Biography
John Schuchardt is a former United States Marine Corps officer and lawyer who became one of the eight defendants in the original 1980 Plowshares action at the GE plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. After his conviction and the long appellate fight that followed, he co-founded the House of Peace in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a community providing hospitality to refugees and people displaced by war, and continued his work as a movement attorney. His memoir of the action and the trial appears in Daniel Berrigan's account The Trial of the Plowshares Eight.
On September 9, 1980, eight Catholic peace activists — Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Carl Kabat, Anne Montgomery RSCJ, Molly Rush, Elmer Maas, John Schuchardt, and Dean Hammer — entered the General Electric Re-entry Systems Division plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where Mark 12A nuclear warhead nose cones were manufactured. They hammered on two of the nose cones and poured their own blood on documents, in a literal enactment of the prophet Isaiah's image of beating swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). They were arrested at the scene and went to trial in Norristown the following year. Convicted of burglary, conspiracy, and criminal mischief, they were sentenced in 1981 to terms of 3 to 10 years; the case was on appeal for ten years before they were resentenced in 1990 to time served (just over a year). The action launched the modern Plowshares movement, which has carried out more than 100 symbolic disarmament actions worldwide since.
