Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community ed. by Rosalie G. Riegle (review)

Rosalie G. Riegle is an experienced oral historian; this is her third collection of oral histories. Riegle’s first book, Voices from the Catholic Worker (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), was followed by an oral history biography, Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003). Doing Time builds on and benefits from her earlier work. In fact, as Riegle notes in several places, she has included here parts of interviews from Voices.

This excellent collection, however, covers a broader sweep of narrators than either of her earlier books. She begins with a conscientious objector during World War II, moves through the draft resisters of the Vietnam era and participants in the Plowshares nuclear disarmament actions, and ends with millennial, post-9/11 peace activists. From 2004 to 2007, she interviewed 173 people who had been imprisoned for civil disobedience. She writes that she includes “insights from sixty-eight of these unlikely jailbirds, their families, and their communities” (xv). The narrators are mostly white, mostly college educated, and from the political Left. They often identify themselves as “faith-based activists” (xiv). Some are recognizable names; most are ordinary voices. They come from rural farms and cities, such as Hartford, Seattle, Baltimore, and Duluth. They speak out on a variety of topics related to civil disobedience: the communities that gave them courage, their families, their time in jail or prison, and then reentry into their former lives, some to continue resistance and face more jail time, some to move on to other kinds of witness.

In her preface, Riegle explains how she collected and shaped the stories and names the archives where she has placed the audio files and the transcripts of all of the interviews. Through seven chapters, Riegle then weaves together a variety of themes, her own sympathetic interviewer’s voice, and the historical background a reader needs. Early on, she introduces the effects of resistance on family in the stories of three resistance marriages from the 1960s and early 1970s, all of which failed. The complexity of the narrators’ family relationships returns in chapter 2, which is devoted to the work of Father Dan Berrigan, SJ, and his brother, Phil Berrigan, whom many recognize as the most inspiring figures during more than three decades of the American peace movement. Phil was married to Elizabeth McAlister, who also spent time in prison for her own peace activism. The interviews with Liz and the three Berrigan children, Frida, Jerry, and Kate, reveal the pain and difficulties of raising children while one parent is behind bars. Frida, talking about the three children, says, “We saw ourselves as our only outlets for being honest about how hard it was when Dad was in prison. We were sort of encouraged—or maybe expected—to present a brave face to everybody else” (60).

Chapter 3 is devoted to the Plowshares actions. The term refers to actions taken by the hardy group of people who have made nuclear resistance the compelling center of their lives. Beginning in 1980, they staged a series of symbolic actions on factories, silos, planes, trains, and ships that make, store, or carry nuclear weapon components. The actions often resulted in long prison terms. In addition to a cogent explanation of Plowshares actions and its roots in Scripture (Isaiah 2:4), this chapter contains a few memorable long-form oral histories, which illustrate once again the value of publishing such interviews. Of note are John Dear, a Jesuit priest and author, who has made peace work the centerpiece of his life, and Katya Komisaruk, who served time after a Plowshares action and then went on to attend Harvard Law School and become a member of the State Bar of California.

The next three chapters move the reader’s attention from the larger historical frame to personal issues of community and family. What environment gives rise to activists...