YOUNG AMERICANS IN EXILE
Wechsler, James A.
Young Americans in Exile by james a. wechsler For many thousands of young Americans on campuses throughout the nation this has been a spring of sad reflection and June may be the cruellest...
...Many of these incipient prisoners and fugitives are not the campus radicals or New Leftists of their time...
...The Student Strike For Peace on April 26 is the best way I can think of to show my disaffection over this country's present foreign policy...
...Young Americans in Exile by james a. wechsler For many thousands of young Americans on campuses throughout the nation this has been a spring of sad reflection and June may be the cruellest month...
...If somehow the President's abrupt change of course leads toward the peace talks, the student revolt— ultimately crystallized around the McCarthy candidacy—may one day be remembered as a decisive force...
...In moral terms there is no reason why the impending, large-scale draft of students should be viewed as a more dreadful consequence of this war than the induction of Negro slum-youths who have heretofore borne so disproportionate a burden of the struggle...
...And even the Korean war, perhaps because it was fought under the U.N...
...For us, the specter of the draft and what September will bring is constantly on our minds...
...It is true that the American campus witnessed large anti-war demonstrations during the mid-Thirties...
...Plans for graduate school, work, or marriage can all be wiped away with one notification in your mailbox come this June...
...The Scientific Manpower Commission has estimated that one-half to two-thirds of all inductees, in the year beginning this July, will be drawn from the class of '68 or the first-year graduate school rolls...
...Many have no doctrinaire allegiances...
...In this suspenseful interim, the paradox remains that some young Americans have already endured banishment from polite society, and many others are facing similar ordeals for crusading in a variety of ways, for the posture of rationality embraced—possibly too late—by the President two days before the Wisconsin primary...
...As the moment of truth approaches, the nature of the gap between the government and a significant segment of students will assume a new dimension...
...Some dissidents will discover ingenious devices for evasion...
...The "Declaration of Concern" signed by such student spokesmen in January, 1967, was one of the memorable turning points in the battle for a rational peace...
...I was there...
...Yet it is clear that the alienation is permeating institutions with no long tradition of student rebellion...
...There may be a certain special poignancy about the shattering of great expectations among those who have had the long luxury of education and now appear destined to share the battleground long occupied by the poor...
...As you so aptly put it, this is the plight of the college student during these perilous times...
...It is not too soon to begin to think of amnesty for past and prospective offenders whose essential crime must be defined as a premature awareness of the futile folly of this war...
...Maybe, together, we can make our discontented voices heard, not just in Washington, but all over the world...
...Johnson said he had listened long to "croakers and doubters worried about the shape of the world and what young people are going to do in it...
...flag and because there at least appeared to be a genuine manifestation of collective security, created no sense of estrangement comparable to that which so many young Americans feel about this dead-end devastation in Vietnam...
...and the ensuing course of events in Vietnam has fortified and expanded the protest...
...Johnson went on television to deliver his extraordinary renunciation of further Presidential ambitions and to proclaim a bombing halt...
...One, Greg Craig, a Harvard graduate, flew back to Madison from England where he has been studying at Oxford...
...Some of the more deeply committed have burned or turned in their draft cards...
...One demeans them, perhaps, by describing their insurgence as the revolution of the respectable...
...But few attorneys anticipate that the high court will void either the war or the draft...
...In World War II, the campuses were a fertile recruiting ground for the armed services...
...at many universities enlistment was the fashionable thing and pacifism a small if tenacious sect...
...By 1937 many who had fervently recited the "Oxford Pledge" were engaged in agonizing self-searching about the calls to serve in the International Brigade of the Spanish Republic...
...As a girl, I do not have to worry about my military status or the draft, but for the boys I know and associate with, this fear of the draft is on their minds more than they will admit...
...others will conceivably accept induction in the hope that the conflict will somehow be ended before they are obliged to begin shooting...
...Certainly the mood varies on some campuses...
...Dean Rusk and others tried in direct audiences to ease the doubts of these young men and women...
...In late February a survey at Columbia College showed that thirty per cent of the seniors would resist military service "at any cost during the present war...
...Most of those who engaged in open defiance by disposing of their cards still remain unpunished except by reclassification...
...That is when, under the new draft regulations, deferments will be terminated for the vast majority of the members of the class of 1968 and those completing their first year in graduate school...
...The poll covered 286 of the 575 members of the graduating class, Shortly after I had written a column in The New York Post on the new draft rules and their melancholy echoes on the campus, I received this letter from a young coed: "As a student presently enrolled in one of the city colleges I read with great interest your column, 'Shadows on the Campus.' It expressed all the fears and trepidations which are daily becoming a part of campus life...
...They failed...
...But numerous signs suggest that the extent of open objection will reach large and explosive proportions...
...I feel particularly involved because my boy friend is graduating this June...
...It must also be said that Lyndon B. Johnson long displayed a gross incapacity for understanding them...
...Many who were voicing disquiet a year ago are now contemplating disobedience...
...Much of the initial momentum of the challenge to the Administration's course has come from the leaders of student bodies and the editors of college newspapers...
...But its overtones of rationality and dignity have a special and memorable quality...
...It may sound dramatic when I say we feel trapped and hopeless, but that is exactly the emotions we have...
...Such symptoms of disaffection are apparently increasing rather than declining as the war drags on and as students approach their confrontations with their draft boards—and their consciences...
...It came at a time when many political dignitaries were cautiously evading the issue and when the "hawks" seemed to be dominating the country...
...Meanwhile, the ranks of those who have placed themselves in jeopardy are likely to multiply swiftly as this year's seniors and first-year graduate students become vulnerable...
...Among Mr...
...At Cornell in the same period more than thirty-five per cent of 180 seniors interviewed said they would refuse to serve in Vietnam...
...It was at Princeton in early spring that 250 students, led by the football captain, participated in a "fast for peace...
...As far back as last January, twenty-two per cent of the 529 Harvard seniors polled by the Harvard Crimson declared they would go to jail or leave the United States rather than yield to the draft...
...Yet, just about forty-eight hours after that speech, Mr...
...They are not the prototypes of any protesters in our modern history...
...No forecast can be precise...
...But the democratization of the draft is hardly the matter to be deplored (infinite as the waste of the educational investment now appears...
...America will be a poorer place if it cannot achieve a reconciliation with those of its sons who refused to succumb to the madness, and for whom the traditional, narrow rules governing conscientious objection offered no genuine alternative...
...But the nation was not at war and there was no conscription process...
...One official has estimated that 150,000 seniors who had been planning to pursue their studies will find themselves summoned to war before the next academic term ends...
...they include respectables of Fraternity Row and the sons of Goldwaterites who, in another time, might have been disposed to view the draft resisters as some species of eccentric or worse...
...Forty-three per cent of the senior class took part in the poll...
...Even if all those who did not respond were signifying assent to induction, this would still leave more than 100 prospective resis-ters or defectors...
...JAMES A. WECHSLER is editorial page editor and a featured columnist for The New York Post, tast month he was honored with the presentation of the Fiorina tasker Civil tiberties Award...
...Many of them have been marching for Eugene McCarthy in Wisconsin and New Hampshire...
...government and incalculable numbers of college-educated youths for whom the classroom has heretofore offered, a privileged sanctuary...
...It is even conceivable that one impact of the revised draft rules has been to compel many middle-class Americans to ask harder questions about the character and conduct of a war that so long seemed a distant thing...
...But in fairness to many of the students whose draft calls are now approaching, it should be said that they —unlike a lot of their parents— exhibited a moral revulsion about this crusade long before their ivory towers were invaded and while many of their parents were asleep or adrift...
...I wondered as I listened to the climactic lines of that speech whether—-among all the factors that induced this startling shift—the rising threat of student disobedience had been far more influential than many commentators conceded...
...How many will instead choose to be young men without a country—either by choosing prison over service, or by actually fleeing to Canada or other places...
...Barring the miracle of peace, it will foreshadow an unprecedented clash between the U.S...
...It is a terrible feeling to know that there is something which is controlling your destiny which you cannot change...
...You can be sure that I and thousands of others will be marching on the 26th...
...Until now the anti-war movement in the colleges has been, for most participants, an exercise in freedom of expression...
...In the last two years I have met many of these quiet rebels whose voices—perhaps because of their reasoned, somber tone—commanded so much attention...
...presumably the Justice Department has delayed prosecution pending the outcome of the Supreme Court tests...
...Only those already in or admitted to medical school, those with a clear record of religious objection, or those with 4-F disabilities are assured of continued immunity...
...In an address to the so-called Young Democrats in late March, Mr...
...a few, guilt-ridden over their protected status, have stoically volunteered for service as a form of sacrificial protest against the inequities of the draft system...
...In many respects they most resemble the youths whom John F. Kennedy enlisted in the Peace Corps—but somehow that adventure now seems a remote enterprise...
...Many are remarkably impressive individuals...
...plainly these are not ordinary times...
...Wechsler's books are "The Age of Suspicion" and "Confessions of a Middle-aged Editor...
...It will offer a bright contrast to the stodgy patrioteering of the AFL-CIO leadership which so tenaciously resisted the emergence of the Labor Assembly for Peace...
...He added confidently that he had seen youth serve in two wars from which "they came back without the blush of shame" and with their eyes fixed hopefully on the future...
...We can't even plan a future together because we don't even know if we will have a chance to have all our dreams fulfilled...
...Students must continue to show their opposition to the war...
...they were evenly divided between the choice of prison or exile...
...For most of those who clung to the anti-war banner, the Nazi-Soviet pact and, ultimately, the attack on Pearl Harbor resolved the issue of personal choice (except, of course, for that small company of unwavering pacifists whose convictions are unaltered by the circumstances of a particular war...
...While the Rusks and Rostows plied the President with dosages of optimism and piety, a different wisdom was emerging from the campus...
...one is tempted to say that Adlai Stevenson would have been proud of them...
Vol. 32 • May 1968 • No. 5
