Crossing the Line: Nonviolent Resisters Speak Out for Peace by Rosalie Riegle (review)

Turn on the television or the radio. Pick up the newspaper or your news magazine. The United States has not declared a war, but most of the news is about the United States’s actions in war that day. A small minority of our citizens, as well as citizens in other nations, have been protesting war for decades. They go to jail for that. Don’t they know they can’t win? Yes, they do know. In Crossing the Line, Rosalie Riegle takes her readers to the prisons, jails, farms, soup kitchens—wherever men and women are serving time because they questioned publicly our government’s killing of people, with a declaration of war or without. Using oral history interviewing as her research basis, Riegle makes available to us their innermost thoughts. This is a book of revelations.

War resisters are often faith-based demonstrators. They are from different religions, such as Roman Catholics, Quakers, Episcopalians, Baptists, Jews, Buddhists, and also people who do not belong to any organized religion. Riegle’s narrators are mainly from the United States but also include people in peace movements in Europe. In her own life, she has been working for peace since the Vietnam War. She describes her purpose in carrying out these oral history interviews: “Instead of coming to the interviews as a social scientist, collecting data and making my own conclusions, I came with a mission—that by listening to people and then bringing their words to print, I might be able to nudge readers to question, as I did, their own attitudes and actions” (xxi).

For Crossing the Line and a companion book, Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), Riegle interviewed 173 people living in the United States and Europe. The interviewing period lasted from 2004 to 2008. Crossing the Line documents the lives of war resisters in World War II up to contemporary Catholic Workers’ protests against the actions of NATO. Riegle reproduces the text of the interviews, both her questions and the answers, and when she quotes from others’ interviews, she offers the reader both question and answer when they are both available. Or, in case of a group discussion, she identifies each speaker.

Much of the book concerns the well-known Catholic Worker Movement, which welcomed into its fold any war resister, whether Catholic or non-Catholic. Dorothy Day, who began the Catholic Worker Movement in New York, started her work by establishing a headquarters dedicated to helping the poor. These Catholic Workers provided food, shelter, clothes, and counseling. Karl Meyer remembered going there when he was nineteen. He found out that a group was getting ready to refuse to go to air raid shelters, “as if bombing and being bombed is an acceptable state.” He told Dorothy he wanted to join them. She said, “Well, that’s fine. But there’s a couple of things you should know. One is we plead guilty and two, we don’t take bail.” (They did not want to get involved in the legal process; they just wanted to do civil disobedience.) “Now, you don’t have to do it that way. But if you go with our group, we prefer that you do” (50). Meyer said that at that moment he crossed over from being a careful moderate to becoming a radical, “There was just that acceptance: you were a responsible person and you had made your choice” (50).

Judith Malina, an actor and playwright, was in prison with Dorothy Day on one occasion. She observed that guards would bring their bibles and rosaries to Dorothy to have her bless them. Priests would find a way to get into prison so they could talk to her. But much of the time Dorothy listened and talked with her fellow women prisoners who wanted to tell her about their lives. Malina said, “Dorothy had a certain spirit of joyousness. After lights out, she...