ALL THOSE DRAFT RESISTERS UP THERE
NYE, RUSSEL B.
ALL THOSE DRAFT RESISTERS UP THERE RUSSEL B. NYE When it comes to facts, I have never really trusted newspapers very much. A youth spent in what Colonel Robert R. McCormick used to call...
...Russel B. Nye, professor of English at Michigan State University, received the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of George Bancroft...
...One cannot, as Alsop wrote, simply walk across the Canadian border and "fade into the economy," or, as Newsweek misleadingly implied, gain landed immigrant status simply by asking at the border...
...to 50,000-60,000...
...In January, Gannett News Service used the figure "60,000-100,000," which strikes me as having a generous margin of built-in error...
...Williams on different pages cited both 40,000 and 60,000 (the Times again...
...Roger Williams, of the Toronto group, used the Times' 60,000 but insisted that "qualified observers" calculated "many more than that...
...As for me, I trust the press no more than before, nor do I have any more information than before...
...for 1970...
...Nolan, citing Reston, and Reston, citing nobody, said "over 50,000...
...The year 1971 was wilder...
...Newspapermen quoting other newspapermen arouse my suspicions, so I wrote to Reston...
...The New York Times in April settled for "several thousand" draft evaders in Canada...
...Newsweek cited 50,00070,000, doubling what their man Alsop said a year before...
...1972 may be a banner year for inflation...
...He escalated things further by claiming that there were actually "three to four times that many" illegally in Canada, i.e., 42,00056,000...
...The most curious statistics of 1971, however, appeared in Roger Williams's book, The New Exiles, which had few footnotes and no bibliography...
...A youth spent in what Colonel Robert R. McCormick used to call "Chicagoland," reading the Tribune, and twenty-five years of historical research have convinced ine that newspapermen are highly fallible sources of information...
...On two other pages he reported 25,000 evaders and deserters legally in Canada, and on yet another page, by adding wives and children, he got the number (legal or illegal...
...The Toronto group (which used 10,000 in 1968) now placed the number at 60,000 (the Times again...
...When I heard Martin Nolan of The Boston Globe remark confidently on television (October 24, 1971) that there were "over 50,000 war resisters in Canada," I thought he might really know...
...This seemed to me an interesting situation, in which draft evaders in Canada quoted the Times which quoted draft evaders in Canada...
...He cited James Res-ton, who had used the 50,000 figure in The New Republic without attribution...
...and Canadian press estimates of 14,000 up...
...Newsweek led off in January with "75,000, mostly in Canada/' while David Brinkley, with oracular finality, made it 75,000-100,000...
...They can't both be right...
...In December, however, it raised that to 60,000 on the basis of estimates from the Toronto draft-resisters' group—a number soon to be enshrined in the American press...
...I received no reply (I was told later that this was a journalistic gaffe...
...The last four references I have seen in January and February, 1972, choose 70,000...
...On another page he put the number in mid-1967 at 5,000-6,000, representing an increase of 34,000-55,000 in less than three years, certainly one of the least-noticed mass migrations in modern history...
...I found no journalist who had consulted easily obtainable Canadian immigration figures, and with one or two exceptions, none who had researched the realities of Canadian immigration laws...
...In 1970 things settled down a bit, but not for long...
...one just doesn't ask Reston) so I thought I'd look it up, especially when that 50,000 began turning up all over the media...
...A staff worker for the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam told the press that there were 60,000 draft evaders in Canada (once more the Times), a figure which included 30,000 in Toronto alone...
...Edmund Taylor, in a well-researched article in the soon-to-be-defunct Reporter, cited a New York Times estimate of 4,000...
...Vance Garner, of the Montreal Resisters' Council, entered the field with a statement that there were 14,000 draft-age landed immigrants "here now," a figure I found impossible to derive from any known Canadian immigration reports...
...Since Senator Taft, who has initiated legislation, and Brinkley, who was commenting on it, differ by 55,000-80,000, the variance seems significant...
...In 1969 amazing things happened...
...Mike Wallace on "Sixty Minutes" used a new Montreal Resisters' estimate of 100,000, noting that it was perhaps inflated, but offering no alternative...
...What emerges from all this, and I have not by any means exhausted examples, is clear evidence of extremely sloppy journalism...
...In February, UPI settled on 70,000...
...I don't know how many draft evaders there are in Canada or elsewhere, but in the light of the growing debate over amnesty, I'd like to know as accurately and honestly as possible...
...Senator Robert Taft, in an interview given to The Los Angeles Times news service, estimated there are "about 20,000 of these men in Canada...
...Army), but nobody asks them...
...Stewart Alsop, in Newsweek, fixed for no discernible reason on 25,000-30,000...
...Nolan's reply was not helpful...
...which other papers dutifully printed...
...Newspaper and television reports on draft evaders and deserters in Canada have, over those two years, varied from 10,000 to 100,000, a margin of error that ought to have stirred a twinge of doubt in some newspaperman's breast somewhere...
...Most striking in the stories was the almost complete lack of plain legwork...
...That the figure represented a spectacular increase of 56,000 over its 1968 news report bothered nobody at the Times, while CBC's "Public Eye" program, perhaps carried away by the Times, also estimated 60,000...
...The Toronto Globe and Mail, for its part, chose 30,000100,000...
...The figure seemed to me important, so I wrote to Nolan, asking his source...
...Finally, at the close of his study, he increased this to 50,000-100,000...
...That year a writer in The Progressive thought there were "at least 10,000" draft evaders in Canada...
...I began in 1968...
...The Times shifted its estimate to 6,000-60,000 (a delightfully flexible figure, I thought) as well as quoting an "independent estimate of 20,000...
...The Atlantic, using the Toronto group's figure, came up with 3,000-10,000...
...Parade, apparently quoting the Clergy and Laymen group, said there were 30,000 in Toronto...
...News and World Report gave estimates varying from 300-400 to 25,000...
...another by a Toronto antidraft group of 10,000...
...Canadian embassy and consular sources that have no ax to grind will, if asked, estimate about 10,000 American draft evaders in Canada (about the same number of Canadians have volunteered for the U.S...
Vol. 36 • May 1972 • No. 5
