WHO are they? These Americans parading about with placards and chanting: "Hey, hey, L.B.J.! How many kids did you kill today?" These burning-eyed youths who set fire to their draft cards and urge others to do the same? These interpositionists who stand on railroad tracks to block U.S. troop trains? These professors who insist that the war in Viet Nam is no more than the struggle of the peace-loving peasant to win the national independence and personal free dom denied him by U.S. intervention? What are they? Are they pacifists in any real meaning of the word? Are they malingerers, humanists, enemy agents, internationalists? Are they valuable dissenters in the sense that democracy not only allows but requires?
They are surely not the U.S. majority. Many Americans have nagging qualms about U.S. involvement in a killing war. But the few who openly attack their country's position with demonstrations and draft-card burnings create a worldwide distortion of the U.S. mood. French radio coverage of the uproar, at least at first, made the U.S. seem split by a profound division of opinion. English demonstrators broke out signs that said WE WANT JOHNSON CRUCIFIED. From his sickbed, President Johnson expressed "surprise that any one citizen would feel toward his country in a way that is not consistent with national interest." Hsinhua, the Chinese news agency, took deep comfort in the "unprecedentedly gigantic movement against the war of aggression in Viet Nam."
Some Principles of Pacifism
All this demands an examination of the phenomenon. Resisting war, in forms that range from high-minded idealism down to the most scurrilous draft-dodging, is a perennial U.S. custom. Many Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, were embarrassed to the point of bitter protest at their country's jumping on Mexico in 1846; rioting draft evaders set part of Manhattan afire during the Civil War. Even draft-card burning is nothing new: Critic Dwight Macdonald put the flame to his in 1947.
The ancestral motivation of war-resisting is religious pacifism. In 1899, Benjamin Franklin Trueblood, Quaker educator and prime mover of the American Peace Society, thought he saw within his own life's span an end to war. He exulted: "Its days are nearly numbered"—and died, 17 years later, of what his obituarists called heartbreak, as his fellow Americans headed into World War I and death in places like Belleau Wood. Trueblood was in the tradition of a thin but spiritually pure stream of philosophical pacifism that has run through Western society since the rise of Christianity, even though the Christian ethic generally holds to the Augustinian belief in the "just" war. But pacifism has usually found its firmest hold only within small sects, ranging from the Anabaptists of the Reformation to the Mennonites (of 389 Americans classified as religious objectors during World War I, 138 were Mennonites) to the Society of Friends.