The first Civilian Public Service camp

On 15 May 1941 the first group of young Americans who had refused military service on grounds of conscience moved into an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Patapsco State Forest, near Elkridge, Maryland, some eighteen kilometres from Baltimore. It was the first camp of Civilian Public Service (CPS), a programme under which conscientious objectors called up under the law that introduced the first peacetime draft were to perform “work of national importance” under civilian direction instead of serving in uniform. The camp was run by the Quaker relief organisation, the American Friends Service Committee. Although it bore the number 3 in the official numbering, it was the first to open. According to an account cited by historians of the movement, the first twenty-six objectors arrived accompanied by fifty-four journalists and photographers, and the camp quickly earned the nickname “the goldfish bowl”.

The lesson of the First World War

The refusal to bear arms had a long tradition in the United States. It was held above all by members of the three so-called historic peace churches: the Quakers, or Religious Society of Friends; the Mennonites, together with related Anabaptist communities such as the Amish and the Hutterites; and the Church of the Brethren. The draft law of 1917 exempted their members only from armed service and allowed the President to assign them to non-combatant duties in the army. Those who refused any co-operation with the army were sent to military camps, where it was assumed they could be persuaded to serve. Some two thousand of these “absolutist” objectors were confined in military prisons, among them Fort Leavenworth and the island of Alcatraz. Some of them were subjected to starvation rations, solitary confinement and violence; two young Hutterites died as a result of their treatment.

After the war the peace churches resolved not to allow a repetition. At conferences in the 1920s and 1930s, above all at a gathering in Newton, Kansas, in 1935, they agreed a common position and a plan for alternative civilian service, modelled on Quaker relief work in Europe after the First World War and on the forestry service that Mennonites in tsarist Russia had performed in place of military service. Their representatives met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 and again on 10 January 1940, asking for civilian supervision of objectors and offering to organise and run work for them themselves.

From statute to camp

The Burke–Wadsworth Act, signed on 16 September 1940, granted in its section 5(g) the right to refuse service to anyone who, “by reason of religious training and belief”, was opposed to participation in war in any form. Compared with 1917 this was a marked advance: the exemption was not confined to members of the peace churches, an appeal could be made against the decision of a draft board, and an objector assigned to civilian work came under civilian direction and the ordinary federal courts rather than military ones. The Act did not say, however, what that work was to be. When more than 16 million men registered on 16 October 1940, no structure for objectors yet existed.

The Selective Service administration wanted to deal with a single partner rather than with each denomination separately. At the suggestion of Lewis B. Hershey – an officer who in October 1940 became a brigadier general and deputy director of Selective Service, and who had in practice been running it from the start – the peace churches set up a joint council in October 1940, renamed in November the National Service Board for Religious Objectors (NSBRO). Its executive secretary was the Quaker Paul Comly French. The hardest task was to convince the President himself. Roosevelt distrusted conscientious objectors and, according to participants in the talks, believed they ought to be drilled by army officers; in November 1940 he rejected a plan that provided for them to be paid. The churches saved the civilian character of the programme by taking its costs upon themselves. Roosevelt’s advisers persuaded him that it was better to send objectors to work in remote camps than to repeat the troubles of 1917–1918. A six-month trial was agreed, and on 6 February 1941 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8675, which empowered the Director of Selective Service to establish work camps of national importance.

The division of responsibilities was unusual. The state supplied the tasks, buildings, equipment and transport to the camps, and technical supervision of the work lay with federal agencies such as the Forest Service, the Soil Conservation Service and the National Park Service. The churches, through their committees – the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee and the Brethren Service Committee – ran the camps day to day, paid for food, clothing and medical care, and maintained the camp directors. The bases used were usually abandoned camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the public works corps of the New Deal era. The objectors received no pay, only between $2.50 and $5 a month in pocket money from the churches; their families received no allowances whatever.

Patapsco

The Patapsco camp lay on a narrow strip of land between the Baltimore and Ohio railway line and the Patapsco River. The objectors came under the National Park Service: they restored dilapidated buildings, built tables and picnic sites, cleared the forest and fought fires. According to a study by the Mennonite Central Committee, roughly a third of them gave their affiliation as Quaker, a third as one of the main Protestant churches, and the rest as smaller communities such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, or as none. They were mostly city dwellers, and more than half had been to college. The camp at once set up its own self-government, which at first took decisions according to the Quaker principle of “the sense of the meeting”, and in July began publishing a newsletter, The Patapsco Peacemaker. The proximity of Baltimore made it easy to keep in touch with local congregations and with sympathetic residents who visited the objectors. There were disputes, too: when the authorities wanted the campers to build a road to a new air-defence observation tower, they protested that they could not perform work of possible military significance, and an appeal to Hershey was decided in their favour.

Patapsco did not long remain the only camp. That same month the Mennonites opened a camp near Grottoes, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where objectors worked on soil-erosion control, and in June the first forestry camps of the Church of the Brethren in Michigan and of the Quakers in California began operating. The Patapsco camp was closed in September 1942; 154 men passed through it.

Six years instead of six months

The trial that was meant to last six months stretched on until 1947. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, objectors were no longer released after a year but – like draftees in the army – kept for the duration, and in practice even longer: the last camps closed in March 1947, a year and a half after Japan’s surrender. According to figures compiled by the NSBRO and by historians of the programme, almost 12,000 men passed through Civilian Public Service in 152 camps and units across the United States and in Puerto Rico. The programme, created by the peace churches, was not confined to their members: according to the same figures, 38 per cent of the objectors belonged to other denominations and 4 per cent declared none. Not all who refused service went to the camps. Many more – some 25,000, by estimates – accepted non-combatant service in the army, most often in the medical corps. Several thousand, mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses who were denied ministerial status, together with men who rejected any co-operation with the draft system, went to prison.

In time CPS work went far beyond digging ditches and planting trees, which many objectors regarded as lacking any “national importance”. Several hundred volunteers became smokejumpers, parachuting to fight forest fires in Montana, Idaho and Oregon. From 1942 more than two thousand worked in 41 psychiatric hospitals that were short of staff; their accounts of conditions in the institutions became the basis of an exposé in Life magazine in May 1946 and of a movement for psychiatric reform supported by Eleanor Roosevelt. Some five hundred volunteers agreed to serve as subjects of government-sponsored medical experiments, on malaria, hepatitis and the effects of starvation among others; many of these studies are now regarded as unethical.

Place in the war

In May 1941 the United States was still formally neutral, but it was siding ever more openly with Britain: two months earlier Roosevelt had signed the Lend-Lease Act, and on 27 May he proclaimed an unlimited national emergency. The Patapsco camp was a minor episode in these preparations, but it shows how a democracy entering a total war tried to reconcile conscription with freedom of conscience. Britain had recognised the right to conscientious objection in 1939 and entrusted decisions on it to civilian tribunals; in the Third Reich refusal was usually punished by death. The American solution lay somewhere in between: it spared objectors the prisons and violence of 1917–1918, but made them work for years without pay and at the expense of their own communities. The experience of CPS was put to use after the war. From the 1950s objectors in the United States performed paid alternative service, now without camps, and many former participants in the programme later played an important part in peace movements, in the reform of psychiatric care and in humanitarian relief organisations.