They were called work camps. Selective Service, and I think the President
of Michigan State University was the original director of Selective
Service, and a very decent guy, I think he had worked with the [American
Friends] Service Committee, set up this pattern of work camps. But the guy died, and this was when Hershey was
appointed. Hershey ran the thing for several decades. The thing that
these people didn't understand, the Service Committee and the church
groups that supported the camp program didn't understand, and this was
the basic error, was that there is all the difference in the world
between a voluntary program and an enforced program. When they tried to
enforce this work camp system on the CO's they ran into an enormous
amount of trouble, although large numbers accepted it. In the camps,
they said they would ask the CO's to prove their sincerity by supporting
themselves while they were in these camps, and they asked all of us to
pay thirty dollars a month for our board and keep. The peace churches
agreed if the young man couldn't supply this, they would ask his family,
they would ask his church and finally, if they couldn't find the money
elsewhere, the underwrote the program. They must have put $9,000,000 in
this program in the course of World War II. Many of the camps worked,
but there were, from the very beginning, dissidents. It started perhaps,
or was highlighted by a group of Union Theological students, led by Dave
Dellinger and George Houser and a few others, who refused to register in
the very beginning, when the draft was signed, the day that people were
asked to register. They were looked on as absolute freaks. As we got deeper into the war, we began to realize—we being
a very small number of less church types in the CO camps—that the camps
were set up not because the government values conscience and respects
it, but were set up because the government recognizes that the CO's were
a bunch of troublemakers and dissidents, and even if they could force
them into the army, they would be more trouble than they were worth, and
the camp system was a means of getting us out of circulation.
They had rules that you could do your alternative service, but you had to
be at least fifty miles away from any place you had ever lived in. So
you wouldn't be a focus for anti-war activity of any kind. The other
problem is that conscientious objection is pretty much of a middle class
phenomenon. Here are people who are idealistic and dedicated and
competent in one way or another, and they found themselves digging
ditches. We didn't object to digging ditches per se, we objected to the
tremendous waste of competence when there was a shortage. There were a
lot of teachers who were CO's, and there were a lot of places in America
that needed teachers and needed them badly. We weren't given anything in
which we could put our efforts and our abilities. This kind of
accentuated a growing dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the camp
system. The other thing that happened was that
guys like Dellinger and Peck and others, who refused to have anything to
do with conscription to begin with, went into the prisons, and then
started a series of actions within prisons. The first was in Danbury,
Connecticut, at the Federal priosn there, where a group of our people
went on strike finally because of the racial segregation in the dining
room. This was Connecticut, not North Carolina or Georgia. Finally, that
was broken down. What was happening, you see, was that the heroes of the
CO movement were all in prison and not in these camps.
I know what happened within me, and I think this is fairly typical. There
is a great deal of apprehension because, I wasn't part of this crusade
against this ultimate evil of Hitler, and there is this guilt feeling.
Two, I wasn't serving in any other way. I was cutting brush down in the
Eastern Shore of Maryland in a project, and later driving a truck on
someproject in Colorado where the resident engineer said the only reason
they are doing this thing was that they had free labor. If they didn't
have our free labor, they wouldn't do it, it wouldn't be justified, the
earthen dam we were building. There was the guilt feeling about not
being part of our generation fighting Hitler, there was the frustration
of our energies and abilities not being used. Then there was the rationalization that the Selective Service System
was not interested in recognizing conscience, but in keeping us out of
circulation. Then, finally, I know I had the very conscious feeling that
if the war suddenly ended and I hadn't made the prison scene, I would
feel cheated.
Having come to that conclusion, I had to wait for the right moment. In
this Colorado camp, there were a lot of troublemakers and we were
running a contest with the camp administration. They were trying to get
guys to leave and go in the army, and we were trying to get guys to
leave and go into prison. We had a big score-board outside on the wall
of the latrine, and we were always two or three ahead of them.° In the course of several months, about
thirty guys broke, and refused to cooperate, left and didn't come back
and were ultimately arrested and jailed. Finally, and it was a moment
of— one has to wait for a moment of total ripeness, it isn't simply
intellectualism, it is not simply a gut decision, it is something that
you have to live with—when we got word that a group of our people and
Dellinger was one of them at Lewisberg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania had
gone on a hunger strike because of excessive mail censorship. This mail
censorship can be really petty. They will let Playboy in and won't let
the Peacemaker in, or something like that. That was it. I'd never met
Dellinger, but he was one of my heroes. Murphy and
Taylor in that Danbury thing were my heroes. Suddenly, that was the last
straw. I went on a hunger strike and a work strike. In due time, in
about ten days or two weeks, I was arrested, and charged, and released
on bail. I went on trial and appeal, and I finally lost. I had to start
serving a three year sentence. By this time, it was all down hill. The
difficult moment was, am I or am I not a CO, which occurred years
before. Then one thing follows another fairly easily.