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Interview with
dellinger-david
, conducted by Paradigm Productions. on The Good war and those who refused to fight it: the story of War War II conscientious objectors. Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Paradigm Productions Collection.
Note: These transcripts contain material that did not appear in the final program. Only text appearing in bold italics was used in the final version of The Good war and those who refused to fight it: the story of War War II conscientious objectors.
start by, yes, rolling?—
Rolling, OK. Interview with Dave Dellinger
Start by introducing yourself
My name is Dave Dellinger. I'm in my second childhood at eighty-three years of age. And, I'm here talking to Judy Ehrlich, and Rick, and Vincent, and Ken—
And me! Everybody!
—and Tim!
Would you start by just talking about what your early influences are? What turned you in the path that you have taken in your life?
Well I think it's fair to say, that, when I was in grade school, my parents intended to send me as they sent all my, well my brother and two sisters, to an elite private school. And I arranged with a girlfriend and a boyfriend, from also well-to-do parents, that we didn't want to be broken up. The three of us were, had a close friendship, and, so we persuaded our parents to hold off on sending us to private school. And finally we went to the eighth grade where the poor kids and including the kids from the Irish ghetto and the Italian ghetto, which was called Dagoland, they all went to the same school. And I, for whatever reason, I fell in love with a poor Irish girl who lived on the wrong side of the tracks. And my best boyfriend was a poor Italian boy who actually lived right on the tracks, so that when finally I persuaded my parents that he could visit me on weekends and I could visit him, I found out that, in this tiny room, his three brothers and he and I all had to sleep in one little room in the summertime with the, with the window closed because when the freight trains went by the smoke, and the gas-the steam, went into the room. And, so I learned not only about racial prejudice, but also about class prejudice. And then that was the same year that, whereas I hated church, I was a good reader. And I read something by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a poet that I came to love, in which he quoted something from the New Testament. And whereas the minister in our church, Congregational protestant church, had spoken only of sin and hellfire and damnation, suddenly I discovered a God of love. Where, who said that love even those who persecute you and who do harm to you. And, so, as I was selective as the minister was, I dismissed all of the hellfire and damnation places, but I, I learned about a Jesus who said not only to love everybody, but when his disciples said, when he said to his disciples that you fed me when I was hungry, you helped me in prison, and you tended to all my needs, they said when did we do ever do that to you? And he said in as much as you do it to the least of these my brethren, and he should have said and sisters, you have done it to me. So I was inspired by that, and I did not become a general radical step by s— you know, it took years to happen, but, but one thing or another, I had at least the beginning there of, of not believing in class divisions and not believing in racial divisions and, and the prejudices.
Talk about, so your, you evolved. You had talked to us before about Gandhi and St. Francis are they also, is that a little later—
[coughs] How did they get in there?
—were they introduced to the, to your consciousness?
Well you see, I've often said that if Gandhi had been against American occupation then the press would not have handled him as well as they did, but because he was against English occupation of India, he got a fairly good press, and I read seriously about him. And then, well, later, people who had, I'm trying to think of one of the guys' names who was very well known at the time. But he went over and lived at Gandhiís ashram for a while and then he came back to this country and told more about him, and I read a lot of books, not only about Gandhi, but other people who had written about war without violence.
And, go ahead.
Gandhi brings up an interesting point. You are not just a practical person, you are a deeply spiritual person, and Gandhi had that combination of spirituality and practicality. Talk about—
Yes
—how that influenced you in terms of a model.
Can you keep looking at Judy when you—
Yeah
Yeah,
Even if he asks the question, look at me.
Oh yes, yes.
You and Rick have to stop squirming in your chairs. We're trying to—
Oh we're making noise? OK, I thought I was in one place. OK—
Well actually. I think that one of the influences in my life which predated Gandhi was that, was World War One. And, I was approximately three years old when World War One ended, and I remember the sigh of relief in all the people in my town, because they wouldn't have to go to war and kill people [Interview gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And then, when I was probably in the, maybe guessing, the sixth or seventh grade, a German man who had been active in the war came to our hometown to speak. And it was a big controversy, some people said that he's an enemy how come he's speaking in our town hall? And, but my father actually took me to go to hear him speak. And he spoke very meaningfully about the terrible things that he had done, and that had also happened on the other side of the war, and he said, so what you have to do is get together and resolve your differences instead of going to war over them. So that was a very profound influence on my life even before I knew about Gandhi.
Let's stop right now and change the tape.
Just one minute.
Oh, we're, change the tapes. That's I didn't know that—
That's, that's—
We got a phone
Oh, wait a minute the phone's ringing. I thought we turned it off
Where is it?
Well, as I've said, I was a good reader. And, early on, I learned about Saint Francis, who—
Let's do it again.
Had learned—
Rolling tape.
Rolling now.
Alright.
After I'd learned about class issues and racial discrimination and discovered Jesus who said to love even those who hate you or persecute you, I inevitably found out about Francis. And, in a sense, his life paralleled mine. Although I, I don't mean to say it that way, because I was wrestling with the problems which he wrestled with early. That is, he was the son of well-to-do parents as I was, and he broke with them, and it took me many years before I broke as seriously or even half as seriously as he did, but I nonetheless was intrigued by him. And, it seemed to parallel my falling in love with the wrong girl; class, quote, enemy, and having a best boyfriend who was also poor. So, when I went, when I graduated from Yale in 1936 and went, I had a fellowship to study at Oxford. I went over in the summertime, and one of the things that I did was to take the road that, well I took it in reverse, but as he moved down Italy. I—
Dave, we need you, we need you to say I, I took the road that Saint Francis took because we may just use that piece—
Yeah. I took the road that Saint Francis took except I took in reverse. But I went from southern Italy up to Florence and I stopped at all of the little churches which were dedicated, which had, he had founded. And, I saw paintings by Giotto of Francis, Saint Francis, and all the rest of it. So then, when I cancelled my three year doctorate at Oxford after one year, because of the, of having gone to the Jewish Ghettos as an antifascist at the time that the U.S. was supporting Hitler and rearming him, much as it later rearmed Saddam Hussain and then turned against him. I, when I cancelled my doctorate and came home after one year at Oxford, I went to work for the Christian Association there, and actually I was offered a job by the University to be a, to be a counselor to freshman. But I turned it down, and, and instead I worked as a Christian Association counselor to the freshman. And then during vacation from the University, I went on the road. And I learned from the poor, much of what Francis of Assisi had taught me already. And I remember particularly one time when I had gotten a ride on a truck and, when the guy got to the Bronx, I helped him unload his, his cargo and then I walked down to Central Park. And I was absolutely exhausted and hungry and all the rest of it, and I fell asleep on a park bench, and then I woke up to hear a woman saying to her son, "get away from him he's a bum." And I suddenly realized that, I was traveling, in my own tentative way, the road that Francis, and instead of feeling sad that she had said I felt, well I finally am living in my small way up to Francis of Assisi. So, all in all, I got a lot out of that, and then I traveled on the rails and I did all kinds of things during those, during that vacation. And those were the first of several roads, several trips that I took similarly.
Go back to the period in Oxford—
Judy
— I'm sorry, yes. The period in Oxford. Did you, were you aware of the Oxford Pledge?—
Explain it to us.
—and did you take the Oxford Pledge. Can you explain the Oxford Pledge to us?
Well I knew about the Oxford Plan—
What was it?
—when I was at Yale. The Oxford Plan was that people, beginning in Oxford, had signed a pledge that they would not fight in any war that the colonial country imposed on its residents. But, when I was on my way to Europe, actually to England, on, in a boat, because there were no airplanes going over in those days in 1936, actually the Spanish Civil War broke out. And one of the things that I did after going to Nazi Germany as a, as an antifascist at a time, not only was the United States rearming Hitler, but also I found out that a, a series of American corporations had established their plants in Hitler Germany under his protection. Just as they, today, or in recent years, have established their plants in Thailand and Mexico and El Salvador and so forth, in order to get the cheaper values there, of dictators which are in many cases in alliance with the United States. So, I, well I, I, went to, beginning, I went to German bookstores and asked for the works of Heinrich Heine, one of my favorite poets who was banned because he was Jewish. And one of them, the people, who actually I think was Jewish, was either a manager or owner of a bookstore. He hadn't been, you know, captive, captured yet, because it took a while. And, he went down and got the book and then he said, if you're as conscientious as you are, why don't you stay in bed and breakfast in the Jewish Ghetto? And from then on I did. And so it was the Jews who said to me that the worst thing possible is for the United States to be the one to overthrow Hitler, because part of his gains are because of the U.S. imposed Versailles treaty on him, or on the, the country. And they said, but already Jewish refugees are being turned away from the United States, and so you should, instead of continuing your studies at Oxford, you should go home and work for an increase in the quota of Germans that are allowed into the United States—
Germans or Jews?
Germans. Right?
Germans.
Germans, all right.
And what they said was, that well known people like Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein are allowed in, but there, but ordinary people, including Jews, are not allowed in. And so I did cut short my time at Oxford and go over there, and then many other boats were, were turned away. And the famous, well known one is the St. Louis, which actually came back, went back to Germany and delivered all of its Jewish refugees to concentration camps where they perished.
You knew about the camps during this period?
I, I am not sure that on my first trip that I did. But when I got Oxford, where I did go for one year, there was a German Rhodes Scholar there. And I immediately assumed, he was actually in my residential college, New College Oxford, and I immediately assumed that he was a pro-Nazi, but to my utter surprise he came to see me and he said that he was anti-Nazi, and we had a lot in common that way. And, he had come from a distinguished family, he had an excellent record, and apparently the Nazis didn't dare veto him, because they were still in a struggle for power. And, but he spoke out against the Nazis so much in England, that he was scared to go home. So in the, one of the vacations, and again in the summertime before returning to the United States, he gave me the names of anti-Nazis and where I could go see them. And then, under the, the security of being an American tourist student, I was able to take messages from one place to another. And, what I did find out, was that Herman Gˆring, one of the leading Nazis, when he was criticized by some people for his treatment, or the Nazis treatment, of the Jews he said, well we learned from the United States that there are some people who are inferior including black people in the United States. And then actually later I got to know a German woman who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, and she wrote a book about the, the Jews coming over here, the ones who did get here, and were not as well known, and having to go to black universities because that was the only place that they could teach. And, then she wrote a book about it, and on the front cover of her book was a picture of a, a cartoon which Gˆring displayed showing Naz—, showing black people being lynched in the United States and saying, there's your answer to your complaints about us.
Mm-hmm mm-hmm. You're bringing up a really important point about the relationship between the politics that you evolved as a pacifist, and how that relates to the, to the equal treatment and the whole—
Louder please.
About. I'm sorry. The relationship of the, of the values you were developing—
Yes.
—and, and the sense of racial equality, and—
Yes.
—and how that related to your later work. Let me, let me just go back one thing, which is how did all of that develop into the pacifism? which—
How did it dev—
How did your thinking develop into pacifism as your main motivation?
Well I, I think it's fair to say that it was, that, a combination of my own reading of the New Testament and the publicity about Gandhiís work against the British, and not just for independence but for human equality and getting rid of the class levels of, of, of India. And I think that it, it was just natural for me to become a nonviolent activist.
Mm-hmm
And even though in college, I have to say that I, well, I should say that, say that later some people said to me, Oh you weren't that radical at Yale were you? And I have to say that I did work with poor people in, in a fellowship house, but that I was studying hard and I was also on the track and cross country team. I became captain of the cross country team, and ran a lot of races in track, mile and two mile, so I hadn't developed it that, that far, but nonetheless I was a nonviolent person.
So, the, the nonviolence. Could you talk a little bit about how, what the atmosphere was before World, before World War Two, the atmosphere. If the, if the antiwar atmosphere influenced you before World War Two, and then how, when the draft, and, and the period in which the draft confronted you how, what, what your thinking was at that time, in 1940.
Well what I learned in my visits to, to Germany was not just that the United States was arming Hitler and establishing all kinds of corporate headquarters over there, but also that the United States wanted to befriend Hitler and to have Hitler attack the Soviet Union, and that meanwhile the Soviet Union wanted to befriend Hitler and have him attack the capitalist countries. And finally, in 1939, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed, friendship pact, the United States knew that it had lost that diplomatic war, and, for the first time, it began to turn against Hitler, and began to conceive of going to war against Hitler. But it was not on the principled basis of his prejudices against Jews or his oppression of human rights, but it was on the basis that they had lost the diplomatic war.
Talk about how you saw, this is all leading up the title of our film is called The Good War: And Those Who Refused to Fight It. It sounds to me like you had already decided maybe it wasn't such a good war. Could you talk about how, how the concept of a good war strikes you? And that as, The Good War.
Well one of the things that happened was, that, I went to Union Seminary in New York City in 1939, and I was disappointed in it, because I had heard some radical speeches at Yale Divinity, Yale Chapel. But one of the things I found out was that there was only one black person at Union Seminary. And black people were mostly treated as inferiors, and, in fact, the Union Seminary was close to Harlem and overlooked it. And, after the first semester in January, five of us announced that, decided that we were going to move to Harlem to establish some kind of friendship with the black people and to get to know them better, and know their problems better, and their insights better, and immediately the president of the seminary announced that we were breaking the community, the Christian community, if we left, and that therefore we would be expelled. But it happened that we had enough support from the students that he didn't dare expel us and we did move to Harlem. And, so I learned that, as I had found out in Germany from Gˆring and others
Two more years, talk a little about your. You know, I think—
Before we go to—
—The Good War thing. Yeah is that—
Yes, The Good War. Just tell, explain—
I don't think you answered the question about—
I can't hear you.
The Good War. How that strikes you—
Was World War Two a good war?
Well, I should say, and, and, maybe I'll read something that I have. [sound of papers rustling] Because I think that a lot of people saw it as a good war, but—
Say that again without the papers rustling. Just—
Say I think that—
I think that a lot of people did see it as a good war, but I had already discovered that the United States had rearmed Hitler, that the Jewish people and the antiwar people that I knew over there said that we have to do it ourselves, get rid of Hitler, and not have the imperialist United States overcome him, and the imperialist colonial powers and so forth do it. But, on the other hand, I realized that many people accepted it as a good war. And I, here is something that I wrote fifty years after the end of the war, when Peace Work, which is an American Friends Service Committee organization, asked me to write something about the end of the war. [reads] "Antiwar activists need to understand why so many veterans look back on that war with a great sense of commitment, honor, and pride. They gave up their lifestyles, comforts, and convenience, to risk their lives for the good of humanity. At least that is what they were told they were doing at that time, and that is what most veterans, with the notable exception of the Vietnam War, believe about whatever war they participated in. In a capitalist society, where the conventional goal is not to serve humanity, but to work to gain more money, privilege, power, and so forth, than ones' fellows, their wartime years were a high point of idealism, in which they acted in behalf of a cooperative community that was larger than themselves, and transcended society's usual individualistic, selfish competitiveness. So they treasure those years, and usually identify with other U.S. wars as times when people express their best selves." So I think it's very important for those of us who refused to fight in World War One, because we knew how dishonest it was, World War Two, because we knew how dishonest it was, that we should not separate ourselves from the veterans. And let me say that, years later, when we had an intentional community in western New Jersey, one to which we invited the poor people from, that we had gotten to know in the, in the slums of Newark, and it was after I got out of Lewisburg that we went to, to this camp. That, I'm, I'm—
It's OK because we're just running out of tape aren't we?
We, we have to change the tape, yeah let's stop and change the tapes.
Yeah we have to change tapes. Just. It's OK. Gather your thoughts—
Oh. I forget. I'm trying to think.
You were just—
All right. Rolling.
So if you could talk about what, the relationship of people who saw it as a good war to those who didn't.
Well I think its important that those who understood the imperialist values and the racial prejudice beyond, behind the U.S. participation in the war, to understand that those who went to war, who believed that it was a good war, that they actually sacrificed and risked their lives for what they thought was the good of the community. And I have always felt that it was very important to relate to veterans in that way, to understand what, what they were risking and sacrificing for the sake of what they thought, they had been told was, the good of the community. And later when I got out of Lewisburg Penitentiary and we established a, an intentional community in western New Jersey, one that related to and invited people out for weekends, and weeks, and vacations, and all the rest of it, from the slums of Newark. That I also related very well to the World War Two veterans who were there, and, again, I have to say that athletics, even though it's, it's so corrupted and, and, you know, with huge salaries and all the rest of it now, that I played with the veterans on the town baseball team, and that was a way of our getting to know each other and becoming friends. And when our economic enterprise was a print shop where we printed mostly for nonviolent human rights activists, and, but also for museums and, and for poetry books and that kind of thing, and when the veterans brought me some of their announcements of when they were meeting and holding veterans' activities, then the question arose in our community whether we would print it or not, and I absolutely said yes. They're not calling here for people to take up arms and, and attack poor people or black people or anything of that kind, they're calling for a celebration of what they thought of as a good war. And, later, a couple years later, when actually I was sent bombs to destroy me. And, well, first of all what happens was that, that, after midnight one night our print shop was totally destroyed, all the equipment and all the rest of it, and a death threat was given to me. So the first ones to come up from town were, were the veterans, who said, you know, we think that probably the government was involved in this, because every time we go to a convention of the VFW, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, people say to us, you know you should get rid of that guy and his work, because he's a disgrace to your town. And they said, well, we don't consider him a disgrace from the town, we, we disagree sometimes with some of his ideas, but he's our friend. And the year before, or a few months before, our equipment was all destroyed, they said some people came in black ties and business suits and said the same thing to us, you better get rid of that guy, and we think he was government, they were government operators. So it developed that, again, our friendship triumphed over the attempts by the government to get rid of us.
Dave, can, can we back up a little bit, because you're talking about after the war years—
Yes.
Talk a little bit, during the war years your position was certainly very controversial, and there was a public response to what resistors did, to what conscientious objectors did, how were you, how, how did people treat you both in prison and how would they respond when you were organizing? Were they, was there a lot of opposition to the views you expressed?
World War Two is glamourized today. Actually the, there was much more opposition to, to getting involved in World War Two than is recognized, and there were, now I don't have the exact figures now, but, but there were thousands of people who actually went to jail rather than fight in it, and there were thousands of others who went to concentration camps for conscientious objectors. And when they were forbidden to do something useful, many of them left the camps and ended up in prison also, but also they brought pressure to be able to do something useful like working with medical units or working with mental health people or disabled people and so forth, and they accomplished quite a bit by that. But also, there was, there was also a third group that was opposed to the war because they thought it was none of U.S. business and they were not idealists, but they were, I'm trying to think of the word that was used. They were isolationists. And, inside, well.
Did you—
But, but, but the, the, what I'm asking you is even though there were people that opposed the war, it was a popular war. So, when you, when people would know in jail, or outside of jail, that you had said no I'm not gonna fight, was there a hostile reaction to that? How did people respond to your stand, personally?
Well I think that you should understand that, because of racial segregation and lynching which was going on at that time, and also because of the poverty from the depression, that if, if people had a, a Catholic Worker type intentional community inside a poor slum area, they were treated very well by the people there. And so there was not that kind of opposition, because we, in addition to doing positive things, we also refused to go to war.
So you were in a community where you weren't finding a lot of opposition—
Yes. Yes.
But did you—
But, but, certainly talk about the prison years now. The warden would try and say this guy is, is a coward, he's a traitor, he's not patriotic, and did, did the inmates buy that?
Well actually. [sighs] When I got to federal prison, after a few days in a prison in New York City where there were all kinds of gang members. They, the gang members there actually said, well you know I just had my lawyer give a thousand dollars or five thousand dollars to a judge in order to reduce my sentence or in order to avoid further trials, and all you guys had to do was to just register for the draft and you would have been exempt. So we admire you. And, so then when I went to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, the first weekend I walked into the movie with a black man whom I had met out in the yard on the way over there. And when I got to the prison, they motioned me to go to the white section and him to go the, the black section, and I went down and I sat next to him, and the next thing I knew I was being blinded by eyes, lights in my eyes, grabbed out, roughly handled, and thrown into solitary confinement. And, when I finished there and came out into the maximum security ward, which was the only place that, where blacks and whites were together, I was told by a big black prisoner that the captains and the other guards have been here saying that this guy is a no good coward who refuses to fight for his country so take care of him, get rid of him, and this was the first of many series of efforts by the prison guards to have me killed. But this big black man said, you tell them that you're a friend of Al Harris and, and if anybody touches you, I'll get rid of him, myself, I'll beat him up. And so we go that kind of support. But also another one, whose name was Jesse Harris by the way, he said to me, when I was in segregation he managed to get there, and said to me, you know I'm a political prisoner too, and I said what are you in for then, and he said I'm for marijuana, except in those days it was called something else, I forget, gin—, gan—, anyways there was a name for it gingu or something like that. And it was not known outside of Harlem. It was years later before it happened. But these men were both long term prisoners who had been sent to Danbury to spend the last six months or year of their sentence in order to, before they were released, to, well, humanize them a little bit from all the pain and suffering that they had suffered. And they got out, both of them, shortly after I got out of prison and they immediately joined our community. And Al Harris in particular organised the Essex County Equality League, which back in 1941 began to picket restaurants that refused to serve black people inside our area, and also in downtown. And so we would go black and white into the restaurant and sit at a table and they would refuse to serve us and then we would refuse to leave, and so there was a lot of, again, a lot of positive things that, that were happening.
So that proceeds the CORE sit-ins? You were doing that in, you were doing that before the CORE sit-ins in Chicago? This is 1941.
That. Yes in 1941 before I went back to Lewisburg.
You were doing sit-ins in Newark?
Yes—
Uh-huh. And how—
—in 1942 and 3.
In forty-two and forty-three.
And then I went ba—
forty-two and forty—
Yeah that's about the same time.
Do you know? That's about the same time as the CORE sit-ins in Chicago
Q:That was when James, James Farmer.
At the same time as what?
As the CORE sit-ins in Chicago. James Farmer and the CORE sit-ins.
Yes, it was, yes—
About the same time.
—around the same time.
Around the same time.
Well actually, I had been a member of some kind of youth committee I think of the FOR with George Houser and James Farmer and others who actually formed CORE magazine, CORE, Committee On Racial Equality.
So you were involved in that as well—
Oh yes, yes.
—I didn't realize that. OK, but you were down in Newark and they were—
So. But let's stay—
Let's go back—
Let's stay with the present some more. Huh?
I wanna go back to one thing which is that, you, you were talking about people's reaction, but would you talk about, at the time, your father's reaction when you decided not to register for the draft.
Well when, when the Union Seminary students announced that we were not going to register for the draft actually it got front page in The New York Times, and it also got Boston paper. Immediately I got a call from my father saying that I was just ruining my future, that I had to register, and if I said that I, and he, if I did not assure him that I would register he would hang up immediately and commit suicide [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And I talked to him, who knows how long but maybe half an hour or an hour, and I finally was convinced that he would not commit suicide even though I did refuse to register. But, then they visited me in the federal prison, my wife, and my mother, and my, and her husband and they were put off by the prison, by the fact that they had to strip
Dave. When you were talking before and in your book you mentioned that after, after James Bennett threatened you that you had this strange remarkable experience one night where you—
Yes.
—almost felt as if you'd died. Tell us that story again.
Well, after James Bennett threatened me and we, a, a group of us were on strike, and I was in solitary confinement. And, I felt scared that not just that I would be killed, but that if I went on with the way of life that I was trying to live up to, the nonviolent action, that I would be in trouble always. And suddenly I had fear, and somehow I went through some agony for how, I don't know how long. And then at the end of it I really, I felt like I was facing my own death and that I should triumph over it and I, in a sense, I died, and then I was still alive. And so I hate to say that I felt like, like a resurrection, but I had gone through all the agonies of, of dying and then I was still alive. So for years after that I called it my bonus years, that any months that I lived after that were just bonus years because I'd already faced my death [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And it wasn't until years later when even I was, like, I remember particularly an incident when I was, had been arrested in Albany, Georgia. And then when I got out of prison, I was supporting other people who were taking the same action for, you know, marching across, black and white together, across Oglethorpe Avenue which was forbidden. And I was being followed by a guy with a, with a sharp knife, and I expected that he would kill me at some point, that at some point he would do what he had threatened to do, stab it in me. And, and I was ready to die. I, I just didn't feel any fear at all because I'd already died. But when, something I've referred to in the past, when the bombs came to my home, and by chance actually I discovered that this package of whiskey, which supposedly had been sent to me from the headquarters of the Peace, of the New York Peace Parade Committee, of which I was co-chariman. When I discovered, and, and, the thing is on the brown package that it had arrived in, it had said VC and the address of this Peace Parade Committee, and I knew that nobody there would actually joke about the VC that way, and so I took, I took the brown paper off and then there was this package of whiskey. And my son, who was home from Swarthmore, said to me, open it up dad and you and I will have a sip. And then I knew I had to do something, but I pulled apart the package down below and I saw black powder and wires. And so then I stood up and I said, Patch come with me. And we didn't tell the other members of the family, but I said. Its a bomb. And we put it out in the snow in the woods well away from the home. And then, that was the first time that I got over having died, because it wasn't my death, but there was a grenade, we had a Christmas fire or a New Years Eve fire, in our fireplace, and there was a, besides a grenade, there was a small bottle of gasoline which would've started a fire and, but anyway the grenade if it had gone off would've killed my first grandchild and all my kids. So that was the first time that I got over this bonus years [laughs], because I realized it was one thing for me to risk my life, but another thing to risk other peoples' lives.
How come the bomb didn't go off?
How—
How come the bomb didn't go off?
Well it didn't go off because I saw the black powder and the wires, and I called the bomb squad. And when they came up, because it was either Christmas Eve or New Years Eve I, I'm not sure which, they didn't come up until the next morning. And when they examined it they, they defused it and they showed me that if I had, that the wires, if I had pulled up the normal top package, you know of the thing, it would have established the connections and blown up the hand grenade and all the rest of it. So it was just by the accident of VC, with the Peace Parade Committee being put on it. And then later I found out that it was, first of all, the bomb squad said that it's a, it's a very sophisticated device and it's not any amateurs. And then the mail person, since I had gotten it in the mail, the person from the Post Office department and said, and this is not the first bomb that has been sent to you. And then he said that two others have exploded in the sorting section for your mail, but they had never told me that, and maybe they didnít' know who they were addressed to 'cause they went off. And I forget exactly, but it seems to me that one person was killed when one of them went off and one was definitely maimed for life because of, of it. So then they said, we're gonna get these guys, but neither the bomb squad nor the post office department ever responded to any requests because I think it went too high and they, they could not afford it.
What year are you talking about Dave? What year—
I'm talking about 19, the end of 1967, just before the 1968 convention.
Uh-huh, uh-huh. So this is much later. Wow, but they didn't tell you about these bombs—
Three more minutes.
Oh we have three more minutes? Go ahead.
Well no, go ahead.
Q:OK we took care of the, your father's response. But have we taken care of the kind of how people—
Let's cut for a second.
Yeah OK. Yeah let's—
—win the baseball game. Go ahead, go ahead.
Yeah. We're rolling?
Well one time when a group of us were on, in solitary confinement indefinitely. There was a very important baseball game coming up in which we were tied for first, I think, with one other team from outside. And one of our, one of the union eight was Don Benedict, who was one of the best softball pitchers in the country, and it was a softball game not, not hardball. And, I think that they decided that they might be able to win if he pitched without the rest of us playing. I think I played shortstop on that team. And, so they came to him and wanted to, to release him from solitary to pitch in that game, but he refused unless the rest of us got out too [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And at the last minute they decided to let us all out, and so at lunch we showed up at the dining room to have dinner and it was the loudest ovation I've ever gotten in my life, from all the other prisoners [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And I always kid Don Benedict about it. I always say, I think he pitched a no hitter, and I always say to him, but you know you only pitched a no hitter because I, I dove through the air and grabbed a, a low liner just when they were gonna get a hit, and you'd already walked some people and they would've won the game, but he knows, he laughs 'cause he knows it's just a joke
Was that Danbury or at Lewisburg?
That was in Danbury.
—was in Danbury. Would you put in perspective, when you were on strike, hunger strike, in the, in Lewisburg right?
Yes.
The hunger strikes were all in Lewisburg?
No—
In Danbury too?
—we struck in—
Just talk in general.
Would you talk. No, I want, what I want to clarify is that did you—
—what was your intention with the hunger strikes? and did you, were you successful? and was that the first time hunger strikes were used, or any strikes were used, to integrate anything—
No, no, no.
OK
We, we, we fasted or hunger struck several times. But actually, when I was given two years at Lewisburg Penitentiary, there was already a strike in process. And, what happened was, that it had started over racial segregation when Bill Sutherland a black member, who was a part of our community in Newark, New Jersey, had sat down at, at a table with some of his white comrades and he was, anyway it ended up that they made several different demands and it was, it had gone on for a long time. And when I arrived I heard about it, and I asked to see them, and the warden said no I can't see them, and so I immediately went on strike, and then I was put in with them [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. And what happened was that, I and some of the other prisoners usually tried to spend as much time with the non-conscientious objectors, or war objector prisoners as possible. So I never took the stand which a few people took in prison, that they will not cooperate with anything or they, they'll strike and then they spend the rest of their time in complete solitary. But, in this case, I found that several of the prisoners felt that they were making too many demands, and that they were going to be there indefinitely. Because they had just, people made one demand and then other people made another demand and they all ended up in the same place. So we gradually decided to go on a hunger strike, I think five of us, and we were immediately, then they let the rest out. And we demanded two things, one, an end to the hole, and, which, you know, is a hole in the ground where you defecate and urinate and, and under very bad conditions. And when I was in the hole in Danbury, it was totally dark and it was, even, it was freezing even in the, in the middle of summer because of the walls. And when I was in the hole in Lewisburg, they kept a light on twenty-four hours a day, and they also interrupted to, to be sure that you couldn't sleep, which is one of the evils of the modern prison system. So anyway, now they put us in separate cells, the five of us, with an empty cell in between, so that we could not communicate. And, we, we were demanding not only an end to the hole, but also an end to prison censorship. And what happened was that, first of all, even at, at Danbury, any reference to the, in the New York Times to anybody who was in prison was cut out so, and they cut out other stuff also, so that it was, it was a shambles, and we couldn't really read it. But in, we demanded in Lewisburg that they could open incoming mail to be sure that there were no drugs or weapons in there, but that they had to let the mail through, and actually we had a limited list of correspondents. But we also demanded that, we named a list of newspapers and magazines and one of them was for Jehovah's Witnesses who were in prison, in, in actually out in the farm where I refused to go, and, but we demanded them. And I forget the other magazines, but I think probably _The Nation_, _The New York Times_, and all the rest of it. Now during that hunger strike, the warden came to see me, knocked on my door, and said that my wife was dying and that she was begging me to go off the hunger strike, and she had had a, a, what do you call it, she had had, she had been pregnant earlier and the baby had died inside her without anybody's knowing it, and so she had been seriously ill from that. And then she decided to get pregnant again, after, when I was getting ready to go to prison again, and, because she said, to me, they may kill you again as they tried to kill you before, and at least I want to have one of your babies to comfort me. And, so the warden came and said that she was dying, and he knew about her previous thing, and he said it's the same thing as before, and she begs you to go off the hunger strike. And, so I said, well if she's dying take me to her. And he refused. And, luckily, because I had been in prison before, I knew that they were often lying, but still I, I, I couldn't be confident of it. But, when we finally ended the hunger strike, she had been writing me letters supporting the hunger strike, but they never delivered them to me.
Can you say that again? Just say that last part again.
When, when we finally ended the hunger strike, I finally got some letters from her in which, all of which, she had supported the hunger strike and, and wished me well, and she was doing very well. By the way, my son was fourteen months old when I got out of prison. But, at a certain point, other visitors released, well were told, about the hunger strike and the hole. And then we finally got an agreement from the warden that they would send in the newspapers and magazines and that they would not censor our mail. And, so then when the hunger strike ended, and I was the last one, and I actually, I had out of body experiences when the, the last two days of the hunger strike, before I was taken into the med-, in the hospital, the prison hospital, and we still continued the hunger strike. And the doctor, Doctor Rink, said we're going to feed you, I'm trying to think, I think it was water, for us. And maybe, but, but actually in the end they, they inserted something in our noses and down into our throats and they poured liquids in, into us to keep us alive. And the first time, whether it was water or the liquid, the doctor shook the bottle and he said, oh there's glass in there, somebody put, some, you're so hated by the convicts that somebody put some glass in there in order to kill you. And, of course, I think the prison put it in. And, anyways, then we were given this other thing and I did actually have a feeling, one time, that I was dying, and immediately that I had the feeling, suddenly I was surrounded by all kinds of officials saying you're dying you must stop the hunger strike. And, actually I believe that what they had done was, because they showed up the minute I had the feelings, and I think they had inserted something in, in the liquid through my nose to, to make me feel like I was dying. And so I refused anyway, but then after twenty-four hours the feeling went away
Dave. One of, one of the statements that's been made about the efforts of the war resistors and your strikes—
Yeah.
—in prison, was that your efforts and people like Bill Sutherland, helped to end segregation in the prisons. Do you think that's true?
They never ended segregation while we were still in prison, but I think that that plus the work of black people that I knew in Newark like Conrad Lynn, who was a lawyer who led a strike, a march against segregation, outside and inside. I think that helped. But I want to say something more about the hunger strike, that, that they did, first of all, during the hunger strike they kept bringing in all kinds of special foods that weren't normally in things and they would put it in, you know, in our cell and of course we refused to eat it. But, and they finally did bring us milk and crackers on the afternoon of the hunger strike ending, but then they brought us the regular prison meal that night, which was Chop Suey. And being hungry I ate more of than I should and I got sick from it. But the next morning they put me in what they called the Fuck-Up Dorm, which was mostly southern military prisoners. And the, the guard said, This is the guy who says, this is one of the guys who says, that he's too good to be in with the rest of you. And, there were some people who had objected, mostly on the outside, to our not being classified as political prisoners. But I, the minute I heard of that, when a couple people on the outside in Danbury were, were demanding that we be called political prisoners, I said no I do not want that, I do not want any advantages that other political, other prisoners, do not have. And so that was a total lie when he said that, they've been up there demanding special privileges from, 'cause they say they're better than the rest of you. And then the second thing that he said was that, and he's a coward who refuses to serve his country in the military. And then, as the guards were leaving, one of them said, and he's a Nazi. Oh that was the third thing they said, they said, no the first guard said, they said, and he's a Nazi who, who supports the, Hitler and the rest of them. And so, take care of him. And then when the guards were leaving the place, the second guard spoke up for the first time and he said, we're going to leave you alone with him for a couple of hours, and when we come back we want you to hand him his body with his head in his hands. And then they left. And I didn't know what to do, but some of them had been playing cards, and I, I went over to, you know, try to explain to a few of them, and they immediately cancelled their card game and went off by themselves, and nobody would talk to me. So I finally stood up against the wall, and I was still weak from the hunger strike, I think it was, trying to remember, fifty-four days or something like that, and I was hard of hearing and all the rest of it, and I talked to them. And I used prison language, and I said, You don't believe those motherfuckin' hacks do you? Because the, the, how many of you know, have been up in the hole? That's what we were striking against. And so forth and so on, but nobody ever talked to me. I couldn't get any response, but I talked on as long as I could. And then I went in, it was a dormitory with the beds right close to each other, and I, I just was in bad shape. And then, when the lights went out, I heard steps marching down the hall from up near where the, the bunks began, and I thought, oh boy they're coming for me now. And, to my surprise, the marches went right on past my bunk. And then I think I fell asleep, 'cause I was so worn out. And, the next morning, I found out that what they had done is gone down to a little guy named Red, and they pulled him out of his bed, took him to the john, as the toilet was called, and they raped him. And now he was in the hospital, and I, that dormitory, worked in the kitchen, and I went there and nobody would talk to me, and I tried to say a few things to people. And then, before the day was finished, they brought the guy, Red, back from the hospital, where he had been taken care of to some extent. So I went up to him and I said, Red, I had no idea, I thought they were coming for me, I had no idea what happened to you, and otherwise I would have helped you, and we gotta stick together to stop that kind of thing from happening here. And he took a big carving knife and he held it up against my chest
Just quickly, who was the other person?
What?
Who was the other person that stayed on hunger strike with you? Do you remember?
I cannot remember—
All right. Well we're gonna—
—who he was, but, but when I finally applied for moving, what had happened was that there was a, a prison-wide Ping Pong tournament. And, I applied for it, even though I was still not well, and I really wasn't that good, but I was fairly good. And after the first day's event, there were two of us who applied, probably we had played ping pong in, in the dormitory and we were the victors, and when we came back the other guys said well I got beaten, but you know Dill here is really good and he's in the finals. And, so then the finals were the next week and I actually won it. And they would, so now I became a hero, because it was so important, like in the baseball game that I told about at Danbury, but it was so important for them to win. And so then I applied for going to a cell block.
And then they let you go. Then they let you go because—
They did after a while. Yes.
We're gonna talk a little about. Let me just ask you one, one more, one thing that you bring up when you're talking about the hunger strike—
—Can you just talk about the concept of courage? and when you, people say conscientious objectors are cowards and you were accused of that, and yet you did these hunger strikes which took tremendous courage and threatened your life, and how do you respond to the concept of courage in relation—
How do I respond—
How do, well, how do you think about the concept of courage and how people expect, people who go to war are the courageous ones and how you see courage in relation to nonviolence.
Well to me it's obvious that, if you go to prison and you go on strikes in order to better the conditions of employees and, I mean of prisoners, and you don't take an easy way out, obviously it's unfair to say that people are cowards if they are war objectors. And particularly in a so called Good War, you have to believe in your principles in order to do it. And I , I just think, I never met a, I never met objectors who, who did not go against the time of, you know, the sentiments of their times. And I just think it's a total misunderstanding to think that war objectors are, are cowards.
Talk about the Vietnam period. Talk about the Vietnam period, about the Chicago Eight, and the, and how you participated. And how, how the, can you track back to, talk to us about how World War Two conscientious objectors formed—
—is, are you out of tape?
No.
No? OK—
Well I have to think about that.
Yeah think about—
—change—
Let's change tapes.
—changing tapes. Yeah. So think about that for a minute.
I have to think about that.
And maybe make it more personal, how you perceived—
Oh yeah maybe—
—change.
—yeah—
Just one at, one at a time—
—That. Just that question. Not before—
Well start, start at the trial and then—
Start at the trial.
On April fourth 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and there were black revolts as an obvious result of it. And the Chicago police acted a little more humanely, understanding why the riots were taking place, or revolts were taking place. And, afterward, Mayor Daly condemned them, and said that you should have acted differently, and next time there is any disturbance in Chicago or area, then I want you to shoot to kill anyone who is committing a felony, and shoot to maim anyone who is committing a misdemeanor. And because of that, there were less people going to Chicago for the Democratic Convention in August 1968 than had been taking place at any major events against the Vietnam war. And when Gene McCarthy did as well as he did in the New Hampshire primaries, he got permission for the, by the time of the convention, he got permission to hold a big rally in a well-known Chicago park. But then, because the Chicago police were acting so negatively, so disastrously to any anti—war people within the city, including Yippies, including National Mobilization Committee, of which I was the co-chair and so forth, Gene McCarthy and his chief lieutenant, who's name eludes me, anyway, they called off, they sent word to people not to come to Chicago because they were risking their lives if they came to Chicago. So that shows how badly the police were acting. In fact, I, I think that spring, maybe in March, there was an anti-war march and the police attacked them and beat up people and all the rest of it. And it was after that that McCarthy and his lieutenant decided to, that it wasn't safe, even for them to come with his anti-war position. So, then there were police riots of various kinds. And I remember the first night, when we were gathering in Lincoln Park, and we had, we had requested that people coming in for the demonstrations be allowed to sleep in Lincoln Park, in tents or in one thing or another. And, they had, permission had been granted in earlier occasions, for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, for the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, for all kinds of groups, but now we were turned down. So in our meetings, combined of Yippies and Mobilization Committee and others, we decided to hold a gathering on I think it was a Sunday night in Lincoln Park where there would be different forms of activities, various concerts, various, Allen Ginsberg would, would do his Om type of thing and so forth. And we decided that when the police had set a deadline, and I, it's not important when it was, but maybe it was at ten o'clock at night that everybody had to leave the park, we had agreed that we would leave the park, nonviolently. And, when I was walking out with other people, somebody suddenly pulled my arm and I looked around and it was the mayor's youth commissioner, whom I had gotten to know in all the negotiations. We never did see Daly, but we did see a lot of his top people. And, the youth commissioner said, Dellinger when you leave here turn to the left because the police are going to attack from the right, and stay as close to the fence as you can. And so I went, I followed him and turned to the left, but I looked to the right and there the police were lined up, ready to attack. And they did. And as they always did they, they marched carrying their clubs and saying "kill, kill, kill, kill." And that's what they intended to do during that week, whenever a bus load of them came up and whenever they attacked some of us. And so actually they went on not just beating up war demonstrators, but they actually step-by-step they began to beat up people who were sitting on their porches watching what was happening and so forth. And the fascinating thing is that for two or three days it never got into the media. And then, one day, when I was being, was asked for an interview with [sighs] the guy who's now head of—
Dan Rather? Dan Rather?
Oh Dan Rather was one of them. Yes, Dan Rather, and he was—
Could you say that all as one sentence? Say one day when I was—
What?
Could you go back and just say that as one sentence?
Yes. Anyway, one day I was asked for an interview with Dan Rather and his outfit was in the basement of the Hilton Hotel. So when Dan Rather and I tried to get into the hotel, there were security guards there, policemen, who said no this guy can't come in, we will not let him. And Dan said, well we're having a, an interview and, and that, that's where our cameras are and all the rest of it. But they grabbed me and roughed me up a little bit, and I think maybe they, I forget whether they roughed up Dan or not, but anyway he had to give up. But later he was roughed up in the convention headquarters, and also the, the fellow who's head of, oh, I can't, never mind.
Yeah, it's all right. That's all right. But—
So, anyway, after, and then also the police began to attack all the, the camera people, so suddenly the camera people had to start showing whatever films they, they managed to survive. So after three or four days of police rioting then it finally began to appear on, on television, and then of course it turned out to be such a disgrace for Mayor Daly and his city that they had to do something about it. And that's when they decided to indict eight of us, one of whom was Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther party, who had not been part of the anti-war demonstrations, and, but they were out to get the Black Panthers. And they, he had come in one afternoon to make an evening speech, probably in Lincoln Park that night, it was in Lincoln Park, and he had spoken to a mostly black audience, and although I knew Huey Newton I had never met Bobby Seale. And he left at noon the next day, and the only one of our members who saw him at all was Jerry Rubin, who made a point of seeing him when he spoke the next day. But that night when he spoke was the night of Lyndon Johnson's birthday party. And we held an un-birthday party for Lyndon Johnson at a, at a large hall, and many people spoke including Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, whom Sartre called one of the saints of the movement, and all kinds of, of people, I think Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell the poet, and so forth and so on. So that's why we didn't even go, although we supported, intended to support the Black Panthers, although their point of view was a a little different than ours. But we, we supported their rights.
But that was the, then that became the Chicago Eight trial which later—
Yes.
Could you just talk a little bit about that?
Well, so, they indicted eight people, and I have to say that there were women who deserved the honor of being indicted as much as any of us males did, but the, the government was sexist and just picked the men. Now I was the oldest of the Chicago defendants, and it included three yippies, two people who had been founders of SDS, Tom Hayden and John Froines, and Bobby Seale. And, after a while, since, well, first of all, Bobby's lawyer, I have to, what's his name? I know—
Charles Garry. Charles G—.
Garry.
Charles Garry.
Charles Garry, yeah. Charles Garry had been defending some Latino who had been falsely charged and he had gone to their defence as a lawyer even to the point where he was suffering from I think it was gallbladder disease, and when he finished his, that trial, he needed an operation. So before the trial took place, our trial took place, we asked for a three weeks postponement of the trial, and we showed letters from the lawyer, from the medical people, saying that he absolutely was risking his life if he did not have the gallbladder excised. And immediately the head of the prosecution said, don't believe them your honor they just want three more weeks to make their subversive speeches around the country, and so the judge, Hoffman, Julius Hoffman, immediately clapped his thing down and said no. So then with Bobby Seale, we had, well, the, the judge said that, and none of us knew Bobby Seale, and he was in prison for, on a charge of murder, because somebody had, some infiltrators to the Black Panthers in New Haven, Connecticut had been, been actually attacked and at least one of them had been killed—
Dave, the Seale stuff is really—
What?
The Bobby Seale story is really not the focus
—opposition to the movement.
Well I think the government was out to, well, first of all, let me say, when Ramsey Clark was the Attorney General, and also one of his lieutenants, who was in charge of community relations, we had been in touch with them, and they were prepared to, I, I'm getting tired.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, let's just talk—
Anyway, I'm trying to remember the guy's name.
Talk about the trial.
Don't worry [inaudible] in general.
Just talk about the trial in general.
Anyway, anyway, when Chicago wanted to indict us, the, and get federal indictments, Ramsey Clark and his lieutenant all said no, they were nonviolent and it was the city that, that committed the riots. And even a presidential commission which investigated the riots, concluded that, although there had been some, minor unwise acts by the, some of the demonstrators, that actually it had been a police riot. So it was not until Nixon was elected that, that the federal government decided to indict us. And then Ramsey Clark and the, and the head of the presidential commission all wanted to testify that it had been a police riot instead of us, and the judge, Julius Hoffman, would not let them testify, along with all kinds of other people, including a member of the British parliament, who had been in, who was a friend of mine, and had been there attending the convention not as an anti-war person, but when she watched some people get beaten up, then suddenly, and she said, oh well don't do that, or somethimg like that, then they maced her. They put her in, in a police van and maced her inside the van. And she wanted to testify, and they were, they would not allow her either.
Dave.
Do you think, I mean, would you say that the trial, the conspiracy trial, was an act of desperation to stop the peace movement?
Yes I think it was an act of desperation to stop the peace movement. And, what happened was, that the media concentrated on our trial, much as they concentrated on the O.J. Simpson trial later, but meanwhile they were rounding people up, not just in Chicago, but everywhere across the country in unfair trails accusing them of having committed violence when, in many cases, it was infiltrators who had committed the violence. And so, when our trial was finally ended and we were, first of all, the judge said that, when, when our lawyers applied for bail, he said they're too dangerous to be out in the streets, and so we were put in jail, county jail. But then our lawyers appealed the case and we were finally allowed to have bail. And then when I got out I went, as some of the others did, I went to all of these other trials around the country, because I knew that ours had been so prominent that if I testified in, in their behalf then at least the local press would, would pick it up. And I remember particularly one example of Seattle, Washington where I was asked actually to go out because one of the indicted people had, had some personal business, so he had gone underground for three or four days, and then he wanted to show himself up by the time of the trial. But he was afraid, typically, that the police would shoot him and say that, and produce a gun, and say that he was aiming at us so that's why we had to shoot him. So I went out, I knew his father, and I went out to the trial, and I contacted his fellow indictees and friends, and they arranged for me to meet him and then we would go together to the FBI so that he wouldn't be shot. And, what happened was, that unfortunately, they set a, a meeting place in a bar, and the bartender recognized him and called the police. And so, immediately, the police came and arrested him there before we could go and turn himself in, but at least he wasn't killed. But then, the bartender was so congratulated by the police and by the FBI, that he became an FBI agent, and his name was David Samsys, and typically he was asked to convince nonviolent people that nonviolence was not working and that they should start making bombs. And he actually did help make some bombs, and then he was horrified when a black G.I. was killed by one of the bombs, who had just come back from Vietnam. And then he was ordered, by the FBI, to make a bomb for the Evergreen Street Bridge which would have three activists setting it, and it was set in a way that it would blow up killing them without blowing up the bridge, and that way the antiwar movement could become so unpopular, because it was gonna blow up this Evergreen Street Bridge, which was so dependent for people getting to work and getting out of work and all the rest of it. And so David Samsys contacted me and let me know, he went public with the story, and it was buried in a little newspaper and never followed up on. And when I wrote a book called, I think it was More Power Than We Know, but one of my books, which was published by Doubleday, then the lawyers want to be absolutely sure that there are no suits. And so, when I gave them the material from David Samsys saying what the FBI had ordered him to do, then the lawyers said, oh OK you, you've got, it's true, and we can't be sued. And so they, they published the book.
Can you briefly describe what had changed in terms of peoples' attitudes between the time, is this the, between the union?
Yes, yes.
I can't hear you.
Can you explain briefly the difference in the attitude in the United States between the time of the Union 8 and the Chicago 8, in terms of war resistance?
Well even though the Union 8, when it went to prison, was better received, particularly by the prisoners, and feared by the government so that they tried to actually kill some of us. By the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention, there were hundreds of thousands of people protesting against the war, and all kinds of civil disobedience and other activities. So that the government just feared that it, it had to end the war, and it, it did everything possible to try to disgrace the anti-war movement. Also, after October 1967, when we had one of our major civil disobediences at the Pentagon, which was to shut, shut the Pentagon down, it, a combination of that plus the Tet Offensive, meant that the chief of staff and the military demanded two hundred and six thousand more troops. And yet, as it turned out, that, they were turned down. And it was not known until well after the Chicago convention that the reason they turned it down was because the war was so unpopular, and they were beginning to get revolts from the GIs themselves in Vietnam, and that's why they kept sending heroin in, so that the GIs, instead of revolting against the war, well they would, get, get their highs from heroin and so forth. And they, they did not dare increase the draft calls because so many people were refusing and so forth. So, for the first time, they, they always reduced the number a little bit from what the military wanted, but for the first time absolutely no, no money was assigned to, to sending more recruits of one kind or another into Vietnam. But, that was the period when people, also infiltrators from the FBI, and the, and the Red Squads were beginning to say, see we're not getting anywhere we've got to use stronger methods. And so I was, for example, Rennie Davis and I, before the Democratic Convention, were approached by a military man who had become, and infiltrated, the Veterans Against War in Chicago, and he offered us a means of dropping bombs on the amphitheatre, and immediately we knew that he was a, he was an agent, and we warned people against him.
Go ahead.
Dave, but, but, you know apart from the police infiltration, the opposition to the war was a very broad based opposition—
Yes, it was.
—And, and you have to say that people like Tom Hayden were not as nonviolent, as pacifist, as you were. What, talk about, what the role of pacifism in the anti-war movement, how sig-, were you able to have an effect as a pacifist?
Well, during this period, when the anti-war sentiment was very strong, but when the government was showing no signs of responding to it, people were, began to think that nonviolence was not working, and that the stronger methods had to be used. And friends, people that I knew and admired began to take that position, including Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and many other people. And, they went underground and formed the Weathermen, as they called them, and because I did respect them and know them, I saw them many times underground, but I told them that I thought that they had fallen for the, for the wrong method. And, finally, when a bomb exploded at the town house in New York City, where two people were killed, and, and Kathy Boudin, whoís home it was, her parents home, was severely wounded, then they admitted, to me, that they had gone into a war camp and that it, it would, was not working. And, after that—
Go ahead.
So, we're, you're just gonna finish that thought about the, nonviolence versus—
The, the debate between nonviolence and—
So after the town house explosion, then the Weatherpeople decided that they would still use an occasional bomb, but that they would be especially careful that warnings were established, and the bombs were placed in places that would not kill anybody. And, from then on, they, they lived up to, to that.
Would you talk about how it felt, when you started out, in the 1940s as an anti-war activist, you were a very small group of people relatively—
Yeah.
—and by the time, in the sixties when you come back, as part of the Chicago eight, Chicago seven trial, it's now a mass movement. How did that feel to you, and did you feel like you had contributed to that?
One thing that should be understood is that the anti-Vietnam war movement developed very slowly [Ineterview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors]. At the first SDS conducted demonstration in Washington D.C., there were not more than twenty to twenty-five thousand people there. But step by step by step, with, including many civil disobedience, picketing, well picketing and civil disobedience at recruiting stations and all the rest of it, plus the teach-ins, which took place in many universities, including the University of Michigan, so that the teach-ins gradually established the truth about the war. And then it was found out, that the United States had actually established a fascist dictator called Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been pro Japanese during the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. And they had installed him, and they had sent him over on a boat, and they had paid people in Vietnam to welcome him by, by the thousands. But they did all kinds of, of material of that kind. And that gradually got to be known, so that the step-, kept growing until, finally, before the war's end, over a million people were actually at the, at one of the major demonstrations.
But Dave, what Judy was asking, your own personal history, having started from a small group that took a position of conscience that the rest of the country didn't support, to the, to being the head of the Mobilization, where all of a sudden people get it—
Yeah, but it wasn't all of a sudden—
—No, no. I mean, not of all a sudden, after, after a long, long—
Yeah.
—period, finally, finally people get it. How did you feel about that?
Well, I often quote Charlie Parker the great jazz musician, who says that jazz comes from where you've been, what you've learned, and if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. And I say that about the nonviolent principles of anti-militarism and pro-human rights. And so even though, at the beginning of the anti-Vietnam war movement it was very small, I knew that one had to live up to it, in terms of nonviolence, and in terms of gradually growing. And it, it did gradually grow, from 1963 when I first spoke against the Vietnam war and was berated by the chairman of the anti-nuclear demonstration for having done it, but there were students there who were protesting, and I felt I had to, you know, live up to what Charlie Parker had said. And then gradually it got the point where, by the Chicago convention and particularly after our trial, the whole world was against the Vietnam war, and it, it, I would have done it anyway regardless of whether it was just a tiny group or it was a mass movement [Interview Gathered for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It: The Story of World War II Conscientious Objectors].
Did it feel different though, being part of a mass movement than being a small minority, or did that make any difference to you?
Well now I'm trying to say no, it didn't.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
No, I think that's a wonderful answer.
That is great. Let me just ask one last thing. Looking back on your life as an activist, what's the thing you're proudest of?
What?
What's, looking back on your life as a, as a peace activist, as an, an anti-war activist, and a pacifist, and nonviolence activist, what's the thing that stands out in your memory, what are you most proud of?
Nothing.
Pride is a sin.
—what would you, what do you think was the best moment of the anti—, what was the best moment for nonviolence in your lifetime?
No, I don't believe that way, I don't think that way.
You're more into the long, the long picture?
Yes.
So say that. You see it as a process, as a growing
Yeah, I think we're done.
We're done. Unless there's some—
I, I, I, just don't like that approach.
Yeah.
Yeah, OK.
You, that gives too much significance to—
Many, many times I have been asked how many times I was arrested, and I never answer that question, because I think that one has to live one's own sense of what is more, most fulfilling to one's self, and that counting the number of times you've been arrested, is, it's like wearing a medal and I do not believe in wearing medals. Because none of us, including myself, do nearly enough.
That's remarkable that you can say that because you've done more than most anyone we know.