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urging sedition and desertion but that
charge was dismissed. The appeals
court's reversal of the lesser charge
means that Priest is now eligible for an
honorable discharge.
-J.P.
WRL AWARD WINNER
GETS WEST POINT DISCHARGE
C ornelius Cooper, Jr., who came to
the I970 WRL dinner to personally accept the twelfth annual peace award,
has become the first West Point gradu-
\E
$:
ate to win an honorable discharge as a
conscientious objector.
The discharge went into effect February 10 with what his ACLU attorneys, Marvin Karpatkin and Michael
Pollet described as "spectacular
speed." Only a month previous, lvlaJ'or
General George Blanchard reversed the
negative recommendation of a hearing
officer and asserted that Cooper "is
quite sincere and is of no benefit to
this division of the Army as a result of
the beliefs he holds."
Cooper detailed those beliefs at a
at)
0\, 2r.
\
$
t.
{
press conference February 1 3 in which
he said the U.S. should adopt pacifism
and disarmament as national policies.
He views it as absurd to try members
of the armed forces for individual acts
!,
of atrocity in Vietnam "since war itself
is a crime." ln his dlscharge application,
he pointed out that as a black man "l
am caused to be more than unusually
sensitive to the fact of violence in life
and the effect of violence on men's
lives." He was one of 8 blacks in the
SAILOR WHO WILLED
INSURANCE TO WRL
WINS ACQUITTAL
'69 West Point graduating class of
about 800.
Last year's WRL annual peace award
went to persons resisting within the
the military. Two others in addition to
Cooper-Russ Malone and Terry Klugattended the dinner to pick up their
scrolls in person.
-,.P.
RIP OUT THE PHONE TAPS,
THERE'S NO LAW
SAYS YOU CAN'T!
Roger Priest, the Navy apprentice
There is no law prohibiting the deand underground editor who willed his
service-connected life insurance to WRL tection and removal of phone taps, regardless of their so-called legality. "The
and urged others to do likewise, has
won a complete acquittal on disloyalty vast majority of phone taps are planted
changes. The Navy announced on Febwithout court approval anyhow," ac.l
rurary 2 that its court of military recording to the Counter-Spy Committee,
view had reversed Priest's courtmartial
a group of electronic technlcians and
conviction promoting disloyalty through lawyers in Washington, D.C. who provide free detection and removal service
his underground newsletter. The reversal was based on a technical error of
to people and groups being tapped but
the trial judge.
unable to pay for professional detection
Priest originally had been accused of se rv ice s.
The committee has a display of devices recently uncovered in and near
the homes and offices of several Washington area government employees,
students and political activists. The
counter-spies found one elaborate device plugged into regular phone company equipment near the home of a
woman school teacher who had parti-
cipated in
a
few marches. The device
was a near duplicate of the equipment
which should have been there, except
that it also served
as a
powerful radio
tran sm i tter.
The Counter-Spy Committee is
looking in other major cities for people
wlth some knowledge of electronics
who would like to be trained and given
equipment to detect taps by the D.C.
committee. The D.C. committee will
send fully equipped teams of technicians to remove devices when local
sleuths discover them. Money is urgently needed for travel expenses and equ ipment upkeep.
Contributors, volunteers and persons
wanting further information
should write to: The Counter-Spy
Committee, 1402 New York Ave.,
Washington, D.C. 20005.
-LNS
R.EPUBLICAN CONG
R ESSMAN
SUGGESTS
NIXON IMPEACHMENT
"The threat of impeachment or at
least the discussion of impeachment"
has been suggested by Representative
Paul McCloskey, )r., Republican of
California as the only means of changing President Nixon's war policy. Mc-
Closkey advanced this proposal in an
interview February
l6 on National
Educational Television.
"Attacks of the kind Mr. McCloskey
directed at Mr. Nixon are exceedingly
rare in American politics, especially by
a legislator of the President's party,"
commented one newspaper. lmplying
that he expected retaliation, McCloskey
said after the interview: "l will probably have served my last term in Congress." He was elected in 1961 after
defeating Shirley Temple Black,
a
rightist Republican, in the primary.
ANTI-WAR ACTORS
SEEK TO ENTERTAIN Gls
"lt's
been very disconcerting for
many of us in Hollywood to see that
Bob Hope, Martha Raye and other
companies of their political ilk have
cornered the market and are the only
er
di
at
m
clr
D
5e
cc
ln
ce
an
Li
c0
lir
0a
te
tu
entertainers allowed to speak to soldiers in this country and Vietnam."
.l
So stated .lane Fonda February 6
press
at a
conference announcing formation of a troupe of about a dozen
well known, anti-war performers in-
cluding Mike Nichols, Elliot Gould,
Dick Gregory, and herself which will
seek to tour military bases across the
cou
ntry.
To perform on a base, an official
invitation from the commanding officer is required and a request for such
an invitation has been submitted to
Lieutenant General .lohn Tblson 3d,
commander at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg, was chosen first "because Tolson has been the key architect of the Army's new look." lf he
turns down the request, the troupe
will put on the show March 13-14 at
the Haymarket Square Coffeehouse in
nearby Fayetteville.
-f .P.
CULEBRA ACTION REPORT
ment
marty laurltsen
burton levltsky
jackson maclow
marls cakars
susan cakars
mary mayo
bruCe chrlstlanson davld mcreynolds
peter
donna chrlstlanson
merlln
dlana j clavles
don mochon
jim peck
ralph dlgla
paul rllllng
karen durbln
davld easterbrook lgal roodenko
jen elodle
wendy schwartz
leah frltz
lorralne shaplro
nell haworth
connle sohodskl
hendrlck hertzberg bonnle stretch
jack horowltz
rnayer vlsh n6r
marty jezer
llnda wood
peter klger
mlke wood
page
atlanta, ga.)
ruth dear (5429 s. dorchester, chlcago,
ilt.)
paul enclmer (c/O venlce draft reslstance,
73 market st. no. 1.1, venlce, callf.)
s6th foldy (2322 elandon dr., cteveland
helghts, oh.)
mlchael brunson (box 12548
seattle, washlngton 981 1 1)
becky and paul (somewhere ln new mexlco)
wayne hayashl (1o35 unlverslty ave.,
rm. 203, honolulu, hl, 96822)
roso labolle (713 ne adams, mlnneapoils,
mn.)
tlmothy lange (1O45 l4th st., boutder,
co.)
mark morrls (3808 hamllton st., philad6lphla, pa.)
paul obtuda (544 natoma, san franclsco,
ca 94103,
6:
Come Together:
the Ann Arbor
Conference
@@@@
tf,
dorothy lane
IN THE PROVINCES
jim geheres (c/o AWIN, bo\ 7477,
pel in the Navy bombing range in the
northwest peninsula of Culebra. The
chapel was built in three days and a
service was held; 6 people representing
the groups involved, including me from
AQAG, stayed in the chapel in violation of atemporary restraining order
and were arrested for contempt of
court. ln the weeks since then ten
other people, mostly Culebrans, have
gone into the bombing range to inter-
The nonviolent struggle on the
small Puerto Rican island of Culebra
to get the U.S. Navy'off the island is
continuing and increasing in strength
and determination. On January i 8,
1971 , just one week after a "peace
treaty" was signed by the Navy, making
small concessions in return for the
cooperation of the Puerto Rican government and the Mayor of Culebra in
fere with the bombing and have also
keeping people from interfering with
been arrested for contempt, and nuthe bombing of the island, a group of
merous other people have gone in withCulebrans, other Puerto Ricans from
out being arrested. ln fact, in the first
the Puerto Rican lndependence Party
three weeks of "Operation Spring(PlP) and the Clergy Committee for
board", the intensification of the
HOME FOLKS
ofella alayeto
marllyn albert
the Rescue of Culebra, and North
Americans from A Quaker Action
Group (AQAG), began building a cha-
page l0:
The Winter Soldier
I nvestigation
page l2:
France Simmers
Again
page
Tet Offensive
15:
in Oswego
page
16:
Dogs Run Free,
Why Not We
peace and freedom
through nonviolent action
page
19:
HowTo Live,
What To Do
339 lafayette street
page
22:
Guerrilla War
in the Movement
page
page
page
26:
28:
33:
Touch!
new york, new
york
10012
telephone .21 21 228-027 O
WIN ls pubtlshed twlcemonthly
exc6pt July, August, and Janu-
ary when lt ls publlshed monthly
by the WtN Publlshlng Emplre
wlth the support o, the War Rs.
slsters League. Subscrlpflons are
$5.OO per year. S€cond class po9
tage pald at New york, N.y.
lOOOI. lndlvldual wrlters are re
sponslble for oplnlons expressed
and accuracy of facts
glven.
Sorry-manuscrlpts cannot be
Reviews
Letters
Cover: Erica Weiss
March 15. 1971
Volume Vll, Number 5
16.
a
turned unless accompanled by
s€lf-addressed, stamped env6lop6.
Prlnted ln U.S.A., WtN lJ a memb€r of the Underground Press Syn-
dlcate and Llberatlon News 56rvlco.
,
bombing in which the navies of the
United States, Canada, Britain, Netherlands, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Brazil participate, there was
only one full day of firing-every other
day was interfered with in whole or in
part.
Repression is increasing: on the
night of January 29th, the chapel was
\
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I
,
(
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)
i\
l
S. i 2th St., Philadelphia, PA., 19101 .
The focus of the continuing action will
be"to stop, in what ways we can, the
testing of bombs and the training of
men to use these bombs to kill, and to
act with Culebrans and other Puerto
Ricans to get the Navy out of Culebra.
-Dan Balderston for AQAG
pulled down, apparently by Navy peoSTRAIGHT SHIT FROM SCEF
ple, and rebuilt by Culebrans the next
day; on February 6th at 3 A.M. the
Wl LM I NGTON, N.C.-Reports distent of those camping out near the cha- tributed by maior news services on repel was torn down by two sailors; in
cent racial violence here have not told
the past two weeks a number of peothe truth about what took Place, a
ple have been beaten, trampled on,
black reporter charges.
kicked, teargassed, and threatened with
Iim Grant, who writes for the
knives and rifles by the Marines. On
Southern Patriot, was on the scene for
several occasions, the bombing has continued even after the Navy knows that
there are people (whom the Navy
calls "intruders" in order to deny
their humanity) inside the bornbing
area. A week ago, February Sth, the
chapel was once again destroyed and
the materials confiscated, this time by
Marines; a group of fifty Culebrans
outside the fence saw this happening
and took down the ten foot high cyclone"fence and the coils of barbed
wire, burned the sentry post, and rescued the cross from the chapel. The
nonviolent character of the struggle
has been quite constant, except that I
understand that three U.S. sailors were
burned last Monday by Molotov cocktails. The plans now include maintaining a vigil at the gate to the bombing
area, and there is a growing feeling to
rebuild the chapel.
Plans for the next few weeks are
slightly nebulous because of the growing repression on the part of the Navy
and Marine Corps, and because of the
need to deepen the nonviolent discipline of the action. The group of sixteen
who have been arrested have a hearing
in the San .l uan Federal Court on February 1 8th. "Operation Springboard"
is scheduled to end on February 26th,
but the bombing will continue after
that date, as will the will to interfere
with the bombing.
q A Quaker Action Group needs ideas
for further action, people to act, and
money with which to act. The project
At one minute before 10:00 on the
has cost more money than we have and
morning following the announcement
we want to continue fulfilling our part
of the South Vietnamese invasion of
of it; also money is needed (at least
Laos, 14 nonviolent guerrillas from
Philadelphia Resistance seized the em$500) for materials with which to rebuild the chapel. ldeas, money, applibassy of the Saigon puppet regime in
cations can be sent to AQAG, 20 S. 12th Washington, D.C., chaining shut the
4
five days at the height of the crisis.
"What happened here was as close
to an insurrection as anything l've ever
seen,' Grant said. "About 1,300 students were involved in one way or
another. The real cause of the trouble
was a conspiracy between police, school
officials, and city government-a conspiracy to try to crush those students."
Grant declared that the following
specific falsehoods were generally
stated as facts in news reports sent out
Sr
C
o
F
t
b
t
b
e
rl
a
of Wilmington:
1. That violence erupted in the city
because of sniper fire from young black
people. The facts, Grant said, are that
Ci
students were peacefully protesting
a'
against conditions in so-called integrated
p
I
tl
St
at
a(
Sr
ki
at
T
ut
fir
h(
m
ar
af
lie
:J.r'r *
pl
rh
Gr
an
rh
wz
gir
th
ha
of
ed
w2
gr(
wi
trL
thi
three wrought iron gates, displaying
banners in the courtyard, confronting
embassy personnel with oranges & raisins & fresh-baked bread. Thirty-five
minutes later Washington police broke
the chains, arrested the demonstrators.
A jury trial is scheduled for March 25th.
shr
wa
Gr
be,
cri
wa
schools. They had been meeting.in the
Gregory Congregational United Church
of Christ for several days-when on
Februarv 4 ihere were anonymous
threats that the church would be
bombed.
People in the community armed th
themselves to defend the church and
built barricades to keep white attackers out. But there was no firing from
those defending the church until ,,maur
auding bands of Klansmen began to invade the area close to the church,
coming in cars and pick-up trucks
loaded with weapons." They passed
easily through police lines a few blocks
away, and fired 4t the young black
people.
"We have it on reliable authority
that Klansmen came in from all the
surrounding counties," Grant said. This
area has long been a stronghold of Klan
activity.
2. That a. 19-year-old black youth,
Stephen Mitchell, who was shot and
killed by police was armed at the time
and that police shot in self-defense.
The fact, Grant said, is that Mitchell
was unarmed. He, along with other
unarmed young black people, was
fighting afire at a store and two black
homes one block from the church. Firemen were refusing to come into the
area. They did not arrive until an hour
after the blaze started. The fire is believed to have been arson. Black people who were defending the church
went out unarmed to try to put out
the fire.
Grant noted. "Maybe he could have 25
coming of the Guard that stilled the
ago-but things aren,t like that
protest, Grant said.
anymore."
"The young people had stood off
Grant himself narrowly missed being the Klansmen
and the police and they
hit by gunfire at the height of the dishad to retreat," he noted. ,,What
orders. He said he was near the barrichanged things was when the congrecades when a truckload of white men
gation of the Gregory Church met on
rode up and jumped out shooting.
February 7 and voted to evict the
"all of us hit the ground_liteially.
young people from the church. They
.A black
minister who did not duck
said the students could stay if they
quick enough was hit in the leg,,, Grant would
stay unarmed. That would have
rep orted.
been suicide. The church people said
The trouble in Wilmington started
they should depend on the police to
when school officials refused to even
protect them from the Klansmen. But
negotiate with black students in three
anyone who could analyze the situaschools who were demanding black
tion knew that the police and the Klansstudies courses, more black participa_
men were working together.
tion in academic and athletic aff airs,
"The students decided it would be
and other such changes. Students be_
foolish to make a ,Custer,s Last Stand,_
gan a boycott of classes February 2, and so they dispersed
into the community.
and on February 4 staged a mass march It was sad; some of the
church trustees
of close to 2,000 persons to City Hall.
were under unbearable pressures; they
There they found the government ofwere dependent on the city power
fices padlocked.
structure for their jobs."
Wilmington quieted down-at least
The white minister of the black contemporarily*after the weekend of Feb- gregation, the Rev. Eugene Templeton,
ruary 7, when National Guardsmen
backed the students completely, Grant
moved in. However, it was not the
said. He has since been fired.
years
-SCEF
tU
2'. \:.
,:t''.
, :a'**e?l*
€
;w4
"lt was cold-blooded murder,',
Grant said. "He was shot several times,
and police dragged him 50 feet and
threw him in a car. We all believe he
was still alive when they started dragging him." Mitchell was a member o1
the student steering committee that
has been pressing demands on school
off ic ials.
3. That a white man fatally wounded on February 7 just happened to
wander into the area on his way to the
grocery. Actually, Grant said, the
white man came into the area in a
truck, rode up to the barricade near
the church, and.got out pointing his
shotgun at the young blacks there. This
was one
of numerous such incidents,
Grant said, and this particular man had
been seen in the area before during the
cr is is.
"l guess he figured he could just
walk into the area and start shooting,,,
SYRACUSE "CONSPtRACY"
SURFACES
dictments of Phil Berrigan & friends &
call it REPRESSION. "
The Syracuse Peace Council recentAt one point there was a march to
ly sponsored a three-day demonstration the FBI office to deliver the sign. Nerprotesting the indictment of Father
vous US attorneys met everyone outPhil Berrigan and five others. Over
side and, fearing a building occupation,
'l
000 people signed a sign which read:
offered to carry the sign in. Later some
"J. EDGAR HOOVER: We the under- demonstrators went inside and placed
signed are members of the Conspiracy
the sign in a more appropriate placeto SAVE LIVES-in S.E. Asia, the US
in front of the door,"
& across the world. We Condemn in_
i;i#ili[:;
l*rr, to the Student Peace Treaty conference in
Ann Arbor hoping that my recent depression over
the State of the Movement would be whisked away
by the presence of two thousand pacifist revolutionaries who were ready to nonviolently take over the
country. My hopes were never realized.
The first plenary session began with several rousing choruses of "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" for the benefit of an NBC newsman who was filming the proceedings. lt went downhill from there. Several delegations
were displeased with the agenda that th'e coordinators
had set up, and when they were told that space at
the University of Michigan was rented in accordance
with the original agenda, the dissenters accused the
organizers of being right-wingers and fascists. This
initial disagreement was representative of the whole
tone of the conference; the delegates were very distrustful of the leadership (though the usual movement "heavies" remained in the background for the
most part) and even more distrustful of each other.
It was not unusual for people to be accused of being
CIA fronts if their politics differed from the more
violent elements present.
And speaking of violence-the rhetoric of the Conference was indeed violent, though I don't believe
that very many of the delegates were prepared for
actual violence, had the opportunity presented itself.
Several people told me that the best thing that could
happen to this country would be the assassination of
Rockefeller, and when I said that the killing of one
man would not make that much difference, they said
I was a dupe of the government. At first a demonstration was planned to protest the lailing of several White
Panthers, but luckily (l Oetieve)
it didn't get off the
ground; if it had I think there would have been widespread violence and hysteria given the predisposition
of the crowd and the fear of the police (a result of
another violent demonstration that had occurred
several weeks before).
The body of pacifists that were present had to
make a difficult decision between organizing a nonviolent caucus and spreading themselves around at
the various other workshops and cauiuses that were
already set up. We finally decided to do the latter,
though my hindsight leads me to believe that either
would have been equally ineffective.
I went to several of the women's meetings and was
disappointed to find a lack of togetherness even
though many women belabored the point that we are
all sisters and should stick together. At one workshop
Jane Fonda got the group involved in an organization-'
al discussion on what women can do to aid Gls and
their dependents. I came late, and I don't know what
machinations she had to go through to gain leadership of the workshop, but it was the only women's
group that I went to that discussed any concrete proposals for direct action. At a women's caucus at
which there were about two hundred present, I tried
to push through a mandate that the women choose
one of the Seven Days in May (the Spring offensive
H
I
r
ANN ARBOR
CONFERENCE
-(
h
proposed by the People's Coalition for Peace and .f ustice) to do a specifically woman-oriented action. The
women overwhelmingly vetoed my proposal, and said
that as long as they had nothing to do with choosing
which days to demonstrate they would not lust
plug themselves into an offensive that some male
movement heavies originated. I argued that by boycotting the Seven Days the women would be leaving
the organization of the Spring offensive to the men
alone, and would thus be perpetuating the scenario
of all the prior antiwar organizing. But the women remained firm, and I believe there will be a strong push
for a women's action in April, though no definite pro-
I
posals were passed.
I also tried to push the Seven Days in May at the
New York Regional caucus, arguing that Seven Days
in May were better than one day in April (referring to
the Trotskyite's march on Washington scheduled for
April 24). Someone later told me that my argument
(
at that point offered the only humor at the entire
conference, but still no decision to support the May
actions was mandated at that caucus. However, at
the plenary the next day, the group voted to sponsor
the People's Coalition plans.
My pessimism over the proceedings is not shared,
l'm sure, by people whose frame of reference
was dif-
ferent. The Gls were really together, a result,-probably,
of the Winter Soldier investigation, and the people
worklng with them got a tremendous sense of affirmation. Likewise, l'm sure those who were closer to the
people organizing the Conference felt more secure
over the student movement because they were dealing
with people whose politics and heads are more together. Butfor me, who sat for hours at a WRL literature table without attracting more than ten people
and who watched the sale of teeshirt after teeshirt
inscribed with "power through the barrel of a gun"
sold in the literature room, the flavor of the Conference was not sweet. My few remaining hopes for the
student movement rest in the wish that the hardcore
organizers remained home organizing, while the
rowdies trecked to Ann Arbor to release their hostilities and frustrations on their brothers and sisters.
Wendy Schwartz
b
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that when they opt out, someone else has to pick up
the bill.
There was also the omnipresent problem of the
s we
all know, being one person atalarge
hectic conference can be a tremendously frustrating and
alienating experience." (From a leaflet written by organizers of the Student and Youth Peace Treaty Conference, Feb.5-7, Ann Arbor, Michigan.)
For me, any event like the Peace Treaty conference
is important in terms of people getting together to
cooperatively discuss problems (in this case, how to
organize around the Peace Treaty) and finding solutions for them. Such conferences are also significant
in terms of how people cooperate on personal levelshow problems like dealing with ego-tripping, good
personal interaction, and in general, creating a goodvibes situation. These are all important indicators of
how committed we are to creating in our lives a microcosm of the society we h.ope to build together.
There were plenty of bummers. There were all too
many people who came to the conference with apparently no idea that these things do cost money.
Because they either couldn't or said that they
couldn't pay the registration fee-which was six dollars, and was planned primarily to cover the cost of
renting buildings (although it was also used to pay
for conference materials, housing, and three meals)
but were nonetheless allowed to register, it seems
probable that the conference put the Peace Treaty
organization into tremendous debt. Fiscal responsibility may seem like a bummer, but people must realize
b
heavies, including some conference organizers and
national movement "heroes." But at Ann Arbor the
heavies had considerably less opportunity to play
their bureaucratic andf or ego-tripping games' For once
the rank-and-file took it upon themselves to make
things happen the way they wanted them to happen'
This strength was f irst demonstrated at the plenary
Friday night, when the proposed agenda was changed
from the floor to fit what people felt were their
needs in terms of the conference being a productive
one. (lt happened, unfortunately, that one of these
changes created a coriflict between a women's meeting ana regional meetings, but as the women's meeting
*is not read as part of the schedule, responsibility
for this conflict must rest with whoever omitted this
meeting from the schedule which was read.)
The tendency to bypass the conference heavies
was strongest at the women's meetings, and was manifested in a number of ways. The women's workshop
decided to dispense with a chairperson and have instead a rotating chairperson (which means that when
one woman finished speaking she called on another
woman). This successfully prevented one or a few
women from dominating the meeting.
A certain number of defined goals-set by conference organizers-were supposed to be achieved at
this workshop, but midway through it we realized
that in order to do this we would have to cut short
our discussion of how we felt about the Peace Treaty
and how we thought other non-movement women
would respond to it. We agreed that the discussion we
were having was more important, both for ourselves,
and because we felt that the freeness of an unstruc_
tured discussion would produce mor.e valuable sug_
gestions in terms of getting women to ratify and im_
plement the peace treaty.
Later on, at another meeting, time was running
short because of the scheduled regional meetings.
Rather than sublimate the women,s issues that had
been raised to deal with the pressures of
a mixed
meeting, women decided to break up into their own
regional meetings to continue discussion of the issues.
When word was received that most of the men in_
volved were willing to wait for the women to finish
their discussion it was decided that each women,s
regional grouping would make its own decision about
participating in mixed regional meetings. While
this
decision may seem like a move to make the men cool
their heels for a while, it was intended as a means of
working outside the conference structure, once again,
because
it
tive action.
was
felt that the structure inhi6ited
effec_
Finally, at still another women,s meeting, there
came a point where tension became very high and
tempers short. lt was suggested that women from
Bal_
timore sing a women,s liberation song they had writ_
ten. Soon we were all singing, and the t.niion *u,
reduced as we remembered our purpose in being together. Sisterhood is powerful.
The heavies didn't vanish,altogether. They were
still present, having their meetings, playing tireir inXrigues, and trying to make their presencelelt, but
they didn't seem to have their usual effect.
l'm at a loss to explain just how this came about.
Perhaps it was because of Erika Huggins, message to
the conference attenders, urging them to move away .
from the hero and heavy syndromes. Or maybe it was
the beautiful, moving speech made by an ex-Marine
from the Winter Soldier investigation, whose words
not only made real to me the stark brutality of the
ways in which men are oppretsed by the military machine, but also brought the horror of the war home in
way. Maybe we've grown
Maybe we've grown up a little as a movement. perhaps the follow-the-leader games are on the way out.
It may be that people at the conference brought with
them a renewed sense of urgency about ending the
war, a sense that stimulated not frustration, bui a desire for creative and productive action, which in turn
created the feeling that if the structure oi the conference did not provide a workable medium for this,
it would have to be changed. Most of the people
there, I think, felt that they knew as much about how
to end the war as any of the heavies, and that the im_
portant thing was to get on with it. As if to underline
this feeling, a telegram was received at the conference
Saturday night. lt was sent by Madame Binh, and
,told of the invasion of Laos by American, South Vietnamese, and Thai troops; and asked that peace forces
be mobilized to protest the invasion.
lf the peace movement can hold on to that sense
of urgency, we may be actually able to end this war.
But that won't happen unless the people*and that
rneans all the people, not
the ,,leaders,,_make
a new
the peace.
iust
-Connie Sohodski
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jeans and business suits, afros and crew cuts, field
Vietnam veter.iackets and love beads. They were all
ans who had come to Detroit, Michigan, to testify
to first-hand knowledge of American war crimes in
ndochina.
These were the obverse of Tom Paine's "summer
soldiers and sunshine patriots." ln Vietnam, they had
been sergeants, privates, lance coiporals, captains,
and in at least two cases, maiors. These were the true
heirs of the men who endured the long, bitter winter
at Valley Forge. These were the veterans of Vietnam
who, in the face of public apathy and indifference,
and official hostility and harrassment, refused to
I
forget.
Appropriately, the Detroit war crimes hearings,
organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against The War,
a national organization of 5000 members, were called
the Winter Soldier lnvestigation. For these were,
truly, the "winter soldiers" of the war in Vietnam'
each
group spanning the six years American combat forces
public
f,ave been in Vietnam, they walked onto the
stage hour after hour for three full days (January 31t0
-
'a!
They came from Texas and Alabama, New York
and California, Kansas and Montana. They wore blue
A dozen at a time, division after division,
-l-
February 2) and presented their eye-witness accounts
of prisoners tortured and killed, civilians intimidated
and shot, villages bombarded and burned, borders
illegally and secretly crossed, indiscriminate defoliation and bombing and artillery daily and nightly used,
massacres large and small. Sunday, lanuary 31 : 1st
Marine Division, 3rd Marine Division, 1st Air Cavalry
Division. Monday, February 1 : 101st Airborne Divi'l
sion, 82nd Airborne Division, 73rd Airborne Brigade,
5th Special Forces, and miscellaneous smaller units.
Tuesday, February 2t 25th lnfantry Division, 1st lnfantry Division, 4th lnfantry Division, 9th lnfantry
Division, Americal Division. ln the evenings and inbetween the panels on the combat units, the veterans
held special panels on "What We Are Doing to Vietnam," "What We Are Doing to Ourselves," weapons
banned by international law (but in widespread use
in Vietnam), and POWs-testimony from former
POWs, families of POWs, Gls held in American brigs,
and methods used by Ametican interrogators of
Vietnamese POWs. They also held unscheduled special
panels on racism and press censorship, both in lndochina and the military and in the United States and
civilian life.
Altogether about 100 Vietnam veterans, from
9
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s
1962to the present, testified at the three-day hearin Detroit's downtown Howard Johnson's Motor'
Lodge. Another 400-500 Vietnam veterans from all
ings
over the continental United States and Canada came
and listened, added their support and conducted nonstop organizing meetings in the hall-ways and nearby
rooms.
Much of the testimony was gruesomely familiar to
of the court-martial of Lt.
William Calley. What was new was the evidence presented was that the same grisly "incidents" permeated
the experiences of men who had served in Vietnam in
every year, in every major unit, in every region of
Vietnam. One woman or child killed here, 30 killed
there, a half-dozen somewhere else, 50 another day, in
another place.
The pattern of daily, or near-daily American war
atrocities year on end was too stark, and too thickly-
even casual followers
woven, to be soon forgotten by those hundreds of Detroit and Canadian citizens who came to hear, 500
at a time, these men who so obviously had been
there, Dozens of sober, concerned, middle-income
and often middle-aged Detroiters had to be turned
away for lack of room. The doubters were conspicuously hushed and few.
Yet there were critics. The Detroit News in particular tried to discredit the hearings by checking the
credentials of the veterans with the Pentagon. With
growing ill-temper, they reported the confirmation
of the stated records of each and every one.
Yet it remained by and large a hostile press. The
liberal, mostly eastern-establishment papers imposed
a near-blackout on the hearings, while the conservative, mostly mid-western press reveled in retorts such
as "alleged veterans," and "so-called hearings," and
other hackneyed tricks of the put-down trade.
But none of the press could deny that the veterans
at the Winter Soldier lnvestigation demonstrated
conclusively that an entire U.S. Marine regiment had
conducted combat operations in Laos, code named
"Operation Dewey Canyon," in early 1969, or that
an American ambush of unarmed Vietnamese during
a Christmas truce had killed 25-31 villagers, who
then were "armed" by the military command collecting the souvenir weapons of Gls and adding them
to the weapons and body count. They could not
deny these two charges In particular because an
enterprising news reporter found other veterans
throughout the country to substantiate the statements
made in
lletroit.
Nor could the press deny that on Monday, the
second day of the hearings, Senator George S. McGovern and Congressman John Conyers called for full
Congressional investigations into the charges made
during just the first day of the Winter Soldier lnvestigation.
There were many other highlights, too numerous
to mention. On Tuesday, the third and final day of
the hearings, as reports of a new invasion of Laos filtered out of lndochina, the veterans conducting the
hearings opened the final session of the Winter Soldier
lnvestigation by presenting a former Special Forces
sergeant who had made at least a half-dozen secret
missions into Laos between August 1968 and August
1969. The press censorship panel which followed this
dramatic opening, conducted by former Army and
Marine combat correspondents, explained why this
was an unreported story in America. As the discussion
quickly focused upon self-censorship by the civilian
press in lndochina, some of the press corps present
in Detroit walked out.
Funded by people as disparate as Jane Fonda and
the United Auto Workers' Emil Mazey, Crosby, Stills
and Nash and Michigan Secretary of State Richard
Austin, Mark Lane and the Business Executives
Move For Peace, the Winter Soldier lnvestigation
was six months in the making. At least a dozen congressmen and one congresswoman, Bella Abzug, endorsed it. Congressman Ronald Dellums has offered
the veterans office space in Washington, where, as a
possible epilogue, the Winter Soldier hearings may
well become official Senate Armed Services or For-'
eign Relations Committee hearings. A group of peaceminded congressmen and senators has called for just
that.
ln the meantime, transcripts of the full Winter
Soldier hearings in Detroit are available from the
Vietnam Veterans Against The War, Room 735, 156
Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10010.
The Winter Soldier Investigation grew out of reaction
to Administration contentions after the expose of Mylai
that the massacre at Sonmy in March 1968 was "an
isolated i ncident." I nfu riated .at such state ments,
viewed by most antiwar Vietnam veterans as official
lies, plans were made in late 1969 by several Vietnam
veterans to bring to light enough other first-hand
accounts of American atrocities to demonstrate
beyond doubt that Mylai was neither "isolated" nor
an "incident." In conjunction with many other
peace groups-clergy,law, Quaker, and college committees-members of the Vietnam Veterans Against
the War helped found first the Citizens Commission
of lnquiry lnto U.S. War Crimes, to conduct a series
of local war crimes hearings around the country (13
cities eventually, in all), starting with Annapolis,
Maryland, in February 1970,and then in September,
the Winter Soldier lnvestigation-to bring as much
testimony as possible and the veterans presenting it
to one national gathering. Detroit was selected for its
symbolic ties with working-class and Middle America
and its proximity to Canada.
Because of the refusal of the Canadian government to issue visas to the Vietnamese delegation invited to present their eye-witness accounts, a major
part of the planned hearings had to be amended,
however. As a substitute, several car-loads of veterans
drove over to Windsor, Canada, the last night of the
Winter Soldier lnvestigation and signed a symbolic
"people's peace lreaty" with a delegation of Vietnamese students exiled in Canada. The symbolism of the
final event of Winter Soldier was fittingly appropriate:
Vietnam veterans of all branches of the iervice,
from throughout America, embracing and apologizing
to Vietnamese, rather than killing them. -jan Barry
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Something is happening in France today that looks
important enough to write home about. Briefly: twenty political prisoners out of some forty now in French
jails have engaged themselves in a hunger strike, dating
back in the case of four in Toulouse to January 4. And
now the strike, and news of it, has begun to spread
outside the prisons.
What I will write about here is based mainly on a
visit I paid to the Sorbonne last night, where ten students and faculty members have holed up, since three
days ago, in the office of the director of the Sorbonne's division of philosophy. ln concert with groups
in two other locations in Paris, and in Aix-en-Provence and Amiens, these hunger-strikers have joined
forces with their imprisoned comrades (the word is
in daily use here) to force the Minister of J ustice,
Rene Pleven, to accede to two demands. One demand
is to accord to political prisoners the rights they have
traditionally held in France (rights of visitation, access
to books, etc.). These rights, presently denied, were
not abrogated even in the hard times of the Algerian
war, when they were extended to supporters of the
F.L.N. and to rightists alike. The second demand is
for the revision, the humanization, of the entire French
penal system, which, according to Jean Daniel, writing
in Le Nouvel Observateur of February 1, 1971, "is
the most severe and the most humiliating of all the
m
systems now in force in Europe."
l've been in Paris iust a month, and I
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don't really
get it: I don't really get the focus of radical sentiment
on the issue of the hunger strike. Not that the action
seems to me at all irrelevant. On the contrary, it has
a character of basic humaneness, of elementary directness: the support by like actions of imprisoned comrades who are mute and invisible, whose latitude for
action is practically nil-who can only put their bodies, their self-chosen privation, on the line.
What I don't get is the reason for the centrality of
these actions, this campaign, in the turbulent protest
movements of the hour. The hunger strike has become
the issue of the day. The battalions of cops visible in
the streets of Paris, sometimes dressed in battle fatigues and equipped with carbines, truncheons, and
plexi-glass shields of old-Roman design, are forced
often to play the cat in Tom and Jerry scenaiios. Militants, at least some of them in the name of the Movement of May 27 , have pledged themselves to an "action" a day as long as Pleven refuses to meet the
hunger-strikers' demands. These actions have included
an assault with Molotov cocktails on the prison of la
Roquette; the occupation of a chapel by one of the
fasting groups; and the "sequestration" of an underdirector of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts who had dismissed a hunger-striker. "Sequestration" is a form of
action currently being taken in factories, and the students at the Beaux-Arts improvised on the system by
putting their victim into a glass-walled concierge's
booth decorated with a hangman's noose and ringed
with chains, and bringing it to an open space for public
viewing. (l must note here that iudging from the
photograph I have seen, this treat.ment seems cruel
and unusual. The smiles of the onlookers surrounding
the glass cage of the under-director express the carnival atmosphere that threatens to become the vogue in
public punishments of political offenders.)
But to speak of an atmosphere closer to the business at hand: the atmosphere of the corridor at the
Sorbonne where I visited the new hunger-strikers was
startling, triumphant, expectant. I felt I was at an outpost of an insurrection, where everything was going
well and the power was accumulating. Because a public meeting at the Sorbonne the previous day (planned
originally in support of Angela Davis but broadened
to take account of the developing hunger-strike) was
attacked by upwards of a hundred rightists, thought
to be from outside the Sorbonne and labelled as
Fascist hirelings, the strike supporters have organized
a round-the-clock guard to protect the strikers. Last
night there was a constant coming and going at Escalier C of the Sorbonne. Activists, the curious, the responsible, were all mingled in the frowning, high-ceilinged rooms, whose walls were plastered with posters,
painted slogans ("Pleven, the people will have your
skin"), and current bulletins. The bulletins, lengthy
texts done handsomely with felt markers on yard-wide
paper yielded to spoken announcements when events
broke quickly. Fifty people milling around hushed and
drew close when someone brought the news of an
attack (an "affront"? a skirmish? I couldn't tell) on a
nearby police station. (ln Le Monde of the following
day, under the daily Agitation heading: "Des Cocktails Molotov sont lances contre le commisariat du
Ve Arrondissement." Three policemen were wounded,
three assailants captured.)
People arriving at the wing of the Sorbonne
where the strikers have established themselves clustered for the lengthy work of reading the new bulle.
tins, running to six and eight feet in length. Outside,
in the cobbled courtyard, the figure of Victor Hugo
sat, very pensive, very posed, on a massive pedestal
painted over in letters a foot high with an appeal for
the support of the Black Panthers.
Politics at the Sorbonne ( and at two other branches of the University of Paris with which l've become familiar, Jussieu and Censier) are very much to
the front. The corridors and facades of these branches
are dominated by political slogans, appeals, treatises,
in a vast disarray, sometimes attractive for its energy,
sometimes a molestation to the eyes. Any least caucus
can make permanent its announcement, 30 feet long,
for tomorrow's soon-to-be-forgotten meeting. Some
current graffiti: Hangings everywhere . . .Sequesirations are good, hangings better . . .Against the penitentiary system . . .Support the strike of the political
pr.isoners.
The efflorescence of politics, radical politics, that
we knew for a few weeks in the States at the time of
the Kent-Jackson-Cambodia crisis, seems to be quotidian here, permanent. at least since the indignation provoked by the events at Burgos. (l should note that the
branches of the University I have mentioned are
closest to what we call the humanities and social sciences, and that the dominating political mood may
be the achievement of 10-15% of the total student
THE GOVERNMENT HAS GIVEN IN
-starting now special conditions (regime special)
for the striking political prisoners
\
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body . . .not a small number.
Did Mao say, "First politics, then economics?"
This is the actuality of the forefront of the student
scene. Politics, right down to razor-fine sectarianism
(as it seems to the outsider.) Politics, for example,
which recently ensued in a fight between Trotskyists
and Communists at Censier, resulting in concussions
for some of the Communists, who were somehow
projected out of second-story windows. (The Trotskyists claimed they were attacked, that they restricted their actions to self-defense, and that the Communists who in the first place attacked them with iron
bars, fled out the windows in panic.)
And economics. At the Sorbonne last night I
spoke with Claudine, an assistant in aesthetics, and
with Hugues, a monitor (that is another faculty grade)
in psychology. Their Marxist outlook was fundamental, the source of their coherence. And the economic relationships were basic-the keystone, the
laser beam of analysis, the fulcrum of change. ln this
perspective, our American inclination to the overall
cultural revolution seems like persiflage, like wrongheaded mechanics, like stubborn trivialism. To Hugues,
the professional in psychology, as to Claudine, the
professional in esthetics, the leil-motif in analysis and
in change is economic.
There remain these addenda: The Gandhian tactic
of the hunger strike, of "taking the suffering on oneself,f is alien to the current mood of French radicalism . . .at any rate the radicalism which is most in evidence at the Universities. ln the repugnance they feel
towards police and the government, in the standard of
vituperation, these French militants are hardly second
to our Black Panthers, who are revered here. But the
tactic of fasting was in the first place indicated by the
limited latitude for action of the prisoners who began the strike. And the tactic is working. Brisoris le
mur de la silence, say the newest posters, Let's break
the wall of silence. And the press is, in fact, now,
finally, taking note of the muffled vigils of the prisoners.
Final addendum: is it an elitist aim to secure the
traditional privileges of political prisoners? What
about the rest, the plain, every-day lawbreakers, the
car-thief, the bank-robber, the cop-hater? According
to one current of thought here the distinction between the ordinary criminal and political prisoners is
lodged in the first place in the standards of bourgeois
morality, and in the second place in the levels of political consciousness and intentionality of the two
types of criminal. Both categories of prisoner are at
root political. So argues Lacenaire in Folitique Hebdo
of February 4.
February 8. lt would appear-is it possible-that
the strikers have wonl at 2 PM the following notice
was posted at the Sorbonne:
l
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-A commission of inquiry will meet to decide on
arrangements for the other prisoners so that the
special conditions may be extended to all
-the strikers at the Sorbonne are meeting to decide on the continuation of the strike
-the striking political prisoners have suspended
their strike pending the results of the commission
At 3:30 the strikers of the committee of support
announced that they would continue their strike for
another 48 hours, to verify whether Pleven would
keep his word.
Over the weekend the strike became a major issue.
Practically every newspaper in Paris took account of
ittoday, Le Monde devoting an entire page to the
issue. lt was in Le Monde last week that there appeared
an article on the deplorable character of foreign restaurants. The writer suggested that one unbeatable
way for foreign embassies to serve their home countries would be for each to subsidize a first class restaurant offering the best home specialties. The point
was made with aperitif in hand, so to speak, and I
take it up here in the spirit: could a hunger strike
have succeeded so well anywhere else than in this
country, where eating is taken to be one of the more
ioyful facts of life and is cultivated as a considerable
art? (Pleven put his foot in his mouth last week when
he sent word to a delegation of 3 hunger-.strikers and
Jean-Paul Sartre that he couldn't meet with them because he was detained at lunch.)
Addenda for this last installment, Februarv 8:
Hugues and Claudine, whom I saw at the Sorbonne
today, protest that I am clipping the truth when I intimate that their outlook is so.tightly bound to economic analysis. And they say that they, at least, hold no
such disparaging attitudes as I suggest towards the
American cu ltural revolution.
And from the Nouvel Observateur of February 8,
the astonishing news that a group of "common criminals" in the model prison of Flery-Merogis, began a
hunger strike in support of the striking political
prisoners. $
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League "Practice Nonviolence" tags and of course,
we printed up 200 leaflets with the heading ,,Blow
up balloons, not people!."
lt read as follows:
Today is Tet New Year in Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos.
As you're here today for your pre-induction physi-
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---
cal or induction, you are much closer to that New
Years Day than you might believe. lf you are inducted
into the Armed Forces of the United States, there is a
good chance that you will be called upon to fight
against the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos;
you will be called upon to kill those people, possibly
to die on their land. You will be called upon to do all
of this in this New Year that begins today. We,re here
to ask you to make a New Years resolution-A resolution that will promise to give the people of Southeast Asia a Happy New Year and that Resolution is to
refuse to be part of the military machine.
Your options are listed on the leaflet presented
outside of the lnduction center-Read and consider
these options well.
We think that this day and this Resolution calls
for a celebration so let's fill this building with balloons
owuego offensive
Oswego County seems, at first glance, to be an unlikely place for anti-war activity. The county's total
population is in the area of 100,000. The largest city,
Oswego, has a population of 25,000. We're largely a
rural area in what is called central New York's "snow
belt", but the Armed Forces lnduction Center, 40
miles away, in Syracuse, N.Y., has come to expect
problems when the bus of inductees and prO.inductees
arrives from local Board No. 60 of Oswego County.
One typical example of what goes on happened in
December when one pre-inductee arrived with an
American flag painted on his ass, while several of the
others took the fifth amendment on all forms presented them. This type of thing happens every month.
It
seems
that by now the Induction Center would
have known better than to schedule a bus from Oswego on J anuary 27th, which was Tet New Years. We
Oswego War Resisters Leaguers felt that Tet shouldn'[
go by without a party and since many Oswego county
people had been called for preinduction physicals on
that day we felt the only practical place to have a real
party was the lnduction Center.in Syracuse.
Being aware that the American military machine is
not very fond of civilian parties in military installations, we decided that our decorations should include
several balloons. There is, after all, no military manner for the removal of a balloon from a military installation. Any manner for its disposal looks very unmilitary, whether it be picking up the fully blown balloons
and carrying them to a waste can, walking around and
popping them with pins, or jumping on them. We felt
that this would cause sufficient confusion to make
our party a real success.
One of our friendly local men of the cloth was
kind enough to donate 1,000 balloons to our cause
with the inscription "Celebrate Life" on every balloon.
We also had a good supply of 300 War Resisters
and wish the people of Southeast Asia and the World
a Happy New Year!!!
When January 27th arrived, we were in the middle
of a blizzard, but we couldn't 1et that stop the party,
so three of us drove to Syracuse and arrived with our
balloons, leaflets, and tags stuffed under our clothing.
We wal ked in as if we belonged there and took a seat
in the lounge where the men sit between different
examinations. We attempted to blend in and began
talking with different examinees and to read magazines.
Soon every civilian in the lounge had at least one balloon and a Ieaflet, and rhey appeared willing to join
the party. Blown up balloons began appearing in unusual places, such as the podium in the Ceremonial
room, where men are sworn in. The military personnel
were getting more and more embarrassed and hassled
finding themselves completely unable to find out
where the balloons were coming from.
We finally decided to hit them full force and
everyone began blowing up balloons and tossing them
about the induction center. We then turned off the
water under all the "Johns" to make them unflushable and made an exit from the rnain floor as Marine
Sergeant Warr (that's his real name) began angrily
stomping on balloons. As the military lifers were busy
upstairs looking for us and jumpi'ng on balloons, we
buried the stairway with balloons and along the two
floors of railings, we tied "Practice Nonviolence" tags
every two inches apart. Just as we finished up our last
touches of party decorating, Sergeant Warr came
running down the stairway, tripping over balloons,
after us. We made our final exit into my car and
started away just in time to see the police arrive.
We left Syracuse laughing and happy. We had been
inside the lnduction Center for more than three hours,
spoke with most all of the civilians there, and did a
great deal of on-the-spot draft counselling. We made
many contacts with new supporters from Oswego
County and we all had a good time doing it.
-Bob Henning
r5
urhynotrc
Tom Forcade
Several
years ago, two anthologies of
the under_
ground press came out. One *u, .*ullrd
The Hippie
Pa.ge1s, edited by
Jerry Hopkins, anA ifre ort
*u,
called Notes From the New Unjergrorna,
"r.
.jit.a
Ov
.f esse Kornbluth. As I recall, nobojy
tooi ,irctr int.r_
est, positive or negative, in either
book when they
came out. Jerry Hopkins was an editor
of Open City,
and .f esse Kornbluth was a Harvard
student *ho lrrt
happened into the commission.
After these books came out, nothing happened
for
a while. Praeger, of ex-ClA notoriety,
.lrrisrioneO u
book on the underground press which
n.u., !o, .or_
pleted. Ethel Romm got out a book
on the u"nder_
ground press called The Open Conspiracy,
which was
not memorable. Richard Nevill of OZ wrotea
book
called Play Power, published in England
and it was
pretty good. Robert Glessing, a Canada
College pro_
fessor (for the first six months after I
met hiri I
thought it was Kenyatta College and was u..f
ir_
pressed) wrote a fairly comprehensive
book called
press
The Underground
in America.
rec-ently,
Countdown,
amagazine in paper,backY9r.
book format, came out three times
in 1970 and
then ceased publication. lt was edited
Uy fr4eiHowara,
a theater producer whose avocation
is the undergrould press. Ar firsr, Countdown was risiit.nry
listed as a UPS member,.and some people
*.r.n,, g.o
ting paid for their contributions. Eu.nirif
V, *"rvbody got paid,
and things cooled do*n, *hJr. th.r.
had been some very hosiile reactions
to CorntOo*n.
Graphically and in choice of articles,
CorntJo*n *u,
about the best thing to come out yet.
Sooner or later, it is inevitable ihat
someone who
spent their childhood collecting baseball
carOs inO
memorizing batting averages will write
TH E auihori_
tative book on the underground press,
which
will
amaze and amuse us all.
. Before going further, it,s only fair to point out
that I have participated in editing t*o u.,ttloiogi.,
which are coming out myself. Ne"ither
on. *itt strut.
the world, no way you can with an antholoey.
but
they're nice books and the writers *if g.t
f
,'or" ,o_
ney. I finished both of them long befoie
t .u.l r,.arO
of the two books I willdiscuss n".^r, und
i t,uu. fong
ago gotten all the money I expect
to get from them.
The contributors not only get mon.V"on
prAii.u,ior,
but continuing royalties, whi.h i, ,ni,.urj
of.'i f,ur.
no pride of authorship and I truly
aon,t cur.'*t,ett,.r
you buy either book or not, out i
*roughiii iuir. to
point this fact out before I get
into ,oriOoj, .f r.,,
books. Both of the ones t was invotvea
in"u-rl'rurrmarket paperbacks, and therefore
,.ttio u .Jrpt.t.ty
different market than the rwo following
b;ksl
TWO NEW BOOKS
and neatly re-pasted into book form.
li has a neat ap_
pearance, and it gives you a feel
of the underground
press, sort of. (Sometimes
I wonder why have antholo_
p';:::,.lll!f
I Know
iyst buy a bunch oi puprr,. I know,
l3t against
the argument
that, but think about it.)
Some of the articles in 1ne Movem"ni,-"i".'t
ur. .on_
tinuing interest. A great many do not,
and therefore
have value only as an example
of , puitirrti. type of
F9r an examp.le, an article unnorn.ing
illi!|.:
a meertng.to be held. Now, it,s about
t*o y.i" ioo f ut. to
make it to that meeting, and the prose
of the piece
isn't too memorable, ,o.l gr"ss it;,
;;
.;;;ple. Goodman says the book is an organizing
tool. Could be, especially ifyou,d never.seen un
,nJ.rground paper.
lnterestingly enough, several unO.igrornjpup.r,
L^
have
started where the people had
nev"er ,r.n unott,.,
u,nderground paper, and they looteJpreit-ymuch like
all the other papers. Which seems ,o prou.
,f",u, ,f,.
underground paper form grows organically
out of
function, nor from imitation. C.rff;i;;;peopte
will find Goodman,s book useful, unJ f ,, giua
i,
came out. A book that big could
have held a lot more
real content, from a much, much
wiOer range of pa_
pert but it's there and it,s happening,
so firie.
The onty probtem is thar a ti;;;."pi;'ilho
urror.
articles-haven,t gotten paid. There,s
a noie in the
back of the book that explains *t y,
,ori-oi. OLt urthors should be paid when a r,re..upiiuil;'.Jrroru-
tion like Klo^pf, owned by Raniom 'H";r;,
*-t i.t i,
owned by RCA, publish a book like
this. nCn (Vo,
know, bomb guidance systems, radar,
electric toothbyr!..1is tiabte legaily and moraily unJii*orrO
U.
ntce tT Goodman would cooperate
to help them get it
now. Hopefully, some of the writers
.un .oii.rriu.f y
bring some action, since letters h"r.
;;r;;';;
,.._
sponse. RCA has the money now,
so why wait until
the book makes some theoretical ,,p
rofit.,,
Fire!, edited by three ex_Rat p.opL,
l, a book
,
wherein the articles are typed, OorUi._rpur.a-.Jn.
book does not contain many articles
una .oii, iZ.Ss.
Need I say more? lt,s like buying.
f.ir,,i.."i"r.f
Tide and finding it half empty. On
the"othe, t,unA, ,o_
body is sropping you from ftipping
irri"rgi'li'u.r"*
you,buy it. lt's their layout concept.
I ao"n,t- aig it;
maybe you
will.
'
-'o
Again with Fire! there was the problem
of pay_
ment to authors. At least one author
has complained
that he did nor get paid. This sort
rhi;;lr;;;vitabte,
and no anthology could come out "f
witfrou't som.UoOy
not getting paid, unless you know
Bernadine Dohrn,s
Anthologies shoutd srirr ue puiiis-rrea,
l1l:.:l^.::
our edttors and publishers should also
immediately
reimburse anybody whom ihey
miss. lf ,f,"ir,i.r"
can't be found, pay the paper.
ilT;ffxH;ll,lllli,rlJiliu::lrt
*iir;';:*
a"'pli'd anyway.The big companies have
SIiT:l'1,.:ffimi,:ffifi[.3"'^r#ur sam' ,;;;, ;;l'r]st because p.opr; ",. ,[r, doesn,t rhe
j'
,Jy3.n'y.unthorogies have come out recentrv,,.one
called rhe Movement Toward u N"*A;;;;;,'.ait.a
,horro
ir''
rvr,'","nt,
book;;;i;.,1.or, [:i?Jffl,T;:j'rni1[:liffi:rffi;]v.
lill rirr.a "
";. and" sells ror g5'95.
sears-Roebuck catalog
with a great number of articles .r,
orlli'u'rul ,lr,nur-
row range of underground papers
and very
cteverty
il.
C.ilii,g t"rk to Fire!, the credits were given
in a
i .uningt.r, mess, with no names connected
i",.v ,]"rt. ti,.r. i, certainlyu.ur. fo,. unsigned
jumbled,
t7
work, but if that was the theory, there should have
been no names at all.
I understand that these same people, who are good
people, are designing Jerry Rubin's next book, which
should be interesting to see. lncidentally, Goodman
was a co-defendant with Doc Spock. How about that.
As far as these two books, go, I might buy Goodman's because it's too big to steal, but Fire! is just the
right
size.
A PROPOSAL
What is really needed to resolve such problems for
both sides is a literary agent for the underground
papers. We at UPS have had to proceed within very
strict boundaries, since we don't have any right to negotiate for them. So we iust keep an eye on things,
ipread the word, and deal with things when specific
papers ask us to- A full-time agent authorized by the
papers would be better. Also, some papers are not
copyrighted. You have one year to copyright, so if
\
\
.u.ry pop.t would put either Copyright WIN (for
example) 1971,or Copyright UPS 1971, then-at the
end of the year we could send in two copies, fill out
all the forms at once and be totally protected with
minimum hassle.
The biggest thing standing in the way of such cooperative things was summed up by Jeff Shero in his
article in Sun/Dance: "We are still too consumed by
our ego competitive death-culture conditioning to
choose leaders who we can trust and bolster, rather
than undercut and make weak through petty jealousy
and infighting. We have lust approached the point
when people begin to lose their selfishness and individualism, and learn to work together. We have not
reached the necessary stage where people can be
chosen for positions of responsibility and leadership
and not be cut down."
Very true, and one of the things stopping more
cooperation within UPS. But it's inevitable for the
time being.
ir
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WHY NOT WE?
/
There is a strong case to be made for movement
people flatly refusing to give books to any establishment publisher. The reason is simple. lf people are
conditioned to look for radical and revolutionary
channels, all you are doing is reinforcing that channel.
All that society is is relationships (channels). And you
don't change it by reinforcing such channels. To put it
another way, capitalist publishing and distribution of
books is like the Grand Canyon and radical books are
like water being poured in there making that Canyon
deeper. Use your own channels. Yes, I know that if
you publish your own book you reach only thousands and when you sell it to them you reach millions,
but it ain't quantity that counts, it's quality. The
mimeographed Trans-Love books blew my mind and
made the revolution more believable and real than
any hundred slick Random House "products." Because the Random House book was obviously for
profit, and the Trans-Love book was obviously because somebody believed in it.
A cliche is a widespread truth: THE MEDIUM lS
THE MESSAGE. So mimeograph it, Xerox it, make
carbons, or pass it around to your friends, but don't
sell it down that Colorado River to become a fucking
product, like a frozen TV dinner.
Over a year ago, Marvin Garson wrote a book called
The Staged Sixties, which he mimeographed. A hell
of a lot of people saw that book and read it, despite
that, and people remembered it because of the medium, while l've forgotten or discounted many books,
because of the medium, despite the message.
ln view of these feelings, perhaps you are wondering why I am having my current books (4) done by
i
establishment publishers. The answer is that I have already sold these. I did take the one unsold book back
from Random House. But my next book will be
FREE! (and remember, folks, you get what you pay
for.)
lncidentally, by far the best underground press anthology is a book from England called Counter-Culture, unavailable in the U.S. Outasite!
l
\
whattodo
Mitch Goodman
i
\
l. .". of their weather reports rhe Weathermen
"lt's
love. "
said,
easy to hate in
Amerika it's
a
lot harder to
l've never met Tom Forcade. The extent of our
connection is one phone conversation. Yet I feel sure
he hates me, and has made efforts to spread that poison. Now, that might be simply written as a personal
matter, if it weren't for the factthal Forcade is some
sort of boss (self-appointed, I think) at UPS, and publishes a newssheet (Clear Head) there, most of which,
as I understand it, he writes himself. Which means
that Forcade has put himself in a position to do con-
siderable good or considerable harm. He's a central-
office man, a kind of watch-dog commissar for the
underground press, and does whatever he feels like
doing, apparently. Does it need to be spelled out?
That way lies "democratic-centralism," with party
Secretary Stalin at the end of the road.
Forcade made up his mind, on the basis of that one
phone call (it's clear he knows little or nothing about
me) that he did not trust me, or, more accurately,
that he didn't like me or the Movement book I had
put together. (Trust is a word he doesn't seem to
know.) He then got out his hatchet and went to work.
u
ll
He hacked out an item for his Clear Head-back in
November some time-in which he jumped right in
with the declaration that I was a ,,capitalist and a
chomp" and that I was busy ripping off the under- .
ground press. He then wrote a quick description and
estimate of the book: "which is a collection of articles
from the underground press, very badly chosen by
Mitchell Goodman, published by Alfred A. Knopf . . .,,
Having thus written off two or more years of hard
work, he quickly summed up his evidence for my
crime by twisting and garbling the facts of the book
and its history that I had told him over the phone.
When I told him, for example, that yes, I had permission for everything used in the book, he seemed
surprised, even disappointed. Still, like the good de_
tective he is, he proclaimed in Clear Head that ,,We
are currently examining Knopf's copyright re. . .,,
leases . . ." and about two months later sent one of
his agents over to look at the permissions letters. He
too seemed surprised to find that it was true: no one,s
material had been pirated. The fact is, people in the
Movement had trusted me to do a book that needed
to be done, was being done under difficult condi-
tions, and required a lot of willing cooperation from
contributors if it was going to get done at all. ln fact,
there was a long note to contributors on p. 152 of
the book, in which I ran down its complicated history
and told them what they could expect (the situation
having changed since I first wrote to them for permission). On the phone I had asked Forcade (who was
coming on like the FBI) to read that note. He evidently did not bother, or chose to ignore it. He was
intent on his hatchet job.
Forcade never suggested he was writing this attack;
he never sent me a copy (l didn,t know Clear Head
existed at the time). I learned of it by accident. Nor
did he sign his name to it.
ln this latest document (above) Forcade seems to
have had some second thoughts about the book.
Grudgingly. lt's typical that the only specific item he
mentions (and he doesn't even specify that one) is ,,an
article announcing a meeting to be held,,, and points
out that it is two years too late to go to the meeting.
That sounds either like spite or some kind of juvenile
petu lance.
But then he tells you that what he's really worried
about is that a lot of people who wrote the stuff
haven't gotten paid. This time he refers to my note in
the back of the book "lhat explains why, sort
of, . . . " lt doesn't just explain why (if permissions
fees had had to be paid at that stage, the publisher
would not have gone ahead with the book; and in the
end, if it ever had been published, it would have been
a $10 or $12 book), it explains how and when contributors are going to get paid-as far as it is in my
power to do something about it.
ln typical Forcade style, he then proceeds to rave
about Random House and RCA ("huge capitalist
corporation"), again ignoring what I (and the note in
the book) had told him. Knopf-Random House-RCA
etc. is not the publisher, certainly not for the purpose
we're dealing with here. Knopf came in at the very
end to handle distribution; it could not have been
done without them. The publisher, the original and
only actual publisher and holder of the copyright, is
Pilgrim Press, a small church-connected non-profit
publisher that operates on a small budget. (They,ve
done two good books lately, one on the military-industrial complex by Sid Lens, another on war crimes
in Vietnam. Neither book made it: no distribution.)
Knopf has a business agreement with pilgrim that
effectively protects them from any further costs, like
demands for payment from contributors. That leaves
Pilgrim Press. They claim that due to the high costs
of the book (true) and the low price, they have not
made any money on it. That question, and the related
question of their obligation (moral and legal) to pay
contributors is being pursued. (photographers and
others whose work was acquired at the end of the process, after Knopf came in on it, demanded payment
and got it. All that part of it was handled by those
who did the production work, not by me.)
But if all we were really talking about here was
money, it wouldn't be worth the fuss (at leastgO%
of the contributors do understand the situation-in
spite of Forcade's paranoid fulminations-and it,s
clear from their responses to the book that they trust
me). ln fact, we're talking about love and hate and
suspicion and what lies under those feelings.
ln his current offering, Forcade is no longer calling
me a chomp capitalist; he limits himself to a sneer.
l'm no more than an accomplice of Dr. Spock. lmagine trying to make a revolution with an old baby
doctor! l've been active in the Movement for six
years, in all kinds of weather, in Ny, Berkeley, Boston and several other places, and all this watchdog
can dig up on me is that I was on trial for conspiracy
with Dr. Spock. Maybe you'd better check with the
FBl, Thomas-with all their deficiencies, their information is better than yours.
But why is Thomas so eager to use that axe on me
(and on the book)? At first I thought he musr be
some simpleminded factionalist, a McLuhanite nonreader, who doesn't like my politics and likes books
even less. But in this latest document of his, there,s
what may be a clue. ln a paragraph beginning ,,Before
going further, it's only fair to point out that I have
participated in editing two anthologies . . .,,, he tells
us that he too is involved with ,,huge capitalist corporations," and spends the rest of the paragraph telling us they, the two anthologies, don,t really amount
to much ("they're nice books',), and that ,,1 have long
ago gotten all the money I expect to get from them.,,
(Really, Thomas? From mass-marketlaperbacks? Wherr
they distribute a million books at a clip?). Then at the
end of his document he suddenly reveals that it is not
really two but four movement books he has been
producing, and that all four are being done by ,,establishment publishers." Forcade is in business. (And
he's gotten so good at it that he somehow manages
to get money for his contributors; but maybe that,s
not so hard to do with mass-market paperback cor-
porations.) Could it be that he sees me as a rival busi"product" is maybe better than his,
nessman whose
and was out on.the "market" first, and perhaps will
make his "nice books" look not so nice after all?
Does that sound too harsh? Then look at it this
way. What makes a guy like Forcade worth bothering
with at all is that 1) he is only human; 2) he's a victim
of this society, like the rest of us; and 3) all this hate
and scorn and canny effort to poison the water is
symptomatic of the Movement in its weakest aspects,
its sickness. Marge Piercy put her finger on the Movement machers (see p. 57 of The Movement, "The
Grand Coulee Dam"): the men who make the Movement their business, and in the process use and demean women (and men, too, l'd add). My guess is
that Forcade is one of them-whether he knows it or
not. (l suspect not.) Probably he's at least half unconscious of what he does with that hatchet, as so many
blind-angry people are. But why so angry? ls he angry
at himself? ls he guilty? ls he, somewhere, afraid he's
got the virus of capitalism in him? Out of feelings like
these comes the need to control, to dominate others,
to cut people down and so establish your own authority. Authoritarianlsm. Domination. The underlying
deformities, on which stand imperialism, sexism, racism, adultism (control of children), capitalism, and
the authoritarian forms of socialism. Which brings us
back to the central office, the watchdog and the ghost
of Stalin.
7
{
A final note: I wanted to get into some of the
other questions: commercial and Movement publishing, etc., but l've already taken more than my share
of the space. The publishing thing, important as it is
(the very last words in The Movement are a cail for a
Movement publishing house), is secondary. First of
all, what kinds of books, what's in them, etc.? Forcade
is still giving us the wornout "truth": The Medium ls
the Message. Bullshit. The feeling, the action, the experience is the message. The Movement is an action:
it embodies the multiform energies of the Movement
as they expressed themselves, with immediacy, thru
all kinds of people. (Staughton Lynd wrote to me
about the book that it "(presents) those sources in a
form which is continuous with that of the thing being
studied, so that the book itself becomes part of the
Movement rather than merely being about the Move-
ment."
Forcade's reductionlst notion of what a book is
corresponds to his parochial view of what the Movement is. He talks about "anthologies", his own and
others. But The Movement is precisely not an anthology, it's a carefully constructed book, a coherent en-
tity, in which the dynamic of the interacting elements
are meant to correspond to those in the Movement itself
.
Forcade insists on thinking that The Movement is
simply a collection from "the underground papers."
("A book that big," he writes, "could have held a lot
more real content, from a much, much wider range
of papers . . .") But to show the Movement and its
matrix, its context, you have to go beyond the underground papers. The intention was to show that the
Movement is broader and deeper than most people
think it is-John Holt, George Dennison, John McDermott, N.O. Brown (to take a few examples) don't
write for the underground papers, but they are all
very much elements of and witnesses to the Movement.
What I did use from the underground papers was,
as I saw
it,
a representative sampling: Great Speckled
Bird, Old Mole, Berkeley Tribe, Chicago Seed, Milwau'
kee Kaleidoscope, etc. Anything wrong there, Thomas? And of course the heaviest contributors were
not underground papers at all, but WIN and Liberation. No regrets. Other materials, from the NY
Times, etc., were used as foils and refractors. I put it
all together-good solid writing-in the hope that
people still read books and don't iust look at them.
Judging from the response, my hope was iustified.
(Radical teachers around the country are beginning to
use it in courses, for one thing.)
As for Forcade's "proposal." Sure, mimeo, xerox,
etc. are important, for certain purposes. (Marvin Garson's stuff is memorable not because of the medium
(mimeo) but because he writes so damned well, i.e.
has the language-power to match his fertility.) And
we sure as hell need more Movement presses, like
REP, New England Free Press, etc. (Forcade never
mentions this crucial element of our media. Nor does
he mention the first signs of actual Movement book
publishing: Peoples Press and Ramparts Books, both
in the Bay Area, where most of what's new seems to
ccime from.) But if Forcade's proposal ends with
mimeo, xerox and carbons and "pass it around to
your friends", then the Movement is going to spend
the next 1 0 years talking to itself. The point, the
need, now is to reach out-by any and all means, including (for the moment) the commercial publishers.
Knopf is distributing The Movement, which is working in and for and beyond the Movement. They do ii
for money and prestige. We do it for the revolution.
ln the long run, who is using whom? I
BUSTNESS
L00ts FoR
BIG WAR
PROFIT
I
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21
ast year in the October I st issue of WIN there
was a three-way discussion-Sid Peck, Harry Ring,
and myself-on how to end the war. The discussion
was occasioned by the split that had begun within
the movement, the withdrawal of the Socialist Workers' Party (and Young Socialist Alliance and Student
Mobilization Committee), from the broader coalition.
At the time I wrote: " . . .their present decision to
pull out of New Mobe and set up their own frame-.
work is a real movement fuckup; it means a kind of
politlcal guerilla war all across the country."
How unhappily correct I proved to be, for now
the movement as a whole is confronted with choosing
between " April 24" and "May 2nd." Some discussion
is in order to account for the forces.behind the two
dates and the reasons for the conflict.
The April 24th date was arbitrarily chosen by the
National Peace Action Coalition (known as NpAC).
The date itself is tied to no event-its one real value
seems to have been that it came a week before the
May dates which everyone has known, since last fall,
were projected as days of intensive action in Washington. NPAC itself is not in any genuine sense a coalition. The driving force behind it is the Socialist Workers' Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC).
The May 2nd date was chosen by the peoples,
Coalition for Peace and Justice, and it was chosen to
mark the anniversary of the invasion of Cambodia
and because it is on the first weekend before the fateful days of May 4 (Kent State) and May 6 (Jackson
State) and also because the International trade union
movement is planning mass demonstrations during
the first two weeks in May to protest the lndochinese
war.
Last year, for reasons I tried to outline in a long
article in the February 15th WlN, "New Mobe,, began to radicalize and broaden its program, and sought
to involve non-white groups in a genuine coalltion
that would link peace and social justice. One can
make fun of the changes of name that have occurred:
Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam to National Mobilization Committee to End
the War in Vietnam to New Mobilization Committee
to End the War in Vietnam to National Coalition
Against War, Racism and Repression to People,s
Coalition for Peace and Justice, but these changes reflect a steady growth in the political nature of that
grouping. The People's Coalition itself was born out
of the Milwaukee Conferences of June and September
of last year and the Chicago Conference of early
lf we moved slowly and required
three conferences it is precisely because the people,s
Coalition is a broad-based organization, ranging from
the forces in the AFSC, WRL, FOR, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About the War in Vietnam, and Women's Strike, to such segments of the Old Left as the
Communist Party, to eiements of the trade unions,
to significant forces in the Chicano, Black, and puer)anuary this year.
Cuerillatmr
inthe
David McReynolds
to Rican communities. By "significant" I mean groups
such as the National Welfare Rights Organization and
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, not
merely individual sponsors.
ln opposition to that complex reality of a coalition
of groups and forces, NPAC has nothing more to it
than its essential Trotskyist cadre, plus a very excellent list of individual sponsors (few of whom were
aware of the split the Trotskyists had brought to the
--\
peace movement), and several community peace coalitions. lt is significant that the People's Coalition is
not trying to get massive lists of sponsors-we don,t
need them because we have an actual base in communities and organizations-while NPAC has laid
tremendous stress on such lists-because they have al-
most no organizational support outside the SWP,
YSA, and SMC.
Now I am not happy to go into this discussion because experience has taught me that splits leave everybody much weaker and, while they are exciting to
some of us, they demoralize most of us. But the
present "guerilla war" in the peace movement is the
only alternative we have to capitulating to the political line of the Trotskyists. What is the basic disagreement?
First, the SWP opposes the peace movement
having anything in its program except immediate
withdrawal from Vietnam, while the People's Coalition feels the time has come to link the brutal foreign
policy of this nation with the brutalization our society
imposes on non-whites and the poor in general. ln our
view Vietnam is no accident, but flows from the
structure of our society and we commit ourselves to
help change that structure.
Second, the SWP opposes any tactic but mass legal
demonstrations. lt opposes civil disobedience and
nonviolent direct action and, because it runs candidates of its own, it opposes the coalition taking any
stands on political parties or candidates. lt knows, for
example, that the independents in NPAC will not support SWP candidates in 1912, so it settles for NpAC
supporting no one and nothing in the political area.
I already pointed out in the WIN debate last Octo-
?2
q
ber that I also believe the SWP is terrified that the
forces now grouped in the People's Coalition may
form a kind of "Left political party" which would
draw people away from the SWP. lf they do fear this
they are probably correct-the People's Coalition is,
potential[y, the first serious move in a long time to
create something more than a "peace coalition" or a
"civil rights coalition"-it is an effort to create an
American coalition aimed at restructuring this society.
Whose date was first?
This is one of those tragically silly arguments. But
to be dealt with. NPAC is saying that they were
the "first" with a date and the People's Coalition is
dividing the movement by refusing to support April
24th. This is not an honest argument. When NPAC
had its conference in Chicago in December, just a
couple of weeks before the People's Coalition was to
meet, our negotiators begged them not to set a fixed
it
has
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date, to wait until the two groups could settle on a
joint date. Everyone knew that, as early as last summer, there was talk of an action in Washington in
May of 1911 and while most of us were reconciled to
the existence of two coalitions instead of one, we
felt that both coalitions should join on a single date
for mass legal action in Washington.
NPAC went ahead and set a date but then did two
things, showing real political shrewdness. They kept
telling the People's Coalition that NPAC was not
"locked into" April 24, that it could be changed, and
we should keep negotiating to find a common date.
That seemingly generous and open approach delayed
the People's Coalition from setting a date as we kept
trying to work out a common program with NPAC.
ln the meantime, while we were postponing any concrete dates that would lock the movement into a
fight, NPAC was proceeding in a very hard way at local levels, lining up buses for April 24th, getting sponsors, etc.
The tactic was effective enough, forcing the
People's Coalition into choosing between an open
fight or into accepting the political leadership and
political line of the Trotskyists. I think I speak for a
great many people when I say that we are no more
prepared to accept this political leadership from the
now than, some years ago, we were prepared to
accept the leadership of the Communist Party. The
SWP
fight
is unfortunate-and tragic-but the alternative
to accept the limitations that a movement has
when it adopts the "single issue, single taclic" concept
of the Trotskyists.
ls there a basis for unity?
one question, yes-the question of a single date
,for On
a mass, legal, peaceful demonstration. The?eople's
Coalition has urged NPAC to give up the April 24th
date and join in sponsoring the May 2nd date. But on
broader questions, no. The Trotskyists have played a
conservative role within the movement for the past
two years, a role that has been helpful in limiting the
kind of mindless "revolution through personal terrorism" approach of the most alienated sections of the
movement, but a rolp that has also stood in the way
of developing genuine mass actions involving civil disobedience. As long ago as March of last year, during
anti-draft week, the local peace committees controlled
by the Trotskyists (and, to a lesser extent, those influenced by the Communists) shied away from concrete support for anti-draft actions.
ln the long run the Trotskyists have probably
talked themselves out of the coalition. This is not the
first time they have sought to exercise hegemony over
' the whole peace movement, but it is their most serious effort thus far to do this, and clearly their most
successful. lt is not merely that hard feelings exist
now on both sides, but that the People's Coalition
has moved to the left of the Trotskyists, leaving
them-ironically, considering their attachment to
orthodox Marxism-with only the most moderate elements of the peace movement as their allies.
A note on "Trotsky baiting"
One holdover from the McCarthy period is the
is
Lt+
feeling that political discussion musL be conducted in
some kind of code. During the suppression of the
Communist Party in the 50's, there was merit in that.
I was not then as aware, personally, as I should have
been that to attack certain persons or groups as C.P.
was to endanger the jobs and even the freedom of
those involved. But in the present context, when the
Trotskyists are extremely respectable and my "accusation" against theni is that they wilt not violate the
law through civil disobedience, I am hardly costing
them their jobs, let alone their freedom.
When individuals and groups are involved in a policy of violence and terrorism we are forced to conduct
the debate with them in very careful ways-one would
not, for example, say that "such-and-such a committee" was infiltrated by Weathermen, or that "so-andso was close to the Weathermen", because such a
charges, if put in those terms, amount to providing
public information for later government action. But
persons and groups in public life whose actions are
within the law (and the Trotskyists are profoundly
within the law) cannot expect to be exempt from a
discussion of their politics and the way in which
those politics affect groups in which they operate-in
this case, NPAC.
So, friends, choose your date
April 24th isn't going to do any harm-it will be a
nice, legal, peaceful rally with only one demand: "out
of Vietnam now." lf your local group has already
signed up with that date, and if you can't change to
May 2nd, don't worry. Contrary to the belief of
some in the movement, the world will not collapse if
there are two demonstrations in Washington a week
apart. lt is too bad, but not the end of the movement.
lf you are able to shift your local group to May
2nd,l urge you to do so. That is also a legal, peaceful
rally with two extremely important differences from
April 24th. First, we will demand an end to social injustice and political repression as well as an end to
the war. Second, May 2nd will be a "support rally"
for the thousands who will remain in Washington for
lobbying on May 3 and 4 and for nonviolent civil disobedience on May 5th.
A NOTE FOR THE FUTURE
The current fight, which has created terrible bitter_
ness among the rank and file who don,t understand
why, confronted with the invasion of Laos, the movement cannot agree on a single date, may also serve to
educate the rank and file that there is not a single and
unified movement. We are confronted with some very
real political disagreements-disagreements which the
Trotskyists forced forward. They are the ones who
split the movement. No one forced them out of the
coalition-they left. But their actions underline the
need for building an American movement that is not
run by somebody's central committee. lf the peoples
Coalition has been slow to move, has floundered,
lacked swift cohesion, required three conferences to
make decisions, it is because no one can manipulate
it and, therefore, one can hope that it represents
something very real in American life. Slow, but sure.
Ponderous and pragmatic, but important.
!J
-"'
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Sam Coleman
April 30, 191"1-
january 22,1971
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i
No matter how close
the flesh
of
marching men
ri
Or Youth
in wild flock
or
I
$il
red phalanx
ffi
Sam called each by name
Catching signals
$
fl
From each soul
That flickered
As
il
m
u
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if it
Were one and all
I
ust so
the iumbled thoughts
we tangled at his feet
He marshalled
to a human PYramid
Broad as the planet of our dreams
With its apex
in the MilkY WaY
Our stars will follow there
-Edward
P. Gottlieb
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0
Phyllis was heading down a flight of steps, from
street level to train level of the Lexington Avenue
Subway line. Someone heading up reached over and
touched her arm. Watch it! ln New York City, such
doings mean trouble. But don't worry. See, the guy
who reached for her knew her. Well, he didn,t actually
know her, he knew Melissa. I guess l'd better explain.
Phyllis is an actress. She's in a play called TOUCH
which is running at a theatre in the East Village. It,s
billed as a communal musical, it's about us ,'youhg
people," and in it Phyllis plays the part of an orphan
named Melissa. "l was so excited when he recognized
me, I mean when he recognized Melissa...This is
really very confusing it's hard to find a way to talk
about Melissa apart from myself. She's not make believe; she's real. My life isn't at all like hers, but she,s
still a part of me, and I'm a part of her."
The first Iime I saw the play it was lnstant Karma.
lnstant in that it was quick, but not that it didn,t require some work. The press tickets I hustled were for
the best seats in the house, front-row in a theatre
which surrou nds the stage on three sides. The slage
began at my feet, and although all parts of the theatre
were used, the performers were never more than fifteen feet away. lt was frightening, and I was surprised
to find it so. l've been going to lots of rock concerts
listening to much live rock 'n' roll music. One skill
?L
U
C
H
I
o
that's been easy to come by in these other audience/
performer activities is being able to keep the performers as distant from me, to keep me as secure behind
defenses as I feel I need. At TOUCH I was vulnerable,
and knew it from the moment I sat down.
Much of my fright came from not knowing what
my part was supposed to be. I felt like one of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. They
were characters from an unfinished play who stormed
into a theatre demanding to know how their play
would come out. They needed to know. Without
knowing they could not carry on. l, too, was unsure
of my role. Looking at the less-freaky-more-straight
theatregoers around me, I felt like I ought to be,
somehow, a representative of the freak community
the play was about. But, how much would be asked
of me? And, what could I afford?
-
TOUCH is official off-broadway theatre. Ads in all
the newspapers, good reviews in most of the same.
But, just recently they received a grant from an arts
and theatre foundation, and a celebration ensued.
Now, at least for a while, the actors and actresses and
other folks involved will get paychecks and not just
slips of paper equal to spare change. They had been
getting $5, sometimes $10 per week; living on that.
second job income, and whatever they come up with
in their panhandling scene. (There is one man who
has been back to see the play several times, each time
of mine commented. They reach out and hug you
warmly, as do many of the communards I know, but
they don't understand (small "p") politics well enough to know that groups often have to (small "o")
organize for getting things done; can't just make it
returning with half-dollar pieces which he freely gives
away in the scene.)
TOUCH grew out of a summer theatre experiment
in Warren, Pennsylvania. Edie O'Hara, mother of
actresses and a theatre buff herself, began a company
called Plowright. They got themselves a barn, put on
shows of standard fare, wrote some of their ownIike TOUCH, and did a do-it-yourself thing for themselves all the way to New York. Plowright's given a
lot of young people the chance to find out what they
can do in theatre, and has plans for continuing with
the same.
Look, Phyllis. I feel uncomfortable trying to do a
straight interview with you . . .l feel involved with the
play...Let
fl#1
L*l
me try to tell
on good vibes and touches alone. Look at the way
the play ends-the "tribe" in the play doesn't really
know how to deal with the inclpient violence of the
townspeople who fear/misu nderstand/feel threatened
by their commune. They could all use a good course
in pacifist activism.
The play's about kids like us who drop out and go
a searchin'. Hit the city and . . .well, cities got the
ways and means to cut up dreams like a street blade
moves through even frozen butter. So they hit the
road, and come together out of need-simple ones at
first, simple in that they are easy to recognize and
understand-like need for sustenance and warmth of
a physical sort. After taking care of that sort of business, they begin to work at understanding the more
complex needs of us human animals, meet some of
them, miss on others, feel pain and pleasure from the
hits and misses, and understand that once in edge
city the return to old ways is beyond consideration.
There's a lot more talk could be done about the
realism and stuff like that of the play. But fuck it. I
know some about the people of the play, as they
appear on stage, and some about them off. I know
they ain't as together as they could be, which means
as l'd like them to be, as l'd like myself to be, but the
process of coming together every night on stage,
among the performers, between the on-stage folks and
the audience, is worth much more than any of these
you...
That first night I was sitting there trying to find a
posture which was comfortable. Physically, I was
squirming ln my seat, just trying to be casual. ln my
head I was looking for some way to let y'all know I
was with you. But during the first act I was being
very critical. I kept telling myself how naive your
characters-all of you-were. Then some of the magic
of good theatre reached me, shortly after the intermission break. l began to step up to where the play
was reaching for me . . .y'know, I stopped watching
myself watch the play and really began to taste it.
It wasn't like I decided to get involved, the play
sort of grabbed me. And then at the end, when you
reached out for me . . .look, I have no idea if that always happens or not, if anyone else was being touched,
if anyone else was being hugged; I wasn't thinking
about it, I was just squeezing you and being high.
That's really fine to hear, Phyllis grinned and said.
I play to the audience. I have to. Their reactions
change and shape and mold everything I do on the
stage . . .During the introductlons, the "Windsong"
scene I sort of case the ioint-that doesn't sound so
nice; what I do is look at the people who are sitting
where I play . . .l usually know at that time in the beginning who I will be able to reach out to at the end . .
Sometimes, though, all I see are coat and tie people,
and that scares me. I have such a hard time trying to
reach them.
David, another of the actors: Sometimes I want to '
be shocking the audience more. They seem so accepting. . .The original notion was to do the intro scene
in blackface; a loudspeaker blaring the lines-using
the convention of cruelty, sort of, using horror as a
device; bur finally we decided that beauty as a device
seemed more appropriate. Now, though, what we hear
is that we and the play are so naive. . .but the in-theknow political people seem to be training themselves
to be refused. lf I could be President, and give them
What they wanted, if I could just reach out and give
them what they wanted (he extends his hand theatrically, palm upward, as he speaks) they would probably cut my hand off.
I tried to interrupt: David, I don't think political
people, as you call them, want a president, nor do
they want to be given things.
At
least the play is realistic in one sense, a friend
.
small words.
I consider the play in much the same way I consider the WIN office, a place to go when the city and
the winter get too cold for healthy consumption. I
take my friends to the play every chance I get. We
bake bread before we go and share it with the cast
and the audience during the intermission..l've returned to the community of the play many times.
As the play ends, each and every time l've seen it, I
want it to go on-Throw away the script, I say to myself, no more need to know how it ends, now that I
know how it begins.
lf the play doesn't mirror the harshness of the
realities many of us have come to know, if it's not as
real and painful as the world we wake up everyday to
it still stands worthy.
I had been waiting for a friend of mine to visit from
Wisconsin, had been plannlng to share the play with
her. I saw much of her in the play-how she was
striving to integrate her own need to end the loneliness of our society with her struggle as a woman, with
the struggle of all folks who say not that I have suffered because of you-it's your fault-but I will be
free, I SHALL BE RELEASED. She didn't make it
home. But I know she would have dug the play. She
would have been too involved in it to trouble over
what it didn't do-she was never much of a critic. Her
review would have taken but one line of your reading
time: "See it," is what she would have said. -f ack
see,
27
the accused "confesses," the prognosis is considered a little
better. But in either case, off one goes to the mental hospi-
tal for an indeterminate stay-often for life! lt is not sur-
THE MANUFACTURE OF MADNESS:
A Comparative Study of the lnquisition and the
Mental Health Movement
by Thomas S. Szasz, M.D.
Harper & Row, New York, 1970
$8.95
The first half of The Manufacture of Madness, by Thomas S. Szasz (M.D.), is a mind-blower. Maybe even the first
7/8ths.
lf you've ever worried about being "mentally ill," the
good doctor sweeps that fear away like Christmas angel's
hair from the honest spruce. lt appears that many of us have
by the sorcerers of the psychiatric establishfor me, at least-such a liberating
feeling to be disenchanted. lt seems, once again, we have
nothing to fear but fear itself, a fear deliberately instilled
and nurtured by institutional psychiatry.
When Franklin Roosevelt uttered that liberating phrase,
many people in the country really did have something to
fear-starvation. But he wasn't talking to those people. He
was talking to businessmen.afraid of losing their dress shirts,
not their daily bread.
ln the same way, protestors and non-conformists and
poor people really do have something to fear from the psychiatric establishment-being locked up in a nut house. But
at least we don't have to fear for our sanity any longer, since
both sanity and insanity have'been proved a myth, a continuation of the myth of witchcraft invented by the inquisition
as a means of disposing of its unwanted challengers.
The parallels Dr, Szasz draws between America's mental
health movementand the inquisition is damned near perfect.
As befits a capitalistic society, the main victims of the psychiatric power structure are the poor. They are the ones
been enchanted
ment and
it
is always
fill
who predominantly
the state mental hospitals and
among whom psychiatric social workers attached to the welfare department daily seek out more and more misfits to
"cure" or put away. The poor, it appears, were also the
main victims of the feudalistic inquisition. So-called witches
were often midwives and dispensers of medicine to the poor.
Physical cures were considered the prerogative of priests
who dispensed the mercy of God (although the upper classes
relied on .lewish doctors), but witches did the devil,s business of studying anatomy and biochemistry. The point is
that witches, like today's "maniacs," were rarely able to
prove their innocence. lf they protested it to the end, they
were burned at the stake as incorrigibles. lf, after torture,
they "confessed," they might be strangulated before being
burned-a more merciful ending. The arbiters of their guilt
were the specialists in witchcraft, the professional ',witchhunters," whose word was accepted by the power-structure
in the same way that two licensed psychiatrists can certify a
person "insane." lf the accused "maniac" protests his/her
innocence, the psychiatrists diagnose a "lack of insight;,, if
k8
prising, in such a situation, that so many mental diseases are
considered to be deteriorating and incurable.
Moreover, the treatments devised for the insine, which
can be perpetrated on them without their consent, Dr. Szasz
views as equally sadistic as those invented in the Middle
Ages to exorcise witches. lnstead of flagellation and clitoral
circumcision, we have electroshock and frontal lobotomies!
Dr. Szasz shows, as many of us have suspected, that "normality" is simply conformity to the prevailing ethic. Thus,
although murder is considered normal for soldiers, individual murderers are thought to be "mad." lgnoring much historical evidence to the contrary, psychiatrists congratulate
the inquisitors for discovering the disease, if not the cure, of
insanity in witches, and then go on to insist that Hitler was
mad! ln what for me was the most incisive paragraph in the
book, Dr. Szasz remarks:
" lf the observer sympathizes with the oppressor and
wants to exonerate him, while he pities the oppressed but
wants to control him, he calls the victim mentally ill. This
is why psychiatrists declare tfiat witches were mad. Conversely, if the observer sympathizes with the oppressed and
wants to elevate him, while he loathes the oppressor and
wants to degrade him, he calls the tormentors mentally ill.
This is why psychiatrists declare that the Nazis were mad.
I insist that both interpretations are worse than false; by interposing mental illness (or witchcraft, as was the case formerly), they conceal, excLlse, and explain away the terrifyingly simple but all-important fact of man,s inhumanity to
man."
Dr. Szasz calls ours a "Therapeutic State,, in the same
sense that the inquisition produced ",Religious States.,,The
psychiatric establishment has become bureaucratized to the
extent that there are psychiatric social workers everywhere
hunting up "neurotics" and "psychotics" the way witchhunters made a business of seeking out witches. The Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests, dispensed by psychologists in the way (the author's analogy) medical technicians test blood and urine, always turn up some kind of
psychological problem-unlike the more objective medical
tests. A person whose blood is tested may turn out to have
perfeclly normal blood; not so with one whose mind is
tested: he/she always comes out sick.
And this, claims Dr. Szasz, is not to be construed as madness on the part of our society, but as an exercisa of power.
How this power eats its way into our daily lives is carefully
documented in this book. As an example:
" .ln a paper advocating psychiatric services in the
public schools, the author lists the following types of behavior as 'symptomatic of deeper underlying disturbance . . .:
1. Academic problems-under-achievement, over-achievement, erratic, uneven performance. 2. Social problems with
siblings, peers-such as the aggressive child, the submissive
child, the show-off. 3. Relations with parental and other
authority figures, such ad defiant behavior, submissive behavior, ingratiation. 4. Overt behaviora.l manifestations,
such as tics, nail-biting, thumb-sucking . . .(and) interests
more befitting to the opposite sex (such as tom-boy girl and
effeminate boy) . .' (Sherwin S. Radin, Mental Health
Problems in School Children, Journal of School Health, Dec.
1962.
f,
"Clearly, there is no childhood behavior that a psychiatrist could not place in one of these categories."
Later on, the author quotes a psychiatric "in-foke":
" . . .if a psychiatric patient is early for his appointment, he
is anxious, if late he is hostile, and if on time, compulsive . . ." Knowing the truth of this, and insisting that men-
tal illness is a myth invented and defined by psychiatrists,
Dr. Szasz still supports the utility of private psychoanalysls.
He views the private analyst as a kind of capitalistic entrepeneur, a role of which he approves. Like the "witch" or
oracle to which medieval people had recourse when emo-
tional problemsarose, the private analyst may possibly be of
some help in straightening out an individual's life.
But he claims, in other passages in the book, that witches
acted as aids to the poor, receiving from them small gifts
(food, etc.) in return. ln our society, private analysts are
only available to those who can afford to pay anywhere
from $50 to $100 an hour, three or four times a week! And
there is nothing, except his own personal sense of ethics, to
prevent a private analyst from committing a patient to an
institution or otherwise ratting on him/her.
Dr. Szasz goes on to put down "collectivism," "communism," etc., because in such economic set-ups the state controls all medicine including the pseudo-medicine of psychi-
atry. Granted communism as we know it, in its present
primitive form, protects itself against nonconformists much
the way capitalism does, but it does not wage all-out war
against the poor. Szasz goes so far as to refer to Western
as the "Free World" without quotation
marks. This after describing the mental health inquisition in
America!
I consider Dr. Szasz's bias for laissez-faire capitalism a
lapse of logic on his part and, perhaps unfairly, l'm inclined
to attribute it to the unhappy experiences Hungarians have
suffered at the hands of both Germany and the USSR. Be
that as it may, if one notices that the poor are systematically
oppressed by the rich in a capitalistic state where individuals
are responsible for the oppression, how can an individualistic
approach be relied upon more than a collectivist approach
to alleviate oppression? Szasz, himself, observes that "man's
inhumanity to man" is an inescapable fact of life. I do not
find in that phrase a distinction between man's individual
inhumanity and men's collective inhumanity. The factory
boss, the private television company, the overly eager private surgeon (who uses his superior knowledge to impress
patients with a false life-or-death need for a particular mutilation), landlords, owners of supermarkets, private philanthropists, oil barons who pollute the waters, automotive industrialists who pollute the air, paper companies which defoliate the forests, people who hire servants-all of these oppress and repress people as surely as any collective,
Furthermore, Mao Tse-Tung is quoted as saying there is
no psychosis in China today . . .perhaps an occasional case
of melancholia which Mao does not regard as a disease. His
statement should be support for Szasz's thesis-that where
there is neither money nor power in it for a practitioner,
mental illness ceases to be a plague on the society. .l ust,as
when witch-hunts ended, witches ceased to appearl
ls it not also possible that laissez-faire capitalism, depending as it does on that most obscene invention of mankind, money, is also a myth? lsn't such a shibboleth as "the
poor will always be with us" part of that myth? Why should
capitalistic societies
u
we accept the notion of riches and poverty any more than
we accept the idea of sane and insane, saint and witch?'
I am not suggesting that social deviants have a better
chance in acollective than in a "free enterprise system." But
the elimination of poverty will certainly take a massive
portion of society out of the category of deviants. The poor
at least will no longer be oppressed for their,state of being
poor, in addition to being persecuted by wantl
Szasz states that he would approve of America fighting
communism by military means, if necessary. But what
wouid America be protecting in such a fight? Another kind
of oppression ! Another myth I
I
am suggesting that
if
collectivism is not the answer,
neither is laissez-faire capitalism. Szasz must be held to his
own acute awareness of one of the observable facts of human life: the cruelty of human beings to one another. He
has astutely refused to define this fact as madness-either
on the part of the perpetrator of cruelty or the victim. ln
this way he has helped to clear our vision so that we can
examine the problem with one less illusion. We must either
find a way to change this fact or to deal with it rationally
for the benefit of the people. No system yet invented-political, social, economic, religious, therapeutic-has yet come
up with a solution.
And so we are left with the moment of truth, the ultimate question. But we owe Thomas Szasz much Sratitude
for standing virtually alone against the newly-defined "military-industrial-psychiatric complex" to help put a part of
that question in the right perspective. He certainly doesn't
want to be categorized as a new saint or prophet-just a rational human being thinking his way through life.
-Leah Fritz
street PeoPle
even before they taught us to read
WALK
DON'T WALK
our friend the policeman
would tell us when to cross
DON'T WALK WALK
we
learned
out of school now
we're political laywalkers
unauthorized personnel
who fail to yield the right of waY
and by refusing to disPerse
stand in contempt of court
DON'T WALK DON'T WALK DON'T
chanting
shouting
the streets belong to the People
when the man comes with sticks and
gas
we keep ourselves from panic flight
with the hoarsely urgent message
Walk Walk Walk
-Henry Mayer
aCI
AI
DE MAYOR OF HARLEM
and known to the similar bops
by David Henderson
Dutton
pre. Orange surprise. Go right out get this collection of
despoems
Henderson,
by David
sentfuturefantasticlovetrue
perado poet, madman, saint, blackbeing, bean, soilplanter;
or steal his words, they can taste better, like stealings. His
Harlem is the only Harlem, his Harlem of de mind,
O the broadway subway train travels
lo
travels quicklY thru
these parts
rear above ground
like a giant sex star
to say hello
to the girls at Barnard
I remember David Henderson, virgovisual
"nuns in flying saucers," etcetera,
word*monster,
I can fill
up this piece
with quotes/mis of his "seven years of poems, documen-
tories tales and lives," but that's nowhere, you have to get
to him the whole thlng, see him, feel his mayoralty, taste
his Biafra Stew, dig his pope, his boppers, the miraculous
switchblades, "whispers of gothic murders," eat from his
eyes. Passion ispain, succulence faith dried wine, guarantees
of Time.
of the roaming hordes
"David Henderson was born in Harlem in 1942. He
worked as a union organizer, picket line boss, messenger,
carpenter, presser in a cleaning store, grocery clerk, magazine salesman, schoolteacher and front man. He has taught
at City College in a experimental program out of the Horace
Mann School of Experimentation, Teachers College, Colum-
bia University, and had served as poet-in-residence to the
Ocean' Hill-Brownsville Experimental School District and
The Free Southern Theater. Mr. Henderson is an original
Umbra poet and a founding editor of Umbra. During the
fall of 1969 he was poet-in-residence at City College. His
poems have appeared in Umbra, the Evergreen Review, the
New American Review, and Negro Digest, and have been
anthologized several times." And things jackets don't reveal,
like energy, essence.
Dig David Henderson.
smell the musk
of body
scent
warm and thick congestion at the function
before the junction
"Nothing could be called the present-still thinking
"l hope
these poems go beyond the popular misery and the popular
loy to some mean point in there where you catch me bopping up and down the streets, dark and old." I remember
David Henderson. I see him in the night, daytime faces.
Harlem ii Apollo, lower east side, southern blues, Frankenstein dates, blood. I remember David, his blood. (A memory
without propoganda). We are in a room. lt is November
cold outside, ragefeel, tenement distress, David in the kitchen, on the floor, blood from his lips, Dracula against the
icebox and Dracula's brother knifeinhand guarding the
about running for de Mayor of Harlem." (David)
slaughter, disprotecting the spirit, blood, blood, blood,
blood, and out of blood flowers. Out of that, and surviving
the other dreams and nights to be, must come the fine campaigns, the sharp poems, the visitations.
every morning
i go and see
the white women
in the glass windowsi
i have heard
they often
appear nude
to huge crowds
Dracula, he suck so much blood, he burst, blood in the
park, rowboating, madness in the moonlight, friedchicken
and spare ribs to bust out of lies. David between the lines
of the accepted lies, the colormyths; live and go, aliveness,
the magical, the miraculous, people turn tables on reality,
a mix, voodoo, voodoo technology, "release the pain of
reconnection," irony, good eyes, hanging out no pity tears,
laughter and live, a celebration of breathing since 1942.
We bopped when about to fight
and we bopped when happy
all in our own slight variances
known to the members of the Road
3o
THE SCHOOL FIX, NYC, USA
by Miriam Wasserman
Outerbridge and Disenfrey,
568 pages $10.00
The public school system in New York City is practically
on its death bed. Although schools are not in quite such bad
shape elsewhere, they are on their way. This study of the
problems of the public schools as they exist in their most
extreme form in New York seeks to illuminate the whole
sickness of American education.
Miriam's basic thesis in this long and highly perceptive
book is that the school crisis in America is not accidental
but is instead a direct result of the role schools play 1n O.tpetuating the status system in America. A basic part of the
school system is the "tracking system" in which very early
in their school careers some kids are tracked to be dropouts,
others to get nonacademic high school diplomas, and still
others to go to college. Miriam feels that the failure of the
average student is inherent in the competitive system. For
some kids to get A's, others must get D's. For some kids to
go to Bronx High School of Science, others must go to some
chaotic madhouse. For some kids to get 800 on thek college
boards, others must get 350.
The rat race atmosphere in education created by the
emphasis on grades, diplomas, and college boards is certainly
unhealthy. I personally don't think we are going to get very
far in reforming education until we abolish diplomas and
degrees. This would accomplish a lot. School overcrowding
,*r..
mighteven disappear. Business could not enforce the absurd
requirement that someone should have a high school degree
to drive a truck or have a college degree to be a junior executive. People would go to school if at all to get education or
training in something they found useful, enlightening, or
enjoyable. There would still be competition, but it would
be competition for the hell
of it or for values that
t,'
really
concern students rather than for phoney symbols.
The two greatest things about Miriam's book, I feel, are
the extremely perceptive interviews with the kids conducted
by John Reiman (he really knows how to relate) and the
stories Miriam tells about schools. At one point Miriam attended a class conducted by a "Mlss White." Miss White began, "This is Mrs. Wasserman, children, a very distinguished
writer. Say 'Good morning, Mrs. Wasserman,' " "Good
morning, Mrs. Wasserman." "Good morning, children."
"This is a very s-l-o-w class, h-o-l-d-o-v-e-r-s," she spelt, trying to elicit Miriam's gaze in an understanding complicity.
lnstead, Miriam looked away ashamed.
The well-trained children stood neatly behind their chairs.
At a signal, first the glrls
sat down, then the boys. Miss
White then said, "Feet flat on floor. Heads up. Sit straight.
Hands clasped on desk." Miriam thought some kind of posture class was about to begin but it turned out to be the required posltlon of the morning.
The opening lesson, which took thirty-five minutes, was
for the kids to read a list of twenty words. Presently Miss
White came to the word "trunk" on the list of extremely
simple words. "What ls a trunk?" she asked. A kid suggested
that a trunk is l'where you put the suit case." Miss White
was utterly baffled. The Metropolitan Reading Test which
Miss White was using as a teacher's guide has a picture of a
foot locker next to the word "trunk." So Miss White, trying
to imagine the world her poor "culturally deprived" kids
lived in, responded "Why would you want to put a suitcase
in a trunk unless there isn't room in the closet?"
Another child tried a different tack in defining trunk
and suggested that you put things in a trunk "like to
go on a picnic." Miss White then lost her cool com-
pletely and angrily
demanded,
"Who
would take
a
trunk on a picnic?" Miriam at this point could hold
her
tongue no longer and broke the cardinal rule that observers
are supposed to remain silent to suggest that the kids might
be thinking of a car trunk rather than a foot locker. Miss
White was ashamed and explained, "Oh, it's been some
years since l've had a car," and then added disapprovingly,
"You know they all have cars."
lncompetence such as this could exist nowhere except
in an entrenched bureaucracy. The entrenched bureaucracy,
realizing this, has resisted all forms of community control
and competitive hiring and has buttressed itself behind the
"merit system." The "merit system" ironically
evaluates
people on the basis of degrees, exams, seniority etc.-every-
thing but competence.
The problem of the incompetence of public education
has become so critical that more and more people feel that
we should iust junk the whole system. Milton Friedman
proposed that we abolish public schools altogether and use
the money to give every child a certificate he could use to
pay for tuition at any private, parochial, "free," or trade
school he chose. lt seemed utopian at the time. lt doesn't
seem at all utopian anymore.
-Henry Bass
THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE
by Daniel Berrigan,
S..1.
On May 1l , 1968, nine men and women entered a local
draft board in Catonsville, l\4aryland, removed several hundred files to an adjacent parking lot and burned the documents with napalm. That October they were tried and convicted on charges of willful infury to government property
and interference with the administration of the
Selective
Service Act of 1961 . Father Daniel Berrigan, one of the
Catonsville 9, writing from underground, condensed the
transcript of that trial into this documentary play.
Like the trial, the play opens with the defense declining
to participate in the selection of the iury and closes with
the final statements and prayers of the defendants after the
"guilty" verdict has been pronounced. Within that framework, each of the accused comes forth and tells his/her own
story as the motivation for that act of fire: the birth of his/
her political consciousness, and its merging with his/her
human conscience. Christians following the teachings of
Christ, they had committed themselves to working with
people in the ghettos of this country and the world. Painfully, they had come to see the immorality and brutality of
United States policies in Vietnam, Latin America, Africa,
and now they sought to focus the attention of other Americans upon the cruel actions of our government.
The judge said he heard the message, but that it's lawnot morality-that concerns the court. We don't know how
many of the jurors heard; we only know that after ninety
minutes' deliberation the twelve returned with a guilty verdict. Who knows about the press? But with this script there
is an opportunity to reach a broader public, for the play is
dramatic, the people in it are real, and thp truths lt speaks
are powerful. I saw it in a church (Phoenix Theatre Production, New York City) where the pulpit as judge's bench
and the choir stalls as jurors' box made an effective set.
WIN readers should present it in their own communlties (especially now, after the new indictments against the Fathers
Berrigan and others) to cause more people to think about
what is really on trial here: the iudicial system in amerika
and the federal government itself.
-Dorothy Lane
-a4
JI
On .f an. 22-23 the Board of the National AFSC agreed that the National
Office should no longer pay the 1A%
tax on telephone service and they will
no longer honor levies iiled by the government when such levies represent
an attempt by the government to collect taxes which an employee has refused to pay as a matter of conscience,
The People's Coalition for Peace
and Justice has endorsed war tax resistance and will promote it as part of
its Spring Campaign. Early in April,
the Coalition will organize a social justice campaign of hunger marches to
dramatize hunger for housing, hunger
for jobs, and for peace; fasts, teach-ins
and other special programs in schools
on April 2; tax protest and resistance
activities on a community level relating
to
reordering priorities; rallies on A-
WAR TAX RESISTANCE
pril 3; religious tributes to Martin Luther King on Sunday, April 4th. There
will also be nonvioleni actions in Washington, D.C. during the first week of
May (beginning May 5th).
War tax resisters can relate to this
social iustice campaign in a very real
way. War Tax Resistance and other organizations will be organizing a lransfer of funds campaign; taking the money out of the hands of the government and putting it into the hands of
the people. We are asking that people
publicly refuse to pay $10 to 950 or
more of their income taxes and public-
ly transfer this money to local community groups on April 3rd. Those
who are resisting the phone tax and
ter greater understanding, good will and
mutual support at 15]2 N. State
Pkwy., Chicago 606.1 0 . . .One realization that came out of this conference
was the appalling lack of information
on women's prisons where conditions
are even worse-overcrowded, no work
release program.
NUKES: Questions for the AEC by
O'Connor, P.l.C. News, 1 212Ol1O:
you please comment on . . .
statement that the chance of such an
accident happening is one in 300 mil_
lion, or the same as a jet crashing into
a stadium full of people, in view of the
bomber which crashed into the_Empire
Egan
ll. Would
State
Bu ildin
s?
.13. In terms of
mathematical probabilities, would you
on the peacetime sinking of 2 out of our 85 nuclear subma-
please comment
rines
.16. Would you please com-
ment on Dean Palladino's remark that,
'Though we can generally tell when
we have a very unsafe reactor, it,s always hard to know how safe you are
with one you believe to b.e safe,?,, . . .
"Every reactor being built today is totally experimental and a menace to
both the public and the national interest." There has been no real progress
5Z
acted
in
1941 as a TEMPORARY tax
and the 1% automo'bile tax was first
enacted in 191J as a TEI\4PORARY
tax. DO YOU NEED ANY
REASONS
NOT
OTHER
TO PAY THESE
TAXES???
Many cities are having phone tax
demonstrations in March. Write to us
for further information on these
ac-
tions and the Spring Campaign.
-Bob Calvert
WAR TAX RESISTANCE
339 Lafayette St.
other federal taxes can also participate
in these actions.
fhe 10% telephone excise tax and
LOOKING TOWARD FREEDOM, A
self-help organization of ex-prisoners
is planning d program to teach skills,
conduct therapy, make an employment
file and open a dialogue which will fos-
l% automobile manufacturers tax have
for two more years. ln
1974 they will both drop 1% point
each year and will expire in 1982??.?.
The telephone excise tax was first enbeen extended
New
york, N.y.
1.0012
(212) 477-2e7O
Prison, Mexico City, have informed the
Centro Dr'l nformacion Latino-America-
DOVETALES
no that napalm is being produced
in accident prevention, in limiting the
results of a large accident or in limitlng
the radiation released beyond a site
boundary. Natl. Comm. to Stop Environmental Pollution 1 13011 1.
MAV-RlC, which is interested in alternate employment opportunities for
c.o.'s and aims to build a referral net-
work, will welcome and dispense
information at 18.1 3 University Ave., SE,
Mpls., Minn. 55414 . . .The )an- 29
Wall Street Journal reports: "Lenient
judges worry draft officials ." ln
.l
1970, 15 out of 6 men convicted of
draft vlolations in No. Calif.
suspended sentences.
received
ln Puerto
Rico,
.l
1961-10, only 1 man out of over 00
accused
was convicted
and
sen-
tenced . . .After 3 months under guard
at a Tokyo.airport hotel, Barbara Bye
is
returning to the U.S. She was refused
entry because she wanted to do
work in Japan.
peace-
ON THE LEFT: The Ampo
Col-
lective devotes an issue of its publication, Ampo, a Report from the Japanese New Left, to Okinawa-its history
and place in Japan-U.S. strategy. Order
Okinawa from Ampo, lshii Bldg. 6-44,
Kagurazaka, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, for
$2 . . .Political prisoners in Lecumberri
in
that country. The Centro in Montreal
(Box 576, Sta. N) has been recently
established by "militants of the former
Latin American Movement Anti-l mper-
ialist" and plans to publish a monthly
bulletin on liberation struggles
"High Schools Promote: IRRESPONSl Bl LITY distortion SCHIZOPHREN-
lA
racism CHAUVINISM hate ELIT-
ISM linear thought SU BORDINAtION
militarism NATIONALISM oligarchies
LONELINESS and other CHARACTER disorders.." Flyer available from
Cadre, 519 W. North Ave., Chicago
6061 0.
LOCALLY: Although the Eleventh
St. Squatters won a legal agreement40
stay until May 31, effolts are being
made to evict them. Send help for
court costs and publicity to them, c/o
Brown, Apt. 2W, 11 E.l1 St., NYC
10003 ."There'll be genocide in
Cairo if you people don't speak for the
people of Chicago," the Reverend
Jones told a Feb. 17 meeting of Women Mobilized for Change. "ln Cairo
you do everything belore nightfall because afterward it is like a little Vietnam," he concluded. Food, clothing
and bail $$ should be sent to Cairo U-
nited Front, 414-14 St., Cairo, lll.
02914
-Ruth Dear
4
most of all, in my opinion. GIs in Japan are
so very isolated from the stateside movement. They need a great deal of publicity
for their activities, as well as current move-
ment news from the states. Our
Notes From a New, Uncharted Land:
I did not run; I was delivered. Not merely
from the agents of law, but from a holocaust
of my own making, an attempt to burn myself out. A friend who loved me carried me
away.
No sooner left to myself, on the other
side of the chasm, than my impulse to destroy myself flared up again. My sickness
had followed me, it seemed, and even the
role of fugitive contained a political, hero-
macher-martyr poison.
But a new name can do wonders. With
time, one's confldence in his newness develops. There comes a point when one's new
name feels mote natural than his old one.
And then, I realized that I didn't have to go
baik, ever:-I was becoming, I am becoming
a new person, out of the ashes.
Now the impulse is to grow. Growth
takes place with relation to those near me,
to the food I eat, to the rhythm of life in
this new place. It is a different drummdr
now, more attuned to life-iess dreading, less
self-conscious, less con fining.
In this new land I am finding new friends
and rediscovering'other fiiends who have
crossed, are crossing, are preparing to cross. . .
that chasm.
i
I
greatest
plague (aside from the brass) when we first
started SEMPER FI was the lack of reliable
communication lines between Japan and the
U.S. Lon Renner and myself were trying to
remedy that situation when the brass gave
us punitive transfers last June.
Happily, in spite of brass repression,
SEMPER FI lives. It celebrated its' first
birthday last month with the issue of Vol.
2, No. 1. As is evident from Judy Merril's
article, however, its' continued existence is
always tenuous, due to the transfers of GI
organizers and the constant turnover of civilian organizers. If Barbara Bye loses her
case in the courts, Japanese immigration
authorities will be able to effectively isolate
GIs from Ameriian civilian organizers. And
that will be a blow, even with the continuing help of Beheiren and other concerned
Japanese. Their assistance isvital, to be surewithout it, GIs would not even be able to
put out a newspaper. But the Japanese are
ill-equipped to counsel American GIs on
points of military law, which all political
GIs fun afoul of at one time ot another.
I would like to return to Iwakuni myse1f,
to keep organizing and to really consol-
idate the position of GI resisters there, insofar as possible. But Japan is a long distance
and I don't have enough money to get there,
I am working, and may have enough money
saved by this summer. In the meantime I'm
considering sending out an appeal for funds,
but I'm not really sure how to go about it.
I hope to see more GI Movement articles
in WIN. Keep up the good work.
George Bacon lex-Cpl. USMC)
Springfield, Va.
For the past 8 months I have been doing
alternative service at the Waltwyck School
for Boys, Prior to that I helped organize the
When one truly loves another person, it
becomes easier to love others, to open himself and extend a hand and welcome others,
lovingly, and to embrace and celebrate the
fact that we are here together, alive and
Suffolk County W.R.L, which went dormant after the events of last May, I am interested in trying to start a Peekskill area
W.R.L. that would serve the Peekskill-Ossi-
alove.
terested W.R.L.'ers or people lnterested in
such a project to contact me at I Buttonwood Rd., Peekskill N.Y. (914-737-4708)'
I am also interested in getting in touch with
people in the Suffolk County area who may
be interested in starting a new Suffolk County W.R.L. organization. I have received many inquiries from W.R.L.'ers in Suffolk asking what the Suffolk County W.R.L. is doing.
Up until last June the Suffolk County W.R.L.
was successful in enlisting nearly 200 people who said they were interested in establishing a major East-End Peace Organization;
raising money to sponsor a peace literature
distribution campaign, in going to Washington to participate in the May demonstration
and in conducting three demonstrations againstmilitary recruiting on the Southampton
College campus which did force the Army
There remains a moment of fear, when
doors that have been carefully sealed for
years resist the will to open. But trust, nurtured through time with love, makes that
step possible and all at once one realizes
that-as it was with darkness-there is nothing to fear. My friend reaches out for me,
and I am free . . .to love.
And all at once I rcalize that all this time
I have kept at atm's length half the human
race.
-alias mark twain column
My December issue of WIN just arrived,
having been forwarded from my old unit in
that ravaged little land across the Pacific. I
was doubly pleased to see the story about
the GI Resistance at lwakuni, and also that
the WRL awhrded its' annual Peace Awatd
to military resisters. Thank you for the excellent coverage you've given the struggle in
Iwakuni. That is precisely what is needed
ning-Yorktown Heights area and I would
like to take this opportunity to ask any in-
and Marine Corps to not attempt similar
recruiting activities this year. The potential
for creating an active and vital pacifist com-
munity on Eastern Long Island is good. I
would like to hear from W.R.L.'ers in Suffolk who would be interested in forming a
new chapter out there and I would like to
share my experiences with them so that it
may prove more srccessful than last time.
Anyone interested in either project please
wdte or call me.
Peace,
Charles E. Semkus Jr,
I am almostafraid to write you, since the
last time I did so, simply to renew my subscription, I discovered my letter in a later
issue of WIN! However, after reading your
December L, 1970 issue, whose back cover
carried your twelfth annual peace award, I
again felt the stirrings of a desire to communicate,
I am paying the army three years of service in return for four years of educaticn in
nursing. It has been difficult to resolve the
conflicts within myself of accepting a commission in the army while at the same time
defending my position agaifist lhe afmy &
against war, particularly the current war in
Indochina. When I've sent money to WRL
I've hesitated to check the first statement
on the envelope since in reality I am suP
porting not opposing war, simply be being
in the military.
So I've always checked the
one, . .
For your peace award, & for its recognition of those of us who wear the uniform
with not a little shame, I thank you.
second
Name withheld
There aren't many times when I smile
while writing a check. This is one.
Thank you all for the vital blend.of grim
facts, love of life and hope for us all that
comes through in every issue. It is that delicate balance that provides the stimulus for
action in a human way. Too many of the
horrible truths can lead one to apathy and
despair, or angry dehumanized violence if
one cannot approach the solution in a loving
peaceful way.
I can't remember when I've even been
tempted to buy a hard cover book (much
$6.95?-$7.95) but I was, and did,
Been Invaded by the 21st Century. And now I won't
let it out of my hands!! So please, push to
have it reprinted in paperback so I can give it
to my tiiends.
I love you all,
less spend
for David McReynolds' We Have
Peace
Ruth Pickering
I liked the issue of Feb. 15 except for
the cover and not because you printed an
"obscenity" but because you didn't. The obvious conclusions would be that you failed
to insert the u in fuck because newsstands
would not carry WIN if it were included, or,
that the post office would refuse to deliver
WIN if fuck was correctly spelled. However,
if this was the case, you should have omitted
the word altogether. It serves no purpose to
be like TIME magazine and politely censor
4-letter words, for whatever the reason.
Anyway, I think that the People's Peace
Treaty may be ratified by the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Senate.
Rich Radbil
,5
Classifleds
representative of the United States government!
Autographed poster of Madame Binh of
the PRG-,,Best wishes for American Wo-
rE--
men's Liberation"-available from U.S.
Committee of Women to Defend the Right
to Live, 2O4W 92nd St., No.3F. $2.OOaprece or $.1-25 each in bulk ( l O or more).
Proceeds go to women's anti-war activities.
---
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M.ovement welfare mother wants healthy
I I I encloee S-contribution
school, etc.,
oppression. Willing and abte to
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long ai mutu_ally compatibte. Write: o. S.itn,hE"
EZ,
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HELP WIN
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iXIg
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copies for credit. Write WlN,
339 Lafayette St., New York,
N.Y. 10012 for further details
IWANT BACK ISSUES OF WIN (BEFORE JAN 1969). TELL ME YOU R
PRICE. PERHAPS YOU'D SHARE PRO.
CEEDS WITH WlN. Jan Suter, 3O9 Navajo,
Maumee, Oh 43537AFO-OT-64 pages on the new free-you
life,91. Atso cROUND nOUrub
from Hakuin Zenji, a way to LET your mind
9o b-al9f 9gt asaint 759,. Movins On, p.o.
nomad
st. '
Ncrv Yock
lqrl2
oo
send
as you can use) and charge
you 15d per copy. You se!!
I
t
Zip-
I
I
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I
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a
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n
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245 East 93rd St., N\/C 1O028
you
-
I I wish to subccribe to WIN for one year, $5.
t I I enclose $3 tor a six-month trial subscriptkxr.
c,o.mmune experience 1summerl ior'
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r4-year-otd son victim ot Dublic
your community. We'll
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Fertlllze yer mlnd, plough und€r yer psych6!
The latest GREEN MOUNTAIN POST contains fictlon, fantasy, poetry, comlx a7d
lots of pretty plctures o, people and cows.
Contributors include Ray Mungo, Marty
Jezer, Verandah Porche, famlly & frlends.
5OC from GMP, Box 269 RFO 1, Montaguo,
Mass, 01351 o; subscribe: 4 lssues /2/
aaa
tsox 624, Mendocino, Cal. 95460
-,
L
v
C
WR]
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Atla
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(,
wRl
n
t'
l_:
Akrt
)r\
r,i
(:
.
lji.,
Alba
2
'!
Bost
(
sufi
Man)
B,
Detrt
ga
Colu
4'l
Milw
It
T-thartd
FROM
PHILAD E
t2A
LPI{IA RESI STANI
EACH OR 5-FOR 36;
Cobl
3r
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PPD.
COLORSg BLUE, cREtN,YELLotl WHTTE
5ZE5: sMALL, t4ED, LAR6E
ALL PROFITS
IO
I^JIN
T
(S#:.ff*.a8
PIIILA.
RtSISIANCE
FRor,\ AARK rqoftRls, 5B0B t{A}rlLT0,l
PHILADE.LPHIA, PENNA I3IO4
JT,
Olivt
Ir
doze
the c
and
and
as 1r
local
prog
Iiterature
THE ONE-MAN REVOLUTION IN AMERICA. Ammon
Hennacy's final book-about l7 individuals throughout A_
merican history who, like himself, fit into such a Jategory.
Paperback,338 pp., $5
WAR RESISTANCE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE. A
mini-"Conscience in America,, by Larry Gara, first man to
be jailed, in 1947, for counseling draft iesistance.
Local
pamphlet, 23pp.,55(
WRL
THE PROBLEM OF PRISONS. David Greenberg,s study of
prisons which concludes by calling for their abolition.
Groups
TRAINING FOR NONVIOLENT ACTION. A manual compiled by Theodore Olson and Lynne Shivers and published
jointly by War Resisters Intl. and Friends peace & Intl. Re_
pamphlet, a}pp-,7 5(
lations Comittee.
WRL-l4test (Western Region Offices, g33 Haight Street,
Pamphlet, aOpp., $l
Atlqntg Workshop in Nonviolence (Southern Region
Office), P.O. Box 7477, Atlanta, Georgia 30309
EXPLORING NONVIOLENT ALTERNATIVES. This guide,
citing 85 specific instances, is by Gene Sharp whose ..Crea_
San Francisco, California 94117, (415)- 626-6976
tive Conflicts in Politics" has long been u populu, WRL
item.
Paperback, 128 pp. $2.25
(4O4) 87s-O646
WRl-Southwesl (Southwest Region office),
mosa S.E., Albuquerque, N.M. 87108.
ll68
(505)
Akron I|RL, 753 Brown Street, Akron, Ohio
(216) s3s-6753
Her-
268_8gi.
l
AMERICAN SERVICEMEN HAVE RIGHTS: Do YoU
KNOW YOURS? A handy pocket guide issued by GI
Coun_
seling Services, single copies free to servicemen. To others_
44311
Albany I|RL, Box 1237, Nbany, N.y. 12201 (51g)
272-2237
Boston llRL, clo Olmsted, 28 Lawrence Street, Boston,
(617) 627-4es2
Suffolk County IURL, Box 536,
tsd
WHICH SIDE ARE yOU ON? At last, a much needed
leaflet
for comrnunity distribution on the UiAate East
issue.
single copies free,
Sag Harbor,
$l
N.y. 11963.
Manhattan Beach llRL, l0l4 Duncan place, Manhattan
Beach, California 90266. (213) 37 g-03 I 5.
Detroit WRL, 28314 Danvers Court, Farmington, Michi-
BUTTONS
gan 48024. (3 1 3) 335-0362.
WRL broken rifle button
Nuclear Disarmament button
each l0l; $l/15; S6/100
Columbus WRL, 30 West Woodruff, Columbus, Ohio
43210.
Milwaukee Area Draft Information Center and IURL,
1618 West Wells, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (al4)
WRL BROKEN RIFI.E PIN in heavy rnetal. Sl
ND PIN black enamcl on steel. g1
342-0191.
Cobb County llIN, clo AWIN,8ox7477, Atlanta, Ga.
3030e. (404) 87s-O646.
Olivet College lilRL, Box 507, Olivet, Michigan 49706.
In addition to the above groups, there are about a
dozen efforts to organize local WRL,s going on around
the country. These are what we could call embryo WRL,s
and when they reach the stage of being able to organize
and work outside the WRL membership we will list them
I local WRL's. If you would like to begin organizing a
local WRL or would like information on the tocal WRL
program please write to the National Office.
r
T---
I
|
to, WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE
,r9
Lafayette Srreet, New york, N.y. 1fi)12
I
items checled.
t I I enclose $-for
I
enclose
$_contribution
to the WRL.
I[ ]
!I
I
Name
Address
zip
per 100
to
whom
I
it
am
may concern,
writi.ng this to inform you of my absolute inabil ity
to repay any of
my debts
at this time. I
have no intention of
I would appreciate a personal letter from you outlining
what my indebtedness
retrieve it.
means
We
is to you
should
at this point avoid
to do this outside of
repayment.
It
may be s1ow,
my commitment
means
ling to
to the
the above mentioned letter.
my o1d address and
If i hold
i-t
one
any more expensive
for a s1ow,
but i will be pretty
sible to any stronger
commit myself
and your present program to
much inacces-
that you might select. I
above program
My
steady
am
if you will
mail is being forwarded
wi1-
send
from
i will receive it through channels.
of your credit cards, i will not be using
any more.
I await your letter.
Yours (in more ways than one),
W,J"L/d,thooL
1::.
Win Magazine Volume 7 Number 5
1971-03-15