from the Isthmus
February 2 2001
by Bill Lueders
Just before the last election, Sam Day called Isthmus
to propose writing an opinion column taking Ralph Nader to task for not being
outspoken enough on issues of progressive concern. We weren't able to fit it in,
but the pitch was quintessential Sam: forthright, uncompromising, perhaps more
principled than politic.
Day, who died last Friday at age 74 after suffering a massive stroke in his home,
was a font of moral courage the likes of which Madison may not see again. Time and
again, as a journalist and activist, he put himself on the line fighting social
injustice and the insanity of nuclear weapons. He was, in the best sense of the
word, a partriot, serving not a nation but a notion -- that we can, and therefore
must, create a world that's fairer and less dangerous.
In 1979, as managing editor of The Progressive, Day helped conceive an
audacious article that challenged nuclear secrecy by revealing what was considered to
be a secret of H-bomb design. For six months, the U.S. government tried to block
publication, until it was forced to abandon its case.
Day went on to found the anti-nuclear group Nukewatch; to fight the owners of
East Towne, unsuccessfully, for free-speech rights in shopping malls; to chase after
and report on trucks that surreptitiously transport nuclear bomb materials on the
nation's highways; and to participate in direct actions against nuclear weapons sites,
in one case drawing a six-month prison term. In recent years, Day has led the effort
to secure the release from prison of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician
who blew the whistle on that country's secret nuclear weapons program.
The son of an American diplomat, Day lived in South Africa until he was 12.
(In 1982, he returned to write a superb investigative piece on that nation's
secret campaign to build and test a nuclear bomb.)
After graduating from Swarthmore College, he embarked on a career in journalism
by taking an entry-level job at the Washington Evening Star, which he
chose over another option -- a State Department position in Asia -- with the flip
of a coin. Much of his middle years were spent as a reporter in Idaho, where he
met Kathleen, his wife of more than four decades, and eventually became editor
of the Intermountain Observer, a feisty weekly in Boise.
Unlike the usual life trajectory, in which advancing age tends to instill caution,
Day grew more radical and daring as his life went on. His first venture into
direct political action, a human traffic blockade in Boise to protest a U.S. nuclear
weapons test in Alaska, took place in 1971, when Day was 45 and the father of
three sons. As he recalled in his 1991 autobiography, Crossing the Line,
the succession of emotions he experienced -- inner struggle, deep fear, calm during
the action itself and then exhilaration -- would recur with each confrontation
with authority.
Day's decision to cross the line precipitated the demise of his paper and launched
him on a new path, beginning with his editorship of The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists from 1974 to 1978 and continuing with his years (1978-1980) at
The Progressive, where he helped make the magazine a national leader in
reporting on nuclear issues, and subsequent work for Nukewatch. From 1984 to 1994, Day
contributed regular opinion columns to Isthmus, writing, sometimes from
prison and jail, on everything from Gov. Tommy Thompson's harsh anti-welfare agenda
to why moms should be able to bring their babies to work. The loss of much of his
eyesight while in prison in 1989 broadened the focus of his activism to include
the rights of the blind.
Part of Sam Day's peculiar courage was that he valued truth above personal
consequences. It was Day who leaked to the press a memo of grievances written by
long-suffering women staffers at The Progressive and, more consequentially,
a letter from a civilian nuclear weapons buff whose publication in the
Madison Press Connection prompted the U.S. government to drop its attempt
to block publication of the H-bomb story.
But Day never wore his courage as a badge of honor: gracious and unassuming,
he inspired others by his example, not by his insistence that he was correct.
He was, above all, a kind man. He left his mark on the world, and his death leaves
a void the rest of us will be hard-pressed to fill. But his life and his legacy
instruct us to try.
"Now, more than ever, there is good reason to cross the line," Day's
autobiography concludes. "In crossing over, I want to help build a society
of peace and justice on the good gound beyond."
