A HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

“I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Street. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fightin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ married, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befur.” — Dunne, Finley Peter, OBSERVATIONS BY MR. DOOLEY, New York, 1902 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1350 BCE

Hebrew midwives, in the 1st act of civil disobedience of which we have a written record, ignored Pharaoh’s order to kill male Hebrew babies (EXODUS 1: 15-21).

RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

600 BCE

From this year until 520 BCE, Jeremiah, who was called as a teenager to be a prophet, with Isaiah and with Micah, would be pointing at social injustice and encouraged the children of Israel to insist that their society be a society of justice and righteousness (THE BOOK OF JEREMIAH).

RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

27 CE

At roughly this point in time, Yehoshua bar Yusef, Messiah claimant #6, having succeeded in living a life of compassion and nonviolence, was being remanded back and forth between the Romans under Pontius Pilate and the Jews under Herod Antipas in Jerusalem. After some torture, it seems, at the dump Golgotha outside Jerusalem, he was executed in the usual exemplary manner.

Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

That is, according to MARK 15: 34, Jesus, a Jewish religious leader, was executed on Friday, Nisan 14th, March 30th, 27 CE. –And at three o’clock, Jesus cried out in a loud voice in Aramaic, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,” which translates to “My God, my God, why did you [desert? sacrifice?] me?” The Last Supper would have been on that Thursday evening. (Bear in mind that April 7, 30 CE and April 3, 33 CE also were Fri/14/Nisan dates that would correspond to MARK 15: 34.)

Jesus would be regarded as having said, “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (MATTHEW 16:28). This would seem to imply that the Second Coming would occur within the lifetime of his contemporaries, and indeed the Apostles would expect Jesus to return before the passing of their generation. MILLENNIALISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”

27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]

1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”

May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”

May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”

July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”

1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”

February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggars: this is true.”

July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

40 CE

Paul of Tarsus went to Jerusalem to get acquainted with (consult? confront?) Peter as described in GALATIANS 18-20.

Until about 80 CE, Paul and the apostles would be preaching a “Christian” gospel of justice, nonviolence, and reconciliation. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

50 CE

Buddhism was reaching China from India.

From this year until about 200 CE, Christian pacifism would be typical among early Christian communities, with many recorded instances of Christians who were encouraged to make a vow of nonviolence. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, AS ABOVE, THAT CHRISTIAN PACIFISM WOULD BE TYPICAL AMONG EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES, WITH MANY RECORDED INSTANCES OF CHRISTIANS WHO WERE ENCOURAGED TO MAKE A VOW OF NONVIOLENCE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE HISTORIAN IS SETTING CHRONOLOGY TO “SHUFFLE,” WHICH IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE OPTION BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD SUCH SHUFFLE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. THERE IS NO SUCH “BIRDS’EYE VIEW” AS THIS IN THE REAL WORLD, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD NO REAL BIRD HAS EVER GLIMPSED AN ACTUAL HISTORICAL SEQUENCE.

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HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

316 CE

The Council of Arles was called by Constantine, against the Donatist schism of Donatus.

People with not enough to do were creating the Pax Romana as indicated: the Romans at Cibalae, legions of HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Constantine, defeated the legions of Licinius.

(The usual sort of thing. However, when he became a “soldier of Christ,” Martin of Tours, a Roman army officer, renounced violence.) CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1535

July 6, Tuesday (Old Style): Sir Thomas More was taken from the Tower of London and beheaded on Tower Hill. (He would be canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935.) His comment at the block was along the lines of Thoreauvian civil disobedience: LONDON HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”

27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]

1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”

May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”

May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”

July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”

1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”

February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggars: this is true.”

July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1552

In this year or the following one, while at university, Étienne de la Boétie authored his DISCOURS DE LA SERVITUDE VOLONTAIRE OU LE CONTR'UN (DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE, OR THE ANTI-DICTATOR) (this would become available to the French audience in 1576 after the author’s death, and in English translation in 1745, and we know Waldo Emerson would refer to this friend of Montaigne’s “... world-warming spark / Which dazzles me in midnight dark, / Equalizing small and large, / While the soul it doth surcharge, / Till the poor is wealthy grown, / And the hermit never alone ...” and would mention this author to Henry Thoreau in a letter of October 25, 1843 well prior to Henry’s preparation of “Resistance to Civil Government”). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1660

The council on Barbados, the island that would be called by a Quaker missionary “the nursery of truth,” enacted that any citizen who refused service in the militia was to be fined “five hundred pounds of sugar for the first offense,” and then a thousand pounds of sugar for each subsequent failure to appear for a militia muster. The offender was to be jailed until his fine was paid. There was to be no exemption for those tender of conscience, such as those afflicted with Quakerism. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 1, Friday (Old Style): Friend Mary Dyer of Newport, Rhode Island was escorted along a back way about a mile from the jail near what is now Dover Street at Washington Street to the municipal gallows on Boston Neck, at the edge of town on the path leading to Roxbury and life and freedom,

Friend Mary was once again asked politely, whether she could commit that she would go away and stay away.

Nay, I cannot, for in obedience to the will of the Lord, I came, and in his will I abide faithful to the death.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE As Friend Mary’s body swung on the gallows a local wit, Major-General Humphrey Atherton, came up with something to yell out to the rubberneckers. If the minister was not yet strangled into unconsciousness at that point, we may hope that the marvelous and spontaneous summation this Major-General unintentionally uttered could be the last thing she heard:1

She hangs there as a flag!

1. One wonders whether her husband William Dyer and her five boys William, Jr., Samuel, Henry, Mahershallalhashbaz, and Charles were present on the occasion of this scheduled public ceremony — the record we have of their lives is entirely silent on this score so the presumption unfortunately may need to be that they had absented themselves, deliberately leaving their errant wife and mother to face the Boston gallows entirely alone; I also do not know whether her Quaker son William, Jr. was at this point already convinced, or became a Quaker only later. This is the way, however, that historians today fudge the probability that Friend Mary had in her extremity been deserted not only by her husband but also by her offspring: “A small group of colonists had gathered around the walls of the prison in the vain hope of getting word to the prisoner. Earlier, when she had been found talking with friends gathered around her prison window, she had been moved to a remote part of the prison where none could speak or signal to her. All night the faithful band of friends remained outside the walls” (Page 1 of Robert S. Burgess’s TO TRY THE BLOODY LAW / THE STORY OF MARY DYER (Burnsville NC: Celo Valley Books, 2000). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

1601 Tycho Brahe unsolicited comment “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh his wife would embalm his head and “Strike, man, strike.” keep it near her in a red leather bag

1649 Charles I the chopper was to wait for a signal “Stay for the sign.” that the king had prepared himself

1659 Friend Marmaduke Ste- unsolicited comments made over the Friend Marmaduke: “We suffer not as evil- venson and Friend Wil- muting roll of a drum intended to pre- doers but for conscience’ sake.” Friend Wil- liam Robinson vent such remarks from being heard liam: “I die for Christ.”

1660 Friend Mary Dyer asked at her execution “Nay, first a child; then a young man; whether they should pray for her soul then a strong man, before an elder of Christ Jesus.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

They buried the body near where they hanged her, south of Dover Street on the east of what is now Washington Street. Perhaps it is there still — or perhaps not, for an undiseased fresh female cadaver would have been quite a prize for the “resurrectionists” who regularly exhumed such for sale to local physicians.2

A Boston sheriff at the scene, Edward Wanton, after going home and discussing the events of this day with his mother, became a Quaker.3 RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

2. I have been indignantly informed via email that Friend Mary Dyer was hanged from the Great Elm on Boston Common, because near the Common now there’s a sort of officious monument (but not at the spot where the Great Elm had been located), and the inscription at the base of said monument reads in part: “Witness for Religious Freedom — Hanged on Boston Common 1660 — ‘My life not availeth me in comparison to the Liberty of the Truth.’” QED, this email concluded, the historical record that she was hanged at the gallows on Boston Neck, and her body discarded there, can only be in error. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1665

John Perrot died in Jamaica, Barbados.

On Bermuda, Captain Dorrell and a group of 8 militiamen entered a Quaker meeting for worship and dragged away 2 men to their musterfield. One of these men, Friend Francis Estlake, who had been neglecting his militia duty, they “tied neck and heels together.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

3. Major-General Atherton would be on his way somewhere on horseback on September 16, 1661, when he would pass by the spot at which Quakers had ordinarily been being cut loose from the cart behind which they had been lashed through the colony, just before being turned out into the wilderness. At this spot his horse was spooked by a cow and Atherton was thrown hard, striking his head. The bloody-minded among the Quakers would note with satisfaction as a punishment by God that the officer’s eyes were out of their sockets, he had brain tissue coming out of his nose and blood dripping out of his ears, and his tongue was protruding from between his teeth. (Watch out, ye blasphemers, God’ll get you!)

Michael Crook of the Annapolis Friends Meeting has sent me an email of his oral family history to the effect that “A man named Stanton, I’m forgetting whether it was William or John, was captain of the guard that escorted Mary to the gallows. He’s one of my wife’s ancestors. That day, after the hanging, because of the accepting, compassionate and forgiving demeanor of Mary and other Friends, he said to his mother, ‘Mother, we are persecuting the people of God.’ He became a Friend, was persecuted himself, and eventually moved to Rhode Island, where he married into the Gould family.” This could not have been a William Stanton, for the only person of this name on the record would have been much too young during 1660 to have served in such an official capacity, and could not have been a John Stanton, for there was such a man attending Harvard College during 1661 but in 1676 this man was a soldier rather than a Quaker. We know of a John Stanton but his only recorded marriage was to a Mary Clark. If this man had married into the Gould family, he would have married a daughter of Representative Daniel Gould of Newport, the gentleman who had accompanied Stephenson and Robinson to encourage them as they were being hanged and for that act of sympathy had been “tied to a big gun” and rewarded with thirty lashes in Boston during November 1659. The putative daughter might have been a Mary born on 2 March 1653, or a Priscilla born on 20 June 1661, or a Content born on 28 April 1671 or a Wait born on 8 May 1676 — but we know nothing of any of the marriages of any of these Gould daughters. The name the Kouroo database has, for the sheriff who went home and spoke to his mother after the hanging and turned Quaker, is Edward Wanton. We do not have the names of his parents. This Boston sheriff was by trade a ship-carpenter and in 1660 was of an age to have a young child and another on the way, and shortly after this hanging of Mary Dyer removed from Boston to Scituate RI. Later, the three of his sons whom we have track of lived in three towns in Rhode Island, and one of them became a long-term governor of the colony at a time when many of that colony’s governors were Quakers, but we do not know of any connection between the Wanton family and the Gould family. Thus, this proffered family history seems to be entirely unsupported. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1674

Governor Richard Kelgwin of St. Helena was seized by disgruntled settlers and soldiers, only to be rescued upon the chance arrival of an East India Company fleet. He was replaced as governor by Captain Gregory Field.

Between this year and 1693, on the island of Barbados under the regime of Governor Jonathan Atkins, over 300 Quakers would be fined more than a total of £10,000 for offenses such as refusing to support either the established Church or the island’s militia. This governor characterized the island’s Quakers as “most repugnant to all laws and orders.”

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1676

March 10, Tuesday (1675, Old Style): The Plymouth court fined 18 potential militiamen for “not goeing forth being pressed,” which is to say, for refusing to serve in the local military. Nine of these 18 were Quakers of Sandwich and Scituate: • Friend Daniel Butler • Friend Zacharia Jenkins • Friend Ephraim Allen • Friend William Allen • Friend Zachariah Colman • Friend Joseph Colman • Friend Thomas Colman • Friend John Rance • Friend John Northy

Three other Quakers also were refuseniks, but evidently had refused even to make an appearance before this court: • Friend Israel Gaunt CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE • Friend Increase Allen • Friend Obadiah Butler THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

According to the Reverend William Hubbard’s A NARRATIVE OF THE TROUBLES WITH THE INDIANS IN NEW-ENGLAND, FROM THE FIRFT PLANTING THEREOF IN THE YEAR 1607, TO THIS PRESENT YEAR 1677. BUT CHIEFLY OF THE LATE TROUBLES IN THE TWO LAFT YEARS, 1675, AND 1676. TO WHICH IS ADDED A DIFCOURFE ABOUT THE WARRE WITH THE PEQUODS IN THE YEAR 1637, published in 1677, on this day a Concord man was killed while going after hay. “KING PHILLIP’S WAR”

Presumably, then, this would be one of the 13 town residents who are listed in the statistics as having died during this year:

Marriages Births Deaths

1656 3 11 —

1657 3 11 3

1658 3 6 3

1659 2 10 4

1660 6 11 3

1661 2 12 6

1662 4 14 4

1663 5 14 4

1664 4 11 2

1665 7 13 6

1666 2 22 6

1667 8 15 6 HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Marriages Births Deaths

1668 4 21 5

1669 4 24 5

1670 2 21 2

1671 6 22 7

1672 5 20 3

1673 6 29 6

1674 3 20 5

1675 5 21 11

1676 4 13 13

1677 11 22 6

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE MARCH 10TH, 1676 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1678

A complaint was made to the Plymouth court, that in Sandwich the Quakers were refusing to contribute to the maintenance of the town minister and the town church. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The petition to the court also instanced that the Sandwich Quakers had been verbally sharp with the non- Quakers, that their literature was deceiving “the hearts of the simple,” and that “wandering” Quakers had “crept in.” The outcome of this complaint would be that in the future no Quaker would be listed in the town records as a member of this town, and thus no Quaker would be entitled to have any share during the distribution of town lands.4

This year marked the completion of the observations of the Reverend William Hubbard in regard to the history of the “New Plymouth” colony.

CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

READ HUBBARD TEXT Chapter LXXVII. A continuation of the History of New Plymouth, from the year 1633, until the year 1678.

4. We can be quite certain that, had the Quakers been more willing to participate in the killing of native Americans during the race war of 1675/1676, this petition could not have been submitted, because as the Quakers attempted to respond to this hostile attack by their town neighbors, they responded by offering an explanation of their Peace Testimony. They had not gone to war alongside their neighbors, they attempted to explain, as a consequence of their spiritual prudence — they had had a selfish interest in the well- being of their own souls, which had prevented them from participating in the killing. It had not been for the well-being of the Indians, that they had refused to go off to kill them, but because “they well know that the Eternall well being of their immortall soules is concerned in it.” They also warned their non-Quaker neighbors that, in persecuting Quakers, they were placing themselves at risk of suffering the wrath of almighty God: there is “nothing more certaine than that he will avenge their cause.” Indeed, unfortunate events had already occurred in the lives of some of their accusers (a number of examples were cited), revealing that “their do doeing provoakes the Lords anger.” The Quakers resented being lumped together with a bunch of non-Quaker cowards who had not participated in the killing “for their owne perticuler intrest which at most could be but the feare of the losse of their outward life.” (It should be noted that one of these contemptible non-Quakers who had neglected to go off to war out of personal cowardice had been John Smith, Jr., son of the local minister.) THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1687

Peter Dashwood, a Barbados Quaker, refused to participate in the military and was twice obliged “to ride the wooden horse with a musket at each leg.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1704

April: A fleet of men-of-war anchored at Plymouth seized and attempted to impress as British navies 2 local Quaker sailors, Friends John Smith and Thomas Anthony. However, when there was a confrontation at sea with a French vessel, these men refused to perform any service. While they were being flogged, Friend John Smith prayed aloud for his persecutors. Finally, after a trip to England and back, after 13 months, these resistant impressed sailors would be released back at the port of Plymouth. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1705

May: Friends John Smith and Thomas Anthony, Quaker sailors who had been impressed for service on a British man-of-war but had refused to provide any warlike assistance, were released at their home port of Plymouth. Recuperation from their 13 months of hardship at sea would be difficult.5 THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

John Evelyn’s diary entry: Very fine weather: The Baily of Westminster, hanged himselfe, he had an ill report, & indeede never was it known that so many made away with themselves as of these late yeares & age among us, among both men of quality & others:...

5. John Smith had been born in 1681 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. After this experience with military induction he relocated to Philadelphia and settled in Kennett Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. His parents “professed the truth in the latter years” (presumably this means that the elder Smiths also became Friends). John Smith married first Ann Pusey, daughter of Caleb Pusey, on March 5, 1706/1707. In 1713 he relocated again, to East Marlborough, where the Society of Friends held meetings in his home (this would become the Londongrove Monthly Meeting). He married a second time, on August 6, 1726, with Dorothy Windle, and they had five children. He would write an account that would be published at least by 1800, entitled A NARRATIVE OF SOME SUFFERINGS FOR HIS CHRISTIAN PEACEABLE TESTIMONY BY JOHN SMITH, LATE OF CHESTER COUNTY, DECEASED, in which he would describe his resistance to being inducted in 1703 and again in 1705, and the abuse he had endured for this.

I have a record of a Thomas Anthony who was born to Joseph Anthony and Mary Waite Anthony on May 10, 1686 in Portsmouth, Rhode Island and died on April 26, 1707. Is this perhaps the other of the two impressed American sailors? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1776

10th, 1st Month: When the Yearly Meeting for Sufferings met in Portsmouth, the Quakers had scruples about the use of paper currency that had been issued in the colonies, because these bills had been issued “for the purpose of carrying on war.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

It was considered that it was “a Duty required of them to guard carefully about contributing thereto in any manner.” THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY RHODE ISLAND

On the following screen is a sample piece of colonial currency prepared for Massachusetts by Paul Revere, that gives us a good idea of what the Quakers were finding so troubling. The figure holding a cutlass is accompanied by a motto from Publilius Syrus, Ense petit placidam, sub Libertate Quietem “By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, A PRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1777

GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE August: St. Leger gathered his forces at Three Rivers before proceeding toward Rome, New York.

Four Quaker men of East Hoosack, Massachusetts were imprisoned for adhering to the Peace Testimony, until the General Court ordered their release. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1778

June 13, Saturday: General John Sullivan had arrested two brothers of the Quaker faith for refusing to participate in any manner in military activities, and their case had been brought before the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations’s Council of War. When Quaker elders had appeared before the Council, it had only been to inform the Council that they would cooperate in no manner. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

They would not, for instance, sign any certificates that this person or that person was a member of the Society and therefore entitled to exemption from military service. Exasperated in the face of such intransigence, Deputy Governor Jabez Bowen, the chairman of the Council of War, wrote to Friend Moses Brown: I call upon you Moses and the whole Society of Friends ... to show the shadow of injustice or inequity in the law. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1779

Fall: An attempt was made to conscript for the Revolutionary army a farmer of Brooklyn, Connecticut who “openly denounced all kinds of carnal warfare as contrary to the gospel,” whereupon he fled into the woods. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

There he was pursued by his neighbors “as hounds would a fox,” and eventually his hiding place was discovered and he was bound, placed in a wagon, and taken to Providence, Rhode Island to be turned over to the Revolutionary soldiers. In the course of the night, however, he got hold of a knife, cut himself loose, and escaped to the woods. He would manage to survive the winter in his new hiding place. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

December: General George Washington ordered 1,400 Continentals to join the forces of General Benjamin Lincoln defending Charleston.

James Madison, Jr. was elected to a 3-year term in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In Virginia, the sheriff went to the home of Friend Robert Hunnicutt of Blackwater monthly meeting on account of his “testimony against war” and consequent refusal to pay war taxes, and seized one of his slaves. The sheriff selected a 6-year-old to seize –not worth nearly as much as an adult– so he wouldn’t need to make change. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

(What was a Quaker doing, with black slaves? –Don’t ask.) THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1780

On account of Mother Ann Lee’s pacifism and her refusal to take an oath of allegiance, she was imprisoned for a few months by the American government on the charge of treason. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

(This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an inability to assent to the value of war would be regarded as treasonous.) MILITARY CONSCRIPTION THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1798

The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends held in London in this year chose to emphasize all the elaborate implications of the Quaker Peace Testimony, such as that it not only necessitated the refusal of all active compliance with warlike measures, but also of any participation in the war economy: We desire afresh to press upon all our members, the necessity of a peaceful and innocent demeanor amongst men; and especially, let all be careful not to seek or accept profit by any concern in the preparations so extensively making for war: for how reproachfully inconsistent would it be, to refuse all active compliance with warlike measures; and, at the same time, not to hesitate to enrich ourselves by the commerce and other circumstances dependent on war ! CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1806

October 24, Friday: French forces reached the suburbs of Berlin.

At this point what was left of his reason deserted Timothy Dexter. He would continue for two days in this condition.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould instanced in his journal that he had been fined for his failure as a Quaker to participate under arms in the local militia and that the penalty had been unfairly exacted through the tax seizure of his hat, that had cost him considerably more than that penalty: 6 day 24 of 10 M / James Chappel has just taken from me an Hat what in the 6 M last cost me six Dollars for a Militia fine amounting to only 2 Dollars & 5 cents including fees — by order of Charles C Dunham the Capt. The warrant dated 6 day of October 1806 & signed by Robt Taylor Just Peace. ——————————————————————————————————— THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1846

July 23, Thursday or 24, Friday: Henry Thoreau provoked Sheriff Sam Staples, who was under contract as the

Concord tax farmer, into taking him illegally to the Middlesex County Prison6and spent the night there, for having for several years (up to perhaps 9), following the example of Bronson Alcott, refused to pay certain taxes as useful for the perpetuation of domestic slavery and foreign wars.7

“RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”: It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour —for the horse was soon tackled— was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen. This is the whole history of “My Prisons.” I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject; and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen now. It is for no particular item in the tax- bill that I refuse to pay it.

6. The usual penalty for failure to pay the Massachusetts poll tax was property seizure and auction upon failure to display a stamped tax receipt, and was most certainly never imprisonment, but young Thoreau possessed few auctionable items and probably did not use a bank account. 7. During the one year 1845, in Massachusetts, the “poll tax” had been being reckoned as if it were a state tax, although in all other years it had been and would be reckoned as a municipality or county tax. As a town tax, and as a county tax, of course, it could hardly be considered to be in support of slavecatching or of foreign wars, since neither the Massachusetts towns nor the Massachusetts counties engaged in either slavecatching or the raising of armies. Also, even in the one year 1845, while this tax was being considered as a state tax, under the law no part of this revenue was to be used for the catching of fugitive slaves, and no foreign war was going on at the moment (the march upon Mexico had not yet fairly begun). Thoreau, therefore, in declining to pay voluntarily this tax bill, actually was not refusing to acknowledge slavery, as alleged, or a war effort, as alleged, but was refusing to recognize any political organization whatever. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(I find it fascinating that Thoreau did not ever, in reminiscing about his famous night in the lockup, make any easy reference to the snippet of poetry that was quite as familiar to him as it is to all of us, from Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea from Prison.” –Thoreau wasn’t going for a hole-in-one!)

Walter Harding has tracked down what may well be the origin of the often-told but utterly spurious story, that Waldo Emerson came to visit Thoreau in his prison cell and expressed concern: he found a “Bringing Up Father” cartoon strip in the newspaper, in which Paddy was in jail for drunkenness, and when Jiggs asks him how come he was in jail Paddy retorts “How come you’re not?” Alcott has reported that Emerson’s reaction to the news of this was to find Thoreau’s stand to have been “mean and skulking, and in bad taste.” Therefore, is this not the point at which we can profitably ask, was Thoreau merely running away from his social responsibilities, as has been so often alleged, when he went out to live at Walden Pond? Let’s attach the humorous title “DECAMPING TO WALDEN POND: A GENDER ANALYSIS BY MARTHA SAXTON”8 to the following quotation:

It seems, from exaggerated nineteenth-century sex definitions, that Victorians were afraid men and women might not be able to distinguish gender. So women were trussed, corseted, and bustled into immobility while men posed in musclebound attitudes of emotionless strength. this suppression of tenderness, warmth, and most expressions of feelings produced the male equivalent of the vapors. Louisa [May Alcott]’s teacher and secret love, Henry David Thoreau, decamped to Walden Pond rather than confront social demands that he be conventionally “male.”

8. On page 226 of her LOUISA MAY: A MODERN BIOGRAPHY OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Saxton accused Thoreau of “unrelenting misogyny” as her way of elaborating on Bronson Alcott’s remark of November 5, 1858 that Thoreau was “better poised and more nearly self-sufficient than other men.” This caused me to look back to her title page and inspect the date of publication and say to myself, “Yeah, this thing was published back in 1977, the bad old days when we thought we had to combat male sexism by nurturing prejudice against anyone with a penis.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another member of the Thoreau family, we don’t know who, paid the tax for him, as the tax had previously been paid by Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar when Alcott had almost been jailed on January 17, 1843. Although Emerson was irritated no end by such unseemly conduct, on the part of an associate, as failure to pay one’s share of the general tax burden, to his credit he did continue to press for publication of Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS manuscript. However, at that time Thoreau was still preparing additions to the second draft.9

9. Lawrence, Jerome (1915-2004) and Robert Edwin Lee (1918-1994), THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL: A PLAY. NY: Hill and Wang, 1971, Spotlight Dramabook #1223, c1970, c1972 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I should make reference here to a snide remark that Albert J. von Frank has included at page 202 of his 1 AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. The sentence is as follows, in its entirety: “Henry Thoreau expressed his own anti-politics a month later by spending a night in jail for tax evasion, an act that drew Emerson’s quick disapproval, thought the principles behind the act, as Thoreau explained in ‘Civil Disobedience,’ had more in common with Emerson’s own position than he then suspected.” Now here are the things that I suppose to be quite wrongheaded about von Frank’s assertion, which would seem on its face simply to be praising Thoreau against Emerson: •“anti-politics” Thoreau’s act was not an act of anti-politics but an act of politics. To privilege assent over dissent in such a manner constitutes an unconscionable expression of mere partisanship. •“tax evasion” Thoreau’s act was not the act of a tax evader. A tax evader is a cheater, who is trying through secrecy or deception to get away with something. Thoreau’s act was the deliberate public act of a man who would rather be imprisoned than assist in ongoing killing, and thus is in an entirely separate category from such cheating. To conflate two such separate categories, one of self-service and the other of self-abnegation, into a single category, in such manner, is, again, an unconscionable expression of prejudicial politics. •“had more in common” The implication here is that Emerson’s attitudes constitute the baseline for evaluation of Thoreau’s attitudes, so that Thoreau may be condescendingly praised for imitating Emerson whenever the two thinkers can be made to seem in agreement, while preserving the option of condemning him as a resistor or worse whenever these contemporaries seem at loggerheads. –But this is unconscionable.

Albert J. von Frank. AN EMERSON CHRONOLOGY. NY: G.K. Hall & Co. and Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Emerson to his journal:

These rabble at Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold & manly cast, though Satanic. They see, against the unanimous expression of the people, how much a little well directed effrontery can achieve, how much crime the people will bear, & they proceed from step to step & it seems they have calculated but too justly upon your Excellency, O Governor Briggs. Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax. The State is a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat. You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful of clover & welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat.

DANIEL WEBSTER We now understand that Sheriff Sam was considerably twisting the law under which he confined Thoreau for nonpayment of that $5 or $6 arrears of poll tax, and for his own convenience. For what the law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts required him to do in regard to such a tax resistor, prior to debt imprisonment, was to attempt to seize and sell some of Thoreau’s assets, such as the books he had in storage in his parents’ boardinghouse in Concord. Sheriff Staples hadn’t been inclined to do this and at this point didn’t have time because he was leaving office — and the sad fact of the matter is that, since he was merely under contract as a “tax farmer,” had he vacated his position without collecting this money from the Thoreau family, Massachusetts would simply have deducted the sum from his final paycheck (bottom line, The Man always takes his cut). For here is that law, and it simply offers no support whatever for what Sheriff Staples did to put pressure on Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Section 7. If any person shall refuse or neglect to pay his [poll] tax, the collector shall levy the same by distress and sale of his goods, excepting the good following, namely: • The tools or implements necessary for his trade or occupation; • beasts of the plow necessary for the cultivation of his improved lands; • military arms, utensils for house keeping necessary for upholding life, and bedding and apparel necessary for himself and family. Section 8. The collector shall keep the goods distrained, at the expense of the owner, for the space of four days, at the least, and shall, within seven days after the seizure, sell the same by public auction, for the payment of the tax and the charges of keeping and of the sale, having given notice of such sale, by posting up a notification thereof, in some public place in the town, forty eight hours at least before the sale. Section 11. If the collector cannot find sufficient goods, upon which it may be levied, he may take the body of such person and commit him to prison, there to remain, until he shall pay the tax and charges of commitment and imprisonment, or shall be discharged by order of law.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

After July 24: In my short experience of human life I have found that the outward obstacles which stood in my way were not living men –but dead institutions It has been unspeakably grateful & refreshing to make my way through the crowd of this latest generation honest & dishonest virtuous & vicious as through the dewy grass –men are as innocent as the morning to the early riser –and unsuspicious pilgrim and many an early traveller which he met on his way v poetry –but the institutions as church –state –the school property &c are grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them. When I have indulged a poets dream of a terrestrial paradise I have not foreseen that any cossack or Chipeway –would disturb it –but some monster institution would swallow it– The only highway man I ever met was the state itself– When I have refused to pay the tax which it demanded for that protection I did not want itself has robbed me– When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me. I love mankind I hate the institutions of their forefathers– What are the sermons of the church but the Dudleian lectures –against long extinct perhaps always imaginary evils, which he dead generations have willed and so the bell still tolls to call us to the funeral service which a generation can rightly demand but once. It is singular that not the Devil himself –has been in my way but these cobwebs –which tradition says were originally spun to obstruct the fiend. If I will not fight –if I will not pray –if I will not be taxed –if I will not bury the unsettled prairie –my neighbor will still tolerate me nd sometimes even sustains me –but not the state. And should our piety derive its origin still from that exploit of pius Aenaeus who bore his father Anchises on his shoulders from the ruins of Troy Not thieves & highwaymen but Constables & judges –not sinners but priests –not the ignorant but pedants & pedagogues –not foreign foes but standing armies –not pirates but men of war. Not free malevolence –but organized benevolence. For instance the jailer or constable as a mere man and neighbor –with life in him intended for this particular 3 score years & ten –may be a right worthy man with a thought in the brain of him –but as the officer & tool of the state he has no more understanding or heart than his prison key or his staff– This is what is saddest that men should voluntarily assume the character & office of brute nature.– Certainly there are modes enough by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion & neighbor. There are stones HDT WHAT? INDEX

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enough in the path of the traveller with out a man’s adding his own body to the number. There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war –to take a single instance– And yet I have not yet learned the name or residence and probably never should of the reckless vilain who should father them– all concerned –from the political contriver to the latest recruit possess an average share of virtue & of vice the vilainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures –lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones. The stern command is –move or ye shall be moved –be the master of your own action –or you shall unawares become the tool of the meanest slave. Any can command him who doth not command himself. Let men be men & stones be stones and we shall see if majorities do rule. Countless reforms are called for because society is not animated or instinct enough with life, but like snakes I have seen in early spring –with alternate portions torpid & flexible –so that they could wriggle neither way. All men more or less are buried partially in the grave of custom, and of some we see only a few hairs upon the crown above ground. Better are the physically dead for they more lively rot. Those who have stolen estate to be defended slaves to be kept in service –who would pause with the last inspiration & perpetuate it –require the aid of institutions –the stereotyped and petrified will of the past But they who are something to defend –who are not to be enslaved themselves – –who are up with their time – ask no such hinderance THOMAS CARLYLE Carlyle’s is not the most lasting words nor the loftiest wisdom –but for his genius it was reserved at last to furnish expression for the thoughts that were throbbing in a million breasts– It has plucked the ripest fruit in the public garden– But this fruit now least concerned the tree that bore it –which was rather perfecting the bud at the foot of the leaf stalk. Carlyle is wonderfully true to the impressions on his own mind, but not to the simple facts themselves. He portrays the former so freshly and vividly –that his words reawaken and appeal to our whole Experience But when reinforced by this terrible critic we return to his page his words are found not to be coincident with the thing and inadequate and there is no host worthy to entertain the guest he has invited. On this remote shore we adventurously landed unknown to any of the human inhabitants to this day – But we still remember well the gnarled and hospitable oaks, which were not strangers to us, the lone horse in his pasture and the patient ruminating herd whose path to the river so judiciously chosen to overcome the difficulty of the ascent we followed and disturbed their repose in the shade. And the cool free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to the wayfarers though still green and crude. The hard round glossy fruit which if not ripe –still is not poison but New English –brought hither its ancestor by our ancestors once. And up the rocky channel of a brook we scrambled which had long served nature for the sluice in these parts leaping from rock –through tangled woods at the bottom of a ravine, darker and darker it grew and more hoarse, the murmur of the stream –until we reached the ruins of a mill where now the ivy grew and the trout glanced through the raceway and the flume. And the dreams and speculations of some early settler was our theme

But now “no war nor battle’s sound” Invades this peaceful battle ground but waves of Concord murmuring by With sweetly fluent harmony. But since we sailed, some things have failed And many a dream gone down the stream Here then a venerable shepherd dwellt ...... The Reverend Ezra Ripley Who to his flock his substance dealt And ruled them with a vigorous crook By precept of the sacred Book. But he the pierless bridge passed o’er And now the solitary shore Knoweth his trembling steps no more. Anon a youthful pastor came ...... Nathaniel Hawthorne Whose crook was not unknown to fame His lambs he viewed with gentle glance Dispersed o’er a wide expanse, And fed with “mosses from the Manse” We view the rocky shore where late With soothed and patient ear we sat Under our Hawthorne in the dale And listened to his Twice told Tale. It comes on murmuring to itself by the base of stately and retired mountains –through dark primitive woods – HDT WHAT? INDEX

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whose juices it receives and where the bear still drinks it– Where the cabins of settlers are still fresh and far between, and there are few that cross its stream. Enjoying still its cascades unknown to fame perhaps unseen as yet by man –alone by itself –by the long ranges of the mountains of Sandwich and of Squam with sometimes MT. KEARSARGE the peak of Moose hillock the Haystack & Kearsarge reflected in its waters. Where the maple and the raspberry that lover of the mountains flourish amid temperate dews. Flowing as long and mysterious and untranslateable as its name Pemigewasset. By many a pastured Pielion and Ossa where unnamed muses haunt, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Helicon Not all these hills does it lave but I have experienced that to see the sun set behind them avails as much as to have travelled to them. From where the old Man of the Mountain overlooks one of its head waters –in the Franconia Notch, taking the basin and the Flume in its way –washing the sites of future villages –not impatient. For every mountain stream is more than Helicon, tended by oreads dryads Naiads, and such a pure and fresh inspirit draught gift of the gods as it will take a newer than this New England to know the flavor of.

Such water do the gods distill And pour down hill For their new England men. A draught of this wild water bring And I will never taste the spring Of Helicon again. But yesterday in dew it fell This morn its streams began to swell And with the sun it downward flowed So fresh it hardly knew its road. Falling all the way, not discouraged by the lowest fall –for it intends to rise again. There are earth air fire & water –very well, this is water. down it comes that is the way with it. It was already water of Squam and Newfound lake and Winnipiseogee, and White mountain snow dissolved on which we were floating –and Smith’s and Bakers and Mad rivers and Nashua and Souhegan and Piscataquoag –and Suncook & Soucook & Contoocook –mingled in incalculable proportions –still fluid yellowish restless all with an inclination seaward but boyant. Here then we will leave them to saw and grind and spin for a season, and I fear there will be no vacation at low water for they are said to have Squam and Newfound lake and Winipiseogee for their mill ponds. By the law of its birth never to become stagnant for it has come out of the clouds, and down the sides of precipices worn in the flood through beaver dams broke loose not splitting but splicing and mending itself until it found a breatheing plaace in this lowland– No danger now that the sun will steal it back to heaven again before it reach the sea for it has a warrant even to recover its own dews into its bosom again with every eve We wandered on by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains –& through notches which the stream had made –looking down one sunday morning over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabitants –like crusaders strolled out from the camp in Palestine–10 And looking in to learning’s little tenement by the way –where some literate swain earns his ten dollars by the month –after the harvest –with rows of slates and well cut benches round –as well cut as farther south –not noticing the herd of swine which had poured in at the open door, and made a congregation– So we went on over hill and dale through the stumpy rocky –woody –bepastured country –until we crossed a rude wooden bridge over the Amonnoosuck and breathed the free air of the Unappropriated Land. Now we were in a country where inns begin– And we too now began to have our ins and outs– Some sweet retired house whose sign only availed to creak but bore no Phoenix nor golden eagle but such as the sun and rain had painted there – –a demi public demi private house –where each apartment seems too private for your use –too public for your hosts. One I remember where Landlord and lady hung painted as if retired from active life –upon the wall –remarkable one might almost say –if he knew not the allowed degrees of consanguinity for 10. We wandered on (by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains — & through notches which the stream had with awe made — looking down ^one sunday morn- ing over Bethlehem amid the bleating of sheep, and hearing as we walked the loud spoken prayers of the inhabi- where every house seemd to us a holy sepulchre tants — like crusaders strolled out from Richards as if we were the camp in Palestine — (T 74) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a family likeness –a singular deflexion of the nose turned each to each –so that the total variation could not have been better represented than in the picture. –But here at any rate the cream rose thick upon the milk –and there was refreshment One “Tilton’s Inn” tooo sheltered us which it were well worth remembering, in Thornton it was where towns begin to serve as gores only to hold the world together –reached late in the evening and left before the sun rose. But the remembrance of an entertainment still remains and among publicans Tiltons name still stands conspicuous in our diary. But where we took our ease was not Canterbury street, no Four corners nor Five points –no trivial place where 3 roads meet but hardly one road held together– A dank forest path –more like an otter’s or a marten’s trail or where a beaver had dragged his trap than where the wheels of travel ever raised a dust. The pigeon sat secure above our heads high on the dead limbs of the pine reduced to robins size– The very yard of our hostelries was inclined upon the skirts of mountains and as we passed we looked up at angle at the stems of maples waving in the clouds –and late at evening we heard the drear bleating of innumerable flocks upon the mountains sides seeming to hold unequal parley with the bears Shuddered through the Franconia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agiocochook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun– And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adroscoggin “take up their mountain march– Went on our way silent & humble through the Notch –heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains late at night –looked back on Conway peak –threaded the woods of Norway pine –and saw the Great Spirit smile in Winnipiseogee11 Varro advises to plant in Quincunx order in order not to “obstruct the beneficial effects of the sun and moon and air,” and adds “nuts, when they are whole, which you might comprize in one modius, because nature confines the kernels in their proper places, when they are broken, can hardly be held in a measure of a modius and a half.” Vines thus planted produce more fruit “more must and oil, and of greater value”. I read in Varro that “Caesar Vopiscus AEdilicius, when he pleaded before the Censors, said that the grounds of Rosea were the gardens [(sedes)] of Italy, in which a pole being left would not be visible the day after, on account of the growth of the herbage.” This soil was not remarkably fertile yet I was so well contented with myself it may be & with my entertainment –that I was really remind of this anecdote. In speaking of “the dignity of the herd” Varro suggests that the object of the Argonautic expedition was a ram’s fleece the gold apples of the Hesperides were by the ambiguity of language [] goats and sheep which Hercules imported –the stars and signs bear their names the AEgean sea has its name from the goat and mountains and straits have hence their names –sic. The Bosphorus Piso makes Italy to be from Vitulis– The Romans were shepherds “Does not the fine [mulcta, a mulgendo] that was by ancient custom paid in kind refer to this?” The oldest coins bore the figures of cattle and the Roman names Porcius –Ovinus Caprilius & the surnames Equitius, Taurus, Capra Vitulus. Vide Cato “Of purchasing an Estate –” “How an estate is to be planted –” &c in Lat & Eng.

11. our way Shuddered ^through that Fran- conia where the thermometer is spliced for winter use, saw the blue earth heaved into mountain waves from Agioco- chook, and where the Umbagog Ossipee and Squam gleamed like dewy cobwebs in the sun — And like bright ribbons the streamlets of Connecticut Saco & adros- coggin “take up their mountain march — Went on our way ^silent & humble through the Notch ^— heard the lambs bleat in Bartlett on the mountains holding unequal parley with the wolves & bears late at night — ^looked back on Conway peak — threaded the woods of Norway pine — and saw the Great Spirit smile ^in Winnipiseogee (T 76-77) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I will insert here some commentary on this early draft of material that would wind up in the “Monday” chapter of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS:

A WEEK: If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, a jailer or constable it may be, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior and brutal ones. Hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening? But certainly there are modes by which a man may put bread into his mouth which will not prejudice him as a companion and neighbor.

The following is, if I recall correctly and can trust my notes, from William Bronk’s THE BROTHER IN ELYSIUM: IDEAS OF FRIENDSHIP AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES (1980), pages 104-106: The crux of the matter is that Thoreau believed that all evil did come in through the opening formed when any man might so betray his own nature as to lend himself to perform an inhuman office. While it might be contended that good and evil are something to be done at will and according to will, without reference to our own constitutions, — that we are of indifferent or irrelevant moral quality ourselves, and are able to choose between a good act and an evil one and so determine by the excess of one kind of action over the other our own moral quality and the moral quality of the world, yet it was Thoreau’s contention that the process by which good and evil came into being was more exacting and natural, less arbitrary than this. He believed that it was always necessary to make the choice between good and evil whenever such a choice was presented, but he also believed that in most cases, the choice was not presented, and that evil resulted in some mysterious way without anyone’s willing it, or being aware of it, and even to everyone’s surprise and chagrin. Thoreau accounted for this phenomenon by saying that being is more important and more effective than doing. Anything therefore might happen to us which was consistent with the nature we took for ourselves, even though the process by which the happening came about was so subtle or so complicated that we missed the apprehension of it, even after its end. If. as Thoreau said, we do outrage to our proper nature, — if we take our identity from the state, then we become liable to the evils of the state, and have no defense against war and slavery, since it has none. It is only by refusing to do the office of inferior and brutal natures that we can hope to escape, on our own part, treatment which in its brutality is suited to inferior natures. We must be treated according to the nature which we determine shall be ours. We can win or lose, or act in any other way, only in accordance with terms we set for ourselves. The identity which Thoreau wished us to find, which left no opening for the evil we claimed to deplore, was most certainly not to be found in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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state; and neither was it to be found in any other external form, for its essence was personal. It was to be found only through that steady communion with one’s deepest desires and insights, which was called silence. He found no evil and little that was ambiguous in silence. It is easier to see now, of course, why Thoreau rejected philanthropy and reform, since to find one’s identity, to become personal, was truly to ennoble one’s being; it was to enjoy those moments of serene and self-confident life which were better than whole campaigns of daring; it was to combat evil directly by leaving no opening by which it could enter. Philanthropy’s method was less direct. It offered the goodness of actions as an excuse and substitute for being. Reform was an attempt to avoid a change in true form by changing the surface only.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

During the pre-Civil War decades, about a thousand slaves were escaping per year to the North, most unattached young males from the border South. This represented only a small percentage of those attempting evasion, however, since for every slave who made it to freedom, several more tried, and for every slave who made it to freedom, there were an unknown number of free black Americans being kidnapped up North and carried South to be sold. Other fugitives remained within the South, taking temporary refuge in cities or swamps or hiding out near their plantations for days or weeks before either returning voluntarily or being tracked down and captured. This was causing the slavemasters no end of aggravation and expense!

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

(Such sentimental depictions of the fabled Underground Railroad as the above, done in the warm eye of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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retrospect as of 1893 by Charles T. Webber, are utterly tendentious. The sad fact is that it hadn’t been like that.) UNDERGROUND RAILROAD “It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1848

July 19, Wednesday: The 1st Women’s Rights convention in America began on this day, in Seneca Falls, chaired by Friend Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass was in attendance, supporting a Declaration of Sentiments based on the wording of the famous Declaration of Independence. (This would pass, signed by 68 women and 32 men.)

Resolved, that all men and women are created equal.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1850

At this point Harriet Tubman had set aside enough money from her pittance as a fugitive laundress/cook to make her first courageous trip back into the slave states, to rescue members of her family. As a conductor on the “Underground Railroad” she would be making at least 18 additional trips into slave territory and would be leading some 300 fugitives –counting her parents– to freedom. Although slaveholders would offer rewards of up to $40,000 for her capture, she would never be intercepted. During her journeys guiding other slaves to the North, she often would resort to “coaxing” weary and frightened fugitives by the waving of a loaded pistol, but somehow she managed never having to shoot a single one of her charges. From Annapolis, Maryland, if you cross the bridge linking to the Eastern Shore and drive south to Cambridge, you will arrive at the Long Wharf at which she arrived by boat to boldly manumit her sister — who was being sold on the courthouse steps a few blocks away.12

Here is the scene as imagined by one of our artists of today, Paul Collins (he would be pleased to sell you a

12. It is an interesting perspective on the noble life of Harriet Tubman, that the family name “Tubman” was an occupational title, a synonym for “nightsoil-collector,” in the manner in which a white family might know itself as Cooper (barrel-maker) or Fletcher (arrow-maker). One may imagine that the humor of the situation –that they were being carried north to freedom by a tubman and were therefore analogous to human wastes– would not have been lost on the black escapees whom this Underground Railroad conductor escorted out of the South. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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print):

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

February:In a course of lectures on the “Social Destiny of Man” delivered at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Dr. Albert T. Bledsoe, professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and a published proslavery ideologue, critiqued the excessive individualism of abolitionists as constituting a threat to the Union and projected that secession might be expected as the result of their efforts.

At about this time John Brown, Jr., James Redpath, Thaddeus Hyatt, and Lewis Hayden were being summoned before Senator James Mason’s special investigatory committee of the US Senate to be interrogated about the details of the Harpers Ferry conspiracy, and Brown, Jr., in hiding in Ohio, was refusing to respond. When the committee was made aware that they had summoned a person of color to incriminate himself before them, they backtracked and rescinded their warrant on Hayden,13 and warrants were made out only in the names of Brown, Jr., Redpath, and Hyatt. Of these, only Hyatt would actually come before the committee in chains, and he, upon refusing to testify, would be remanded to the District of Columbia’s prison.

John C. Rutherfoord, a legislator from Virginia, ventured to mention the explicit linkage which was being made between the Secret “Six” supporters of Northern white abolitionists such as John Brown and the supporters of Southern white abolitionist racists such as Hinton Rowan Helper, by referring to them in a pot category “admirers of Brown and endorsers of Helper.” The author of the incendiary THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH: HOW TO MEET IT, which offered a commonality of interest between the poor white man of the North and the poor white man of the South against the interests of the rich white man of the South with his substantial investment in his African chattels, was perhaps the most dangerous man, from their point of view, in our nation — more dangerous by far than any mere deluded idealist such as Brown could ever hope to

13. This would count as another of the many evidences that the business of the committee was the suppression of information as to the nature of the conspiracy, rather than any public disclosure of its real extent or purpose. Had they been intent on finding out anything, when they discovered that Hayden was a black man they would have had him tortured to death! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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become.

Helper had, of course, fled his native South to avoid assassination by indignant rich white men, seeking the shelter afforded by New-York.

Henry Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” and “The Martyrdom of John Brown” were published in James Redpath, ed., ECHOES OF HARPER’S FERRY. Clearly, Henry was attempting to find some way to spin the treason situation by reconstructing Captain Brown as a sort of hero of civil disobedience along the lines of Sir Thomas More or Friend Mary Dyer: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1867

2d edition, posthumous, of James Robert Ballantyne’s THE LAGHU KAUMUDI, A SANSKRIT GRAMMAR, BY VARADARÁJA.

2,000 Chinese railroad workers staged a week-long strike protesting inhumane and racist conditions.14 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

On the dedication page to his NOJOQUE, A QUESTION FOR A CONTINENT, Hinton Rowan Helper supposed that the American nation could be rendered all-white by 1876, our centennial year: “No Slave nor Would-be Slave, No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative Indian, No Black nor Bi-colored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality [should ever again be allowed to] find Domicile anywhere within the Boundaries of the United States.” HINTON ROWAN HELPER

Reading between the lines of this, we may infer that Helper’s phrase “unnative Indian” was intended to allow that since native Americans had not been brought from anywhere else, it made precious little sense to ask them to go back where they came from. SLAVERY

14. Please understand that the nonviolent civil disobedience in this incident was entirely on the side of the Chinese. There was no nonviolence on the part of white Americans. They burned a number of the Chinese laborers alive, and scalped, mutilated, branded, decapitated, dismembered, and hanged others from gutterspouts. One Chinese man’s penis and testicles were severed and toasts were drunk to them at a nearby saloon, as a “trophy of the hunt.” The event would come to be known as the “Rock Springs Massacre.” (It goes to show you, that civil disobedience is not the sort of tactic that will function well, when the opposing group is incapable of shame.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1871

King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s conservatory on the roof was completed at the München Residenz (royal apartment).

During the Franco-Prussian War, 1,000 women in Paris blocked cannons and stood between Prussian and Parisian troops. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

June: In several US cities and in England, Switzerland, Italy, and Turkey, Mother’s Day was celebrated — a peace holiday that had in 1870 been proposed by Julia Ward Howe. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Arise then ... women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God — In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1891

Ida B. Wells started her lifelong anti-lynching campaign by establishing her own newspaper, the Memphis Free Speech, to draw attention to the brutal lynch-mob murders of African-Americans. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1898

February 15, Tuesday: The USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing 260. Although this was most likely an accident, the convenient incident would in April enable a US declaration of war.

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

Thousands of Americans would protest this Spanish-American War. Leaders would include Mark Twain, the author of “A War Prayer” and other works on the folly of war. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1901

Through nonviolent resistance over a period of some five years, Finns would oblige Russia to repeal laws that had imposed a military draft. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1906

September 11, Tuesday: In perhaps the initial event in the 20th Century’s history of nonviolent resistance, 3,000 Indians gathered in the Empire Theater of Johannesburg, South Africa for an indignation meeting, to oppose the Transvaal pass law newly enacted on August 22d. The final speaker of the approximately 20 speakers was the organizer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. A few hours later the theater was burned to the ground. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1907

Bubonic Plague killed 1,200,000 in India.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a British-educated Indian lawyer in prison in Pretoria, South Africa, read “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”:

The Thoreau-Gandhi entente has ... become a straw for Indo-American amity for both nations to clutch at on appropriate occasion. The Thoreau Centennial provided such an occasion in 1962, and the Indian Ambassador to the United States made a whole log out of this straw when he delivered his address at the dedication of Malvina Hoffman’s bust of Thoreau in the Hall of Fame at New York University.

Thoreau’s essay titled “Civil Disobedience” was republished in a South African newspaper Indian Opinion which Gandhi was editing.

The leading anarchist journal in the US, Liberty, began to claim “Civil Disobedience” as an “anarchist classic.” However, these people were still focusing more upon Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman than upon Henry Thoreau. (And they were paying no attention at all to actual US legal enactment and precedent.)

Publication of the Reverend James Wood’s THE NUTTALL ENCYCLOPÆDIA BEING A CONCISE AND COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE CONSISTING OF OVER 16,000 TERSE AND ORIGINAL ARTICLES ON NEARLY ALL SUBJECTS DISCUSSED IN LARGER ENCYCLOPÆDIAS, AND SPECIALLY DEALING WITH SUCH AS COME UNDER THE CATEGORIES OF HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND ART: THE SEVEN SAGES OF GREECE: • Solon of Athens, his motto “Know thyself” • Chilo of Sparta, his motto “Consider the end” • Thales of Miletus, his motto “Whoso hateth suretyship is sure” • Bias of Priene, his motto “Most men are bad” • Cleobulus of Lindos, his motto “Avoid extremes” • Pittacus of Mitylene, his motto “Seize Time by the forelock” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• Periander of Corinth, his motto “Nothing is impossible to industry.”

WILLIAM TELL, Swiss hero and patriot, a peasant, native of the canton of Uri, who flourished in the beginning of the 14th century; resisted the oppression of the Austrian governor Gessler, and was taken prisoner, but was promised his liberty if with his bow and arrow he could hit an apple on the head of his son, a feat he accomplished with one arrow, with the second arrow in his belt, which he told Gessler he had kept to shoot him with if he had failed. This so incensed the governor that he bound him to carry off to his castle; but as they crossed the lake a storm arose, and Tell had to be unbound to save them, when he leapt upon a rock and made off, to lie in ambush, whence he shot the oppressor through the heart as he passed him; a rising followed, which ended only with the emancipation of Switzerland from the yoke of Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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(People still play around with this legend. For instance, on January 16, 2001, at a circus performance in Paris, Mme Cathy Jamet has been shot in the face by a crossbow arrow fired by her husband M Alain Jamet.)

William Denison McCrackan’s THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES: BEING THE RECORD OF PILGRIMAGES TO FAMILIAR AND UNFAMILIAR PLACES OF THE “LAKES OF AZURE, LAKES OF LEISURE,” TOGETHER WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THEIR QUAINT TOWNS AND VILLA GARDENS AND THE TREASURES OF THEIR ART AND HISTORY (Boston: L.C. Page & Co.) (1908, 1913, 1918). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1908

The journalist Willing English Walling reported on a race riot for the liberal weekly New York Independent, describing the plight of US blacks. Social worker Mary White Ovington contacted him, and in the following year the result would be the founding of the NAACP. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1909

The completion of the Manhattan Bridge. The National Negro Committee was formed in New York City by founding members W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Terrell (this committee would be reorganized in the following year as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1914

The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded as World War I began, pledging to “keep the bonds of Christian love unbroken across the frontier.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Dr. Bernard Weil mobilized into the French army soon after the outbreak of World War I. The family, including André Weil, born in 1906, would move each time he was transferred. SIMONE WEIL

During the “Great War” Otto Frank would be serving in the German Army and would reach the rank of lieutenant (later on, he would have occasion to discover that this having been a good soldier wouldn’t really serve to obtain for him or for his family any particular credit as “good Germans” — go figure). ANTISEMITISM

ANNE FRANK

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1917

January 10, Wednesday: Buffalo Bill became Mister Death’s favorite.15

National Woman’s Party pickets held up two banners in our nation’s puzzle palace, Washington DC: “Mr. President, What Will You Do For Woman Suffrage?” and “How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty?” These pickets would rotate hourly, on the sidewalk outside President Woodrow Wilson’s White House, for half a year. Their banners would become more and more offensive. Police would begin arresting suffragettes who were picketing there, and some, including Paul and Lucy Burns, would go on hunger strike while in jail; their militancy would meet with sympathy from some quarters but disdain from others. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE FEMINISM

July 23, Monday: When NAACP officials including W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson led a silent Protest Parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue as a civil disobedience demonstration against the East St. Louis riots of 3 weeks earlier, almost 10,000 people joined the procession.

15. A month after his death the US military would negate his Medal of Honor on the grounds that since he had been a mere mercenary civilian rather than a soldier, he shouldn’t have received anything more than his contracted cash payment for services rendered. They would never make an attempt, however, to recover the medal itself from the surviving family — and much later on, a special tribunal would in Cody’s individual case reassert this heroism award since civilian or not he had in fact led the soldiers in a cavalry charge against their enemy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 27-28: The prison “alienist” (psychiatrist) having refused to declare Friend Alice Stokes Paul16 insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized, the jailed White House pickets of the National Woman’s Party, still on hunger strike, were unconditionally released.

(Friend Alice, being force fed at the Occoquan Workhouse) FEMINISM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

16. Friend Alice, a graduate of Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the leaders of the National Woman’s Party. She would receive a law degree in 1922. She is the author of the Equal Rights Amendment: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1918

Conscientious objectors in World War I numbered more than 4,000. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The US law of conscription was encapsulated during 1918 in Selective Draft Law Cases, 245 US 366. There was less tolerance of conscientious objection than even during the US Civil War. At Alcatraz, 17 of these draft resisters would die of maltreatment. MILITARY CONSCRIPTION

! OHNE MICH

This is not a photograph of Alcatraz while it was being used to house the American COs who died of maltreatment, but of a British prison in use for the same purpose of the isolation and neutralization of attitudes HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of conscientious objection, in this same period (I do not know of any Brits who died of maltreatment):

“In the course of one year of conscription, 64,693 made application to be excused from combatant status, and of this number, 3,989 desired exemption also from non-combatant duty. Of this number, 99 consented to be sent to France and to engage in reconstruction activities, 1,200 worked on farms, and in other ways their number was reduced to 503, who were given prison sentences.”

“A total of 1,461 [were found to be sincere]. Those found to be insincere numbered 103. The remaining cases HDT WHAT? INDEX

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were disposed of by various means.” Here is a group of WWI conscientious objectors, photographed in prison:

In Illinois during this year, German-born American Robert Prager failed to stand during our national anthem. Stripped of most of his clothes, he was forced to kiss the American flag. He was bound with strips of cloth torn from an American flag and lynched before a cheering crowd of some 500 or more people. When those responsible were brought to trial, their defense was the “unwritten law” and the jury acquitted in less than an hour, characterizing what had happened as “patriotic murder.” COLDBLOODED MURDER

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1919

February 23, Sunday: In Italy, Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci italiani di Combattimento.

PROTO-NAZISM

In Ahmadabad, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi appealed for civil disobedience against the proposed Rowlatt Acts (these regulations allowed, in political cases, trial without jury and internment without trial; it was his initial public action against British rule in India). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1920

August 26, Thursday: The 19th Amendment to the federal Constitution went into effect. Amendment XIX The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. FEMINISM

Charlotte Woodward and Rhoda Palmer, the only surviving attendees of the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, were in attendance at the ceremony marking the completion of this process (only Woodward would live long enough actually to be able to insert a ballot in a ballot box). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 17, Sunday: Irish nationalist Michael Fitzgerald died in prison after a hunger strike of 68 days. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 25, Monday: King Alexandros of Greece died from infection following a bite by a pet monkey.

The Romanian army intervened in a general strike demanding the right to join trade unions. All unions were banned and strike leaders were arrested.

Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died in prison after a hunger strike of 74 days (an Irish nationalist, MacSwiney was protesting his sentence for possessing seditious materials). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1921

The 7-ton white marble statue commissioned of Adelaide Johnson by the National Women’s Party, depicting Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, and Friend Lucretia Mott, to commemorate the passage, in 1920, of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, was presented to the all-male Congress. The three portrait busts are copies of the ones she had carved for the Court of Honor of the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. A black Belgian marble base and a white Carrara marble base would be donated by Adelaide Johnson in 1925. However, the black stone would arrive broken and would not be replaced by the artist until 1929. By 1930 both pieces would be installed, and it would soon be being referred to as “Three Women in a Bathtub.” After a struggle among representatives with differing attitudes, and a temporary exhibit on the Rotunda, the three practitioners of civil disobedience would be secreted in a broom closet in the basement. The government brochure now lists the vitas of the three figures as: • Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1865 to 1893; author of the woman’s bill of rights, which she read at the Seneca Falls, New York, convention in 1848; first to demand the vote for women. • Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), abolitionist, temperance advocate, and later president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, who joined with Stanton in 1851 to promote woman suffrage; proposed the constitutional amendment passed many years after her death. • Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), Quaker reformer and preacher, who worked for abolition, peace, and equality for women in jobs and education; organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, convention, which launched the women’s rights movement.

FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1923

20,000 women silk workers in Shanghai, China went on strike demanding a 10-hour day (there doesn’t seem to be any record that they accomplished something by this). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

We were supposing that the way humans should go about correcting situations was by killing something, and were spraying DDT all the way from Long Island Sound up to the border with Canada to once and for all get rid of Leopold Trouvelot’s gypsy moth, that he had supposed would produce silk. Instead we got rid of a lot of robins and were unhappy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1927

The Filipino Federation of Labor was organized in the face of rising discrimination. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Henry Beston spent this year, as well as the previous one, in his 16’x24’ two-room shack “Fo’castle” on the Cape Cod’s great beach near Eastham, three miles south of Nauset Light. He would describe this in THE OUTERMOST HOUSE (New York 1928). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1928

The League of Latin American Citizens was organized in the face of rising discrimination. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The printer Carl Purington Rollins used his own home hand-press “At the Sign of the Chorobates” to produce a fine edition of ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1929

September 18, Wednesday: Henry S. Salt wrote to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi asking whether he had been influenced by Henry Thoreau. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 12, Saturday: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi responded to Henry S. Salt’s letter that: I was agreeably surprised to receive your letter. Yes, indeed your book which was the first English book I came across on vegetarianism was of immense help to me in steadying my faith in vegetarianism. My first introduction to Thoreau’s writings was, I think, in 1907, or late[r], when I was in the thick of passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. It left a deep impression on me. I translated a portion of that essay for the readers of Indian Opinion in South Africa which I was then editing, and I made copious extracts from that essay for that paper. That essay seemed to be so convincing and truthful that I felt the need of knowing more about Thoreau, and I came across your Life of him, his “Walden” and other short essays, all of which I read with great pleasure and equal profit.

RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1930

The Japanese American Citizens League was organized in the face of rising discrimination.

During the “Salt March,” Richard Bartlett Gregg returned to India as an observer and authored “Gandhiji’s Satyagraha or Non-Violent Resistance.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1933

A.J. Muste abandoned his Christian pacifism, becoming an avowed Marxist-Leninist. He would be a key figure in organizing the sit-down strikes of this decade and would merge his group of activists with James Cannon of the Trotskyist movement, to create the Trotskyist Workers Party of America. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Putting aside temporarily his duties as dean of the school of religion at Duke University, Dr. Elbert Russell used his sabbatical year to go with his wife Lieuetta Cox Russell on a world tour, to Japan, China, India, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Greece. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

The Catholic Worker was founded by Dorothy Day, a newspaper reporter, and Peter Maurin, a self-taught French peasant, emphasizing pacifism, hospitality to the poor, and voluntary poverty. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1934

Richard Bartlett Gregg’s THE POWER OF NON VIOLENCE, which in 1960 would be revised as THE POWER OF NON-VIOLENCE and republished with a foreword by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

George Mills Houser matriculated at the University of Denver. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1940

Fall: Eight students at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, although eligible for deferment, refused to register for the draft. William Lovell, Richard Wichlei, Meredith Dallas, David Dellinger, Joseph Bevilacqua, George Mills Houser, Donald Benedict, and Howard Spragg would spend a year in prison.17

“Hell no, I won’t go.” MILITARY CONSCRIPTION

In a Columbia University laboratory on Manhattan Island, in what would become “the Manhattan Project,” Enrico Fermi’s team of physicists split the atom. ATOM BOMB

17. Michael Meyer has asserted that “There was not one American analysis of even article length on “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” ... prior to the 1940s.” However, at the Library of Congress there are about 17,000 books concerning Jesus (the second most favorite topic, Shakespeare, having merely some 8,000+ titles). You don’t suppose therefore that these students had been reading in one or another of the many books about Jesus, and that reading had turned them into subversives? HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 16, Wednesday: Tres Piezas op.6 for piano by Alberto Ginastera was performed for the initial time, in Montevideo.

This was “Registration Day” for the 1st peacetime draft in US history. Over 16,000,000 American men lined up as demanded by the Selective Training and Service Act. The Union 8, eight seminarians of the Union Theology Seminary in Manhattan, young men who anyway would be immune to the draft, refused to register and were taken into custody. Among them were Dave Dellinger and George Houser.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MILITARY CONSCRIPTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1941

June: The Reverend George Mills Houser helped the Reverend A.J. Muste and A. Philip Randolph organize their March on Washington against racial discrimination in the armed forces (the demonstration would be called off when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25th, using the Fair Employment Act to bar discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1942

Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. dropped out of Northeastern University in Boston.

George Mills Houser completed ministerial training at the Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Methodist elder, deacon, and minister. He married there in Chicago. He and his wife would produce a son, Steven Houser. He became Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and would work closely with the Reverend A.J. Muste, the leader of the organization. He, James Farmer, and Friend Bayard Rustin established the Congress on Racial Equality (members of this “CORE” had been deeply influenced by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that he used successfully against British rule in India and had convinced themselves that the same confrontational methods of nonviolent civil disobedience could be employed by African Americans to obtain civil rights in America).

German students from the White Rose resistance movement against the Hitler regime distributed thousands of leaflets exposing the nature of the Nazis and their treatment of Jews. They urged “obstruction of the war machine by passive resistance, including sabotage.” Several of its leaders would in 1943 be tortured to death, and several guillotined. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1945

During World War II, Finland had saved all but six of its Jewish citizens from death camps through nonmilitary means. In the case of Denmark, 6,500 of 7,000 Jews had escaped to Sweden and most of the rest had been hidden, and aided by the people. In Holland, a rail worker strike almost shut down traffic from November 1944 until liberation in May 1945. In Norway similar resistance, such as teachers refusing to disseminate Nazi propaganda, undermined the extermination effort. Romania at first persecuted its Jews, but then refused to give up even one Jew to the death camps, with thousands of Bulgarians marching in demonstrations, hiding Jews and posting countless letters protesting anti-Jewish measures — Bishop Kiril had threatened to lead civil disobedience and lie down on the tracks in front of trains. ANTISEMITISM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Winter: Because the proud papa and “absolutist” war prisoner John R. Kellam was refusing to do any prison work at the minimum-security prison in Milan, Michigan that might free someone else to kill, he was placed in “administrative segregation”: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE So I was labeled as an absolutist. I was sent to administrative segregation. There were two others [other draft refusers] in that segregation row at the top of that cell block; one, Leroy Shafer, was two cells to my right, as I would look out through the bars. On my left was a young Quaker, John Stokes, who came from an old Philadelphia area family. He was very quiet, in contemplation of his inclination to join the Roman Catholic Church. I remember his describing all of the major religions as built essentially of legends and symbolism, none much more or less productive of pacifist ideals carried into action. Another, Wally Nelson, was in the second cell to my left, next to a man to be executed. We had cinderblock walls between us — the bars were open and we could hear each other. To my right, between Leroy and me, there was a German prisoner of war, Gerhart Gutzat, a tank corps sergeant from Rommel’s army. He’d been captured by the Americans or the British as they were chasing the Germans and being chased by them, alternately back and forth along the north rim of Africa. Gerhart was a graduate of Hitler’s youth corps before he got drafted into their army and assigned to duty in the Afrika Korps. He was not enjoying his incarceration any more than we were so I let him find out as much as he was pleased to find out about me. LeRoy Schafer who was on the other side of him in the next cell at the end, a young Brethren from Durand, Michigan, did the same. LeRoy was a different kind of a CO in some ways than I was. We were all different! Ha-ha! But thoroughly respecting each other and glad that each other had stayed out of all the killing. Well, this tank corps officer was a little bit younger than I and he’d been through a lot of combat. He’d seen terrible things. I think he was being perfectly loyal, understanding what he did and the way he was raised so that he really couldn’t pretend to understand our viewpoint. But he was personally friendly and he HDT WHAT? INDEX

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could speak English just well enough so that we got along fine. Then one day that awful copy of LIFE Magazine came through. Every week we had been passing that magazine along with all the pictures and so on. The old kind of LIFE Magazine full of pictures. This was the issue that announced to all Americans and others wherever LIFE Magazine went, abroad, the concentration/ extermination camps discovered in Germany, Austria and Poland and with pictures of mounds of dead bodies and of fewer survivors in pitiful condition. So this was in the winter and early spring of ‘45 that I got to know Gerhard Gutzat, the tank corps officer who was a POW. He’d been in British war prison and then was transferred over here and was put into any opening that they had in our prison system. The COs in prison didn’t help with making space available for POWs! (Ha-ha-ha!) But anyway, that was interesting. I saw this LIFE Magazine that came down the row, which first was given to the condemned prisoner who was on death row. He was three cells to my left, two other guys in between, including one I never did get to know very well.18 Wally Nelson was pretty quiet. The other one was one of the angry, uneducated criminal types that had been in violence. I guess it was because they didn’t know any better. They weren’t having any of this nonsense from anybody who was in jail for trying to be good! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! That was out of their world too far! Anyway, when I saw this LIFE Magazine, I kept thinking as I read about all this horrible concentration camp system, what’s Gerhart going to think when he sees this? Does he know anything about this going on? I wonder, I wonder, I wonder. So, before I gave it to him, I said, “Gerhart, I have the new LIFE Magazine, which I have seen and I’m ready to pass it to you but I should warn you first, it’s unlike any previous issue that was ever printed by LIFE Magazine. You’ve seen a variety of them already, but this tells a terrible story and I warn you it’s pretty rough to look at.” “Well,” he said, “from what I’ve seen in the war, there’s nothing very rough that I could be surprised about.” “Well,” I said, “all right, Gerhart, but I think you’re going to be surprised about this.” So I handed it to him. I said, “If you don’t want to talk to me about this, that’s all right and maybe you’d prefer that, but if you would like to talk to me at all about it, I’m willing and it’s been shocking to me. So, we’ll see what you think.” There was silence for a long time, much longer than any previous time when he’d been passing a magazine over to the CO, Leroy, in the far cell. Then he said, “John?” “Yes, Gerhard?” He said, “There is something about this war that I never realized.” 18. The condemned man had had two or three execution dates set and then postponed. One day when his case had been in court, but they didn’t take him on that appeal, two guards came in and shouted his name and marched over to the front of his cell and started talking smart about his having lost his appeal and making cracks about how they were probably going to “fry” him after all. They brought with them a length of chain and very noisily they wound this chain up and around his door, through the bars various ways, and put a padlock on it. Well, this condemned prisoner was telling the guards how absolutely ridiculous they were being with this phony security chain and he asked if the warden knew that they were cutting up like this. So he and the guards had a very strong dislike of each other which seemed to be very personal.... I remember it as if it was yesterday. It’s amazing how some experiences don’t fade at all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I said, “I’m glad you didn’t know anything about this before but I’m sorry you have to know about it now.” He said, “That isn’t what I meant. Until now, I didn’t think any military organization in the world was as skillful at concocting propaganda as it shows the American military organization has been to get all of this into LIFE Magazine. I don’t know how they did it, these piles of bodies. They’ve gotta be fake!” “Well,” I said, “Gerhart, I’m afraid they are not. I don’t think it would be possible for any organization ever to become skillful enough to create this kind of a humbug propaganda. This can’t be false.” For one thing, I thought, if this is a false story, LIFE Magazine is dead! But they want to keep on publishing. It’s a lucrative publication. They make a lot of money through subscriptions. I told him, “They’ll probably get a few people cancelling their subscriptions because it’s too rough and they don’t want their children to see it, or they don’t believe it, just as you don’t believe it. You don’t think it really happened, do you?” He said, “No! It couldn’t have happened!” So, after a while I said to him, “Gerhart, I would be interested if you would care to tell me why you think it could not have happened.” “That’s simple enough,” he said. “If anybody in Germany, or occupied areas in Central Europe, had tried to organize this kind of a crime of exterminating a whole big group of people, Hitler wouldn’t have stood for it! Such a person or group would have been put down immediately. Their career in any organization run by the Third Reich would be over! They would have completely discredited themselves. Nothing like this could happen in Germany! Or any occupied area controlled by Germany!” I said, “Gerhart, I wish it could be true the way you believe but the way this is presented it’s an awfully hard thing for me not to believe.” Well, Gerhart lived for one purpose, and this isn’t about me now, but it’s part of my experience. His family in the free city of Danzig in the metropolitan area east of Pomerania in Poland had been overrun by the Russians, and many of the German people in the small towns were killed. The Russians wanted that area to develop as vacant land would be developed. They were absolutely ruthless and had no respect for civilians. “So,” he said, “My family all got murdered. I’m the only one left that I know of. Since before I went into the army, having been in the part of Poland that the Russians didn’t get to control, I was not in that and I am the only survivor as far as I know. After this whole war is over, if I ever get repatriated back to Germany, I’m going to make it the business of my life for as long as it takes to find out who it was, probably among the Russians, that are responsible for my family all having been killed. I’m going to get revenge for that if it’s the last thing I ever do.” I said, “Gerhart, it’s an awful thing to live for, just to get that done. In a big war, even in a little one, there are all kinds of hateful things that happen. If people spent the rest of their lives still fighting that war in one way or another, HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

it would never be possible for wars to cease. We’ve got to forget any vengeful feelings we might have had after the awful things that happen. Because otherwise there’s no way out of this for the world.” Well, I didn’t convince him.

There was one notable conscientious objector particularly at Milan just then and his name was Corbett Bishop. He was from Alabama and he didn’t cooperate at all with any draft board or any war official of any kind. He’d been in and out of prison several times, cat and mouse, and he had thought his way through so thoroughly that he didn’t feel that he should pick up his food and put it in him. He also didn’t take care of his own excrement so they tied a diaper on him. He was certainly a much more thoroughgoing absolutist than I ever dreamed of being. We were aware that he was in the prison hospital in a little single patient cell. He was being fed by tubes through his nose, into

his stomach, a thick kind of grainy food substance, not too unlike a malted milk except that it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t ice- HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

creamy, but it was nourishing enough. So they were keeping him alive for quite a long while. He had been transferred to Milan in a sedan with two officers, he was in the back seat, and he wouldn’t agree not to run away, so they had leg irons on him and handcuffs, ha-ha-ha! And there was an accident. Their car went out of control and down a ditch and up into a field, a cultivated farm field and it had rolled over. The two guards who were taking him to another prison were bruised up a little bit, but they got out of the car. There weren’t any seatbelts in those days. Corbett was jammed down between the back seat and the back side of the front seat, a one bench front seat, and it had jammed back on him so he was pretty tightly squeezed in there. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t any more injured than he was. They came over and asked him if he was all right. He didn’t answer. He just looked at them, but he wasn’t communicating with them before. They had even offered to take the leg irons and handcuffs off if he’d walk in to have lunch with them at the stop, but he wasn’t giving any cooperation to them or to anyone whatsoever in any position of authority over him. He didn’t recognize that authority at all but they were demanding information from him as to how his body felt. When he kept on this non-cooperative basis, as before, they said, “Oh come on for God’s sake, Corbett, answer us will you please? We’re concerned about you! You’re not supposed to get banged up while you’re in our charge. If you are we’ve got to get you to a hospital and get you attended to. So will you please let us know how you are?” So he said, “All right, fellas, don’t worry, I’m O.K.” They let him out of that jammed position and he sat up and the bruises, if there were any, were very slight. But, he went right back into his regular completely passive role and they somehow got back on the road and got the car fixed up and continued the trip. He was duly delivered. Ha-ha-ha-ha!... Anyway, at Milan, Michigan, I had declined a haircut. I had been letting my hair grow. I didn’t think I should ask for or accept any unnecessary services from the prison. I wasn’t offering the prison any of my energies and I didn’t want to take from the prison any more energies than I had to. But somebody decided I needed a haircut. It was offered to me and I declined and it was offered to me another time or two! I still declined. So one of the guards decided he’d had enough nonsense with this fella. He said to me, “Come on, you’re getting a haircut!” “I didn’t ask for one and I don’t feel entitled to it.” “Well, but you are. Are you coming?” “No.” So he took hold of my shoulder and I went down on the floor. He grabbed my hair and dragged me out by the hair, out of the doorway of the cell, down the corridor and into the little anteroom beyond the big lever that closed all the doors at once. He sat on me and another guard appeared and did a very quick job with the clippers and pretty soon there was a pile of hair on the floor. So they swept those up and said that I could stay here if I wanted to or go back to my cell. Anyway, they were beginning to let the inmates out to go up the stairs to the roof for an exercise period. So I picked myself up and I don’t HDT WHAT? INDEX

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remember if I went up on the roof or back to my cell.19 After recreation we were all expected to close our own cell doors. A CO named Wally Nelson walked in to his cell and we heard various doors clanging and then the guard at the end, where the big lever was, yelled down to cell number eight, “Shut the door!” Quick as a wink Wally said, “I don’t close cell doors! I wouldn’t close them on anybody else and I won’t close them on myself.” So the guard came down and flung his door shut. I thought it was going to break the door. With all that heavy steel it made a terrible noise. So Wally didn’t go up for recreation until they said he was going to agree to close his own cell door first. I don’t know what the ultimate outcome was of all that. But you could just feel the principle crackling. I’d like to tell you about a serious dream I had at Milan, Michigan. It was a couple of months before Franklin Roosevelt died. I was thinking over what I knew of Tyler Kent’s story. The dream was about my being a visitor in a long line of visitors to the White House. We were given the usual tour. It wasn’t until decades later that I would really go through the White House. But in my dream, it was while the war was still going on, Roosevelt was still president and we had actually been ushered into the Oval Office for a few minutes and Roosevelt made some pretty little speech to us. Then we were ushered out. I was in the tail end of the procession going out and I hesitated in the doorway. Roosevelt said, “Do you have something you wanted to say to me?”

I said, “Well, I’m not sure I want to say this to you but I feel extremely critical of you for what I know of your messages to 19. [T]here was another hair-dragging that I saw. The CO’s name was Larry Gara. He was at Lewisburg and he had had a tooth infection for several days that kept on getting worse. He had asked to see the dentist and they put him off. It got even worse so he was pretty miserable with pain in the jaw. So on the way to breakfast he decided that he was hurting too much to enjoy any breakfast anyway. The route that they took, being marched through the halls, went right past the dentist office so he stepped out of line and sat down on the waiting bench outside the dentist office. The guards were immediately alarmed at anything out of the way. They tried to pick him up off the bench and get him marching again. His legs went limp to jelly and he slid to the floor and one of the guards who had quite a reputation for roughing up inmates, grabbed his hair and yanked him along the floor, terrazzo floors that were pretty well polished, it must have been a good two hundred feet sliding down that long corridor lying down, and dropped his head in front of the elevator and pushed the button. I was taking a walk around the center area between the two rows of beds in the hospital ward that I was in, so I walked out there to the hall to watch what was going on, just out of ordinary curiosity, and this guard who had been dragging Larry came over to me and barked at me that I should get back in the ward. As far as he could tell, I didn’t hear a word of it. I just stood there mildly looking on, so he grabbed me by an elbow, pulled it up tight and I went down on the floor. My feet weren’t obeying him and neither was the rest of me. So he suddenly flipped around there and yelled to another guard who was with him, “See what they give us?” — as though he were the one being harassed by me. I just stayed there listening, not moving, and then the elevator door opened and he grabbed Larry somehow, maybe by the collar or something, threw him into the elevator and the door closed. The action was all over and nothing else was happening so I picked myself up and continued walking around the ward. That guard’s name was Steininger. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

and from Churchill trying to get this country attacked by Japan so that we could declare war on them and then war against Germany could begin, they being part of the tripartite.” I proceeded to tell him exactly what I thought of the kind of perfidious performance that I was aware of on his part. I told him how it confirmed very strongly and deeply my own determination not to be a part of any war whatever, for any government, under any pretext. That dream was so vivid through my waking that it has stayed with me ever since. What I welcomed it for most of all was that it reconfirmed for me the depth of my own commitment, my own convictions about war and peace. I knew that it wasn’t some contrived surface attitude and this really was a welcome revelation for me. I have the same attitude precisely even in my dreams, despite all the rest that dreaming does in terms of crazy fantasy! But this was not crazy at all.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1952

December 16, Tuesday: Professor Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University, who had been an adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists during World War II, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Washington DC on seven counts of perjury (the Sinologist has been the subject of investigations into Communists in the government by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy; the perjury trial would occupy three years and it would be discovered that while the Soviet Union was our ally and Stalin our friend the Professor had made comments sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Stalin, and it would be revealed that he had used the term “feudal” (a term sometimes used by Communists) — all charges against him would eventually be dismissed but this trial would effectively bring his long academic career to an end). WORLD WAR II

Potti Sriramulu died after a hunger strike of 58 days in support of the creation of a new state from the Telugu- speaking areas of Madras state. Riots ensued, in which five died. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

In Baden-Baden, String Quartet no.2 by Hans Werner Henze was performed for the initial time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1953

Having been convicted and imprisoned in Pasadena, California, on a morals charge (homosexual behavior), Friend Bayard Rustin was expelled by A.J. Muste from the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

At the age of 68 A.J. Muste “retired” and became the leader of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, an organization whose members sailed ships into nuclear test zones in the Pacific, hopped barbed wire fences into nuclear installations in this country, and went out in rowboats to try to block the launching of American nuclear submarines.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1954

Summer: A Quaker committee involving Stephen G. Cary, Chairman, James E. Bristol, Amiya Chakravarty, A. Burns Chalmers, William B. Edgerton, Harrop A. Freeman, Robert Gilmore, Cecil E. Hinshaw, Milton Sanford Mayer, the Reverend A.J. Muste, Clarence E. Pickett, Robert Pickus, and Norman J. Whitney, and Bayard Rustin,20 was struggling to create a new pamphlet about peace. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

They titled their 71-page tract, which would be immensely influential, SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER: A QUAKER SEARCH FOR AN ALTERNATIVE TO VIOLENCE. It would be the 4th in a series that the American Friends Service Committee was publishing on aspects of US foreign policy. SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER THE ABOVE, REDONE NOW

This injunction “Speak truth to power” has since become one on which we Quakers have learned to rely. ABOUT THE COLD WAR

This document is powerful because it forcefully engaged the American assumptions underlying the Cold War. Its best known section is probably its final one, “An Affirmation.” Here is the first tantalizing paragraph of that final section: There is a politics of time, but there is also a politics of eternity that man would ignore, but cannot. He plays with the politics of time, sees it, manipulates it, imagines it as of himself alone; but both the politics of time and of eternity are of God. Only the eye of faith perceives the relationship, for it alone glimpses the dimension of eternity. Man sees but dimly, yet enough to know the overarching Power that moves in the affairs of men. Because we are first men of faith, and only secondarily political analysts, we would speak now, finally, of the politics of eternity which has undergirded the whole.

20. Friend Bayard’s name would not appear because, he agreed, as a homosexual who would eventually be convicted of engaging in illicit sexual activities in Los Angeles in 1953, this might well have compromised the work’s acceptance. According to the recollections of the clerk of the committee, Stephen Cary, however, it had been around Rustin and Pickus that the group had coalesced. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

This may be the most powerful statement of pacifism as yet achieved in this country, and it would be well worth your while to give it a read from beginning to end. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

When after the publication of this pamphlet the committee would be asked, how they had managed to come up with their neato injunction, “Speak truth to power,” they would respond that they weren’t sure except that it must have been found somewhere in Quaker tradition. The problem then has been, to figure out from whence in the Quaker tradition this injunction had been derived. Over the years since 1954, many yellowing Quaker treatises have been scanned without anyone being able to come up with the expected Quaker precedent. (Someone suggested that, since Friend Milton’s background was Jewish, the source might have been somewhere in his tradition, so Jewish literature also has been scanned — but to no avail.)21

We have noticed a story that when Zilu asked Confucius how to serve a prince, Confucius advised “Tell him the truth, even if it offends him.” So we have posed for ourselves a question, might Mayer have gotten this from Confucius?

We have noticed that in an 1828 essay on the poet Robert Burns placed in the Edinburgh Review by Thomas Carlyle, one of the tropes the poet utilized was “How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?” So we have posed for ourselves the question, might Mayer have been a fan of Burns, or Carlyle?

Recently this puzzle has, I think, been solved! The phrase this committee had picked up in the summer of 1954 has turned out to have originated as a comment by Mohammed the prophet of Islam — upon whom be peace.

Our key to the puzzle is the surreptitious committee member, Friend Bayard. We just don’t know, at least as yet, exactly how early, or in what manner, he had been able to access this in the Islamic writings, and translate it into a pithy English-language injunction:

• In the Mishkat collection, BOOK OF RULERSHIP AND JUDGMENT, Chapter 1, Section 2, we learn that a man of Mohammed’s time named Jami’i at-Thirmidhi put it on the record that Mohammed had said (such a record of such a saying is referred to in the Islamic tradition as a hadith), “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler.” One of the

21. For background on this, consult H. Larry Ingle’s “‘Speak Truth to Power’: A Thirty Years' Retrospective,” Christian Century, CII (April 27, 1985), 383-385, and his “Milton Mayer: A Quaker Hedgehog,” Quaker Theology, V (Spring-Summer 2003), 67- 81 (especially page 75). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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famous classical commentaries, the RUH AL-BAYAN, also refers to this particular hadith.

• The injunction had been familiar to Friend Bayard before the summer of 1954, when this group was struggling to create this new pamphlet about peace, for, in John D’Emilio’s biography LOST PROPHET: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BAYARD RUSTIN (NY: Free Press, 2003) there appears on page 48 a letter from Bayard to his Friends monthly meeting in Manhattan, written on August 15, 1942 while this group was considering the possibility that it might begin to provide hospitality and services to American service men in “USO” style: The primary social function of a religious society is to “speak the truth to power.” The truth is that war is wrong. It is then our duty to make war impossible first in us and then in society. To cooperate with the government in building morale seems inconsistent with all we profess to believe.... The greatest service that we can render the men in the armed forces is to maintain our peace testimony. Since 1942 was years before the use of the injunction in the Quaker pamphlet, clearly, therefore, it would have been Friend Bayard, who already had this injunction “Speak the truth to power,” who would provide it during the summer of 1954 to the primary author, Friend Milton.

This saying of Mohammed, this hadith, “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler,” is in the grammatical form that is described as a Declaration. The phrase in the title of the Quaker pamphlet, “Speak truth to power,” is in the grammatical form that is described as an Injunction. So, how does one go about transforming a Declaration into an Injunction?

Let us practice by permuting the Declaration “The best way to put out a house fire is to throw buckets of water on it.” What would be the Injunction that would correspond to this Declaration? We might think of “To put out a house fire, throw buckets of water on it,” but that’s not short and sharp, so we should shorten and sharpen it. Immediately we think of “Fight fire with water.” That does nicely!

That’s enough practice, now for the real thing. Let’s proceed to transform the Prophet of Islam’s Declaration into a pithy English-language Injunction. Mohammed’s declaration had been translated in full as “The most excellent jihad is when one speaks a true word in the presence of a tyrannical ruler.” The injunctive form for that would be “To deal with a tyrannical ruler, say a true word to him or her.” That’s not really catchy, and as we will see below, Friend Bayard slept on it and came up with “speak the truth to power.” To get from Bayard’s “speak the truth to power” to Friend Milton’s “speak truth to power,” all we need to do is drop on the floor an utterly superfluous definite article.

In that letter Friend Bayard had written on August 15, 1942 he had put the phrase within quotation marks, and this of course indicates that he knew very well that the phrase was not original with him. Was there a reason why he might have refrained from providing an attribution? –For sure there was, as he was writing the letter in question to a bunch of Quakers who were mostly in the Christian tradition, who would have been turned off cold had they been informed that “Speak the truth to power” actually derived from the prophet of Islam. I think it is very likely, since when Friend Milton was questioned about “the phrase that he had come up with,” he obfuscated by suggesting that maybe it was to be found somewhere in the Quaker tradition. That, to me, indicates precisely one thing: Milton was aware that he really shouldn’t say any more on such a subject. He could no more admit to any other white Friend “I got this from Friend Bayard Rustin,” who wasn’t even being acknowledged as a member of the committee, than Friend Bayard had been able to admit to the Friends in the Christian tradition “I got this from Mohammed, the prophet of Islam.” There were ample reasons why for the benefit of the peace work in a generally Christian and Jewish context, such a provenance needed to be kept in the dark at the back of the closet. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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We may note in this context, that during June 2002 there has been quite a tempest in a teapot at Harvard University. Zayed Yasin, a Harvard senior chosen as one of three student orators for that year’s graduation, decided to urge his fellow students to apply the Islamic concept of jihad to their lives. He intended by his oration, which he wanted to entitle “American Jihad,” to redeem this word jihad for American audiences by informing his Harvard community that within Islam there was a use for this term which was both benevolent and righteous. The “greater jihad,” in Islam, is a spiritual struggle within the person, in which the person strives to become the proper and decent sort of person. Only what is known as the “lesser jihad” –the external holy war against unbelievers– might be a proper subject for our disapprobation. Those people who are going around with dynamite strapped to their midsections are truly terrifying — but they should not be allowed to hijack such an important word and make it apply only to their own peculiar form of viciousness. The tempest in the teapot at Harvard commencement was over whether or not this senior would be allowed to deliver his commencement oration, with its provocative title “American Jihad.” (Now of course the matter is done and over with, without any harm, but the incident has reinforced what a sensitive word this word is.)

The “speak truth to power” injunction in the title of this peace pamphlet seems interestingly ambiguous. If one were to approach it from the perspective of might makes right, which of course is the perspective most commonly useful in the real world, the phrase might indicate that when one is confronted by powerful people, one had better tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth without evasion or distortion, because such folks aren’t forced to and aren’t about to put up with evasions and distortions, and most definitely have the ability to punish one upon their displeasure. If one approaches it from the perspective that power creates its own reality, in such manner that the inheritors get to own the official truth, however, the phrase might indicate that when one is confronted by powerful people, one ought to defy their official truth, and accept whatever consequences follow from having spoken disturbing and irritating words which they desire not to be forced to hear. Thus, unfortunately, it is the sort of phrase with which a number of quite different people could agree, and does not in itself perform a critical discriminative function. –But then, one supposes, most language is subject to such limitations. We need, therefore, when we use this injunction, to make certain that our hearers are not misreceiving our communication. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1955

Late in the year: A bus boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama. Soon after the boycott began its leader, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received a copy of Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “The Power Of Non Violence.” “I don’t know when I have read anything,” he wrote to the author of this literature, “that has given the idea of non-violence a more realistic and depthful interpretation.”

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December 1, Thursday: Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, a 42-year-old mulatto American, was arrested because she had refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she move to the back of the public bus to create a seat in the front for a white passenger. The black community launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After a year of struggle the boycott would succeed. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1957

September: Despite threats to their lives Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals became the initial students “of color” to attend the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. From a federal standpoint this amounted to obeying the law, the new law. However, from a state standpoint this amounted to deliberately disobeying the law and courting punishment — a problematic act of civil disobedience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1959

At the 36th Anniversary dinner of the War Resisters League the League Peace Award was presented to A.J. Muste by Norman Thomas. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the speaker.

At this year’s NAACP convention, the Reverend King debated nonviolence with Robert F. Williams.

During the late 1950s the Reverend Douglas Moore, minister of Durham’s Asbury Temple Methodist Church, along with other religious and community leaders, pioneered sit-ins throughout North Carolina to protest discrimination at lunch counters that served only whites. A sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro captured the nation’s attention. Within days the Reverend King met Reverend Moore, and Dr. King coined his famous rallying cry “Fill up the jails” during a speech at Durham’s White Rock Baptist Church. Advocating non-violent confrontation with segregation laws for the 1st time, Dr. King said, “Let us not fear going to jail. If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South.”

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized by the Reverend King, Ella Baker, and other black leaders. The educator Septima Clark set up Freedom Schools all over the country. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1960

Richard Bartlett Gregg’s “The Power Of Non Violence” of 1934 was revised and reissued as “The Power of Non-Violence,” with a foreword by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Edward Dahlberg’s 1941 DO THESE BONES LIVE? was republished in a revised edition as CAN THESE BONES LIVE? with a preface by Sir Herbert Read, with 42 drawings by James Kearns including a houndawg- eyed drawing of Henry Thoreau and a grayflannelsuit depiction of a man who is leading a life of quiet HDT WHAT? INDEX

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desperation, by New Directions of Norfolk, Connecticut (James Laughlin). DESPERATION

Here are pages 13-25: We cannot perceive what we canonize. The citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship. By the touch of Circe’s wand, the divine troublemakers are translated into porcine stone embroidery. Think how Henry Thoreau and WALDEN have been shunned. WALDEN, the purest parable ever written in America, remains shut. However, WALDEN, which takes its inspiration from the Vedas, is the secular bible of our ethics. What it hints of —how to resist evil, society, patriotism, poverty and war— we dare no longer neglect. How to resist? Therein lie all the morals and all the terror of this world. There is an uncanny shrewdness in those well-governmented Americans who have looked at Thoreau as a kind of cranky male sybil, a crabbed and catarrhal water sprite of our woodland culture. Little wonder that his “Civil Disobedience” lies dormant and half forgotten as a curio in libertarian and anarchist anthologies. Imagine were it otherwise: what state would dare render sincere homage to its great malefactor, Henry David Thoreau? What society of men so beautifully groomed in submission could countenance “Civil Disobedience”: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I HDT WHAT? INDEX

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answer, that he cannot without disgust be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.” How unconsciously astute is the Massachusetts Commonwealth to garment Thoreau, an anarchist and militant defender of Captain John Brown, in marble robes while mortally detesting John Brown, and in our own lifetime executing those simple pure apostles of free men, the shoemaker and the fish peddler, Sacco and Vanzetti. His journals overflow with such anathemas as: “My thoughts are murder to the State; I endeavor in vain to observe nature; my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the State. I trust that all just men will conspire.” And his curses fillip the stars whenever the dust of his native place is upon his tongue: “As for Massachusetts, that huge she-Briareus, Argus and Colchian Dragon conjoined, set to watch the Heifer of the Constitution and the Golden Fleece, we would not warrant our respect for her, like some compositions to preserve its qualities through all weathers.” The State is adept in the mysteries of evasion and interment. Henry David Thoreau is honored; but his books like buried like the fresh barley seeds stored by Joseph in granaries and scattered in Pharaoh’s tombs. Administrative Philistia needs no economic astrologer to help it read “Civil Disobedience” or WALDEN. Society is clairvoyant, knows how to govern, when to load its musket, when to erect an obelisk — and when to canonize. The antiquarian is the State’s best servant and art’s most formidable foe. Sequester the writer, make him an “early American” of a Golden Age of Letters, and you refuse him. You disclaim him by a spurious exaltation of his period. Writes Hans Ryner: “We say that the age of Pericles was magnificent. Yet Pericles was the object of all sorts of accusations. Phidias was prosecuted; Anaxagoras was exiled; Socrates drank the hemlock.” The artist in any age is a divine accident. In what time and place was Herman Melville’s genius born: whence came this Job? this creator of the Cabala of Whaling Science? Where is the American signature furrowed in Henry Thoreau’s Himalayan brow? “The social condition of genius,” wrote Thoreau, “is the same in all ages. Aeschylus was undoubtedly alone and without sympathy in his simple reverence for the mystery of the universe.” No other American but Bourne has taken such a deep and accurate measurement of the secular despotisms of government as Thoreau. None has had his ethics — a social conscience with a moral auditory nerve which responded to the finer shadings of injustice. Writing with the intense Christian fervor of a Leo Tolstoi, Thoreau says in “Civil Disobedience,” “Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?” Thoreau was an opposer: he was against society, slaves, institutions, church and politics; and the sum of his giant negations is a more illuminating text for a way toward understanding the subtler courtesies and gentler urges of men than those weedy and unkempt affirmations in Whitman’s DEMOCRATIC VISTAS. The “canting peal” of Sunday morning service was as raucous to his ethical senses as the sound of an air-biting HDT WHAT? INDEX

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drayman’s whip was to the ears of Schopenhauer. “I am too high- born to be properties,” he said. Announcing his total disallegiance to organized government, he wrote: “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any Incorporated Society which I have not joined.” To him the body politic was “covered with scoriae and volcanic cinders, such as Milton imagined.” Should we mistake this anger for misanthropy, we wholly misconceive Thoreau, for his virtues were heady enough; it was nature in him that was so diluted. He might do all within his abilities to ameliorate man’s condition, his poverty and judgment and humble life in this world, but he could not stop loathing his low mortal habits. But he had ample goodness and urgently wanted on occasions to be easily familiar with the rhythm of habit, usage and ordinariness. We must curse the heavens for Thoreau’s limits, for they were beyond correction. Thoreau could say that the “utterer of oaths must have honeyed lips,” sadly surmising that his own were so niggardly clothed. He could write, “There is no remedy for love but more love,” without being able to love anyone. In one line — “I am not above being used, ay, abused, sometimes,” — he makes us his subjects; for he who can so trust life lives forever after. We see this long-nosed and thewy New Englander with flinty eyes walking through Concord village, hoping that the meanest man, “Sam” the jailer, will call after him: “Thoreau, are you going up the street pretty soon? Well, just take a couple of these handbills along and drop one in at Hoar’s piazza and one at Holbrook’s, and I’ll do as much for you another time.” “There is some advantage in being the humblest, cheapest, least dignified man in the village, so that the very stable boys shall damn you.” Thoreau belonged, if he belongs anywhere, with the Christian anarchists of the world, with the Nazarenes, the Mennonites, the Dukhobors, with Tolstoi, although he lacked the Christian, tragic impulses that made Melville, Keats, Shakespeare and Tolstoi sit in Job’s sackcloth and enact in their own lives the eternal Passion Play at the tomb of man’s misery. WALDEN is the nearest he ever came to the drama of man. It is the drama of Fortitude succored by Logic, without any hidden trap doors of the heart. WALDEN, because it is so untouched by miscreeds, casts a dry light upon the Bible socialists of the Forties and Fifties, the era of the American communitarians: the Oneidans led by John Humphrey Noyes, Yankee apostle of pietism, socialism and complex marriages; the Rappites, shrewd colonizers and communistic economists, and “God-propped”; the Owenites of New Harmony, the Brook Farmers, the Shakers. Here we have, perhaps, the prefiguration of a Democratic America, the individual emancipated from State hegemony, or living apart, State-free. “If a State is governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame; if the State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” So wrote Confucius and so believed Henry Thoreau. Thoreau was concerned only with the Orphic politics of the soul, the only politics for man — no politics. Character just sculpt its own background and Fate, and emit its own historical HDT WHAT? INDEX

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aureole. This seer, whose body is fog, fen and vapor, was as subtle as the modern diaboliques of the flesh, as an Emile Verhaeren or a D.H. Lawrence. Thoreau feared conscience as much as evil; too much conscience bleeds the soul to death, and too much morality cankers the whole man. Thoreau eschewed all doctrine and all saviorism. Whitman’s humanitarian bathos, his democratic rhodomontade — “I will not exclude you until the sun excludes you,” — was wholly alien to that quieter individual. A visionary democrat, Thoreau was not too democratic, not too common, nor too clean. Thoreau was not the Common Man, although he reverenced what is innocent and humble in man and in himself. He wrote that Emerson was not “comprehensive” enough to trundle a wheelbarrow. He, of course, could build a fence, caulk a boat, hoe potatoes, although he made no occult humbug of the homespun agrarian life. When the triviality and dust of Concord galled him and he had to refresh his olfactories, he retired to Walden, picked the “hairy huckleberry” at Truro, fished, trekked through Maine, or lived with the Indians; and when he grew weary of all these changes he returned to Concord. Henry Thoreau had a sane imagination; he saw how great was the fall from man to farmer. Thoreau would have had no patience or sympathy with an Occidental cult of industry: in WALDEN he writes with a sentimental tartness: “Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of earth?” Here again he was close to Tolstoi who said: “The exaltation of work is as monstrous as would be the exaltation of eating to the rank of a virtue.” He never wrote any fig and nut homiletics on the unmitigated beatitudes of the life of the American Farmer, or, like Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, turned America into an exotic Bible land of wild bees, maize, snakes and Indians. Thoreau never saw any vestal fires rise out of manure composts. He was so singularly without doctrine that he could write an essay, “Life without Principle,” and no conscientious reader could conceivably garble his meanings. He went wherever life sent him and made no credo of his private experience. He recorded it beautifully, and, if we have eyes, we can profitably read it and then pursue our own private follies, tinctured by his. WALDEN itself is not a Manual of Conduct, but a mood, a Chanticleerian ode. Thoreau lived and sang it and, when he grew tired, he entirely forsook it. “I lived there two years and two months. And at present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” Elsewhere he writes in the same simple, unswollen vein: “I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my business called me thither.” He was too alert, and, with what irony we must confess it, too dry for the general pitfalls of men and the herd cures that each generation prescribes for itself. In this spirit he wrote about literature, democracy and America, jotting down rare observations, and offering no nostrums, “those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea.” Thoreau tells us that he liked a “tawny grammar”; relished a phrase that had the fiber and woody odor of sturdy hickory. But he never ruralized HDT WHAT? INDEX

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English or speciously Americanized it. He could write preternaturally exquisite passages on New England soil, grass, berry, Indian relic, swamp, tarn or tare, without making a fetish of locale. “I wish,” said Thoreau, “to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the American, out of my head and be sane a part of every day.” When we read Thoreau we no longer misconceive democratic literature. Thoreau’s prose has the astral fragrance of dawn, an early “morning prescience” rather than the hue and emanation of apotheosized place. He is a Vulcan hammering out of lichen, maple, alder, sumac and berry, the purest essence of truth. His “Musketaquid” flows through those remotest mountainous regions of the inward man. There is Thoreau’s New England — the soil, fertilized with the arrow and flint and immaculate bone of Indian and American Farmer — that he revered. There, fronting the Atlantic, are the severe weather shingles, skeletal remains of puritan bigotry and beauty, transfigured by sun and apricot blossoms into human flesh. There! Albert Pinkham Ryder’s charred fumes of waves illuminated by mineraled moonlight. Henry Thoreau is the parable which will never be experienced until America has transmuted the logic of WALDEN into the lore of the heart. Keats has said, “Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are comments on it.” There is no other way of seeing WALDEN, ourselves, America, at this fevered moment. One Oriental has suggested that if you take out the names and places in WALDEN it reads like a Chinese masterpiece; and it is true that we think of Henry David Thoreau as an Eastern sage; for the thought, vines, leaves and herbs of WALDEN are laved in the summery winds of the Vedas. Thoreau himself said, “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” From the Brahmans Thoreau learned patience, how to sit and wait, and, so needfully, how to be bored! Thoreau writes: “Hippocrates even left directions how we should cut our nails.” At the nethermost core of history, and at the underside of war and poverty, lies tedium. It is the grand malaise of the Western World. Europe today has a “crisis” every few weeks. It is the national flagellation which the dictators give to the wretched and the starving instead of bread. When Thoreau said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” he read the funerary lines of Western man. How true it is that every little man, newspaper reader, shipping clerk, “rank and file” socialist and communist, cannot abide more notes, conferences and diplomatic parleys, not because he is so wicked and hypocritical, but because he needs a spurious, historical event, the pungent excitement of troop and fleet movement — another sexual dramatic “crisis” in the world — in his empty, slavish life — to save democracy and defend Soviet Russia! Is this exaggerated? A close reading of men’s beliefs discloses that they do not emanate from the stars and heavens, from planetary ideas, but from the frenzied and agitated blood vessels. The exquisite poesy of carnage is at the root of the intellectual, the revolutionist, the student, the war correspondent, the fascist and the laborer. Look not at their principles but at the “nature” of them. Noble HDT WHAT? INDEX

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partisanship today has an undercrust of beast. Since it is the mind that is the vessel of all good and evil in the world, why is it that we so distrust its strength in opposing the violence at large today. Thought is always prior to deed, war, history. Baudelaire said: “Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.” However, never before have the seers of the world been so despised. And never before did Americans so need WALDEN. Is WALDEN, it is demanded, a system of economics, a doctrine, an organized panacea for social ills? It is none of these. WALDEN is a vision; it is the “Bhagavad-Gita” of the moods and seasons of Conscience; it is a poet’s rather than a lawgiver’s prayer. Conscience is various, brooding and chameleon, and is not a law any more than are the works of Shakespeare or Keats. Teach men to understand one single line out of Measure for Measure or the “Odes” and you teach them all they need and can ever know of the fervor of beauty which is the poetic ecstasy of justice. WALDEN is such a fervor and such an ecstasy. Know it, and none will raise his hand against another, none will be poor and none will go to war. “Justice,” “beauty,” “moral fervor,” “ideals,” — are these not taboo words out of the unclean and stupid mouths of the unproselytized Gentile, the bourgeoisie? We live today in an age of foolproof certitudes. We ask, has Thoreau a theory, has this thinker an economic metaphysic? We have constructed out of economic theories and Atropos-like dogma, an iron fate, that is as certain to slay our minds and bodies as will the evils it is to correct. Man must eat, but must man eat man to have his loaf of bread? Can a bread and butter culture sustain society? can idealism be held, historically, in abeyance, while men murder for food — for ideals? Is there not a grim and baleful contradiction here; for there is more than one kind of feeding for mankind. “Woe be to the generation,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “that lets any higher faculty in its midst go unemployed!” Let us take care that the bread men get may not be the offal from Circe’s sty. For man cannot afford, as he is doing, to neglect the chivalry of ethics in his pursuit of economic salvation. His hunger in the end will be so great, his denial so desperate, that he will break out in more bloody fury than before to reclaim his spirit; for spirit is so good and so evil and so chemic that, if you starve it, man will eat the whole world to have it back again! But how can we overcome evil in the world, or can we? We have drifted far, far from the simple Christian logic of humanity: “Thou shalt not kill.” We believe we are wiser, but we are only craftier. We know how to meet our enemy on his own terms: tank for tank, bomb for bomb. That is all. Thoreau with his face toward the East wrote: “The Brahmans never proposed courageously to assault evil, but patiently to starve it out.” Men who see, see slow. The Buddha sits with his knees ruminatively folded under him and waits; and the Occidental never learns the true vision of this posture. The wise Buddha waits upon history so that it can unfold itself in its own time; waits upon evil which must live its own life and die its own death. The Buddha patiently teaches and lets life do the rest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Is this fatalism? We are fatalists only when we cease telling the truth, but, so long as we communicate the truth, we move ourselves, life, history, men. There is no other way. This is the simple epitome of the wisdom of nonresistance to evil. It is what Confucius, Thoreau and Tolstoi taught. It is the incredible, the visionary way, and it announces treason and betrayal more boldly than firearms or airplanes. Tolstoi, who deeply saw the virtue of comprehending simple things simply, answered the sophists who garbled his words: “All this apparently complicated proposition about non-resistance to evil and the objection to it reduces to this, that, instead of understanding it, as it is written, ‘Do not resist evil or violence with evil or violence,’ they understand (I even think, intentionally) that it says, ‘Do not resist evil, that is, be indulgent to evil, be indifferent to it’: whereas to resist evil is given as a rule how to struggle in the most successful manner against evil. It says, ‘You are in the habit of struggling against evil by means of violence, or of retribution. This is a bad, a wicked, means.’” We had in Thoreau’s own time the Hopedale commune, the gentle Oneidans, the Harmonites, all of whom warmed over their socialisms with the Sermon on the Mount. We have as an immortal lesson in truth the way of the Christian Dukhobors of the Caucasus who refused to submit to military service and who burnt their weapons lest they be tempted to resist injury with violence. So powerful was the spirit of these meek Dukhobors that the Cossacks who guarded and whipped them had to be sent away because in the end they refused to do either. These are amongst the rare conquests of humanity. The reason that we forget our true spirits so readily is that there is no frailer phantom, spun of such seraph-breathed tissue, than faith. Men require dogmas to support their eternally expiring beliefs. Great lives are moral allegories and so soon become deniable myths because we cannot believe that such good men could have existed in such an evil world. So we doubt the existence of Christ, the authorship of Hamlet, the profound human heart logic of Tolstoi, the miracle and wonder of WALDEN. But WALDEN does exist and for us. It is a revelation of the inward unity of the man that the beginning of WALDEN is on poverty and the conclusion on war. Show man that life at its apex is a supreme allegory and he will memorize WALDEN to the last syllable of its pulse. But persuade and hint. WALDEN cannot be rushed into men’s hearts. “The light,” says Thoreau on the final page of WALDEN, “which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to us to which we are awake.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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I have a bone to pick with certain other comments Edward Dahlberg made from point to point in this volume. It would seem that although he was a very astute reader of Henry Thoreau’s texts, he had little accurate information about Thoreau’s life or personality. He made a comment which may indicate that many people who encounter Thoreau’s letter to the absent Emerson about Ms. Sophia Foord’s proposal do so through a self- imposed lens of what may perhaps be legitimately characterized as sexism. I will first paraphrase Dahlberg’s attitude toward the Thoreau/Foord affair, and then quote at length from his book (pages 61-2, 64, 91-4, 127, 129 passim of the revised edition) in substantiation of my paraphrase. My paraphrase of Dahlberg’s rant would be that although we can safely acknowledge that Thoreau was making a stab at being an ethical metaphysician, or at least a moral teacher, his stab was a total failure because his egregious distaste for humans tainted all his efforts to set an example and tainted all his efforts to give good advice. Thoreau, so earnest and truthful, was just another one of those rationalists deficient in blood pigmentation. Which is to say, the man wasn’t a real man: his emotionality was deficient. Thus although Thoreau was an adept in the humanity cult, he was blocked in arriving at his love for humankind directly through his emotionality, and was forced to arrive at it through the multiplication-tables, that is, by way of bloodless categories created in the mind. Celibate Thoreau, in order to be pure, cast out demons, but in so doing –like Adam after the Fall– he hid in quagmire, mud and fen, and so in effect it was he himself who entered the swine, or, to change the idiom: he turned his snorting hot-blooded steed Pegasus into a sneaking cold-souled cat. Thoreau’s very life was his disgrace, a devil’s nuptial of man and pond. When the man fell in love, it was but with a scrub oak. We should consider, as an example of this, Thoreau’s refusal of the proposal by Ms. Foord, a repudiation which must be described as having been not only “orgiastic” but also “savage.” This episode of his life amounted to the carnal error of a man with a spirit-glutted soul, or amounted to the blood-revenge of a man with an apriori bosom. It is not by chance that no women appear in the WALDEN book, or in the life at the pond. Thoreau, the “bachelor of nature” erecting in WALDEN the Western Fable of Ennui, altogether excluded women from his life and his surroundings and his writing, replacing this human contact with but the emeritic patience of ruminative sitting and waiting. (Well, that’s my synopsis of his incidental remarks and asides. If you doubt that any of this could be an accurate gloss of these remarks, I would urge you to compare and contrast the gloss I have made, above, with the original source.)

This Edward Dahlberg rendition –that Thoreau’s refusal of Miss Foord’s advances must have been “orgiastic and savage”– would be a superficial reading perhaps motivated more by Mr. Dahlberg’s personal situation in the world than by any familiarity with the historical materials. (We may note that Mr. Dahlberg was also troubled that Professor Kant had been guilty of self-stimulation, or, perhaps, troubled at Professor Kant’s having provided a philosophical rumination on the topic of masturbation. I would ask, if Dahlberg is troubled by such a thing, is this not conclusive evidence that he is importing some sort of irrelevant personal baggage into his study of these cultural icons?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 1: Feeling that they were being demeaned on account of the color of their skin, four black college students seated themselves at a racially segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina and stated that they would not rise until they were served. Within days such civil disobedience “sit-ins” would spread across the state.

The revolt by Europeans in Algiers collapsed as the rebels surrendered. Rebel leader Pierre Lagaillarde was arrested and would be flown to Paris where he would be held for trial. Fascist leader Joseph Ortiz escaped. Rebel barricades were torn down. The military and civil authority returned to Algiers. The French cabinet voted to ask the National Assembly for decree powers for one year.

Arjuna, a symphonic poem by Alan Hovhanness, was performed for the initial time, in Madras.

February 16: By this point, lunch counter civil disobedience sit-ins were occurring in 15 cities in the southern United States.

Danza “Variationen über ein karibisches Thema,” a ballet by Werner Egk, was performed for the initial time, in the Prinzregententheater of München, Germany, and was conducted by the composer himself.

February 17: A new cabinet was named in the Congo Republic, for the first time without whites.

About 300 blacks and 200 whites battled during a civil disobedience sit-in demonstration in Portsmouth, Virginia, after which about 40 people got arrested.

US Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates apologized for an Air Force training manual that alleged that the National Council of Churches of Christ had been infiltrated by Communists.

Divertimento for brass ensemble and percussion by Karel Husa is performed for the first time, in Ithaca, New York.

February 23: At a department store in Chattanooga, Tennessee, enraged whites attacked blacks attempting a civil disobedience sit-in. Twelve were arrested.

February 27: Enraged white Americans attacked black Americans attempting to employ the civil disobedience tactic of the “sit-in” against segregated service at lunch counters in two Nashville stores. Fist fights broke out and 100 were arrested. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 29: Irkanda II (String Quartet no.5) by Peter Sculthorpe, was performed for the initial time, at Lincoln College, Oxford. It was the winner of the £100 Royal Concert Fund Prize.

An earthquake centered near Agadir, Morocco, and the ensuing fire and tsunami, caused 12,000 deaths.

The first Playboy Club opened in Chicago.

In the face of demonstrations and civil disobedience sit-ins in his state, Governor John Patterson of Alabama commented that if blacks “continue to provoke whites,” there wouldn’t be enough police in the entire nation to protect them.

March 15, Tuesday: A conference on disarmament, attended by five NATO and five Warsaw Pact nations, opens in Geneva. It is the first important disarmament conference in over two years.

Aaron Copland leaves the United States heading for the USSR where he and Lukas Foss will represent the United States as part of a cultural exchange program.

A protest by about 1,000 blacks against lunch counter segregation in Orangeburg, South Carolina was dispersed by police using tear gas and fire hoses. 350 people were arrested for civil disobedience. In Atlanta, 200 blacks sit-in at ten lunch counters in the city and at least 76 were arrested.

March 16, Wednesday: Blacks and whites ate peacefully side by side at a lunch counter in San Antonio, Texas. A fun time was had by all — nobody got indigestion and nobody caught anybody else’s cooties. This was the first such incident of entirely successful civil disobedience in a large city in the southern United States.

March 26, Saturday: An agreement was signed in Paris providing for the independence of the Malagasy Republic.

Governor Buford Ellington of Tennessee ordered the investigation of a CBS camera crew who had filmed a sit-in by civil disobedience practitioners in Nashville.

On this day and the following one, hundreds of crosses were being turned into rural torches by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. An Alabama Klan member would explain

“We just wanted to show the public we are organized and ready for business.”

Concerted Piece for tape recorder and orchestra by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky was performed for the initial time, in New York, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. This was a taped “Young People’s Concert” which would air on the following day. The official premiere would take place on March 31st.

Evocation no.1 for violin with piano and percussion by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, New York.

April 15, Friday: The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 9, Saturday: Belgian airplanes began refugee flights from Léopoldville.

After five months of civil disobedience, lunch counters at 7 downtown stores in Charlotte, North Carolina were racially desegregated.

At noon Roger Woodward, a 7-year-old, became the 1st person to survive going over the Niagara Falls without a barrel. He and his 17-year-old sister Deanne Woodward, local residents, had set out that morning on a harmless ride in a 14-foot aluminum motorboat on the upper Niagara River with an adult family friend, James Honeycutt of Raleigh, North Carolina, who was a contractor at the Niagara Parks Commission hydro project. Honeycutt was living in a house trailer at the Lynch Trailer camp along the American shoreline. They began their excursion about five miles upstream of the falls. At noon when they arrived about a mile upstream of the Horseshoe Falls, they were turning the boat around when the propeller pin of its outboard sheared. Wasting no time to don a life-preserver, Honeycutt began rowing toward shore. He had just gotten Deanne to don her life- preserver when waves flipped the boat. The teenager was carried into the shallow rapids near Goat Island. Within a few feet of the curl at Terrapin Point, her hand was grabbed by an onlooker, John Hayes, leaning far out over the protective railing, and then another onlooker, John Quattrochi, grabbed a thumb, but meanwhile her little brother and James Honeycutt were going over the lip. James, without a life-preserver, was battered and drowned. At 12:55PM, however, the crew of the Maid of the Mist II spotted the 7-year-old boy bobbing in his life-preserver in the water at the base of the falls. Captain Clifford Keech was at the wheel and it required three approaches –eight minutes– before they could get a flotation ring and rope to Roger. Taken to the Greater Niagara General Hospital, he was found to have sustained only minor cuts and bruises.

July 25, Monday: The whites-only lunch counter at the FW Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina was desegregated after four black students insisted on civilly sitting down there and disobediently asking the counter help to take their orders. This sort of insolence would spread in campaigns to desegregate restrooms, movie theaters, restaurants, and libraries. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 26, Tuesday: Amintore Fanfani replaced Fernando Tambroni as prime minister of Italy.

The Soviet Union vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation of the shooting down of a US military plane in the Barents Sea. Nyet. It also vetoed a resolution asking that the Red Cross be allowed to visit the two US airmen currently held by the USSR. Nyet.

Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba ended two days of talks with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and Security Council members in New York. Lumumba demanded the removal of all Belgian troops, to be negotiated by the UN, a neutral foreign policy, and the maintenance of UN troops in the country to keep order.

After a week of racial violence surrounding civil disobedience lunch counter sit-ins by blacks, a 9PM-to-6AM curfew was imposed on Greenville, South Carolina. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

August 1, Monday: The Republic of Dahomey (Benin) was declared independent of France under President Hubert Maga.

Circles for female voice, harp and percussion by Luciano Berio to words of cummings was performed for the first time, at Tanglewood, Lenox, Massachusetts.

Lunch counters in several stores in Durham, North Carolina and Miami were integrated after civil disobedience sit-in demonstrations.

At the Durham, North Carolina Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

Clerks of Meeting 1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill 1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr. 1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr. 1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens 1951-1952 John A. Barlow 1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith 1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers 1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson 1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer 1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore 1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith 1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley 1970-1971 John Hunter 1971-1972 John Gamble 1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms) 1974-1975 Helen Gardella 1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk 1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton 1980-1982 John B. Hunter 1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger 1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013- Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 10, Thursday: Five battalions of paratroopers began a coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

When a summit of communist party leaders from 81 countries convened in Beijing, Chairman Mao Tsetung did not attend.

At a segregated lunch counter in Nashville, Black civil disobedience sit-in demonstrators were sprayed with water, powder, and insecticide.

A federal judge prohibited implementation of school segregation laws in Louisiana. The New Orleans School Board approved a plan to admit 5 black children to white schools.

Former President Harry S Truman hosted former President Dwight David Eisenhower on the latter’s initial visit to the Truman Library. (Presumably they had an opportunity to discuss what had happened on January 20, 1953, when tradition had it that the two Presidents were to visit inside the White House and then ride together to the inauguration ceremony, but Eisenhower had remained for a long time in his limousine in the driveway of the White House, fuming, reluctant to come inside and greet Truman and unsure that he could force himself to ride next to him in the official open Lincoln limousine, while Harry and Bess were waiting for Dwight and Mamie to join them in the Red Room for coffee.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1961

A team of pacifists hiked from San Francisco to Moscow, carrying a message of unilateral disarmament not only to towns all across America, but into Moscow’s Red Square. Meanwhile, A.J. Muste provided diplomatic liaison.

Amnesty International was founded to document and protest torture and capital punishment and would gain more than a million members within 20 years.

Young Freedom Riders protested discrimination on buses. A bus was burned in Alabama, riders were attacked in Birmingham, and riders spent 40-60 days in jail in Jackson, Mississippi (six months later the Interstate Commerce Commission would ban segregation on buses and trains). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 29, Wednesday: A court in Praetoria acquitted 28 people (including Nelson Mandela) who had been accused of attempting to overthrow the government because the prosecution had failed to prove that the African National Congress was “Communist-infiltrated,” or that it had been planning to overthrow the government by force.

The 34th state ratified the 23rd Amendment to the US Constitution. Henceforward, citizens of the District of Columbia would be able to vote in presidential elections.

As nine black students were put on trial in Jackson, Mississippi for their civil disobedience sit-in protest, about 100 other black citizens gathered outside the courtroom. They were dispersed by police using clubs and dogs (white citizens who were gathering outside the courthouse, meanwhile, were asked to leave).

April 14, Friday: Early in the morning, a group of eight B-26 bombers piloted by Cuban exiles attacked airfields at Ciudad Libertad in Havana, San Antonio de los Baños, and Santiago de Cuba. The attack wiped out 27% of the island’s fighter planes. The raid of the “mystery planes,” coordinated by the CIA, was designed to destroy as much of Castro’s air power as possible before the scheduled landing of a force of US-trained Cuban exiles. However, to keep the US connection from becoming public, an additional set of airstrikes on Cuban airfields had to be canceled.

Yuri Gagarin made a triumphal visit to Moscow and was cheered by throngs as he joined the Soviet leadership above Lenin’s tomb. That evening President Leonid Brezhnev awarded him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star.

The Tamil Federal Party, calling for the official use of the Tamil language in the northern and eastern areas of the country, began a campaign of civil disobedience against the Ceylon government.

May 4, Thursday: Two groups of “Freedom Riders” departed from Washington DC heading for New Orleans. They intended a civil disobedience test of the desegregation of bus facilities that had been ordered by the federal courts (these Freedom Riders of course consisted of teams of black and white participants traveling together). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 5, Friday: Preliminary talks began in Hin Heup between the warring sides in Laos.

Alan Shepard became the initial American to enter space by blasting off from Cape Canaveral atop a Mercury- Redstone rocket. He reached an altitude of 185 kilometers and splashed into the Atlantic 485 kilometers downrange 15 minutes and 22 seconds later.

May 14, Sunday: About ten whites beat and kicked civil disobedience teams of Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama while three policemen watched. As the bus reached Birmingham, Alabama the passengers were set upon by 30-40 white thugs who had been waiting expectantly for them. They were dragged into the bus station and beaten with pipes and fists. Ten minutes later, after these assailants had left, police officers arrived. A 2d bus is forced off the road by a flat (presumably slashed) tire between Anniston and Birmingham and was fire- bombed by a mob of white citizens. Two policemen arrived and disperse the white citizens. Twelve Freedom Riders were hospitalized.

Arabic Numeral (any integer), to H.F. by LaMonte Young was performed for the initial time, in New York.

May 15, Monday: The office of Governor John Patterson of Alabama released a statement that the governor “refuses to guarantee [the] safe passage” of civil disobedience Freedom Riders.

May 16, Tuesday: Five South Korean army officers led by Major General Park Chung Hee overthrew the government of Prime Minister Chang Myon. Troops and armored units seized control of major cities. They placed President Yun Po Sun under house arrest. Martial law was declared, all meetings were banned and travel abroad was prohibited.

An international conference on the future of Laos began in Geneva with 14 nations represented.

Representative George Huddleston of Alabama averred that the civil disobedience Freedom Riders “got just what they asked for” for “trespassing upon the South and its well established and understood customs.”

Serenata III for tape by Bruno Maderna was performed for the initial time, in Venice.

May 18, Thursday: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy quoted or referred to Henry Thoreau in public speeches on least three occasion. The initial occasion was in his address to the Canadian Parliament on this date: But we share more than a common border. We share a common heritage, traced back to those early settlers who traveled from the beachheads of the Maritime Provinces and New England to the far reaches of the Pacific Coast. Henry Thoreau spoke a common sentiment for them all: “Eastward I go only by force, westward I go free. I must walk towards Oregon and not towards Europe.” We share common values from the past, a common defense line at present, and common aspirations for the future — our future, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

indeed the future of all mankind.

He would also quote or refer to Thoreau trivially on September 25th and September 27th, 1963. In addition, the Harding Collection has a telegram to Dr. Ralph W. Sockman, Director of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans as follows: “I am delighted to send a word of greetings to all those gathered in New York Sunday for the unveiling of the bust of Henry David thoreau in the Hall of Fame. It is most appropriate that the ceremony occur on the 100th anniversary of Thoreau’s death. Your selection of Ambassador Nehru as the principal speaker reflects Thoreau’s pervasive and universal influence on social thinking and political action. With all best wishes — John F. Kennedy.”

May 20, Saturday: Negotiations between French authorities and representatives of the provisional Algerian government began in Evian. French authorities declared a unilateral cease fire in Algeria as a gesture of good will. More than 20 bombs went off in Algiers and Oran injuring several people.

Conservatives ransacked and set fire to the Swiss consulate in Oran. Switzerland offered to let the Algerian delegation to the Evian conference stay in Geneva.

Elegy for Young Lovers, an opera by Hans Werner Henze to words of Auden and Kallman, was performed for the initial time, in Schwetzingen.

Civil disobedience Freedom Riders and reporters were beaten by mobs of white citizens at a Montgomery, Alabama bus terminal. Police Commissioner L.P. Sullivan informed a reporter that “We have no intention of standing guard for a bunch of troublemakers coming into our city.” After 1,000 whites had joined the melee, police intervened and dispersed the crowd with tear gas. 19 were injured. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched 350-400 federal marshals to Alabama. Patterson termed these federal marshals “interlopers.”

May 21, Sunday: Crowds of white citizens gathered outside the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in which black citizens were attending a meeting. The church was protected by federal marshals. Governor John Patterson of Alabama declared martial law in Montgomery. The National Guard arrived and surrounded the federal marshals who were guarding the church.

Perspectives for orchestra by Thea Musgrave was performed for the initial time, in Stirling.

Bagatelles op.87 for band by Vincent Persichetti was performed for the initial time, at Dartmouth College, with the composer himself conducting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 22, Monday: The new military regime in South Korea ordered the dissolution of all political parties.

Black citizens attending a meeting at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama were escorted home by National Guard troops. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered 200 more federal marshals into Alabama.

Music of Tree for orchestra by Toru Takemitsu was performed for the initial time, in Hibiya Hall, Tokyo.

May 24, Wednesday: 27 Civil disobedience Freedom Riders traveled from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. In Alabama they were escorted by 16 police cruisers, with 1,000 National Guardsmen stationed along the road. For the entire trip the two buses were trailed by a caravan of 20 automobiles with reporters. The Freedom Riders were arrested in Jackson for attempting to use rest rooms reserved for white citizens. A second group of Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson a few hours later and were arrested when they refused an order to leave a restaurant reserved for white citizens.

May 25, Thursday: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy committed the United States of America to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. What a marvelous cover story it would provide, if we could pretend that the high-throw-weight intercontinental ballistic missiles being developed for total nuclear-Armageddon war with the Soviet Union were actually purposed to play a peaceable scientific game of cow-jumps-over-the- moon!

Seven black and four white civil disobedience protesters were arrested when they requested service at a lunch counter at a Montgomery, Alabama bus terminal. Among those arrested were the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University, and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy.

The Reverend Solomon Seay, a civil rights leader in Montgomery, Alabama, was shot in the wrist in front of his home by gunmen firing courageously from a passing car.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy removed all but 100 of the US marshals he had sent to Alabama.

June 2, Friday: A federal judge in Montgomery, Alabama banned civil disobedience “freedom rides,” but also ordered the Montgomery police to protect all riders on interstate buses and ordered the Ku Klux Klan to refrain from interfering with interstate travel.

June 8, Thursday: Farmers protesting falling farm prices laid siege to Morlaix, France, blocking all entry points to the town. They took over the office of the sub-prefect and forced him out.

Percy Sutton, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Manhattan, and Mark Lane, a white New York state legislator, were arrested for attempting to use racially segregated rest rooms in the Jackson, Mississippi airport.

Five black and four white civil disobedience protesters were arrested in Jackson when they refused to leave the racially segregated waiting room in the Jackson railroad station. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 9, Friday: Five civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested at the Jackson, Mississippi railroad station after arriving from Nashville.

A revised version of The Greek Passion, an opera by Bohuslav Martinu to his own words after Kazantzakis, was performed for the initial time, in Zürich.

June 11, Sunday: Six civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested at a Jackson, Mississippi bus terminal after a trip from Nashville.

June 16, Friday: Leading Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev left the Kirov company as it was about to board a plane in Paris to London. He asked France for asylum.

Farmers protesting falling prices attacked the city government building in Pointivy, Brittany, hurling various objects through the windows. Police used tear gas to disperse them.

A bomb went off in front of the Paris home of the ambassador to the US. Five people were injured.

The University of Illinois appointed Harry Partch as a Research Associate in the Department of Speech and Theater.

Five civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested at a Jackson, Mississippi bus terminal after traveling from Nashville. Three Freedom Riders were arrested after a fight with two white men in Ocala, Florida who attempted to prevent them from using the segregated cafeteria in the bus station. After waiting 24 hours to enter a closed restaurant at the Tallahassee airport, seven whites and three blacks were arrested for refusing to leave the terminal.

June 20, Tuesday: Adolf Eichmann took the stand in his own defense in a Jerusalem court. What was all this fuss about?

Lt. General Marie-Michel Gouraud was sentenced to seven years in jail by a Paris court for his part in the Algerian insurrection.

14 civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested at the Jackson, Mississippi railroad station.

June 25, Sunday: Prime Minister Abdul Karim al-Kassem of Iraq claimed the newly independent Kuwait for his country.

Eleven black and nine white civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested for refusing to leave a segregated waiting room in the Jackson, Mississippi railroad station.

Alain Resnais’ film L’année dernière à Marienbad was released in France. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: At 4:15AM, the primary coolant system of the nuclear reactor of Soviet submarine K-19, conducting exercises in the North Atlantic near the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen, sprang a leak. When water pressure in the aft reactor dropped to zero the coolant pumps stopped. Within three weeks 8 members of the crew would be dead, but their family members would not be informed of the nature of their deaths. Likewise, the replacement crewmembers would not be informed of what had just happened. The commander of the sub, Nikolai Vladimirovich Zateyev, would be required by the Soviet government to keep silent about this accident.

The Kennedy administration had imposed, in April, some new financial limitations on the celebration of holidays. The 4th-of-July celebrations at the US embassy in London and other world capitals were therefore somewhat less than ordinarily flamboyant.

At public swimming spots near Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Lynchburg, Virginia, African-American citizens had the temerity to don swimsuits and get wet in spite of the offensive color of their skins — staging something they were terming a civil disobedience “swim-in.”

In the Philippines, Manila staged a celebration in honor of General Douglas MacArthur that was even bigger and better than any celebration that had ever before been staged in honor of that General.

In Berlin, a row of Patton tanks delivered a terrifying 50-gun salute. BANG!

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the flag that had been flying continuously above the gravesite of Betsy Ross was stolen.22 CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

July 10, Monday: Four civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only waiting room in the Little Rock bus station.

The Kennedy administration ordered the US military to cease and desist from conservative “educational” programs the function of which was political indoctrination.

Time Cycle for soprano, clarinet, cello, celesta and percussion by Lukas Foss to words of Nietzsche, Auden, Housman and Kafka, was performed for the initial time, at Tanglewood, Lennox, Massachusetts, with the composer himself at the keyboard and conducting.

22. Betsy has somehow acquired the reputation of being this country’s first American flag-maker. This reputation seems poorly grounded in historical detail and, anyway, the flag that was stolen had been manufactured recently in China and was quickly replaceable with another American flag perhaps out of the same shipping container. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

August 7, 1961 Gherman Stepanovich Titov had become the 1st human to remain in space longer than 24 hours, when his Vostok II spacecraft came down at Krasny Kut near Saratov after 16 earth orbits.

Answering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s speech of July 25th, Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev reaffirmed his nation’s determination to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany.

Incidental music to a play by Lawrence and Lee, Turn on the Night, by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in John B. Kelly Playhouse-in-the-Park, Philadelphia. The music had been recorded from July 13-29, 1961 in San Germán, Puerto Rico. 11 August 1961: The Berlin Wall was completed. August 18, Friday: East Germany erected a barrier of 1.5 meters at the Potsdamer Platz border crossing, Berlin.

Antoine Gizenga publicly committed to end the secession of his Oriental Province and join the central government of the Congo.

Kenneth Kaunda began a campaign of civil disobedience to the British administration of Northern Rhodesia. He burned his identity card.

October 31, Tuesday: The USSR set off yet another largest nuclear detonation, one having a yield of perhaps 58 megatons. Their bomb has now gotten bigger than our bomb — what are we gonna do? (We can’t let them get ahead of us.)

Five rebel cabinet members of the Algerian provisional government went on hunger strike to protest removal of their privileges by the French authorities. 4,000 Algerian prisoners began a concurrent hunger strike. In Oran, there were a total of 30 explosions in the course of this night. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Te Lucis Ante Terminum for chorus and instrumental ensemble by Peter Maxwell Davies to words of the Roman Missal was performed publicly for the initial time, in the Parish of St. John the Baptist, Cirencester, and was conducted by the composer himself.

November 19, Sunday: Mario Davidovksy got married with Elaine Blaustein.

4,000 Algerian rebel prisoners ended their hunger strike (begun November 1st) when the French authorities agreed to recognize them as political prisoners. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

With overt US backing, President Joaquin Balaguer of the Dominican Republic declared a state of emergency and assumed supreme command of the armed forces, in order to thwart an attempted coup by family members of former dictator Rafael Trujillo. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 20, Monday: East German authorities began building fortifications behind the Berlin Wall. They dug ditches and installed anti-tank barriers. A wall 225 meters long, 2.5 meters high and two meters thick went up around the Brandenburg Gate. Thousands of West Berlin students attempted to storm the wall at two separate points, but were driven back by West Berlin police.

Ismet Inönü replaced Cemal Gürsel as prime minister of Turkey.

Five Algerian rebel leaders ended their hunger strike (begun November 1st) when France agreed to transfer them to a nursing home near Paris where they would be under the care of a Moroccan physician. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

29 relatives and friends of the former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo arrived in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, diffusing the current political crisis of the island nation.

December 1, Friday: Regular television service began in Ireland, serving the vicinity of Dublin.

Four civil disobedience Freedom Riders arrived from New Orleans at the bus terminal in McComb, Mississippi. Protected by the town’s entire 15-man police force, they made their way through 700 taunting white citizens without injury. They returned later to board an outgoing bus under the protection of the police force, which by this point had been reinforced by two sheriffs and ten deputies. The Freedom Riders were able to depart without injury, but the white citizens beat and threatened four journalists.

Incidental music to Brecht’s play The Exception and the Rule (translated by Bentley) by Stefan Wolpe was performed for the initial time, in Wollman Auditorium, New York.

December 10: UN jets (India, Sweden) destroyed the most important Katangan military facility, Camp Massart. They also attacked targets in the area of Jadotville. A train with 400 white women and children left Elisabethville for Northern Rhodesia.

Albania announced that the USSR had closed its embassy in Moscow and recalled the entire Soviet embassy from Tirana.

Nine civil disobedience Freedom Riders and two others were arrested outside the Albany, Georgia railroad station and charged with disorderly conduct.

December 13: 205 people were arrested as they marched around the city hall of Albany, Georgia during a trial of civil disobedience Freedom Riders.

UN planes (Sweden) partially destroyed the Lido Hotel in Elisabethville which has been fortified by the Katangans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

December 16: UN troops continued their advance into Elisabethville. They captured the Katangan stronghold of Camp Massart. White civilians directed sniper fire on the UN soldiers.

266 people, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were arrested as protests continued in Albany, Georgia.

500 Freedom Riders staged civil disobedience sit-ins at 40 restaurants between Baltimore and New Castle, Delaware, mostly without incident. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1962

Robert F. Williams’s NEGROES WITH GUNS (New York: Marzani & Munsell; reprinted Wayne State UP, 1998) denigrated the black-on-white civil disobedience of the American civil rights movement by contrasting this with the reality of white-on-black violence which he had been experiencing in his own life trajectory. The Afro-American cannot forget that his enslavement in this country did not pass because of pacifist moral force or noble appeals to the Christian conscience of the slave-holders. Henry David Thoreau is idealized as an apostle of non-violence, the writer who influenced Gandhi, and through Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. But Thoreau was not dogmatic; his eyes were open and he saw clearly. I keep with me a copy of Thoreau’s “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”. There are truths that are just as evident in 1962 as they were in 1859 when he wrote: ... It was his [John Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but such will be more shocked by his life than by his death. I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me.... I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail!... We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our henroosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharpe’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them or the like. I think that for once the Sharpe’ s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them. The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has appeared in America, as yet, who loved his fellowman so well, and treated him so tenderly. He [John Brown] lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him. What sort of violence is that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens, not so much by HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women? This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death; the possibility of a man’s dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in America before; for in order to die you must first have lived. It is in the nature of the American Negro, the same as all other men, to fight and try to destroy those things that block his path to a greater happiness in life. READ SEVERAL CHAPTERS

January 13, Saturday: 20 people were killed by terrorists in Algiers and Oran.

Fighting broke out in Stanleyville between Congolese troops and followers of the leftist Antoine Gizenga.

60 civil disobedience Freedom Riders were arrested at racially segregated restaurants in Cambridge, College Park, and Beltsville, Maryland.

Television pioneer Ernie Kovacs drove his Corvair into a utility pole on Santa Monica Boulevard, killing himself instantly.

January 22, Monday: French authorities instituted strong security measures in major Algerian cities. Algiers, Oran and Bône were sealed off and all incoming traffic was inspected. Civilian traffic was banned after 9PM. The military surrounded all districts prone to terrorism. Searches and seizure took place without warrant. A general strike paralyzed Bône.

One person was killed and 13 injured when a bomb exploded in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Paris.

Civil disobedience sit-in participants were beaten and sprayed with chemicals at a segregated lunch counter in Huntsville, Alabama.

Violence began in Caracas in protest against the foreign ministers conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay. A bomb blew a hole in a wall at the US embassy. President Betancourt ordered the army onto the streets.

January 24, Wednesday: 39 people were arrested in a civil disobedience march on City Hall in Albany, Georgia. After this about 2,000 people gathered and heaved rocks and bricks at the police. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

January 27, Saturday: Direct negotiations between rival factions in Algeria began, easing tensions.

The East German government announced it had failed to meet production goals in agriculture, heavy machinery, and electricity for the first half of 1962. They indicated however that their success in coal and chemical production made up for these losses.

27 people were arrested in a civil disobedience prayer pilgrimage to the City Hall of Albany, Georgia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1963

G.I. Joe was born in Rhode Island. (His inventor, of the Hasbro corporation, coined the term “action figure” to cope with the cultural given that little boys weren’t supposed to play with dolls. Dogtags were provided, but Dad needed to purchase his weapons and other equipment separately.)

A.J. Muste began to function as a central coordinator for the movement to end American involvement in Vietnam.

The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed after six years of demonstrations and public pressure.

The March on Washington was the largest demonstration to date, bringing more than 250,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I have a Dream” speech. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 1, Wednesday: The French government announced plans to shift their nuclear test center from the Sahara Desert (it’s difficult to figure out, there, whether you’ve succeeded in destroying anything) to the vicinity of the island of Tahiti.

The United Nations transferred sovereignty over West Irian to Indonesia.

In Prague, students protested against the government and the poor economy.

Eight persons of color were taken into custody in Attalla, Alabama while attempting to complete the civil disobedience “Freedom Walk” that had been begun but not finished by the white man William Lewis Moore (Moore himself having been found shot dead, execution style). They were not allowed to deliver Moore’s petition letter, which averred to the governor of that state that “the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights.”

May 18, Saturday: In Indonesia, the Peoples Provisional Congress appointed President Sukarno “President for life.”

Three days of civil disobedience by thousands of black Americans began in Durham, North Carolina. This was a protest against racial segregation of public facilities. 1,400 were taken into custody.

A federal court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring segregation of hotels was unconstitutional.

Epitaphe de Jean Harlow op.164 for flute, alto saxophone and piano by Charles Koechlin was performed for the initial time, in the Théâtre Municipal, Dijon, France, 26 years after it was composed.

The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi, a cantata for soprano, bass, children’s chorus, chorus and orchestra by Gian-Carlo Menotti, was performed for the initial time, in the Music Hall of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and George Harrison were on tour in England with Roy Orbison at the top of the bill. They were the warmup crew with songs such as “Love Me Do,” and then Roy and his backup singers would come out as the main event to do songs such as “She’s walking back to me.” (Soon, due to audience reaction, although by contract Orbison had to remain at the top of the bill, despite his magic voice he would be ask to warm up the crowd for the increasingly popular “Beetles.”)

May 19: Eleven people engaged in a 3d attempt to complete William Moore’s civil disobedience Freedom Walk were arrested by police and sheriff’s deputies in Alabama.

The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer for unspecified instruments, one of the Four Dreams of China by LaMonte Young, was performed for the initial time, at the New Jersey farm of George Segal. The work was performed on bowed mandolins.

May 20: Great Britain agreed to grant internal self-government to the Bahamas.

The US Supreme Court held in six decisions that it was unconstitutional for a city to prosecute blacks for using the tactic of civil disobedience to seek service in private businesses if the city required segregation.

Die Soldaten, a “vocal-symphony” for six vocal soloists and orchestra by Bernd Alois Zimmermann was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Westdeutsche Rundfunk, Cologne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 21, Tuesday: Zalman Shazar became President of Israel, replacing provisional president Kadish Luz.

A federal judge in Birmingham ordered the admission of two black students to the all-white University of Alabama. Governor George Wallace announced that he would personally bar the admission of blacks to the school.

Civil disobedience came to an end in Durham, North Carolina when the mayor announced that seven restaurants had agreed to racially desegregate. Harvey Rape would no longer be sitting at the entrance to his cafeteria with a shotgun across his lap, promising to blow the head off any black citizen who attempted to come through the door — as he would confess to the mayor late one evening in tears, he’d experienced a religious revelation that segregation was a sin.

El amor propiciado, the second revision of Panfilo and Lauretta, an opera by Carlos Chávez to words of Kallman after Boccaccio translated by Lindsay and Hernández Moncada, was performed for the initial time, in Mexico City.

May 28, Tuesday: 500,000 people march ed in a funeral procession for peace movement leader Grigoris Lambrakis in Athens. Among other things, they shouted “Lambrakis zi!” (Lambrakis lives). The letter Z would become a symbol of resistance to the corrupt conservative government blamed for his murder.

A black man and two black women sat at an all-white lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. They were joined by a small number of white supporters. A crowd of 200 whites began pouring condiments and other lunch counter items onto the civil disobedience demonstrators. A white man knocked the black man to the ground and kicked him in the face. A melee ensued during which some demonstrators were punched or thrown out the door. Police did not intervene, but later charged the two principals with crimes.

About 300 blacks, including Olympic champion Wilma Rudolph Ward, were denied service at a segregated restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee.

June 6, Thursday: Dr. Stephen Ward, who had brought John Profumo and Christine Keeler together, denied running a call-girl service and asserted that he had long ago notified British authorities about the relationship.

One day after black citizens requested service at several businesses in Lexington, North Carolina, 500 whites invaded the black district. They were met by about 100 blacks, and a riot ensued with flying missiles and shots fired. One person was killed and one injured.

280 people were arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina as they conducted a civil disobedience march to protest the arrest of local student leader Jesse Jackson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 10, Monday: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed an Equal Pay Act, requiring employers to pretend that, at least ideally, they preferred to offer equal pay for equal work regardless of gender.23 READ THE FULL TEXT

New negotiations between the US, UK, and USSR on a nuclear test ban were announced.

Major hotels, motels and restaurants in Nashville, Tennessee agreed that they would desegregate. Police in Danville, Virginia used firehoses to break up an anti-segregation demonstration. 47 of the marchers were injured, and 38 arrested. A peaceful anti-segregation march in Gadsden, Alabama was broken up by police using cattle prods and night sticks. Civil disobedience sit-ins by black Americans begin at lunch counters in Charleston, South Carolina. ASSLEY

23. By 1984, this Equal Pay Act had been in full force and effect for more than a decade. After I escaped from the Iranian revolution, I had made my way to Silicon Valley. At Tandem Computers in Cupertino, my cubicle was next to the cubicle of Jane Wyman. I was a “techwriter” and she an “editor.” My pay was therefore almost precisely twice hers. I received a job offer with significantly better compensation, at a just-founded Silicon Valley startup called Sydis Computer Systems, and informed my supervisor that due to the fact that Tandem had in my employment contract stipulated that I would be provided with a home computer but he had reneged on that obligation, I was providing them with two weeks notice. Later on that same memorable day Jane and I sat down together with him and pointed out that she and I had been not only working in adjoining cubicles, but had been being assigned precisely the same work. His explanation to us was that due to my background I had technical skills in the computer industry, whereas hers was a mere humanities background and she was being compensated accordingly. I pointed out to him that my BA had been in Philosophy and she pointed out to him that her PhD was in Literature, as well as that she had been techwriting for a number of years whereas I had, since escaping the Iranian revolution, been doing this sort of computer work for approximately one. At a knickknack store on El Camino Real I purchased two lapel buttons with an appropriate humorous logo, a piece of humor that she accepted in good grace. Two weeks later at my exit interview with the Personnel Department of Tandem, I noticed that the chic young lady had pre-checked the block on her form for “Do Not Rehire,” and that her notion seemed to be that I was being processed for termination for cause. She was surprised to be advised that Tandem had not honored its employment contract, but made no comment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 6, Saturday: Murray Kempton, in an article in The New Republic, “The Clarity of A. Philip Randolph,” quoted Bayard Rustin and then suggested that Randolph, the mild and persistent old chief of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was an inheritor of Thoreauvian civil disobedience tactics:24

“Every now and then,” says Bayard Rustin, “I think he permits good manners to get in the way and that he even prefers them to sound tactics. Once I complained about that and he answered, ‘Bayard, we must with good manners accept everyone. Now is the time for us to learn good manners. We will need them when this is over, because we must show good manners after we have won.’” ... Randolph is alone among these leaders because he neither feels nor incites hostility. He is a pacifist in a native American tradition; before most members of King’s nonviolent army were born, he was reminding the Negro of Thoreau’s prescription to cast the total vote with feet and voice along with the ballot.... The porters remain as they have always been, moderate in the particular that involves manners, and radical in the general that involves principle. CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

August 16, Friday: A 71-year-old Buddhist monk burned himself to death in Hue to protest the anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese government.

Duke Ellington’s My People was performed for the initial time, in the McCormick Place center in Chicago.

24. Better press than this would be hard to imagine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

August 28, Wednesday: Thoreau translator Alireza Taghdarreh was born.

The South Vietnamese government alleged that the recent anti-Buddhist events had been perpetrated by the army.

Concerto for orchestra by Michael Tippett was performed for the initial time, in Usher Hall, Edinburgh.

Friend Bayard Rustin was chief organizer and logistician for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

It had been at Rustin’s urging that A. Phillip Randolph had called for the march. The death of W.E. Burghardt Du Bois was announced by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP at the beginning of the march. The march culminated on this day in the historic “I Have a Dream” speech before the Washington Memorial by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to an audience of 250,000.

BE IN THE AUDIENCE

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check - a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

be free one day. This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

August 31, Saturday: Great Britain granted internal autonomy to Sarawak and North Borneo. They were to become part of Malaysia immediately, but that had been postponed pending the outcome of a UN investigation into the voting in which citizens favored federation with Malaya. Singapore declared its independence.

Georges Braque died in Paris at the age of 81.

A civil disobedience march by more than 500 black citizens on the city hall of Placquemine, Louisiana was attacked by police, some on horseback. They used fire hoses, cattle prods, and tear gas. 69 people were arrested.

Concerto for piano trio and strings by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in Lucerne, 30 years after it was composed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1964

January: Robert Cunningham resigned as Headmaster of the Moses Brown School of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island. Friend Whittemore Whittier, the Assistant Headmaster, would serve as Acting Headmaster until June 30th.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a 30-year-old assistant professor of Zoology at Duke University, Friend Peter H. Klopfer, along with five other professors and several younger persons, were arrested on a charge of simple misdemeanor trespass after a civil disobedience action at a local segregated restaurant. The case of Professor Klopfer would differ from the others, who would all be convicted either after trials or after a collective plea bargain — in his case the jury would deadlock and the judge would declare a mistrial. Subsequent to this court event, however, the local prosecutor would rely on a procedural device whereby the indictment might remain open indefinitely, hanging over the professor’s head as a legal threat to guarantee future “good” conduct. This interesting variant on primate behavior would be taken to the Supreme Court of the United States, which would decide that such a legal procedural device might not be deployed in such manner as to nullify statutes of limitations.

June 11, Thursday: The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and 17 others were arrested in St. Augustine, Florida when they refused to leave a motor lodge restaurant after being denied service. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 12, Friday: Nelson Mandela and seven other opponents of apartheid were sentenced to life imprisonment in Pretoria.

The USSR signed a 20-year treaty of friendship with East Germany in Moscow. It recognized East Germany and the inviolability of its borders but iterated the Soviet Unions’ obligations under the Potsdam Treaty of 1945.

60 people were arrested at segregated restaurants in St. Augustine, Florida. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Harvard University conferred an honorary degree on Roger Sessions. Considering his performance while a Harvard undergraduate 50 years ago, Sessions needed to ask himself, “I wonder if they looked at my academic record?”

Benjamin Britten’s stage work Curlew River op.71, to words of Plomer after Motomasa, was performed for the initial time, at Orford Church, conducted by the composer. This day also saw the premiere of Britten’s Nocturnal after Dowland op.70 for guitar, in Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 14, Sunday: 17 people are arrested at segregated restaurants in St. Augustine, Florida. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Plus/Minus no.14 for unspecified instrumentation by Karlheinz Stockhausen, was performed for the initial time, in Rome. The premiere was played on two pianos by Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski.

The Cappemakers, a dramatic cantata by John Tavener to the York Mystery Play, was performed for the initial time, in Charleston Manor, conducted by the composer.

Horn of Plenty for orchestra by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in the auditorium of Beverly Hills High School, California.

June 17, Wednesday: 16 people were arrested at segregated restaurants in St. Augustine, Florida. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 18, Thursday: 41 people are arrested at a motor lodge in St. Augustine, Florida after some were removed from the restaurant and others dove into the pool. Among those arrested are 17 members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 21, Sunday: “Freedom Summer” had recruited 700 young people to practice civil disobedience by registering new voters25 in Mississippi. On this night, civil rights workers James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner disappeared after being released from jail near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

(Following the FBI’s supremely reluctant MIBURN investigation,26 eight men, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and Sam Holloway Bowers, Jr., the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, would be convicted of murdering the young men and burying their bodies in a dam under construction, and sentenced to imprisonment under federal civil rights statutes.)

June 23, Tuesday: A car belonging to the three civil rights workers missing since June 21st was found in a swamp near Philadelphia, Mississippi. It had been burned.

Fantasy for organ, brass and timpani by Roy Harris was performed for the initial time, in Philadelphia, the composer conducting.

25. “New voters” is a code term. Can you break the code? 26. Real life FBI guys aren’t anything like the principled movie actor heros in a film such as “Mississippi Burning” — they’re more like a bunch of suits who never forget they are working for the establishment and keep constantly in mind which side of the butter their bread is on. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 30, Tuesday: On the 4th anniversary of independence, the last UN troops (Nigeria/Canada) left the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

About 80 owners of public accommodations in St. Augustine, Florida announced that they planned to obey the new Civil Rights Act. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 2, Thursday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the East Room of the White House, ending racial discrimination in all places affected by interstate commerce. This guaranteed voting rights and granted aid to desegregate schools. READ THE FULL TEXT

July 3, Friday: Speaking in Nicosia, Greek Cypriot leader George Grivas made his first public statement in favor of union with Greece.

Lester Maddox, owner of the Pickrick Restaurant in Atlanta, stood in the door with a pistol while supporters stood behind him with pick handles. He would close his restaurant rather than integrate it, become governor, run for president, and sell signed pick handles labeled “Pickrick drum sticks.” Although he would live for a long time after this period of his life, he would never ask forgiveness for these racist provocations. It would be his big deal, that he had driven three black divinity students out of his establishment at gunpoint when they had in accordance with civil disobedience tactics sought service under the Civil Rights Act signed into law on the previous day. From his standpoint, he was protecting every American’s God-given right to the free and sole possession and self-determination of private property (I have personally met this man and guy to guy, he has explained all this to me, so I am quite sure I have gotten it right).

The Lady From Colorado, an opera by Robert Ward to words of Stambler after Croy, was performed for the initial time, in Central City, Colorado.

September 29: Defense Minister Pierre Messmer announced that French forces in former colonies would be reduced by 75% by the following July.

The Free Speech Movement at the University of California – Berkeley staged a 12-hour civil disobedience sit- in at the University’s administration building to protest the banning of political activity by the school’s leaders. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1965

January 18, Monday: The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and 11 other black citizens registered at the previously all-white Hotel Albert in Selma, Alabama. While registering the Reverend was assaulted by a white man, who was then arrested. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

January 19, Tuesday: In Selma, Alabama law officers of Dallas County began to arrest any black citizens who sought to register to vote. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

January 20, Wednesday: Five Buddhist monks began a hunger strike in Saigon, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Tran Van Huong. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Alan Freed died in Palm Springs, California at the age of 43.

Taking the constitutional oath as President, Lyndon Baines Johnson orated against isolationism: “We can never again stand aside, prideful in isolation.”

Hey, hey, LBJ! This was the month in which the US Navy was beginning its river patrols of South Vietnam’s 3000 nautical miles of inland waterways. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

January 23: 200 Buddhists in Nhatrang began a hunger strike to protest the government of South Vietnamese Prime Minister Tran Van Huong. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

About 5,000 Buddhists marched on the US Consulate in Hue (a few dozen of them would break in and set fire to the building).

A federal court prohibited the January 19th actions of Dallas County officials and forbade them to harass anyone attempting to register, or anyone helping them.

January 25, Monday: 15,000 Buddhists marched through Hue, South Vietnam, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Tran van Hong and the recall of US ambassador Maxwell Taylor. The military declared martial law in Hue due to continuing anti-government violence. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Three days of violent demonstrations took place in Madras state, India to protest the replacement of English by Hindi as the official language of the country (which was due to go down on the following day).

January 26, Tuesday: 17-year-old Huynh Thi Yen Phi killed herself by self-immolation in Nhatrang, to protest the government of South Vietnamese Prime Minister Tran Van Huong.

Pursuant to the provisions of the Indian constitution, adopted precisely 15 years earlier, the official language of the nation changed from English to Hindi.

Prime Minister Hassan Ali Mansour of Iran died of wounds suffered on January 21st. Shahanshah Pahlavi appointed Amir Abbas Hoveida to replace him.

34 black citizens were arrested while trying to register to vote in Selma, Alabama. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

January 27, Wednesday: 24 people were arrested for attempting to stand in line to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, or for urging others to persist in that course of conduct. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Lieutenant-General Nguyen Khanh seized full control of South Vietnam’s government from Prime Minister Tran Van Huong. Nguyen Xuan Oanh was named acting prime minister. Their objective temporarily achieved, five Buddhist monks ended their hunger strike begun on January 20th.

National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara sent a memo to President Lyndon Baines Johnson stating that the US had reached a “fork in the road” because America’s limited military involvement in Vietnam was not succeeding. We needed to either escalate or withdraw, and whichever option we chose, we needed to begin this soon.

Hey, hey, LBJ! Norman Dello Joio was elected to the council of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Six Simple Songs for voice and piano by Bohuslav Martinu was performed for the initial time, in Prague, 48 years after it was composed.

Brass Quintet by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, in Kaufmann Concert Hall, New York. Also premiered was Numbers for flute, horn, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, violin, cello and double bass by Morton Feldman.

Three works by Steve Reich were performed for the initial time at the San Francisco Tape Music Center: It’s Gonna Rain for tape, Music for Two or More Pianos or Piano and Tape, and Livelihood for tape.

February 1, Monday: The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and 263 others were arrested while marching on the courthouse in Selma, Alabama. They were protesting the refusal of county officials to register black citizens to vote. About 500 black students were arrested for picketing the courthouse. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 2, Tuesday: 120 blacks were arrested for standing in line outside the courthouse in Selma, Alabama to register to vote. 400 black students were arrested for marching on the courthouse. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 3, Wednesday: Australian combat troops arrived in Sarawak and Sabah.

Hermann Krumey, an aide to Heinrich Himmler, was convicted in Frankfurt-am-Main of assisting in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. He was sentenced to five years at hard labor.

300 black children gathered at the county courthouse in Selma, Alabama and sang civil rights songs. They were arrested for truancy. 700 black children were arrested at the Perry County Courthouse in Marion. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Four Nocturnes (Night Music II) for violin and piano by George Crumb was performed for the initial time, in Buffalo, with the composer himself at the keyboard.

February 4, Thursday: National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy visited South Vietnam for the first time while Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin was arriving in Hanoi.

Loyal Laotian troops gained control of Vientiane, crushing a conservative coup.

A federal judge in Mobile found that the barring of blacks from the voting process in Selma, Alabama was systematic, and attempted to correct that by ordering the Dallas County Board of Registrars to process at least 100 applicants every day it was in session. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 5, Friday: 500 black citizens marching on the county courthouse in Selma, Alabama were arrested. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Cradle Song, a song by Charles Ives to words of A.L. Ives, was performed for the initial time, in the Alma Gluck Concert Hall, New York.

Chamber Piece no.1 for 14 players by Stefan Wolpe was performed for the initial time, in Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, Washington.

February 6, Saturday: At Pleiku in the central highlands of South Vietnam, the Viet Cong killed 8 Americans, wounded 126, and destroyed 10 aircraft.

February 7, Sunday-8, Monday: “I’ve had enough of this,” President Lyndon Baines Johnson commented to his national security advisors. Clearly he had not had enough of this, for then he ordered US Navy jets from the carrier Ranger to drop bombs on a North Vietnamese army camp near Dong Hoi (Operation Flaming Dart). Although the President made no speeches or public statements in regard to this action, the opinion polls showed a 70% approval rating for the President and an 80% approval of US military involvement in South- East Asia — so Johnson began the policy of sustained bombing of North Vietnam. In Hanoi, Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin was being pressed by the North Vietnamese to help them counter American “aggression,” and new sophisticated Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) would arrive in theater within weeks.

Texas isn’t big enough yet February 10, Wednesday: A Viet Cong bomb went off under a barracks housing US troops at Quinhon. 23 Americans were killed.

At least 21 people were killed in language riots in Madras State, India.

Fluktuationen for orchestra by Isang Yun was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.

Sheriff’s deputies with electric cattle prods herded civil rights marchers out of Selma, Alabama. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February 18, Thursday: Another military coup in Saigon resulted in General Nguyen Khanh finally being ousted and a new military/civilian regime, led by Dr. Phan Huy Quat, installed.

For the first time, US warplanes attacked Viet Cong positions without participation by the South Vietnamese Air Force.

Gambia, under Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Dawda Kairaba Jawara, was declared independent of Great Britain.

400 black demonstrators were attacked and chased by state troopers in Marion, Alabama (one of them was killed). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Alberto Ginastera’s Harp Concerto was performed for the first time, in Philadelphia.

March 7, Sunday: 700 civil rights protesters attempting to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma were routed with billy clubs, tear gas, whips, and cattle prods by the Alabama state police. The police wounded 66. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Symphony no.3 by Easley Blackwood was performed for the initial time, in Chicago. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 9, Tuesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson authorized the use of napalm, a jelled gasoline gobs of which stick to the skin while burning, in Vietnam.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.... It smells like ... victory.”

Three white Unitarian reverends who participated in the march of March 7th were savagely beaten on a street corner in Selma, Alabama. Four white men would be arrested. Marches in sympathy with the Selma civil rights demonstrators took place in major cities throughout the United States. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

American Tryptich: Three Studies in Texture for orchestra by Gunther Schuller was performed for the initial time, in New Orleans, and was conducted by the composer himself.

March 11, Thursday: Operation Market Time, a joint effort between the US Navy and the South Vietnamese Navy, began to intercept coastal routes by which North Vietnam might be resupplying the South, to force the use of the more difficult land route of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

ARIEL by Sylvia Plath was published by Faber in Great Britain.

The Unitarian minister Reverend James Reeb of Boston died in a Montgomery hospital of wounds suffered during his streetcorner beating in Selma, Alabama on March 9th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 16, Tuesday: The Israeli Knesset voted to accept an offer of diplomatic relations from West Germany. Anti- German riots took place in Iraq and Lebanon.

Police attacked about 600 civil rights demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama with clubs and electric cattle prods (a county official would later apologize, explaining that there had been “a mixup and a misunderstanding of orders”). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

In memoriam: Die Weisse Rose for 12 players by Hans Werner Henze was performed for the initial time, in Bologna.

March 17, Wednesday: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was sent to the federal Congress by President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

A US federal court prohibited Alabama state officials from interfering with a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

1,600 civil rights demonstrators marched peacefully in Montgomery. At the end, leaders met with county officials to try to avoid violence. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 18, Thursday: Aleksei Arkhipovich Leonov becomes the first man to “walk” in space, exiting his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for ten minutes.

Former King Farouk of Egypt, deposed in 1952, died in Rome.

Governor George Wallace of Alabama, speaking before the Alabama legislature, denounces the federal court ruling of the previous day and made personal attacks on the judge. He called the civil rights marchers “communist-trained” but called on Alabama citizens to exhibit restraint. The legislature thereupon adopted a resolution calling the march “asinine and ridiculous.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 19, Friday: President Sukarno of Indonesia ordered the seizure of four foreign oil companies operating in the country.

Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, First Secretary of the Romanian Workers’ Party, President of the State Council, died of cancer. He was replaced by a 3-man committee as President of the State Council, ad interim.

State police used clubs to chase away civil rights demonstrators attempting to integrate the cafeteria in the state capitol building in Little Rock, Arkansas. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Ring a Dumb Carillon for soprano, clarinet and percussion by Harrison Birtwistle to words of Logue was performed for the initial time, in London.

The Emperor of Ice Cream for eight voices, percussion, piano and double bass by Roger Reynolds to words of Stevens was performed for the initial time, in New York, conducted by Gunther Schuller.

March 20, Saturday: President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 21, Sunday: 3,200 civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama began a trek to the state capital in Montgomery, protected by federal troops. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Hans Werner Henze’s Lucy Escott Variations for piano was performed for the initial time, in Berlin.

Kitty Hawk (An Antigravity Piece) by Robert Ashley to his own words was performed for the initial time, in St. Louis.

March 23, Tuesday: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 survived a cloture vote in the US Senate.

March 25, Thursday: Dudley Senanayake replaced Sirimavo Bandaranaike as prime minister of Ceylon.

Chivu Stoica replaced Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as Chairman of the Presidium of Romania.

The West German Bundestag voted to extend for five years the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes.

At the end of a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 25,000 marchers gathered before the state capitol building to hear speeches by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Meanwhile, 3,200 began a march in Selma. In the evening, Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife who had ferried marchers to Selma and was on her way back to Montgomery, was shot several times by the occupants of another automobile. She was killed but her companion would survive. Four men would be arrested for the crime. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 26, Monday: 10,000-20,000 people marched on City Hall in Chicago to protest de facto school segregation. This was the 42d such march in the last 47 days, but it was the largest, and was the first personally led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Nonet for strings by David Diamond was performed for the initial time, in Philharmonic Hall, New York.

August 6, Friday: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and other civil disobedience leaders in attendance. READ THE FULL TEXT

August 31, Tuesday: President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed a law criminalizing the burning of one’s Selective Service draft card. Although such a gesture might result in a 5-year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine, this attempt at freedom of speech in America would become rather common during anti-war rallies because often it could succeed in attracting the attention of the media.27 Out in the Rose Garden of the White House, the President declared the beginnings of Project Head Start a success and announced expansion of the program to provide year-round opportunities for 350,000 children, summer programs for another 500,000 and followup contacts for those limited to summer sessions.

September 8, Wednesday: The United Farm Workers union launched a table-grape boycott, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 18, Monday: A massacre of Communists began throughout eastern Java. About 100, perhaps, were killed on this day.

FBI agents arrested David Miller in Hooksett, New Hampshire for having 3 days earlier destroyed his draft card in a New York City demonstration. He was the initial person arrested under the new law raising the stakes by criminalizing such acts of civil disobedience.

Symphony no.19 by Henry Cowell was performed for the initial time, in War Memorial Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee.

27. Draft card burnings marked growing resistance to the US war in Vietnam; millions joined in demonstrations, draft counseling, tax resistance, civil disobedience, or other forms of protest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1966

A.J. Muste led a group of pacifists to Saigon where, for trying to demonstrate for peace, they were arrested and deported. Then, later in the year, he flew with a small team of religious leaders to Hanoi and met with Ho Chi Minh. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Professor Walter Roy Harding reported in this year that CAPE COD had been Henry Thoreau’s “sunniest, happiest book.” More recently Bob Pepperman Taylor has regarded such a take on such a book, concerned as it is with violent death and arbitrary violence, as simply “bizarre.” –And the Harding who has been the perpetrator of such a trivializing misreading would be, Taylor points out, for some time considered “the dean 28 of Thoreau studies”! It is in his chapter “Fraternity” of AMERICA’S BACHELOR UNCLE: THOREAU AND THE AMERICAN POLITY (Lawrence KA: UP of Kansas, 1996) that Taylor takes up the book CAPE COD for consideration, intending by an exemplary close reading to demonstrate that actually this sunniest, happiest book on violent death and arbitrary violence offers a Thoreauvian civil disobedience political analysis of overlooked sophistication:

On the opening pages of CAPE COD Thoreau says, “I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape Cod, as well as my neighbor on ‘Human Culture.’ It is but another name for the same thing.” The problem of this book and of a number of Thoreau’s other travel, or “excursion,” writings, is the problem of human solidarity. How is it that human beings are, or might be, held together in coherent, meaningful morally respectable community? In light of its history, and since contemporary residents of the Cape “are said to be more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the state,” this is an ideal setting for evaluating the nature and character of a social 28. It would be in this year that Walter Roy Harding would leave the chair of the Humanities Division at SUNY – Geneseo, becoming University Professor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

fabric.... this problem of human community can first be approached negatively: What are the forces that threaten the shared experiences and commitments essential to any healthy community? In CAPE COD Thoreau considers in some detail two of the most privatizing elements of human life, death and the yearning for personal salvation (or, in more general and secular language, for an independent moral integrity), and the problems they pose for human solidarity. Thoreau severely criticizes three major responses to these forces within the American experience, all of which represent attempts to prevent the dissolution of common life: charity, our historical narratives, and religious intolerance. But we know from other writings, most importantly “A YANKEE IN CANADA”, that he is even more critical of societies that do not even aspire to civic concern or moral consensus, societies that are built only and self-consciously upon brute political force. For Thoreau, we desperately need a moral community, but the models that exist for such communities in the American tradition are significantly flawed.... Thoreau’s concern in this book is not economic (as it is in WALDEN or “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”). He is here interested in the impact that nature and death have on the forces of social integration, on the relationships between citizens and individuals. And what he finds is terribly disturbing.... Thoreau was well acquainted with the overwhelming frustration the living may face in properly relating to, sympathizing with, and grieving for the dead. Death threatens the stability of community not only in an economic or material sense but in an emotional, affective sense as well. It strains and threatens to rend the foundation of individualized concern upon which meaningful community is built.

We may contrast this, as Bob Pepperman Taylor does, with the sort of CATCH-22 political analysis which is to be found in “A YANKEE IN CANADA”: What Henry Thoreau sees in Canada is blatant political oppression: an attempt by the English to create a political community through the frank imposition of physical force. In CAPE COD Thoreau concludes that religious imposition is a flawed method of creating social solidarity, that our telling of history is incomplete and dishonest, and that our charity is a thin and hypocritical fraternal gruel. But his observations in Canada demonstrate to him that brute force is the most cynical method of all for imposing a sense of social unity. This is illustrated by the way in which a tyrannical military robs its own soldiers of their manhood. It is impossible to give the soldier a good education, without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 16, Wednesday: 10,000 Buddhists rallied in Saigon against the removal of Nguyen Chanh Thi from the government.

A rally took place in Sydney, Australia to protest involvement in Vietnam. Twelve draft cards got burned. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Gemini 8 was launched from Cape Kennedy to carry out the initial docking in space. Pilot Neil Armstrong maneuvered the spacecraft to join with an Agena target vehicle.

La Divina, a comic opera by Thomas Pasatieri to his own words, was performed for the initial time, at the Juilliard School, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1967

April 14, Friday: While visiting Saigon, Richard Milhous Nixon opinioned that the civil-disobedience people back in the US were “prolonging the war.” (Guess what, anybody who didn’t agree with our president must be a traitor.) “[President Richard Milhous Nixon] will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation.” — Murray Kempton HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 21, Saturday-23, Monday: In London, protesters attempted to storm the US embassy. A civil-disobedience “March on the Pentagon” drew 55,000 protesters. Inside the Pentagon, during this year, an effort had begun to compile a secret “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy,” something that eventually would surface as the “Pentagon Papers” after Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst, would take the personal risk of making a personal copy on an office copier and take the risk of leaking it to the free press. Publication of such government secrets would infuriate President Richard Milhous Nixon and would be one of the principal motivations that would lead him into the Watergate entanglement.

Hero of Civil Disobedience

October 24, Tuesday: In a 3-hour artillery exchange across the Suez Canal, the oil refining facilities of Suez were largely destroyed.

Royal assent was given to a British bill legalizing abortion under certain circumstances.

Lewis Hershey, director of conscription in the US, ordered that all men who involved themselves in the civil- disobedience protests against the Vietnam War by destroying their draft cards were to lose their deferments.

“OK, you want to play rough? –No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

Funeral-Triumphal Prelude in Memory of the Heroes of the Battle of Stalingrad op.130 for orchestra and band by Dmitri Shostakovich was performed for the initial time, in Moscow.

Psalm 25 for chorus by Charles Ives was performed for the initial time, in the Arts and Industries Building of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, 66 years after it had been composed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 1, Wednesday: 24-year-old Konstantinos Daoutis, a shopkeeper, was sentenced to four years in prison by a Greek military tribunal for selling a record by Mikis Theodorakis. Soon, in prison, this Greek composer would begin a hunger strike. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The film Cool Hand Luke was released in the United States. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 2, Thursday: The Greek popular composer Mikis Theodorakis began a hunger strike in prison to protest the government’s refusal to allow him as a witness at the trial of his comrades. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

US Ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg announced that if the Geneva Peace talks on Vietnam were restarted, his country would favor the inclusion of the National Liberation Front.

Concerto per contrabasso for double bass and orchestra by Hans Werner Henze was performed for the initial time, in Chicago.

After a funeral for a black man beaten to death in police custody, violence erupted in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 50 people were injured, 270 arrested, $350,000 in damage done.

In the Durham Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends:

Clerks of Meeting 1943-1947 Edward K. Kraybill 1947-1948 William Van Hoy, Jr. 1949-1949 John de J. Pemberton, Jr. 1950-1951 Harry R. Stevens 1951-1952 John A. Barlow 1952-1957 Susan Gower Smith 1957-1960 Frances C. Jeffers 1960-1961 Cyrus M. Johnson 1961-1965 Peter H. Klopfer 1965-1967 Rebecca W. Fillmore 1967-1968 David Tillerson Smith 1968-1970 Ernest Albert Hartley 1970-1971 John Hunter 1971-1972 John Gamble 1972-1974 Lyle B. Snider (2 terms) 1974-1975 Helen Gardella 1976-1978 Cheryl F. Junk 1978-1980 Alice S. Keighton HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1980-1982 John B. Hunter 1982-1984 Edward M. Arnett 1984-1986 Calhoun D. Geiger 1986-1988 John P. Stratton 1988-1990 J. Robert Passmore 1990-1992 Karen Cole Stewart 1992-1995 Kathleen Davidson March 1995-1998 Nikki Vangsnes 1998-2000 Co-clerks J. Robert Passmore & Karen Cole Stewart 2000-2002 Amy Brannock 2002-2002 Jamie Hysjulien (Acting) 2002-2005 William Thomas O’Connor 2005-2007 Terry Graedon 2007-2009 Anne Akwari 2009-2012 Joe Graedon 2012-2013 Marguerite Dingman 2013- Co-clerks Cathy Bridge & David Bridge

November 12, Sunday: After ten days of a hunger strike, the composer Mikis Theodorakis was taken from his cell to the Averoff prison hospital. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 21, Tuesday: William Walton received the Order of Merit.

The Indian government instituted direct rule over West Bengal and Haryana, which previously had governments run by the opposition United Front.

Speaking in Washington, General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, offered that “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.”

Eight people were convicted in an Athens court of attempting to overthrow the government of Greece. They were given sentences ranging from four years to life in prison. 13 others were given suspended sentences and ten were acquitted. The popular Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis was due to be a defendant in this case but was still in a prison hospital after his hunger strike in protest at the government’s unwillingness to allow him to offer testimony. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1968

March 12, Tuesday: In the New Hampshire Democratic primary, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was able to defeat the anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, by only a very slim margin, just 300 votes. Public support for Johnson had been seriously eroding. Public opinion polls taken after the Tet Offensive revealed that Johnson’s overall approval rating has slipped to 36%, while approval of his Vietnam policy had slipped to 26%.

Hey, hey, LBJ! Mauritius, under Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, was proclaimed independent of Great Britain.

As Rome University was reopened for the first time since March 1st, 4,000 students staged a civil disobedience sit-in forcing the rescheduling of examinations.

Oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

March 28, Thursday: Student demonstrators at the University of Warsaw demanded the reinstatement of six of their professors and the dismissal of all charges against fellow students arrested since January 30th. Over the succeeding several days the government would close eight departments at the university and would force more than 1,000 students to reapply.

About 600 Madrid University students agreed to evacuate a campus building they had occupied, after they were given assurances of safe conduct by the police. As they exited the building, however, the police attacked them with clubs (after months of violence the university would be closed by authorities).

Violence erupted after a civil disobedience march led by Martin Luther King in Memphis. One person was killed, 150 arrested.

Students rioted in Rio de Janeiro after a young man was killed by police during a student demonstration.

Symphony by Ulysses Kay, commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the State of Illinois, was performed for the initial time, in Macomb, Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

March 31, Sunday: Worn to tatters by civil disobedience, President Lyndon Baines Johnson stunned the world by announcing a surprise decision that he was not going to seek reelection. He also announced a partial bombing halt in Vietnam (a bombing halt that affected only targets such as Hanoi north of the 20th parallel) and urged the Northern government to cooperate in peace talks. “We are prepared to move immediately toward peace through negotiations.”

Hey, hey, LBJ! How many lives did you save today?

May 1, Wednesday: South Vietnamese peace leader Truong Dinh Dzu was arrested by agents of the Saigon government at a Saigon hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition caused by a 12-day hunger strike. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Police stormed a peaceful protest rally at Columbia University. Eleven were injured.

May 17, Friday: Philip and Daniel Berrigan and seven other Catholic priests and lay people destroyed 378 draft files at the Catonsville, Maryland draft board, dousing them with homemade napalm and then torching them in the parking lot.29 The protest would spark dozens of similar acts of civil disobedience.

November 16, Saturday: The Jordanian government reached an agreement with several terrorists organizations operating within its borders.

Students at Prague University began a civil disobedience sit-in, demanding a restoration of rights lost by the Soviet invasion. The students were openly supported by secondary school students, factory workers, miners, the Prague Union of Journalists, and the musicians of the Czech Philharmonic.

More than 3,000 Catholics marched into the center of Londonderry and were assaulted by Protestants throwing rocks.

Credo for chorus and orchestra by Arvo Pärt was performed for the initial time, in Tallinn.

Carol for orchestra by Henry Cowell was performed for the initial time, in the Municipal Theater, Tulsa.

29. Not the kind invented at Harvard and being manufactured in bulk by Dow — homemade small-batch low-tech stuff made out of scrap odds and ends of plastic melted in gasoline. But effective enough. Don’t attempt this unless you’re a priest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1969

Greenpeace adopted nonviolent direct action to protect the environment and dramatize its cause. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

February: There were a series of civil disobedience sit-ins and protests on the campus of the Moses Brown School of the Religious Society of Friends in Providence, Rhode Island. Enrollment had reached nearly 600.30

April 19, Saturday: Violence erupted in Londonderry when police blocked a planned march by Catholic civil rights protesters. Catholics threw rocks and bottles at the police. Protestants then attacked the Catholics. Water hoses were brought into play to scatter the protesters. Later, Catholics attacked a Londonderry police station. In the course of the day 288 were injured.

One day after a burning cross was found outside a cooperative for black women students, black students at Cornell University occupied Willard Straight Hall. Some white students failed in an attempt to eject them. The building was then surrounded by members of Students for a Democratic Society, using the tactic of civil disobedience to protect those within.

Piano Sonata no.5 by Lejaren Hiller was performed for the initial time, in New York.

April 21, Monday: Dr. Roy Bowen directed a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, about Henry Thoreau’s night in jail and Thoreauvian civil disobedience. This play would premier in October of the following year in Washington DC as the very often staged “The Night Thoreau spent in Jail.”

May 18, Sunday: The Apollo 10 manned moon mission blasted off from Cape Kennedy.

Streams in the Desert for chorus and orchestra by Howard Hanson to words from the Bible was performed for the initial time, at Texas Technology College, Lubbock, Texas, the composer conducting.

30. In this year, also, black students protesting alleged racism at the public Hope High School across the street were also trashing its facilities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 21, Wednesday: Violence erupted between blacks and police at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Over the following 3 days police and national guard would be battling snipers in dormitories. Tear gas would be used.

In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was sentenced to death for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Apollo 10 entered orbit around the moon.

Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley voted to boycott classes for so long as the National Guard remained on campus.

May 22, Thursday: Biafran aircraft attacked an airfield at Port Harcourt, destroying 3 federal Nigerian war planes.

1 was killed and 5 injured in an exchange of gunfire at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro.

University students took over an area of 50 blocks in Rosario, Argentina and battled police from behind barricades. Federal troops were called in with orders to fire.

Leaving astronaut John Young behind in the command module, astronauts Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan detached the lunar module of Apollo 10 and guided it towards the moon. They descended to within 14 kilometers of the surface, surveying the landing site for Apollo 11 at the Sea of Tranquility, then returned and docked with the command module.

About 500 were arrested during an attempt at a protest march in downtown Berkeley, California.

Orpheus--for the Singer to the Dance for tenor, chorus and percussion by Lou Harrison to words of Duncan, was performed for the initial time, at San Jose State University.

May 23, Friday: The National Guard cleared the campus of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro by the use of tear gas, rifle fire, and smoke from airplanes. 200 were arrested.

Labor leaders called a general strike in Rosario, Argentina in sympathy with striking students.

Songs of Ecstasy for soprano with piano, percussion and tape by Ralph Shapey was performed for the initial time, in Mandel Hall of the University of Chicago.

Colloquy for orchestra by Leslie Bassett was performed for the initial time, in Fresno, California.

May 24, Saturday: Having jettisoned the lunar module, Apollo 10 left lunar orbit.

A raid by Biafran war planes on Benin destroyed a Nigerian fighter and some civilian aircraft.

A federal judge ordered the sheriff of Alameda County to cease and desist from beating and torturing prisoners arrested in civil-disobedience protests. At the urging of the Berkeley city council, most National Guard troops were removed from the city. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1970

April 29, Wednesday: 6,000 South Vietnamese soldiers marched into Cambodia’s “Parrot’s Beak” west of Saigon.

Israel confirmed that Soviet pilots were flying combat missions for Egypt.

An Egyptian commando raid in force across the Suez Canal failed.

A play about Henry Thoreau’s night in jail, and Thoreauvian civil disobedience, had been produced at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio one year earlier (this play would debut as “The Night Thoreau spent in Jail” in Washington DC in October). Students at Ohio State had begun protesting the presence on campus of ROTC, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. 1,200 National Guardsmen appeared and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. They arrested some 600 students. About 20 shotgun wounds would be treated.

Speaking for the first time since his release from custody, Mikis Theodorakis called for a “national council of resistance” to overthrow the Greek government.

Ringing Changes for twelve percussionists by Charles Wuorinen was performed (performed without interruption this time), at Jersey City State College.

May 4, Monday: Neither of the two groups of US and Saigon government forces penetrating Cambodia reported any substantial contact with the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong.

The Greek government freed Greek-born French journalist Jean Starakis and flew him to Paris.

Palestinian terrorists entered the Israeli mission in Asuncion, Paraguay. They killed the wife of the first secretary and injured an employee. They were arrested.

The Pulitzer Prize in music was awarded to Charles Wuorinen for his Time’s Encomium. When asked about the meeting of April 9th, Pulitzer board member Vermont C. Royster repeated his performance over the telephone for a New York Times reporter. “It goes something like this: ‘bum, beep, deetely doot.’”

At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of students, killing four anti-Vietnam student protesters and wounding nine. More than 400 colleges and universities across America immediately shut down. In Washington DC, nearly 100,000 protesters surrounded various of the government buildings including the White House and the historical monuments. The message was clear: “This is the sort of conduct up with which we are not going to put.”

“A victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.” — Jean-Paul Sartre HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

For the first time more than a million US citizens would join in nonviolent anti-Vietnam protests. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 8, Friday: 200,000 people began three days of anti-US protests in Melbourne and Sydney. They also protested against their own government for supporting the US.

Construction workers wearing helmets attacked a civil disobedience anti-war demonstration in the financial district of New York. 70 were injured. These helmeted conservatives then invaded City Hall to force city officials to raise a flag to full staff that had been at half-staff in mourning for the four students killed at Kent State University.31

Seven members of the Black Panther Party, indicted for taking part in a shootout with police, were released by the State of Illinois (there was a lack of evidence that any of them had discharged a firearm).

Gymkhana Formule I for tape by Pierre Henry was performed for the initial time, in the Gymnase de Malakoff.

Time’s Encomium for synthesized and processed synthesized sound by Charles Wuorinen was performed completely for the initial time, at the State University of New York, Albany.

Piano Sonata no.4 by Lejaren Hiller was performed for the initial time, in Buffalo, 20 years after it was composed.

The POTUS, Richard Milhous Nixon, couldn’t sleep, and so he got his valet up at 4AM to go out with him and

31. US Attorney General John Mitchell would announce in 1971 that there wasn’t going to be any federal grand jury investigation of the killings at Kent State. The State of Ohio would agree in 1979 to the settlement of a civil lawsuit over the killings. They would agree to pay $600,000 to the parents of the students killed, and to nine students who had been injured but survived, and in addition $75,000 for legal and other expenses. Although Governor James Rhodes and 27 National Guardsmen who were defendants in the case would sign a statement that the killings “should not have occurred,” no-one would ever offer any sort of apology. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

talk with the anti-Vietnam students camping out at the Lincoln Memorial. Exiting the safety of the White House without the awareness of his Secret Service security detail, he tried to chat up the young protesters with talk about football. In the course of the event he informed everyone who would listen that, having been raised as a Quaker, he was about as much of a pacifist as anyone could possibly be.

Now for a little lesson in logic. Many arguments are based on a simple “if... then” structure. These arguments are so common and useful they have been awarded a special Latinate name, modus ponens.

In addition to the phrase “modus ponens,” logicians have special technical words for the various features of these arguments. The “If... Then” premise is called a conditional, and the two truth claims, the beginning one and the end one, are called the antecedent and the consequent: Main Premise (antecedent) Helping Premise (If antecedent, then consequent) Conclusion (consequent) The solid connection between premises and conclusion is known as deductive validity. If both premises are true, then the argument is sound. In the next, generalized, illustration, the letters P and Q are used to stand for the distinct claims expressed in whole sentences. Main Premise (P) Helping Premise (If P then Q) Conclusion (Q) HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Consider the following example of an argument purporting to have valid logical structure and purporting to be dealing in true assertions:

Obviously, the above is a proper use of the modus ponens form of logic. Now let’s consider another one: President Richard Milhous Nixon was proclaimed to be a Quaker. A Quaker would have opposed the war in Vietnam. Therefore, Friend Richard opposed the war in Vietnam.

Although they are about very different topics, these two arguments have the same basic structure: Notice that the claim P occurs twice: once in the main premise, and once after the If part of the helping premise. The claim Q also occurs twice: once after the then part of the helping premise, and once in the conclusion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The nice thing about modus ponens arguments is that their conclusions are quite as good as their premises. The connection between premises and conclusion is solid. This means that all you really have to do in order to evaluate a modus ponens argument is check for the sense in which the premises are true. In this modus ponens argument, if the premises are both at least probably true, the reasoning must be strong and the conclusion must be established. As always, if there is a sense in which at least one of the premises is not true, the reasoning may well be incorrect and lead to spurious conclusions. Contrariwise, if the conclusion is obviously false, then one or the other of the premises was also, in some important sense, false. The inference above is an improper one because there was a very real sense in which Richard Nixon, although he had been raised by a Quaker mother in a Quaker church, and although he was never officially disowned by that church, should not be considered to have been a Quaker.

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS “[President Richard Milhous Nixon] will, with time, be a landmark in the history of quiet, determined desperation.” — Murray Kempton HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 23, Friday: The play about Henry Thoreau’s night in jail, and Thoreauvian civil disobedience, that had been produced at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio a year earlier, made its debut in Washington DC as “The Night Thoreau spent in Jail.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1971

Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights stumbled upon “Operation Garden Plot,” the United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, a plan which gave federal forces power to “put down” “disruptive elements” and called for “deadly force to be used against any extremist or dissident perpetrating any and all forms of civil disorder.” The “Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI” released to the press secret files on that federal agency’s domestic counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, revealing that not only had well- known media figures such as Professor Albert Einstein, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, and Elvis Presley been targeted, but also any number of ordinary private citizens. Senator Frank Church would later vow that “never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers a threat to the established order” and nevertheless in 2002, the New York Times would report that the FBI has “nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity,” and a year after that, FBI Intelligence Bulletin no. 89 would be sent to police departments, revealing that the federal government was advocating that private US citizens be spied on by local authorities. When the Atlanta Police Department acknowledged that it routinely placed antiwar protesters under surveillance, Georgia Representative Nan Orrock would remind the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “This harkens back to some very dark times in our nation’s history.”

The Canadian environmental group Greenpeace launched its “Rainbow Warriors.” While these activists would at first espouse nonviolence they would soon begin to spike trees, vandalize bulldozers, and ram whaling ships. In the words of the Arizona environmentalist Edward Abbey –who considered himself something of a 20th- Century Thoreau– “What’s more American than violence?”

James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University John Bordley Rawls’s A THEORY OF JUSTICE defined civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (page 320). To qualify as civil disobedience, he held, such lawbreaking must be undertaken only after other legal and political avenues have been exhausted or repeatedly blocked by civil authorities. Also, this must be done openly and in plain view of a wider public. Also, the protesters’ must articulate and explain their reasons for breaking the law to that public. Also, such disobedience must be nonviolent, that is, cause no harm or injury to anyone other than (when the authorities use physical force) the protesters themselves. Also, the protesters are meekly to accept whatever punishment is meted out to them by civil authorities.

April 10, Saturday: A provisional Bangladeshi government took its oath of office in Meherpur Kushtia.

To report on the United States table tennis team in the People’s Republic of China (refer to the movie “Great Wall”), 7 western reporters were allowed to enter.

At the age of 90, Jeanette Pickering Rankin, who had been the 1st woman in the US Congress and had been to India 7 times to study the nonviolent civil disobedience tactics of Gandhiji, led an 8,000-women march on the Pentagon against the Vietnam war and for nuclear disarmament. 1,000 veterans protested the war, followed by the largest demonstration ever against the war.

April 19, Monday: “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” began a week of nationwide civil disobedience protests. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

April 24, Saturday: Another mass anti-Vietnam-war civil disobedience demonstration was staged in Washington DC, attracting nearly 200,000 protesters.

May 3, Monday-5, Wednesday: In our nation’s capital, there was a mass arrest of 12,000 citizen protesters. These civil disobedience thingies are not without their consequences. VIETNAM

July 15, Thursday: A group of 45 Jews, in the 3d day of their hunger strike in Moscow’s central telegraph office to protest the failure of Soviet authorities to process their applications for emigration to Israel, were taken into custody. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

President Richard Milhous Nixon announced that Premier Chou En-lai had invited him to visit Communist China in 1972 and that he has accepted — a major diplomatic breakthrough by our foreign relations president.32 VIETNAM “Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” — President Richard Milhous Nixon

32. For more about this, you can listen to Philip Glass’s “Nixon in China,” available on CD. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1972

November 3, Friday-9, Thursday: The Trail of Broken Treaties march occupied Bureau of Indian Affairs offices in Washington DC to dramatize Native American needs. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1974

June 2, Sunday: Andrei Sakharov began a hunger strike for amnesty for Soviet political prisoners. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

72 Chileans, including a former cabinet minister, were allowed to leave the Mexican embassy in Santiago and fly to Mexico. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1976

February 12, Thursday: Private banks reopened in Beirut after being closed for two months due to the civil war.

The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola declared that it had defeated its rivals and constituted the sole government of the country. They were recognized by the OAU and other countries. Rival factions vowed to fight on.

Irish Republican Army member Frances Stagg died in a West Yorkshire prison after a 61-day hunger strike. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1977

When the files of the “Sacco and Vanzetti” case were made public, they proved to contain wiretap transcripts indicating that the state of Massachusetts had been tapping the telephone of Felix Frankfurter (this was the Frankfurter who would later serve as a Justice of the US Supreme Court) while he had been attempting to defend them from the prosecutors of the state of Massachusetts.

Michael Meyer’s SEVERAL MORE LIVES TO LIVE: THOREAU’S POLITICAL REPUTATION IN AMERICA (Westport CT: Greenwood Press). In 1995, the book would be reviewed by Wynn Yarborough of Virginia Commonwealth University as follows: Criticism of Henry Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” changed dramatically from the 1920s to the 1970s. Michael Meyer’s SEVERAL MORE LIVES TO LIVE: THOREAU’S POLITICAL REPUTATION IN AMERICA shows the progression of opinion surrounding Thoreau and his politics. In the 1920s, an age of relative affluence, Thoreau was popularly seen as an anarchist, a rebel. In the critics’ minds, but there were mixed opinions. Most of these reflect a reaction to the materialism of the time. Eliseo Vivas noted that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” in The New Student, was “... one of the first native attacks upon American Imperialism....” (34) Vivas was writing when the US was involved in many countries in South America and Central America. Vivas saw Thoreau’s politics, especially his stance on resistance to government, as troubling, “Thoreau’s ideals are inoperative in the real, everyday world, and because he will not compromise his ideals, at all, they have no effect upon the world: they are politically useless” (35). In the 1960s, we will see how useful Thoreau becomes. Another critic, Vernon Parrington, would praise Thoreau as truly original and independent. “Parrington transforms what several of his contemporaries [such as Atkinson] considered to be Thoreau’s selfish tenacity into a virtue. Thoreau’s unwillingness to compromise was not a sign of perversity but of principle” (40). The political anarchist image of Thoreau does not disturb Parrington, who considered him American in political thought: “Parrington places Thoreau in the liberal tradition by tracing the political ideas in “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” back to William Godwin’s POLITICAL JUSTICE (page 409, Parrington), which helped inform Jefferson...” (42). The 1920s criticism also shows the one direction criticism of Thoreau would maintain, in some slight degree, throughout the century. Brooks Atkinson, a conservative critic, bashed Thoreau for his politics, calling him “a self-contained, unsocial being, a troglodyte of sorts” (36). But it is not his personal attacks on Thoreau that emerge as important; in fact we could disregard his opinion except for the fact that underlying his charges against Thoreau’s “feline” politicism is his great respect for Thoreau, the naturalist. This will reappear throughout the century, the focus away from the political towards the naturalist. Here would be a good place to note why. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” clashes with his defense of John Brown. In one he advocates non-violent resistance; in the other he defends the actions of violence. This is where critics find the clash of logic, and many simply ignore his politics, because they are considered inconsistent. I would argue that Thoreau is human, subject to emotion and became quite involved in the slavery question. Brown was an individual doing what he thought necessary; Thoreau opts for another course, one of nonviolence, although the implication in “Resistance to Civil Government,” is that violence is prevalent throughout history. Here is where the student of Thoreau must make a decision, Should Thoreau be held to a philosophical tract he wrote in 1848 as compared to “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN,” written in 1860 at a time of great tension about slavery? It must be remembered that Thoreau did not join a society for abolition, but rather vocalized his thoughts on injustice. He is political in thought, and as proven from his own action, a practitioner of non-violent resistance. In the 1930s, James MacKaye would turn to the politics and denounce them. MacKaye saw Thoreau’s politics showing no cooperation and devoid of reason. Meyer sees him as an extension of the twenties critics, “In this, MacKaye followed commentators of the twenties. It is one thing for a person to regulate his own economy and thereby free himself from want, but it is quite another to repudiate government.” MacKaye continues in the tradition of Atkinson, whereas Blankenship, continues in the tradition of Parrington. The thirties marked a different era for America, the flirtation with communism, trying to find a solution for the Great Depression. “[H]is radicalism was no longer considered to be so shocking by most commentators of the thirties. His radicalism was studied even within the academy” (58). It should be remembered that it was not academics who were doing the writing on “Resistance to Civil Government” but journalists and social critics. “Until the forties, the best criticism on Thoreau (using any critical standard for excellence) is to be found in journalistic pieces, or occasional chapters on Thoreau in books — most of them written by critics outside the academy” (59). Meyer goes further to state that “There was not one American analysis of even article length on “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” ... prior to the 1940s. In the thirties there was a strong tendency to use Thoreau first and ask questions later”(74). There was an avoidance of the politics in this essay, although people used him and his simple economy to protest the effects of industry, especially in an age of the collapse of the American economy. The 1940s show some of the universal appeal of Thoreau, in terms of his usefulness. Thoreau was used as guidance for those who opposed the war as “conscientious objectors.” A society gearing up for war might have trouble appreciating Thoreau. Thomas Lyle Collins, one critic who was opposed to the war, “uses Thoreau as a rationale for American isolationism and noninterventionism” (85). Max Cosman used Thoreau to justify World War II based on the differences between the War on Mexico and WWII. Here we see a reconciling of “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT” and “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

JOHN BROWN.” In “A Plea,” Thoreau foresees circumstances where he might have to “kill or be killed”; this applies to his attitude against slavery. Cosman sees the same attitude towards the Nazis. Cosman “calls attention to this passage in order to conclude with the major point of his article, which is that Thoreau speaks to Americans in 1944” (86). Here we see the usefulness of Thoreau by dissenters and by consenters. The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 by Walter Harding who saw Thoreau as being in both camps in the debate over the war. He saw Thoreau “[as] not a dangerous isolationist but an individual”(94). Harding does go further to see Thoreau as primarily a non-violent pacifist, ignoring his support of John Brown. Meyer seems to see Harding as doing what Thoreau himself would have loathed, “deification.” F.O. Matthiessen connects Thoreau with socialism in AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. Matthiessen was concerned with the text, the art itself, not the artist so much. Matthiessen said that Thoreau’s individualism was inflated, that Thoreau believed in collective action. Meyer, while lauding the contribution of Matthiessen to study of WALDEN, saw Matthiessen as too political in his assessment of Thoreau, “Matthiessen allows his enthusiasm and appreciation for Thoreau’s art to interfere with a view of politics that would be more in keeping with his own values, values which were highly suspicious of Transcendental individualism” (101). Please remember that Matthiessen is noted as changing the face of American criticism from the artist to the art. The 1950s, the age of McCarthyism, reflected the ignorance of his politics again. The influence of Matthiessen is evident in how Thoreau’s political thought diminished and literary art form increased, “Commentaries on Thoreau tended to be about how he expressed his ideas rather than about what his ideas were” (110). Stanley Hyman, chief critic during the fifties and one of the most respected scholars on Thoreau, cites style as more important that politics in Thoreau. He follows, of course, Matthiessen. Meyer traces this view of elevated artist as tied to Hymen’s personal view, which once again shows us the “usefulness” of Thoreau. Hyman places Thoreau in the “compartmentalized functionaries” of Emerson; one is an artist and that is it. Henry Eulaus, a political scientist, saw Thoreau as promoting his own version of the nation-state. Eulaus “reasons that because liberals have convinced themselves that Thoreau was a liberal collectivist, they overlook his self-righteousness and fall into the same trap of “ethical absolution” that he did” (124). Eulaus sees Thoreau as close-minded and concerned with “the individual conscience as the bedrock of all action” (124). Eulaus saw the dangers of both “enlightened liberalism” and McCarthyism and, more importantly, the need for compromise, so it is easy to see why he would have problems with someone like Thoreau. This is the first critical essay on the politics of Thoreau, according to Meyer. In the 1960s, Thoreau became not only relevant but almost a popular icon. “He became important to the reform impulse of the 1960s, and as that impulse spread HDT WHAT? INDEX

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so too did Thoreau’s political reputation” (152). Carried over from the fifties was the beginning of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King would use Thoreau to show the path of nonviolent resistance, but once again he was using Thoreau, not studying him. “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT” was used by everyone from the Beats to the Pacifists. Staughton Lynd, a New Left historian, claimed that Thoreau was both violent and nonviolent, which would seem to follow from the dichotomy of messages in “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT” and “A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN.” Meyer claims that “Lynd does not make an issue of the means of reform, because he is interested in gathering “non-aligned individuals” of the new radicalism under one umbrella in order that they might discover what unites them-their insistence on direct action as a response to injustice” (165). Some attacks on Thoreau came out of this period that still focused on his isolationism and his “estrange[ment] from collective action and the specific needs of the people” (170). But one of the most original perspectives to come out in the sixties was a psychological interpretation of Thoreau. This came out of Carl Bode’s introduction to THE PORTABLE THOREAU, which he edited. Bode re-edited this edition in 1964 and drew on a Freudian approach to Thoreau, based on Raymond Gozzi’s work. Bode claims that Thoreau was “plagued by an ‘incipient homosexuality’” (page 111, Bode as quoted by Meyer, 173). Bode saw John Brown as a mythological father-figure for Thoreau. The hatred of father is translated into a hatred of state, of the paternalistic powerful government, according to Bode. In the same psychoanalytical mode, C. Roland Wagner writes “that much of Thoreau’s writing represents his unconscious struggle for a sexual identity” (Meyer 175). The 1970s saw Thoreau as the forefather of protest to the Vietnam War. THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee was a one-act play which centered on his protest of the Mexican War. It was quite successful and kept Thoreau alive in terms of the seventies, ushering in the Vietnam era. Meyer has the great last word by recalling Thoreau’s sense of humor and disgust, “washing of hands” in political matters: it “is important and chastening to be learned from Thoreau’s apolitical temperament, a temperament which resulted in his unwillingness to take politics seriously and his subsequent impulse to champion violence as a means of surgically removing evil from the world” (192).

June 14, Tuesday: The Janata Party won majorities in eight of ten state elections held over the last five days.

26 people began a hunger strike at UN offices in Santiago de Chile in an effort to gain information about 500 citizens abducted by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

December 10, Saturday: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo took out a newspaper ad in Argentina in which they listed the names of mothers and pictures of 230 of the “disappeared” — their offspring who had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the military. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1978

July 1, Saturday: Claude Eatherly died. He had been the pilot of a weather reconnaissance B-29, the Straight Flush, that had taken part in the raid that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His part in the event had been to radio back to the approaching Enola Gay that visibility was clear over the target. WORLD WAR II

Eatherly’s life subsequent to this involvement in a historic incident of violence had been exceedingly problematic, even crazed. Very clearly the locomotive of his life had gone off the rails but it is problematic whether this was due to the bomb, or something far more mysterious and personal. He was involved in a lot of questionable stuff such as running guns for Cuban revolutionaries but seems also to have made a number of attempts to re-create himself as a minor hero of civil disobedience.33

33. Examples: he once forged a check for a small amount and contributed the money to a fund for the children of Hiroshima; he would break into post offices without taking anything; he stuck up a bank with a fake or broken gun and had them put the money in a bag, then walked out without the bag. –The more you study the details of this life, the less anything makes sense. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1980

During the decade of the 1980s, the organization “Witness for Peace” would be sending thousands of Americans to Nicaragua as a “shield of Love,” to help stop violence by US-backed Contras. 80,000 US citizens would sign a “pledge of Resistance” promising to deploy the tactics of civil disobedience at home if there should be an invasion by US forces.

The Irish Republican Army campaigned in Northern Ireland. Hunger strikes began in Maze prison.

Rediscovery of an endemic flowering shrub, the St. Helena Ebony, believed for over a century to be extinct.

Opening of St. Helena’s Broadway House museum.

In accordance with a St. Helena tradition of never housing local prisoners locally, two islanders convicted of murder and manslaughter were dispatched to Britain to serve out their prison sentences. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

August: The New York Times reported that cocaine was allegedly being used by baseball players in every major league team.

SPORTS

“Solidarity” was founded at the Lenin Shipyards in Poland. Repressed under martial law in 1981, in 1989 it would win every available seat in parliament and begin to govern the nation. This triumph would come without a single violent act. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 27: In Turkey, the Chairman of the National Security Council, Kenan Evren, was named Head of State.

Seven IRA inmates of Maze prison in Ireland (near Belfast) began a hunger strike demanding to be treated as political prisoners. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

December 15, Monday: Libyan forces moved south from the Aozou Strip into northern Chad.

23 more prisoners joined the IRA hunger strike in Maze prison in Ireland. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

December 18, Thursday: Poland announced the first meat rationing since World War II.

The original seven Irish Republican Army hunger strikers in Maze prison in Ireland ended their hunger strike after 53 days (those supporting them would end their hunger strike on the following day). CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1981

May 5, Tuesday: Indian troops were sent to the outskirts of Bihar city, after 5 days of struggle between Hindus and Moslems had produced 48 deaths.

Bobby Sands, the imprisoned IRA leader and elected member of parliament, succumbed after a 66-day hunger strike in Maze prison in Ireland. In Belfast and Londonderry, the violent clashes between Roman Catholics and British troops continued. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 12, Tuesday: The Polish government recognized the independent farmers’ union Rural Solidarity.

A 2d IRA hunger striker succumbed in Maze prison in Ireland, Francis Hughes. This inspired more violence in Belfast. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 21, Thursday: A 3d IRA hunger striker succumbed in Maze prison in Ireland, Raymond McCreesh. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

François Mitterand replaced Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as President of France. He named Pierre Mauroy to replace Raymond Barre as prime minister.

In Geneva, the World Health Organization voted 118-1-3 to require a code of ethics to curtail the use of baby formulas in the Third World. Because they often needed to be mixed with contaminated water, the only water available, these formulas were causing disease and death. The United States cast the lone dissenting vote. Two high officials of the US Agency for International Development resigned over the vote, calling it “unconscionable.”

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin demanded that Syria remove its surface-to-air missiles from Lebanon.

May 22, Friday: A London court found Peter “the Yorkshire Ripper” Sutcliffe guilty of 13 murders and 7 attempted murders and, in its wisdom, decided to retain him securely in prison for the remainder of his life.

Patrick O’Hara became the 4th IRA hunger striker to succumb in Maze prison in Ireland. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The Czechoslovak government released 26 of the 36 human rights activists who had been arrested earlier this month. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

July 8, Wednesday: Over the following week, 40 supporters of the deposed President Abulhassan Bani-Sadr would be executed in Teheran.

Joseph McDonnell became the 5th IRA hunger striker to succumb in Maze Prison, renewing violent clashes in Northern Ireland. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Rioting in London and Liverpool spread to Manchester.

July 13, Monday: Martin Hurson became the 6th Irish Republican Army hunger striker to succumb in Maze Prison. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met with city and community leaders in Liverpool and told them that the rioting was not to be explained by the level of unemployment — upon leaving the meeting Mrs. Thatcher was rewarded for her insights by being the recipient of a couple of tomatoes and several rolls of toilet paper.

August 1, Saturday: Kevin Lynch became the 7th IRA hunger striker to die in Maze Prison. Riots followed in Belfast. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera was killed in the crash of a military aircraft in Panama.

Paddy Chayefsky died in New York at the age of 58.

MTV went on the air, in northern New Jersey.

Der Tribun, a radio play by Mauricio Kagel, was staged for the initial time, in Aix-en-Provence.

August 2, Sunday: Kieran Doherty became the 8th hunger striker to die in Maze Prison. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Mohammad Ali Rajai became President of Iran, replacing a provisional council.

August 8, Saturday: Four days of fighting between rival Moslems in Beirut ended with a cease fire after 30 people were killed, 50 injured.

Thomas McElwee became the 9th IRA hunger striker to die in Maze Prison. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

August 20, Thursday: President Ronald Reagan flexed the mental muscles of the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, by telling them: “Let friend and foe alike know that America has the muscle to back up its words. Ships like this and men like you are that muscle.”

Just imagine all those strong American young men, in their swaying bunks and berths aboard that vessel on that night, dozing off to dreamland while ruminating earnestly about how friend and foe alike could know that they were Americans, American men who had the muscle, American men who had the muscle to back up the mighty words of other men. You too can stand at attention in neat formation and be told what to think. You too can lie in a swaying bunk alone and doze off to dreamland while ruminating earnestly about what you have been told to ruminate about. All it requires is that you declare your willingness to kill people you have never met, when you are informed by people in authority over you that they do not deserve to be alive.

Akhmatova: Requiem for soprano, bass and orchestra by John Tavener was performed for the initial time, in Usher Hall, Edinburgh.

In a by-election in Northern Ireland, IRA supporter Owen Carron won a seat in Parliament. In Maze Prison, Michael Devine became the 10th IRA hunger striker to succumb. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

September: Protests began against cruise missiles based in Greenham Common, England. At the peak of this protest 8,000 women would be living in tents outside the base, while demonstrating and committing acts of civil disobedience.

September 4: In Beirut, gunmen killed Louis Delamare, French ambassador to Lebanon.

The Tunisian government sentenced 107 Moslem extremists to varying prison terms.

After 52 days IRA supporter Matthew Devlin abandoned his hunger strike in Maze Prison. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

September 6: In Athens, Serment-Orkos for chorus by Iannis Xenakis to words of Hippocrates was performed for the initial time.

After 70 days IRA supporter Laurence McKeown abandoned his hunger strike in Maze Prison. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

October 3: The six remaining hunger strikers in Maze Prison near Belfast reluctantly call off the strike. Their families will not allow them to die. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

November 21, Saturday: Over 300,000 people marched peaceably in Amsterdam to demand that the Dutch government not participate in a planned modernization of NATO nuclear forces. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The first 3 parts of Mitternachtsstük for speaker, solo voices, chorus and instruments by Mauricio Kagel to words of Robert Schumann were performed for the initial time, in the Théâtre Municipal, Metz.

Clarinet Quintet by Harrison Birtwistle was performed for the initial time, in St. Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield.

November 22, Sunday: Andrei D. Sakahrov and his wife Yelena G. Bonner began a hunger strike, demanding that the Soviet government allow their daughter-in-law to join her husband in the US. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras by John Cage was performed for the initial time, in Pont-à-Mousson, near Metz, France. Also premiered was Komboï for amplified harpsichord and percussion, by Iannis Xenakis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

December 8, Tuesday: Andrei D. Sakahrov and his wife Yelena G. Bonner end their hunger strike of over two weeks when Soviet authorities agree to allow their daughter-in-law to emigrate to the US. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

The ruling Social Democratic Party loses nine seats in parliamentary elections in Denmark. The returns leave the seats almost equally divided between right and left. Social Democrat Prime Minister Anker Jørgensen will form a new government.

The Canadian Senate approves the constitutional reform bill, already passed by the House of Commons. The resolution is presented to Governor General Edward Schreyer and thereupon placed aboard a Canadian Forces jet with Justice Minister Jean Chretien and carried to London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1982

January: Sister Helen Prejean became a pen pal to a prisoner on death row; she later would compose a powerful memoir of her experience, DEAD MAN WALKING, which would be made into an award-winning movie. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

June 12, Saturday: Israel declared a cease-fire with the PLO but of course this broke down within hours.

Argentine fire damaged a British ship off Stanley, killing nine. In the Falkland Islands, the battle of Mount Longdon.

An international convocation at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan featured prominent peace activists from around the world, and afterward these participants marched up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, where 750,000 people had assembled for the largest civil disobedience nuclear disarmament demonstration in US history.

The European Monetary System raised the value of the West German mark and the Dutch guilder while devaluing the Italian lira and the French franc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1983

January 14, Friday: Political prisoner Anatoly Shcharansky ended a 4-month hunger strike when, for the first time in over a year, his captors allowed him to receive a note from his mother. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Rain Tree Sketch for piano by Toru Takemitsu was performed for the initial time, in Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall.

May 17, Tuesday: South Korean opposition leader Kim Young Sam began a hunger strike to demand a return to democracy. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

A Concerto for organ and orchestra op.235 by Ernst Krenek was performed for the initial time, in Melbourne Concert Hall.

Israel and Lebanon signed a final agreement for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon.

Paa Vidderne for reciter and orchestra by Frederick Delius to words of Ibsen was performed for the initial time, over the airwaves of Norwegian television, 95 years after it was composed.

A federal study concluded that Love Canal residents were at no greater risk than any other residents of the community of Niagara Falls — so, you see, not to worry, you’re as safe as anybody is around here.

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

Civil Disobedience “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1984

May 2, Wednesday: Andrei Sakharov began a hunger strike in Gorki to publicize his demand that his wife, Yelena Bonner, be granted medical treatment abroad. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Iannis Xenakis was admitted to the French Académie, replacing Georges Auric.

December 15, Saturday: 40 East Germans who sought refuge in the West German embassy in Prague started a hunger strike. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a high ranking official in the Soviet Communist Party, begins a week-long visit to Britain.

Wayang V for piano and orchestra by Anthony Davis was performed for the initial time, in San Francisco, the composer at the keyboard and John Adams conducting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1986

February 25, Tuesday: In the morning. Maria Corazon Cojuangco Aquino was sworn in as President of the Philippines. Salvador Laurel was appointed prime minister. By using tactics of civil disobedience, Nonviolent People Power in the Philippines had brought down the oppressive Marcos regime.

Soviet leader Gorbachev dismissed the offer of the previous day and called on the US to enter real negotiations to eliminate the nuclear threat.

In spite of a request from eight Latin American countries to halt aid to the Contras, US President Reagan proposed to Congress $100,000,000 in military and other support to the Nicaraguan rebels.

Embross for three woodwinds, three brass, percussion, strings and electronic instruments by Lukas Foss was performed for the first time, in New York.

Concerto da Camera for woodwind quintet by Shulamit Ran was performed for the first time, in Cooper Union Hall, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1987

January: At the Nevada Test Site, the actor Martin “Mr. President” Sheen and 71 other nuclear disarmament protesters were arrested in a civil disobedience demonstration marking the 36th anniversary of the initial nuclear test.

February 5, Thursday: Outside the Nevada Test Site nearly 2,000 demonstrators, including for some reason six members of Congress, staged a civil disobedience rally to protest nuclear weapons testing. Then more than 400 of them were taken into custody as they moved toward the nuclear proving grounds.

The Soviet government announced that, since the US had two days before conducted another nuclear test, their unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing obviously needed to be history history history.

The Canadian government decided to allow women to take on combat roles in its military (the Canadian answer to the problem of men with guns is now women with guns, just as the Texas answer to children bringing guns to school is now to require all teachers to pack a concealed weapon all the time).

April 28, Tuesday, Mother’s Day: 3,000 people gathered on Mother’s Day at the Nevada Test Site for a civil disobedience protest of preparations for nuclear war. Proclamation 5641 — Mother’s Day, 1987 By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation

For more than 70 years, we Americans have set aside the second Sunday in May to honor our mothers and tell them of our love. No matter how often we express these tributes of the heart throughout the year, we choose to do so in a special way on Mother’s Day. That is because we know and can never forget all that our mothers have given us every day, year by year, in love and courage, in toil and sacrifice, in prayer and example, in faith and forgiveness. There is no love like a mother’s — she who carries the child that God knits in the womb, she who nourishes and guides, she who teaches and inspires, she who gives of her heart and soul and self for the good and the happiness of her children and her family. As mothers help give their families a stability rooted in love, steadfastness, devotion, and morality, they strengthen our communities and our Nation at the same time. Mother’s Day is a wonderful time for each of us to give thanks for America’s mothers and for all they mean and have meant to our country and our history. It is also a time to thank our own mothers; and whether we may do this in person still, or by loving memory, let us do it with all the love and thanks and prayer we possess. In recognition of the contributions of mothers to their HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

families and to our Nation, the Congress, by a joint resolution approved May 8, 1914 (38 Stat. 770), has designated the second Sunday in May each year as Mother’s Day and requested the President to call for its appropriate observance. Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby request that Sunday, May 10, 1987, be observed as Mother’s Day. I urge all Americans to express their love and respect for their mothers and to reflect on the importance of motherhood to the well-being of our country. I direct government officials to display the flag of the United States on all Federal government buildings, and I urge all citizens to display the flag at their homes and other suitable places on that day. In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of April, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and eleventh. Ronald Reagan

September 30, Wednesday: At the Nevada Test Site, 110 demonstrators, including for some reason 7 pediatricians, were taken into custody for civil disobedience (all charges were later dropped). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1988

The RU-486 abortion pill was developed by French scientist Étienne Baulieu.

Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group, citing Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” experimented to determine the effectiveness of the tactic of civil disobedience. The faithful would psych themselves up at a church service and then go directly to an abortion clinic to get themselves arrested for trespassing. Randall Almira Terry, head of this organization, explained to a reporter that “the system will cough us up because it is not equipped to deal with large uprisings.” (More recently some of the activists of this group, dissatisfied with the meager results obtained through the tactic of civil disobedience, have been convicted of the assassination of abortion providers.)

The United States Army purchased 100,000 pairs of polycarbonate-filled wrap-around sunglasses (6-10% of modern battlefield casualties are produced by explosion fragments in the eyes). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1989

Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany obtained freedom from Soviet control through the deployment of civil disobedience tactics. Nonviolent independence movements within the Soviet Union were launched in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Moldavia, and the Ukraine.

Romanian secret police attempted to arrest the Reverend Laslo Toles. Using the tactic of civil disobedience, parishioners jammed the streets, lit candles, and refused to move. The crowd gathered until 50,000 converged on the city center. Violent suppression by the government sparked the revolution that forced Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu to flee the capital in a helicopter.

The Chinese government crushed a civil disobedience student protest at Tiananmen Square, but not before images were televised everywhere in the outside world (your Chinese guy-in-the-street has no idea that anything happened).

March 20, Monday: At the Nevada Test Site, 75 protesters were arrested for having committed trespass during a Palm Sunday civil disobedience event.

April 22Saturday: Asahi Shimbun reported that Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita received ¥50,000,000 in loans from Recruit Company in 1987.

An official memorial service for the former General-Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, took place in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Three students representing the 100,000 gathered in Tienanmen Square knelt in civil disobedience on the steps of the Great Hall to deliver a petition to Prime Minister Li Peng. Li Peng did not respond. Riots broke out in Xian and Changsha.

Festlicher Tanz for wind quintet by Isang Yun was performed for the initial time, in Witten. Also premiered was 3x7 for clarinet, horn, trombone, harpsichord, violin, cello and double bass by Alfred Schnittke.

Arias and Barcarolles for soprano, baritone, two pianos and strings by Leonard Bernstein was performed publicly for the initial time at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

April 24, Monday: Students began a civil disobedience boycott of classes in Beijing to call for democracy.

Herbert von Karajan resigned after 34 years as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic.

April 26, Wednesday: A Peoples Daily editorial accused Chinese student leaders of plotting to overthrow the socialist system. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

April 27, Thursday: Students from 40 universities staged a civil disobedience march to Tienanmen Square to protest the Peoples Daily editorial of the previous day. 100,000 to 150,000 people marched through the city calling for democracy. They were cheered on by as many as 500,000 others.

May 4, Thursday: Speaking to foreign bankers, General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang contradicted the Peoples Daily article accusing students of trying to overthrow socialism.

100,000 Chinese marched in Beijing to demand democracy. Civil disobedience protests also took place in Shanghai, Changchun, and Dalian.

Bulgarian General-Secretary Todor Zhivkov announced plans to dissolve large collective farms and allow individual farmers to lease land.

Oliver North was found guilty of three crimes in the Iran-Contra affair in federal court in Washington.

The Rogers Pass Tunnel opened in British Columbia. A rail tunnel running through the Selkirk Mountains, at 35 kilometers, became the longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere.

Fantasy and Polka for orchestra by Ned Rorem was performed for the initial time, in Evian, France.

May 13, Saturday: Hundreds of students in Tienanmen Square began a civil disobedience hunger strike.

The government of Hungary announced that it was suspending construction of its end of a hydroelectric dam across the Danube. This would strain relations with Czechoslovakia.

White and Light for soprano, two clarinets, viola, cello and double bass by Harrison Birtwistle to words of Celan (translated by Hamburger) was performed for the initial time, in Brighton.

Let Not the Prince Be Silent for chorus by John Tavener to words of St. Clement of Alexandria was performed for the initial time, in Sherborne Abbey, Dorset.

May 14, Sunday: Student civil disobedience representatives began formal talks with the Chinese government. They shortly broke down.

Voting in Argentina assured the election of Peronist Carlos Menem as president.

May 15, Monday: Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Beijing. This was to be the first Soviet-Chinese summit since 1959. The civil disobedience masses in Tienanmen Square were disconcerting.

Janez Drnovsek replaced Raif Dizdarevic as President of Yugoslavia.

Music for keyboard instruments and orchestra by Mauricio Kagel was performed for the initial time, in Cologne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 16, Tuesday: Two days of anti-Soviet civil disobedience protests began in Krakow.

China and the USSR renewed normal diplomatic relations.

Sunni Moslem leader Sheik Hassan Khaled and 21 other people were killed by a car bomb in West Beirut.

The Washington Post reported that the USSR had halted arms shipments to the government of Nicaragua due to a shift in US foreign policy in Central America.

May 17, Wednesday: The number of civil disobedience demonstrators in Tienanmen Square, Beijing reached one million.

Czechoslovak authorities released Vaclav Havel for good behavior after he had served three months of a nine month sentence.

Freedom of religion was granted in Poland. Full citizenship rights were granted to Roman Catholics.

Milan Pancevski replaced Stipe Suvar as President of the Presidium of the League of Yugoslav Communists.

Mohammed Ali Hamadei was sentenced to life in prison for his part in the hijacking of a TWA jet in 1985 and the murder of a passenger.

The Organization of American States condemned Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega and called for a peaceful transfer of power to a popularly elected government.

May 18, Thursday: Prime Minister Li Peng met student civil disobedience leaders in a televised meeting in the Great Hall of the People. Nothing was achieved.

The Supreme Soviet of Lithuania adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, claiming that the 1940 Soviet takeover was illegal.

Epicycle for cello and 12 instruments by Iannis Xenakis was performed for the initial time, in London.

May 19, Friday: General-Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Zhao Ziyang visited civil disobedience hunger strikers in Tienanmen Square, urging them to stop. When student leaders learned of the government’s plans to declare martial law, they called off the hunger strike and instituted a mass sit-in. They created the Independent Workers Union.

The coalition government of Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita resigned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

May 20, Saturday: Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng declared martial law in Beijing. The army’s advance to the city was slowed by the civil disobedience of citizens. 300,000 people demonstrated in Xian in favor of democracy.

Sinfonia tragica for orchestra by Karl Amadeus Hartmann was performed for the initial time, in München, 49 years after it was composed.

The Appalachian Psychoanalytic Society was founded at the Holiday Inn World’s Fair in Nashville, Tennessee and Paul Lerner was elected 1st president of the organization.34 PSYCHOLOGY

May 21: 3,000 civil disobedience hunger strikers in Tiananmen Square ended their fast, in anticipation of confrontations with the military.

500,000 people marched in Hong Kong in support of the Beijing protesters and assembled in Victoria Park for a protest rally.

Huit esquisses en duo pour un pianiste by Jean-Claude Risset was performed for the initial time, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

May 22: 100,000 people staged a civil disobedience march in Shenzen in favor of democracy.

May 23, day: 500,000 people took to the streets in Shanghai in support of the Beijing civil disobedience protesters. 100,000 people did likewise in Canton.

Egypt attended an Arab League summit for the first time since 1977, in Casablanca.

June 2, Friday: Four student leaders began a civil disobedience hunger strike in Tienanmen Square.

Sosuke Uno replaced Noboru Takeshita as Prime Minister of Japan.

Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society was shown for the first time, at the Toronto Film Festival.

William Schuman’s Chester: Variations for piano was performed for the initial time, in Fort Worth, Texas.

June 3, Saturday: In the early morning, unarmed Chinese soldiers attempt to clear Tienanmen Square without using deadly force. They were blocked by civil disobedience demonstrators before they reached the square. They withdrew. This “victory” emboldened the protesters and hundreds of thousands of civilians poured into the square.

At 2PM, police and troops fired tear gas and begin attacking civilians in Tienanmen Square.

At 4PM, troops and civilians exchanged flying missiles, mostly bricks, near the Great Hall of the People.

At 10PM, Chinese army units advanced on Tienanmen Square, firing on anyone who attempted to detain them 34. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or who openly opposed them. Perhaps thousands were killed.

Two weeks of ethnic riots began in Uzbekistan.

Iran’s paramount ruler the Ayatollah Ruollah Khomenei died in a Teheran hospital.

France announced a ban on the importation of ivory.

Incidental music to Pushkin’s play A Feast in Time of Plague by Alfred Schnittke was performed for the initial time, in Taganka Theater, Moscow.

June 4, Sunday: The final day of a series of pro-democracy civil disobedience events around Tiananmen Square in central Beijing that had begun on April 14th. The Chinese government displayed the warmth it felt toward democracy. Most of the killing took place some three miles to the west of the square, out of which the student demonstrators had peaceably marched. Regarding this, perhaps mistakenly, as the clearest possible sort of warning of what was to come after the July 1, 1997 re-colonization of Hong Kong by the PRC, educated and well-to-do Chinese there began using all avenues at their disposal to emigrate to other safer locations (actually, the PRC doesn’t ever molest Hong Kongers because of how badly this would play in Taiwan).

At 1AM, clashes began between Chinese army units surrounding Tienanmen Square and protesters. Troops fired into crowds, killing hundreds. Civilians set police vehicles on fire and lynched soldiers they managed to capture.

At 5AM, as thousands of students began to exit Tienanmen Square peacefully, army units attacked with tanks.

At 7:40AM, the Chinese government declared it was in control of Tienanmen Square.

Soviet troops were dispatched to Uzbekistan to quell violence.

President Ali Khamenei replaced Ruollah Khomenei as Faghi of Iran.

The Arab League truce in Beirut broke down as fighting begins again.

In free elections in Poland, Solidarity-backed candidates won 99 of 100 seats in the new Senate. They won a majority of contested seats in the Sejm but 65% of the seats had been guaranteed to the Communist Party.

Monologue for viola and string orchestra by Alfred Schnittke was performed for the initial time, in Bonn.

“Osten” from the cycle Die Stücke der Windrose for small orchestra by Mauricio Kagel was performed for the initial time, in the Rathaus, Aachen.

June 27, Tuesday: The European Community, meeting in Madrid, announced stringent sanctions against China for its crackdown on pro-democracy civil disobedience demonstrations and the subsequent executions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Our national birthday, Tuesday the 4th of July: American flag burnings, and pro-American flag rallies, occurred in many locales throughout our nation, and meanwhile, in Newport News, Virginia, our Vice President, J. Danforth Quayle, defended a Bush administration proposal that it be made illegal to desecrate our nation’s banner.

This July 4th, 1989 had been designated as “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” in honor of the 50th anniversary of Gehrig’s memorable farewell-from-baseball address, which he had made on July 4th, 1939.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a Medal of Liberty was awarded to Polish union leader Lech Walesa.

In Boston, Massachusetts the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts honored the pro- democracy civil disobedience protesters of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. At a 4th-of-July celebration at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, 7 Chinese students formally requested political asylum in the USA. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1990

At the “Pilgrim Village” at Plymouth, the actor/historians began to present “living history” environmental- theater reenactments of events of the year 1627 in Plimoth.

Disabled demonstrators in Washington DC demanded passage of a bill guaranteeing their civil rights. Sixty highlighted their struggle by a tactic of civil disobedience — abandoning their wheelchairs and attempting to crawl up the steps of the Capitol Building. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1991

The START treaty was signed, signifying further reductions in nuclear arms (or so we supposed).

Communism fell across Eastern Europe, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) disintegrating and being superseded by a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). General George Butler became the head of the Strategic Air Command and was privileged to peruse the SIOP Single Integrated Operational Plan for the United States of America in the event of a nuclear confrontation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He would comment to Eric Schlosser that “This was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life.... I came to fully appreciate the truth.... We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”35

Los Angeles policemen subduing a drunken motorist named Rodney King under a street light did not grasp that their conduct was being videotaped by a citizen watching from his front window (evidently their mental universe hadn’t caught up with the VCR).36

Republication of Professor John Rawls’s 1971 A THEORY OF JUSTICE defining civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (page 320). To qualify as civil disobedience, he had pointed out, such lawbreaking must be undertaken only after other legal and political avenues have been exhausted or repeatedly blocked by civil authorities. Also, this must be done openly and in plain view of a wider public. Also, the protesters’ must articulate and explain their reasons for breaking the law to that public. Also, such disobedience must be nonviolent, that is, cause no harm or injury to anyone other than (when the authorities use physical force) the protesters themselves. Also, the protesters are meekly to accept whatever punishment is meted out to them by civil authorities.

An example of this would come in this year as Soviet tanks attempted to stop the progress towards independence of the nation of Estonia. The Supreme Council of Estonia together with the Congress of Estonia repudiated Soviet legislation while citizens acted as human shields to protect their radio and TV stations. Estonia in fact regained its independence without bloodshed.

35. Eric Schlosser, COMMAND AND CONTROL: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THE DAMASCUS ACCIDENT, AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY (Penguin Press: September 17, 2013). 36. When I played this videotape for my mother she could not perceive it as police abusing a citizen. It was very clear to her that here was a Negro in bad need of being taught a lesson. The police were only doing their job. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1992

April 20, Monday: At the Nevada Test Site, 493 anti-nuclear protesters were arrested on misdemeanor charges, as civil disobedience demonstrators clashed with guards (at this location, for obvious reasons, there’s a demonstration each and every Easter). HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1994

Four years after he was released from the Robbin Island prison camp, Nelson Mandela was elected as the initial Black president of South Africa. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1995

August 6, Sunday: At the Nevada Test Site, 500 people gathered to mark with an act of civil disobedience the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1996

July 28, Sunday: Inmates in several Turkish prisons ended a 69-day civil disobedience hunger strike after reaching a settlement with the government. About 7,000 prisoners had taken part in the strike, protesting torture, abuse, and moving inmates away from trial sites. A dozen people had died in the protest and hundreds were critically ill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1997

In the case of the poor University of Cincinnati patients who had been used as guinea pigs in military research into the effects of Plutonium, several families were objecting to an initial settlement proposal that precluded any individual families from pursuing their own cases, and this would necessitate intervention by a federal mediator and then by US District Judge Sandra Beckwith herself. SECRET MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

At the Nevada Test Site, more 2,000 people turned out for a civil disobedience event and 700 were arrested.

The GE test reactor (GETR) at which I had been a “jumper” during the 1970s had been a closed facility for more than a decade when, at this point, our Department of Energy attempted a cleanup effort, after which the facility was to be turned over to General Electric. Agreement was not, however, as yet reached with General Electric as to the portion of the cost burden which they would need to sustain.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to eliminate these weapons that kill and injure.

February 20, Thursday: Dozens of students in Vlora, Albania began a civil disobedience hunger strike calling for the resignation of the government. Police battled about 1,000 protesters in Tirana. Four people were injured.

Olympic Dances for orchestra by John Harbison was performed for the initial time, in Denton, Texas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HISTORY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

1999

A Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been signed in 1996 by 164 nations, including the United States of America, and ratified by 89 of these nations, such as France, Great Britain, and Russia. At this point the US Senate declined to ratify this treaty.

The Library of Congress published a report indicating that Al Qaeda “could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House.” NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) began running drills, simulating hijacked airliners crashing into buildings. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, co chairs of the United States Commission on National Security, reported that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers” as the result of a terrorist attack.

Professor John Rawls revised his 1971 A THEORY OF JUSTICE. This treatise defined civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government” (page 320). To qualify as civil disobedience, he had pointed out, such lawbreaking must be undertaken only after other legal and political avenues have been exhausted or repeatedly blocked by civil authorities. Also, this must be done openly and in plain view of a wider public. Also, the protesters’ must articulate and explain their reasons for breaking the law to that public. Also, such disobedience must be nonviolent, that is, cause no harm or injury to anyone other than (when the authorities use physical force) the protesters themselves. Also, the protesters are meekly to accept whatever punishment is meted out to them by civil authorities.

The TV series “Little Men” offered an episode entitled “Civil Disobedience” (in the episode, crusty lawyer Eli McBride tried to get Jo to sell the school by bringing a negligence suit against Plumfield, after Tommy broke his ankle while climbing a tree).

The Environmental Law Center produced a legal handbook for activists, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2003

March 24, Monday: An elegantly simple article by Hendrik Hertzberg, “Wagers Not Taken,” led the material in the New Yorker: “I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl,” Leo Tolstòy wrote in “The Kingdom of God Is Within You.” “I have a gun in my hand — I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this reasoning — from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs.” This is the traditional case for pacifism. It hangs on an insight about means and ends. “Thou shalt not kill”: whether the commandment is seen as coming from God or simply from self- evident moral intuition, few dispute that to kill is to commit a wrong, and that to refrain from killing is to prevent a wrong. In war, killing is the means. The end —the “war aim,” the putative goal of the killing— may be right, but it is speculative, possibly unachievable, off in a future that is more or less unknowable. By its example, and by its corrupting effect, killing begets killing, evil begets evil. To do evil today, in the expectation that in the future, at the end of a long chain of causation and chance, something good will emerge, is the wager that pacifists refuse to make. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2005

August: The body of Nicolas Copernicus was exhumed from its unmarked tomb in Fromberg Cathedral. DIGGING UP THE DEAD

Jack Turner, in “Performing Conscience” in Political Theory (Volume 33 Issue 4, pages 448-471) raised the issue of whether Henry Thoreau had a “positive” politics. Hannah Arendt, he pointed out, had famously portrayed Thoreau’s commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. Although more recent commentators have been willing to grant that Thoreau had a politics, they have characterized his politics as profoundly negative in character. This author, however, argues that Thoreau indeed had sponsored a positive politics — and that this positive politics had been one of performing conscience. He bases his reading on Thoreau’s 1859 lecture defending the radical abolitionist John Brown.37 According to his view the performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of conscience from a personally political act into a publicly political one. The aim of such a performance would be to provoke one’s neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that would render them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship, and conscientious political agitation.

The New York City health department called for voluntary elimination of trans fats at all Gotham restaurants. “Let’s don’t be evil.”

Outside the gates of the Nevada Test Site about 200 peace activists, including the actor Martin “Mr. President” Sheen, gathered for the perpetration of Thoreauvian civil disobedience. Dozens of them crossed the police line and were given trespassing citations (no-one was taken into custody). Clearly, the participants in this action would come down on the side of performing conscience and –if they have studied the political writings of Thoreau at all– would like Jack Turner tend to accept him as having advocated a more positive rather than an exclusively negative politics.

37. It is not clear whether the author is referring to “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” or “After the Death of John Brown.” Perhaps any one of these texts would fit well into his argument. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2006

May: At the Nevada Test Site, 200 civil disobedience activists protested the Divine Strake explosives test and 40 of them were taken into custody.

May 18, Thursday: Andrew Martinez, who during Summer 1990 as a student on the University of California campus in Berkeley had gone naked constantly, explaining that he was inspired to nonconformism by Henry Thoreau, killed himself in his isolation jail cell.

According to his obituary in the New York Times: Andrew Martinez wanted to be called the Militant Nudist, but the nickname never stuck. He was simply too gentle, too agreeable for it. In the summer of 1990, when he was 17 and had fallen under the nonconformist spell of Henry David Thoreau, Martinez took off his clothes in public for the first time. But before he did, he went door to door, fully clothed, in his hometown, Cupertino, California, to ask his neighbors if they would mind. Soon he was walking down Highway 9 wearing nothing but a backpack and a sign that read, “I was born naked and so were you.” He made it about a mile and a half before the police stopped him and asked him to put on some clothes, which he obligingly did. Later, as a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Martinez came to be known by a moniker as straightforward and genial as he was: the Naked Guy. He ate his meals nude. He went HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to parties nude. He even attended class nude. Berkeley being Berkeley, few people took offense.... [Eventually the campus enacted a rule against public nudity, and he was expelled. He remained for a time in Berkeley.] After a period, Martinez left Berkeley and moved back to Cupertino to live with his mother and stepfather. Although he no longer went naked in public, his erratic behavior continued, and schizophrenia was eventually diagnosed. He spent the next decade shuttling between jails and mental-health institutions. In January he was living in a halfway house not far from his childhood home when he had a confrontation with a guard. He was charged with battery and assault with a deadly weapon and was placed in solitary confinement in the maximum-security section of the Santa Clara County jail to await trial. One night in May, alone in his cell, he put a plastic bag over his head, tied it around his neck with a bedsheet and suffocated himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2007

April: At the Nevada Test Site, the “Nevada Desert Experience” civil disobedience event. 39 citations were issued by police. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2008

January 19, Saturday: At Naval Base Kitsap at Bangor, 17 citizens staging civil disobedience event about nuclear weapons in honor of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were detained or arrested (all would be soon released).

November: About 15 people held a rowdy civil disobedience protest against the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in the offices of the Public Service Board that regulates utilities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2009

April: A civil disobedience rally and two full-page advertisements in The Burlington Free Press, which mocked the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, were paid for by a newly formed group, “The Clean Green Vermont Alliance.”

About 150 civil disobedience activists marched from Montpelier’s City Hall to the State House to urge lawmakers to back development of clean energy sources such as wind power and solar power; the marchers had gathered 12,000 signatures in support of closing the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

September: Frances Crowe and three other women were arrested for non-violent civil disobedience at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

November 2, Monday: Five civil disobedience protestors, including Jesuit Priest William J. Bichsel, S.J. were arrested for breaking through two levels of security to protest the nuclear weapons stored at Naval Base Kitsap. The protesters walked to a bunker where the weapons were stored and spilled blood, hung posters, and prayed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2010

January: A coalition of anti-nuclear activists participated in a 126-mile civil disobedience walk from Brattleboro to Montpelier in an effort to block the re-licensing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. About 175 people took part in the March, some joining for the day and some for longer stretches.

John Gilbert McCurdy’s new CITIZEN BACHELORS: MANHOOD AND THE CREATION OF THE UNITED STATES (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 2009) was reviewed by Professor Benjamin Irvin of the U of Arizona on the H-SHEAR list. “A Batchelor lives in fair Nature’s despite, He cumbers the earth without use or delight, And robs Dame Posterity out of her right; And therefore, unless he can shew good and sufficient cause for remaining in his solitary state, ought to have a heavy taxation laid on his shoulders.” These lines, printed in the December 1778 edition of the Westminster Magazine (London), encapsulate only a few of the prejudices against single men that prevailed in early modern Anglo-American literary and political discourse.38 While the Westminster author censured the bachelor’s perverse nonprocreativity, other writers denounced his sexual profligacy, his greed, and his cold heart. Believing that the bachelor contributed little of value to society, lawmakers and social commentators alike argued--in much greater earnest than twenty-first-century readers might surmise from the playful juxtaposition of poetry and policy quoted above--that the bachelor ought to be taxed out of existence. In fact, many single men in England and America did face heavy, discriminatory taxation, but rather than obliterating “the solitary state,” such policies served instead to politicize bachelors and to draw them fully to the brink of citizenship. In CITIZEN BACHELORS: MANHOOD AND THE CREATION OF THE UNITED STATES, John Gilbert McCurdy writes the history of this remarkable development. His narrative is convincing, elegant, and often astonishing. McCurdy explores both the lived experiences of single men and the social construction of bachelorhood as a gendered identity. Whereas Howard P. Chudacoff turned to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to observe the heyday of the bachelor, McCurdy shifts toward the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to witness the era of his birth.39 Though highly attentive to the English origins of bachelor norms and regulations, his book focuses primarily upon Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. He predicates his analysis upon a close examination of diaries, periodical and pamphlet literature, laws, tax records, and primary and secondary demographic research. CITIZEN BACHELORS opens in mid-sixteenth-century England. There, rapid population growth and intense inflationary pressures produced massive unemployment and poverty, as well as vagrancy 38. “Cases of Compulsive Bachelors Answered,” Westminster Magazine (December 1778), 637. 39. Chudacoff, THE AGE OF THE BACHELOR: CREATING AN AMERICAN SUBCULTURE (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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exacerbated by the enclosure of grazable lands. To ameliorate these conditions, Parliament enacted a series of laws between 1549 and 1562 known collectively as the statutes of laborers and artificers. These laws required single persons to attach themselves to settled households and to contract for specified terms of employment. Decades later and an ocean apart, the colonial legislatures of New England adopted similar labor laws, certain of which applied only to men and none of which were commonly enforced against women. As McCurdy explains, “Masterlessness in New England was a masculine crime” (p. 35). Meanwhile, in the Chesapeake, a severe shortage of single women compelled most men to wait for marriage. As numerous men took up housekeeping without a wife, “a nascent bachelor lifestyle” began to emerge. Single men pooled resources to hire servants. Single planters dubbed their estates “Batchellors Choyce, Bachelor’s Chance, and Batchellors Delight.” And single males participated in bachelor-governor Francis Nicholson’s Olympic- style games (pp. 45-46). As Britain’s North American colonies matured, the implementation of new tax laws further differentiated single men as a legal category. In 1653, the town of Marshfield in Plymouth Colony imposed a poll tax upon unmarried men working “at their own hands.” In so doing, Marshfield became the first jurisdiction in England or America to bestow this sort of civic responsibility upon men without households (p. 60). Meanwhile, Pennsylvania authorities levied a poll tax upon single men and granted property tax exemptions to fathers with “a great charge of children” (p. 61). As a result, single men “paid higher taxes than the vast majority of the province’s taxable population” (p. 62). By distinguishing single men both from married men and from single women, these colonial taxation schemes called the bachelor into legal existence. Chesapeake legislation accomplished much the same. In 1725, the Maryland assembly granted debtor relief to married men and fathers, but not to bachelors. Similarly, during the Seven Years’ War, the Virginia House of Burgesses authorized Governor Robert Dinwiddie to draft “young men ... who have not wives or children.” These laws fostered a new concept of citizenship “in which all men owed the community some obligation that could either be executed through paternity or through special services to the state” (p. 82). Having investigated the unique legal standing of single men in England and America, McCurdy turns readers’ attention to literary representations of the bachelor, focusing first upon political pamphlets. Alarmed by a steep decline in marriage rates in the late seventeenth century, English political economists condemned nonprocreative sexuality. Anticipating Thomas Malthus’s conceptualization of marriage as an economic choice, these writers advocated the imposition of new taxes to heighten the costs of bachelorhood. Unlike colonial American bachelor taxes, levied to raise revenue, these English proposals explicitly sought to promote marriage. British belletrists, inspired by ideals of romantic love and companionate marriage, likewise denounced bachelor HDT WHAT? INDEX

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licentiousness and avarice, but they did not wholly condemn the single state. The Tatler’s Richard Steele and the Spectator’s Joseph Addison both adopted the narrative personas of benignly chaste bachelors. They placed the bachelors’ sins--homosexual behavior notably absent from the list--alongside other human imperfections and kept the possibility of the bachelor’s redemption within view. Even lascivious old men might fall in love. Colonial scribblers could not match the British literati for output, but Benjamin Franklin kept pace with their wit. Surveying Franklin’s most famous works, including the letters of Silence Dogood (1722), “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (1747), POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC (1732-58), and OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE INCREASE OF MANKIND (1751), McCurdy asserts that “Franklin’s approach was consistently antibachelor” (p. 107). Franklin considered the failure to marry a failure of manliness. Too often disgraced by the indulgence of luxury, bachelorhood, as Franklin saw it, was decidedly not the way to wealth. Such a perspective, McCurdy accedes, does not readily square with the amorous, even rakish life that Franklin himself led. Yet it also breaks awkwardly against another of Franklin’s writings, the oft-anthologized “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress” (1745). In that circulated but unpublished epistle, Franklin paid tongue- in-cheek tribute to the institution of marriage, declaring it the “most natural State of Man.” He further likened the bachelor to an “odd Half of a Pair of Scissars,” as potent a metaphor of uselessness as ever one was.40 But after perfunctorily admonishing his reader to wed, Franklin lustily celebrated recreational sex with well-seasoned women. In so doing, his “Advice to a Young Man” provided counsel for bachelors wishing to avoid loneliness, bastardy, bad sex, ill repute, indebtedness, and sexually transmitted disease. >From law and literature, McCurdy turns to lived experience. A close reading of two dozen diaries kept by college-educated New England males leads McCurdy to conclude that during the mid 1700s young men came to embrace bachelorhood as an opportunity for travel, homosociability, the acquisition of consumer goods, and the pursuit of romantic encounters. McCurdy cautions against the class and urban biases of this source material, but he also argues that “bachelorhood had somewhat of a trickle-down effect in late colonial America. Single men in rural areas found their lives changed as well” (p. 121). In support of this assertion, McCurdy examines a sixty-year span of tax assessments from Concord Township, a predominately Quaker, rural district in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Not particularly religious, but not particularly rowdy either, the 267 men who paid bachelor taxes between 1715 and 1775 acquired a reputation for material ostentation, lending credence to Franklin’s apprehensions about bachelorhood and luxury. McCurdy rounds out this, his fourth of five chapters, with a lively analysis of Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, many of whose members passed from bachelorhood to marriage during the brief history of that “gelastic” institution. 40. Benjamin Franklin, “Old Mistresses Apologue,” June 25, 1745, in Leonard W. Labaree, ed., PAPERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 39 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959-), 3: 27-31. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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By the late eighteenth century, more than two hundred years of discriminatory legislation had differentiated the bachelor, while a succession of Restoration and Augustan penmen had affixed upon him a litany of vices, and even a virtue or two. Perhaps because earlier writers had so thoroughly stigmatized single men, American patriots invoked bachelorhood to disparage not only the effeminate luxuriance of the British citizenry but also the hypermasculine bloodlust of those mercenaries who fought on Britain’s behalf. Simultaneously, however, the War of Independence brought new civic and political opportunities for single men. Revolutionary bachelors once again paid heavy wartime taxes and performed a disproportionate share of military duty. The Revolution, moreover, ushered in new ideas about republican citizenship. By extending suffrage to adult male taxpayers without regard to property ownership, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 enfranchised large numbers of single men, a fact not particularly lamented by Pennsylvania Republicans, who found much else to fault in their state’s new liberal government. By 1792, half of the states in the union had likewise granted limited or full voting rights to male taxpayers and by 1800 nearly every state had repealed its bachelor laws (pp. 177, 180). These reforms resulted in large part from bachelors’ contributions to the Revolutionary War. “The taxing and drafting of single men,” McCurdy declares, “advanced the notion that there was no meaningful legal difference between the rights and obligations of free white men because of marital status” (p. 196). McCurdy’s focus upon the founding of the American republic unfortunately draws his attention away from ongoing developments in Great Britain. Had McCurdy contrasted the history of male suffrage in the United States with that in the United Kingdom, particularly through the electoral reforms of the early 1830s, he would have provided readers with a greater sense of the divergence or possibly the reconvergence of notions of bachelorhood and citizenship in the Anglophone world. McCurdy’s book also raises unanswered questions about race. Because enslaved African Americans exercised little of the personal autonomy characteristic of bachelorhood, and because poets and pamphleteers who wrote about bachelors rarely bore single men of color in mind, McCurdy rightly limits his study to white males. But if bachelorhood was a unique prerogative of white men, to what extent did it function as a marker of racial distinction? Did whiteness depend upon bachelorhood? If so, where and how? McCurdy’s narrative, more subtle and nuanced than may be fully explicated here, makes a vital contribution to the study of early American manhood and masculinity. At little more than two hundred pages of body text, CITIZEN BACHELORS is anything but thin. McCurdy explores the many paradoxes that riddled bachelorhood as a legal and literary construct in the eighteenth century, rather than explaining those paradoxes away. Throughout the book, McCurdy explicitly engages the scholarship of Richard Godbeer, Mark Kann, Anne Lombard, and Thomas A. Foster, among HDT WHAT? INDEX

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others. Though his evidentiary base is unfortunately limited in places, McCurdy judiciously tightens and qualifies his conclusions. McCurdy also supplements his work with an appendix of laws that will provide invaluable assistance to scholars wishing to conduct research in the field of British North American legal history. Written in clear, uncluttered prose and offering rich rewards for scholars of gender, sexuality, the family, and the law, CITIZEN BACHELORS should be singled out for careful reading.

The author John Gilbert McCurdy then replied to Benjamin Irvin’s review: I am honored and privileged to write a response to Benjamin Irvin’s review of my monograph CITIZEN BACHELORS: MANHOOD AND THE CREATION OF THE UNITED STATES. I thank Brian Luskey and H-SHEAR for allowing me this opportunity and I thank Professor Irvin for his thoughtful comments on my work. As Professor Irvin notes, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a plethora of tracts condemning the bachelor on both sides of the Atlantic. Anyone who has sifted through the periodical and political literature of this era knows that the bachelor was often written about with the same animosity that the American Revolutionaries usually reserved for British regulars and taxation without representation. Like others, I was initially fascinated by this literature and convinced –as many historians have been– that these works provided a window into the hearts of early Americans. However, over the course of many years of research and writing, I came to appreciate the nuances and contradictions that accompanied even the most colorful attacks on the single life. Those who wielded the pen in the late eighteenth century loved to poke fun at the bachelor, but behind their lampoons lived a political critique of politicians who sought to use the power of the state to force people to marry as well as an avenue to politicization that eventually resulted in single men being able to claim the full rights of American citizenship. Professor Irvin does an excellent job capturing the essence and the argument of my work, and I truly appreciate his careful analysis. His detailed recounting provides a usable summary of the book and there is very little in his assessment that I can disagree with. He is correct that I largely dispense with my discussion of Great Britain after the third chapter. I chose to do so for reasons of brevity and because my interest lies with the emergence of the United States. Nevertheless, I agree that there are opportunities for comparison. For example, in 1785 the British Parliament approved a law that laid a tax of one pound and five shillings on every servant maintained by men “never having been married.” The fact that such a law was passed at a time when the American states were moving to equalize the tax burden among their citizens regardless of marital status and the fact that the tax was passed to help pay for the failed war in America is certainly worthy of note. I invite other historians to pursue this intriguing point. Similarly, I invite other historians to investigate issues of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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marital status as they relate to race. As Professor Irvin notes, I do not explore how racial identity may have informed the evolution of bachelorhood. My research routinely turned up inconclusive evidence on how bachelorhood applied to African Americans –or even Native Americans– and thus I ultimately decided to focus exclusively on white single men. To some extent, my flaw was the lens through which I was choosing to view bachelors. Laws, literature, and diaries were the documents of the colonizers and not the colonized or the enslaved. A more creative method will have to be devised to understand how the bachelor tax divided America along the lines of color. Ultimately, I hope that my work will fuel more research into the issues of gender in the colonial era and the creation of the American republic. Although I based much of my theoretical inquiry in men’s studies, my research made me aware of how interconnected issues of gender were and are. Too often, we have written about “men” as if they were a single group, ignoring division created by race, class, and marital status. As we begin to understand the texture of manhood and its internal conflicts, I hope that we can apply these observations to a better comprehension of womanhood and the complex ways in which gender informed the early republic. — John Gilbert McCurdy, Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University

February 24, Wednesday: A large number of anti-nuclear activists and private citizens gathered in Montpelier to be at hand if needed for civil disobedience as the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 to not issue the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant the “Public Good” certificate it needed for continued operation past 2012 (under Vermont law the re-license would have to be approved by both houses to continue operation). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2011

March: 600 people gathered for a civil disobedience event outside the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. The demonstrators offered support for the thousands of Japanese whose lives were being disrupted by radiation from the wrecked Fukushima TEPCO reactors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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2015

March 9, Monday: Henry Thoreau rated a mention on page 69 of the The New Yorker. In reporter-at-large Eric Schlosser’s article “Break-in at Y-12 (How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America’s nuclear weapons sites),” there appears the following: Leavenworth Penitentiary is the oldest federal prison and one of the most unsettling. Built more than a century ago, in Kansas, it was designed to look like the U.S. Capitol. Imagine the Capitol, flattened, stretched, surrounded by forty-foot-high walls made of red brick and topped with gun towers.... [Gregory] Boertje-Obed was slight and soft-spoken, wearing a beige prison uniform that looked a couple of sizes too big. But, as I listened to him talk about his faith and his devotion to nonviolence it became clear that down deep he was harder and tougher than most of the inmates in the yard. Henry David Thoreau spent a single night in jail as an act of civil disobedience and then wrote a famous essay about it. Boertje-Obed had already spent more than a thousand nights behind bars for his beliefs and may spent at least a thousand more. he seemed to have no regrets. “You must live your Christian beliefs fully,” he told me, “as though judgment may come at any moment.” Boertje-Obed said that no one from the government had ever asked him for suggestions about how the security at nuclear-weapons sights could be improved. He certainly doesn’t want terrorists to do what he’s done. The Bureau of Prisons sent him to Leavenworth, nine hours away from his family, he said, because it considers him to be a “domestic terrorist.” Boertje-Obed plays a lot of Scrabble now, belongs to a Bible-study group, and spends time teaching a man in his cell block how to read. If he’s attacked by another inmate, he won’t fight back. but he might intervene to separate other inmates who are fighting. Right before the corrections officer led him out of the room, Boertje-Obed looked me in the eye and gave a subtle little smile.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 26, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.