Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

11 Grindstone

206 11 Grindstone Grindstone was a do-gooders’ getaway. An eleven-acre island in Ontario’s Big Rideau Lake, Grindstone also provided the name for an institute that hosted intensive training programs for nonviolent civil rights activists. The first week-long session in August 1963, sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Canadian Friends Service Committee, brought in thirty-five men and women who participated in workshops, lectures, and roleplaying exercises. Roy heard good things about the Grindstone training, and he wanted to participate. His bookstore nearly ran itself, and Patricia was accustomed to handling the kids, and so in August 1964 Roy joined four other Americans in Grindstone’s second annual Training Institute in Nonviolence. The timing was more apt than anyone could know. On August 2, just as Roy was embarking for Grindstone, U.S. officials spuriously reported that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired on an American destroyer. In an August 5 speech, President Lyndon Johnson sought from Congress the authority to respond militarily . Congress saluted, approving on August 7 the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by a 416–0 vote in the House and an 88–2 vote in the Senate. The Tonkin Gulf resolution began the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in earnest, though Roy had already been paying attention. As early as 1962, Roy was clipping articles about U.S. military forces in Vietnam. It takes a guerrilla to kill a guerrilla, one 1962 article about Green Berets noted approvingly. In this shadow, as Congress was writing Johnson a blank check payable to quagmire, the Grindstone trainees began going through their paces. Grindstone  207 The participants were a diverse lot. They were community workers , nurses, artists, craftsmen, students, and one bookseller. From six in the morning through ten at night, the Grindstone students studied, practiced, and meditated. In the afternoons they would work, clearing paths through woods, digging garbage pits, hauling firewood. The Grindstone theoreticians cited Erich Fromm in speaking of how the manual labor would help overcome modern man’s alienation from nature, though not everyone bought the theory. Sometimes it just seemed like drudgery. At night, inside a lodge originally designed for the first admiral of the Canadian navy, the participants would rap about peace. Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Jerome Frank explained hostility. Humans, Frank asserted, are naturally inhibited against committing violence against someone similar. Wartime indoctrination therefore establishes the enemy as someone other: the Jap, the Kraut, the Chink, the Gook. The task of a nonviolent movement was to recognize a sense of common humanity with the enemy. Roy talked about the necessity for new approaches toward practicing nonviolence. Turn the famous American ingenuity to solving the problems of war and peace. Invaders , for instance, could be explicitly welcomed. Greet them, house them, feed them. Fundamentally, Roy urged, communicate with the enemy as human. For a day and a half the Grindstone participants put their ideals into practice with a scripted scenario involving nonviolent Islanders being invaded by a military force called the Southern Alliance for Peace. The Islanders prevailed, in part due to persistent bickering among the invading force members. That, too, was a lesson. Personality clashes, egotistical assertions, and tactical disagreements could drive a wedge into any alliance. A week after returning to California from the training, Roy had finished a sixty-one-page, single-spaced paper summing up his thoughts. The session invigorated Roy, reminding him of where his life’s work was meant to be. Roy himself had a lot to offer the Grindstone program. He was level-headed, rational, and seasoned as an activist. Alluringly, he also had some attractive contacts. One of the 208  Radical Chapters Grindstone organizers subsequently wrote Roy and asked whether he would attend a future session scheduled for the summer of 1965. And, by the way, was it possible to bring Joan Baez? As it happened, neither Roy nor Joan would attend the August 1965 Grindstone session. Joan, though, was listening to both Roy and Ira. Roy helped handle her finances. He could tend the bottom line. The money was rolling in, and temptations were everywhere: No one who saw it ever forgot young Joan’s new Jaguar sedan. Ira was more the intellectual advisor, the one to accompany Joan on her political outings. He was with her on November 20, 1964, when she sang on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall for several thousand students participating in...