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250 13 Hard to Find Building for Nonviolent Revolution and the Pacifist Underground MATT MEYER PAUL MAGNO In activist priest Daniel Berrigan’s classic 1972 poem “America Is Hard to Find,” he talks about those aspects of contemporary United States reality that escape common recognition. Things of beauty—wild strawberries, swans, heron, and deer—and things that people thrive on—good news, housing, holiness, wholeness, and hope—were all hard to find in an era marked by racism, assassination, and the continuing horror of the Vietnam War. But Berrigan was writing of personal experience as well. The subtitle of his book bearing the same name as his poem is straightforward enough: Notes from the Underground and Letters from Danbury Prison.1 “I shall shortly be hard to find,” Berrigan wrote before beginning a clandestine life in April 1970. In part to escape capture from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and imprisonment for his part in the Catonsville Nine case of the destruction of draft records, Berrigan’s four months of evasion were mostly symbolic in nature.2 Because, he believed, actions against war and injustice needed to become more militant, dramatic, and serious, all parts of the movement should prepare for escape from capture and for a deeper level of total commitment . “Remember me,” Berrigan declared somewhat ironically, as his very public, media-oriented speeches, television appearances, and writings during these four months made it difficult to forget about this Jesuit-on-the-run. “I am free, at large, untamable, and not nearly as hard to find as America.”3 The exploits of Daniel Berrigan and the Catholic Left of this period are just one aspect of a larger tendency of radical pacifists and peace activists who wanted to move beyond the sit-ins, teach-ins, and demonstrations of the earlier radical groups. Though under-reported and often misunderstood, these efforts make up a major part of that mythological period known as “The Sixties,” that time in U.S. history beginning in the early 1950s and going late into the 1970s. The 1970s, in particular, saw small but significant groups of nonviolent activists take the call for revolution seriously—adapting that call to fit their philosophical, strategic, and HARD TO FIND 251 tactical beliefs. Whether through personal witness or mass action, through secret campaigns or public disobedience, through “dropping out” of the system or naming and fighting that system of imperialism and colonialism, the history of revolutionary nonviolence remains largely hidden. Many examples of militant nonviolence may be found as individual or exceptional narratives, but these stories must be seen in the context of developing new ideologies and modes of practice. The political trajectory of these pacifist radicals troubles the too-easy attempts to explain movement decline by way of tactical excess. This coterie of pacifist militants invites a redefinition of violence by providing an example of clandestine revolutionary force absent physical harm—using nonviolence as, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s terms, “the sword that heals.”4 Movement historians and organizers have largely failed to understand that the frustrations of the late 1960s related directly to various but often unconnected actions of the early 1970s, which, in turn, influenced widespread action in the late 1970s and 1980s. By connecting the words and deeds of these nonviolent revolutionaries to the activism of the time, we hope to identify those obscured sites of militancy that shaped nonviolent action during and since the Vietnam War. In their story, we find a sector of the Left that took seriously the challenge to forge a revolutionary response to the horrors of American empire but did so guided by a commitment to pacifism. These activists made connections within and beyond the Left on the basis of shared radical politics; their profound and unswerving understanding of revolutionary nonviolence provided the basis for, rather than an obstacle to, forging coalitions with others. Theories of Nonviolent Revolution Though the anarchist and socialist conscientious objectors who had served prison time during World War II used the phrase “nonviolent revolution,” the concept did not come into popular usage until the radical upsurge of 1967–1968. World War II conscientious objectors like Dave Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, Bill Sutherland, and others were still active at this time: Sutherland in Tanzania, providing support to the guerilla movements of Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique; DiGia on the national staff of the War Resisters League; and Dellinger as the central architect of the coalitions to end the war in Southeast Asia.5 With...

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