To Stand Against the Storm: Draft Resistance and the Struggle against the War in Vietnam

Shortly before 1 o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, May 17, 1968, a group of Catholic peace activists entered the offices of the local draft board in Catonsville, a suburb of Baltimore. Barging past the startled clerks, they began to ransack the office, seizing draft files and placing them into two large wire baskets. About five minutes later, they took the records into the parking lot and, in front of watching reporters (who had been tipped off about the action) doused the files with homemade napalm (a mixture of gasoline and soapflakes), set them alight, and said a prayer. They then waited to be arrested. Charged with a variety of crimes, including the destruction of government property, the “Catonsville Nine” used their fall 1968 trial as a forum for debating America’s war in Vietnam and as a focus for wider antiwar protests. Found guilty (the jury took less than ninety minutes to reach their verdict), the defendants received sentences ranging from two to three and a half years. After an appellate court rejected their appeals, four of the nine decided to go underground rather than report to the authorities, as a way of further demonstrating their opposition to what they viewed as an immoral and unjustified war. One of the activists would remain in hiding for the best part of a decade.

In writing this first, book-length history of the Catonsville Nine, Shawn Francis Peters has worked hard to bring color to the story and to shed light on the character, background, and motivations of the central protagonists. The Nine included two priests: Philip Berrigan, who had been ordained into the Order of St. Joseph, and his brother Daniel, a Jesuit. Alongside them were Tom Lewis, a local artist and social justice campaigner; Tom and Marjorie Melville, and John Hogan, who had all been missionaries in Guatemala; George Mische, a Catholic peace and social justice activist; Mary Moylan, a nurse who had undertaken missionary activity in Uganda; and James McGinnis Darst (known as “Brother David”), a member of the Christian Brothers. Two of the nine, Phil Berrigan and Tom Lewis, had actually been involved in an earlier raid on a Baltimore draft office, during which blood had been poured on some 600 files. They had helped to plan the Catonsville raid while awaiting sentencing for their role in this earlier protest.

While not surprising, it is nevertheless striking that all of the Catonsville Nine had long histories of activism. Tom Lewis, for instance, had been heavily involved with the Congress of Racial Equality during the early 1960s, before turning his attention to the growing protests against the war in Vietnam. Phil Berrigan, whose religious order had a special focus on ministering to those of African descent, supported the struggle against segregation in the South, and, later, along with Lewis, helped to found an antiwar organization in Baltimore. In the early 1960s, George Mische had worked as a labor organizer in Latin America under the auspices of the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress, before becoming involved in social justice and peace activism in the United States. The Nine were also influenced by the wider currents of Catholic reform, including Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII’s encyclical of 1963 that called for conflict and injustice to be resolved by peaceful means, not through violence; and Vatican II, which helped spark an upsurge in social and political activism among American Catholics.

The Nine shared the view, common among many antiwar radicals, that poverty and racism at home, and militarism and exploitation abroad, were manifestations of a fundamentally corrupt American system that required substantive change. They had come to this view, in large part, as a result of their earlier experiences of, and encounters with, American power. While a missionary in Uganda, for example, Mary Moylan observed up close the impact of America...