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Chapter Four: Standing Trial
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter Four Standing Trial We dare not disobey God for the sake of man’s command, though it cost our life. We must obey God rather than men. —Jakob Hutter Worrisome Signs for the Defense In the summer of 1918, the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf awaited their trial for refusing to follow even the most basic of orders that they saw as military service. They had no access to independent legal counsel, putting their trust in a higher power. The military code had permitted the men to hire an outside lawyer of their choosing, if one were available, and to assemble , as they were able, the most robust of defenses.1 But they chose instead to accept as a defense lawyer whomever the army would appoint from within its own ranks; their deference was not all that surprising, given the Hutterite community’s long-standing reluctance to file suit or use other levers of legal power for personal advantage.2 Just as Hutterites in the home colony practiced Gelassenheit, bending themselves in submission to the will of God and to the rules of the community , so too these men appeared resigned to the government’s findings. In their letters, the men offer no indication that even among themselves they carried out any research or prepared formal statements in advance of the trial. The letters do suggest an absolute trust that God would give them 78 Pacifists in Chains words as needed to testify, if not with the eloquence of a lawyer, at least in keeping with their convictions. Apart from the absence of independent legal counsel and of personal preparation, the men approached the trial with yet one more handicap. They had limited formal schooling, reaching no higher than the eighth grade. The education they did receive prized rote learning and conformity to church doctrine. In a trial, they would be called on to answer a challenging set of questions intended to uncover inconsistencies or faulty reasoning with no script to follow. Like most of the Mennonites and Amish, the Hutterites arrived in court without having had many opportunities to make public and personal faith statements; in the best of circumstances, they were understandably not always articulate in expressing their religious convictions. To make matters worse, court-martial defendants generally entered a hostile courtroom with mediocre assistance at their side. Defense counsels might not even try to secure a fair trial; they were often, in fact, antagonistic toward the very men they were defending. As a special War Department Board on Courts-martial noted immediately after the war, amid calls to reform a system of military regulation that was in many ways unchanged since 1775, “courts-martial have always been agencies for creating and maintaining the discipline of armies” rather than engaging in the “nice exemplification of technical rules of law.”3 H.E. Foster, a lawyer from Seattle who represented objectors at Camp Lewis, put it more bluntly: “A courtmartial trial is a trial where the party sitting in judgment is more or less prejudiced and the matter prejudged before hearing.”4 In the World War I courtroom, transparency was not a high priority; the members of the court used a secret vote to determine questions of law and to reach a verdict. Moreover, most counsels for the defense lacked formal legal training during World War I. Court-martial procedures and the Articles of War were well established in the American military, but only in 1919, after the war, did the special board urge inducements for young officers to study law and only in 1948 did the government require counselors to be attorneys. In this respect , though, the Hutterites were fortunate. Merton A. Albee, a thirty-yearold attorney and second lieutenant, served as their defense counsel. He had studied at the University of California at Berkeley and also spoke German. [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:38 GMT) Standing Trial 79 While an undergraduate at Berkeley, Albee had served as vice president of Die Plaudertasche, one of five German clubs on campus. As the trial approached, the Hutterites had one more reason for worry, if they had known about recent cases at camps across the country and the legal directives coming out of Washington. Roger Baldwin—the director of the National Civil Liberties Bureau in New York, a leading advocate for conscientious objectors—protested the severity of the courts-martial sentences that spring. Baldwin told officials in Washington that sentences of twentyfive years were...