The Anti-War and Anti-Draft Movement in Worcester, 1965-75
From Worcester Activist wiki
This article is copyright 2007 by Michael True
The Abbie Hoffman exhibit at the Worcester Historical Museum celebrates the life of an icon of the anti-war movement prior to his leaving for New York in 1966. Exposing the ignorance and arrogance of those who plunged us into a war that killed sixty thousand Americans and three million Vietnamese, Abbie Hoffman had a genius for street theater, in dramatizing that the emperor had no clothes.
As an activist, Abbie was part of a significant movement in Central Massachusetts against the Vietnam war, before his moving on to New York’s East Village and national fame. Meanwhile, other local activists sustained that decade-long movement, as well as a campaign to repeal the draft. That community included Dale S. Fair and Dr. David Todd, early critics of the war; Thurston Taylor, head of the Worcester Public Library; the Reverend George Seale, Adams Square Congregational Church; and Margaret Amberson, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Peggy Amberson maintained a valuable mailing list of local activists throughout the period, which proved particularly useful during the Eugene McCarthy for president campaign in 1968.
In the early 1960s, John Dorenkamp paid the initial rent for a store front at 65 1/2 Main Street, which harbored several organizations essential to the movement: (1) the Phoenix Friday night discussion group, with speakers such as David McReynolds, War Resisters League; Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker Movement; Russell Johnson, American Friends Service Committee; and Worcester’s Father Bernard Gilgun; (2) the Vietnam Summer project in 1967 and, briefly, the Draft Information Center, initiated by Thurston Taylor and Bill Barry; and (3) Abbie Hoffman’s Snick (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Shop that sold handcraft to benefit voter registration campaigns in Mississippi. Several of these people had been active in the civil rights movement beforehand, along with Betty Price and Lenny Cooper, who helped to initiate Prospect House, an important neighborhood center.
Several draft resisters from the area, including Ken Dupuis, an Assumption alumnus, went to Canada or went A.W.O.L., while in the army, and later to jail. A case that became a well-known court decision involved Philip Goguen, Gardner, who first read Leo Tolstoy’s pamphlets against military service as he went A.W.O.L. from Ft. Dix, New Jersey, to visit his congressman in Washington, D.C. He eventually served time in military prison. Such widespread resistance led to revisions in repressive laws governing the draft, with the assistance of the Massachusetts and National Councils to Repeal the Draft. In 1973, that campaign led to the draft being placed on stand-by.
In 1968, Daniel Dick and Dr. Irving Wolfson, Dr. Frank and Joan Cassidy, Auburn, founded Worcester Area Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CLC), with links to the National and State Committees founded three years earlier. Members included Bruce McQuarrie, W.P.I.; Spencer Potter, Clark University, and several Episcopal clergy—Fathers Al Lafon, Thomas Sullivan, Robert Walters, and Thaddeus Clapp. CLC sponsored talks by nationally known figures, such as the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., and members of the Milwaukee 14, who burned draft files in 1968 and eventually went to prison for several years. Father William Zaide, CLC’s treasurer, faithfully supported and helped to sustain the Draft Information Center, once it moved from 350 Main Street to Franklin Street, with students from area colleges, including Donald Bullens, Worcester State, and Jim McMahon, Holy Cross.
Quaker members of CLC included Russell and Margaret Angell, the Rev. Rutherford Everest, and Francis J.W.W. Wheeler, as well as Sister Elizabeth Hillman, R.C., who, with Jean Dewey, co-founded the local Catholic Peace Fellowship at Blessed Sacrament Parish, and, with David O’Brien, Holy Cross, the New England Catholic Peace Fellowship (NECPF). In 1971, Dorothy Day addressed four hundred people who attended the first NECPF conference at Holy Cross and Assumption colleges; the organization met at colleges, universities, and religious institutions throughout New England over the next two decades, when NECPS folded into Massachusetts Pax Christi.
In 1969, the Reverend Paul Henniges, Unitarian Universalist Church, and Annabel Wolfson founded the Interfaith Center for Draft Information, sponsored by the Diocese of Worcester, Worcester County Ecumenical Council, and the Jewish Federation. That cooperative venture, housed at 63 Wachusett Street, served as a national model of inter-religious cooperation on behalf of young men making difficult moral choices about the draft. Thurston Taylor and Annabel Wolfson were particularly important in seeing that local draft boards obeyed their own laws and regulations, their associate Attorney (later Judge) Mel Greenberg providing legal assistance for draftees.
Later, Annabel Wolfson, who probably knew more about draft laws and regulation than anyone in Washington, and I testified against the draft at a hearing at the U.S. Senate, co-chaired by Barry Goldwater. Bishop Bernard Flanagan testified before an earlier Senate committee that if he were a young man he would have applied for conscientious objection.
In resisting the war, activists endured considerable criticism, much as those who early on opposed the war on Iraq. Outspoken critics sometimes received anonymous notes accusing them of being communists or anti-American. Eventually, ordinary citizens, as well as newspaper reporters covering demonstrations against the Vietnam war, learned something about issues surrounding the war, in spite of the lies and misinformation from Washington. Editors of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, except for John McMillan, went out of their way to ridicule anti-war activists, however. Editorial cartoons lampooned anti-war activists, as editorials and columnists arrogantly, not to say ignorantly, dismissed the hard evidence against American foreign policy in Southeast Asia.
The summer of 1970 was a turning point, as Clark University students went door-to-door asking local citizens about their reactions to the war. That April, Clark undergraduates Victor Reinstein, Josh Miller, Glen Rabut, among others, and two faculty members from Clark and Assumption were arrested for blocking the entrance to the draft board, and were sentenced to ten days in the old Worcester County Jail and House of Correction on Summer Street. While there, the U.S. invaded Cambodia, as Worcester erupted, with over two hundred people arrested for draft resistance at 340 Main Street. In June, Dr. Jim Dacey a teacher at Assumption and later Doherty Memorial High School spent time in jail after being arrested on similar charges. Every day hundreds of students from every campus gathered for demonstrations against the war, and at the end of the semester, final examinations were cancelled on college campuses.
Several local organizations provided important leadership and public education on issues surrounding the war and the draft, such as the Worcester County Ecumenical Council, under the leadership of the Reverent Edgar Chandler which also sponsored forums on the danger of nuclear weapons, and Worcester YWCA, where the Reverend Joan Bott initiated the “Electronic University,” an open university that offered courses and events related to draft counseling, peacemaking, and conflict resolution.
In 1972, Frank Kartheiser and Shawn Donahue, Holy Cross students, founded the Mustard Seed Catholic Worker on Pleasant Street, before moving to its present location, 83 Piedmont Street, under the leadership of Richard Alix, Assumption, Michael Boover, Worcester State; and Gerry DiNardo, Elms College. Fortunately, many of these talented young people chose to remain in Worcester, and now contribute to various community organizations central to the life of the community.
American troops in Vietnam came to number 500,000, and the war dragged on, marked by on-going demonstrations, lectures by national leaders of the anti-war movement, and local organizing in Central Massachusetts. Numerous buses took hundreds of Worcesterites joining the huge demonstrations in the nation’s capital, where Yippies promised to levitate the Pentagon. Eventually even members of congress began to speak against increased American presence in Vietnam. What was Lyndon Johnson’s war, until he declined to run for president in 1968, became Richard Nixon’s war. Horrible policies and directives, including a “pacification” program in Vietnam that moved peasants off the land and into concentration camps and confined Vietnamese prisoners in tiger cages. Henry Kissinger, whom journalist I.F. Stone called “one of the great war criminals of the 20th century,” ordered a cruel and unnecessary Christmas bombing in 1972.
Finally, after a ten-year struggle to end the war, the U.S. left Saigon in defeat in 1975. The tragedy of the war remained apparent in the psychological and physical wounds of returning service men and women, many of whom remain homeless to this day. It has been said that “No one wins a war or a hurricane,” a truth that comes home to us again in the midst of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Because too many Americans assume, without solid evidence, that policy makers in Washington know more than they do about matters of war and peace, we seldom speak out against cruelty and lies, before the damage is done. In the process, powerful politicians, careless of democratic principles and practice, lie and mislead the public, with the media and a so-called educated elite only too happy to go along to get along.
During the Vietnam war, many Americans learned the necessity of speaking truth to power when the “spin” and lies and cover-ups become obvious. The publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and the Washington Post cleared up some of that confusion.
In a massive democratic movement to stop the killing, ordinary citizens built and sustained a massive democratic movement, as they had during in the progressive movement prior to World War I, the labor movement in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s.. Eventually, they brought to justice some of the people responsible for an unjust war in Southeast Asia. Can one hope that those who have labored, similarly, to expose lies about weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda will reclaim the possibility of justice? Is it possible to return this government to some semblance of democratic governance?
Michael True, whose latest book is People Power: 50 Peacemakers and Their Communities. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007, is emeritus professor Assumption College.
