PORTRAIT
OF THE YOUNG MAN
AS A CONSCIENTIOUS
OBJECTOR
by W.W.
PROLOGUE
The many events touched upon in
this account took place between, roughly, 1950 and 1960--which is now
40+ to 50+ years ago. I'll try to be as accurate as possible and as
thorough as necessary. But I can no longer vouch for the details. I'll
do the best I can.
ALTERNATIVE
SERVICE
Because the U.S. has not had
conscription for many years (though young men still have a legal
obligation to register for the draft), lots of people have only a dim
idea of what a conscientious objector--a C.O.--is. The first federal
draft law, which was passed during the Civil
War, exempted from military
service those like Quakers
whose religious affiliation
prohibited their participation in war. This has continued off and on
ever since, though the exact grounds for exemption have been relaxed
somewhat over the years. A C.O. is one who claims such exemption from
military service. A C.O. called for duty has been required to fulfil
two years of "alternative service" in some civilian work of social
value. (This characterization of conscientious objection is an
oversimplification. If you want a more detailed account, click
here.)
It's hard to say when and how my years as a conscientious objector
began. I was at least nominally a Lutheran
and not a member of one of the
historic peace churches like the Society
of Friends or the Mennonites.
But I nonetheless took Jesus'
teaching clearly to prohibit participation in war. (My article "WHY
I AM [OR AM NOT] A..." might shed some light on this
stage of my development.) If Jesus said it, I believed it; and that
settled it.
I registered at my local
Draft Board in 1953 when I turned 18, and
noted then that on religious grounds I was opposed to participation in
war in any form. But the issue of my eligibility for military service
did not arise at that time, since the Selective
Service System (SSS), which oversaw the
draft, granted me temporary exemption as a college student. Upon
graduation in 1956, I obeyed the order to appear for my pre-induction
physical examination. Although it was called a "physical examination",
it was actually an examination of one's (in)eligibility for military
service on physical, mental, and moral grounds.
It was on this occasion that I formally initiated my claim for
exemption as a conscientious objector. As it turned out, my request had
to await the investigation of two incidents from my college years. (1)
While visiting a friend in Chicago, I had attended a meeting of what in
those days was called a "communist
front group". And (2) I had been
arrested, convicted, and fined $5 for what, with considerable
exaggeration, was called INCITING
TO RIOT! It was at worst DISTURBING
THE PEACE during a protest at a VFW
Loyalty Day parade through my
college campus. (It was a bum rap. For
that story, click here.)
The investigation of a C.O.'s claim to exemption went roughly this way.
You appear before your local Draft Board to make your case. If they're
not persuaded, as mine wasn't, they turn the case over to the Department of Justice,
which in turn gives it to the
FBI
for investigation. In my case,
that investigation dragged on for months and months and months. The FBI
then reports to the Department of Justice, which in turn reports to the
SSS, which notified my Draft Board that as far as they were concerned I
was physically, mentally, and morally fit to be a mass murderer. They
in turn notified the Army, which, it turned out, was not satisfied with
my fitness on political grounds. So they turned my case over to their Counter Intelligence
Corps for further
investigation. (For that story, see below.) More months drag by.
When I graduated from college in 1956, I (foolishly) assumed that I
would promptly be classified as a C.O. and would get on with my
alternative service. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I wanted
something more interesting than sweeping floors at a hospital. So I
visited the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) headquarters in Philadelphia,
and explained my situation.
They said that they did indeed sometimes hear of opportunities for
C.O.s in alternative service, and they would notify me if something
arose that they thought I'd find interesting.
Meanwhile, to fill the time and make a little money, I'd gotten a job
selling advertising space for a local newspaper in North Philadelphia.
As the FBI investigation was
dragging on, the AFSC contacted me to tell me of a Dr. ______ in the Psychiatric
unit of Bellevue Hospital
in New York City,
who needed a "volunteer normal control patient" (that's "guinea pig",
to you) for a very important
experiment that he and some colleagues were just beginning to design. I
visited him in New York, and learned that (a) the experiment, which he
described in some detail, would be at best several months off, and (b)
he was virtually certain that he could get me a job at the New York University Medical Center
just next door to Bellevue if
I participated in his experiment. I explained that I was willing, but
that I had to wait until my Draft Board granted my C.O. claim. That was
fine with him, since the experiment was still in the planning stages.
More time passed, and Dr. ______ finally notified me that they were
ready for me. I had a tough decision to make. But I decided to move to
New York without my draft classification as a C.O.. I got a job as a
clerk in the Personnel Department at NYU's Medical Center, and an
apartment within easy walking distance.
I'll relate my experiences in the experiment itself below. First I want
to finish the story about my relations with the SSS. I started working
at NYU in the summer of 1957, and the experiment was over by the summer
of 1959. (Actually, the experiment itself took up a relatively small
percentage of those two years.) By the middle of 1959, my Draft Board
classified me as a conscientious objector. I very politely asked them
to recognize my prior work in the hospital and the experiment as
fulfilling my alternative service obligation, since that work had been
undertaken for the precise purpose of performing such service. They
"split the difference", as it were, and required a third year of
hospital work to complete my service. I was a little sore at this. But
I realized that they would have been within their rights to require two
more years, since I was not a certified C.O. for those first two years
from 1957 to 1959. So they were satisfied, and so was I.
THE EXPERIMENT
One of the hot issues in
psychiatric research at the time concerned the relation between blood
constitution and schizophrenia.
A number of different sorts
of experiments had been done to explore the possibility that the blood
of a schizophrenic contains some sort of toxin or "schizococcus" that
caused aberrant mental states and behavior. Some experimenters had
injected volunteers (lifers at Louisiana prisons,
as it turned out--not your
most stable population!) with a synthesized substance that they thought
closely resembled a substance they had found in the blood of
schizophrenics. The volunteers subsequently tested nutty. Other
experimenters injected spiders with the blood of schizophrenics, after
which the spiders wove quite bizarre webs.
No one had ever simply exchanged the blood of a normal and a
schizophrenic individual to see what would happen. At first glance it
seemed like a good idea, testing two distinct hypotheses at once. If
the schizophrenic patient has something extra in his blood which is
responsible for his illness (I say "his" because in this case he was
male), we might expect the normal volunteer to go crazy--temporarily,
we hope. If, on the other hand, the schizophrenic is missing
something--some "normalizing factor"- that is present in the blood of
psychiatrically normal people, then we might expect the schizophrenic
patient to get better for a while after a dose of "the good stuff".
I append a copy of the report on the experiment published in the American Journal of Psychiatry
in 1959. Thus I can omit from
this article the details of the experiment, and concentrate on my
personal observations and reflections.
The experiment was conducted at New York
state's psychiatric research
center at Rockland State Hospital.
In broad outline, here's how
the experiment ran...or was supposed to run. Before any blood was
exchanged, the patients involved would be tested for various relevant
psychological and physical conditions. If the patients "passed" these
tests, then a "control run" just like the real thing would be
performed, except that no blood would be exchanged. If this induced no
relevant changes, the cross-transfusion would take place. Thereafter,
the patients would again be tested to determine what if any
psychological (or physical) changes had occurred as a result of the
exchange of blood.
More specifically, here's what happened. The two patients--the normal
patient W.W. and the schizophrenic patient F.F.--lie head to head on
padded operating tables, their arms strapped securely to boards
projecting from either side. (I hope you appreciate the posture! It may
play a role in the final result.) Between their heads is a pump
apparatus with a tube running to each arm of each patient--four tubes
in all.
Blood was pumped from W.W. to F.F., and from F.F. to W.W. Initially
W.W. got a dose of dye in his blood stream so that the experimenters
could periodically determine what mix they had achieved--what
percentage of W.W.'s blood supply came from F.F. and vice versa. (It's
impossible by such a procedure to get all of each patient's blood in
the other's system. The theoretical maximum is a 50-50 mix, which could
never actually be reached, but only approached more and more closely,
though more and more slowly. If a perfect mix were attained, from then
on the same blood mixture would simply be going round and round.)
Throughout the more than six hours of the exchange, the doctors kept
talking to the patients to determine their psychiatric state. Among the
group of observers in the room was the science editor of the New York Herald Tribune,
who chatted with W.W. about
current theories of cosmology in between questions from the doctors
like "How many fingers am I holding up?", "What day is it?", and "How
do you feel about me?" (The doctors ultimately decided that W.W. had
not lost his mind in the procedure.)
One incidental moral to this story is that science is not, as some
think, the accurate description of the observable world. F.F. not only
hallucinated a good bit of the time, but was able to report his hallucinations.
When Dr. ______ was not
asking W.W. what seemed like silly questions at the time, he was at
F.F.'s end checking on him. "Can you hear me?" "Nnnnnnnnnmmhh." "F___!
Can you hear me?" "Mmmmnnnhhhhnn." And so it went for what seemed like
an hour or more. But at one point, the dialogue was different. "F___;
can you hear me?" "Uh, yeah, Doc. I can hear you." "Great, F___. Tell
me: are you seeing things?" "Yeah, Doc. I'm seeing things." "Tell me,
F___. What are you seeing?" "Well. I see your hair, and I see your tie,
and I see the wall, and I see the clock on the wall, and I see the
nurse, and I see the window, and I see the tree outside the window, and
I see the light on the ceiling, and I see the door, and...." This
seemed to go on for five minutes--the identification of everything in
F.F.'s visual field. If science were the accurate description of the
observable world, F.F. would have been the world's greatest scientist.
So it went, for over six hours. I believe they stopped because another
hour or so would have made very little difference in the ratio of one
patient's own blood to the other's blood in each system. The doctors
had all the data that observation of the cross-transfusion itself could
provide. What remained was for them to observe the patients over the
following weeks, test them for relevant conditions, and analyze all
their data.
The big question: how did these two patients fare during and after the
exchange of blood? The study reports that, among other things, F.F. was
"mildly paranoid at the beginning of the experiment, and had
fluctuating bouts of catatonia."
"About 4 hours after the
cross-transfusion had been discontinued, [F.F.] became more catatonic
than he had been previously, and more paranoid....This period of
increased catatonia and paranoia
in the patient lasted for 24
hours following the completion of the experiment."
Well, how about that! This poor soul had a prior tendency to think that
people meant him harm. Then eight white coats strap him down,
immobilizing him for over six hours, stick a big needle in each arm,
and ask him entirely pointless questions. Is it any wonder that he
became more paranoid after the experience? As nearly as he could tell,
people surely were out to get him.
A piece of unconfirmable speculation. For a moment think of psychiatric
well-being as a single condition ranging from, say, zero at the bottom
to ten at the top. (Of course, it's much more complicated than this.
But let's imagine combining all the relevant features of psychiatric
health into a single measure.) It occurs to me that W.W.'s "good blood"
might actually have improved F.F.'s psychiatric condition by three
degrees on the hypothetical scale--from 3 to 6, say--but that that
improvement might have been swamped by five degrees of psychiatric
deterioration due to the enormous strain on F.F., leaving a net loss of
two points--from 3 to 1. Then the doctors would never have observed the
positive effects that the "normal" blood actually had on the
schizophrenic patient.
Now for W.W. His psychiatric condition improved between his initial
testing and his final testing. How can that be? The paper offers some ad
hoc hypotheses to account for this unexpected outcome. (1)
Enhanced self respect. He thought of himself as making a valuable,
though somewhat painful and dangerous, contribution to humankind. Here
is this young Christian, affixed to a cross, bleeding for the good of
all! That will enhance self-respect if anything will!
(2) Further, the before-and-after tests were not separated by days but
by months. Any number of things might have taken place in that time to
help explain W.W.'s improvement. Among other things, not long before
the cross-transfusion he got married to his fiancee who lived some 100
miles away and whom he saw irregularly. As the authors of the study so
delicately put it: "Apparently his heterosexual and interpersonal
adjustment improved markedly at that time." Translation: "He was
getting laid regularly."
We can propose an unconfirmable hypothesis like the one above. The evil
demons coursing through F.F.'s blood stream might have impaired W.W.'s
psychiatric condition by, say, two points, which loss was overwhelmed
by three points of improvement due to increased self-respect (and
fornication), for a net gain of one point--from 8 to 9. Under such
conditions, the doctors could not have seen the actual impairment that
F.F.'s blood caused.
Of course, this is rather wild speculation. But it is surely not as
wild as this attempt to account for F.F.'s deterioration: Perhaps "a
normal blood substance was supplied to the patient in larger quantities
than he had been accustomed to, and...his body converted it into a
toxin which produced a more profound psychotic response than he usually
had...."
I have a quite different
hypothesis to account for the observed results--as they put it, "it
would seem that the patient [F.F.] was temporarily worse following the
experiment, and that the volunteer [W.W.] was improved by the study."
Surely the simplest hypothesis is that the doctors put the labels
"schizophrenic" and "normal" on the wrong individuals. Given that,
everything falls neatly into place, just as expected. (See the second
paragraph of THE EXPERIMENT above.)
Remember, finally, that "both the patient and the volunteer were given
an initial control-run [just like the real thing, but with no blood
exchanged] to make sure that neither would respond to the stimuli of
the experiment." It is my best recollection that a different
patient--not F.F.--took part in that dry run with W.W., but was
withdrawn from the experiment at the request of the next-of-kin who had
originally given their permission for him to participate. The fact that
that patient did not "respond to the stimuli of the experiment" is, of
course, irrelevant. I can only assume that F.F. underwent a control
run. But if he did, it was not with his final partner, W.W. This seems
to me to be one more flaw in the experiment. But I'm no expert in
experimental design.
I leave it to you to evaluate their bottom-line conclusion: "It is
probably psychiatrically safe for a larger quantity of blood than was
used here to be exchanged in a shorter period of time...." Let's
exchange more blood faster! My bottom-line conclusion: Given the ways
things turned out, it is obvious that nothing of any interest or
importance could have been learned from this experiment, or from an
"accelerated" version of it.
ADDENDA
There remain three brief stories
which may not be very interesting in themselves, but which flesh out
the story of my relations with the Selective Service System.
(1) The first is the story of my "inciting to riot". Actually I played
a very small part in this drama. But the "townies",
the local police, and the
college administration needed to punish a few students, and I was one
of the few who had been identified.
It was May 2, 1953, and the Korean War
was still going on. The Veterans of Foreign Wars
routed their "Loyalty Day"
parade right up High Street,
the main street of campus, and then down a side street to the athletic
field, where patriotic displays, music, and speeches would be held. The
police had put a few barriers across High Street at the point where the
parade was to turn right toward the athletic field. At a long and
accidental break in the parade, the students standing on High Street
behind the barriers simply picked them up and relocated them across the
side street. So the next unit of the parade, which had fallen behind,
kept marching up High Street and out of town, with the final two-thirds
of the parade following. It couldn't have been better if it had been
carefully planned, which of course it wasn't. (I guess you'd call it a
"target of opportunity".) Loyalty Day turned into a fiasco.
Now I was nowhere near this intersection and knew nothing of the
goings-on there, but was watching the parade from a spot earlier in the
line of march, right in front of my dormitory. A housemate who had
witnessed the event down High Street came running back to tell us about
it. We moved away from the curb perhaps twenty feet to gather around
him on the lawn and hear his story. Just then a very big policeman
roughly snatched his baseball cap from his head, threw it on the
ground, and shouted at him: "Take your hat off when the flag goes by!"
Of course we had no idea that a color guard was passing at that moment.
So I and some others got hats from the dormitory and clamped them
defiantly on our heads--defying not the flag or the VFW, but the Gestapo
agent who had enforced his own
brand of patriotism so crudely.
So those are two components of the riot. I am told that there were a
few more. Somebody was reported to have shot a water pistol at a tank.
And somebody else was reported to have draped a Nazi
flag from a dormitory window
overlooking the athletic field.
Well, the Loyalty Day celebration never took place, and lots of people
(though not all) were sore. The college yielded to political pressure,
investigated, and turned over to the police the names of about eight
students who were known to have had something to do with inciting the
(non-existent) riot. We were arrested and tried. We pleaded nolo contendere
(acknowledging the alleged
facts but unwilling to say we were guilty), we were convicted, we were
fined $5 apiece, and we were given a stern lecture on patriotism and
the flag by the judge. To add injury to this insult, the college
suspended each of us for two weeks on the vaguest of contrived charges.
(To add further insult to this injury, my parents wouldn't let me come
home for those two weeks, because they felt they couldn't explain to
their neighbors why I wasn't in school; so I stayed with another rioter
whose parents were either bolder or more imaginative than mine.)
(2) The second "footnote" to this whole story concerns one exchange I
had with the agent for the Army's counter-intelligence corps. At one
point in his long interrogation of me, and after a number of bland
questions, he figured he'd trick me. "Say, Bill. How do you feel about
admitting Red China
to the United Nations?"
"Do they want to be in the
United Nations?" I asked. "Gee," he muttered; "I dunno." "Well, I'll
tell you what I think," I replied. "If they don't want to be in the
United Nations, then I don't think we should force them to join."
[scribblescribblescribblescribble] I had thought that the Army put
their smartest in counter-intelligence, not their dumbest.
(3) I had thought in 1956 that my C.O. claim was a relatively simple
one that would be brought to a successful conclusion rather quickly.
But evaluating my claim dragged on for three years, during much of
which time it was in the hands of the FBI.
In 1971, I got a powerful insight into why my FBI investigation had
dragged on so long. In the dark of night, a team of activists
opposed to the Vietnam War
broke into the regional
headquarters of the FBI and stole many if not all of their files--over
1000 pages. It was both an administrative and a public relations
disaster. But the activists didn't leave it at that. They painstakingly
organized each person's own SSS file, and mailed it to him in a plain
brown wrapper.
In my case, this file was about two inches thick, since it contained a
copy of the whole unexpurgated FBI file. So I had before my eyes the
whole record of the FBI investigation. I knew just what each
"informant" had told the FBI about me--or at least what the
investigator reported was said. Much of it was innocuous or favorable,
and pretty much what I would have expected. But there were a couple of
shockers in the file.
I had been an M.A. student at NYU
between 1957 and 1960, where I
and perhaps twenty others took a course in Philosophical Theology with
one of the world's most distinguished British philosophers (who,
fortunately, is still alive for me to hate). I never had a private
conversation with him, spoke very little in class, and wrote one paper
for the course. But he was and still is a virulent reactionary. All the
FBI had to say to him was, "one of your students claims to be a
conscientious objector," and he unloaded on me. I was a "queer fish"
who simply couldn't be believed or trusted. And on and on and on. I
believe to this day that this person and a couple of other people who
barely knew me (and certainly didn't know about my religious and
political views) were the ones responsible for the inordinate delay in
my getting classified as a C.O.
You might like to read my FBI file. So would I. I wanted to keep it to
show to my friends, my children, my as-yet-unborn grandchildren. But my
wife at the time--who was as courageous, progressive, and smart as they
come--didn't want to have it around. We were both rather conspicuous
anti-war activists--she more than I--and the last thing we needed was
for the authorities to find stolen government files in our house. So we
destroyed them. Alas!
Copyright © 2003, William A. Wisdom
The following article appeared in the American Journal of
Psychiatry (Vol. 116, No. 4, October, 1959, pp. 334-36) and
is reprinted with the permission of the American Psychiatric
Publishing, Inc. Copyright © 1959.
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