with the rest. The Japanese deserved tit for tat, what with Pearl Harbor and all. Families in the neighborhood displayed stars in the window for their sons at war. A gold one meant a boy had been killed. Just the sight of it made Jean weep.

Her father was Irish and her mother Danish, but in the great Irish ghettos of Chicago the one seemed to overwhelm the other. What would you be if you weren’t Irish? so the saying went. I’d be ashamed of myself, is what.

And the church, that was the font of all that was good. As a girl, Jean walked two blocks out of her way so she wouldn’t have to pass the public school on her way to St. Lawrence. Those kids weren’t Catholic. Imagine.

When Jean got serious about Joe, her Auntie Vi nearly split a gut. OK, he was of the faith, good enough. But his family came from Germany. How can you go out with a Hun after what they’d done in the war? she wanted to know.

But Joe sure seemed terrific to Jean. On Saturday nights, he’d sometimes plan their date around a special 1 a.m. Mass downtown and receive communion. He was 19 when he went into the Army in 1946. Then he got an engineering degree on the GI Bill.

Traditional To-Do

Their wedding was a huge, traditional to-do, and it wouldn’t be long before Jean was pregnant. They thought the happiest families were the biggest ones and they had 12 blessed events in a span of just 13 years and 11 months.

Joe thrived as a provider, working for a company that made control panels for factories. He was a lean, disciplined man, a tireless cross-country skier. His vocabulary came right out of the encyclopedia. Machines disassembled before his eyes, dividing into their logical parts.

In 1954, he moved the brood into a three-bedroom Dutch colonial house in Morton Grove, just north of Chicago. As more new feet skipped across the floor, he penciled the plans for an addition. In time, they’d sleep the nine girls upstairs in bunks and trundle beds, the boys in the basement.

Jean possessed the unmistakable manner of a tireless mom. Short, round-faced, never too fancy, she had a sharp tongue to go along with a soft heart. It’s so nice to see you. And wipe those dirty feet!

She was chief cook, but not bottle washer. The children drew one of six work stations: set, serve, clear, sweep, wash and dry. No time was more important than supper. The phone was stuffed in a drawer, and flowers were placed at the centers of two rough-hewn pine picnic tables in the dining room. The family chewed over each other’s day along with the evening meal.

Jean’s Special Event

Christmas was Jean’s special event. The cooking went on for months, and the blinking lights led down from the banisters out into the bushes and over the storm gutters. The tree always touched the living room ceiling as if lifted by the mound of gifts at its base. Oyster stew was served after midnight Mass, and then the whole gang sang carols before the fire, trying out harmonies.

Church was an obligation. To lapse was to suffer an eternity in hell, Joe warned the kids. He and Jean often attended morning Mass, assiduously during Lent. To them, the rules--whether for diet or love or worship--were a seamless garment. Inside it they were cloaked in faith.

Home was the center of their lives, but not its circumference. They felt a duty to do good works, and in the 1960s joined the Christian Family Movement, which urged Catholics to get involved in social justice. The motto was: Observe, judge and act.

So there went the Gumps, delivering food in the slums. C’mon now, it’s safe, Jean would tell her friend Mary Ellen Grear. The suburban ladies would go banging on doors in high-rise housing projects: Hello in there! Is there anything we can do for you?

Civil rights seemed a perfect cause. As Jean remembered her catechism: Why did God make you? And the answer was to know him, to love him and to serve him in this world and forever in the next. And how do you serve God? By serving other people. What other people? You serve the oppressed.

To a Freedom March

Of course, not everyone agreed. Jean went off to a freedom march in Alabama and other parishioners were appalled. “For that she left her 12 children behind!� says Irene Weibel. Some kid painted “Nigger Lovers� across the garage door.

After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Jean phoned St. Martha’s, ready to gear up: “ ‘Father, Chicago is on fire, and we need to offer the church to people who’ve lost their homes!’ And he told me: ‘For God sakes, Jean, why don’t you teach those people not to burn down their own houses?’ �

The ‘60s shuddered into the ‘70s, and all the while it seemed a cyclone. It was as if society’s attic door suddenly blew open and all the bats were loosed. No home was spared. Some of the Gump children began using drugs. One of the boys became schizophrenic.

Around then, Jean was like some modern Rip van Winkle, awakened only to find the others asleep. She and Joe disagreed on plenty. In his mind, the husband had the last word. Ich bin der Herr im Haus . Jean had other ideas. “You know, you don’t have to make all the decisions,� she said.

She’d give him an ear job about the pollution that companies pump into the air, and Joe thought this was nonsense. “Ralph Nader!� he would call her, only half-razzing. She’d fume: “Maybe you ought to read more,� and he’d say he already read plenty, putting his nose back into a copy of Technical Engineering.

Less Time for Causes

Joe’s career was on the ups. He became a manager and he had less and less time for causes. They’d host dinner parties, and Jean would start right in about corporate recklessness. People said she gave them a headache. Joe would have to usher a friend to a corner so he could talk bottom line.

But their biggest split was over the Vietnam War. Both opposed it, but the difference was in degree. Jean could no longer tolerate religion-as-usual at St. Martha’s. “The crap that was coming down from the homily had nothing to do with the war; they just ignored it,� she said.

Joe knew why, so it didn’t bother him. “Priests are in a tough spot,� he said. They can’t get into controversy, especially out in the suburbs.

So on Sunday mornings he would leave for church alone, and Jean would close the door behind him.

It took seven years for Jean to return to St. Martha’s. She missed the sense of community, but nothing had tempered her feelings about the church itself. Give it a war, it blessed the soldiers, looked away and then shut up. What kind of love-thy-neighbor is that?

In the meantime, she had been into one thing after another. She became president of the high school PTA. She won an alternate spot as a George S. McGovern delegate at the 1972 Democratic convention. And she would have kept on full-bore with peace groups, but they all kind of evaporated into the weary air of the 1970s.

Why is waging the peace always so half-hearted when the waging of war is so total? Jean wondered. Then around 1981 people began getting excited about something called “The Nuclear Freeze.� The idea was this: America and the Soviets were in a dead heat in the arms race. So why not stop right here, no more building, no more testing?

The movement was hopscotching its way across the country. Morton Grove had to be in on it, Jean thought. She and her friend Isabel Condit became co-chairwomen. Off they went, passing out leaflets: Please, can we have a minute of your time?

Jean and a few of the kids even marched in the village’s annual parade, hauling a 15-foot cruise missile made from cardboard. “My God, the hooting,� remembers son Joey. They pulled the thing right down Dempster Street past American Legion Hall.

Anti-Nuclear Rally

In June of 1982, Jean hopped a bus to New York for an anti-nuclear-weapons rally. She spent the night on a church floor, then marched from the United Nations to the Great Lawn of Central Park. Unbelievable: Nearly a million people! The streets bulged with the line, 3 miles long.

“I’m telling you, for every person there, there are 10 more like them at home and this thing is just too big to keep down,� Jean proclaimed when she got back, spellbinding Isabel and their friend Belle Sanders during the women’s regular lunch out.

But in the middle-class bedroom community of Morton Grove the Freeze never took hold. Sure, we’ll go to a meeting, people would say. Then afterward came the excuses: We had folk dancing that night. Or the baby had colic.

Jean would corral an expert and reserve a room in the library. She’d announce the lecture in every church bulletin and bake a mound of cookies. Then only seven people would show.

She joined citizen lobbies and went off to Washington. Ugh, to actually meet those senators! It made her want to use her next ballot for Kleenex. “We’re just spinning our wheels here,� was her new theme at lunch.

Nuclear Cancer

For one thing, a Freeze wasn’t enough. America was financing the world’s destruction and calling it the price of freedom. She decided that the planet must be rid of all the bombs, and everyday citizens had to be the ones to do it. We’ve got to stop denying this nuclear cancer! she said. “We numb ourselves to anything we don’t think we can control.�

By then, her first grandchild had been born, and a feeling of somberness competed with the joy. What could you tell a youngster on the day of the bomb? That you had hoped it wouldn’t happen?

Observe, judge and act, she reminded herself, and she began going to meetings of the Disarm Now Action Group (DNA) in Chicago, just a handful ready to do acts of civil disobedience at defense contractors.

They planned to be arrested at Motorola in suburban Schaumburg. That’s an idiotic idea, Joe thought. He drove Jean to a meeting and gave her what for. But on a drizzly October morning, 1983, there was Jean, blocking the way as people came to work.

Her spot was alongside thin, white-haired Betty Lewis at the revolving door under the canopied executive entrance. It was easy enough. The two women simply lodged their feet at the hub.

Captain Walked Up

Open the door! the businessmen demanded. Nope, fellows, not today. Finally, a police captain walked up. He was so incredibly tall and he pulled his best authority voice from deep in his diaphragm: Game’s over, ladies!

The only thing they knew to do was sing peace songs, except they couldn’t think of any. So they tried “My Wild Irish Rose,� a fortuitous choice that melted the heart of the Irish cop, who joined them in a robust tenor.

Eventually, the singing had to stop. They were arrested with 26 others. It made Jean giddy to get fingerprinted. She glanced at her mug shot and started to talk sassy.

“Marvelous picture, officer, could you have one made for me?�

“You’re costing enough money as is,� he grumbled.

She was released on her own recognizance--relieved not to go to County Jail, but emboldened too. Confronting the system was a fine cocktail of adrenaline and purpose. She wanted more, though there were a few things to work out.

‘Prolong the Disruption’

The DNA group was a little scary. “Jean was of the let’s-all-sit-down-and-get-arrested school, but some of us wanted to use objects, blockade things, prolong the disruption,� says Rich Hutchinson.

Jean debated them on and on. To her, civil disobedience was a philosophy, not just a tactic on the way to violent struggle. She refused to call anyone names or throw trash in the street.

In 1984, she changed over to the Chicago Life Community. It, too, was just a handful, but its members were primarily Catholics and “faith-based,� studying the Bible. This was appealing.

To Jean, the church was still both push and pull. She yearned to be a part of it--had even become a lay minister at St. Martha’s, helping with communion. Yet the more she reflected on the teachings of her faith the further it took her from the huge institution that is Roman Catholicism.

The church just lets people go on fat and comfy, she said. Then in a pinch it plays politics like a dirty old ward healer. The American bishops had sent down a peace pastoral that year, declaring nuclear weapons immoral. In the same breath, they said it was OK to keep the bombs as a step toward disarmament.

‘Give the Green Light’

“Once you say these weapons have any value at all, you just give the green light for nations to go ahead and do what they want,� she said. “We are made in the image of God, and the good in life is creativity and love. Where is there room in that for nuclear weapons?�

Morton Thiokol Targeted

The Chicago Life members targeted Morton Thiokol. Every eighth day, they stood at the downtown entrance at 4 p.m., praying and handing out leaflets: If you oppose nuclear weapons, why support the corporations that build them?

Jean would take the train into The Loop. Once, Isabel Condit went along. To her, it all seemed so senseless. After a while, people had seen the same protesters 100 times. “They were invisible,� she said.

But Jean Gump never missed the afternoon vigil. Then she would rush home with the other commuters, hurrying to put a good dinner on the table.

She was arrested four times--or five, or six. Who can remember? Once was over at Morton Thiokol. They had taken their prayers inside and refused to leave the lobby. The cop was mean that time. He twisted Jean’s arm until the pain shot into her shoulder. Later, she smart-mouthed him.

“What’s the worst scenario, officer? The Russians will take over Chicago, march down State Street and so on. But how will they control the people? They’re going to have to hire you.�

“Lady, I’d never work for any Russians.�

“Sure, you will. You’ll work for anyone who pays your salary.�

Then in 1985 she was arrested with her sisters Nancy and Pat out at the Strategic Air Command base in Nebraska. Actually, they were on a weekend peace retreat nearby. But some of the people decided to get busted too.

Jean thought this a bit silly. Everything is so prearranged. The Air Force draws a line at the gate. People pray, then cross over 10 or 12 at a time to be processed and sent home. But at least it gave her sisters “the feel of an arrest.�

No One Really Listened

By then, her ideas were doing cartwheels. Protests and vigils began to seem breezes that barely shook the leaves. No one really listened. And worse, what did they ask of her? Not much. Her life was as smooth as her good china.

To truly work for peace, to actually walk the path of Christ, would require something much more--something that might even take her from Joe and the children and their children.

So-called Plowshares Actions carried civil disobedience beyond the sidewalk and into the actual gear work. Back in 1980, eight people--including Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and his brother Phillip--hammered on the nose cones of warheads in a Pennsylvania arms factory.

Since, there had been almost 20 similar events. Helen Woodsen, a mother of 11, got 18 years in prison for using a jackhammer on a silo in Missouri. “That must have tweaked the right people in the right place,� Jean figured.

A Plowshares group was forming in late 1985, and Jean was interested. The way it works, the participants go off every other weekend for months to pray and reflect and study. Six started out, and five stayed with it.

Others Were Younger

Jean thought them all wonderful people, so kind to let a grandma from the suburbs in on this. The others were much younger. Darla Bradley was just 22, a sweetheart of a girl who’d grown up on a farm. She had moved into a Catholic Worker House in Davenport, Iowa, living in poverty to provide food and shelter to the poor.

And the young men were such scholars. Ken Rippetoe, 23, and Larry Morlan, 25, once had been students in the seminary. They, too, devoted themselves to Catholic Worker houses. John Volpe, 39, had taught history in high school and had a wife and three small children. He also was a Catholic Worker.

In different ways, and at different times, they had each concluded that good works were only half a Christian’s obligations: Too many forget the duty to resist evil. And the great evil of modern times was the machinery that placed the world on a nuclear Death Row. They immersed themselves in books about mass killing, the terror rising at them from every page. The effect was malarial.

The United States and the Soviet Union have enough bombs to destroy each other dozens of times over. They can strike each other in 30 minutes--or in 10 if they launch from their submarines. Radar is scouring the skies for warheads, satellites for missile exhausts. But what is that blip on the screen? There are thousands of false readings every year. Is it a malfunction? Is it space debris? Is it It?

Once, the arsenals were a military deterrent. If one side fired, the other could surely retaliate and make them pay an impossible price. But the newest missiles are so accurate they can hit a football field from across the globe. Missiles can disable other missiles in their silos; one side’s weapons might not be around to shoot back: He who hesitates is lost.

Tongues of Statesmanship

The entire globe is wired, and the tongues of statesmanship have not caught up to the apparatus of a new age. We need the nukes because they have them, and they because of us. Ken Rippetoe kept repeating: Who will accept the responsibility? Nations have failed. The church has failed.

And his answer was the individual: “Logic tells you we can’t accomplish anything, but logic also insists we try.� At the least, we separate ourselves from the evil. At best, we become the biblical watchman who sounds the trumpet, awakening the thousands.

But is damaging property justifiable? they asked themselves. Then they snugly fit their situation into an analogy, one Jean especially liked: If you had seen the trains rolling toward the Nazi death camps, would you have tried to destroy the tracks?

And if the answer to that was not persuasion enough, there was a poster on the wall of a child in a doorway. Its words seemed to circle them, examining their seriousness: “When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, cursed be your religion and your life.�

Their choice was to hammer on a missile silo and then be sent away, however long. Month after month, they fortified themselves, steadied by the magnetics of presumed righteousness.

Later on, some of them--though not Jean--would wish they had better weighed the sacrifice. God knows, it was one thing to confront the beast, but quite another to be devoured and trapped inside.

But no devil’s advocates were permitted into their sanctuary. After all, it was the devil they meant to defy. They had heard the deceitful racket all their lives and now wanted to shut out the noise.

To them, the missiles took root in man’s greed. The superpowers guard their wealth by rattling their sabers over others with less. But it is a fool’s avarice. The bombs gobble up too much money and energy and brainpower.

So in the end we serve the weapons instead of the poor, Jean said. Then we drive our big cars and wear our fancy clothes: Her own kids with those Calvin Klein jeans! She’d threatened to rip off the labels and sew on Levis.

Gifts Forbidden

There was no grand Christmas at the Gumps in 1985. Gifts were forbidden. The department stores enjoyed the celebration, not the Prince of Peace. Besides, Christians these days don’t believe in peace, Jean said.

She had been secretive about what she was up to, but confidantes like Betty Lewis could pick up the clues and chart the upheavals. Jean told her she was trying to reshape her life without the “impediments� of family, possessions and self. There was joy in her eyes, Betty says: “She had given up fear.�

Carmen Pappas had been a friend since the PTA days. It was as if Jean was under self-hypnosis, she observed. All this talk about the prophet Isaiah and swords into plowshares. Carmen worried: “Yes, for sanity’s sake let’s get rid of these weapons, but, Jean, all this religion just turns people off.�

Joe began to sense what was about to happen. In the past, he could usually be light-hearted about Jean’s protests. Go get ‘em, he’d say. But this time would mean a real separation--a disruption! True, the kids were grown and even those still in the house were independent. But c’mon, Jean, nothing will ever be the same.

Joe would get up early to jog, then come back to find her reading the Bible. He slipped into a gloom. After 36 years of marriage, they were in two entirely different worlds now, he in the dependable pulse of the present and she in some morbid and haunting vision of the future.

Riding Tandem Bicycle

Among their favorite things was to ride their tandem bicycle. One time, as they pedaled along, Jean tried to explain the changes in her thinking. I don’t want to hear, Joe snapped.

But it ate at him. Sleep became fitful. Finally, on another outing, he was ready to listen. You’re not talking, Jean, he said. Well, you don’t want to know, she replied. And then through that small opening it all gushed out:

Joe, have we ever really considered what it means to live our faith? To understand the meaning of Thou Shalt Not Kill? To face something so obviously and monstrously wrong as nuclear weapons?

No, he had not, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to start then, either. He could see their forking paths and the distances up ahead. There was the imminence of her arrest and trial, and then there was him left behind.

One morning, as he left for work, he hesitated in the kitchen.

“Jean, do you think you’re going to die?� he asked.

“That’s a possibility,� she said.

He dismally shook his head and then he kissed her.

Explanations in Mail

Not so many weeks later, on Holy Thursday in fact, she sat in the dining room and wrote to Joe, her mother, her sisters, the children and some friends. They would receive her explanations in the mail, after the action was done.

“I know that I must endure a certain amount of suffering, but the freedom to follow my conscience is so liberating I can hardly breathe,� she wrote her sister Pat.

Then she sobbed. From a window she could see her flower box, where the tulips were just coming up through the soil.