A Short Dedication
After graduation from the University of Texas in 1969 with a double major in German Literature and History, I was drafted into the US Army and served as a combat medic in Vietnam. I was also a conscientious objector (CO), known by our Selective Service classification as 1-A-O. What, you say, a conscientious objector in the Army! Yes, such a thing actually existed and all of us who were begrudgingly granted this special designation by local draft boards were destined to become medics, and, more often than not, medics assigned to combat units — infantry, artillery, armor — though we received no weapons training and carried no weapons. I had been very much opposed to the war, hence my application for CO status, and this is where my story intersects with that of Dr. Swaffar, for she was also very much involved in her own right in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a commonality that has occasioned many interesting discussions and comparisons.
After being discharged from the Army at Ft Sam Houston in 1971, I returned to my studies as a graduate student in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas where I had been offered a Teaching Assistantship. Although I never took a course at this time with Janet, she did supervise me as a TA, and through this association we got to know each other. I left the University in 1976 as ABD (all-but-dissertation), my wife and I deciding that we would prefer the stability of ranch life for ourselves and our growing family over the uncertainty and stress of an academic career. We never regretted this decision, but for many years I carried a lingering regret that I had not finished my doctorate. It is important, after all, to finish what you start. Even though I consciously turned my back on academia, I did not renounce my scholarly interests, which led me to begin a parallel career as a published author. By a serendipitous chance meeting — at an art opening in Columbus, Texas, of all places — Janet and I recognized each other after lo those many years and fell into a lengthy catch-up conversation. I mentioned that in addition to my first book, Nassau Plantation; the Evolution of a Texas German Slave Plantation, I had just completed an annotated translation of a Texas German novel by Friedrich Armand Strubberg, Friedrichsburg; The Colony of the German Fürstenverein in Texas, which was destined for publication by the University of Texas Press, but had not yet been released. Janet said that it might be possible to use this translation as my long missing dissertation and thereby obtain my doctorate. I could not believe this was possible, but she took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and made it happen. It was an extraordinary turn of events: Janet appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, and single-handedly made the impossible possible, erasing the aforementioned regret and opening up a whole new and exciting chapter in my life that allowed me the opportunity, with the newly acquired doctorate in hand, to teach at my old alma mater, albeit at a rather late stage of my life. Better late than never. I shall remain eternally indebted to Janet. To me she exemplifies the best in academia and it is a pleasure and honor to dedicate the following essay to her.
“The History of Pacifism in the United States as it relates to 1-A-O Conscientious Objectors in Vietnam; a Short and Personal Overview”
Four main currents supported pacifism in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: an array of historic peace churches, the growth of secular organizations dedicated to international peace, the rise of an International Labor and Socialist movement, and, finally, the advent of prominent individuals who lent their prestige to the cause of peace and non-violence. In this article, I will give a brief overview of these four major currents and relate them to the always difficult and never-resolved problem of the conscientious objector within the military, which came to a head during the Vietnam War, a development that intersects with my own personal story as a 1-A-O conscientious objector. The thesis of this essay is twofold: 1) that the dilemma posed by the emergence of the secular/ethical/political conscientious objector as opposed to religious conscientious objectors was an important, if not overriding, factor contributing to the termination of the draft by Congress and President Richard Nixon in 1973 and the establishment of an all-volunteer, professional army, and; 2) that the service of 1-A-O medics in World War II, Korea, Vietnam was something quite extraordinary in the history of warfare and deserves not to be erased from memory.
Religious pacifism: Chelčický and Anabaptists
Pacifism and non-violent resistance as a meaningful movement relevant to the present really begins with the Bohemian Reformation, which is strongly associated with the Czech theologian and Catholic priest, Jan Hus (1369-1415). Drawing on the writings of John Wycliff, who preceded him, and anticipating Martin Luther, who followed him, Hus was appalled by the excesses and corruption of the Catholic Church. He was especially incensed by the shameless peddling of indulgences, a form of celestial bribery by means of which one could purchase leniency in the afterlife with gifts to the church in the here and now. Hus, unhappily, was burnt at the stake for his heretical views in 1415, but his teachings had fallen on fertile ground and grew into a formidable movement that survived his martyrdom and cut across all classes of society. The populations of both Moravia and Bohemia swelled to be majority Hussite, eventually rising in rebellion against Catholic authority, and remaining Protestant in one form or another until 1620 when the momentous Battle of White Mountain (Bílé Hoře) gave a decisive victory to the Catholics in the Thirty Years’ War. Protestantism, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a meaningful movement very shortly thereafter in the Czech-speaking lands.
But before this disastrous turn of events, the Bohemian Reformation produced the first national church separate from Roman authority in Europe and also the first truly pacifist movement, which achieved a separate identity within the lager Hussite movement. The pacific element derives almost exclusively from a most extraordinary figure, Petr Chelčický (1385-1460), who himself took early inspiration from Jan Hus, but found an entirely different emphasis. As early as 1420, Chelčický taught that violence was unacceptable, especially in religious matters. Chelčický used the Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:24–30) — always a scriptural touchstone for pacifistic sentiment — to show that both the thief and the honest man, the hard worker and the slacker, should be allowed to live together until the harvest was done. He thought that it is wrong even to kill the sinful, and that Christians should refuse all military service. He argued that if the poor refused, the powerful would have no one to go to war for them. Chelčický taught that no physical power can destroy evil, and that Christians should accept persecution without retaliation. He believed war was the worst of all evils, and thought soldiers were no more than common murderers. He even opposed defensive wars. He believed that the example of Jesus and the Gospel was, first and foremost, an example of peace and forgiveness.
His teachings included ideas later adopted by Anabaptists, Quakers, and other smaller pacifist sects, and also embraced much later by important philosophical pacifists such as Leo Tolstoy. He was the first pacifist writer of the Renaissance, predating Erasmus and Menno Simons by nearly 100 years. Paradoxically, the main part of the Hussite movement rejected Chelčický’s teachings on nonviolence, and much bloodshed occurred within the Hussite movement itself as different factions fought pitched battles for ascendency in the name of God.
Nearly a hundred years after the death of Chelčický, but before the Battle of White Mountain, another religious movement gained a foothold in the southern part of Moravia, the other main Czech province. Anabaptist refugees from Southern Germany and the German speaking areas of Switzerland under the leadership of Balthasar Humbaier sought refuge in Moravia. Here, the Brethren as they were known in shorthand, lived in villages and townships of from 100 to 2,000 inhabitants where they practiced an extreme form of communal existence on the principle of omnia sunt communia [everything in common], rejecting even the personal ownership of money as they sought to follow what they believed to be the example of the early Christians according to Acts 2. They too exhibited pacifist tendencies.
The Counter-Reformation and resulting wars changed everything. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), either a religious war with political overtones or a political war with religious overtones, depending on your point of view, devastated whole areas of Central and Northern Europe. During these religious upheavals, those Protestant leaders who had been willing to form close alliances with local sovereign leaders, be they members of the aristocracy or the burgers of free cities, emerged as the most successful, and the movements they shaped survived to become the dominant and, in some states, exclusive Protestant sects. This was especially true of Martin Luther in Northern Europe and of John Calvin in Switzerland and the Low Countries, and clearly their successes owed more to political expediency than religious fervor. The principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, [whoever rules; his religion], first adopted in the Treaty of Augsburg in 1545 and subsequently revived in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, helped to cement this reality. This development, however, obscures the fact that scores of charismatic reformers and hundreds of thousands of common people from all walks were unhappy that both Luther and Calvin had subordinated their movements to secular authority and exchanged one priestly authority for another. This disaffection gave rise to the Radical Reformation as opposed to the so-called MagisterialReformation; a reformation of the Reformation, so to speak, which became, in turn, the seedbed of the Anabaptist movement.
Anabaptism spread like wildfire across Holland, Switzerland, and Southern Germany in the period from 1525 until 1550. For those not schooled in the intricacies of Christian theology, it is hard to appreciate in retrospect why the rejection of childhood baptism administered by priests in favor of adult baptism at one’s own initiative — the core belief of all Anabaptists– was such an explosive issue. But this rejection struck at the heart of the Catholic belief system, which held that only the Catholic Church had the ‘Power of the Keys’; that a person could only gain entrance to Heaven in the afterlife through the intercession of Catholic priests and the application of Catholic rites, especially the rite of Baptism. Since it was a precondition for the afterlife, the sooner one was baptized the better. Both Luther and Calvin disagreed with this only to the extent that they substituted their own “reformed” churches for the Catholic Church. The rejection of clerical authority, be it Catholic or Protestant, also carried within it an implicit rejection of all authority, including secular. This is the main reason why the Anabaptist movement ran headlong into a stone wall of opposition: Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics joined with secular authorities to make it the most persecuted sect in the history of Central and Northern Europe prior to the persecution of the Jews in the twentieth century.
The fact that many Anabaptist leaders openly supported the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524/ 25 — that extraordinary and spontaneous uprising by hundreds of thousands of peasants across large swaths of German-speaking Central Europe — did not help their cause. With Martin Luther’s blessing and encouragement, the feudal overlords in the affected areas unleased a bloodbath. Armed only with pitchforks and scythes and a naïve belief in divine intercession, the peasant masses stood no chance against the well-armed and well-trained armies of their feudal overlords. Consequently, upwards of 100,000 perished in several pitched battles and in the pogroms that followed. The hatred and persecution suffered by the Anabaptist leaders is perhaps best symbolized by the three iron cages that still hang from the steeple of St. Lamberti Cathedral in Muenster Germany where the tortured and mutilated bodies of three Anabaptist leaders of the local uprising were left to rot in 1535.
The active support of many Anabaptists leaders during the Peasant’s Revolt underscores the fact that although most longed for the simple life modeled after Christ’s example, not all rejected the sword. The movement, in fact, split early on into two factions, the so-called “Schwertler” [the sword-bearing] or those willing to use violence to achieve their ends, and the “Stäbler” [the staff-bearing] or those rejecting violence and embracing a total pacifism reminiscent of Petr Chelčický from whose writings they clearly drew inspiration. Menno Simons (1496-1561), a former Catholic priest from the Friesland region of the Low Countries, emerged as one of the most eloquent spokesmen and charismatic leaders of the pacifist branch, becoming the eponymous leader of the Mennonite movement. His influence on Anabaptism in the Low Countries was profound, and Dutch Mennonites generally followed his lead in rejecting violence.
In 1527 Michael Sattler chaired a convocation of Swiss Anabaptists in Schleitheim, Switzerland, that unanimously endorsed the so-called Schleitheim Confession, the clearest statement of Anabaptist principles in respect to pacifism that exists. Article six of the agreement is unambiguous:
Now many, who do not understand Christ’s will for us will ask whether a Christian may or should use the sword against the wicked for the protection and defense of the good, or for the sake of love. The answer is unanimously revealed: Christ teaches and commands us to learn from Him, for He is meek and lowly of heart, and thus we shall find rest for our souls.
Looking back, the hostility encountered by the Anabaptists and the brutality with which they were persecuted are quite remarkable. Michael Sattler, who had chaired the meeting that issued the Schleitheim Confession that rejected violence, was himself put to death. The persecution, torture, and executions continued throughout Europe for 150 years, and, unlike Calvinists and Lutherans, the Anabaptist failed even to get recognition in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the treaty that put an end to the horrors of the Thirty Years War. The result: persecution continued in Europe well after the treaty, and — once it became an option — remnants of the pacifist Stäbler — the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and other smaller groups — began a systematic relocation to Southern Russia and North America, leaving only small pockets in Europe, while the more militant Schwertler vanished completely from the European scene.
An extraordinary book, Martyrs Mirror or The Bloody Theater, first published in Holland in 1660 in Dutch by J. Thieleman van Braght, documents the stories and testimonies of Christian martyrs, especially Anabaptists. The 1685 edition of the book is illustrated with 104 copper etchings by Jan Luyken that display in graphic, horrific detail the suffering endured by Anabaptists. Next to the Bible, the Martyrs Mirror is said to hold a prominent place in nearly all Amish and Mennonite homes and served as an inspiration to later generations who faced their own trials.
By this point, the Anabaptist sects had taken on certain characteristics that continue to define them to the present: they were communal rather than individualistic, agricultural rather than mercantile, of rural peasant stock rather than urban, and inward-looking rather than missionary. The communities they established endeavored to be left alone to live their lives according to their core beliefs, making only such bare-bone concessions to outside secular authority as absolutely necessary, but remaining throughout stubbornly dedicated to their pacifistic beliefs and always (or nearly always) refusing military service.
Since they rejected an organized clergy and any kind of established authority that could insist upon a standard orthodoxy, the Anabaptists continued to be fluid and dynamic with shifting allegiances and changing requirements, some stricter; some looser. The result has been a bewildering array of subsets within the movement that continued to shift and realign in subtle ways. The Old Order Amish are the most conservative, clinging stubbornly to the simple life. We associate them with horses and buggies, homespun clothes, and houses without electricity. They are sometimes referred to as “Plain Mennonites.” Those associated with the General Conference of Mennonites, on the other hand, have often made concessions to modern life, although they remain agricultural for the most part, wear distinctive clothing, and preserve the trappings of a simple communal life. The degree to which they do this varies from community to community as each community is governed by its own Ordnung [set of rules], but the most liberal of these communities allow tractors, cars, and even electricity. Both groups preserve within their communities various German dialects from the seventeenth century, as if in a linguistic museum. Of all the Anabaptist sects, the General Conference Mennonites emerged as the most numerous and by 1916 they numbered about 80,000 members in the United States.
Large numbers of German, Swiss, and Dutch Anabaptists began arriving to North America around 1685 as part of a larger migration of Germans from the Palatinate area of Southern Germany. The dynastic wars between the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs for control of the Holy Roman Empire accelerated this emigration. This conflict reproduced on a smaller scale the horrors of the Thirty-Years War with the Palatinate area of present Germany becoming the main arena of warfare. Once again, the peasants and rural villagers suffered the most. England, hoping to consolidate its hold on Northern Ireland, took in thousands of refugees, who came to be known as the “Poor Palatines,” and attempted to resettle them in Northern Ireland. However, most resisted assimilation and stubbornly held on to their native language and customs. Frustrated that they refused to become Englishmen, first Queen Anne and then King George eventually shipped the great majority to crown colonies in the New World over the first half of the eighteenth century, principally to South Carolina and Pennsylvania. The Anabaptists formed a significant part of this larger migration from the Palatinate and settled almost exclusively in Pennsylvania, which, due to its Quaker influence, was known for its religious tolerance.
With the thought that German industriousness would pump up tax revenues in newly acquired provinces, including the Crimea, Catherine the Great also encouraged Mennonites to settle in Russia, the other major destination of Anabaptist emigration. Thousands made the move between 1785 and 1788, but eventually a large number of these actually fled Russia and resettled in North America in the period from 1872 until 1910 after the Czar of Russia began to withdraw their exemption from military service, which had been one of the original conditions for their move to Russia. It has been estimated that about 17,000 made the move to the New World with many of them choosing the prairie provinces of Canada, which reminded them of the Volga landscape of Russia.
Religious Pacifism: Quakers
Quakerism, the other main source of European religious pacifism, was exclusively an English movement until it found a second home in North America. George Fox (1624-1691) is considered the father of the movement. In the midst of the religious and constitutional turmoil sweeping over England during his lifetime, he experienced a series of revelations, becoming increasingly convinced that it was possible to experience Christ directly without the intercession of an ordained clergy and arguing passionately that the true experience of Christ was fundamentally a call for peace and brotherhood among men; an epiphany remarkably similar to that experienced by Petr Chelčický and other early leaders of the Anabaptist movement.
In this, the two movements were similar, but they differed markedly in other ways. Quakerism was by and large a movement of prosperous tradesmen and shop owners in the towns and cities rather than farmers from the countryside. William Penn, who succeeded George Fox as the leader and promoter of the movement, was a scion of one of the richest and most politically influential families in England. The Quakers were always willing to take an active hand in local councils and governing bodies, often rising to positions of leadership even in places where they were in the minority. The movement was also missionary from the beginning, another important difference, patiently seeking to gain converts and always taking the long view that over the years, decades, and even centuries their movement would gain in membership proportionately to eventually become dominant. Individual members suffered persecution, to be sure, but the membership as a whole never experienced the ferocious and unrelenting hatred encountered by their mainland counterparts, the Anabaptists.
The Quakers were granted their own colony, of course, in Pennsylvania, but it never became exclusively Quaker while Quakers themselves often settled in other areas of North America, principally in the New England colonies. Here they occasionally did suffer outbursts of hatred and persecution. Massachusetts was the most active in persecuting the Quakers, but the Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven colonies also singled out Quakers for their beliefs. When the first Quakers arrived in Boston in 1656 there were no laws yet enacted against them, but this quickly changed, and punishments were meted out with or without the law. It was primarily the ministers and the magistrates who opposed the Quakers and their evangelistic efforts. A particularly vehement tormentor, the Reverend John Norton of the Boston church, clamored for the law of banishment upon pain of death. He is the one who later wrote the vindication to England, justifying the execution of the first two Quakers in 1659.
Despite these isolated examples, Quakerism set root early in the North American colonies and became one of the main sources of pacifism in the United States with a growing respectability and acceptance that existed from the time of the French and Indian Wars to the present. In the eighteenth century the Quakers set up meeting houses even in those areas in New England where they had formerly met persecution. Because many pursued occupations in the small trades and in commerce, they branched out where opportunity beckoned, and never seemed to be tied as closely to place and community as their Anabaptist counterparts.
Home Grown religious groups of a pacifist nature
The nineteenth century witnessed a broad-based religious awakening in the United States that by and large rejected the solemnity and gravitas associated with Lutheran, Anglican, and even Quaker services. They favored a new brand of religiosity that was loose, informal, and openly emotional in a way unthinkable to the older denominations that originated across the ocean. The two most successful of these, the Methodists and Baptists, actively proselytized by sending out itinerant preachers and organizing enthusiastic camp meetings. Active for the most part in the Southern States, both denominations converted thousands during the nineteenth century. Neither of these mass religious movements, however, made any claim to pacifism and relatively few of its members ever claimed conscientious objector status based on the teachings of their founders and proselytizers.
A bewildering array of lessor sects, denominations, and churches, however, that also sprang up during the latter half of the nineteenth century did profess pacifist beliefs. Their presence became particular noticeable during the First World War. These included the International Bible Students Association (Russellites), Seventh Day Adventists, Church of God and Saints of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ, Church of Daniel’s Band, Church of the Living God, Pentecostal, Church of the Nazarene, True Light, Metropolitan, Molokans, Brethren in Christ, Christadelphians, Church of the First Born, Israelites of the House of David, Church of the Holiness, Koreshan Unity, and a few others.
Of these, the Seventh Day Adventists, both by virtue of their numbers and a peculiarity of their belief system, emerge as the most interesting for our story. After much struggle and institutional skepticism in the nineteenth century, the sect eventually gained complete acceptance as a legitimate pacifistic church during the Second World War, but more on this later.
Rational Pacifism: Erasmus and the Enlightenment
We turn now to what is usually termed rational pacifism (as opposed to religious pacifism). This concept also appeared for the first time in Europe during the period of religious turmoil and ferment that gave rise to Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, on the one hand, and the Anabaptists, on the other. The name we most associate with philosophical pacifism from this period is Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), the widely respected scholar of the Northern Renaissance and eloquent voice of Northern Humanism.
Erasmus had an instinctive distrust of herd-think and religious tribalism; a very admirable trait, and one near and dear to my own way of thinking. But I am also drawn to Erasmus’ uncompromising pacifism, which seems to have sprung from both his mind and heart. Deeply grieved by the death of his beloved pupil, Alexander, son of King James IV of Scotland, a promising young man who fell alongside his father at the Battle of Flodden, he wrote passionately of the stupidity and irrationality of war:
There is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome, in a word more unworthy of man, not to say a Christian.
Erasmus also argued eloquently against war on rational grounds, and many of his arguments later became mainstays of liberal pacifism. Princes who wished to display their power and glory, suggested Erasmus, would be better employed developing the welfare of their own kingdoms than extending their boundaries at the price of untold suffering. War, he suggested, was ‘unnatural’: animals did not make war on one another. ‘Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?’ War was nothing but a device that allowed the nobility to maintain control over their subjects.
In retrospect, Erasmus’ plaidoyer against war and those who wage it sounds like a lone voice in the wilderness; it went too much against the grain of the times and the Renaissance notion of what constituted manliness to receive general approbation. Also, it lacked any concrete suggestions about how to restructure the existing political order in a way to that would promote peace rather than insure perpetual warfare.
The first real coherent plan along these lines emerged in the latter part of the eighteenth century in the period known as the ‘Age of Reason’ or the ‘Enlightenment’; that revolutionary turning point in the intellectual history of Europe. With the discovery (or rediscovery) of the scientific method the genie was let out of the bottle. The rigid belief systems that explained the world and man’s place in it, upheld for centuries by Church dogma and enforced by the Inquisition, crumbled before an avalanche of hard facts obtained by patient and careful observation, the heart and soul of the new method. Our understanding in all the sciences increased by leaps and bounds, but revolutionary ideas of a social, economic and political nature, also derived from the new spirit, took root. Our own constitution is the clearest political expression of the new ideas that came out of the Enlightenment.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss all the individuals and all the intellectual currents, many still operative, that had antecedents in the Enlightenment. I will restrict my discussion to three individuals, representative of a new attitude and plan for perpetual peace: the French essayist Charles de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the Scottish economist, Adam Smith (1723-1790). Between the three, several essential points emerged as a basis for perpetual peace based on rational considerations:
- War is inherently irrational (Charles de Saint-Pierre, Kant)
- Republican forms of government are more likely to be peaceful than kingdoms or monarchies (Charles de Saint-Pierre, Kant)
- An international order is necessary to arbitrate disputes among nations (Kant)
- The new idea of free trade, where a rising tide lifts all ships, promotes peace; the old philosophy of mercantilism, where a country only gains wealth at the expense of other countries, guaranteed perpetual strife and war. (Smith)
These points crystalized to become the basis of liberal, pacifist thought from that point to the present and gave rise to many organizations on both sides of the Atlantic dedicated to promoting peace between the nations. The first such American organization of note in the United States was the Massachusetts Peace Society (1815–1828), established to “diffuse light on the subject of war, and to cultivate the principles and spirit of peace.” In 1828, it, along with several other smaller groups, fused to form the American Peace Society, which emerged the largest and most significant of such organization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Society opposed war between nation states and in a series of international conferences vigorously lobbied for the establishment of a “Congress of Nations” to achieve this end.
The first International Congress was held in London on the initiative of the American Peace Society in 1843. Throughout the next decade, more congresses convened in various cities. Interestingly, however, the Society did not oppose the American Civil War, regarding the Union’s effort as necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery, which underscores an important point: the organization was vehemently opposed to organized warfare among nation-states, but not to all warfare, which is to say it never approached the absolutism of Petr Chelčický during the Bohemian Reformation, Erasmus during the Northern Renaissance, or Leo Tolstoy at the end of the nineteenth century.
Both the League of Nations, founded after the exhaustion of WWI, and the United Nations, established after the horrors of WWII, clearly rest on the core ideas vigorously championed by the American Peace Society and popularized through the international conferences sponsored by it and similar sister-organizations across the sea. But for our discussion, these organizations offered scant cover to individuals opposed to warfare primarily on philosophical grounds who found themselves faced with military conscription.[1]
Socialism and the International Labor Movement as a source of pacifism
A competing secular/political force gathered momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century to become one of the main wellsprings of pacifist sentiment by the time of the First World War, and that is the international labor or socialist movement. It shared some common ground with American Peace Society and similar organizations in that it was definitely secular at root but it differed fundamentally because its antecedents lay in the Industrial Revolution, not in the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the latter decades of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century, spread quickly to both Central Europe and the United States where it fundamentally and irrevocably transformed the traditional class structures of Western society that had been operative since time immemorial. The large proletariat class it created, men who had nothing to offer but their labor, called for a new interpretation of history and society. Philosophers in France, Germany, and England rose to the occasion to offer new analyses based on the new realties, and in this connection, we think of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Ferdinand LaSalle in Germany, Henri de Saint-Simon in France, Robert Owen in England, and Mikhail Bakunin in Russia. The United States produced no philosopher of the stature of these men but it did produce a brilliant organizer, Eugene Debs, a pivotal figure in the labor movement in this country. “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” became the rallying cry of the Socialists, and to their way of thinking the substitution of class loyalty for narrow national, religious, or ethnic loyalties, held out great promise for world peace.
Prominent Individuals: Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King
In addition to the existence of religious sects dedicated to non-violence and the rise of secular organizations committed to peace, pacifism received significant impetus toward the end of the nineteenth century from another source, namely the influence of famous individuals unconnected to either organized religion or established peace societies; men and women who raised their voices and leveraged their celebrity status in furtherance of peace. In this respect, the example of the famous Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) comes first and foremost to mind. Tolstoy is, of course, world famous for his monumental novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The novels brought him international fame and cemented his reputation as one of the great novelists of all time.
Tolstoy, however, achieved another kind of notoriety by virtue of a non-fiction book he released in 1894 entitled in English, The Kingdom of God is Within You. Invoking the example of Petr Chelčický and his belief that the true example of Christ was one of absolute non-violence, Tolstoy almost single-handedly resurrected the memory of this most remarkable man who, as we have seen, had inspired the first truly pacifist sect in Western Civilization. Knowledge of Chelčický had remained sketchy in the English-speaking world since he had written exclusively in his native Czech and had never been fully translated.
Rejecting both organized religions, on the one hand, and international peace societies, on the other, Tolstoy argued eloquently for an individual approach to pacifism, usually referred to as “Christian anarchism,” which had a profound impact. Martin Luther King took his inspiration from Mohandas Gandhi, but Gandhi had been so “overwhelmed” by the experience of Tolstoy’s book that he opened up a lifelong correspondence with the famous Russian and readily admitted his abiding influence on his life and thought. Thus, Gandhi’s efforts in securing independence from Great Britain for India and Martin Luther King’s non-violent movement to achieve equal rights for Black Americans go straight back to Tolstoy, who, in turn, goes straight back to Petr Chelčický.
The individual pacifist prior to the First World War
Four main currents, then, bolstered pacifism in the nineteenth century: an array of pacifist churches, secular organizations dedicated to international peace, the Socialist/Labor movement, and famous individuals who lent their prestige to the cause of peace and non-violence. Within this context and background, we need now to ask the question how did the common pacifist fare and what mechanisms were in place, if any, to deal with him within the United States prior to the twentieth century? Fortunately, a reputable scholar, Peter Brock, has provided us with a massively detailed study, Pacifism in the United States; From the Colonial Era to the First World War (1968). When we step back from the hundreds of individual case studies he documents, a picture emerges that some might find surprising. What we find prior to World War I is generally a picture of accommodation, if not tolerance, especially for those who hailed from the old-line peace churches: the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, and this is due, for the most part, to an interesting safety-valve that had existed in North America almost from the beginning.
The South introduced universal conscription for the first time during the Civil War. The North quickly followed suit. Prior to that, authorities had relied on well-regulated militias to quickly ramp up numbers to meet any military contingency, be it a threat from the French, the Indians, or (subsequently) the British. Service in these militias, organized at the colonial and later state level, was usually compulsory for all adult men in their good years (18-45), but nearly always it was possible to avoid active participation by either paying for a substitute or paying a fine. This safety-valve continued to operate for both the South and the North during the Civil War even after compulsory conscription became law.
The practice came in for much criticism, but it did provide an outlet for avoiding service for those wealthy enough (or credit-worthy enough) to afford it. Many hundreds of Amish, Mennonites, and Quakers took advantage of this provision to avoid service, but as Brock documents in his study, even those who could not raise the necessary funds, and were compelled to serve, usually ended up as non-combatants, often in the role of hospital orderlies, teamsters, or grave diggers. For the very few who faced courts-martial, or even the firing squad, President Lincoln himself often intervened to grant clemency.
In February 1864, a little more than a year before Appomattox, the North actually enacted a law for conscientious objectors, the first of its kind, and one destined to be a model for future laws.
Members of religious denominations, who shall by oath or affirmation declare that they are conscientiously opposed to the bearing of arms, and who are prohibited from doing so by the rules and articles of faith and practice of said religious denominations, shall, when drafted into military service, be considered non-combatants, and shall be assigned by the Secretary of War to duty in the hospitals, or to the care of freedmen, or shall pay the sum of three hundred dollars to such person as the Secretary of War shall designate to receive it, to be applied to the benefit of the sick and wounded soldiers. (Section 17 of the Act of February 24, 1864 (13 Stat, 6,9).
Opposition to the draft per se was more determinative and a greater challenge for authorities both North and South than disruptions occasioned by individual conscientious objectors. The New York City draft riots, which erupted among Irish immigrants and morphed into anti-Black mob action, were the most spectacular manifestation of this sentiment in the North. But it became a much more serious problem for the South. Few of the historic peace churches had much of a foothold in the South, so authorities rarely had to deal with the problem of conscientious objection due to religious upbringing. The draft was another matter. In their first wave of enthusiasm for the war, secessionists had deluded themselves that the war would be of short duration and that they would be able to satisfy all manpower needs from their militias. The reality of the first year of war, however, had quickly disabused them of such phantasies. Universal conscription would be the only way to satisfy manpower requirements for a protracted war, as distasteful as it might be for the Confederacy, a government founded on an extreme state’s rights agenda and a weak central government. Prior to the spring of 1862 when the conscription laws came into effect, those opposed to secession and reluctant to put on a Confederate uniform could simply sit out the war on the sidelines, but his was no longer possible, and it was not long before serious trouble broke out, especially in the ring of border states where the dominant slave holding elite was not so well entrenched.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to document all the lynchings, pitched battles, and low-grade bushwhacking that occurred as a result of these tensions, but I do mention that my own great-great-grandfather, a Union man in Northwest Arkansas, was murdered in front of his wife and children by a gang of Confederate Jayhawkers, who, using the pretext of rooting out disloyalty, systematically terrorized families of known Unionists and often engaging in outright criminality, including pillage and murder. My great-great grandfather’s story was not unusual. Being Unionist in the South during the Civil War was often a harrowing and precarious experience.
World War I and the first national draft
The close of the Civil War brought an end to the draft until America’s entrance into the First World War,[2] which saw the first truly nation-wide draft. After President Wilson and the US Congress reversed course and decided to declare war against Germany in the spring of 1917, Congress hastily organized a national draft, based closely on the Civil War law mentioned above. At the same time, the Wilson Administration set up a propaganda wing, the Committee on Public Information (1917–1919), the so-called Creel Commission, whose purpose was to persuade and cajole the American Public to fall into lockstep behind the war effort, including the draft, but barring that, to publicly shame and intimidate any and all who still harbored reservations. With the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, Congress criminalized all opposition by granting the government extraordinary powers that essentially invalidated the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Accordingly, it actually became a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” to oppose the U.S. or the war effort, including the draft.
Their efforts fell heavily on two groups: Socialists and German Americans. With the activities of the Creel Commission and the implementation of above-mentioned legislation, the war quickly took on the coloration of a righteous crusade for the preservation of democracy against the threat of German militarism, and in the poisonous atmosphere thus created, it became ill-advised to speak German in public, to hold German festivals, to play German music, to print German-language newspapers, even to hold Lutheran church services in German, and so forth and so on. German-American culture in the United States, if not completely extinguished by the campaign of organized intimidation that ensued, was set back in a way from which it never fully recovered. Indeed, it is not too much say that he greatest abuses against the U.S. Constitution occurred during the First World War, exceeding even those of either Federal or Confederate authorities during the Civil War.
This anti-German bias extended to the draft and becomes an important part of the story. Congress had actually conceived the new draft law in a spirit of broad tolerance and, taking its cue from English law, had even made nominal provisions for so-called “individual objectors” (i.e., secular/ethical/political). But a wide gap soon opened between the law as written and the policy as implemented. The chief problem arose from the fact that there was only de facto civilian oversight in regard to conscientious objector applicants.[3] The law required young men who received induction notices, including those who intended to apply for conscientious objector status, to report directly to local Army bases where one’s fate hung from the discretion of whatever officer happened to be in charge. These officers, in turn, often took their cue from a growing institutional skepticism toward conscientious objectors and the burgeoning anti-German bias that had quickly emerged within both the military and political establishments. A quote from the then Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, makes this skepticism quite clear:
One’s contempt for the slacker and coward makes him naturally impatient of a man who refuses to take the risk of battle and distrustful of excuses based on conscience when one’s own healthy conscience shows the path of duty to lie in the direction of self-sacrifice. [4]
This skepticism fell heaviest on those religious sects that had their roots in the German-speaking areas of Europe. Major Walter Guest Kellogg, then Judge Advocate of the U.S. Army and Chairman of the Board of Inquiry, the man charged with hearing the appeals of all conscientious objectors, made his prejudices crystal clear. In a remarkable frank and self-reflective book, The Conscientious Objector[5] published in 1919, a year after the cessation of hostilities, he wrote in respect to the Mennonites:
It is difficult to realize that we have among our citizenry a class of men who are so intellectually inferior and so unworthy to assume its burdens and its responsibilities. I doubt extremely if fifty percent of the Mennonites examined, because of their ignorance and stupidity, should ever have been admitted into the Army at all…They are good tillers of the soil; they are doubtless, according to their own lights, good Christians, but they are essentially a type of Americans of which America cannot be proud.
In consequence of these prejudices, an unspoken policy quickly took shape, namely the military took upon itself the task of persuading, cajoling, or intimidating conscientious objector applicants who had their roots in European Anabaptism into changing their minds, especially those who refused even non-combatant status within the military, and this included the great majority of Mennonites. The fact that many of them still spoke German clearly exacerbated the institutional prejudice aligned against them. The Army was often successful. The policy even led to friction between the progressive and conservative wings of the Mennonite movement after a substantial number of the progressives reluctantly agreed to non-combatant service within the military and agreed to wear the uniform. In contrast, the conservatives Mennonites (including Old Order Amish and Hutterites), who were usually referred to as “Plain Mennonites,” stubbornly refused either of these directives and insisted on alternative service outside the military, usually as farm laborers. Commanding officers often denied or prolonged applications for both classes that should have been routinely granted since they clearly met all the criteria as spelled out by the law, and they did this in order to implement this unwritten but well-understood policy of coerced dissuasion and suppression of any and all things German, even if pacifistic.
In contrast to his attitude toward the Mennonites, Kellogg actually praised the Quakers:
It is pleasant now to turn to the Society of Friends…However much it may be regretted that so intelligent and so, at bottom, patriotic a class should differ so radically from most of us as regards duty in time of war, the Quaker, by and large, is fundamentally sincere…I think of the majority of Quakers I have seen as pleasant appearing, clean-limbed young men… [sic. who] knew and understood the causes of the war, were well-versed in current events, and who balked only in actual fighting.
In light of such overt institutional bias from the highest level down, it is not surprising to read that Quakers were routinely approved for CO status during the war while Mennonites and similar Anabaptists sects were routinely turned down or their applications were strung out or prejudiced in such a way that confrontations often escalated to the point of imprisonment, abuse, torture, and even death. It is a sad chapter in American history, and all the more so because those responsible seemed utterly oblivious to the profound irony inherent in the fact that, in the name of a crusade against German militarism abroad, they were persecuting Americans of German descent at home for rejecting the militarism of their own government. The capacity for incoherence in humans never ceases to astound.
But as much as he lamented the “ignorance and stupidity” of the Mennonites, Kellogg and other members of the military were much more alarmed about the “intelligence and conviction” of the “individual objector,” of the man who had come around to his own beliefs regarding pacifism as a result of personal reflection and study rather than by way of “religious upbringing and tradition,” and who was able to engage and persuade others to accept his point of view. From the military’s standpoint, the religious objector never really posed any serious threat to morale and military discipline. He could be dismissed as an annoying oddity, like a benign wart on the nose, but the individual objector was quite another story. Here was a malignancy that could metastasize and spread. And of these individual objectors, the Socialists came in for the greatest scrutiny. Indeed, Kellogg devoted a whole chapter to the problem of the “Socialist Objector” in his book. The result, although in total numbers the socialist objectors formed but a small fraction compared to religious-based objectors, percentage-wise they came in for the greatest scrutiny and persecution. They had the double problem of not meeting the “opposition to all wars” requirement while the mere act of defending themselves exposed them to prosecution under the afore-mentioned Espionage and Sedition acts, since the rationale for their pacifism had essentially been criminalized.
The Selective Service Act of 1940
With the end of the World War I, the draft ended, but the Selective Service System (SSS) continued as an independent agency of the United States government. In a fit of introspection and regret, the government offered pardons to nearly all who had been sentenced to long terms at Fort Leavenworth and other prisons for their pacifist sentiments during the war. The Mennonites chose not to make issue of the abuses they had suffered, but interestingly, in the last decade or so, their grandchildren have revived the story and documented thoroughly the indignities and cruelties their forefathers patiently endured through a series of books, articles, seminars, podcasts, and public exhibitions.
As the clouds of war began to gather again in 1939, the government thought it prudent this time around to begin ramping up the Armed Services before rather than after the outbreak of hostilities. Acknowledging the problems of the previous war, Congress also thought it advisable to thoroughly revamp and redesign the whole system. The result was the 1940 Selective Service Act, the first peacetime draft in American History. The law was largely the work of one man, General Lewis Blaine Hershey (1893-1977), who had made a close study of the draft as implemented during the First World War and of the numerous problems and abuses that had arisen.
The structure created by Hershey remained basically the same from its inception in 1940 until its termination in 1973, and this despite the fact that Congress on two occasions — in 1948 and 1967 — passed new legislation reauthorizing and revamping the Selective Service System. But in all instances, Congress tweaked rather than overhauled the system. General Hershey continued as sole director of the SSS from beginning to end. Celebrated because of his decades of dedicated service, he was also reviled by anti-war protestors during the Vietnam era, especially after he issued a memorandum in 1967 that threatened students with forfeiting their college deferments if they participated in demonstrations opposing the draft or if they burned their draft cards; a memorandum that was subsequently declared unconstitutional.
Two bedrock features of the SSS law of 1940 remained intact from beginning to end: 1) a comprehensive classification system that included a range of deferments and 2) civilian oversight. Hershey recognized that the absence of meaningful civilian oversight was the key deficiency of the World War I draft. Consequently, he proposed a system of locally controlled draft boards, which could pass on all decisions regarding eligibility and deferment, and whose decisions could not be overruled by the military. All men who were subject to the draft during its thirty-three-year term will instantly recognize the more important classifications, such as 1-A (eligible for the draft), or II-S (student deferment), but the system included a whole range of classifications, many for occupational deferments that were deemed essential during times of war, and others for medical or psychological disabilities that rendered one unsuitable for the stresses of military life.
In respect to conscientious objector status, a quick comparison of the earlier law with the 1940 law reveals striking differences. Of the four main currents of pacifism we have examined – religious, secular, Socialist, and individual – the Selective Service act of 1940 only granted standing to the first, namely religious-based pacifism, but even here, it restricted CO status, with few exceptions, to members of historic peace churches, i.e., to the Quakers, Mennonites, et al. For those who met the qualifications, however, acceptance was now simple, routine, and devoid of controversy. The law, therefore, was much more restrictive in respect to overall CO status than the one it replaced, but in practice much more lenient to the ones to whom it granted recognition.
General Hershey realized that the “Mennonite” problem during the First World War was basically a self-inflicted injury on the part of the Army itself. There never was a political dimension to the Mennonite opposition to war; it was simply a belief system grounded in a centuries’ long Anababtist tradition to which its members stubbornly adhered. The Mennonites, moreover, were a self-contained, minority population, who could be dismissed or sidelined because of their quaintness, and who, therefore, poised no real threat to either the war effort or the draft that supported it. Placed conveniently out of view in civilian work camps similar to the CCC camps of the Roosevelt New Deal — another feature of the new law — they could build trails in the national parks or perform similar service outside the military and discreetly removed from public attention.
The Seventh Day Adventists, however, presented a challenge for Hershey and the Selective Service System. Their unusual — if not unique — belief system mandated not only pacifism, but active military service as well. Indeed, the Church often organized summer camps for the young men in its congregations along military lines and taught military skills (other than weapons) in preparation for future service. What to do? Because they wanted to serve and because they were at root apolitical, they posed no threat to the draft or military morale. And because the 1929 Geneva Conventions had declared that all medical personnel were ipso facto non-combatants, they could be easily incorporated within the existing Army structure in a way that was consistent with their beliefs, on the one hand, and useful to the Army, on the other.
The result was a two-tiered classification for CO status; one for those willing to perform alternative service outside of the military establishment (1-O); and one for those willing to serve in the Army in a non-combatant role (1-A-O). Thus, the 1940 SSS Act, perhaps unwittingly, gave rise to a situation without any known historical precedent: a consciousness and a conscience opposed to war, albeit exclusively religiously grounded in the beginning, now embedded in the center of war. No longer sidelined as (say) truck drivers or rear area hospital orderlies, 99% of all 1-A-Os received medical training, and usually served — ironically — as non-combatant, frontline combat medics. Desmond Doss, a Seventh Day Adventist, has emerged as the poster child for 1-A-O medics during the Second World War. As one of the most decorated soldiers of the Pacific Theater in World War II — he received both the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Silver Star — his story even made its way onto the silver screen in a 2016 biographical war film, Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson.
SSS Form 150, the official document used to request conscientious objector status, framed the CO experience for thousands upon thousands of young men during three wars. You were asked to sign one of two claims for exemption and then document your claim:
I am, by reason of my religious training and belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form. I, therefore, claim exemption from combatant training and service in the Armed Forces, but am prepared to serve in a noncombatant capacity if called. (Registrants granted this status are classified I-A-O.)
………………………………………………………………….
(Signature of registrant)
I am, by reason of my religious training and belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form and I am further conscientiously opposed to participation in noncombatant training and service in the Armed Forces. I, therefore, claim exemption from both combatant and noncombatant training and service in the Armed Forces, but am prepared to perform civilian alternative service if called. (Registrants granted this status are classified I-O.)
………………………………………………………………….
(Signature of registrant)
The Selective Service System set up by the 1940 legislation, including its two-tier system for conscientious objectors, worked almost to perfection during the Second World War and, to a lesser extent, Korea. Because there was such overwhelming support for the war effort, pacifism outside the historic peace churches collapsed so that the exclusion of individual pacifists from official CO standing resulted in very little controversy. The system of occupational deferments was well thought out and the rationale for these deferments was plain to see for all who reflected upon them. Indeed, a reverse situation to what happened during the Vietnam War often occurred during World War II: men who received unsolicited occupational deferments for (say) farming often petitioned to have their deferments nullified because they felt guilty seeing their friends and other young men of draft age going off to war when they were mandated to stay behind. For their part, Mennonites, Quakers, et al, quietly performed alternative service in special camps out of the public view while (mainly) Seventh Day Adventists served within the Army exclusively as medics.
And then came Vietnam. Hershey’s beautifully oiled and well-functioning machine began to creak and moan until the wheels came off, resulting in a situation for which no one was happy: not the Army because it received mainly — as it saw it — the leftovers;[6] not those eligible for the draft who regarded it by and large as something to be avoided, side-stepped, or evaded by any means possible, legal or otherwise; and not the draftees — largely the marginalized, the naïve, and minorities — who often felt they had gotten the short end of the stick. Hershey’s draft became a central flashpoint of student opposition to the war, and burning the draft card became one of those iconic acts – along with burning the flag — that infuriated hawks (and sent General Hershey into paroxysms of rage), on the one side, while emboldening doves and anti-war demonstrators, on the other, to even greater deeds of defiance.
The draft, however, ceased being necessary to sustain the Vietnam war effort shortly after Nixon/Kissinger put into place their carrot and stick plan for ending the war in 1970. Renewed saturation bombing, invasion and disruption of the sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, and “Vietnamization” formed the three pillars of the new plan. After the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970, the U.S. withdrew the 1st Infantry Division from Vietnam, quickly followed by the 25th Infantry Division. But in practice, only the colors and the top brass went home while all others were reassigned to new units within Vietnam. This mechanism of “standing down,” as it was called, reduced dramatically the number of new draftees required for the war effort. It was for this reason that the SSS introduced the lottery in the draft in the fall of 1969. This kept the machinery of the draft in place but reduced the number actually called for service markedly.
In the meantime, several Supreme Court decisions successfully challenged the religious requirements for CO status that had been comfortably in place since the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940. As we look back, the most famous of the legal challenges was mounted by Cassius Clay (Mohammed Ali) in 1965 after he refused to take the oath at the induction ceremony and, consequently, was sentenced to five years prison as a draft evader. His story riveted the nation’s attention and thrust the CO question front and center into the national debate about Vietnam. As Ali famously said in 1966, “”I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong … They never called me nigger.” His legal challenge, however, which the Supreme Court finally decided in his favor in 1971 on a technicality,[7] was not the most important case, although surely the most celebrated. Two other Supreme Court decisions, United States v. Seeger, (1965), and United States v. Welsh (1970) upset the apple cart in a fundamental way for both the Selective Service System and the U.S. Army. Seeger successfully challenged the strict religious requirement for CO status, while Welsh cast doubt on the “opposition to all wars” provision.
No longer restricted to members of historic peace churches, the floodgates opened to allow men from all those strands of pacifism previously examined in this essay to once again apply — from the individual idealist, to the anarchistic Christian, to the Socialist, to the purely political. And apply they did, albeit the great majority – over 90% — applied for alternative service outside the military (1-O status). In World War II, the ratio of exemptions to inductions – thanks to General Hershey’s restrictions and general support for the war effort — had amounted to less than two tenths of one percent. Between 1966 and 1972, however, this ratio rose continually and dramatically to be a third or more of all summons, and this increase happened even though inductions were steadily dropping.
The hand-wringing this occasioned at the highest levels of government contributed significantly to the termination of the draft in 1973 as a way out of the dilemma, a fact that has been all but forgotten, but a fact which examination of internal documents among the highest echelons of the SSS clearly corroborates.[8] But it also briefly produced a truly extraordinary scenario that has been almost completely erased from memory, and that was the substantial influx of 1-A-O medics who no longer fit the old religious criteria and for whom the Army and the powers that be regarded with the greatest suspicion and concern. In 1969, leading newspapers across the nation ran a syndicated article about 1-A-O medics and how they received specialized training in San Antonio entitled, “Echo 4 Co. at Fort Sam Houston is most unorthodox unit in the U.S. Army.” In the concluding paragraph of this very informative and generally sympathetic article, Captain Castleberry, the officer in charge of Echo 4, voices concern about “…the growing influx of COs who seem more politically than religiously motivated.” It is these men, he fears, “who might lower the caliber of COs coming into Echo 4 and affect the morale of the Army in general.” His concern was widespread and reached to the highest levels of government.
But their suspicions and concerns proved groundless. The truth of the matter is that this new breed of individually and often politically motivated CO performed exceptionally well in Vietnam even under the direst battlefield conditions, and although hundreds served, few, if any, instances of insubordination, seditious activity, or dereliction of duty surfaced to blemish their collective record. How could this be when these men embodied and exemplified a conscience opposed to the very war they found themselves embedded in? The answer is deceptively simple. This brand of CO voluntarily chose to serve when they checked the 1-A-O box on SSS Form 150. These then were men who had been motivated and swayed equally by a sense of duty and a rejection of war. When the Army accepted and recognized their non-combatant role, they felt like a bargain had been struck. It was a compromise, to be sure, but the bargain needed to be upheld on both sides.
The Army, however, now that it is all voluntary, remains uneasy with the legacy of these medics and chooses, sadly, to disremember their story. On the grounds of Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, where medics from all the service branches are now trained, and where all 1-A-O medics were trained during the Vietnam years, the U.S. Army has constructed a very large and impressive facility to celebrate and showcase the Army Medical Corps throughout all its wars. But there is not one mention of the thousands of 1-A-O medics who took their training on the grounds of Ft. Sam Houston and who, alongside their comrades, served, suffered, and died by the hundreds, albeit as unarmed medics. It is time to correct this oversight, whether intentional or otherwise. We existed and our story deserves to be remembered. I am proud to have counted among their ranks.
James C. Kearney
[1] Both England and the US, it is true, lone among Western nations, did nominally offer a legal path for political conscientious objectors in WW I. In practice, however, few succeeded in being granted conscientious objector status for political reasons. Lord Bertrand Russell, the famous English mathematician and philosopher, exemplifies this reality for he was sentenced to jail for his pacifism during the First World War, a pacifism based entirely on rational premises.
[2] It is true that the draft was authorized briefly for the Spanish-American War but the war ended favorably before it could be put into place.
[3] The law made provision for 4,648 local exemption boards. These local exemption boards had some discretion in granting exemptions, especially in the case of men who could base a claim upon several factors such as dependent children or elderly parents, but the exemption for conscientious reasons was from combatant duty only. Regardless of how the local board ruled, the inductee had to validate his claim again after arriving at camp and convince skeptical military authorities of his sincerity. (Donald Eberle, “The Plain Mennonite Face of the World War One Conscientious Objector,” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 3(2):175-201.)
[5] Walter Guest Kellog, The Conscientious Objector, New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.
[6] Facing the draft, thousands upon thousands chose instead to volunteer whereby they could choose their branch of service. Naturally, most chose either the Navy or Air Force, insuring they would not be “outside the wire” and in combat. Draftees went almost exclusively to the Army where they formed the majority of “grunts” out in the field doing the fighting and dying.
[7] His conviction was overturned because he had not been informed by his draft board why his original application had been overruled, thus violating the “due process” clause in the Bill of Rights.
[8] In the spring of 2019, I and a fellow 1-A-O med, Bill Clamurro, spent a week at the National Archives in Washington, examining the files of the SSS administration. These files corroborate my assertion many times over.
jamesckearney.com 