Refusing War, Affirming Peace: A History of Civilian Public Service Camp #21 at Cascade Locks

Chapter Seven: 1945-1946: The End of the War and the End of CPS #21

138 CHAPTER SEVEN 1945-1946: The End of the War and the End of CPS #21 “Morale at the Wyeth camp clearly dropped during 1945.”1 Some of the men were entering their fourth year in CPS; most were entering their third.As detached service opportunities opened up in mental hospitals and medical and agricultural experiments, many of the men with the most talent and initiative had transferred to these more challenging units. Transfers to other camps and the constant shuttling of men back and forth to side camps made it difficult to sustain organized activities or even to plan ahead. Marriages suffered the financial strain of years without an income. In February Charlie Davis presented an intriguing proposal, which apparently originated at the CPS camp in Belden, California. Because of the pressing need for prostheses for returning veterans, the Belden group had suggested that the camps begin making and fitting artificial limbs. Davis’s idea was that the men at Wyeth would start making them in their spare time, taking orders from as many places as they could. Once production became efficient and a backlog of orders had built up, men would not be released to the Forest Service for project work, but instead would make prostheses, arguably work of more national importance than forestry. Selective Service would be in a bind. How could they prevent the COs from making artificial limbs for crippled soldiers? Even if the men were arrested and convicted for violating the Selective Service act, it was likely that a sympathetic judge would give them suspended sentences and send them back to camp to continue their valuable work. With characteristic enthusiasm, Davis began to research the details: canvassing opinions of the men in the camp, talking to lawyers, and investigating the costs of power tools. The plan never came to fruition, partly because Davis was unable to obtain the essential information, and partly because the war was winding down and planning for demobilization took precedence.2 Chapter Seven: The End of the War and the End of CPS #21 139 Sessions on Psychiatry Also in February 1945, J. Edwin Keller offered a series of talks on psychiatry. Keller, who had completed a year of graduate work in psychology at Northwestern, had transferred to Cascade Locks after twenty-one months of work on the violent ward of a mental hospital. He and his wife, Helen, who came with him, were also students of the general semanticist Alfred Korzybski, whose book Science and Sanity was quite well regarded at the time. The psychiatry study group was “in almost every respect a signal achievement.” Keller had spent several weeks preparing for the sessions, which were attended by about thirty people. Keller’s presentations were “put across with a degree of original insights that makes facts speak.” Jim Townsend’s descriptions of the sessions is lyrical: He always builds discussion on previous experience rather than falling back on concepts as such. The structure of some of the talks has been almost like that of a musical fugue, with varied reference back to instances and experiences previously given. Through charts and use of gesture and a constant colloquial language the mind receives a several dimensional presentation, so vivid that it becomes, like folk-lore, a recurrent theme in camp. The barriers that so often separate class work from everyday life are not present, of course, which is an intrinsically valuable contribution itself.3 Balloon Bombs During April and May 1945, about fifty men were transferred to Cascade Locks from eastern camps to augment the fire-fighting crews, in response to the fear of forest fires caused by Japanese balloon bombs. Selective Service had suddenly ordered the transfer of 560 men to camps in Oregon and California. These mysterious moves had aroused the suspicions of Paul French who confronted Colonel Kosch. He would say only that the reasons were secret but that the men would eventually understand. When French independently learned that the transfers were due to the discovery of the balloon bombs, he was faced with a dilemma. On the one hand he did not want to reveal a military secret; on the other he did not think that he should make the decision for all the men in CPS, some of whom might object to participating in a military-related project. French also believed that Kosch had hidden 140 Refusing War, Affirming Peace the truth because he...