Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community

1. Precursors to the Plowshares Movement

1 Precursors to the Plowshares movement L ike most, I was taught US history with an emphasis on wars and westward expansion. Only as an adult did I learn that there have always been citizens opposing war and actively living their lives in opposition to armed conflict.1 The few conscientious objectors (COs) to World War I received harsh sentences and little institutional support. The founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1914 and the US Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in 1915 was a start, and in 1923 the War Resisters League (WRL) began supporting COs who signed a pledge renouncing participation in war, regardless of religious affiliation. After the debacle of World War I, groups such as these made the 1930s a decade where peace seemed respectable; they were aided by socialists and others on the left as well as the traditional peace churches—Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites—and some mainline congregations. Their parades, prayer services, and protests against war toys helped a nation to remember the carnage of the supposed “war to end all wars.” Pacifists saw the dangers of Nazism early on and protested vigorously when President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to lower immigration barriers to allow escaping Jews into the country. But when the draft was reinstated and war fever swept the land, almost all the peace groups except the WRL and the Catholic Worker at least temporarily buried their pacifist ideals.2 Fifty-two thousand men were classified as COs during World War II and 6,086 men refused to cooperate with the draft and went to prison. (Over 75 percent of the latter were Jehovah’s Witnesses.)3 David Dellinger and seven other ministerial students at Union Theological Seminary received wide publicity for refusing to register for their draft deferment and going to prison. 7 Dick Von Korff went by himself, unheralded and unknown. A man who knows his own mind, Dick was born in 1916 and decided “war was stupid” when he was in high school. After going to Sandstone Prison for refusing induction into the army in World War II, he completed his education with a PhD in chemistry. His research career finally took him to the Michigan Molecular Institute in Midland, Michigan. He was eighty-nine when I interviewed him in 2004, with a mind still going a million miles a minute. We looked at his scrapbooks as we talked. Dick Von Korff “I pled guilty and I was guilty because my draft orders came and I disobeyed them. There was no way around it, I violated the law. But wars are wrong. The only way we’re going to stop them is to refuse to participate. ” my wife, Jane, convinced me. this was in 1944 and we lived in Peoria, illinois. i was working in a lab, doing top secret work on penicillin, without a graduate degree, even. i told the people at the lab i wouldn’t go, and they said that i was crazy, that i’d ruin my career. [Reading his refusal statement.]“i am unable to report because of my religious belief.” that’s not right. i should have said,“i will not report.”sure, i was able to, i just wasn’t going to do it. after i didn’t report, the lab tried to make me quit, and i said,“oh, no no no! in this country you’re innocent ’til you’re proven guilty.”so i went on working until the FBi said they had a warrant for my arrest. then i went in immediately, with Jane, who was pregnant at the time. Got out on bail and was able to start graduate Dick Von Korff, 2011. (Photo courtesy of Dick Von Korff.) 8 Doing Time for Peace school in minnesota before finally being sentenced to eighteen months at sandstone , the federal penitentiary. i was treated very nice. i never encountered any nastiness, ever! nowhere. in prison, i found that if you respect the other guy, they’ll leave you alone and respect you, no matter what. my problem was being away from my wife and child. He was four months old when i went in, and he and Jane came up every month. But i got my revenge because once Jane accidentally left a diaper full of Bm under the bench. and it served them right. oh, i used to live for those visits...