Donald Wetzel (1921–2007) had a long literary career—publishing six novels including A Wreath and a Curse (1950) and The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God (1957), the former adapted as a Broadway play—before turning to his World War II experiences in Pacifist: Or, My War and Louis Lepke, in 1986. These experiences may have been difficult to revisit: sent into solitary confinement on his arrival at the federal prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he would serve time as a conscientious objector, he suffered a nervous breakdown and ended up in the psychiatric ward, sedated and confined between wet sheets. He spent most of his jail time simply trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, and to survive (prison was “every rotten thing that all the books written by prisoners say it is,” he wrote). Here, he describes how he and his nonviolent fellows had to respond not just to the war outside but to the assaults of “conventionally red-blooded” criminals with whom they were housed. Was it a compromise of principle, one wondered, to dodge a blow?
I’M NOT sure how long I remained at Chillicothe—a few months at most—before I was transferred to the federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky.
At Chillicothe, as at most federal prisons where conscientious objectors were being held, objectors tended to be employed, along with embezzlers and other white collar criminals, in the administrative office of the prison, so that we objectors often knew what was going on in the prison and in the prison system itself well before many of the prison civilian employees did. So it was that I knew in advance that I was to be transferred to Ashland, and transferred there as an agitator.
This last came as quite some surprise, as it had seemed prudent to me—upon entering the general prison population and after looking around and listening about—to remain as modestly inconspicuous as possible without being obviously chicken. My fellow non-pacifist inmates, whatever their other social failings, were virtuously, even violently, patriotic. They were young, conventionally red-blooded; when denied all access to the sexual or criminal outlets of their choosing, patriotism did indeed become their last refuge. They were hardly those among whom a thoughtful worker for social justice and world peace would seek to win converts. There were, of course, a few pacifists who tried, but I, fresh from the psycho ward or not, was not among them.
(I would guess, as a matter of fact, that a more patriotic group cannot be found in any nation during wartime than in its prisons and reformatories. And I would suggest that this tells us something at least about one of the reasons why men are willing to go to war in the first place; not so much that they are all that hot to defend what they have and what they are, as they are to escape it.)
And while that may not have been an observation first made by me—as to what can persuade a man to put down his welding torch or pocket calculator and to pick up the real or symbolic gun and go off to kill or get killed instead—it was for certain an observation brought home to me at first hand, and most forcibly, as it was to other objectors, with a fist in the mouth or a knee in the groin, as this or that imprisoned patriot would have it.
We cowards numbered, I’m sure, not more than fifty; probably less, in a population of many hundreds. With such odds, it was remarkable that although we were most of us more than once beaten, none of us, at Chillicothe, were actually beaten to death.
Friday nights, I remember, were movie nights, and the movies more often than not were war movies. And so on weekends, with nothing else for the general prison population to do, it was open season on conscientious objectors. We joked about it among ourselves; couldn’t the administration at least show the bloodier movies on week nights?
Steve was a socialist, a scholar, a New Englander; precise in speech, deliberate, logical, often devastating in debate. He had that sort of detached intelligence—a respect for clear thinking in and of itself—that could not easily remain silent in the face of aggressive and otherwise unchallenged stupidity. At the time I met him, he had, as well, discovered that it lessened the impact of a blow to the head if one moved one’s head with the blow. Steve asked me about it during our first meeting. Was it, he wanted to know—was moving one’s head with the blow—in my opinion, a compromise of the principle of non-violent resistance?
I told him I thought not.
I also pointed out to him that by leaning forward toward a blow to the head—most of which blows your average brawler throws in a round-house fashion—the blow will wrap harmlessly around the neck, or better yet, bruise or bust some knuckles on the bastard’s hand as it comes up against the harder part of one’s skull. Make them, for God’s sake, hit your head, not your face, I told him. At that first meeting his face was a bruised and lacerated mess.
We became friends. Steve was impressed, if somewhat taken aback, by my occasional gutter vocabulary and my familiarity with the skills involved in fighting with one’s fists. He confessed that he found me a rather unconventional fellow member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I had told him of my meeting with Lepke. He doubted that he himself could have ever quite so hit it off with the man. Steve talked like that.
I remember him telling me one day, quite thoughtfully, that he supposed it must be extremely difficult for one of my background and so earthly an orientation just to stand there and take it.
You have no fucking idea how difficult it is, I said. But I think he did.
I ducked, went around all such confrontations, avoided all such “taking of it” as decently I could.
Steve, I’m sure, understood. But for himself, he stayed and contended, and rolled with the blows as best he could.
He was no kind of an athlete at all.
Many of the pacifists and war resisters I met in prison were from the traditional peace churches; they were brave in the strength of their traditions and their faiths. Others, like Steve, were men only of principle, without faith or illusion; they were simply brave.