Interviewer #1:: Are we ready?Crew Member:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: OK.Crew Member:: We're rolling.Interviewer #2:: So, would you start just by introducing yourself?Asa Watkins:: Well, my name is Asa Watkins, Asa DuPuy Watkins, Jr. DuPuy is a French name that I got from my father's family, they were Huguenots. And, what else do you want to know about me?
Interviewer #1:: What part of the world did you grow up in?Interviewer #2:: [unintelligible]Asa Watkins:: I grew up in, I was born in South Carolina, Spartanburg and I lived there a year, and wh-wh-when I was a year old I moved to Virginia and I grew up in Prince Edward County, which is Piedmont. Red clay, dark tobacco market, s—agricultural place and about halfway between Lynchburg and Richmond. At a small college called Hampden-Sydney College which was founded in 1776 [sic] and is still in operation. I went there to college, my father did and he taught there and that's where I grew up.
Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm. Just one, two things. One is look—Camera Crew Member #1:: Did that question sound [unintelligible]Interviewer #2:: —even if Rick is asking, look at me—Interviewer #1:: Yeah. I keep looking at it.Asa Watkins:: OK.Interviewer #2:: —and the other thing is—Asa Watkins:: Want me to go over that again, then?Interviewer #1:: No, no, that's fine.Interviewer #2:: —[unintelligible] me, my angle, right?Interviewer #1:: Yeah, that's right.Interviewer #2:: And the other thing is just to, when we ask you a question, just include the question in your answer. So—Asa Watkins:: Mm-hmm.Interviewer #2:: My, our questions aren't going to be audible.Asa Watkins:: OK, alright.Interviewer #2:: So we just need you to make—Interviewer #1:: Yeah. [clears throat]Asa Watkins:: Alright.
Interviewer #1:: So let's talk a little bit, more about growing up in the South. You told the story before about the issues of guns and how, how important guns are in the South, but you grew up and your family didn't have a gun. Tell us that story.Asa Watkins:: Well, I, I know—to answer your question about that, my father was both a Presbyterian minister, he had a theological degree and he also had a degree from Harvard in English Literature. He was a beloved Southern gentleman, but to be a Southern gentleman, one had to have guns. I mean that was the perception that I had as a kid growing up because all my buddies had guns and they went out and shot squirrels and rabbits and everything. And one day when I was about eight years old, you know, I thought well, something's wrong 'cause I don't see any guns around the house. I went to my Papa and I said, Papa did, do you have a gun? And he looked me right in the eye and he said, son, I've never owned a gun and I never will. And that was that. That both pleased me and, and upset me [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] because it meant that I probably wouldn't be able to go be right where I sh-should be with my buddies, on the other hand I was kind of proud of my father that he'd said this, you know. And as I grew up—my father died suddenly in my presence when I was fifteen, he dropped dead right by me and I think a child kind of turns off things to deal with it, so it wasn't until much later on that I began to realize my pacifism did not probably come from my mother's somewhat close contact with Quakers in Philadelphia when she in Bryn Mawr College, and she graduated in 1903, but it was from my father. He was a true pacifist and was able to be so and be a gentleman in the South, and a guy in the South and get by without it because he looked to by the community, I mean, he was a, a, sort of a pillar of the community, you know, so he conformed to in, in, in, in other ways, but not with guns. Now why—see I never really had a chance to really find out why he never owned a gun, but I'm sure it was my father that set me on the pacifist path.
Interviewer #1:: When you talk about him being a, a true pacifist and you're growing up in the period between the wars, did he make reference to World War One as an example of why pacifism would work? Was that, was that an issue that was discussed? I mean why—Asa Watkins:: He—Interviewer #1:: —pacifism was important?Asa Watkins:: —he, he, we, it—in connection with World War One, the only conversations I can remember having with my father were the many people in, in Virginia that he had to nurse through the flu. Everybody got that awful flu, you know, and even, even, I guess we were up at Lake George during maybe '17, I was born in '17 or '18, around the end of World War One, people got the flu up there and my father would go into their houses and help take care of them, I remember.
Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: But I don't remember anything because he had no, he was not involved with World War One either. As a matter of fact his fir, first cousins and his nephews, nieces and nephews were also pacifists, they refused to be part of World War One and the, all the rest of our cousins were humiliated by the fact that my father's people wouldn't just conform and go right to war, you know. So, I don't know, I don't know what was going on. Now, the only thing that I can think of is that the Watkins' when they came over here in 1685 from Wales were Quakers, but I didn't know that and I don't think my father knew it because he never told me anything about Quakers.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: And it was his niece, who was old enough to be my mother, you know I—first cousins, you know, the generations are kind of stretched out, she told me this when I was an adult. She said, you know, your, your Watkins relatives were Quakers and they came over from Wales. When they came, and they turned into Presbyterians, why they became Presbyterians I'll never know because I'm not too happy about Presbyterians [laughs].
Interviewer #1:: Well, but, let's talk about Presbyterians and pacifists, that is not a, a central tenant—Asa Watkins:: Well—Interviewer #1:: —of Presbyterian faithAsa Watkins:: —well, exactly and my father was a Presbyterian minister and yet he, and yet he had this aversion to, to violence. My church, when I announced that I was going to be a conscientious objector wanted me to get out of the church. They wanted, they, they didn't think that I was worthy of being a member of that church. Now, I just let it go, I didn't do anything about getting out but I mean, that was the kind of reaction I got from my church.
Interviewer #2:: Did they say to you—was it you that said that Presbyterian is a war church—Interviewer #1:: Or a fighting church? Did someone say that? Someone told me—Asa Watkins:: Well I've said it and I think, I don't know whether—Interviewer #1:: Go ahead and tell us.Asa Watkins:: I, I think it is because boy do they—Interviewer #1:: Tell us, I think the Presbyterians are a fighting church.Asa Watkins:: I think the Presbyterians are a fighting church. Now, that was the Presbyterian Church U.S. During the Civil War, the Presbyterian Church split.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: The Presbyterian Church U.S., which is the southern Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church Union, Presbyterian Church, for the U.S.A. Up, up until just a few years ago, they were still separate. They are now joined, u, united. And I am a member of the Interfaith Council of the Chathams here, so I get to see two Presbyterian ministers quite a bit, the Catholic man and the Unitarians and the whole bunch, Congregationalists, and Quakers because our Quaker meeting is part of it, and I think I'll have to revise now my opinion of Presbyterian ministers 'cause I don't think they are fighting [laughs] people the way they were, that, that I grew up with, but believe me [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] they were. And they were really disturbed when I, when I wouldn't have anything to do with it.Interviewer #2:: Tell us a little bit more about what happened—Crew Member:: We're going to have to change[cut][tape change]
Asa Watkins:: His sister was old enough to be his mother—Crew Member #1:: [inaudible]Interviewer #1:: [inaudible]Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: —his nephews who were much more, sort of, in his coterie, they were—I, I always thought as a child that they were [laughs]—it was difficult for me to realize that they were his nephews because they're more like his contemporaries. They were farmers and teachers, one of them was the principal of a high school in, near us. And the other one was a farmer, raised, he raised tobacco for awhile and then couldn't stand it and didn't raise it anymore, and he was a pacifist at heart also, I'm sure. And his mother and father were, tended to be as, as I, I knew them—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —very sweet, gentle, good people who were not—but, but most of the other people in our community, man, they were really gung-ho, and I, I mean, they were proud of what they did in World War One, and when World War Two came along they were just fighting to get in there again, you know.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: That's the way that I, I perceived it.
Interviewer #2:: But, but—Interviewer #1:: Well—Interviewer #2:: —did you, did they, they didn't go to prison or anything or so—they weren't punished for not going to World War One, as far as you know—Asa Watkins:: No.Interviewer #2:: —your family.Asa Watkins:: No, no, they weren't.
Interviewer #1:: Well, Asa, you've talked about getting pacifism from your dad, but even so, no matter what you get from your family, when you get to the point where you have to make a personal decision—Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —it comes from inside of you.Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: Talk about how you made the decision to be a pacifist and not go into the Army.Asa Watkins:: Well, how did I make the decision to be a pacifist and not go into the Army. I began to think about it when I realized it was going to be, that I probably was going to be drafted and I think it was 1939, maybe 1940, I don't remember it was '39 or '40 and I was then doing graduate work in Richmond, Virginia. And during that summer when I was, wasn't at the school, up at Lake George, I remember I thought to myself, I'm going to write a secular essay of my feelings about violence, and I'm also going to base it on my Presbyterian upbringing, on, of the Sermon on the Mount. I didn't know a whole lot about Quaker theology or how, you know, what Quakers believed or didn't believe, or accrued to themselves as far as _The Bible_ was concerned and so on, I didn't know a great deal about that at that time. So I did that, I wrote a, a, a—to the draft board, saying that I felt that based on my religion and on Jesus Christ, which was the center of it, and the Sermon on the Mount, "thou shalt not kill," et etcetera that I—that, just couldn't do it. But then I wrote this secular essay, a separate essay, completely different and I don't think I have a copy of it anywhere, I don't know why I haven't been able to find one, in which I just—it seemed to me to be logical. I wrote it from the standpoint of logic. Perhaps I have a fairly logical brain, I excelled in geometry, I don't know if geometry has something to do with logic [laughs] I don't know. Anyway, and when I went to the draft board, when they called me of course they didn't answer—I don't remember any answer—they called me in though, I think it was in 1943, just about the time when they were really calling up people. And they said, Mr. Watkins, we have your two essays. I didn't ask them if they'd read them because, after the what they—the way they responded was this: we want you to work in a munitions plant. And I burst out laughing. I mean, I tried to stifle the laugh, but I mean, I really couldn't see how they could ask me to do that. How could they ask me to give somebody else an instrument to kill, of which I wouldn't be involved myself? So I said, no I can't do that. And they didn't answer me one way or the other and I thought they just dismissed me, and I thought maybe I was gonna have to go to jail because I, you know, they didn't say, well you, you, we're gonna allow you to do this. And I was inducted, had to go down to the, the inspection center, the health center, you know—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —to be physically approved and all that and I went with, with the other guys right down there in Richmond, and I felt sure that I was going to be ordered to go to camp, and that I'd have to go to jail 'cause that's what I, I'd decided to do, I was just gonna not do it. But when the ticket came it was to Buck Creek, North Carolina, to the Friends camp, the Civilian Public Service camp. So the, the draft board did decide to send me, but it was reluctant, this is why they didn't communicate with me 'cause I had no security at all as to what was gonna happen after they talked with me.
Interviewer #1:: Had you, in preparing and in thinking about and in writing your essays, were you in a community of like minded people? Did you know other students who were not gonna fight, or were you making this as a complete isolated decision, or was this something that people you knew were thinking about?Asa Watkins:: I really didn't know any except in Richmond, Virginia just by chance, something happened that was interesting. The year, year before I had written the essay, I think it was well, well, it was bound to've been 1939 or '40, I don't remember exactly which, but round the time that, that I wrote the essay, but I can't remember if it was before or after I wrote the essay. My mother had a friend named Nell Morton, who was a Presbyterian from Tennessee who was studying at the, at the Union Theological Seminary [sic], and she and my mother somehow or other got to talking and my mother realized that she was a pacifist. And she said, son you've got to come and meet this woman, and I did, I went and met with her. My son—my mother was at that time living in Richmond too and had rented an apartment, and I went over and met Nell Morton and I told Nell, Nell Morton what I was felt I was going to do and she said, I want you to come to my apartment Asa, on Friday, I have some friends I'd like you to meet. When I got there, there was Bayard Rustin and two or three other people, friends of hers sitting around and they were COs and I couldn't—that's when I first met Bayard Rustin. Couldn't believe this, my god, a woman in the South and in the Union Theological Seminary, well I won't go into Nell Morton, but she is something else, she used to be, teach here at Drew, she came up here and Luella, Luella and I knew her, and we recently, we have a memorial every year, there's a memorial program of some kind for her, but, 'cause she was so, so remarkable and stuck to her pacifism.
Interviewer #1:: So was that—Interviewer #2:: Did that—ask about her, yeah.Interviewer #1:: —was that, did that solidify your ideas when you met people like Rustin? Did that, did that help you make a decision, really?Asa Watkins:: Well it, it encouraged me because I realized, I mean Rustin, he was from the Caribbean or somewhere, you know, and I didn't, didn't—I don't remember asking him why he was a pa—but, Bob, a guy by the name of Bob Swink was there with him, he was from Richmond, Bob was, and Bob said right there at Nell's apartment that night, he said, I'm gonna go to jail, I'm not gonna even be drafted, I'm going right straight to jail. And he did, he was in jail the whole time, except when his child was born and the, the, the prison officials came to his house one night and said, would you please come with us, and they blindfolded him and took him to the jail, I mean took him from the jail to the hospital and he, they took him up to the, his wife's room and there he, she was with the baby and after he'd seen the baby, the put him back, right back in jail.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: He was there for, for the four years.
Interviewer #2:: How, would you—did you remain friends with Rustin after that? Did you—Asa Watkins:: Not really, but I got to know him in New York a little bit because I, we, after the war, I moved to New York and lived down in lower Rivington Street—Interviewer #1:: Mm.Asa Watkins:: —right down near the river, almost under the Williamsburg Bridge, and Bayard lived up, a, a few blocks, not too far from me in the same general area and we, I got together once with him and, and, and, and went to see him in his apartment and then, he, he and, oh, who was the guy who was the head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation—Interviewer #2:: Muste.Asa Watkins:: A.J. Muste. He and A.J. Muste, and I and a bunch of us marched down Fourteenth Street and burned our draft cards, and put 'em into a great big tin can, you know, one of those big garbage can things, and made a fire on, at Union Square and had a lot of fun doing that. That was the—and then later on, when the, when we were, just before the Vietnam War, when we were reconsidering and having all kinds of things going on in, in Washington, I remember I went down to the Pentagon once we got gassed and everything down there, Bayard Rustin led us in one of those things. So, so to that extent I knew him, but not really personally.
Interviewer #2:: What year was it that you burned the draft ca, cards with them?Asa Watkins:: That would have been in 1946 or 7, probably 1947.Interviewer #1:: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Interviewer #2:: So before Korea and after the war?Asa Watkins:: Probably 1947. Oh yes, before Korea, yes, right.
Interviewer #1:: Asa, in the previous interview you, you made a really interesting statement when you were talking about what nonviolence means to you. You said it's sort of a crux, it's sort of a fulcrum in the way in which behavior is balanced.Asa Watkins:: Well I think it's, I think, I think I mean by that, yes it is. It's—Interviewer #1:: But gimme, say it—nonviolence is a, is a—tell me what.Asa Watkins:: The fulcrum, seems to me I used the word fulcrum.Interviewer #1:: Yeah, but tell—start over again from scratch saying nonviolence is, is a, and explain that.Asa Watkins:: Non, nonviolence is a fulcrum, is that what you want me to say?Interviewer #1:: Yeah, yeah.Asa Watkins:: Nonviolence is a fulcrum of, of behavior in, in relation to, to dealing with people, I think. And I think that it has to come into almost every instant thought, every—it, it has to be with you all the time because you, it's so easy to be violent without knowing you are and so you have to constantly use this fulcrum as a, as a means of furthering what you were interested in furthering without being violent about it. Or restraining whatever you wanted to restrain without being violent about it. You can get very enthusiastic and happy over something but that can have elements of, oh, a little bit of rough edges in it too, you know, so I think that's what I mean by that. I hadn't thought about that recently though, I mean, about the—
Interviewer #1:: Well, it's an interesting thing. And, and I guess it's like you, if you're committed to that, you have to train yourself to, to think in those terms, right? It—does, does it come naturally?Asa Watkins:: No, no, it doesn't, it doesn't come naturally, I don't think it comes naturally to me now and I regret to say that but, because I have to constantly work at it.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: I mean, I have, I have a family, I have a wife who disagrees with me about a lot of things, I have sons who disagree with me about a lot of things, I have my older son who has brought up his, has been bringing up his father since he was six, and still does. And we don't agree on certain things, though I've noticed that neither one of my sons use guns, so I, I don't know, I suspect maybe a little bit has rubbed off on them, but they are not, they are not or haven't articulated any desire to be with a church, any particular religion or, or that sort of thing.
Interviewer #2:: Were they Vietnam era COs, your sons?Asa Watkins:: No, they were before that, just, just on the cuff of that.Interviewer #2:: They were a little too young?Asa Watkins:: Yeah, they were too young.Interviewer #2:: Mm. Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: Right. See, William was born in, in '57, and Richard was born in, in '60 I believe, no he was born in '59.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. OK.Asa Watkins:: Yeah.
Interviewer #2:: Could we go on to, I think—did we cover the whole draft board and, and induction?Interviewer #1:: They, they didn't tell him where he was going and he ended up on the train to the camp.Interviewer #2:: I think we interrupted him before he finished.Interviewer #1:: No, I think we got that.
Interviewer #2:: Oh, did we? OK. Did we have you on your way to—OK, you're at Bucks [sic] Creek now, so could, maybe you could tell us—Asa Watkins:: Well, I, I, got off the train at Buck Creek and Doctor Raymond Binford, who was president of Guilford College in North Carolina, a Quaker college, still there and is a marvelous place, has a beautiful choir, chorus they travel around doing music. He was there and he met me at the station and took me up to the camp and I was, for the first two or three weeks felt completely disoriented, I didn't really know what I was doing or what I could do, but we were building the Blue Ridge Parkway, right underneath Mount Mitchell. So I broke rock and, and, you know, just did what I had to do. I've got a piece—matter of fact, there's a bump in my, in my—that has nothing to do with that thing, that's something else [removes band-aid] but this bump in there is a piece of steel that I got in my arm when I was breaking rock up on, building Mount, the, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the thing went in here and came up and landed right in there and I kept it as a souvenir. I'd been told to wear my goggles and I didn't like to wear goggles, but man, the minute that happened, five minutes after that, I put my goggles on and I never took 'em off when I was breaking rock after that 'cause it could've gone into my eye, of course. We broke rock and did bui—we, we, we built what is now called Crabtree Park [sic] on the Blue Ridge Parkway as you're going, it's north of Asheville, a few miles and it's a, a wonderful place where you can stop off and, you know, have lunch and all that kind of stuff and there's a beautiful waterfall there, we worked down the waterfall too [laughs]—
Interviewer #1:: Well, was that—Asa Watkins:: —building trails down there too.Interviewer #1:: —was that enough? Was that really helping your country, was that doing work of national importance?Asa Watkins:: Well, no, it wasn't and, and we began to be more and more uncomfortable about it, of course. See, I got to the place in, in, I guess it was in May or June and by October we were so disturbed about what we were doing that seemed to us irrelevant as far as human beings were concerned, I mean we could all build the Blue Ridge Parkway later on, after the war, which was, which has been done, as you know it's a gorgeous thing. So we, we began to be quite disruptive and, and annoying to the American Friends Service Committee which apprenticed us under Selective Service. And we told Selective Service too, we said, you know, we, we don't feel that we're doing anything that's helpful to the country this way, so we'd like to do something else. And that's when they opened up the Williamsburg hospital. It was the first mental hospital to be opened up in the United States for conscientious objectors to work at. [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] And we went there in October. I mean it didn't take too long for them to realize that we meant business.
Interviewer #1:: Well, back up before, before you even get to the hospital—Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —I mean, the whole issue always comes up with conscientious objectors of, of, you know, the public perceptions then and to a certain extent now are people who don't want, don't feel they owe their country anything, aren't patriotic—Asa Watkins:: Mm-hmm.Interviewer #1:: —are cowards or lazy. Now this, that was an issue for people then, wasn't it?Asa Watkins:: Well sure it was. Now, I don't know exactly what you're asking me now.Interviewer #1:: Well what I'm saying is, is, as a conscientious objector you felt, you still felt just because you couldn't kill, you still felt an obligation to your country.Asa Watkins:: Oh yeah, right. I think we all did. Except there were a few people, there were a few sort of, kinda way out guys that in, in during the four years when I was, five years, oh four and a half years that I was in, in the mental hospital unit. We had a guy, for instance who came from the Army. He refused to be in the Army any longer and they put him in there with us. I don't know that it was any religious conviction on his part, it was just that he just got, as he, damn unhappy with [laughs] being in service.Interviewer #1:: Well, but—Asa Watkins:: He came with us. And we had people who went the other way too. We had people who went from our unit into the Army.
Interviewer #1:: Let me put it this way. As a conscientious objector, what do you think your responsibility is to your country?Asa Watkins:: As a conscientious objector, my responsibility to the country is to do whatever I can do to be creative with the country and help people in, in anyway that I can, but outside of putting a uniform on. You see, Lew Ayres put a uniform on. He felt that was OK and to do that and that's fine and I respect him for that, but I didn't wanna be identified as, I felt I couldn't be identified with any of the armed services in any way.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: I felt that would be a compromise, whereas Bill Swink, Bob Swink rather, he went to jail because he, he couldn't, he wasn't even gonna, he was gonna give himself as much punishment as he could short of being killed, you see what I'm saying?Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: He felt that he should pay for it in that way and I respect and admire him for that. I didn't want to go that far, but I didn't want to put on a uniform, I didn't think I could do that.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.
Interviewer #2:: Do you feel that you made the right decision in retrospect? As you look back, do you think...Asa Watkins:: [sighs] You know, I'm not absolutely sure, Judy, I'm not absolutely sure. Because I wonder if I shouldn't have done what Bob Swink did and just gone to jail, you know.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: On the other hand, at that time, I felt that it was important to be of some value and I just wouldn't be of any value to anything in jail. But it, I didn't have any sense of guilt about not going to jail, but I was, you know, wasn't quite sure, but what else could I do? Four, four, four E was the next classification I could accept and—Interviewer #2:: You went—Asa Watkins:: —and I would be of some use to some people doing that, doing that.Interviewer #1:: And in fact, when you look back over what you did in the hospitals, that does feel like you did help, didn't it?Asa Watkins:: Oh yeah, I mean, I mean, as you, as you know we, we rejuvenated that hospital, I mean, within one year we, we had a hospital all—I, I don't know, I think I've told, told you about that and it's been in that book that Manuel did on me.Interviewer #2:: Tell us again.Interviewer #1:: Tell us again.Asa Watkins:: Well, we—Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: —we decided when we got to the hospital that something had to be done about the hospital, and we got in touch with the Episcopal rector of the Bruton Parish Church right there on Duke of Gloucester Street, the main street of Williamsburg, Frank Craighill and he was wonderful and he said, you know I will set aside a drawer in my desk in my office, every day after you feel, after you've done your work—we were on twelve hour duty, day and night, I mean twelve hour night and twelve hour day duty—bring me a little brief, bring me a little notes or whatever you felt and we'll put it in my desk and we'll keep 'em there and then we'll see if we get enough of them what we can do. So we did that every day, well don't say that we always did it every day, but I mean we, we constantly were taking our thoughts and suggestions and feelings about things over to his office. I had a friend, a dear, dear friend at that time who, he's like a brother to me and still is, though he's been gone since 1980, he died in 1980. He felt that he had to go into the worst aspect of being a soldier [motorcycle passes] in order to, I don't know, but to somehow otherwise satisfy his conscience because he didn't think that he could be a [clock radio goes off] conscientious object, though he felt like he'd like to've been—oh dear [laughs]—Interviewer #1:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs] My goodness.Asa Watkins:: —that's that clock radio, that's that—I forgot about that—Interviewer #1:: My—[cut]
Interviewer #2:: —remember [laughs] before thatAsa Watkins:: Where were we in this conversation?Interviewer #1:: Well, there's two different—Interviewer #2:: You were talking about your friend who went into the military and, and looked to do the worst duty possible and—Asa Watkins:: Yes, he looked—Interviewer #2:: —it's actually perfect because a truck went by right when you were saying that.Asa Watkins:: Right.Interviewer #2:: So that's good.Asa Watkins:: Yeah. He, he felt, he, he was a Thomist, he'd become a Thomist, he knew Jacques Maritain, who was the French rep, representative to the Vatican, I think at the time and all and he'd studied under him at Columbia University and all. And so Marshall felt that he had to go to, to, into the war but he didn't, he wanted to go into it in the most, in the most uncomfortable circumstances possible, not making any nice, little cubbyhole for himself. So he joined the Marines and went in to Parris Island and took basic training there and all, and after he was finished with that, before he got sent overseas, he wrote to me at Williamsburg and said, Asa, I would like to come up and be part of your unit for as long as I can before they send me overseas 'cause they are going to probably—they sent him to the Pacific as a matter of fact, he was a navigator on a bomber—that, and just see what I can do, I'd love to come and be, so he did. So, since we were yellow-bellied COs in the, in the opinion of the hospital authorities, we had a perfect person to take the brief to the Governor of the Un—of Virginia, to Governor Darden. And my, my, my family happened to know a lawyer who knew him, so we went to the lawyer first and then gave, got—so—Interviewer #1:: [coughs]Asa Watkins:: —after a year, Marshall came about, after we'd been there about a year, he, we gave him the brief, we got the brief and gave it to him and he took it to the Governor and the Governor came and they cleaned out the hospital, I mean they had hearings, we all had to appear in court and all that kind of stuff, and within a, a month or so the hospital was completely changed. The superintendent was fired and a new superintendent was put in and not only did they do our hospital, they did all the hospitals, mental hospitals in Virginia, [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] they cleaned 'em out. So, from that time on we had much more authority, much more, it was much easier to begin to do some things we, we felt we needed to do and as when we left in '46 the, the blind rooms in ward five didn't exist anymore. They, it was an unlocked ward.
Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm. Did that reform spread beyond Virginia, from your work in Virginia? Or did it happen—Asa Watkins:: Well, it spread, it spread to the, gosh, who was the guy, you probably know, he was the head of the, of the, the U.S., the U.S. hospitals, mental hospitals and so on. What was his name? I can't remember now, but he came down and interviewed us as a matter of fact when he was thinking about doing things, such, and—the Karl Menninger Foundation, I think was involved with this and they were very much impressed with it, so it did, it did help I think the whole way in which hospitals are administrated or administered throughout the country, the, the national hospitals, the federal hospitals as well as the state hospitals. I think it did have a lot of effect on that, however, how much effect that's had, it has had on the, the whole meta—mental health since, since the drugs began to come in because they came in just about the time we quit.Interviewer #2:: Mm.Asa Watkins:: I mean, you know, penicillin was, was the wonderful drug for, for syphilis, but then when the drugs came out for the, for calming people down so they wouldn't have to be put in the, giving the electroshock and so on and so forth, this was, this was, made a completely different—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —situation and as I, as I, as I—Interviewer #1:: [coughs]Asa Watkins:: —as I told you before, the, the, the hospital in Williamsburg now only has 750 patients, which does not reflect the growing population, it certainly goes in the opposite direction because patients just aren't put in the mental hospitals—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —the same way they were.
Interviewer #2:: Could, could you describe what it was like in the mental hospital? What happened the first day you walked in?Asa Watkins:: Well, the first day I walked in, I got there in the afternoon on the train from Buck Creek and I went up and announced myself, and they said, go right up and work on the violent ward, we want you to start working right away and they handed me scissors and a straight razor and told me to go on up there and, and shave the patients and cut their hair. And, as I recollect it, I got up to the, where you open the gate and unlock the gate to get in, they, I unlocked the gate and went in and then the, the attendant who was with me said, now hand me back your keys. And I had to handle him, hand them to him through the, the big, the big metal fence of, you know, the cage, so, and so he, I had no way of getting out. So, so I had the razor blade and the scissors in my hand and realized [laughs] I had to deal with the patients on my own from that time on, and that was when, I think I told you before about this, that the patient came up and grabbed the scissors out of my hand and said he was going to stab me in the heart with 'em.
Interviewer #2:: Tell us again as if you haven't told me.Asa Watkins:: Well, I, I, I came in, in, into the ward and it was locked on the ward without my keys to get out and this patient came up and grabbed the, the scissors, not the razor blade but the scissors out of my hand and said, I'm going to stab you in the heart with these. And I caught sight immediately of a patient who was facing us that that patient realized that this was a joke. I mean I, I, I realized at, that this man was just pulling my leg and he wasn't going to stab me with them at all and he turned out to be a clown, he, and I got to like him very much, so it wasn't dangerous, but I, we, I was still concerned about the razor blade because I had that razor blade in my hand and that could be so easily slashed around, you know, but they didn't grab that from me and I began to pay, shave the patients as best I could with a razor blade, straight razor which I had never used before and that was that. So, that was my initiation onto the violent ward and it seemed to me to be a, to have been a slightly, you know, dangerous thing for them to have, to have done to break you in, I mean, it wasn't a bit, didn't seem to be—it could've been, it could've been bad, I guess, but it wasn't.
Interviewer #1:: Do you remember what you first, just overall impressions of going onto that ward and what you saw, what—Asa Watkins:: Well, I was absolutely, I was absolutely horrified. I, I was, I was, I couldn't, I'd heard about Bedlam in England and being so bad and all that, and it just struck me as being—when I went into the john, the, the, the bathroom where they, the guys could wash up a bit and go shower and go to the toilet, there was this much water on the top of the floor with feces flowing, and toilet paper floating around in it because the toilets wouldn't flush, they'd just overflowed. And the pa—a patient was in there with a bucket and the duty of that patient was to take this, all this stuff and throw it out the window and it caught on the screening of the window, you know, the big metal outer covering of the window that was of course lowered, and all the toilet paper and feces and everything were just dripping down off that and they went down onto the street. And this is the way they got rid of the sewage, that, that was what was happening. I mean, that was the situation I saw the very first day. So of course what we had to do was to do, do what we could to protest to the hospital that they needed to do something about these, the sewage, drainage system, and they did do it, but reluctantly and they did it within a month or so, I think we had a fairly decent shower rooms and toilet rooms for the patients, but that was the thing that impressed me that first afternoon, I remember very much, after I'd had this little episode. I couldn't believe it, and the patients were in the blind rooms, so called, the woman [sic] I told you about, Tom Russell, in that kind of room. I went, I saw a patient lying in one of those things and I went in there, he was not violent, he was just lying down on a mattress. He was pretty much nude, and I spoke to him and he didn't respond and I looked and got down and looked at him closely and I saw that he was kinda bleeding. And I tried to change his position and turn him over and when I turned him over all his skin came off onto the mattress. He died a week later from syphilis that had just not been—[end of camera roll][cut]
[new camera roll]Interviewer #2:: —again.Asa Watkins:: There was a guy—you're not ready again?Interviewer #1:: No, go ahead now.Camera Crew Member #1:: Yeah, we have it.Interviewer #1:: Go ahead.Interviewer #2:: No, we're, we're rolling.Asa Watkins:: The guy in the blind room that I—
Interviewer #2:: Why don't you start by explaining what a blind room was.Asa Watkins:: A blind room were, were the, were the cells with just a cement floor, no furniture, just a mattress and a cement floor and sometimes they didn't even have a decent mattress in 'em. For the, for the violent patients, the patients that they considered to be most violent were secluded and they were just locked in there always. You'd pass them their food to them and then, then an attendant would let them out when they had to go to the john once in awhile and I think they had, they had one of those cans in there, you know, that they spit into, and urinated into, but for any bowel movement or anything of that sort they had to go to the other, the toilets, I think but occasionally they would use the cans also for their bowels, but I mean it was, they were not furnished in anyway suitably for anybody. Even for the, you know, the worst prisoner, it, it was just, they were just hideous, hideous places. And it was during the first few days, the first week I think that I was there, after this episode that I told you about when I was broken in that way, I went into one of these places and saw inthis guy lying on the floor and he looked almost motionless and I knelt down to, by him and touched him and he didn't seem to do anything. And I thought, gee whiz, he's, he's, he's alive, he's breathing but, you know, so I, and he seemed to be, I felt he needed to be, needed to be turned over, it looked to me like he'd been lying in that one position for a long time, so I tried to turn him over on this mattress and his skin, the back of his, his back skin came all off onto the mattress. So when I turned him over, he was just a bleeding, bare backed, bleeding creature. And he died within a, less than a week, I guess, by a week he was dead. The reason being that he, he, he was in the last stages of syphilis [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] and they just let him, were just letting him rot away there. Now we gave, we, we, we gave patients, we, after we were there awhile, we were able to treat the patients with arsenic for the syphilis, and then for the, I don't know whether I ever told you about what we did for them when it got into the central nervous system, it's a spirochete, you know. I know something about spirochetes 'cause I've had Lyme disease, both Lo and I have had and that's a spirochete too, and it's almost impossible to get rid of. For the central nervous system, we, we gave them malaria and let them have three terrific rises of temperature, just kept them cool with ice and so on, so they wouldn't get, the fever go too high, and then we would give them quinine to st, to get the malaria out and this did help them in, help the central nervous system to a certain extent except once the syphilis got in to the central nervous system, it was really difficult to completely burn out, you know—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —you couldn't really do it.
Interviewer #2:: Were, were there many people in the, this, this is pre-antibiotics, were many people in the mental institutions syphilis, syphilis—Asa Watkins:: Oh yes, oh yes, many of them. Syphilis was a big thing and we had one of our, one of our guys who, Phil Vale, who's a wonderful guy and one of his sons comes to the Quaker meetings here sometimes now. Phil developed a mass way of, of treating 'em. He would put a needle, one needle and he'd get 'em all lined up, bare assed and he'd go along and put a needle into [laughs], into, into each one of their buttocks and then he would take the syringe, you see, and [makes sound effect], mass production and get it done that way faster than if, if he had to do it each time with each patient. So we all laughed about that, but he really had quite a system worked out and he did it very well.
Interviewer #1:: Asa, you'd, you'd talked before about the fact that, that working in a mental hospital was really a good test of being a Christian. What does that mean?Asa Watkins:: [pause] Well, I think it, it simply gives you the extremes of life, perhaps that you have to deal with as a Christian, in the sense of, of, of dealing with anger, dealing with indifference, you just have all those things sort of magnified, those aspects of, of human nature that, or, whatever you want to call it, sin we, you know, according to my Presbyterian upbringing we, we were all born into. It was, it was a, a magnifying glass of all that, that was all. It was just, it just, it gave you the chance to really try to deal with some of these things that you knew about first hand in a very, but which were in a very advanced sort of state, an extreme way. All kinds of evil. Stealing, lying, fighting, just everything that you could think of that was bad. People being selfish, including some of the patients would, you know, would just harbor things and steal everything they could get hold of and...
Interviewer #2:: You, you didn't say anything about, in that sentence about, or those sentences about where you, what you're talking about, about being in a mental institution. That—Asa Watkins:: Yes I, that, this was in the Virginia State Hospital, the, the mental hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, first called the Virginia State Hospital in Williamsburg. And, and it had 1,900 patients, pretty much equally divided between the sexes, there probably were a few more women than men, about 1,000 women and about 900 men.
Interviewer #2:: You, you, you talked about it being a, testing your Christianity. How about it testing your pacifism? Was that also—Asa Watkins:: Well, of course it was the ideal place to test the pacifism because you had to really, really practice at that. We took a, we took a vow before we left the camp, we'd heard about how these patients were being treated by the, the attendants, beat with rods and, you know, just all kinds of things to them, sticks and baseball bats and everything they had. We decided that we would not assault or in any way strike a patient. [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] We, we realized that we would have to grab them, we'd have to sometimes surround them and hug them, you know, put them in a tight hold. I, I had an experience with a catatonic schizophrenic once and wrestled with him for about half an hour, 'cause he'd tried to choke me with a thread which he came from behind and put around my neck and started to tighten it you see, and choke me, so I had to get control of him in some way, so I sort of embraced him and finally we were on the floor, wrestling. I finally managed to get, I don't know how because I'm not an athletic person, I finally managed [laughs] to get him, to get him seduced enough so that I could get the thing off my neck. And then by that time, a patient came and—I think it was somebody like Joe Albert, I've told you about Joe Albert, how wonderful he was, he came and assisted me and he was very gentle with the guy and we got separated. But, that's the kind of thing you had to deal with all the time.
Interviewer #2:: Was it frightening?Asa Watkins:: You know, these things are frightening when you think about them and anticipate them, but they're not frightening when they actually happen. You deal with them as best you can, and we had decided that we would always deal with them nonviolently, and we managed to do that, really, largely. I don't think any of us really succumbed to any violence, although some of us, some of us were, were more, sort of, easily excited than others, but even they, you know, they could put the brakes on and keep from really being violent with a patient. I don't think any of us ever hit a patient with our fists or struck a patient in any way with any instrument. And—
Interviewer #1:: And, I, I, I guess people find it hard to believe that mental institutions were so brutal then. I mean, when you say, I never struck a patient, they're saying, well, people don't get beaten up in mental hospitals now.Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: But people don't understand how bad it was then.Asa Watkins:: It was absolutely awful. And whether ours was especially bad or not, I don't know. You know when you came onto the campus of the hospital, you, you probably have seen it before it was torn down. It, they, they were these nineteenth century buildings, and rather, rather beautiful buildings, all sort of built out of stone with stucco on the outside, and then the towers at the corners and the staircases going up there, usually about three stories. And they were handsome, post-Civil War type structures, Victorian structures and they were quite, quite good looking. And I kind of enjoyed that. Now that, mix, mixed in with them were, was awful architecture too, brick, [thunder rumbling] more recent architecture which was hideous and they, they were just thrown up, [thunder rumbling] you know, and it was awful, [thunder rumbling] but all of those buildings now are gone in Williamsburg [thunder rumbling]. They, they built what they call [thunder rumbling] Little Colonial Mental Hospital, which they had, [thunder rumbling] they think they had, had [thunder rumbling] before—Interviewer #2:: We might have to wait, sorry [laughs].Interviewer #1:: That's OK. I'll [inaudible][cut]
Interviewer #1:: Go on. But what I'm referring to is a psychological environment of brutalisation and intim, intimidation. Talk about how that was.Asa Watkins:: Well, it seemed to pervade the entire hospital staff, the attendants that we, there were a few attendants left, but they quickly left after we got there, but some of them seemed to begin to like us a little bit, some—most of them didn't, and they sort of were silent and we couldn't talk to them very much. The, the, the superintendent of the hospital when we got there was really, he was really, he was a cultured Virginia gentleman. He had the FFV accent and everything, you know, the "cah" and the "yah," and you know, the, I'm gonna pakh the cah and go for a walk, you know, that kind of, he was a real FFV type speaking man, but he was absolutely unbelievable in what he felt was necessary to do. For instance, if he caught one of the kids masturbating, one, one of the boys masturbating, he would immediately, give him a testicle removal, you know, he would un-sex him. Yeah, he would castrate him. That, that was the way he treated that particular activity.Interviewer #2:: That's pretty strict.Interviewer #1:: I don't—Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: Right.Interviewer #1:: Asa Watkins:: Interviewer #2:: Everybody in the room sort of [gasps] lost it when you said [laughs] [unintelligible].Camera Crew Member:: That, that's not nice.Asa Watkins:: No, no.
Interviewer #1:: So, so—Camera Crew Member #1:: You're the only one who's laughing.Interviewer #2:: I know. [laughs]Interviewer #1:: —it was, was obviously a test of your pacifist principles, but it wasn't abstract because it affected people's lives. How did the patients respond to what you guys were trying to do there?Asa Watkins:: Well they quickly began to—Interviewer #1:: Start, start off by saying, the patients were...Asa Watkins:: The, the patients responded from that kind of behavior, immediately. I mean, they, they, they quickly caught on that they had, they at least had some, were beginning to have some rest from their awful treatment that, so it wasn't very long before they began to be very friendly with us and, and, and, and to prove what we were trying to do. I'm not saying that they, they may have thought we were stupid in some ways and maybe too slow in reacting to a patient who was, which was causing trouble, but they finally were, were all for us. We didn't have any trouble with, with the patients who were basically sound people, at all, no.
Interviewer #2:: How, how did the other staff treat you, the ones who were still around? Was there some problem—Asa Watkins:: They, they, they, they jeered at us and called us yellow bellied COs and, you know, were not very nice to us, but even they began to like us. Mr. Gallimore, who was the superintendent of the hospital after the, after the main, after the physician, he was the sort of, ran the hospital, he was called the superintendent but they, also, of course, the guy, head of the hospital, the physician, was also called the superintendent, Mr. Gallimore, he didn't like us at all at first, but, within a year or so, he, he left after about a year or maybe a year and a half or so, he, he, really I think, we, we were friendly with him and I think he, he felt he was sort of a part of us. We, we enjoyed knowing him. So, I, I felt good about that.
Interviewer #2:: Did you, could you describe a few more of the incidents that happened when you were there? I think, didn't you describe one of the rooms as being like hundreds of incontinent, naked men, was in men on the ward? Was that in your hospital, or was that in Byberry?Asa Watkins:: That was, no, no, well, well, it may have been true in Lyberry too, Byberry—Interviewer #1:: Tell us, tell us, use the—Asa Watkins:: —in Byberry, but it wasn't, in our hospital, I told you about the, the, the john, the toilet room—Interviewer #1:: Mm-hmm.Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: —the shower room, the bathroom of the hospital on, on the fifth ward, which was the middle ward of that building, the violent ward, that it was just absolutely unbelievable, I mean, they hadn't, the toilets were all stopped up, they overflowed so the patients were put in there with buckets just, every, all, that was their daily duty. They didn't try to fix them at all. They were just taking the stuff up with the bucket and then throwing it out the window and the window screening, the, the outside screening that was to protect the patients from jumping out or trying to escape, was just, you know, the, the toilet paper and the feces would just sort of stick to it and dangle down on it, I mean, and it would go right down onto the streetInterviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: And just, and this was the way they got rid of the, the sewage, this was the way, the sewage worked in the hospital when we got there. We, we couldn't believe this.Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: And it was happening, it happened also in certain other parts of the hospital where they had the, the very difficult patients who were, were afflicted with, who were perhaps way, way below zero [laughs] in their mentality and were really animals, sort of, you know, and they were, they didn't do much better for them either. They had them outdoors in sort of tent like buildings, I mean, they were, they kind of lived in, as though they were out camping, you know, they had them in situations like that, that was pretty awful.
Interviewer #2:: They had them in camps out—Asa Watkins:: Well, they—Interviewer #1:: [inaudible]Asa Watkins:: —they were, they were more, they were considered not to be human beings because they were so, so retarded and so awful, and having so much trouble that they just sort of let them kind of go half naked and kept they—and during the winter, they'd keep the place more or less heated and they'd let, let them put, put good clothes on 'em, and so on, but they, there was a special ward that was that way. You could look out the window of the Sequeyra building and see them down there, just like animals. They just let them be animals. And of course when they died, when any of the patients died, then we had to bury them. And they reduced the rules about the six foot grave, you didn't have to dig it six feet, you could dig it four feet and they would bury them in four foot graves. I've, it, yes, I've dug a four foot grave and I'm telling you it's some job even to dig a four foot grave. So, when, if they had no family and there was no, no contact at all we could, we could get when they died, we'd, we'd just bury 'em in the potter's field back in the back of the hospital.
Interviewer #2:: I'm just wanting to, that picture I have in my mind, I'm almost sure you told us about this—Camera Crew Member #1:: [clears throat]Interviewer #2:: —about the, the big, open room where there were a lot of patients just milling about and many of them didn't have any clothing, because people either stealing their, stolen their clothing or it was just too much trouble to deal with clothing, or...Asa Watkins:: That was, that was the way it was in this sort of, of shed like place outside, but it was also true in some of the other wards, not just the violent wards, yes, it was. They would just wander around, they had these sort of khaki clothes that they wore and if they didn't like 'em, they'd just tear them off, so they were just going around with sort of rags on, you know. Yeah, it, it was bad. Now, in the first ward, building where the old men were, it was better than that. They, they were allowed, I think I told you about Robert Clark, who was a retired professor from VPI, Virginia Polytech, mathematician, he always had his suit on, you know, and always sat with his hands like this, you know, always folded and you'd go and speak with him, and I think I've told you about Robert Clark. I did a drawing of him. And you'd come in and he'd say, oh, Mr. Watkins, how are you? and again he had the FFV accent, First Family of Virginia accent, and he, he would talk to you about, about what was going on, and then all of a sudden he would go into a completely schizophrenic, aura of some sort and he would say, you know Mr. Watkins, the peanut is to the walnut as the apple tree pit is to the peach. And he would just keep on this, going on this thing, it was always usually had to do with fruit in some way, with the pit of the fruit and the analogy and the comparison of the, it was almost poetic actually in the rhythm in which he'd do it. And he'd just keep on doing this, so then, then you realized you, you couldn't stop it, so you'd say, well, Robert, it was awful nice to be with you for, and I'll come back and see you later. And you'd leave and so, then, then he would say, fine, sir and good-bye. Then you'd come back, say maybe ten minutes later and he'd start all over again, for awhile he'd be perfectly normal and then he'd go off into this thing. So he, he was a different kind of, beautifully dressed and cogent and, and interesting man, except he was just schizophrenic and had this compulsion and that was that. On the women's ward, the women were sometimes really just as bad off as the men. I had to work on women's wards sometimes at night if I were, if I were the guard for the night, if I was to do guard duty, I'd be called over, the, the women would be in trouble. I remember one night I was called over because one of the, this woman that was causing the trouble had [laughs] I, I think I've told you about some of the things she did before—
Interviewer #1:: Tell us.Asa Watkins:: —anyway, well, the first experience I had with her—well, I'll tell ya, the first time I, I saw her or knew anything about her was that her room [laughs] was on the female side of the hospital and it was right on the, the street that is parallel to the Duke of Gloucester Street, and a lot of the people who were tourists in Williamsburg at the time would go down that street and they could get to the inn and the, the hotels, and the eating places in that part of town quicker that way so they'd go down that way which was right parallel to the Duke of Gloucester Street. This woman was a schizophrenic, she was a catatonic schizophrenic, she would hang on the radiator pipes, she would pull herself up like a monkey on the radiator pipes, she would pull down the top of her window and then she'd yell to the tourists, [speaking loudly] come up and fuck with me, come up and fuck with me! [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs] [inaudible]Asa Watkins:: That was, that was the way I first got her, knew about her [laughs]. Well, one day I, [laughs] I'd taken the men from the, the first ward, the old men, we'd, I'd taken them out for the church service, one of the, you know, the ministers would come very Sunday and they'd have church in the chapel, so called, it was also the movie theater. And, so I went with my gang of men and we were sitting there and the women came in too, a bunch of 'em from that same ward that this woman was on and she was with 'em. And the minister was preaching away, you know, and all of a sudden, oh my goodness, the absolute, most crucial pain in my ankle you ever saw, I mean, I, it was just unbelievable. I looked down and that woman had crawled all the way under the seats and she had my ankle in her mouth. Well, you know, the jaw, [laughs] the jawbone muscle is the most, I think the most powerful muscle in the body, I was afraid she was really gonna break, crunch down into my ankle bones. So I tried to be as quiet as I could and I sort of reached down, you know, and man, managed to somehow get her mouth off of it, but I mean, [laughs] that was the kind of thing [laughs] —Interviewer #1:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: —that, that this woman would do. Well, this one time I was, it was the weekend and I was the policeman for the hospital that weekend and I got a call and I went over there and this same woman [laughs] was, had caused, and when you went into the nurses' station, they were all up against the wall like this, you know, just scared to death. Well, I called for Joe Albert [laughs] again, I called for Joe to come help from the violent ward, it was so, there were so many anachronisms, I mean strange things 'cause here I'd go to the violent ward to get the patient, the patient to help who was the most peaceful patient in the hospital [laughs]. And, and so, and we managed to get, to sedu—subdue her with some help from the other attendants there, the female attendants, we managed to get the woman on the floor and I put out a call immediately for Doctor Barrett, he was down in the movies downtown, going, at the movies, so I put in an emergency call for him and he came up. And, he came up, she was stark naked, of course, and he, she [laughs] was on the floor, he came up and he put his foot on her belly and says, give her, give her the, what is the drug that we give her, the tranquilizing drug? Oh, it skips my mind for the moment, but it's not a drug that's used a great deal at any rate, give her a shot. Just put his foot, now he was a new hospital attendant, he was not a violent man and he was really helpful in a lot of ways, but he had his male moments of being, you know—put his foot on her belly and said, get around her and hold her down and give her the shot. We did and that was it for that time. But I mean, this was the kind of thing that, that happened down in the women's wards as well as the men's wards, I mean, women could be really frantic sometimes, screaming and carrying on and, and, of course we like to think that the women were more violent than the men and I don't think they really were, but they, they could demonstrate with more effectiveness perhaps. More interest, I mean, the men did not, never, did, did not go around to get people's ankles in their mouths—Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: —in church. [laughs]
Interviewer #1:: So—Interviewer #2:: [laughs] What provoked her to put, to bite you in church?Asa Watkins:: No, I, nobody [laughs] has the slightest idea why she picked me because she knew I was in charge of those men at that time.Interviewer #1:: She knew you weren't gonna hit her.Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: That's true, that's true [laughs]
Interviewer #1:: So when that period came to an end, I mean—Interviewer #2:: You OK [laughs]?Interviewer #1:: —it sounded like, it sounded like a constant series of challenges and tests—Asa Watkins:: Well it was. It was.Interviewer #1:: —for you. How did you feel, like, the moment when you said, it's over, I'm gonna leave this world, I don't know what's gonna happen to the patients, I'm going back to, was that a difficult transition?Asa Watkins:: You mean when I was discharged from that hospital?Interviewer #1:: Yes, yeah, yeah.Asa Watkins:: You know, I, it was in May or April or May, I think it was in May or June, I guess it was in June of, of '46 that I was discharged. I really felt sad in a way to leave the place, though I was [laughs] also terribly eager to get away from it too, you know, and I, I think you know what I did, I went and volunteered and worked on a cattle ship going to Poland, taking heifers to Poland. I didn't keep up with any of those patients except maybe two or three for awhile and then I lost track of them. So, and I went back to the hospital once or twice in, in subsequent years within the, the ten years from the time that I was there, just to sorta to look around, but I, I haven't been back really.
Interviewer #1:: But, but were, were you sad to leave, really? I mean, did you, did you miss being able to help people like that, that—I mean you, you were, it's, it's very rare where you can be in a situation where you really feel that you can do something to, directly to benefit—Asa Watkins:: I missed, I missed some of those patients that, that I'd gotten to know as individuals, but I don't, no I don't think so, I think I was ready to leave, I think I wanted to go and seek my fortune in other ways. And I felt that we'd done, that we'd put the hospital in pretty good shape and I felt the hospital was, was into good shape at the time and it was. And so no, I don't think I had any real regrets except that it was, you know, it was sort of a poignant time in a way. I mean, I wouldn't see some of my buddies in the unit that I wanted to see, they were gone. I wouldn't see some of the people like Booger Bear and, and Robert Clark [laughs] and others. Booger Bear was another patient that I think I've told you about, he was on the violent ward and he, [laughs] he really was, he was a comedian, and he was, you know, almost looked like he almost had simian qualities and, and he was a, a white guy with a beard and everything and he was just a jokester. He would do all kinds of things to, to, to sort of frighten you and amuse you and he, but he would, he was on the violent ward, but he, but he was often let out to do things, so he wasn't really a, he certainly wasn't in a blind room or anything of that sort. We called him Booger Bear for some reason or other.
Interviewer #2:: What, you went on later—Camera Crew Member #1:: [inaudible]Interviewer #2:: —to work with disturbed children right, teaching art to, to disturbed children, is that right? Have I got that straight?Asa Watkins:: Well...Interviewer #2:: And was that to do, did you, was your interest in that piqued by the, your experience during the war?Asa Watkins:: When, when, what happened was that when I came back, I, I worked in New York for, after the war and did further study in Art history and the American Friends Service Committee sponsored me and gave me funds for that, that at New York University Institute of Fine Arts and I, I did work in Art history there. And then I also worked in a Children's Aid Society building down in the Lower East Side and I managed to get the kiln working again and we'd do ceramics and that sort of thing and, but I, I, I wasn't, and I had some of the Williamsburg drawings and I showed 'em to this friend of mine who was the Museum of Modern Art and he said pbbth, you know, and he was sorta, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't his sort of art at all. And I didn't even get any encouragement from him even to go ahead with my drawings, he didn't, he certainly didn't want 'em shown in the Museum of Modern Art [laughs].Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: But [laughs] I was not savvy and wasn't bold enough and wasn't clever enough I guess to do what a lot of my friends did who wanted to be artists in, in getting either into good art classes or being able to market my work in any way. So I just kept at it though but, in order to, to live I found, finally found a job working in this little restaurant up on MacDougal Street called Minetta Washington Square, and I, she, she really did all the cooking herself with her, her wonderful, wonderful very, very black, large woman who was really did everything, I mean she was, that was Geneva her name was. And Mrs. Lange was a widow and she had a son and three daughters, and I waited on tables there. And that's how I got to know Hope Lange because Hope was one of the daughters, she was eleven years old at the time. And I would wait on people like Mrs. Bernstein, Leonard Bernstein's wife and others that, other artists and famous movie people who were sort of around that area. Greta Garbo would come down the street and go up MacDougal alley and see her friend, now she never came into the restaurant, but I mean, it was, it was fun. And that's, so finally during that period when I was sorta wasn't doing anything, I finally managed to get a job over in Newark teaching at the art school of Rutgers extension in Newark, and they needed people teaching life classes, needed people to, to get the models and [coughs] teach part of that sort of thing and that's where I met Luella because she and her father came to night classes there in that school. And they both studied under me [laughs]...
Interviewer #1:: But you ended up working with disturbed children too, in different—Asa Watkins:: So finally, so finally Luella and I were married and I tried to do various things again, you know, this and that, and a friend of mine established a print shop making prints and all that kind of thing, but it didn't work out, so finally in desperation, I needed, needed a job and I couldn't teach anywhere, where, way, I mean, you know, I got offers of jobs in Oklahoma and Texas and places like that. The art school in, at the Rutgers art school had, the wave of the people coming back from the war and all the G.I. Bills, and everything was sort of fading out, so I was really, really up a tree, so I finally decided I would, just get a job teaching something, so I went down to the, the Newark Public School system and announced myself and said, here, here I am, you know, I have training in art and what do you need? And when they, when I told 'em what my background had been during the war, they just grabbed me up like this [gestures] and said, you're gonna work in the special schools with the, the disturbed children and the, the, we had fifteen schools devoted to special problems of some kind or another, crippled, blind, disturbed and that sort of thing. So I started in, but in order to, to really get a contract, I had to go to all kinds of cra—I had to go to, I went to New York University, Montclair State, Seton Hall, all these places that I had to go to study, it took me two years to get credits to teach—Interviewer #1:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —'cause I had to have Health, and all these stupid things, you know, under your, but—
Interviewer #1:: But when you actually started working with the kids, did you see any, I mean, the school wanted you to do that because they saw the connection—Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —did it, did it feel like it was connected to what you'd done before?Asa Watkins:: Yes, it did, very much.Interviewer #1:: How so? How...Asa Watkins:: Well, well, I mean, I was having to show my nonviolent feelings and convictions in regards to these very disturbed children, and also, not only with them but with the teachers who, who handled them, because some of them were just, almost as bad as some of the patients that I'd had to deal with in the hospital, believe me. Some of the ways these teach— these children were treated by their teachers was not very nice. So, and I worked all over town, I mean, I had to go to a different school every day. I worked in Newark for twenty six or seven years and for part of that time I worked for five years in one school alone, a, a school for teenage disturbed girls and retarded girls, Girls Trade School it was called. And then the budget for the school system kept going down, down, down, down, so then they couldn't spare me anymore to just have me going to the special schools, so I had to work in the regular schools too. And having been very active in the Teachers Union, because I felt that, that was a very necessary, the, the, the, the NTA wasn't doing anything, so I joined the AFT Union and it had some [whispers] communists in it, they, they said. [Regular voice] I, I joined it and I went on strike and everything, so I landed in jail, you know, for once I got a six month sentence and landed in jail all the summer of 1972 I was in jail. I got out on good behavior.
Interviewer #2:: For what?Asa Watkins:: For striking. For going on strike, not putting down my picket sign, oh yeah and I was in jail two years before that once for ten days for the same reason. That whole striking situation, we finally got control of the school system which was good, but that whole striking situation was very interesting. I had to bring in my convictions about nonviolence all the time with the Union, because I was asked to get under the trucks that delivered food to the school and slit the tires. And I told them I would do nothing that was not reversible, so I'd get under the trucks and [laughs] take the air out of the tires, by you know, pressing the, the valve to make it pump it back up and it would delay them, but I would not slash the tires. So I had, I had quite, quite a, a thing to deal with when I was dealing with the Union, which I believed in and wanted to be a part of and am now, I'm president of the retiree chapter, I have to go down once a month and chair meetings at the Union and we're really into some very interesting things, we have one of the best reitree chapters in the, the country, I think.
Interviewer #1:: So, so looking through your, your life from the '40s on, there are some threads and constant principles that—Asa Watkins:: Oh yeah.Interviewer #1:: —that have made maintained you.Asa Watkins:: Yeah, yeah.Interviewer #1:: Talk about them.Asa Watkins:: And I felt good about going on the cattle ship too, that was, I felt that was really—Interviewer #2:: You—Interviewer #1:: What are the constant threads in your life?Camera Crew Member #1:: You wanna change tapes?Interviewer #2:: Yeah, change tapes—Asa Watkins:: What are the constant threads—[cut][new camera roll]
Asa Watkins:: What?Interviewer #1:: Yes, what I'm saying is, is—Asa Watkins:: Should I look at you, you know when, when—Interviewer #1:: —no, look at Judy.Interviewer #2:: Look at me.Asa Watkins:: You know, when you talk to me, I want to—Interviewer #2:: This is so good.Interviewer #1:: I'm, I'm trying to—yeah, you're doing great on that.Asa Watkins:: Oh, OK.Interviewer #1:: Oh, are you on?Camera Crew Member #1:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: Yeah.
Asa Watkins:: [sighs]Interviewer #1:: I'm trying, I know this is sort of a philosophical question, but when you look back over your life and the different things you've done starting with being a conscientious objector, teaching the disturbed children, what, what are the common threads, the values that run through your life, the rules you've tried to live by? What's, what's the, the unifying principle?Asa Watkins:: Well, the Sermon on the Mount is again the unifying principle that I, that I aspire to [laughs]. It has to do with honesty, unselfishness, purity, which is difficult to, to deal with, I think we all have difficulty with that, and love. And it has to do with the agape love, and not the eros and philos aspect of love, eros, you know is carnal love, sexual love, philos is brotherly, family love. And then there's the love of people, and the, it doesn't, the agape, the love of people isn't as close to one's spirit in a way, because you have to, it, you, it has to be behavior, it has to be action, not, not the way you feel. So, so it, to, to love people when you don't actually feel or maybe, maybe even don't feel very loving towards them, is, is something that is, it's difficult to handle because if you, you can handle it dishonestly, you see. I mean, you can pretend to when you don't really feel, so how do you deal with agape, I don't know, but it's one of the most important things, I think, in our civilization, the love of human beings. It was the same kind of love that was articulated by, well, it's articulated by perhaps by Buddha, and it's certainly articulated by Jesus, and it, it exists, it existed and it still exists in some aspects of Hinduism, although Hinduism is a very strange and disparate religious plinth or environment. I don't think Buddhism is, Buddhism is even considered a religion, I think it's considered a philosophy, I don't think it's in the dictionary you'll find it listed as under religions.Interviewer #2:: Did, were you influenced by Gandhi—
Interviewer #1:: [unintelligible]Asa Watkins:: —greatly interest by Thoreau.Interviewer #1:: Well, so—Interviewer #2:: Why do you say that?Interviewer #1:: —yeah, go ahead. Start over again about Gandhi.Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: Well Gandhi was—Camera Crew Member #1:: Wait, everybody's talking in the background.Interviewer #1:: Shhh.Asa Watkins:: Gandhi was, Gandhi who's always been [laughs] a god of mine, if, to put it that way. He was influenced apparently, and I have not studied Gandhi a great deal, but I do know that he was influenced by Thoreau and probably Emerson also. Particularly in regard to the, I think, I think this is true, particularly in regard to the end pre-exists in the means [thunder rumbling]. The end pre-exists in the means, [thunder rumbling] so if you have an end, you've got to think very carefully how you're going to get that end without, with the proper means without, without achieving it with the means that would be bad in any way: dishonest, violent, or whatever.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: And—
Camera Crew Member #1:: We've got a big thunderclap.Interviewer #1:: Yes.Interviewer #2:: Yeah, yeahCamera Crew Member #1:: I'd like to get the [inaudible].Interviewer #1:: I'm curious, you know, because for my generation, when you talk about pacifism, people talk about Martin Luther King. But for your generation—Asa Watkins:: Well, well, I talk about him too—Interviewer #1:: Yes, but, but in terms,—Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —in terms of early influences—Asa Watkins:: Oh, yeah, yes.Interviewer #1:: —what did Gandhi represent to your generation?Asa Watkins:: Oh my goodness, he, he, he was, I guess the word god comes into my mind, I mean, I'm, he, he was the, to me, and to many of us in CPS certainly, he was the articuler [sic] the best articulator of nonviolence that we had in the world. And he had really worked at this, in South Africa first and then he went to India. And he was willing to do things that I've thought about so much in this Kosovo thing, if Gandhi had been alive and had been handl— and, and, and had been active and been able to deal with this Kosovo thing, he would have gone there, with his troops and they would have started to feed those people and take care of them, right amidst the violence of the Serbs, without any guns and they'd have to be killed, some of them would have lost their lives, as, as happened with, with one particular time in which he did this demonstration, he and his folks went, there was some gate they had to go through and they were not supposed to go through and they went through anyway and there was they were just slaughtered. Now, some people would say, well, this is violence in itself and he was thereby articulating violence. It wasn't that, I am convinced it wasn't that with Gandhi at all. He put himself in as much danger as the others and he felt it was the only way that they could demonstrate what they believe, what they felt was so important, to be nonviolent in any situation but not to give up on the situation, and to at times be quite active in doing it. Now whether I could, whether I would be able to handle that or not, I don't know, I mean, whether I would be able to go down in, into Kos—over to Kosovo, and start giving food and, and sustenance to those people that, that were under fire with the, from the Serbians, I don't know 'cause I haven't experienced that. I've never, I've never experienced anybody holding a gun to my, to my head.
Interviewer #2:: Did it took, take courage to be a conscientious objector in World War Two?Asa Watkins:: Yeah, it took courage. But for me, I was lucky and fortunate in the sense that my family though they, though they'd, I don't think they ever dreamed that they would have, my, my father was dead, and I know he would have been with me had he been alive, but my mother, who was a very, I mean she was a very, you know, vigorous and intellectual woman and, and always doing things, you know, good Presbyterian too. She, she supported me and my uncle did too even though he was a Presbyterian minister, her brother, my uncle supported me even though they might have had doubts about my doing this, they still supported me, so from my family I had support even though my relatives and cousins outside the family, my immediate family were very critical of me in some ways and as I've told you, they wanted me to leave the church and all that.
Interviewer #2:: Did, were—Asa Watkins:: But I—Interviewer #2:: —you harassed? Did people bother you about taking this position? How did people tell you [unintelligible]Asa Watkins:: No, no they were all, they were all, they were at, at home where I grew up in Hampden-Sydney College, in Virginia, they were quite civil to me. They were quite civil, they were just restrained, you know I could tell that they were disturbed. No, I didn't have anybody active, I didn't have anybody doing that to me and see, I'll never know whether, if that had they been whether I would have succumbed to that or not, I don't think so because the more, the more I got into it, the more determined I was and, and, I think now, I think now I know I would now if I were young and, and were drafted, I would refuse to register. I would refuse to register to be a part of, see, I, I did register, you see. Tom Swink didn't, I mean Bob Swink didn't, he didn't register, he went to jail just said that was what he was gonna do and I really admired him for that, but I would do that too now.
Interviewer #2:: Why?Asa Watkins:: And—because I think that mass, coercing the, the citizenry in, in any mass way for a, for violence is, it's just, it's just awfully bad, wrong. Now, my sister says to me, she's a high church Episcopalian, has always sympathized with me too, but she says, well what about being drafted for two years of work as a young person for the government? I mean, me, me, me being required to register and do that and when she, when she puts that to me, I have to think a minute, I don't know, I'm not absolutely sure about that, but I also still resist the coersion by, by my government in saying to me that this is, this is the way you have to do. It puts me in a difficult, difficult position because I'm a Democrat, I'm a free-thinker in that way, I'm politically I'm a liberal, so I'm, you know [laughs] I'm not a Republican, I don't want to be a Republican, all the people on my mother's side were Republicans, oh boy, and for them it was kind of rough when I did this, but they, they supported me. They supported me even if, even, even reluctantly because they loved me and, you know, they supported me. No, I, I, I don't think I ever felt any from my immediate family, I don't think I ever felt any terrible antagonism to what I was doing.
Interviewer #2:: Does anyone ever say to you, how could you refuse to fight the good war? And what would you say to someone if they did say that to you?Asa Watkins:: Oh yes, oh yes, they've said it to me many times. And I, I say to them...Interviewer #2:: What, could you say—Asa Watkins:: How, how, how do you, would I fight the good war or how do you fight the good war? The war that is important and is for good. I can't answer it, because I've never been put to, put to that crucial test at any particular moment, I mean of, again, I, as I said before, I, I mean if, if somebody was going to kill me for what I was doing, if I was feeding somebody and they came up and put a gun to my head, I hope I'd have the poise to accept the, accept that. But I don't think one can say that one, because one's reactions are, you know, one's muscular nervous reactions to, to certain situations one can't always predict, so I hate to say that I would do it. I would hope I would, I hope I'd be willing to be shot right on the spot rather than not, but I don't know because I haven't really been to that point exactly.
Interviewer #2:: I think maybe you didn't—Interviewer #1:: [unintelligible]Interviewer #2:: —answer the question I—what I meant was World War Two, meaning how, what, did people ever say to you, how could you have refused to fight Hitler? Refuse to fight World War Two, refused—Asa Watkins:: I've always said, I've always said, and I said it then and I say it still, of all the wars that I've known about, that I knew about, that I know about, and from history and so on, this was the most legitimate war because it was trying to do something for people who were greatly abused and it was important and we had to deal with that in some way. Now how would Gandhi and Emerson have dealt with this? Well, Gandhi was dealing with it all the time, though I don't know, was India involved in the, were they, I don't think so.Interviewer #2:: I don't think, no...Asa Watkins:: No, no. This is the, this is the question [sighs] you see, if you, if you study World War Two, you will, you will realize that it wasn't just this that the, we, that we wanted. Just as we are right now trying to be such Puritans and we're doing such wonderful things for these poor Kosovians, but is it really that? Is it all that? I don't think so, I think Britain and the United States are, have other interests involved, and we have to face that.
Interviewer #1:: And do you think that was the case in World War Two?Asa Watkins:: Yes, I think it was the case in World War Two also, yes.
Interviewer #1:: Well, what do you think was—Asa Watkins:: I mean, I mean, we had the Lindberghs and we had the other people who, who were, who were perfectly aware of what was going on and who didn't think it was right to go to war to do it. And we were, in a way you could say we were sucked into it by Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill and, though nobody believes that [laughs] that Roosevelt asked the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor, [laughs] some people think he did, of course. I don't subscribe to that at all. But, I don't know, you, you, in order to deal with this matter of violence and for good and all, you've got to be very, very sure and honest and straightforward about it and say you don't understand it fully. I got, don't understand it, psychologically no, I don't understand it. I can't just give a good, solid, pat answer to that, I can't.
Interviewer #2:: But—Interviewer #1:: Because you know, we're trying, we're trying to—Asa Watkins:: I think there are ways that people could do, could, I mean even in regard to the Jews we could have done things to help them. My Presbyterian uncle who was a minister, and who worked with what was called the Oxford Group movement at the time, he and some buddies went over and tried to talk to Hitler, and they, they got as far as the anteroom to his office. And he refused to come and talk with them. So I did have members of my family who had tried to deal with Hitler on a pacifist, on a peaceful way, and, and tried to disabuse him of what he was doing, of his, his thoughts on this. But, I don't know.
Interviewer #2:: You said before that—go ahead Rick, I'm sorry.Interviewer #1:: No, I, I was saying we're, you know, part of our, part of our attempt in this film is to explain why people like you did what they did and what it meant—Asa Watkins:: Well, I didn't—Interviewer #1:: —to, to people who, who don't see it that way, that—can a pacifist understand why someone goes to war though?Asa Watkins:: Oh, sure. I mean, well, I was talking to a guy yesterday down in, where I was giving a demonstration I had to do in the library in East Brunswick and I had to do it for two days, recently, go down there and work on the stuff right in the library and people come and talk to me, and this old man who is about my age came up and talked to me and he was talking about World War Two, you know, how he felt so good about having to been able to help his country. And it was perfectly honest and sincere and right. I don't criticize him at all because he thought this was the moral, right thing to do. And, who knows? Maybe there was some cowardice in me that, that, that operated in, in with, you can always incorporate that into any good thing, you can, you know, you can use your, your deficiencies and your weaknesses in, in your, with your strengths to modify them and to justify them. So I, I—Interviewer #2:: Did you—Asa Watkins:: —but, but the more I li-, more I go on living and the more I deal with my own family and with my relatives and my, and my friends and my, the public and being in the Quaker meeting and all, the more I feel I was right in doing this and that it has to be done. It has to be continued to be worked on throughout history, it has to be—we are still very basic, primitive creatures. We are tribal [phone rings] creatures still.
Interviewer #1:: Let's stop for a second, we got a phone there. You know, we did an interview, a couple of interviews with Steve—Interviewer #2:: Yeah, we did.[cut]
Interviewer #1:: The position of—let's start it.Asa Watkins:: Where, where is my wife? How, why isn't she answering?Interviewer #2:: Did she got out maybe?Camera Crew Member #1:: Who, who's chair is squeaking?Interviewer #2:: I dunno.Asa Watkins:: No, but her phone is ringing and nobody, it's, the, the answering machine isn't working apparently if she's not there.Camera Crew Member #1:: I unplugged the phone in this back room here Asa.[cut]
Interviewer #2:: —being nonviolent, yeah, OK.Interviewer #1:: So, but, I was talking about this comment that Steve Cary made to us, that, that he says, he, he—Interviewer #2:: [inaudible]Interviewer #1:: —doesn't, he doesn't believe he's going to prevail but that he believes he will influence people and, and, and make a difference.Asa Watkins:: Well, I think Steve Cary is, is more mature and wise about that, in saying that [burps] than I am because I keep hoping before I die that I'll see some substantive, locking onto nonviolence as a means, and that you know, I tend with this Kosovo thing to think, oh God, gee, what have I done, you know, what have I been able to do? It hasn't had any effect. Of course, I mean, [laughs] I mean history is pretty drawn out and my, my little life is pretty compact, you know, in, in the sequence, pretty small, little segment. So, but, I think Steve Cary is very wise in putting it that way, I would, I would agree with him on that.
Interviewer #2:: Well I like the way you put it too. When you think about, you had said to us before, to me, when we'd talked before that you felt that sometimes being nonviolent, being a pacifist set you apart from other people—Interviewer #1:: That you were separate kind of breed—Interviewer #2:: —separate breed.Interviewer #1:: —separate kind of person.Asa Watkins:: Oh I did, yes.Interviewer #1:: Tell us—Interviewer #2:: Could you tell, say that.Interviewer #1:: —what, what do you think?Asa Watkins:: Well, of course it was when I was with my buddies in, in the war, I, I, I felt secure with them, but, at, still now in some ways, I feel inarticulate with people who don't agree with me. It's such a, sort of radical and to some people sort of nonsensical attitude. Oh very nice, sort of, you know, OK, you feel what you want to feel, thing. Yeah, OK, but pbbth [makes sound effect]. You know, that [laughs] sort of reaction, that I have to sort of live with that and I don't know any way to deal, to deal with it except persistence and, and grace and, and willingness to listen to the them and talk with them, and, and let them feel that I'm not trying to push anything over on them. But it's, it's rough, I mean I, Steve, Steve is the only person I know who's, I mean I heard that quote from you just now and I haven't heard anybody say it in just that way and I think that makes a lot of sense because you, you, maybe you can influence some people, and maybe this will gather momentum throughout the ages. I think I detect, I've thought I've detected over the last few years in, in the press, foreign and native, a tendency to maybe just question whether armaments aren't obsolete, as far as human relations are concerned. I dared to say this to an elderly ninety year old Presbyterian minister the other day, well a few months ago, and he said, oh no, we're going to self-destruct and very soon. That was his response, so [laughs] I didn't get any [laughs] encouragement from him at all. But, and maybe it's wishful thinking, but I do think that maybe the articulation of the few pacifists who, who are around, and that there may be an inclination amongst other people too, I don't know. I tend to think that at least in considering the possibility of nonviolence as a means to a realizable end is beginning to maybe just catch fire a little bit amongst some of the politicians and reporters, certainly among the press I think maybe they're beginning to wonder about it, think about it a little bit. But this could be wishful thinking on my part, you see, because I'm so anxious to feel that...I don't know.
Interviewer #2:: Do you—Interviewer #1:: We live, we live in a violent society though, I mean—Interviewer #2:: —yeah...Interviewer #1:: —maybe, maybe military arms are—Asa Watkins:: We do—Interviewer #1:: —going, but guns are everywhere.Asa Watkins:: —we, we live, we live in a violent society and this is, this brings up another thing.Interviewer #2:: [inaudible]Asa Watkins:: I've, my father said to me, I'll never have a gun, you know, like—Interviewer #2:: I'm sorry, you said.Interviewer #1:: I'm sorry, go ahead. Start again.Asa Watkins:: My father said to me, I'll, I'll never own a gun. I have never understood how anyone, since we're, we're out of that, the, the time when we had to use a gun sometimes, or use some kind of instrument to kill creatures to live and all that. Actually, I think I'm becoming more vegetarian all the time because I don't think you do need to meat maybe to live. But, it may be...what am I trying to say?
Interviewer #2:: Do you—Interviewer #1:: Well, about the violence of society. I think we're starting again.Interviewer #2:: [unintelligible] Oh, OK, it's probably the [unintelligible] with him.Asa Watkins:: The, the whole matter of you of, of making your life so that you don't need to use any kind of instrument to kill is, seems to me to be important. Now the gun, as I see it, is an instrument that is dedicated to only one end. A wrench, even though it's dedicated to one end and may, can be used as a hammer, a hammer can be used as something else, to pull something else out with. What can a gun be used for that, that is really interesting except to kill? It's meant to kill creatures, animals or people. Therefore I see no logic in perpetuating it. It, it was better than the bow and arrow because it was more efficient, but it's so efficient that it can be used without any danger really to the user, from a distance. It's the only instrument of death that you can use, privately I mean, the pistol and the gun, from, from a distance that, so that you can't be requited in some way, or fought in some way by the, the, the creature that you're trying to kill. The, the gun is a very efficient instrument designed only to kill, therefore I see no reason for any human being to want it. And, as far as the rifle, the American Rifle Association, the NRA, the National Rifle Association is concerned, I cannot see how those people that are in it, including Carlton [sic] Heston who sometimes I think is slightly retarded, I mean, I'm tempted to think that he must be retarded—Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: —how can he be so fervently involved, and want something that is absolutely, has only one end and that is to kill human beings, 'cause we, I mean, if people want to use it to fight, kill animals, I suppose, but even that is not needed anymore, it's just for hobbies, it's just for fun. And to kill an animal just for fun doesn't seem to me to be justified. I mean, I have a friend who, who is very wealthy and can go over to Africa and go on a safari and kill, and bring back zebras and all kinds of creatures, I went into his house not too long ago and he had twenty skins that he'd brought back and turned 'em into rugs. I mean, how can you do that? How can you do it and be a human being? But I, but you see, then I get to be judgmental. It's difficult—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: to, to, to as I say, I come back more and more to the tribal aspect of human beings they are, we are still tribal and if we can get out of this and grow out of it in some way, in the future I don't know. Of course how long we're going to be on the, we've been here relatively short time on the planet. I don't know.
Interviewer #2:: Hold on for a second, I think it's a travel agent on the phone.Interviewer #1:: Oh, someone's calling you?Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: Oh, OK.Interviewer #2:: Yes, calling me—[cut]
Asa Watkins:: This letter was written on June twenty-fifth, 1942. It begins, [reads] "All is well. I'm learning things every day. All kinds of things from the profoundest things about people and life to the littlest things colon how to roll logs so they won't run over you, how to get to bed in the total dark, how to wipe ten pieces of silver at one time and thoroughly, how to drink water to best advantage, and millions of others. All sorts of things like how to be happy and homesick at the same time." [stops reading] See, see that's pretty nice. I didn't realize I wrote that.Interviewers #1 and #2:: [talking over one another]Interviewer #1:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs] Remember thirty-five years.Camera Crew Member #1:: "How to drink water to advantage," I'd like to learn, to learn that lesson [laughs].Asa Watkins:: [laughs][cut]
Interviewer #2:: —from camp, from Buck Creek.Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: From Buck Creek.Interviewer #2:: Yeah, I think [unintelligible]Asa Watkins:: I think it was. Yes, because I wouldn't have been—Interviewer #1:: Sure.Interviewer #2:: You were on [unintelligible]—Asa Watkins:: —right, right, yeah.Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: OKAsa Watkins:: This is October tenth, 1942, [reads] "Well, the first casualty among the CO Army at Williamsburg occurred today when a patient manipulated his fists so as to contact the cheekbone of an attendant, one Asa Watkins [laughs], thus causing the cheekbone to separate into two portions [laughs]. I've got a broken cheekbone, probably a compound fracture. X-rays have been taken and there's nothing to do but to let it knit itself. I will always have a dent in my face but that is better than a scar. I'm taking sulfathiazole to keep infection out of my sinus. The pain is bad but not too bad. I'm OK and I will go back on the same ward unless the authorities prevent me. The accident was entirely unavoidable. This is a life." [stops reading] That was when that guy came up and socked me, the schizophrenic guy came up and do—strong, straight, strong armed me, right in the cheek. Yeah, that's when that guy told me when they sent me up to the hospital, to, to Richmond to get an, an opinion, he said, well, you know, if you were a good looking guy I'd say you should be operated on, but since you aren't, just let it go because it'll be OK and in ten years you won't even know you had it. And it's true, it's smoothed out, that malar bone has smoothed out. Now how could that malar bone do that? Isn't that amazing?Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: Gosh, the guy was right.Interviewer #2:: [laughs] [unintelligible]Asa Watkins:: Except it took a lot more than ten years to do it.Interviewer #2:: [laughs] [unintelligible]Camera Crew Member #1:: He was a good judge of looks though.Interviewer #1:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Asa Watkins:: It's all [laughs], it's only smoothed out in the last few years. It was [laughs]—Interviewer #1:: Well, better late than never.Asa Watkins:: [laughs]Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Interviewer #1:: Which is this?Interviewer #2:: Oh, this, this is—[cut]
Interviewer #1:: Hold it up.Asa Watkins:: Oh, you mean the October fourteenth one?Interviewer #1:: Yeah, just from here on down.Interviewer #2:: Just the part [unintelligible]Interviewer #1:: From here—Asa Watkins:: From "smart".Interviewer #1:: Yeah, got it?Asa Watkins:: Do, do you want the date 'cause I know what the date is?Interviewer #1:: No, no.Interviewer #2:: It doesn't matter.Asa Watkins:: OK. [reads] "It is sort of like a perpetual bad dream. The smells, the sounds of the insane voices, the bad equipment, the long, dark corridors. I tell you it is all very much like a medieval fairy tale of the nether regions. If we just had about twenty-five more—"Interviewer #1:: Oh, I'm sorry, cut—[cut]
Asa Watkins:: OK.Camera Crew Member #2:: Bring it up and rotate your body towards Rick a little bit.Interviewer #1:: Yeah, face, face me.Camera Crew Member #1:: There you go.Camera Crew Member #2:: No, not that much.Camera Crew Member #1:: No, no.Interviewer #1:: ThereAsa Watkins:: Right?Interviewer #2:: Is that good?Camera Crew Member #2:: Too much.Interviewer #2:: Too much. No, back, back towards me a little bit [laughs].Camera Crew Member #1:: [laughs] You think, thought the hospital was cruel.Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Interviewer #1:: [laughs] OK, you got it.
Asa Watkins:: [reads] "It is sort of like a perpetual bad dream. The smells, the sounds of the insane voices, the bad equipment, the long, dark corridors. I tell you it is all very much like a medieval fairy tale of the nether regions. If we just had about twenty-five more attendants we could begin to do something, but as it is we have to use a great deal of patient help and you can't teach insane people easily how to treat with other insane people. It occurs to me that you may be wondering whether the fellow who hit me has ever hit any of the other attendants. He has, he hit one and made him see stars, but didn't manage to break anything. He just goes completely wild at times. My, but this is the place to test your convictions on, on, on your—this is the place to test your convictions on nonviolence. You have to restrain a patient, but never strike him or yell at him. I feel more than ever than that violence is wrong." [stops reading]Interviewer #2:: Would you just do that last little bit again?Interviewer #1:: No, let's have him read the whole thing.Interviewer #2:: Read the whole thing?Interviewer #1:: Read it one more time.Camera Crew Member #2:: You're bringing it up too much there.Interviewer #2:: Yeah, yeah, a little bit too much there.Interviewer #1:: There you go.Interviewer #2:: Yeah, that's good.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "It is sort of like a perpetual bad dream. The smells, the sounds of the insane voices, the bad equipment, the long, dark corridors. I tell you it is all very much like a medieval fairy tale of the nether regions. If we just had about twenty-five more attendants we could be, begin to do something, but as it is we have to use a great deal of patient help and you can't teach insane people how easily to treat other insane people. It occurs to me that you may be wondering whether the fellow who hit me has ever hit any of the other attendants. He has, he hit one and made him see stars, but didn't manage to break anything. He just goes completely wild at times. My, but this is the place to test your convictions on nonviolence. You have to restrain a patient, but never strike him or yell at him. I feel more than ever than that violence is wrong. October fourteenth, 1942" [Interview gathered as part of The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors] [stops reading] Do you want me that to, do you want that too?Interviewer #1:: No, no, that was—Interviewer #2:: Is that, which page are you on?Interviewer #1:: We just finished this one.Interviewer #2:: One thirty-seven or one thirty-eight?[cut]
Interviewer #1:: Hold it up a little bit.Asa Watkins:: Do I do the date, or not?Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Camera Crew Member #2:: So we're straight on this one?Interviewer #2:: In this one, if you could say from "Buck Creek," 'cause this one's from Buck Creek.Asa Watkins:: This one is from Buck Creek written on June twenty-fifth, 1942. [reads] "All is well. I'm learning things every day. All kinds of things from the profoundest things about people and life to the littlest things, colon, how to roll logs so they won't run over you, how to get to bed in the total dark, how to wipe ten pieces of silver at one time and thoroughly, how to drink water to best advantage, and millions of others. All sorts of things like how to be happy and homesick at the same time." [stops reading] [laughs]Interviewer #1:: OK, that, that was—Interviewer #2:: [unintelligible][cut]
Interviewer #2:: —half as much—Asa Watkins:: —that was, I was the pie maker, yeah.Interviewer #1:: You were.Interviewer #2:: [laughs] [unintelligible] half as much flour as water, what was the—Interviewer #1:: Read, we, we need to do this one again too.Asa Watkins:: OK.Camera Crew Member #1:: Bring it up.Interviewer #1:: Bring it up a little bit. Yeah. That's good.Asa Watkins:: This is—Interviewer #1:: Too much. Down, yeah. [thunder rumbling]Interviewer #2:: There.Camera Crew Member #2:: Let's let this thunder roll off for a second.Interviewer #1:: OK we will.Asa Watkins:: Boy, these, these thunderstorms are doing what they said.Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: I'm glad they haven't gotten hail.Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: Oh, have you ever seen hail really strip the leaves off the trees?Interviewer #1:: Wow, no.Asa Watkins:: It is something. I experienced it once in Virginia.Interviewer #2:: Yeah. Yeah?Asa Watkins:: My god—Interviewer #2:: Sounds intense.Asa Watkins:: —it was in June, and the leaves were all there—Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: [inaudible]Asa Watkins:: —and, and when the hail storm had gone, there were no leaves on the trees.Interviewer #1:: Amazing.Asa Watkins:: And they all put out second leaves.Interviewer #2:: Wow. Did you—Asa Watkins:: And it smelled of sap and the whole air was filled with this sort of juicy smell of sap—Interviewer #1:: Huh.Asa Watkins:: —and ooh, man.Interviewer #1:: We all right now?Camera Crew Member #1:: Yeah.
Interviewer #1:: OK, go ahead.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "October tenth, 1942. Well, the first casualty among the CO Army at Williamsburg occurred today when a patient manipulated his fists so as to contact the cheekbone of an attendant, one Asa Watkins, thus causing the cheekbone to separate into two portions. I've got a broken cheekbone, probably a compound fracture. X-rays have been taken and there's nothing to do but let it knit itself. I will always have a dent in my face but that is better than a scar. I'm taking sulfathiazole to keep infection out of my sinus. The pain is bad but not too bad. I'm OK and will go back on the same ward unless the authorities prevent me. The accident was entirely unavoidable. This is a life." [stops reading]Camera Crew Member #1:: A life.Interviewer #2:: It's better too. Ken, how about closing this door?Interviewer #1:: OK, so that was—[cut]
Asa Watkins:: —right.Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: The one about the apple and the false teeth. It's that little part I marked.Asa Watkins:: Oh. The funniest thing? All right. [reads] "The funniest thing I've seen yet is the time a man took out his false teeth to eat an apple by using the teeth as a spoon. [laughs] It was one of the weirdest performances I've ever witnessed. This is nothing you don't see here. There's nothing, nothing you don't see." [stops reading]Interviewer #2:: Do it again.Interviewer #1:: Read it one more time.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "The funniest thing I've seen yet is the time a man took out his false teeth to eat an apple by using the teeth as a spoon. It was one of the weirdest performances I've ever witnessed. There's nothing you don't see here." [stops reading] I, I, I'd forgotten all about that.Interviewer #2:: [laughs] I love that image.Interviewer #1:: [laughs] Can you tell us about the—[cut]
Interviewer #2:: OK.Asa Watkins:: Have I got it the right—Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Interviewer #2:: Yeah. I think it's the bottom there.Interviewer #1:: Yeah, that's good.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "February tenth, 1943. He tears up blankets and shreds them into strings. He twists strange knots from these and clinging with gnarled toe and splintered fingernail, he ties them to the grating above his door. Wracked by exertion he lies face up on the cement floor, eyes fixed on the accomplished task. He has tied his soul to the bars above his door with strings of blankets stretched claw-like above his head and above the bed." [stops reading] I, it was actually above the bed. Should I read that over again?Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: Yeah. Start from the—Interviewer #2:: Maybe, I almost want to take the page so—Interviewer #1:: —no, no, that's fine.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "February tenth, 1943. He tears up blankets and shreds them into strings. He twists strange knots from these and clinging with gnarled toe and splintered fingernail, he ties them to the grating above his door. Wracked by exertion he lies face up on the cement floor, eyes fixed on the accomplished task. He has tied his soul to the bars above his door with strings of blankets stretched claw-like above his bed. I can see his soul ensnared, twisted there around the bars." [stops reading] Boy, that's pretty good, isn't it.Interviewer #1:: That's pretty poetic.Interviewer #2:: [laughs]Interviewer #1:: That's, that's—Asa Watkins:: [laughs]Interviewer #1:: —you're waxing—[cut]
Asa Watkins:: —right?Interviewer #1:: Yeah, that's fine.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "The older we become, the more sorrow we experience, but the less remorse. Sorrow is a darkly toned thing, but it is not the companion of unhappiness. Rather it is the inevitable companion of joy, the complement of happiness. Joy and sorrow, pain and ecstasy, life and death. These are the stuff of which life is made." [stops reading]Interviewer #1:: Try it one more time.Interviewer #2:: Can you, yeah.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "The older we become, the more sorrow we experience, but the less remorse. Sorrow is a darkly toned thing, but it is not the companion of unhappiness. Rather it is the inevitable companion of joy, the complement of happiness. Joy and sorrow, pain and ecstasy, life and dea—"[end of camera roll][cut]
Asa Watkins:: [reads] "The older we become, the more sorrow—"Camera Crew Member #2:: Begin again.Asa Watkins:: OK.Camera Crew Member #2:: Please.Asa Watkins:: [reads] "The older we become, the more sorrow we experience, but the less remorse. Sorrow is a darkly toned thing, but it is not the companion of unhappiness. Rather it is the inevitable companion of joy, the complement of happiness. Joy and sorrow, pain and ecstasy, life and death. These are the stuff of which life is made." [stops reading]Interviewer #1:: And, and at the bottom of the page.Interviewer #2:: There's, there's some more at the bottom.Interviewer #1:: Start at, "that because"Asa Watkins:: [reads] "April tenth, 1943—"Interviewer #2:: Yeah, it goes on to the next page.Asa Watkins:: OK. [reads] "I tell you what has happening as the war progresses, the COs are going to be more and more in the red. I shall not be surprised to find myself in prison yet. I don't believe I shall get there, but if I do, I shall not be surprised. It has sort of came over me tonight that I shall never be able to say quote it is over and I can go about my business end quote. This war will never be over in my lifetime. It may be over so far as the military goes, but it will not be so over so far as the civilian life goes. It will never end like the last war did. It is going to be a constant struggle. After the actual fighting, it will be compulsory military training and compulsory education along government lines, the government control of colleges and government control of everything. The dark ages are upon us, I'm very depressed. Of course for us who have found the way it is different, we are in a different order. However, we shall, we shall suffer too. I'm not an alarmist, but I just wonder what the next ten years will bring forth." [stops reading] Want me to go ahead?Interviewer #2:: Cold War, huh?Asa Watkins:: [reads] "I'm determined to follow my painting and drawing, and all that, all that doing so involves. Wouldn't it be fun if Marshall and Jack, and William and others who might be interested could have a score [sic] of our own where we could teach." [stops reading] Oh—Interviewer #2:: Yeah, not that part.Asa Watkins:: —have a school.Interviewer #2:: Do we—[cut]
Asa Watkins:: —What we would have done without music? I have a little—Interviewer #1:: Hold on for just a second.Interviewer #2:: We'll need to start again, sorry.Camera Crew Member #2:: Can you take your glasses off, please?Camera Crew Member #1:: Glasses off.Asa Watkins:: I had a, I had a few records that I—Interviewer #1:: Start over again.Asa Watkins:: I had a few records, mostly classical records. They were, in those days they were 78s, of course, and the, Dick Scott, Richard Scott down the hall from me had a gorgeous record player, for those times, of course nothing was stereo then or anything. And he had the Schumann piano concerto, and other gorgeous things and we had, and Clarence Angell, who was the sort of our head guy there for awhile, Clarence had that marvelous organ composer, what was his name? I can't remember it now, anyway, he had marvelous pipe organ things and he knew how to amplify things off the base, you know, so the big pipe organs would, would bellow forth. Yes, that meant a lot to us. And then we had, had Isabelle, Isabelle, her last name escapes me, she came to, to work with us, she was not a CO, but she came to work with us because she was interested in what we were doing. Isabelle Maddox her name was, M-A-D-D-O-X, and she had, she liked jazz and she had jazz records and then, another couple of guys in one of the rooms, room near me had jazz records too, and I learned about jazz because my family had sort of scorned jazz, you know, I began to really understand what jazz was all about and love it. I don't know what we would've done without those records. I mean we didn't have a whole lot but we played 'em over and over again, and we had many discussions about them. So music meant a great deal to us. Now, we didn't, as I remember, form a, a, a singing unit or chorus or quartet or club or anything of that sort, but the actual being able to have music was, to me, absolutely incredibly wonderful. I don't know what I'd have done without it, really.
Interviewer #2:: Did you guys sing or write any music or do, do any performances yourself when you were there?Asa Watkins:: No. I don't think so.Interviewer #2:: Or at Buck Creek?Asa Watkins:: No.
Interviewer #1:: But, you're talking about discussions of music—there you are in that world of the mental hospital and it's a really a dramatic scene and it takes all your energy, are you still talking, are you still looking at the news from the war? Are you still wondering when it's gonna end? Are you still sort of keeping track of the world outside of the hospital?Asa Watkins:: Oh, yeah.Interviewer #2:: And, and, are you talking about pacifism too?Asa Watkins:: Oh, yes, and you see, we were a, we were a little meeting, a little Quaker meeting. And we had meeting once a week and we, it was a meeting for, you know Quakers have the meeting once a month for, for, the meeting for worship, for business when we talk about our business things, but it's always, you see, a meeting for worship for business, not just meeting for business. We had that and we, we did a lot of discussion about what we felt was going on, where, where, how we were being able to behave ourselves and whether we were doing this or that, right or wrong. And we had discussions too on music and I, I remember I'd have these discussions on music more than other things, I mean we didn't have much discussion on politics as I remember. Maybe, occasionally, we, some of us had read a good book and we would talk about it. I think we did have sort of at times kind of book reports, you know, of people, ones of us had read.
Interviewer #2:: But, but you didn't—Asa Watkins:: That kind of thing.Interviewer #2:: —about why you weren't fighting or how, the challenge of why you weren't fighting in this particular war? People didn't discuss that? In your group.Asa Watkins:: Not much because we were all pretty much of the same opinion. We didn't need to discuss it, we were all felt, felt very unified that way, except for a few as I said that came, had come in sort of strangely from the, from having been in the Army and then just refusing to fight and rather than be put in jail, they were sent to the CPS unit. We had one or two kid, boys like that, and they were very interesting because they were, they were really hard bitten. They'd turned into pacifists, I believe, believe me, whether it was cowardice or not, or whatever it was, they were true pacifists by the time they got to us, I can tell you. That was very interesting. And then we had also, we had one physician who was a Mennonite, had come from up in Virginia in, in the valley of Virginia, and he was married and his, matter of fact one of his children was born when he was at Williamsburg, Doctor Crumpacker his name was, he was wonderful. And he was one of the ones who helped us perfect the shock therapy team and all that. He decided right in the mid-term, oh about two years after he came in that he was gonna go into the Army, and be a physician in the Army, he felt that he could be of more use in some way, reason that way than to be with us. And I was very distressed by that, I mean, it really, it really disturbed me, I felt, I missed him a lot. But also I was troubled by the why he decided to do that. Maybe he felt that he would be, having, having a child and all, maybe he needed more money to support his family—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —I don't know what, why he did it, but he never really told us why.
Interviewer #1:: Could we just do this one, that one story about how you got the patients into the shower and, and would just get in the shower with them 'cause it was so hard to, to get the patients clean that they hadn't been attended to in so long?Asa Watkins:: Right, well the patients had body lice, they all had body lice. I, I think I'd mentioned to you that Doctor Barrett asked me to be exterminator for a year, with all the vermin around in the hospital and I did that for a year, but this was before that, it was before he, it was before he came on, into the hospital. We were still under Doctor Brown's tutelage in quotes, and the only, I found the only way you could really clean a guy up, you had to put the mercuric ointment on him, get it down into the pubic hairs and all over his hair and under his arms and everywhere you had to kill the lice. You had to put this mercuric ointment all over him, rub it on him. The only way you could do it thoroughly was to get into the shower with him and do it and then wash him off. But the stuff kills the, the vermin very quickly, it kills the lice and all very quickly once you get it on it'll kill 'em very quickly and then you can wash 'em off. That was the only way you could get 'em clean, so we had to do that all the time. I did it on, on my ward, that was with the old men on the first ward, not with the violent patients, yeah.
Interviewer #1:: Well—Interviewer #2:: Have we done it all?Interviewer #1:: —yeah, I mean, I think we've done it all 'cause—Interviewer #2:: We haven't asked him Pearl Harbor or _All Quiet on the Western Front_ questions.Interviewer #1:: No...Interviewer #2:: Did you see that Asa? Did you see _All Quiet on the Western Front_?Interviewer #1:: The movie? The anti-war movie?Asa Watkins:: Wasn't that, wasn't—Interviewer #1:: That was the one with Lew Ayres.Asa Watkins:: —yes, yes I did see it, yes.Interviewer #1:: Did it have an effect on you, or...Asa Watkins:: Well, it, as I remember it, it sort of, wasn't it kind of an, not exactly an epiphany because I don't think I was that, but it was sort of an end to a creative effort, I thought that was done very well and articulated very well and, and a guy that was in it, a guy that I knew in it was, I never met him, but I mean I felt I did, that he was actually [laughs] of this ilk, you know, that was wonderful. So I, yes I, now whether it was a very fine movie or not, it, you know it hasn't been revived or, or shown any...Interviewer #1:: You can still get it in video stores now.Interviewer #2:: Yeah, yeah, it's out and about.Asa Watkins:: You can?Interviewer #2:: Yeah, it's on TV and yeah.Asa Watkins:: Oh, OK, right. There's something about television that, that's increasingly, turned me off, I've noticed in the last two or three years, and I don't even like to watch films on it. I, sort of when I go to a film, I want to be in a theater with people around me, watching a large screen rather than that little—Interviewer #2:: Mm. Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —thing somehow, so Luella and I don't get them very much. We, we probably should avail ourselves of it more than we do.Interviewer #2:: That's a legitimate—Interviewer #1:: I think we're about done.Interviewer #2:: —problem.
Interviewer #1:: Is there anything else we haven't talked about that, in terms of, I mean, you know, think about the fact that most people who see this were probably born after 1950, 1960, have, you know, have only the fuzziest ideas of what this world means, like what's important for them to know about what you went through and what those times were like.Asa Watkins:: Gee, I don't know, that's a good question, I don't know.Interviewer #1:: I mean, like, when you tell your children about it, what—can, can your generation explain what it was like, or did, did you have to live through it?Asa Watkins:: You mean when I talk to my children?Interviewer #1:: Yeah. I mean...Asa Watkins:: You mean can—Interviewer #1:: The fact that we weren't there in the '40s, can we get it, can we, you—Interviewer #2:: What, what was it like to be a conscientious objector—Interviewer #1:: —tell us?Interviewer #2:: —in World War Two?Asa Watkins:: I think that my sons have, have gotten some of it, I think, they haven't queried me a lot about it, but of course as they get older they want to hear more and more about it, you know, we're having to go through all that business. I mean they're in their forties, their early forties now and one of 'em just got to be forty. We, we were late getting married and everything, you know the kids should be in their sixties or seventies I guess, you know, or something or other, but Luella and I didn't get married until we were in our thirties and forties. So, they, they increasingly want to know, they, they increasingly occasionally refer to something or ask me about it, but no, there's not a great deal of, of interest in it, from them that I've noticed or from anybody really.
Interviewer #1:: Well, what about the World War Two movies, those are pretty popular, aren't they?Asa Watkins:: They sure are pretty popular.Interviewer #1:: Why, why do you think that is?Asa Watkins:: I wish I knew, I mean, I wish, it distresses me. And that's one thing that worries because as World War Two was coming on, World War One movies were getting very popular too. I mean I, you see, I, I have to constantly check myself because I think I'm being pessimistic or you know wrongly un, unhappy by making analogies, and seeing things that happened then that look, appear to me to be happening now. And are we just repeating ourselves, are we just going to get into World War Three, you know, really or something? I mean this really bugs me, I really am up, upset by it. It's very discouraging, I mean I, some days I get really depressed by it, I have to really watch that—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: —I guess when you get older you maybe have little periods of depression anyway, particularly if you, if you want to go on living forever, as I do [laughs] and obviously I'm not, you know, I mean that ain't the way the world's arranged, so I don't, I don't know exactly how to answer that. If you want to ask it another way.Interviewer #1:: No, but, I think—Interviewer #2:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —I think it's interesting that, that, that you draw that connection, that—Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: Yeah.Interviewer #1:: —that, like what you're saying is here we go again or—Asa Watkins:: Yeah, yeah.Interviewer #1:: —you're afraid thatAsa Watkins:: Yeah, exactly.Interviewer #2:: And I think maybe—Asa Watkins:: And I'm hearing, I'm hearing the same kind of, and you know, I'm hearing the same kind of things from some of the young people, oh well, you know, we'll have to, oh yeah, we'll sign up, you know, we're—oh my God, yeah. We're, the, the interesting thing is that we are, we are loathe to put our soldiers to the test, and we are using what we consider to be a sort of, how, how can I say, very violent nonviolent technique of bombing people who are not even in the war, who are not even fighting or not even involved in it, with it officially, I mean and that to me is a horror in itself. I mean that is a new kind of horror it strikes me. Here we are destroying a whole city, we try to be selective about it, now whether we, I mean, and we're, we're very skillful at it, I, I mean even though we, we, we made that awful error with China, I mean, maybe we didn't make an error, some people think we didn't, it wasn't an error, and don't know, I rather hope we didn't in a sense because then we'd know the truth, but, I mean, I, it's not that I hope that was the truth, but I mean I'm disturbed about whether, what happened there and how it could have happened. But, so it's amazing that we have that technique and it probably would be perfected and maybe eventually we can, you know, drop a bomb right into Slo, Milosevic's house and just kill him and, and not hurt anything else, maybe not even hurt the furniture, might, maybe not even crush a glass or knock the silver off the table, I mean it's possible, I suppose. And that's perhaps what we aspire to, but what is it doing to the, the so-called civilian society? I mean, the civilian society is more involved in war almost than the, the, than the professional war people are involved in it.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: I mean, look at the those people, look at the people in Belgrade, what are they going through? It's just...
Interviewer #2:: So, have we not learned from history? Is, what can we learn from the history of, that you, that 12,000 of you, or 40,000 of you depending on how you count it, refused to fight in World War Two, is there something that we can learn from that, that you want, that this generation—Asa Watkins:: I would, I would hope that they, that they would learn from it and that we can learn from it, but I'm afraid I don't see much of it happening. The people that, that, that are my age, and even the people in Vietnam of course, they're, like this gentleman here understand it and we learned a lot from, from Vietnam. But, I don't know, I mean the British and American determination to go ahead and do this destructive act...
Interviewer #1:: It's like, and you think about Britain, what Britain went through, right?Asa Watkins:: Yes.Interviewer #1:: Britain understands war better than American does.Asa Watkins:: They understand bombing, they understand the cities being bombed, they understand that very well. So they should, maybe, don't tell me there aren't some of 'em left around there, they sure are.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: And I like Tony Blair, but I mean, I, I basically like him and I like his sort of attitude and he's done a lot to try to really decentuate the Irish problem.Interviewer #2:: Mm-hmm.Asa Watkins:: I think he's, but what his, it's all so mysterious to me, I wish I could put some finger on, you see you always want to get a finger on this kind of thing, it's like quicksilver, it really is. You can't get a hold of it. What is it? You can't get a hold of what you, of what is happening in history, or what is happening now. I, I mean is there, what is the relation of this to our being tribal people, what is not the relation of, to that, what is the relation to World War One, which, which in my opinion created World War Two, and if it's World War Three, it's just gonna go down, down, down, down the chain. I mean, can we ever break this sequence, can we ever break this change, really break it? And can we listen to certain people that throughout history have articulated this? I mean there are people in every culture that were pacifists. We, we are, we are trained to only pay attention to a few of them like Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad, and so, and so on, but my goodness, man, I don't know. I, I pray for affirmation, I pray that I will not become cynical or worried you know, or, or, or terribly disappointed about it. I have to kind of work, work at it every day.
Interviewer #2:: How come only ten percent of Quakers refused to fight?Asa Watkins:: Don't ask me except that the pro-, so-called programmed Quakers were quite, I think probably in the, the biggest number of, the biggest proportion of Quakers, they were the, the meetings that were, you know, began to worship in churches, we used to call 'em steeple houses—Interviewer #1:: Mm.Asa Watkins:: —President Nixon grew up in—Interviewer #1:: Yeah.Asa Watkins:: —one of those families. Unfortunately our two Quaker Presidents were not very Quaker-ly.
Interviewer #1:: Who was the other?Asa Watkins:: Hoover.Interviewer #1:: Oh.Asa Watkins:: He called in all that army business whey they shot up all the people right there in D.C. when they were, the—Interviewer #1:: The Bonus March.Asa Watkins:: —yeah, yeah exactly, yes. That was absolutely awful. And it's very sad to me and I worry about it a lot. How could two Quaker Presidents be as involved in violence as they were? Now, of course, Hoover had a lot to do with not being violent in, after World War One, because he helped feed the people that had been so decimated and all that and he was marvelous at that. I've been to his home in Wisconsin and his meeting, it is a programed meeting. But I, I don't know,I, it's a mystery to me.
Interviewer #2:: Are we gonna get into cows, no?Interviewer #1:: No, no I think we're done—[cut][end of interview]