WHY I AM IN PRISON
Irons, Peter
WHY I AM IN PRISON by PETER IRONS "V/TY LAWYER just called from Cincin nati. In a few days I must report there to the U.S. marshal in the modern, ugly Federal building. From this building, in...
...My card was accompanied with a letter which politely, and at great length, explained that I was returning the symbol of my "obligation" to a system with which I could not cooperate...
...One of my fellow students answered that anyone drafted "should not be able to judge where he is sent...
...and a pamphlet that I had printed and distributed on several college campuses...
...The following week, only a few dissenting votes were cast in Congress against a four-year extension of the draft...
...I was still working in Washington, doing legislative research for one of the largest unions in the country and helping "edit its weekly newsletter...
...At the time I was scheduled to be drafted, in April, 1963, only a small group of students gave any serious thought to their participation in the Vietnam war...
...But it was evident that thousands of students, if not opposed to all war, considered the war in Vietnam a dirty, brutal conflict in which they would not participate...
...In public, however, they are chaste in their dissent, limiting it to signing newspaper advertisements, or fearing to make their views known at all...
...Six months after my appeal was heard, the court handed down a two to one ruling against me...
...I, too, am dismayed by those of my friends who privately abhor the war but argue that open dissent only weakens the country...
...One of them helped me secure an excellent lawyer in Cincinnati, who was later joined by a former Federal attorney skilled in criminal law...
...Most of them had the safe harbor of a 2-S student deferment, but many acknowledged that, in a sense, they were avoiding the issue: whether or not to bear personal witness against the war...
...The most relevant way in which I could "disaffiliate" from the system was to make a personal protest by returning my draft card to my local board...
...I had met students in Montreal who were involved in helping American students escaping the draft...
...Many of my trade union colleagues excoriate the President in the safety of their offices, as do many college professors and other certified liberals...
...Most of the people with whom I was working had been active in radical and anti-war movements during the Thirties, and many of them sympathized with my position...
...We cannot fight under the banner of this eagle...
...Pacifism did not become more than a vague intellectual commitment for me until 1960, after the first sit-ins began to mushroom into a national student movement...
...The trench-coated pair left with a vague promise to return shortly, but they never came back...
...My own refusal to be drafted had been passed from my draft board to a Federal grand jury in 1964, and I was indicted for refusing to appear for my physical examination and for induction...
...He felt that in view of a recent Supreme Court decision broadening the "Supreme Being clause," my case should be remanded to the lower court for a new hearing, but my refusal to cooperate with the sanctified procedures of the Selective Service System did not sit lightly with his associates on the bench...
...Although students across the country were busy in the peace and civil rights movement, the growing war in Vietnam was just beginning to penetrate their consciousness...
...It was at this time that I spent a day at the hearings before the House Armed Services Committee on the extension of the draft law...
...The penetrating questions of one judge (coincidentally, a former member of the union for which I had worked) convinced me that I had at least one vote...
...But dissent can take a variety of honorable forms...
...I faced the judge in the Federal District Court with apprehension and with the strange feeling that I was a spectator at a play, a shadowy production in which the actors went ritualistically through their roles...
...A portrait of William Howard Taft, massive and black-robed, stared grimly from the wall behind the three judges...
...It was not until I had dropped out of school and gone to work for a labor union in Washington that the draft board finally tired of our sparring and declared me "delinquent...
...The draft also ranked fairly low on the list of priorities among liberal students, behind such issues as Cuba, segregation, and the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...That fall, I was living and working at the National Institutes of Health near Washington, D.C...
...They returned to their campuses in a militant mood to continue organizing against the war and the draft...
...The proceeding before the Court of Appeals was a somber and austere experience...
...General Lewis Hershey, the tall, aging director of the Selective Service System, was given obsequious attention by the Committee...
...One agent, with a son at a nearby college, was relieved to find that no seditious appeals to refuse induction had been sent to entice his boy...
...Beery bull sessions in the dormitories and fireside chats in the chapel invariably turned from talk of courses, girls, and jobs to serious discussion of the Army, and the student pacifists were articulate and convincing to an impressionable freshman...
...I decided to leave graduate school and serve my sentence...
...Beyond this, I did not know what faced me...
...When the hearing before the U.S...
...Representative Carl Vinson, the wizened, since-retired chairman of the Committee, looked impassive as he rapped his gavel at the end of fifteen minutes of my testimony...
...After returning to my job in the hospital, I spent several days mulling over my thoughts about the possibility of being drafted to defend a country which would throw me in jail just for entering a bowling alley with friends of a different color...
...The question deserves an answer, even as the times call for the asking of the question...
...I hoped to collect enough "participant-observer" data for a graduate thesis and to do "good time" qualifying me for early parole...
...When I entered college I had never met or even heard of a conscientious objector and had dutifully registered at my local draft board on my eighteenth birthday...
...Draft counseling groups such as the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, in Philadelphia, reported double and triple numbers of CO . applicants and other draft refusers...
...This was a government I would not defend by force of arms...
...And until American foreign policy undergoes a fundamental change, and we stop shoring up every cheap dictator and oligarch around the globe, the dilemma will remain, and the agonizing question, "Why go to prison...
...will be increasingly asked...
...Not every trade union member or politician need emulate Eugene Debs, who was sent to the Atlanta penitentiary for his vocal opposition to World War I. Not every student can afford to give up his student deferment from the draft...
...Half a dozen of us piled into a car and drove to Atlanta for the second national meeting of the fledgling Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee...
...Many of my friends fear that I will be "branded" when I get out, and this fear dissuades most of them from taking such a drastic step no matter how much they oppose the Vietnam war and the draft...
...I had graduated from college and enrolled in the graduate school of one of the Eastern state universities...
...Section 6-j of the draft law, as then interpreted, limited exemption to those with "religious beliefs" and excluded those with political and sociological objections to war, or those whose objections were based on "a purely personal moral code...
...to be an infringement on the First Amendment's prohibition of an "establishment of religion...
...There I listened, spellbound, to a penetrating talk by the Reverend James Lawson, a young Negro who had recently been expelled from a Southern divinity school for leading restaurant sit-ins...
...I was gloomy about the prospect of a reversal by the Supreme Court and disheartened with the thought of waiting out another year or two of uncertainty while the Supreme Court deliberated...
...I am to be an inmate of a Federal penitentiary...
...This, in my opinion, was unconstitutional and discriminatory, and I was determined not to file as long as this section remained in the law...
...Disregarding Lawson's earlier plea, we were bailed out after a day, and went back to picketing and sitting-in around the Washington area...
...The judge (I had chosen not to have a jury trial) was stern-visaged and seemed hostile, and even as I was cross-examined on the stand I felt like the anonymous defendant in Kafka's The Trial...
...To understand my own answer to the question requires placing it in the context of my personal experience...
...Many of the young pacifists were Quakers, brimming with quotations from Gandhi and Thoreau...
...My friends were more shaken than I at the prospect of my incarceration...
...In a debate over the college radio station on that same October day, I argued that I could not fight for a government in Vietnam headed by a professed admirer of Adolf Hitler—Premier Ky...
...From this building, in which both my trial and my appeal hearing were held, I will be sent to the Federal penitentiary in Milan, Michigan, to begin a three-year prison sentence for refusing induction into the Army...
...We see the United States, our country as well as yours, as a bloody-taloned eagle hypocritically brandishing the olive branch of peace while taking up arms for every beleaguered dictator who claims to be part of the "free world...
...The reaction of young dissenters to the draft was recorded in such frontpage headlines as these from The New York Times of October 19, 1965: DRAFT PROTESTERS SEIZED BY FBI FOR BURNING CARDS, ANTI-DRAFT GROUP MAPS NEW CAMPAIGN, JOHNSON DECRIES DRAFT PROTESTERS, PRESSES INQUIRY...
...The Justice Department had specially retained the same prosecutor, and he and my lawyers argued basically the same points as in the first trial...
...Friends of mine—even one for whom I had managed an unsuccessful Congressional campaign in 1962—had served prison sentences for draft refusal, but my one experience in a moldy county jail did not give me a cheerful impression of what a Federal prison would be like, and I faced the prospect with nervous apprehension...
...But more and more, those who face conscription are saying "No...
...More than twenty-five thousand students flocked to Washington in the spring of 1965 to join an anti-war demonstration called by SDS...
...Seven years ago I was a student at a small, midwestern college...
...This is up to the decision-makers in the Army and in the government...
...Some of those who choose prison rather than cooperation with the draft hold the questioning of timid liberals in contempt, believing that they have "sold out" to "the system...
...The conflict touched me most directly through the Selective Service System...
...During the next four years, the draft board and I engaged in a polite but frosty dueling match...
...During the next two years, students on campuses across the country, led by the Students for a Democratic Society, hotly debated the draft and the war...
...The pall of the McCarthy years hangs heavy in their memories...
...I was convicted and a month later sentenced to concurrent three-year terms for each offense...
...My objections to war in general, and the war in Vietnam in particular, are shared by many...
...A few weeks later, I experienced "Southern justice" for the first time...
...Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals was held a year later, I was back in college, finishing the last year of work for my degree in sociology...
...I knew that the club-poking police in Maryland were not representative of all government officials, but I also knew of the huge gap between the preachments of the American credo of democracy concerning peace and equal rights and their daily flouting at home and abroad...
...I was arrested for entering a segregated bowling alley in Maryland's Prince George county, a suburban area bordering on Washington...
...As long as the war drags on, and as long as television newscasts give instant coverage to the napalming of villages, and as long as people mistrust the motives and rhetoric of the President, a few of us will be sent to prison for saying "no" to participation in this and future wars...
...I was also teaching an Ohio State University extension course for trade union leaders...
...My friends ask me, as many young men ask themselves: Why go to prison...
...In the spring of 1963, I received a notice to appear for a physical examination to which I responded with what was becoming a stock letter outlining my objections to the draft...
...WHY I AM IN PRISON by PETER IRONS "V/TY LAWYER just called from Cincin nati...
...One ,day two FBI agents showed up at the college I was attending and asked me interminable questions about my beliefs, reading matter ("Which version of the Bible do you read...
...But at college I met several students and professors who considered themselves pacifists...
...Just twenty miles from the nation's capital, police and jailers as bigoted as their brothers in the deep South, poked and prodded us, shoving us into fetid, Jim Crow cells...
...Brief thoughts of moving to Canada were overcome by the knowledge that I would not be able to return to the United States...
...a middle-class college graduate and teacher with a criminal record...
...The day of the sentencing my lawyers filed an appeal...
...I added that I was not applying for exemption as a conscientious objector because I considered the asking of the question, "Do you believe in a Supreme Being...
...Lawson argued passionately for "Jail, not bail" as the course to be followed by those who wished to bear witness to the evils of segregation...
...Living in the ward with me were two Negro students from Howard University, firebrand leaders in the growing civil rights movement...
...I claim no special merit in choosing prison rather than cooperation with "the system...
...Late in the afternoon I proposed, on behalf of the Student Peace Union, a "long overdue reform" of the law by broadening exemption provisions to include those whose sincere objection was not based on traditional religious belief in a "Supreme Being...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
