Then I read Larry Gara and Lenna Mae Gara’s new book, A Few Small Candles: War Resisters of World War II Tell Their Stories, and here is Arthur Doyle, a young man when the Selective Training and Service Act was passed and signed into law on September 14, 1940. Dole writes of his pre-resistance experiences at Ahimsa Farm near Cleveland, Ohio, as “pacifist boot camp.” So much for our illusion of originality.

This is exactly the kind of reading experience one associates with a book that advances theory in its description and analysis of practice, and I had this happen to me again and again as I delightedly consumed and digested the Garas’ volume in a kind of endless rasorial search for stories that illuminate some bits of the truth of nonviolent power.

For years it has occurred to me that the theorists of nonviolent conflict management had better have a plan for society’s need to deal with the Jeffrey Dahmers who are occasionally among us. Opprobrium, boycott, persuasion, noncooperation, and all other nonviolent methods can fail to isolate sociopathic murderers from our naïve youth, and we who believe in nonviolence need ideas. Methods of non-pain-compliance physical interdiction were the answer, I thought some years ago, and perhaps those techniques are available from those who work with violently mentally ill people.

Now I read about them pioneered by some of the World War II resisters who found alternative service with just such populations of violent patients. Until then, violent restraint was the rule, but the resisters began exploring new restraint methods that employed physical but pain-free techniques. Thus, the conscientious objectors to war use their philosophies to lead society in a new, better direction, and the leadership comes out of mass resistance to war.

The book is simply ten true tales from men now in their late seventies to mid-eighties, most of whom were students when confronted with the advent of “the Good War.” Not insignificantly, most began their noncooperation with the first peacetime draft in U.S. history a year or more before Pearl Harbor Day. War for American boys was by no means certain, but prison time for resisting the draft already was. Several were assured of ministerial deferments but chose to refuse to register rather than work within a war system they could not abide.

Of further interest to those fascinated with what we feel called to do to demonstrate our disgust with a method of conflict management that relies upon ending lives violently is that most of the resisters were not satisfied emotionally with simply serving out prison time in the Gandhian sense of becoming model prisoners. These youngsters were there while their brothers, literally, were fighting German and Japanese troops in mortal combat. The resisters often refused most degrees of cooperation, and it could be said that they felt called to this path in order to offer up further sacrifice themselves. These practices certainly were more prevalent then than during the Vietnam War–era imprisonment of thousands of resisters.

As one learns over the years of studying the history of peace and justice movements, just as the seeds of one war are in the waging and settlement of the previous war, so too with movements focusing on resistance to war and oppression. A common theme in many of these recollections is battling racism both in the hearts and in the policies of the imprisoners. When a draft resister sat on the African American side in chapel and was sent to the “Hole,” when a war objector went on a hunger strike until the dining hall was integrated, and when these young men lay down in blockade of brutal and racist guards, we are learning of some of the seeds of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s taking root in the federal prisons of the 1940s. Indeed, one of the contributors became a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equality and joined the first Journey of Reconciliation in 1947, which preceded the Freedom Rides by fifteen years.

Make no mistake: plenty of World War II resisters were locked away for long times; three to five years was common. About 6,000 young men served that kind of prison time, and another cohort of a similar number served time for evading the draft during the years of 1940–46. Further, there were many thousands more in the alternative service camps or in alternative service in the military. Thus, tens of thousands of young U.S. men refused to fight in World War II. From that perspective the marginal ranks of objectors doesn’t look quite as thin as we may have thought.

I especially commend the chapter by William P. Roberts, Jr. A young free spirit when suddenly required to decide if he would be willing to kill and die for a nation-state, Roberts is the most mystical of the contributors, and quotes liberally from his letters of that period, which he recovered from his mother and others. His honest affinity for justice and the spark of the ethereal in the midst of the most noxious prison conditions is the inspiration of this book:

I wish all those who want to reform the wicked criminal could have been here in this dormitory one evening this week when someone spotted a mouse scurrying across the cement—(not a frequent occurrence) and yelled “Catch him! Kill him!” Some—thankful for any break from the monotony—jumped to the chase. But at the same time several yelled “Lay off! Leave the little thing alone!” In fact such a majority defended the mouse’s life that the creature finally scampered away very much alive. Later, one explained that he’d never kill a mouse because once a mouse had kept him from losing his mind: once he had spent 90 days in solitary in another prison and a mouse had been his only companion ...Enemies of the State—punished by Caesar, loved by God ...They are not guiltless, because no one is. (168)

That we can now read a bit about what these men did with the rest of their lives (so far) is a great benefit of this book. Here is a former Trappist monk-turned-insurance actuary. Here are professors of history and psychology. Not a one had his life ruined by becoming a felon for peace. Indeed, most became professionals, and several went from that experience into a life-time of full-time peace and justice work. It is virtually certain that some of these men, and some of the rest of the 6,000, became much more serious life-time peace workers because of their nonviolent resistance to war. It is equally certain that the civil rights movement was vitally strengthened by the early work done right in the prisons during the war by these resisters. This kind of realization makes the power of nonviolence more complex and makes the definition of success more profound.

George Houser was one of the original eight draft resisters from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He reminisces about his years in prison and what effect it had on his life. He went on to help found CORE, went on the bus rides challenging segregation, and continues his activism on into his eighties.

In July 1999, when I attended the summer national committee meeting of the War Resisters League, I brought along my new copy of A Few Small Candles. One of the usual suspects at these meetings, Ralph DiGia, was there. I had just read his entry and, as a fellow felon for peace, I felt his recollections of his emotions upon release from prison were insightful and accurate. I mentioned that to him immediately upon my Friday afternoon arrival at the former Committee for Nonviolent Action farm near Voluntown, Connecticut. The next evening some of us watched a video Ralph brought of the panel presentation at Wilmington College upon publication of A Few Small Candles. Several of the contributors spoke, some of them updating us on their lives.

Among them was Dave Dellinger, who is probably the person who has longest practiced nonviolent resistance in this country. From his prison time he went on to a career of nonviolent resistance in theory and practice, writing several books during decades of traveling the world to promote the practice. He became most known to my generation as the oldest of the Chicago Eight and the most firmly committed to nonviolence of all of them. More than anyone else, Dave Dellinger brought nonviolence into the popular antiwar culture of the late 1960s. He still risks arrest, fasts in opposition to oppression, and attempts to be a counterfriction to the machinery of the armed state. His chapter in this book is a dramatic story of how to practice vigorous nonviolence under truly adverse conditions. His reliance upon nonviolence in prison when violence or submission seemed to be the only viable options reminded me of Ammon Hennacy’s dictum that practicing nonviolence between wars [or violent crises] is a bit like being a vegetarian between meals. Dellinger is a testimony to consistency in human values and commitment.

Another leitmotif running through selections from several contributors is the success of the nonviolent approach to conflict, usually “inside the walls.” Sometimes an anecdote would describe an interposition between violent guards and prisoners, between violent inmates, or actions taken by individuals or groups of prisoners against prison practices. For example, Bronson Clark describes watching a very serious resister, Meredith Dallas, fast indefinitely in resistance to mail censoring. When after twenty-seven days of water-only fasting the warden announced a new policy that wouldn’t censor religious, political, social issues or economic writings—and that inmates could now criticize the policies of the prison in their letters—all the inmates gave credit to Dallas’s fast. Presumably, since Dallas was known as a nonviolent resister to war, his fast was not taken in the same scofflight as, say, a Bobby Sands–style fast-as-tactic, when, thirty years later (in the heart of the “civilized” empire) Margaret Thatcher allowed IRA members to fast to the death, knowing that a fearful British public wouldn’t condemn her for allowing a member of the violent IRA to perish at his own hand.

Ralph DiGia pointed out in his description of a mass fast to bust dining hall segregation at the Danbury, Connecticut, federal correctional institution that their eventual success was in part due to the outside pressure brought to bear by publicity generated through support from the War Resisters League. This element of nonviolent resistance is not dwelt upon by contributors to this book, but it played a part in many of the larger successes they reported and ought to be duly noted by activists who sometimes shun publicity nowadays as “ego-stroking.” Public education and political pressure has been used through the generations.

Larry Gara, a skinny nineteen-year-old when he began serving three years in a federal pen, wrote of one episode of nonviolent resistance while in Lewisburg prison, a medium-security facility in Pennsylvania (where different war resisters are still incarcerated more than fifty years later, some for trespass at the School of the Americas and one for an act of nonviolent direct disarmament on a nuclear missile silo in Colorado on Hiroshima Day 1998). Gara intentionally served his entire sentence so he wouldn’t have “paper” (probation or parole) when he walked out the door. He was then told on his release day that he would have to travel to Reading, Pennsylvania, which he absolutely refused to do, having done the whole “bit” so that he could be free upon release.

On my release day I barricaded myself in the cell with a mop handle barring the door, refusing to leave unless I could travel freely. Two burly guards quickly removed the mop handle and tried to force me to walk by twisting my arm. When that failed they placed me in a large wire laundry basket. Two resisters, Bayard Rustin and Rodney Owen, lay down in the path of the guards, who then walked on their backs. As we proceeded down several flights of stairs, I told the guards the whole thing was silly. I would not go to Reading, and if they insisted I would remove my clothing when they put me down. On the other hand, I was eager to cooperate if they would only let me choose my own destination. Weary of the whole episode, they accepted my offer and took me to the station. (90) How many nonviolent victories come from the oppressor growing “weary of the whole episode”? More, I think, than we know. Abbie Hoffman always said that his victories, when he had them, came from him simply being “the last one to keep showing up.” If no other message comes to us from this representative slice of a nation’s war resisters to “the big one,” their persistence must be it.

By the way, Larry and Lenna Mae, don’t think you got away with your acronymic title; I’m sure many folks noticed that Quaker political code right off.