The following is Jim Forrest's remarkable account of the nonviolent action of the Milwaukee 14 against the Vietnam War in which he and others burned bags of draft cards with home-made napalm. His new book will be worth reading.
The following pages are a draft of three chapters in an autobiography I’ve been writing. It’s a work-in-progress. >> The Milwaukee Fourteen
Dan Berrigan had just been released from prison on bail and Jim
Douglass, a co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship, was in town. We
decided to visit Dan at a Jesuit parish in the Bronx where he was
briefly staying before returning to his chaplaincy work at Cornell.
Sitting on wooden chairs in the weedy backyard of the rectory, we
discovered that Dan, usually remarkably upbeat, was depressed. The
reason quickly became apparent. Several months had passed since the nine
had put Catonsville on the map and, so far as Dan knew, no one was
preparing a similar action. Both Jim and I were dumbfounded — we had
both seen the draft-record burning in Maryland as a one-of-a-kind
happening, not a prototype. It hadn’t crossed our minds that what
happened at Catonsville was intended to presage a parade of raids. We
were speechless. On the subway back to Manhattan, we both talked about
reasons we couldn’t do anything that was likely to cost years in prison.
At the top of the list was the fact that we both were parents of young
children. Yet I was troubled by my hesitations. Should not peace-making
be as costly as war-making? Should so much be asked of soldiers and so
much less of ourselves?
Soon afterward I was in Washington to attend the annual meeting of
the National Liturgical Conference, a group dedicated to renewal of
worship in the Catholic Church. Dorothy Day was the principal speaker.
(Martin Luther King was to have been the main lecturer but had been
murdered in Memphis four months earlier.) After being greeted by a
standing ovation, Dorothy began her address by confessing she was “more
at home washing a batch of dishes than standing before such an august
audience.” She spoke about the connection that had long existed between
the Catholic Worker and Benedictine monks working for liturgical
renewal. “It was the liturgy,” Dorothy said, “which led us to pray the
psalms with the Church, leading us to a joyful understanding in prayer.
It was the liturgy which brought us close to scripture.” Coming to know
many of the psalms by heart, she said, had helped sustain vigils for
peace and justice as well as times in jail.
Dorothy referred to the “hard sayings” in the Gospel — love of
enemies, forgiving seventy times seven, refusing to respond to violence
with violence, turning the other cheek, going the second mile. She named
various people in the Catholic Worker movement who were in prison that
very day because they were attempting to shape their lives around the
“hard sayings” of Jesus — Tom Cornell, David Miller, Bob Gilliam, Jimmy
Wilson and others.
She drew particular attention to Phil and Dan Berrigan and the
witness of the Catonsville Nine and their “revolutionary act of
destroying draft records.” Their motivation, she stressed, was “love of
brother and compassion for men conscripted and dying in Vietnam and
other countries of the world to which we have sold arms and planes.” She
was aware that some had judged the destruction of draft records as an
act of violence, but Dorothy disagreed. “It was a nonviolent act,” she
argued, “in that it was directed only against the symbols of man’s
present-day enslavement and not against man, and at the same time it was
the violence of the Lord Himself when he overturned the tables of
commerce in the Temple.”[1]
I was deeply moved by what Dorothy had said. Afterward, walking the
streets of Washington side by side with George Mische, one of the
Catonsville Nine, George told me that a second Catonsville-like action
that was taking shape and asked if I was interested in joining it.
Without hesitation, the word “yes” flew out of my mouth. I was
astonished at what I had just said.
When and where the event was to take place, George said, was as yet
unknown. He told me that several people, including two priests, had
expressed readiness. He was adding my name to the list.
My next stop happened to be Milwaukee where Dan Berrigan and I had
both agreed to speak at a conference of Franciscan teaching nuns. For
the several days we were there, we stayed at Casa Maria, the local
Catholic Worker house of hospitality. Our hosts were Michael and Nettie
Cullen. Michael was an enthusiastic Irishman, with a brogue thick as
potato soup, while Nettie was, with her mid-western accent and practical
manner, as American as pumpkin pie.
On our second night at Casa Maria, Dan and I found ourselves drinking
beer in a crowded kitchen in which several of those present, Michael
among them, made clear they were eager to follow the Catonsville
example. All Milwaukee’s nine draft boards were conveniently located in
adjacent offices on the first floor of a downtown office building in
front of which was a small park dedicated to America’s war dead. It was,
Michael pointed out, “the ideal spot for burning draft files.”
George Mische’s list had quickly enlarged. The next step was a
weekend gathering of the twenty or so potential volunteers on August
23-25, at St. Paul’s Abbey, a monastery in northwest New Jersey. Paul
Mayer, coordinator of the Catonsville Nine Defense Committee, made the
arrangements. The gathering was shaped liked a retreat, with Mass each
morning and a period of Bible study later in the day. In addition there
were sessions at which we got to know each other, discuss our motives
and backgrounds, and to make decisions about who would take part in the
action, who would form a support team, and which of several cities being
considered should be chosen.
By the time the retreat ended it had been agreed that Milwaukee was
the best option, in part because four of the participants lived there.
Fourteen people committed themselves to take part: Don Cotton, Michael
Cullen, Fr. Robert Cunnane, Jerry Gardner, Bob Graf, Jon Higgenbotham,
Fr. Jim Harney, Fr. Al Janicke, Doug Marvy, Fr. Anthony Mullaney, Fred
Ojile, Brother Basil O’Leary, Fr. Larry Rosebaugh and myself.[2]
Twelve were Catholics, five of them priests. The oldest member of the
group was a professor of economics, another was a Benedictine monk. Few
of us had met each other before the retreat. A date was set— the 24th of
September, just four weeks away. We decided to gather in Milwaukee two
days beforehand.
I agreed to draft a group declaration. Here are extracts from the final document: We who burn these records of our society’s war machine are
participants in a movement of resistance to slavery, a struggle that
remains as unresolved in America as in most of the world. Man remains an
object to be rewarded insofar as he is obedient and useful, to be
punished when he dares declare his liberation. Our action concentrates
on the Selective Service System because its relation to murder is
immediate. Men are drafted — or “volunteer” for fear of being drafted —
as killers for the state. Their victims litter the planet. In Vietnam
alone, where nearly 30,000 Americans have died, no one can count the
Vietnamese dead, crippled, the mentally maimed. Today we destroy Selective Service System files because we need
to be reminded that property is not sacred. Property belongs to the
human scene only if man does… Property is repeatedly made enemy of life:
gas ovens in Germany, concentration camps in Russia, occupation tanks
in Czechoslovakia, pieces of paper in draft offices, slum holdings,
factories of death machines, germs and nerve gas…. In destroying these links in the military chain of command, we
forge anew the good sense of the Second Vatican Council: “Human dignity
demands that each person act according to a free conscience that is
personally motivated from within, not under mere external pressure or
blind internal impulse.”
Others worked on an action plan. Doug Marvy took on the task of
finding a way to open the doors to the nine boards half-an-hour after
the staff left for the day. Others mapped the boards, locating the
cabinets in which the files of people in the 1-A category were stored —
those who had passed their physicals and would soon receive orders to
report for military service.
Amazingly the action came off as planned. The fourteen of us walked
in pairs from a variety of starting points, converging at the office
building that housed the draft boards. My knees shook every inch of the
way. The nine doors were successfully opened, the many burlap sacks we
had brought with us were filled to bursting with 1-A files — 10,000 of
them, it was estimated during the trial — and dragged out to the park
across the street. Homemade napalm, made according to a recipe found in
the U.S. Army Special Forces Handbook, was poured on the files and a
match struck. The fourteen of us lined up on one side of the bonfire and
prayed the Our Father and sang “We Shall Overcome.” The police and fire
department were slow to arrive. Had we wished, we could have quietly
walked back to Casa Maria, but the trial to follow was as important to
us as the destruction of the files.
Here is the account of my role in the action that I gave in testimony during the trial:
“I would like to describe what I personally did when we went to the
Bruder Building. I entered Board 47, a board on the right side of the
building as you face it, second floor, halfway down the corridor. The
door was already opened [by Doug Marvy] when I got there. There were
several burlap sacks on the floor and a large screwdriver for forcing
open file the locked cabinets so that we could remove 1-A files and
other key registration records. One priority item was a large volume
that had names, serial numbers, addresses and classification histories. I
took the cross-reference book and several drawers of 1-A files. I also
took some other files that were in a drawer marked ‘Delinquent’ — people
who were in trouble with the Selective Service System.
“I dragged these sacks down to the front of the building. When the
street was clear, I ran across the street to the little park. I then
helped a couple of the other guys pull sacks. Others were piling the
sacks together. The gasoline — homemade napalm — was poured on them and
someone lit the fire. We knew that the fire posed a slight danger to
other people — some of us were working to make sure nobody was too
close. Then we stood on one side of the bonfire singing ‘We Shall
Overcome’ and then read from the Gospels and prayed.
“I should add that while I was in the building I heard a woman
screaming in the hallway. I went out and saw Mrs. Pauline Gaydos, a
cleaning woman, running down the hallway. My reason for stopping her
wasn’t to prevent her from screaming, but because she was in a state of
terror. My hope was that she could understand what was happening, what
we were doing, so that she would know that she had nothing to be afraid
of. I walked her backward into Draft Board 47 with one hand around her
belly and one hand around her cheek. She was rigid with fear. I let go
of her and started talking to her — in fact I had start talking to her
while I was still holding her in the hallway. I don’t remember exactly
what I said, but, as you have already heard her testify, it was
something like ‘perhaps you have a son who is in Vietnam, or perhaps
have neighbors who have sons in Vietnam, or perhaps you have friends
whose sons might go to Vietnam and their parents are afraid.’ I was
concerned about her fear and was speaking very softly. Suddenly I felt
her body relax in the most beautiful way. It was like an iron bar
turning into a pillow. A relaxed feeling just poured out of her. It was a
very wonderful feeling. She looked at me and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell
me that before ?’ We talked for a while longer, and then there was a
knock on the door — Doug saying it was time to leave the building. We
dragged all the sacks to the park and set them on fire.”
I doubt the police had ever arrested a more cheerful or cooperative,
in fact elated, set of prisoners. We had set out to declare nonviolent
war on military conscription and to do our bit to impede the war in
Vietnam and had achieved all we had dreamed of.
I recall these events with gratitude, pride, embarrassment and
astonishment, but at the same time I’m disturbed that it never occurred
to me to back out. I still have mixed feelings about having been one of
the Milwaukee Fourteen. I am still troubled by my unexpected encounter
with Mrs. Gaydos. Thank God she didn’t have a heart attack. I am also
disturbed that I left my son fatherless for part of his young life. It
was one thing for celibates like Dan and Phil Berrigan to go to prison,
another for the parent of a five-year-old child. My defense was that
soldiers were being sent to Vietnam who would never see their wives or
children again, or who would return home with appalling injuries,
physical, mental and spiritual. Was I unwilling to make a much less
costly sacrifice?
The hardest part of preparing for the action was working out Ben’s
care during the prolonged absence I anticipated. Jean’s sister, Mary
Corchia, agreed to play a significant part, but the main role was taken
by my mother. Thank God in the end it all worked out remarkably well —
Ben has many happy memories of that period of his life and is proud of
what I did — but it still troubles me that I put work for social change
ahead of family responsibilities, much as my father had done during my
own childhood. Dad had often remarked that I was “a chip off the old
block.” Perhaps I should have been less so. >> Trial
One doesn’t have to be have undergone arrest to know what happened
next. The ritual has been endlessly and accurately reenacted in
countless TV crime dramas: handcuffs, transport by police car or paddy
wagon to the nearest police station, the emptying of pockets and removal
of pens and wrist watches followed by finger printing and the taking of
mug shots. The same had happened to me six years earlier when I had
been among those blocking the entrance to the Atomic Energy Commission
in New York. I felt as if I were playing a familiar role in a crime
film.
As night was falling, we were delivered to at the Milwaukee County
Jail where we were briefly deposited in a “drunk tank” and then moved to
a dormitory with six bunk beds plus an adjacent unlocked cell with a
bunk for two — a perfect arrangement for the fourteen on us. The County
Jail was to be our home for a month. Doug Marvy and I shared the cell.
In court to be arraigned the next day, we found we charged with three
felonies: burglary, theft and arson — burglary for breaking into the
nine draft boards, theft for removing draft files, and arson for burning
the files.
The judge who arraigned us had the remarkable name of Christ
Seraphim, a notorious foe of Milwaukee’s civil rights movement and a
past president of the Eagles Club, a whites-only fraternity. He set bail
that would have been more appropriate for kidnappers, rapists or bank
robbers: $430,000 in toto — approximately $3,000,000 in today’s money.
It took a month but, after the amount was reduced by a different judge
and thanks to generous loans from supporters (one couple mortgaged their
house), we were set free pending trial the following May. This gave us
half a year to prepare our defense as well as to organize all sorts of
public meetings and events, from discussion forums to poetry readings to
helping people who were organizing new draft board actions.[3]
There was a major surprise at the end of the second day behind bars.
Hearing loud cheers outside, we looked out our third story window to
discover a large crowd led by the comedian and civil rights leader Dick
Gregory had gathered on the streets below. Earlier in the evening
Gregory had given a talk at Marquette University and then led his
audience and many more to the jail to say thank you to the fourteen.
“You’ll receive better treatment from the government if you cheat on
your income tax than if you burn your draft card,” Gregory told the
crowd. At his side was Fr. James Groppi, an often-arrested leader in the
local battle against racism. Soon after he became co-chairman of our
defense committee.
The time together in jail proved to be a great blessing — a month in
which we really got to know each other. Each day there were seminars led
by one or another member of the group. Doug Marvy told us what it has
been like, while in the Navy, to live in the Antarctic and to closely
follow the lives of penguins. I recall Basil O’Leary teaching us the
basics of economics. Bob Graf, who had been a Jesuit for seven years,
introduced us to the life of St. Ignatius Loyola. Tony Mullaney did
sessions on the Holy Rule of St. Benedict. Larry Rosebaugh focused on
the parables of Jesus. Mike Cullen talked about Irish history and
culture. I led a discussion on the history of the Catholic Worker
movement. We all shared life stories — events in our lives that had
finally led us to the nine draft boards of Milwaukee. Discussion of the
forthcoming trial was, necessarily, a major topic. Local priests managed
to visit and celebrate Mass with us.
Several lawyers volunteered their services — Percy Julian, William
Kuntsler and Mark Stickgold — and did a great deal to help us prepare
our defense, but in the end we made a decision to represent ourselves
rather than have lawyers speaking on our behalf. This gave us greater
leeway to express our views. Mark Stickgold, a professor of law at Wayne
State University in Michigan, stayed on as legal adviser.
By the time the trial began we were down to twelve — Mike Cullen and
Jerry Gardner had opted for a separate trial with representation by
their own attorney.
One of my main stops during the half year between being free on bail
and the trial was at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Thomas Merton
had died a few months before, on the 10th of December 1968. I felt
orphaned by his absence. While I knew he hadn’t fully approved of the
sort of action I had participated in, I also knew he would have been
supportive of me personally and would have helped in any way he could.
His many letters had played such an important role in my life for more
than six years. I thought one useful thing I might do while in prison
was to edit his letters to me with the goal of making available, in a
booklet, extracts potentially helpful to others. “Thomas Merton’s Advice
to Peacemakers” was the title I had in mind.[4]
The trial began in the Milwaukee County District Court on May 5th, 1969, with Judge Charles Larson presiding.[5]
Larson, in his sixties, was Republican, the Wisconsin Commander of the
American Legion, father of Vietnam veterans, and a devout Roman
Catholic. Having five Catholic priests and one Christian Brother in the
dock for protesting war was not an experience he could ever have
imagined or wished for. Surprisingly he was a kind and relatively
patient man who allowed testimony many other judges would have muzzled,
albeit rarely with the jury present.
Two lawyers from the District Attorney’s office carried on the
prosecution, both of whom, we discovered, sympathized with our anti-war
views if not our methods. One was white, Deputy District Attorney Allen
Samson, the other black, Harold Jackson Jr. Both were twenty-nine. “The
immorality of this war bothers me more than its unconstitutionality,”
Samson said in an interview. “We’re using Vietnam the way Russia used
Hungary and Czechoslovakia. If I were boss I’d have our boys home by
tomorrow noon. I’m more anti-war than anyone in the courtroom, but I
don’t burn draft records. It’s bad for the peace movement.” Jackson
agreed. “I’m as anti-war as anyone in the courtroom,” he said. “Our
draft laws are obscene. But these draft-file burners are the worst thing
that could happen to us liberals. They’ve polarized the community so
much I thought I would have to resign.”
We sat on the left side of the court room at a long table heavily
laden with law volumes and others books. We looked like “a graduate
seminar at a respectable university,” Francine du Plessix Gray wrote in a
lengthy essay about the trial published in The New York Review of Books.[6] A local sheriff told her that we were “the classiest bunch of defendants ever.”
The first day was taken up with jury selection. We took turns
interviewing the candidates. After I had asked one potential juror too
abstract a question, Judge Larson advised me, “Not everybody is a
philosopher like you, Mr. Forest. You have a doctor of philosophy
degree, is that correct?” I confessed I had no degrees at all — “I am a
high school dropout, your honor.” But it was good advice. Afterward I
stuck to simpler questions.
Following jury selection — eight men, four women, eleven of them
white, eight of them Catholics, none of them critical of the Vietnam war
— the prosecution proceeded to make its case. It wasn’t hard. Evidence
presented during the first five days of the trial included charred draft
records, screwdrivers, gasoline cans and photos of files being burned.
Witness testimony was given by policemen, two cleaning women, a
photographer, journalists, passers-by and Selective Service employees.
Two days were spent in arguments concerning the value of the draft files
and what purpose the files served. We argued, unsuccessfully, that the
material value of the documents destroyed was not great enough to
qualify as a felony.
On our side, we readily admitted we had done what we were charged
with doing but contended that our actions were intended to prevent
greater crimes and thus were legally justifiable. We were attempting to
impede a war that was, as expert witnesses would testify, illegal,
unconstitutional and immoral. Our purpose was to save lives. We sought
permission of the court to argue the protection of “defensive privilege”
— statute 939.48 in the Wisconsin legal code — which declares that
actions normally punishable under the criminal code may be considered
privileged, that is non-criminal, if the action is taken with the
“reasonable belief” that it may prevent bodily harm to another party. A
classic example: a driver running a red light to get a gravely injured
person to the hospital. We were prepared to show that we had earlier
tried a wide range of legal methods of stopping the war and that our act
of civil disobedience was a last resort.
To prove that it was reasonable to believe that our actions were
justifiable, we sought the court’s consent to present as exhibits
scholarly judgments contained in books, documents, and legal journals
testifying to the illegality of the Vietnam war. We also hoped to
demonstrate that our action was in accordance with Christian doctrine.
The exhibits we offered — all rejected by the Judge Larson — ranged from
the Congressional Record’s list of the war dead and Pope John’s
encyclical “Pacem in Terris,” to Gordon Zahn’s book on the Catholic
Church in Hitler’s Germany, and the New Testament. (Remarkably the
prosecution was willing to admit the New Testament as an exhibit, but
Judge Larson ruled that “to admit [the New Testament] into evidence may
create substantial danger of undue prejudice or of misleading the
jury.”)
It was not always easy to connect Judge Larson’s rulings with the
life-and-death issues being raised by our trial, but at least Larson at
times wrestled with the implications of our “justification” defense.
“Mr. Forest,” Larson asked me in one exchange, “I want to ask you a
question. Was John Wilkes Booth justified when, believing he was acting
for the welfare of the Confederacy, he shot and killed Abraham Lincoln?”
“I would simply point out,” I replied, “that the only charges against
us are damage to property, not to persons, and that, in fact, we were
trying to prevent people from getting killed. So, the direction
is the opposite. I’m not saying that the jury should find us innocent.
I’m simply hoping that the court will allow us to try to demonstrate [to
you and to the jury] the reasonableness of our belief and to decide for
themselves whether, in fact, it was reasonable. The jury must determine
whether the threat was apparent … whether we could reasonably believe
as we do. Therefore all the evidence relevant to establishing either one
of these points we believe must be admitted into evidence so that the
jury can decide these points…. In Weston versus State 28 Wisconsin 2nd,
136 of 1964, the court agrees with this analysis. The court in this
instance allowed evidence to be introduced under 939.48, the
justification defense, and then gave an instruction to the jury
explaining that theory.” (“Well, Jim comes from a family of lawyers,”
one of my co-defendants audibly remarked.)
“Let the record show,” said Larson, “that while these defendants are
in court without counsel, time and time again they have cited law which
is very pertinent and relevant, law which requires a learned legal mind
to ferret out…. The Court therefore wants the record to show that
although it does not appear so in the courtroom, clearly they are
receiving legal assistance.”[7]
Continuing my exchange with Larson, I pointed out that I was not
saying that the jury was obliged to find us innocent, only that the jury
be allowed to hear the argument that we broke the law in the reasonable
hope of saving lives. As jurors they could then decide whether or not
our action could be regarded as justifiable. “The jury may not be the
ideal representative of the community,” I said. “Nonetheless we would
like the opportunity to let the jurors decide, with all the facts before
them, and not just the fact that doors were opened, papers removed and
files burned… I realize that we’re on untrod paths as far as legal
precedent is concerned, but it seems to me that when boys are literally
dying every hour, American boys, Vietnamese soldiers and civilians,
women, children, the old, the young, that it’s certainly imminent peril
that we’re speaking of…. We would like the jury to decide whether the
peril is imminent or not…. By analogy, consider the situation of a Jew
in Nazi Germany. He didn’t have to be walking into the ovens to be in
imminent danger. He was in danger if he was a Jew and could be found.”
“Mr. Forest,” Larson responded, “why have you assumed the heavy burden of making [such determinations]?”
“I think I stand on fairly solid ground in American tradition,” I
answered, “although I admit there are many who would question whether
I’m right. It may well be that the jury will decide I’m wrong. I am
prepared for that. But it seems that many times in the history of this
nation small minorities have had to act…. It was only a small minority
that first sought to establish these United States. It was, at first,
only a small minority that believed that slavery was wrong.”
“You call this civil disobedience, Mr. Forest?”
“Yes, your honor, in the same sense that it was civil disobedience,
in the 1850s, to help prevent an escaped slave from being forcibly
returned to slavery.”
Not all the exchanges in court had to do with issues of historical
importance. A nice moment occurred after I saw clear indications that
District Attorney Sampson was suffering from an overfull bladder. He had
asked Larson for “a very brief recess” but been told to be patient.
However when I seconded Sampson’s request, Larson grasped the urgency
and gave us a ten-minute break. Sampson gave me a grateful smile and a
thumbs-up as he hurried out of the courtroom.
We brought three expert witnesses to Milwaukee prepared to testify on
the reasonableness of our views on the war and the place of civil
disobedience in American history: Howard Zinn, professor of government
at Boston University and author of A People’s History of the United States, war crimes expert John Fried, and Marvin Gettleman, author of Vietnam: History, Documents, and Opinions.
Zinn came first. With Dan Berrigan, he had recently played a major
role in obtaining the release of three U.S. pilots being held in Hanoi.
“The tradition of civil disobedience in this country goes as far back
as the colonial period,” Zinn testified, “reaching a height during the
American Revolution. It has been enunciated by the Fathers of our
country, written into the Declaration of Independence, carried on in the
movement to end slavery, and carried on in the movement to win decent
conditions for laboring people. The tradition of civil disobedience goes
back as far as Thomas Jefferson and it comes right up to today… People
distinguished in the field of law and philosophy recognize that there’s a
vast difference between a person who commits an ordinary crime and a
person who commits an act which technically is a crime, but which in
essence is a social act.”
Zinn was beginning to answer a question about acts of civil
disobedience committed against the fugitive slave laws in the 1850s when
Judge Larson stopped him. “We are not here to consider the fugitive
slave laws. Such testimony is inflammatory and immaterial.”
The only fragment of a substantial comment that Zinn was allowed to
make was in response to a question concerning the relationship of civil
disobedience to democratic process. “Whatever progress has been made in
the United States in eliminating social evils,” he responded before
being cut off, “has been due in part to the courage of some people in
committing acts of civil disobedience. If these acts were considered
ordinary crimes, this country would be far worse off than we are today.”
After a hail storm of attempted questions and forbidden responses,
and after a warning of arrest from Larson, Zinn left the witness box.
John Fried was the next witness. He had been chief consultant to the
American judges at the Nuremberg war crime trials of leading Nazis as
well as a United Nations Adviser on International Law and also an
adviser on international law at the Pentagon. We hoped he would be
allowed to testify on “a hierarchy of law in the international world
order.”
The prosecution and Judge Larson objected that testimony drawn from
such documents as the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Principles
concerning the U.S. violations of international law would be irrelevant
to charges of burglary, arson, and theft. Amazingly, after heated
argument, Fried was allowed to answer a number of questions though in
the absence of the jury. “I say with a very, very grave heart and after
very, very careful study that the U.S. military intervention in
Vietnam,” Fried said, “that it does violate essential and basic
provisions of the United Nations Charter, and this is not an isolated
opinion of myself.”
“What recourse does a citizen have,” Basil O’Leary asked Fried, “when
his country pursues war in violation of international treaties which
the citizen holds have been violated?”
Expecting an objection, Larson looked toward the prosecution table.
“No objection,” said Jackson; “if he can answer that, God bless him.”
Fried replied, “The International Tribunal at Nuremberg, at which the
United States was represented, stated that it is the moral choice of
the individual if he feels that for him obedience to the higher order —
to the world order — is more important … then he has to take the moral
choice and do the things which he considers morally proper. That is the
great ethical and moral method of Nuremberg.”
He added: “The United Nations Charter does not give the rules for
conduct during war time. There are other treaties, like the Hague
Treaties of 1907 long preceding the Charters of the Geneva Conventions
of 1929 and 1949. In the hierarchy of law, international world order as
stipulated in treaties … is the highest. If, then, a dichotomy develops
between international law and domestic law, the dilemma for the
government and for the individual is great.”
“No more questions,” said Basil.
Our last witness was Marvin Gettleman, an expert on the history of
the Vietnam war. He was questioned by Doug Marvy. Upon Doug’s first
question to Gettleman — whether, on the basis of his expert knowledge,
he was aware of the United States ever being attacked by North Vietnam,
Larson dismissed the jury, then asked Doug what he intended to prove.
Doug replied, “I have no reason whatsoever to speak outside the presence
of the jury on any matter …. I am not interested in speaking to the
Court.” “It makes it difficult to proceed,” said Larson. Doug agreed.
“I’m merely following court procedure,” Larson responded. “I’ll speak
when the jury is in the room,” Doug insisted. The twelve of us went on
strike for a brief period, refusing to do or say anything in the jury’s
absence.
Finally Larry Rosenbaugh broke the silence by describing how
Gettleman’s testimony would show that the war in Vietnam was crippling
the nation’s war on poverty. Larson predictably interrupted Larry to
declare such testimony as irrelevant. Unpredictably, prosecutor Samson
asked Larson to be patient as because “everyone knows that the war is
taking money away from urban planning.”
At last Gettleman was dismissed. He had not been permitted to answer a single question.
After days of passionate endeavor on our part, Larson ruled that we
had failed to prove that military conscription constituted an “imminent”
threat to anyone’s life and thus we could not argue that, in destroying
draft records, we were protecting lives. Larson ruled that section
939.48 of the Wisconsin penal code regarding privilege was “not
applicable in this case.” He added, “I shall not permit any testimony
about the fairness of the draft or the fact that it discriminates
against some, and as far as the Vietnam war is moral or anything else,
it is not relevant here.”
Prohibited from presenting evidence on the illegality and immorality
of the war in Vietnam, our only way of communicating to the jury what
lay behind our destruction of draft records was through our own
testimony. In the course of several days we took turns cross-examining
each other.
One of the high points of the trial were the three hours in which
Tony Mullaney, a Benedictine monk, explained what had brought him to
interfere with the work of the Selective Service System. He proceeded to
identify several aspects of his state of mind. “The motto of the Benedictine order has always been Pax
— peace. The vows of the monk can be summed up as a single vow to set
up the conditions whereby man can be fully human. The monk is supposed
to be a sign of hope, he is supposed to be a sign that history can be
moved in the direction laid down in the Gospels, and therefore a sign
that we are responsible for history and the direction that history
takes.”
Tony described the justifiable anger “that stems from a correct
assessment of a present moment in history. My anger on September 24th
was based on first-hand evidence that I had that the draft was doing
violence to the consciences of young men, doing real psychological
damage to young men.” No less important were the experiences he had in
Roxbury, an area of Boston “where poverty is perhaps at its worst. In
Roxbury, your defenses are shattered the day you arrive.”
Another element was “fear of a very deep and very pervasive
polarization that is going on in the United States…. We are a nation
that’s very seriously divided … black-white, rich-poor, young-old … the
growing gap between the powerful and the powerless. My participating in
the burning of draft records was my attempt to say something about the
polarization, which, if it is not checked, is going to lead to great
disaster in this nation.”
Finally Tony read aloud the 1500-word statement which the Milwaukee
Fourteen had handed to reporters at the time of our action.
Notwithstanding some objections from the Court that Father was giving
“an oration on social matters” he was allowed to read through this
entire document.
“Tony, reverend doctor,” Fred Ojile asked in his cross-examination,
“when does the question of who determines destruction of property become
pertinent in the decision-making process?”
“The decision to destroy property,” Tony replied, “has to be
confronted whenever the person has reasonably concluded that there is no
longer any relationship between that property and the enhancement of
those values to which he is committed, through his membership in various
communities such as the American community, the family of nations, and
so forth. In other words, when property no longer enhances the dignity
of the person. Property is an instrument, it does not have substantial
value, it has instrumental value.”
When it was my turn to describe my intentions, I stressed that
breaking a law does not necessarily imply contempt for the law: “One
aspect of our action was the idea that our action would not add to an
atmosphere of lawlessness in this country, but, on the contrary, help
restore law and order in our society. You have heard it said, and it was
my belief at the time as it is today, that our public officials are
failing to take proper cognizance of the Constitution of this country
and the law of the land. Our leaders we’re paying a great deal of
attention to small laws, but overlooking the very big laws which are the
most important ones to this country and its future.”
I also emphasized our commitment to nonviolence: “One of my main
concerns was to reopen the possibility of protest being nonviolent in
our society. Many people have said ‘when Martin Luther King died,
nonviolence died with him.’ We don’t believe that. We wanted to keep
open the possibility of people undertaking their protests in the context
of nonviolence, with respect for life, and to keep people from becoming
so frustrated that protest would simply become destructive.”
I spoke about the influence on my life of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk,
Thich Nhat Hanh: “I spent three months last year traveling with Thich
Nhat Hanh to campuses throughout this country. Thich Nhat Hanh is the
founder of the Van Hanh University in Saigon and also of the Buddhist
Youth for Social Service movement, which in this country would be
something like a blending of the Red Cross and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference — that is it undertakes both the works of mercy
and is involved in nonviolent methods of change and resistance. Thich
Nhat Hanh has worked closely with Christians in Vietnam and has helped
to restore a peaceful atmosphere between Christians and Buddhists. He
created in me a deep feeling for the culture of Vietnam — the awareness
that we are destroying a culture — a culture far older and, in many
respects, more beautiful, more serene, than our own.”
I also tried to describe the climate of our action: “It was my hope
that day — perhaps this is the hardest thing to describe — it was my
hope to encourage in this movement for renewal of our society not only
something we call nonviolence, but a style of action which could be
called celebrative, coming out of the word “to celebrate.” We
believe that such actions should be a kind of celebration — that they
should speak not only to the minds of other people but to their hearts
as well. We believe that imagination should be involved. When you look
at the film of the Milwaukee Fourteen burning the draft files, notice
we’re singing. It was our hope that that people would see not just a
fire but our joy — see that this was a celebration of life. It was a new
style of protest — not a model for others to imitate like echoes, but a
qualitative sort of thing where people put their lives on the line, not
sadly and not in mourning, but in hope. As you look at the film, I
think you will see that in our faces.”
As the trial drew to its end, it was remarkable that Assistant
District Attorney Jackson, who so often had raised objections to what we
were trying to say, confessed to a journalist how shaken he was by the
trial. “I’m more torn by this case than at the beginning. I see nothing
but honesty and intelligence here, depth of perception and integrity, an
atmosphere that I can only describe as very loving.” (After the trial
was over, Jackson resigned from his job in order to concentrate on black
civil rights cases. “Negroes in this country are being sent to jail
like Jews to Auschwitz,” he said in his office on his last day. “There’s
not enough legal talent around to help them.” He explained that the
trial of the Milwaukee Fourteen had been’ a turning point. “That trial
tore me up,” he said. “I’m still not sure what they accomplished
politically. But whatever religion is, they’re where it’s at…. I suppose
the essence of religiousness is to break rules at the proper time….
What the hell do you expect when a great priest like [Tony] Mullaney
leaves his monastery after nineteen years and to see what life is like
in Roxbury, Massachusetts?”)
On May 26, the eleventh and last day of the trial, Larson gave the
jury its charge: “The law does not recognize political, religious or
moral convictions, or some higher law, as justification for the
commission of a crime, no matter how good the motive may be…. People who
believe that the Vietnam war is illegal or unconstitutional or morally
wrong have the right to protest in various ways but not to break the
law.”
The jury deliberated for only seventy minutes before returning its verdict. All of us were guilty as charged.
Dozens of spectators rose and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
“I pity the nation that fears its young!” said Tony to Judge Larson.
>> Sabbatical
After the trial, I spent just over a year under lock-and-key in
Wisconsin, more than half of that time at Waupun, a prison that closely
resembled the penitentiaries Hollywood used in classic black-and-white
crime movies starring such iconic gangsters as James Cagney and George
Raft: castle-like walls, barred cells four tiers high with metal
catwalks, metal staircases, metal bunkbeds, metal toilets, metallic
slams as steel gates and cell doors were opened and closed. The smallest
sounds reverberated in metal echoes.
Waupun, opened in 1851, was Wisconsin’s oldest and most guarded
lockup — a “maximum security” prison. The population of convicts housed
there was a thousand or so, mainly men convicted of the most serious
crimes: murder, manslaughter, armed robbery, rape and child molesting.
It was an odd environment for a young writer who had a principled
objection to war and other forms of violence, but in many ways I
gradually came to find being there a blessing. I have ever since
referred to it as my sabbatical year. My monastic side came to the
rescue, but also the good luck of being locked up in Wisconsin. In the
seventies, Wisconsin and California were regarded as having the best
state prison systems in the U.S. If I was a long way from paradise, in
most other states it would have been much worse.
My first seven days were spent in 24-hour-a-day isolation — similar
to solitary but not as grim — while a decision was made about what work I
would be assigned to. I felt like a caged squirrel. My main human
contact was with an elderly prisoner-trustee delivering a tray of food
three times a day. This was the hardest week for me, a week of fear.
Fear was not unreasonable. I drew on years of reading stories about
prison brutality, drugs, gangs, racial rivalries, and rape. I was full
of dread. But when I was finally assigned to a cell block and released
into the general prison population my anxieties quickly receded. Waiting
in line in the cafeteria, a huge man with battered features standing
behind me tapped my shoulder. I expected him to say, “What are you doing
standing in front of me?” Instead he quietly asked, “Would you like a
caramel?” Assuming my terrified silence meant yes, he pushed a
cellophane-wrapped candy into my hand and told me his name was George.
I was initially assigned to the laundry. Six days a week truckloads
of sheets, pillowcases and clothing from various state institutions,
including mental hospitals, orphanages and other prisons, were sorted,
washed, ironed and folded. Especially in the summer it was work with an
outhouse smell as the sheets were often smeared with feces. Flies by the
thousand were drawn into the delivery area.
Eventually I was moved into the section where ironing was done with
industrial steam presses. Here my first prison friendship took root
while working side-by-side with a man in his mid-sixties — I’ll call him
Thomas Jones. He was then in his eleventh year of serving a life
sentence for murder. Though as kind and caring a man as I’ve ever met,
Thomas had the handicap of being black and near the bottom of the
economic ladder — not helpful when it comes to police, lawyers and
judges. I asked what led to his conviction. The story he told was simple
and tragic. He had rented a back room of a neighborhood bar for a
celebration with family and friends of his wedding anniversary, the 25th
as I recall. Two aggressive drunken young men crashed the party and
behaved toward his wife in an insulting way. Thomas, who also wasn’t
sober, went out to his car, took a handgun out of the glove compartment,
and returned to the anniversary party. “I swear to God,” Thomas told
me, “I didn’t mean to hurt no one. All I wanted was to scare them. I was
just waving the gun around. But somehow I pulled the trigger. If I had
any target in mind, it was the ceiling, but that one bullet hit one of
those boys in the head and he died of the wound. Biggest mistake of my
life.” Thomas was not convicted of accidental manslaughter, as a white
man with a good lawyer might well have been. He was doing time for
premeditated first-degree murder. He may well have died at Waupun.
I was to meet quite a few men who were inside the walls for their
inability to hire a good lawyer. Many others that I came to know were
convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Wrong skin color — racial
factors so often played a significant part. Drugs were another common
factor leading to years in the penal zoo. I would estimate that less
than ten percent of the prisoners at Waupun posed a danger to anyone.
In many ways I was so much luckier than my fellow inmates. For
starters I had many caring friends on the outside providing a network of
support. One of them, Francene de Plessix Gray, who had written a
detailed and engaging account of the Milwaukee Fourteen trial for The New York Review of Books,
gave me a typewriter — a handsome red-and orange Italian-made Olivetti
portable. Equipped with a copy of the trial transcript borrowed from
the court, over many weeks I typed up a 250-page abridgement of the huge
text.[8]
I also used my beloved Olivetti for correspondence, writing projects
and for helping illiterate prisoners who needed assistance with letters
home, or, in the case of more literate convicts, in their efforts to
obtain a retrial or parole.
Letters to Ben, now seven years old, were more graphic than verbal —
water-colored pen drawings with text written around the illustrations.
Each page was a kind of children’s story. (Obtaining permission to have a
drawing pen — a Rapidograph — and a set of water colors in my cell had
not been easy.) Ben’s drawing of his dad in prison.
Ben responded in kind. Of all the communications I received while
locked up, the most cherished is a crayon drawing Ben made for his
Sunday School class at my mother’s church. The topic that week was St.
Paul. The teacher leading the group mentioned that St. Paul had been
imprisoned for his faith. “So is my dad — he’s in jail right now,” Ben
announced with pride. The drawing he made that day showed me behind
prison bars with victoriously raised arms and a big smile. Framed, it
now hangs in our house.
The other major treasure that made its way to my cell was a photo of
the planet Earth that an astronaut had taken on the historic Apollo 11
Moon voyage in July 1969.
There is a back story. Most people at the time watched the moon
landing on television. In my case, I listened to it via a pair of aging,
low-tech earphones provided in each Waupun cell by the State of
Wisconsin. I wonder if it wasn’t more exciting listening to the landing
on the lunar surface than seeing it in blurry images on TV? Radio’s
great advantage has always been enlisting one’s own imagination for all
the visual effects. Having seen so many science fiction films made in
the fifties and having read so many volumes of science fiction, I had
plenty of props to assist my imagination. It wasn’t hard picturing the
crew of three crossing the dry and airless sea of space, then actually
landing and standing on the Moon’s dusty surface.
But the biggest surprise was yet to come: the delivery of a packet
from NASA containing an 8-1/2 x 11-inch color photo of the Earth made
from the actual negative. I doubt the photo could have reached the White
House many days sooner than it reached my prison cell. The same image
was to appear a few months later on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, but even in that case didn’t have the richness of color and detail of the original photo. Whole Earth – Apollo 11 photo – July 1969.
The prison administration made it difficult for me to receive the
photo — it hadn’t been sent by an “authorized correspondent.” I was
given a form to sign that had two options: authorization to destroy the
packet or to return it to the sender. After a struggle with the prison
bureaucracy and an appeal to the warden, the packet was delivered to my
cell and for the rest of my time in prison it rested on top of my
book-laden table. It has been a treasured icon for me ever since. I
often carry the photo (now plasticized) with me when I travel. It has
been held by thousands of people.
How did this remarkable photo come to me? As there was no letter in
the packet, I could only guess. My theory: The Milwaukee 14 trial had
received a great deal of press attention. Perhaps something I had been
quoted as saying about our world as God sees it had been read by one of
the astronauts and lingered in his memory during the voyage to the Moon
and back. Many astronauts have said that it is a life-changing,
soul-deepening experience to see the borderless globe we live on through
a window in space. I could only guess that his sending me a photo of
our astonishingly beautiful planet could have been his way of saying
thank you.
If I am right about the sender being one of the astronauts, the donor
was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force saying thank-you to an
anti-war protester locked in a small cell in middle America. How good it
was to feel the bond between us.
Later on I came upon this statement from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth human being to walk on the moon:
“[Looking at the Earth from the moon] you develop an instant global
consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the
state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out
there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to
grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a
million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
My sabbatical year was also a year of reading. Dorothy Day had urged me time and again to read Dostoevsky’s greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov. There is no better place to give such a book the unhurried attention it deserves than prison. I went on to read Crime and Punishment. Next came Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Curious to know more about Tolstoy, I read a brilliant memoir about a
visit with him written by Maxim Gorky, which in turn led me to Gorky’s e
enthralling autobiographies: My Childhood, In the World, and My Universities.
In them I met Gorky’s saintly grandmother, whose vividly described
prayer life left a lasting impression. One Russian author led to another
— Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, and, from the Soviet era, Solzhenitsyn, a
fellow prisoner. I had no idea at the time that my reading was laying a
solid foundation for work I would later be doing in Russia.
There were other books and authors that left a mark on me, not least J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.
And poetry was important: Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder and
Galway Kinnell sent book after book. My cell was hard pressed to hold
them all.
Most important was the New Testament. Starting with Matthew, I read a
chapter a day and then, when I reached the end, started over — much
like the crew that is continuously repainting the George Washington
Bridge.
Complementing the Gospels, there was the rosary. I discovered I
needed no string of actual beads — the ten fingers I was born with
served the purpose. After years of regarding the rosary as something
mainly for pious ladies of modest education, I found myself praying
“Hail Maries” as I was marched from building to building at Waupun or as
I gazed through remote windows at the sky.
God and my guardian angel must have been laughing. Via an act of
civil disobedience, I had stumbled off the conveyer belt that carries
peace activists along at the same speed that corporation executives
travel. I had once aspired to the contemplative life and, in a funny
sort of way, found it in the company of convicts in a maximum-security
prison.
My time at Waupun came in two slices that together added up to just
over seven months. There was also a brief in-between period at Camp
Gordon, a minimum-security compound in northwest Wisconsin whose inmates
did maintenance work at state parks and, when needed, fought forest
fires. The few guards took sadistic pleasure in withholding mail. I was
sent back to Waupun at my own request. In my second stint at Waupun I
worked in a factory that made metal furniture for state institutions.
My last four or five months were spent at Fox Lake, a medium-security
facility in central Wisconsin that was, as prisons go, a remarkably
decent place to be — attractive modern buildings, each prisoner with his
own room, and guards and staff who seldom were heavy handed. After a
short period working in a factory that made wooden furniture, I became
assistant to the Catholic chaplain, Jim Koneazny, a priest who was
outspoken in his support of the Milwaukee Fourteen. We became good
friends and stayed in touch until his death from cancer a few years ago.
Were there no horror stories? In my case no. Two or three guys
wondered if I might like to get to know them sexually — they accepted my
negative response without protest or threats. At Camp Gordon I was once
struck in the face by a Native American prisoner who had assumed I was
his enemy. He apologized the same day and we soon became friends. I
never felt in danger at Waupun, but this may be due in part to a black
inmate who discovered I lived in East Harlem, his own neighborhood, and
immediately appointed himself my bodyguard. He was a contract killer by
trade who had been caught in Milwaukee with a dead body on the pavement
and a smoking gun in his hand. “Bad timing, man,” he explained.
* * * [1]
In the weeks that followed, shaken by a Catonsville-style raid on the
offices of the War Resisters LEAGUE, Dorothy had second thoughts about
the tactic of property destruction as a means of protest. “We ought not
do to others what we would not have them do to us,” she said. She also
worried that less dramatic efforts to end the war would be denigrated
and judged less valuable than actions that were likely to result in long
prison sentences. Early in 1969, she reminded Catholic Worker readers
that peacemaking most often took quite ordinary forms. “The thing is to
recognize that not all are called, not all have the vocation, to
demonstrate in this way … to endure the pain and the long drawn out,
nerve-wracking suffering of prison life. We do what we can, and the
whole field of the works of mercy is open to us…. All work, whether
building, increasing food production, running credit unions, working in
factories that produce for human needs, working in the handicrafts — all
these things can come under the heading of the works of mercy, which
are the opposite of the works of war.” For more about Dorothy’s change
of mind, see pages 365-367 in the collection of her letters, All the Way to Heaven, edited by Robert Ellsberg. [2] Information about each of the fourteen can be found here: www.nonviolentworm.org/Milwaukee14Today . [3]
By the time the war in Vietnam ended, nearly three hundred draft board
raids had occurred. In addition the headquarters of the Dow Chemical
Corporation, the infamous manufacturer of napalm, was targeted. The
documentary film Hit & Stay: A History of Faith and Resistance by Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk provides an excellent overview. The DVD, produced by BRINKvision, can be ordered online. [4] What I envisioned as a booklet finally evolved into a book, The Root of War is Fear: Thomas Merton’s Advice to Peacemakers, published by Orbis in 2016. [5]
Quotations in the pages that follow mainly come from a 250-page
unpublished abridgement of the trial transcript that I typed from the
court record during the months I was in prison in Waupun. The pages are
online at this URL: http://jimandnancyforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Milwaukee-14-abridged-trial-transcript-sm.pdf. [6]
“The Ultra-Resistance: On the Trial of the Milwaukee 14,”, Francine du
Plessix Gray, http://jimandnancyforest.com/2006/11/m14trial/ . [7]
He was correct. Law professor Mark Stickgold helped prepare us for the
trial, taught us how to find and cite relevant case law, instructed us
in courtroom etiquette, and attended the trial, meeting with us
afterward to join in evaluating what has happened that day and to help
us prepare for the next day. [8] The pages are online at this URL: http://jimandnancyforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Milwaukee-14-abridged-trial-transcript-sm.pdf.
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