Postscripts: Venture to honor anti-nuclear legacy runs aground on coronavirus fears – The Westerly Sun

For years, several rather conventional, if not pleasant, acrylic paintings of sailboats on loan from Mystic Seaport Museum were displayed among the heroic studies of clipper ships hanging on the walls in the palatial marble lobby of what long was the Savings Bank of New London and in more recent years the Citizens Bank on Eugene ONeill Drive in downtown New London.

The artist was Albert Smith Bigelow. His name lives on, though Citizens Bank, like its predecessor, no longer occupies the building. Presumably the paintings are back in the confines of the Seaports vast collection. A sailor and marine painter since his 20s, Bigelow, in 1965, executed the seascapes. That same year, he gave eight paintings to Mystic Seaport, expressing, in a letter, a great fondness for the Seaport. He also complained that hed received only a form letter of thanks, not a personal note. The Seaport loaned three of the paintings to the bank.

Bigelow did not make his name as painter, but rather a confrontational pacifist protesting nuclear proliferation after World War II and as a Freedom Rider in the Civil Rights years. Unfortunately, he was known, as well, as the betrayed husband in a scandal that captured New York and Boston headlines in late 1929.

In June 1929, the weekend of the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta on the Thames River, Bigelow, a graduate of Harvard and scion of a Boston Brahmin family, married Josephine Noyes Rotch, also of Boston and Bryn Mawr, in a grand ceremony attended by 400 at the Congregational Church in Old Lyme.

Some six months later, Josephine, just 21, was found dead beside her lover, the poet Harry Crosby, a nephew of financier J. P. Morgan, in the Hotel des Artistes in New York. It was deemed a murder-suicide. Crosby shot Josephine and, hours later, killed himself. Society in New York and Boston was properly shocked, though the Boston papers, in deference to the patrician families, made less of the sensational details. Josephines tombstone, in Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, bears the curious epitaph: In Death Is Victory.

Bigelow, who studied architecture at MIT after Harvard, moved on. He joined a New York architectural firm and helped design buildings for the 1939 Worlds Fair. During World War II, he served in the Navy aboard submarine-chasers and later as a lieutenant commander on destroyer escorts in the Atlantic and Pacific.

The war transformed Bigelow. As he wrote in his book, Voyage of the Golden Rule: An Experiment with Truth, published by Doubleday in 1959, the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945: forced me to see that I had no choice but to make the commitment to live, as best I could, a life of nonviolence.

He married again. His second wife, Sylvia Weld, belonged to another patrician family in Boston. She appeared in the original Broadway productions of the plays Ethan Frome and American Landscape, and later became a nurse.

In the 1950s, the Bigelows, living in Greenwich, Conn., became active in the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers. Bigelows religious convictions led him to participate in a 1954 protest of chemical weapons at Fort Dietrich, Md., and later to take in, with his wife, two women known as Hiroshima Maidens who survived the 1945 atomic bombings and came to the U.S. for reconstructive surgery.

In February 1958, Bigelow and three other men attempted to sail Bigelows 30-foot ketch, the Golden Rule, into the Eniwetok Proving Grounds, a U.S. nuclear test site in the Marshall Islands. Their boat was detained by court order in Honolulu before they could sail in defiance of the Atomic Energy Commission. They tried again, but were arrested and jailed for 60 days.

Bigelow was a Freedom Rider alongside John Lewis, today the esteemed congressman from Georgia, in the early days of the civil rights movement, beaten with chains at a bus stop in Rock Hill, S.C. The bus Bigelow was on was bombed in Anniston, Ala., in May 1961.

He died in 1993 at age 87 in Walpole, Mass.

Since his death, Veterans for Peace, a national organization with a membership of some 8,000 spanning World War II through the Korean and Vietnam wars and current conflicts, has continued Bigelows protest of nuclear proliferation and U.S. military interventions.

The group also found Bigelows ketch Golden Rule derelict in a California marina, raised funds to restore it and now sails it as a symbol of the organizations convictions. A crew intended to make its way aboard the Golden Rule across the Pacific to be in Japan from July through late August or September to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the civilians in those cities. However, the global coronavirus outbreak has forced the crew to postpone departing Hawaii until November or December.

The Golden Rule itinerary still includes the Marshall Islands, Guam, the Marianas and Okinawa.

Hawaii was the first stop on our Peace in the Pacific mission to stop the possibility of nuclear war, the group says. We are also bringing attention to the environmental and human cost of nuclear and military activity on Pacific Islands, as well as how Island communities are challenging nuclear madness and militarism.

Steven Slosberg lives in Stonington and was a longtime reporter and columnist. He may be reached at maayan72@aol.com.