"Foley's timely book, with lucid, original scholarship, tells the precious story of a time when America, following truly patriotic Americans, gave peace a chance."
-James Carroll, author of An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us
"The best scholarly study of draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Foley has recovered an almost forgotten history that poses a striking contrast to many of the postwar stereotypes that portray antiwar activists as frivolous, cowardly elitists who sought only to save their own skins."
-Christian G. Appy, author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam
"Foley's meticulously researched and well-written study of draft resistance in Boston during the late 1960s . . . sheds new light on the motivations of those antiwarriors and how and why they fashioned their innovative strategies and tactics."
-Melvin Small, author of Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds
Shedding light on a misunderstood form of opposition to the Vietnam War, Michael Foley tells the story of draft resistance, the cutting edge of the antiwar movement at the height of the war's escalation. Unlike so-called draft dodgers, who left the country or manipulated deferments, draft resisters openly defied draft laws by burning or turning in their draft cards. Like civil rights activists before them, draft resisters invited prosecution and imprisonment.
Focusing on Boston, one of the movement's most prominent centers, Foley reveals the crucial role of draft resisters in shifting antiwar sentiment from the margins of society to the center of American politics. Their actions inspired other draft-age men opposed to the war - especially college students - to reconsider their place of privilege in a draft system that offered them protections and sent disproportionate numbers of working-class and minority men to Vietnam. This recognition sparked the change of tactics from legal protest to mass civil disobedience, drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely suburban, liberal, young, and middle class - the core of Johnson's Democratic constituency.
Examining the day-to-day struggle of antiwar organizing carried out by ordinary Americans at the local level, Foley argues for a more complex view of citizenship and patriotism during a time of war.
MICHAEL S. FOLEY is assistant professor of history at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.
Excerpt
Unlike the AFSC or the individual resisters from the Committee for Non-Violent Action, BDRG counselors advised men to take advantage of the system any way they could. If a counselee felt that he could not in good conscience comply with the Selective Service System at all, outright resistance became an option; but few such discussions took place. Counselors more often sought to find something in the young man's life that made him eligible for a deferment. Popular artists like Phil Ochs had described nearly every available escape from conscription in songs like "Draft Dodger Rag," but many men remained unaware of their options. Counselors, then, would lay them out as Ochs had.