Dissent Among the Dissenters

It was billed as "Stop the Draft and End the War Week." By the time the scenario of civil disobedience had been played out in 34 cities last week, all that had been stopped was a little traffic, and nothing had ended but the tenuous unity of the protesters themselves. The customary documents were burned--few were actually draft cards --and the traditional chants were bellowed, but the turnout from San Francisco to New York was diminutive and dispirited, compared with October's Pentagon march.

Marigolds & Mischief. Main targets of last week's demos were federal induction centers. In San Francisco, a crowd of 800, ranging from hippies and clerics to an actively nursing mother gathered in a nippy Bay wind for an "offertory" service. Only 87 filed forward to place their draft cards in a silver bowl for mailing to Washington.

Cincinnati's antiwarriors conducted their draft drama with a bit more panache. Sporting marigolds and sparking mischief, a group of 50--mostly students from nearby Antioch College--gathered in front of the main post office to protest the impending induction of James R. Wessner, 22, grandson-in-law of Cleveland Industrialist and Russophile Cyrus Eaton. Wessner was clad in a black Halloween "death" costume and toted a scythe--a grim tableau that found an almost exact duplicate in Des Moines. Nine young men turned in their draft cards in Cincinnati, after dipping them in a cup full of blood contributed by two Antioch students. When the group attempted to dissuade a Negro inductee, Kenneth Dunn, 19, from entering the center, he told them: "I'm willing to lay my life down if necessary so that you can bitch and protest, but I don't suppose any of you will understand that."

Symbolic Arrests. The biggest turnout was in Manhattan, where a crowd of up to 2,000 surrounded the Whitehall Street induction center near city hall, and surged through the rest of Manhattan playing antidraft tag with twice as many cops for four straight days. Greeted by freezing temperatures and the ominous rattle of police billies on the barricades, the demonstrators never managed to reach the main door of the center. Police allowed Dr. Benjamin Spock, Poet Allen Ginsberg and Author Susan Sontag, among others, to sit-in symbolically on the cold stone steps, then just as symbolically arrested them.

The violence on both sides that had marked last month's anti-Dean Rusk dustup at the New York Hilton was notably absent. Frustrated by competent cops, who refused to club them into martyrdom, the dissenters finally began to dissent among themselves. Even the presence of Lyndon Johnson at St. Patrick's Cathedral for Cardinal Spellman's funeral failed to unite them: protesters halfheartedly staked out the midtown cathedral, but soon dispersed. At Battery Park, moderates and militants clashed in a shoving match during a violent argument over whether to march on city hall.

More ominous for the future of anti war protest was the rising reaction evident among public and officialdom alike. Hundreds of New Yorkers-including members of the International Longshoremen's Association--staged counterdemonstrations of their own last week, and police were hard pressed to keep workers from attacking antiwarriors. In the harshest tongue-lashing yet by a Cabinet member, Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman summed up the mounting mood of disgust with the dissenters, denouncing them as "prophets of doom, carping critics, scofflaws--white and black--who are selling America short in a rising, vicious babel." He could take heart from the fact that last week's babel was considerably muted, a sign that the antiwar movement in its most virulent form may be past its peak.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.