How to Beat the Draft Legally (and illegally)

IN THE late evenings of the second week of October, peaceful insurgents stalked Boston's colleges posting four-page white pamphlets entitled "RESIST OCTOBER 16." On the second page of the pamphlet, a photostat of a ripped draft card framed a quote from Camus.

"The Resistance begins on October 16," the third page began. "No matter what their government threatens, members of the Resistance will work together, confronting the government as a community, working to make their community grow, bringing to a halt the system of war."

It reminded one of those 95 theses Martin Luther nailed on the church door in Wittenberg. On October 16, 280 New Englanders broke with an old faith and returned their draft cards to the U.S. Attorney General's office. After four months, more than 1400 young men have become lowercase protestants.

The October 16 rallies around the country made the Times' front page and notified those concerned that the anti-war movement was changing directions. Ask any serious radical today, and he'll tell you that the draft should be the main focus of any serious anti-war activity. Students for a Democratic Society gave up the idea of mass marches after they started them in 1965, but in the two years since they have found no popular alternative. For non-student radicals, organizing over the price of potatoes in ghetto communities was satisfying, but it did not provide the same vivid insight into the "crumbling society" as the Vietnam War did.

The Golden Crowbar

Then, in the winter of 1966-67, students discovered their golden crowbar in the fight to prevent the use of college rankings for student deferments. A surprising number of students rallied around that flag.

The campaign was followed by the "We Won't Go" advertisements, signed by almost 200 Harvard students. Students who had been unmoved by the questionable morality of the Vietnam War were stung into activism by the personal threat of the draft. SDS had found a popular alternative. In December, 1967, three Harvard SDS members initiated a twice-a-week counselling service, which has processed 15 students per week.

Outside the university, protest was also turning to the draft. The largest and most expensive anti-war effort of 1967, Vietnam Summer, began with a hard-won cynicism about the worth of marches and demonstrations. The local chapters were to concentrate on door-to-door canvassing. But without expert organizers this effort was hopeless, and across the nation the most effective Vietnam Summer chapters developed anti-draft techniques.

The American Left learned first that it was not enough just to sing and carry signs for Peace. It learned second that it was also not enough to sit down and organize against war. The Left has had to admit that material self-interest must precede material sacrifice.

The best way to convert a poor white or a Harvard student into a political activist is to show him that the anti-war movement offers valid alternatives to a tour in Vietnam. This is what draft resistance is all about.

"If Enough People..."

The Resistance is the most romantic part of the anti-draft movement. It is based on a single moral act--turning in your registration card--and a simple political philosophy, "If enough people do it, we have to win." With its adult support group (Coffin and Spock are among the leaders), the Resistance aims its straightforward acts of courage toward a moral confrontation with the United States Government. The plan was that thousands of resisters would be arrested for not carrying their draft cards. The hope was that the arrests would create national indignation.

The Government, however, did not agree to suffer this embarrassment. Few of the resisters have been arrested; most of them will be re-classified 1-A. Except for the trial of the "Boston Five," any moral confrontations the Resistance creates will occur within the resisters themselves. The situation exposes the central weakness of the Resistance as a political force: individuals do not control the consequences of their acts.

"They went in on a moral basis without thinking what political effects their actions would have," says Mark Dyen '70, SDS co-chairman at Harvard. Dyen and most other experienced organizers consider the Resistance, which is primarily campus-based, an admirable effort, but "politically amateurish."

They maintain that the draft finds its most effective use in community organizing. "It can be used as a tool to reach those people who hear about the war only by reading their newspapers," says Vernon Grizzard, who organizes against the draft in Cambridge.

BDRG Is Broader

The dispute over the most effective use of the draft as an organizing tool is nationwide. In Boston, the broader approach is embodied in the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG). The Resistance wants persons to dissociate themselves from the Selective Service; BDRG just wants them to avoid it.

Although it is not listed in the yellow pages (after "Dowels and Dowel Pins" comes "Draft Controls, see thermometers"), BDRG has a full-fledged and publicly-acknowledged existence at 102 Columbia St., Cambridge, two blocks off Central Square.

It is the only anti-draft office in Boston and is always filled with 30 or 40 heterogeneous people, from white Harvard teaching fellows to black Roxbury drop-outs and elementary school teachers. Somehow, they all work together to handle Boston's four sustained anti-draft activities: counselling, induction center protests, speaking, and high school and community organizing.

Members of the Resistance, like recently arraigned graduate student Michael Ferber, also work through the BDRG office. In fact, the only continuing Resistance activity, a Monday night dinner, is held at the home of Harold Hector, Jr., one of BDRG's three paid employees.

Individual draft counselling is what the BDRG office originally was meant for. There are seven counsellors who confer with an average of 15 persons a day, six days a week. Before the recent Spock indictments, the number who requested advice was less than half that many. According to Hector, a majority of those who come in already have deferments lined up, and most of the rest of them find one through the counselling. "Only two have actually gone on to face induction," Hector said. "We usually never see a person more than once," he added.

But as the draft calls increase, the pressure on potential draftees is more intense. "The first question we ask is whether the person would go to Canada, to jail, or into the army," explains William A. Hunt, a teaching fellow in Social Studies and a regular draft counsellor.

The counsellor's first job is to see if the person is eligible for one of the 13 Selective Service deferments. If not, Hunt recommends a multi-issue approach for several months before the probable induction date: make a claim for conscientious objection (even if it is unrealistic it will waste time and tends to lessen the jail sentence if you eventually refuse induction), begin seeing a therapist and complain about your fears of entering the army, engage in anti-war activities, write a series of indignant and inflammatory letters to your draft board.

Homosexuality Deferment

The central question is how much indignity a person a person is willing to undergo to avoid Canada, the army, or jail. "I knew a person who after months and months succeeded in getting a 1-Y deferment for homosexuality but in the process just about ruined his life," says Hunt. An individual can move in with a welfare mother to get a III-A dependency deferment.

"This is where we need our subversive ministers and social workers to write the necessary applications," says Hunt. The counsellors also have at their disposal a Psychiatrist Referral Board, which has produced a "substantial number" of sympathetic recommendations to draft boards.

If the worst happens, and an individual is inducted, he can always punch the sergeant in the nose at the pre-induction physical or refuse to sign the loyalty oath at the induction, a move which usually means a five-month delay.

Every month each draft board sends between 30 and 90 of its registrants to be inducted. The BDRG organizes "bussing teams," which meet the inductees at 6 a.m. while they are waiting for the bus in front of their local draft boards. "The first thing we ask is how many want to go to Vietnam," says director Mike Mickelson, "and usually no more than one or two will raise their hands." The BDRG teams advise them on the possibilities of avoiding service and often able to enter the bus with the inductees.

"Disappointingly few have refused induction, but the effort is still having an appreciable effect," says Mickelson, a 21-year-old Dartmouth graduate.

Because there is only one anti-draft office, and so much anti-draft opinion, an enormous speaking calendar is a patriotic duty that BDRG must perform. Neil Roberston, Hunt, Ferber, Hector, and Grizzard meet most of the requests for speakers on the draft.

"We have to let other people know what we're doing," says Grizzard, "and we also want to decentralize BDRG." In one week, BDRG spokesmen addressed the Dorchester Voice of Women, a teenage gang in Allston, students at Northeastern, and neighborhood groups in Providence, Waltham, and Bridgewater.

The most novel part of the BDRG's work, and a completely new concept in student anti-war movement, is community organizing around the draft. Grizzard and John Maher '60 have been organizing since October in two Cambridge working class areas, the neighborhood around the BDRG office and the area between Putnam Ave. and M.I.T. bordered by Mass. Ave. and the Charles.

Each day, Grizzard and Maher divide 10 to 15 volunteers into boy and girl pairs. They work for a few hours and come back and discuss their experiences. A pair will cover from four to a dozen homes per day. The organizers have covered nearly 400 homes so far, Grizzard said. The list of 1-A's is available at local draft boards, and the homes visited are confined to this list.

Inevitable and Natural

The difficulty in organizing working class youths is that they typically regard the draft as inevitable and natural. It is part of growing up and being a man and is an opportunity to leave home and learn a trade, they believe. "It is this propaganda which we must defeat," says Grizzard. "It is a deep feeling and not easy, but it's possible because nobody likes this war. It's gone on too long for them. Nobody believes the government anymore."

The most important thing, according to Grizzard, is getting into a conversation with the people. The organizers represent the Government as an outside force that pushes the people around and represents the draft as a neighborhood problem which must be met by a united effort.

"We communicate this idea, and the people believe us. This is not heresy. It makes sense. They can talk about it," says Grizzard. The idea is that people in the neighborhood should watch out for each other and make each other more secure about the draft.

Thirty persons worked with Maher and Grizzard in the fall. Twenty were students. "Students are a help getting something started but for sustained work you need day-to-day presence," says Grizzard. For these reasons, according to Grizzard, it is better for students to confine their anti-draft work to the campus.

Students can most effectively fight the draft by forming a draft union, Dyen says. Harvard SDS hopes to establish an effective draft union and canvass the entire senior class within the first four weeks of this semester. The union would organize students to resist the draft and provide support for their confrontations with authority, by staging demonstrations at induction centers and possibly boycotts of classes. The Harvard draft union would also be an anti-war organization, distributing films, planning demonstrations.

A Harvard student interested in draft information, after trying the yellow pages without success, finally resorted to telephone information:

OPERATOR: Oh, are we getting a lot of telephone calls for that number!

STUDENT: Yeah?

OPERATOR: Yeah, a whole lotta boys are interested.

STUDENT: Miss, you are a patriot!

OPERATOR: Who am I to believe?