The Making of a Draft Resistor

Michael K. Ferber is a young foot soldier in the fight against the war in Vietnam. When the Justice Department last Friday indicted the generals--including Dr. Benjamin Spock and William Sloan Coffin Jr.--for conspiracy against the draft laws, it picked Ferber out of the ranks to join them. Despite the prospect of a five-year prison sentence for his October anti-draft sermon in Boston's Arlington Street Church, Ferber last night committed what the Attorney General might consider a similar "offense" in speaking at Harvard's anti-war, anti-draft Teach-In.

In a press conference Saturday, Ferber said that the only appropriate response to the indictments is to redouble anti-draft activity across the country. In face of the indictment, he plans to continue "teaching, preaching, and speeching" against the draft--just as before. It's the kind of thing that people have come to expect from him.

Ferber once described himself as a "child of the New Left." If he is that, he is also a product of the government's treatment of dissenters characteristic of the post-McCarthy period. He once said that he imagined that the current crop of war resistors probably started out being "nice, sincere, honest, strictly legal, thoughtful guys who never dreamt of being radical or of taking a step that would put them in prison." He might as well have been describing himself.

Now 23, Ferber has all the superficial characteristics that most college students have come to associate with New Left people. In private conversation, he speaks softly, slowly, locking eyes with his listener. In public speeches, he's forceful, fiery, even dramatic. His conversation is sprinkled with phrases like "doing their own thing" and "friction in the machine"; he quotes Stokely Carmichael and Paul Goodman.

No Cubbyhole

But if one resists the temptation to slip him into the New Left cubbyhole and looks beneath the superficialities of speech and manner, Ferber comes forth as a complex, contradictory blend of the pragmatist and idealist, religionist and radical idealogue. His belief in non-violence is firm. His sense of perspective and grasp of social realities make him an exceptional even atypical, member of the New Left. If the government jails him, he just may have the entire prison organized before he leaves.

At the press conference, one reporter asked him whether he considered resistance to authority a "healthy" thing. Ferber's friends erupted in laughter, knowing that that's not the kind of question he usually answers in two minutes. Later he elaborated:

"I would agree with the whole tradition that really is as old as the Greeks about what's a just and an unjust law. And I think one breaks unjust laws, even if it's a traffic law. In a way it's purely logical: that if one is morally opposed to a law, then it is one's moral obligation to break it.

"Now that doesn't mean everyone should go about breaking all the laws that one wants to break. I didn't say 'want,' I said 'morally convinced is wrong.' If you were thoughtful, you would probably agree with most laws and obey them. Certainly traffic laws should be obeyed; it's stupid to break those.

"For thoughtful people, the first term in any major premise is not the government's wishes. I get a lot of silly arguments from people who say the laws come first, and your morality sort of works itself out in between them. That's a morally bankrupt position.

"Anyone who understands the logic of moral thinking must conclude that laws--like everything else--are subject to ethical consideration. Once you've thought it out and consulted yourself and you've concluded your moral obligation to think and decide, then it's your moral obligation to act. Unless it's purely suicidal, in which case you haven't thought it through right. In other words, you've got to think. And all laws are fair game."

Nothing New

Ferber has broken quite a few laws in the last several years. He spent most of his spare time as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College working in the civil rights movement in Chester, Pa., through the then embryonic Students for a Democratic Society. Their goal was to clean up some of the "wretched conditions" in some of the city's nearly all-Negro public schools.

Ferber thinks they achieved the "only complete victory in the history of the civil rights movement" there. They closed down an elementary school, the city hall, and the town's switchboard through massive sit-ins. "We had the city virtually paralyzed."

He and the other Swarthmore students were jailed, but soon released with the local administration's assurances that changes would be made. Nothing was done, and they took to the streets for days of demonstrations until the state troopers were called in.

"The state troopers beat up a lot of people, but specifically avoided the Swarthmore kids. There was blood in the streets; it was so bad.... It demoralized the movement, and it was disillusioning for us because so many people got hurt.... I think it had a radicalizing effect on us.... It upset a lot of people in Philadelphia, who sent in a lot of money. Violence does that.... The incident made us a little suspicious of liberals: that it takes blood in the streets before they realize that conditions are bad."

After graduating from Swarthmore Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in Greek, he came to Harvard in the fall of 1966 on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to major in modern English literature. Although still protected by his 2-S graduate deferment, Ferber decided then that his religious and non-violent beliefs had matured sufficiently for him to apply for a 1-O deferment as a conscientious objector. He started out strictly legally, "playing the game their way," but circumstances and his own morality soon compelled him to a position outside the law:

"My CO application was primarily religious. Being an unorthodox, kind of small letter 'c' christian--or Judeo-Christian--and officially being a Unitarian, it's not easy to answer simply 'yes' or 'no' to whether I believe in a Supreme Being. I tried to discuss something like a Supreme Being that is imminent rather than transcendent: a function or aspect of human experience. I could have quoted Hindu doctrine to make it fit, but I chose to write it in my own words. I wrote about the highest moments of perception and truth and reality, and the power of love, communion, and creativity....

"If someone came in off the street and asked me whether I believed in God, I would say, 'No, I'm an agnostic.' Because I know what most people mean when they say God. But if a theologian asked me, I'd say 'Yes and no, let's try to define it.' That's what I tried to do. I tried to define the religious dimension of man, which I think can exist with or without God. I think it makes perfect sense to describe this dimension as an experience of a Supreme Being. Whether it's your own being supreme, or an external thing that seems at the moment to be crucially important. I used Tillich's definition of religion as one's ultimate commitment or ultimate concern. On that kind of definition, I would stand."

Ferber's CO application also quoted Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It included letters testifying to the sincerity of his beliefs from ten people (including two combat veterans), statements from his ministers, and a list of the 13 political demonstrations in which he took part--the first during his sophomore year in high school.

His application was turned down almost upon receipt; he suspects they didn't even read it. His local board in Buffalo reclassified him 1-A, despite the fact that he was still a full-time student. This was in May, 1967, before the new draft law abolishing graduate deferments was passed. The lawyer Ferber contacted told him that this was a blatantly illegal move, since there was no basis for stripping him of his 2-S.

"My religious beliefs were even more conservative than the ones that the Supreme Court accepted for CO in the Seeger decision. My hearing officer was totally unsympathetic. There was little I could do, unless I was a Quaker in the pious, conventional sense. They have an image of what a religious person is, and I'm not that. There's nothing wrong with my case. [Ferber's lawyer assured him they could win in court.] I had all my political and religious activities in it.

"I don't see a fundamental distinction between religion and politics. Religion and morality are the same, and politics is an extension of morality. I made that point very clear, but they didn't seem to see it. The very first question at my hearing was, 'Mr. Ferber, what are your political beliefs? They didn't take too kindly to the fact that I had caused all kinds of 'trouble' in high school and college and got arrested in Chester. I couldn't be religious and do that. Apparently, a religious guy just sits off in a corner and meditates. And a pacifist is a retiring sort, 'who resists not evil.' I think it's our business to resist evil."

The summer of '67 marked his move from dissent to resistance, as he spent the greater part of three months "hassling" with his local board in a vain attempt to be granted CO status or be reclassified 2-S. He made numerous trips to Buffalo and couldn't hold a regular summer job.

"I did the whole bit, played their game perfectly, just what they wanted. At first when you're doing this, you feel that you're doing something good: striking a blow against the system. Hah, you're going to make them read your file, have a big argument, a showdown, and then you're going to pass out leaflets at your physical.

"After a while, you realize that they're playing the game a lot better than you are. That you're becoming though. I don't know how I'll bear up."

Ferber is out of place in the list of five. All the other men--including Mitchell Goodman, a New York author, and Marcus Raskin, co-director of Washington's Institute for Policy Studies--are charged with sponsoring the nation-wide draft resistance program. Ferber isn't. All the other men, are ineligible for the draft; Ferber is the only one who is draft eligible and has turned in his card.

He sees the government's including one real draft resistor among the five as an attempt "to scare all the other kids." "The government is saying to the kids, 'No matter how many adults you bring in to bear the brunt, we're going to get you too.' I was just an easy, prominent target because of all my public speeches."

Howard Zinn, professor of Government at Boston University and a major anti-war figure, agrees: "It's the government's way of saying to all the ordinary people who have growing doubts about the war, 'You had better shut up!'"

Martyrdom

If he goes to jail, will he think it has been worth it?

"Yes, if my imprisonment brings thousands more kids into the Resistance. People in SDS have argued that we're all silly romantic idealists and martyrs, offering ourselves up on the altar to be slaughtered by the government. I think that argument misses the point that sometimes martyrdom can be useful. By our actions, we galvanize other people into similar acts. There is a whole new generation of energy. It reaches not only the guys who take the step, but also their parents and friends. Let's face it, these are the sons of some powerful, influential people. For whatever selfish reasons, their parents and friends are pushed pretty far. Just like in Chester.

As Stokely Carmichael said: 'Your politics are determined by what you see when you get up in the morning.' When I get up in the morning, I see my 1-A, my indictment, my name in the papers. It's very obviously a psychological, existential thing. Your conditions change.

The Resistance encourages kids to take the step that will cause these changes. That's what I meant by creating energy. Harvard SDS has been called a debating society. That wasn't true during the Dow business, but it tends to be true, partly because the politics of most of those kids are determined by getting up in Dunster House and going to class. They will act when their conditions are such that they have to.

"You have to decide on the moral choice to make the move that will keep you psychologically on the ball to handle things. This may sound very Machiavellian, but I think it's practical politics. If they abolished all student deferments, the revolution would come tomorrow.

"And turning in a draft card is more than a symbolic gesture. It causes friction in the machinery: resistance. Maybe we can get a two or three per cent slowdown. We have to face up to the fact that there isn't going to be a revolution in this country. Maybe we should start talking about change.... The true radical makes any changes he can.

"Some people in SDS, maybe because they've experienced more but probably just as likely because they're more frustrated, think there is no possibility for change and that they're justified in doing anything: That all democracy is dead. That's wrong, though it sounds more radical to say it. But it really isn't because it's less honest.

"I think the Resistance is making a dent that will carry over. If nothing else, it's producing a pretty tough, rugged bunch of people dedicated to change. Whether or not they go to prison, they've done a lot and grown up an awful lot. I've seen lives change in days. Some come out of prison raring to go. One guy was in jail for 14 months, was out less than a day, dropped by our office, picked up a thousand leaflets, and left to hand them out.

"So even if we fail to achieve any programmatic change with this war, we'll still have this new race of people, who won't sell out because they've gone through too much. And all of us are going to be around when the next war comes.