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Chapter Eight: Outside Advocates
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Chapter Eight Outside Advocates What will you do with the world? World is world and will remain world until the Lord will come and end it all. —“The Diary of Paul Tschetter” Rights Group Accuses Government of Torture Though government officials were determined to sideline the National Civil Liberties Bureau, if not put it out of business entirely, the little organization in New York City remained a tireless advocate for conscientious objectors. The year 1918 was especially challenging, beginning with the War Department’s blunt notice (around the time that the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf arrived at Camp Lewis in May) that the government would no longer cooperate with requests for information. Then on August 31, federal military intelligence agents filed into the bureau’s offices off Union Square and seized the organization’s records. And on October 30, having been drafted after the government raised the eligibility age for soldiers, the organization’s thirty-four-year-old director, Roger Baldwin, went on trial. Baldwin was accused of violating the Selective Service Act after he refused to appear for a physical examination (“I am opposed to the use of force to accomplish any end, however good,” he said. “I am therefore opposed to participation in this or any other war.”).1 Before the trial, Baldwin showed a copy of his prepared speech to his friend Norman Thomas, vice chairman of the National Civil Liberties Bureau and brother of Evan, a de- Outside Advocates 185 tainee at Leavenworth. Despite a moving courtroom speech in which he portrayed conscription as “a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals,” Baldwin could not alter the law on the books. The judge said the federal mandate was clear. He sentenced Baldwin to a year in prison. Thomas and other friends of Baldwin, including John Nevin Sayre—the peace activist and Episcopal minister whose family ties led to President Wilson—did their best to intervene. Wilson generally preferred not to get involved with individual appeals, but in Baldwin’s case he contacted Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory directly. Gregory assured Wilson that Baldwin had received fair treatment. The Justice Department had determined that Baldwin was “very intelligent” and had “a very pleasing personality .” Nevertheless, Gregory said, an assistant who prepared the report had concluded with a warning: “Baldwin is one of a very dangerous class of persons, most of whom are at large in this country and from whom I fear we may hear a good deal in the future. I consider the punishment visited on him exceptionally light.”2 In the fall of 1918, Baldwin was headed to jail and the National Civil Liberties Bureau was under siege. Still, the office labored on, serving as a nexus for social activists, labor leaders, parents, pastors, and others from across the country who were trying to influence wartime policies. High on the agenda was improving the prison conditions of conscientious objectors like the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf and securing their early release. While the bureau had no formal authority, it exercised power by conducting research, petitioning government officials, and engaging in publicity campaigns. That fall the National Civil Liberties Bureau investigated conditions for conscientious objectors imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth and Fort Jay in New York Harbor. Based on information gleaned from teams of interviewers sent to both of the disciplinary barracks, the organization issued a report in November, concluding that Fort Jay and Fort Leavenworth were “fairly well run as prisons go” (the bureau had no investigative report on the third federal prison, Alcatraz). But the agency cited what it called several glaring and unconscionable exceptions: the use of dark cells, the practice of manacling, and the diet of bread and water for those prisoners in solitary confinement.3 [44.221.43.208] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:09 GMT) 186 Pacifists in Chains This treatment, the Civil Liberties Bureau said, constituted a form of torture . “Torture inflicted upon any prisoner for any reason,” the organization said, “is as stupid as it is wicked and abhorrent to the American spirit.” Even more objectionable, the bureau said, was that this brutal treatment was being carried out against men whose only offense was a “steadfast refusal, for conscientious reasons, to become part of the military machine or obey military orders.” These men are in no sense criminals, the bureau argued. At both Forts Leavenworth and Jay, prisoners who refused to work generally spent half their time in isolation and half in an alternative lock-up. For...