Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 12th, 2017, Part Two - Interview with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 12th, 2017, Part Two

Written statements by the people, but some of it is court testimony and some of it was tape-recorded, you know, from live presentations, not necessarily my life, you know, I mean like somebody at a conference where I recorded it.

Sure, well, let me start off just by saying it is January 12, 2017.

Right

And we're interviewing Alice Lynd. Dan Kerr and Catherine Murphy are here, and I'm just going to open this up really quickly. Do we want to just quickly talk about maybe a first oral history interview and then we can get into the big issues just so we did-

Whatever you wish.

Okay.

And that's on and recording.

It is on and recording (*Catherine: and we have plenty of battery*) and it's plugged in, plenty of battery. So-let's hold off on that for a second. And let's get to the-the big-the big questions about kind of some of the major motivations that have shaped your work, using personal-and I'll-I'll put it this way, a little less interested right now in-in the mode of technology of recording, but in using kind of the personal testimony stories, analyses of the people you've worked with really from your early work with draft resisters all the way up through your present work with people experiencing incarceration. What would have been the kind of reasons that have drawn you to using personal testimony?

Well, let me give you a narration. During the Vietnam War, we were living in New Haven, Connecticut. Staughton was much more involved than I, but we had friends like Todd and Nancy Gitlin who came to visit us, and I remember Nancy having been in touch with Vietnamese women-she may have made a trip to Vietnam, I'm not sure. But she talked about Vietnamese women who at the night and during the night, would go out and talk to the soldiers and plead with them, you know, not to damage their village or whatever it might be. And, I had the feeling, what can I as a mother of young children do that could be comparable in some way to what those Vietnamese women were doing to try to reduce the effects of war. In the summer of 1965, August 6th and 9th, which was a commemoration of the atomic bombings, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Staughton and other friends, organized, an assembly of unrepresented people with the purpose of declaring peace with the people of Vietnam. That is to say, our government may be fighting you but we, American citizens, are not. This is not our war with you. It was a-the workshop took-I mean the demonstration took place over several days on the mall in Washington, DC and a lot of different groups would set up a tent and have workshops, or even out on the grass, have a workshop. And at that time I was very concerned about the possibility that the house on American Activities Committee would go after Staughton, among others. And so I went to a workshop on on that topic, and then when it was over, I was looking around for another workshop and I saw a little tent that said, Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, so I went in. And they were talking about the need for draft counselors. So, after the workshop ended, I went up to the man who was leading it and I said, can I be a draft counselor, because I figured that would not involve anything outside the home necessarily. I mean, we lived five blocks from Yale University. People could come to us, I didn't have to be out at a pic-outside with a picket sign running the risk of being arrested, which I was not willing to do. So I said, could I be a draft counselor, and he thought about it and he said, well, yes, there's one woman who does it, if you could get anybody to come to you. So they had a little sign, that little poster you could put up, saying draft counseling available here, and I put it up on the wall whereas people went up to the steps and came into our apartment it was the first thing they would see. It wasn't that I was, you know, soliciting people, but it was a notice, draft counseling available here. Well, during the course of the months after that, well actually, the very first case that I had is in, and we won't go-the-the wife of a man who was-what was Mary Ann Brown, whose husband, David Brown, had gone into the Armed Forces with the idea that he could be a chaplain. And when he got in, he found that being a chaplain in the army was not but he thought it might be. And in his case, it was obviously a very complex case, and I referred him to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors in Penns-in Philadelphia, where he did get the help that he needed. We're still in touch with David and Mary Ann Brown. However, what-what led me, well the the next major step, was that divinity students at the Harvard-at the Yale Divinity School, we're concerned that people who were serving as ministers or in Divinity School were exempt from the draft at that time, and they felt why should we be exempt and all these other people were being drafted? What should we do about it? So they wanted to come and discuss these things. And I remember a young woman, I don't know whether she was the wife or, but anyway, she was concerned. She said, well, I know a man who refused-I think he may have refused even to register and had gone to prison. And her question was, well, what good does that do, you know? She thought he was disillusioned after he got out of prison and so forth. I thought, we know that guy, I wonder what he'd say. So, after the meeting, I said to Staughton, you know what your next book should be. You should do a book on-on what different people have tried and how they felt about it. Why they did it, what happened to them, and he said, why me? You do it. I'll help you. So, that was the beginning of We Won't Go. I was in the early months of pregnancy with our third child, but I remember going to New York City,, which wasn't far from New Haven where we lived on a couple of occasions, one of which was a gathering at the Catholic Worker, where a number of men who had turned in or burned their draft cards spoke. I went to a conference where a couple of lawyers who were were taking these cases for draft resisters, one from New York and one from California, were describing things. And-and, you know, I was just at the beginning of my learning curve about the consequences of various choices. So that I then did things like send a letter to New Left Notes, which was the newsletter for students for a Democratic Society and I think I listed maybe ten questions or something like that and said anybody that wants to please write to me if you're-you're interested in participating, and I got a lot of people who responded in that way. As I look at the book now, I see that many of the entries that became part of the personal accounts of war objectors, which I called, We Won't Go. A lot of those were written statements, some of them written for me, some of them being letters that they wrote when they were going through this process, some of them being what I used to call dear draft board letters. That is, I am refusing induction or I am refusing to register or I'm, you know, not going to cooperate, and they would state their reasons. Some were petitions, some were excerpts from court cases, a variety of different sources, but they were first person statements or, you know, we the undersigned kinds of things. Some of them-one in particular, I remember, described how well-there were little we won't go groups springing up all over the country. I mean even in the South, Texas, you know, groups of men meeting at coffee houses, or meeting wherever they met to talk with one another. And, we-our house-we had an open house at our house, every Wednesday night for, well, this was after we moved to Chicago, where draft resisters could come and talk with each other and well, to what extent, is non-violence a way of life or to what extent, is it a technique that-that we should be using it this time but not necessarily an all-time commitment or, you know, what is really going to be effective? This was a big concern of effectiveness, but it also had to do with a sense of ,well, who do you know who's struggling with these problems? Bring that man to the next meeting. And I felt it was very important for the girlfriends or the wives to be involved. (*phone rings in the distance*) Staughton may get that.

When she comes back I want to put the lavelier on her, although I really-we really don't know yet how much better it is or if it better (*Dan: Mmm-hmm*) than the others but at least we'll have it.

Yeah, we can always-if its not good we can always delete it.

I can't hear a big difference through the earphones, to be honest with you, if it's on or not, which is why it took me a minute to just-

Sorry about that.

No problem, but it gives me the perfect opportunity to put this second mike on you.

Okay

And we want to make sure to take photographs of the cover of the book, and-

It's one of the best covers we've had.

Thank you Alice, just going to-its a wonderful book cover.

This is the hardcover. We want to see we want to see We Won't Go?

You get me putting her up and actually, I will, actually do one.

And then I'll get one with just you and we-

Yes, and then Alice and her book.

Okay, can you it alright?

I can see it great. One, two, three. Good. One more. Excellent.

Good.

Okay.

So, I really did We Won't Go before I became an expert draft counselor. This was done while I was pregnant and nursing our youngest child, and it was-she was born in February 1967. We moved to Chicago in July of 1967, and there was a man there who was an extremely well informed non-lawyer, who knew probably more than-than most lawyers know about Selective Service law, regulations, and practice, and he emphasized the importance, you can't tell what happens just by looking at the regulation. You have to know how its applied. Well, this was invaluable to me in all of my subsequent legal work. You don't just look at the Union contract, you asked you guys on the shop floor, how has it been interpreted? What-what actually happens, you know, this is what it says but what happens, and similarly this may be what the local board memorandum says, but what does the local board do? So, I went to a lot of training sessions with him and in the fall of 1968, when this thing was-had covers on it by then, that-its- we'd gone through all of the copy editing and crises with the-

Come across Staughton, just beware of this little cable right here if you-

The copy editor, mangling it in numerous ways about which I've never felt happy, but in the fall of 68, this man Joe Tochinsky opened up a midwest office for the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors known as the Midwest Committee for Draft Counseling and he hired me and another counselor to do draft counselor training. I always much preferred doing the counseling to doing the counselor training, and I didn't like the curriculum that he set up because it was all-it seemed like it was all by the book and what I subsequently did after-well I worked for him for maybe a year and a half or so, but then, I went over to the American Friends Service Committee, Chicago regional office, which was responsible for all of the draft counseling centers in the Chicago area, to see that they were trained, that they had access to whatever advice they needed. I did a great deal of draft counseling. I mean, like, four hours a day, five days a week, and I did draft counselor training once a week in the evenings. And the thing that I thought was most successful, well, actually in the-the way I did training was to say, okay, the person comes in, what questions do you need to ask him? You know what-what do you need to know in order to know how to counsel him? You know, what's he struggling with? What-what's his situation does? Does he have an induction order? Because if he does, the advice is totally different from if he still has a student deferment, which he thinks he's about to lose, I mean, you know, there is a tremendous range as to where he could be in the process, what he may have already done, what he hasn't done, what the issues are that, he is struggling with. And so, I-I changed the draft counselor, training in that way. But then this one thing that I thought I did, that really worked, was once a month I would find a situation where, say, a counselor out in one of the suburbs, how to counsel- or he felt this man needs more advice than I know how to give him. Can I bring him in? And we would have a group of experienced counselors, one of whom would counsel the man, but then we would discuss it. What were you driving at when you asked that question, you know? I think the most-the more experienced we were, the more we learned from listening to the other counselors as to how they approach this particular thing to somehow open the door to that body that you needed to be able to to explore, and that, I think, entered in a great deal to the way I later developed interviewing of prisoners where I would start off with simple routine questions that were in a sense public knowledge, you know, like, I might check out the date of birth and how long they've been in prison and what they were convicted of and how, you know, and just some of these sort of routine questions and then only gradually work into the more subtle things having to do with mental health or whatever it might be. Similarly, when I did Social Security disability cases, I would start with non-threatening routine questions and then slowly work into, well, with all that you've been through by way of disability or the times it gets to you, well that's- that opens up. Yes, the-the-the stress, the pain, the relationships with other people that have been disrupted. The sense of, you know, feeling defeated by not being able to do the things you normally did etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That is too. I think doing the draft counseling was the beginning of what I have done since the 1960s and whatever kind of work it was where how do you open that? That cocoon. How do you get to what it is inside that you really need to know in order to be of any help to the person. We were in close touch with a Chicago area, draft, resisters, Cadre. They were for the most part people who refused induction. They didn't go the conscientious objector route whereby, they would have to do some sort of alternative service or noncombatant service in the armed forces. And the-many of these people in Cadre were expert, draft counselors and we discussed what we called, mind-bending, some draft counselors, particularly out on the west coast, would use any means possible. They would send a person to a doctor who might write some sort of a letter for them whether or not it was true to try to get them off on physical grounds or something like that. We didn't do that at all in the Chicago counseling area. And I remember very strongly that-that they would say that we are not into mind-bending, now that means, you know, trying to persuade a person to be a non-cooperator or trying to persuade a person to do this or that. No. That person is going to have to live with the consequences of what he decides and you better not be pushing him in the wrong direction. Yes, it makes sense to say, well, what avenues are you going to cut yourself off from if you do that? If you get a prison record, are you going to be able to do this, that, or the next thing that-that is what your you would like, your-your life projectory to be? If you do that, how are you going to deal with your parents' opposition or your girlfriend's desire that you do whatever else it might be? To be sure that you've given the person the best that you-Imean to ask him to consider what the possible consequences are and what he's prepared to do now about it. And I had one counselee that, you know, I counseled, he came back 14 months later and he said, okay, I've finally written out my CO application, would you look at it? I mean, it took him that long to put the pieces together and he came back. Well, then I had surgery, and I was disabled, I couldn't work anymore, but people-we lived in an area which was very quickly changing from white to black, so that there were a lot of black militants not very far from where we lived. And the typical one might have been brought up in the Baptist Church and had the feeling that, you know, yes, I learned all of this stuff when I was a kid but I don't see the church doing anything about it, and now I'm a black Muslim or a whatever. They did have the religious training and belief that's necessary for a conscientious objector, and they did have an objection to participation in war in any form and they were sincere and those are the three pillars. So, there was a black counselor, not far away. And so Staughton would often say-he'd take the phone and he'd say well I could tell you how to really-really find a black counselor. No, we want Alice Lynd, so they would come to the house. I mean, not together, but, I mean, individually come to the house come in with a huge afro and I would do the best I could to counsel them. But then the lottery came in, and I didn't-because I wasn't working in an office with other people that, you know, were aware of the latest developments, all of the time, I couldn't keep up with the changes and I had to stop. So, by 1970, I was beginning to get into work on occupational health and safety, which was also a continuing interest from then on. When I went to law school that was one of the things that I wanted to do, but by the time I got to law school I was in my 50s and I didn't have the technical background and scientific background. I just figured it's too late.

Why the book? I mean I assume you could have written a book where you just kind of laid out all the guidelines and the consequences and kind of created a guide book. Why do this book?

Well, We Won't Go has appendices, which include the Seeger decision, which at that time was the Supreme Court decision. It was superseded by some other ones that were important, but the appendices are the Seeger decision, the application form for conscientious objector classification. So, if you wanted to know what questions you're going to have to be able to answer they're here, documents related to war crimes, the Nuremberg principles, things of that nature, that-that might be of use to a person in saying, I'm not going to do that.

Interestingly enough, in-earlier, in Staughton's interview, he talked about the documents being in the appendix. (*Alice: Yeah, right and-and that-*) So, what about the heart of the book?

Well, the-the last thing here is sources of information. List of draft counseling organization-you know, just all sorts of legal and counseling resources. I mean, maybe you're in some hick town, but the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors might be able to tell you who's doing draft counseling in your hick town. I, well, I mean the way it arose was, you know, we know this guy. What would he say? We know how to reach other guys. What would they say? And it was part of this, what we later recognized as mind-bending. We don't want to say, this is what you should do. We want to say, read about these things you might not want to do what any of these people do, but it will get you thinking. Okay, I wouldn't do that, wouldn't do that, wouldn't do that, but I could do this. Or, my situation is different. Well how is it different? You know, just, it's sort of like priming the pump. Get-get-get the conversation started. Not that-that any-and these people are very, very different from one another, that's why they're in there, to-to give a sort of a cross-section of people coming from very different backgrounds, trying very different things, feeling very differently about how they did-you know how it went. Just, you know, that might be a put of- a pothole you don't want to put your foot in.

Did you view the book kind of as an extension of the circle of bringing different voices so that the person who is considering the war, whether-or considering their own relationship to the draft could, through reading the book, literally sit and think and listen to the voices of those who-who would physically be impossible because they're incaracerated?

Yes, yes, I think it was something like that.

I don't mean to be mine-bending with that question, but-

Right, right, exactly. Oh, well, it's true that-what actually happened, it-it sold a lot of copies and had to go into a second printing and-and so forth, but what I got by way of feedback was that it wasn't so much helpful to the people for whom I intended, namely the prospective objector, but for them to explain to their parents why they would do something that's as way out as this, you know that? That other people were doing it and that their-their son wasn't the only screwball. So that it served a purpose, not necessarily the purpose for which it was intended, but it served a purpose.

And when you moved onto your work with Rank and File, did this-did your work on We Won't Go inform that-that project in anyway?

It may have but not in any way that-that I was conscious of or thinking about it the time. Rank and File, we did much more oral interviewing, recording rather than these pieces, which were predominantly written either in response to my questions or things that -that people had written and published in magazines or newsletters or things of that nature where I collected them from-from what they sent me, journals. It was not, I mean, some was tape recorded, but not a lot of them were tape recorded. And not a lot of them, I mean, among the recorded ones, they weren't necessarily me interviewing the person, whereas we did, we did in-in Rank and File and even more in Homeland, we were interviewing people. And we would, we would not put our questions in the transcript, but we would take what they were saying, and if they said the same thing in three sentences that were somewhat incoherent, we would edit it into one coherent sentence and then take it back to the person and say, did we get it right? And often that would trigger, yes and I forgot to tell you and then you get a new one, you know. I mean that that process of taking it back to the person often led on to something more. And that-that was a very gratifying experience.

Why did you decide to do that? I mean, bring-do the recordings and engage in that process?

I don't think that stuff-I don't think that stuff existed in writing. There may have been some of that but I don't-it doesn't come to mind. It was-that we wanted to get a range of different kinds of material but we were somewhat limited in terms of travel had we been able to travel to Appalachia or to the Deep South or to the southwest or to the West Coast or, you know, the plains, there might have been quite a lot of material that-that just wasn't available to us. But we worked with what was, and if that promoted people who did live in the southwest or wherever to do something similar great. I don't know what Staughton would say to-to that. I think that, definitely, in the case of Homeland that-the book about-of interviews with Palestinians, I remember going to, with our transcript of what we wanted to use, to visit a man in Youngstown, whose family were partly in the West Bank and partly here in Youngstown, and who himself had been, I think, a teenager at the time of the 1967 war when the his street was occupied and so forth. So, we're reading over the transcript with him and his children come in and they are utterly fascinated. I didn't know that, I didn't know, you know, the-the sharing of the whole family in that event of-of reading the transcript was just a big moment for those children, who were old maybe 12 to 16, 18, something like that, probably younger than 18, but you know, still school children in Youngstown. So that-and that served a function. We in doing Homeland, were advised by the editor of the publishing company that took it on, Olive Branch Press, we gave her a manuscript after our trip to Palestine, I think it was in 1991, and she said I want you to go back and go to some of the same people that you went to before and find their relatives and come back with stories of families because family is so important in the Palestinian context. So, we did, and, in some cases, we have, you know, three generations of the same-different people in three different generations of the same family. And that was a very valuable suggestion, so it went all the way from arranged marriage, which is part of the culture, she was saying is just not, not just the occupation as part of this culture and the experience of the occupation and the experience of the much younger, you know, teenager who's being picked up because he's part of some cell and put in administrative detention and eventually gets to this country, gets to the United States. You know the the fabric of life, what it felt like, and not just what an historian might write down in terms of what happened the day that the Israelis invaded Ramallah.

Do you-I'm wondering, so with the book We Won't Go your intended audience were other young men who were really grappling with this decision and what to do (*Alice: yes*) similar to the people you were counseling or that-but obviously the audience grow beyond that to include their family in-in ways that you hadn't foreseen. With Rank and File, when you were engaged in that project, who did you conceive of that this work was for, like-?

Well, I know Staughton's eloquent on this subject, but the idea of-of, well, young people, some-well, it was quite a sense among radical students that we should be trying to reach the working class. That is that-that the people who were opposed to people who were opposing the war were the the hard hat working class. Okay, if we can't win them over, then, you know, we're never going to succeed that it's there that the people who are, for the most part, on the front lines in the war. That is, they don't have student deferments, they're going over and fighting that war and some of them are pretty disillusioned about it, and it was a sense of wanting to pass on to younger people what the people working in the mills and the auto factories and so forth had gone through in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and pass on their experiences, their knowledge, to a younger generation. And we had a writers workshop in Gary, Indiana, think-of is it Hammond? Anyway, in northwestern Indiana across the state line from Chicago, where young people would come and would express interest. I remember I did a pamphlet together with somebody from the writers workshop on the history of the income tax, and initially, it was just to tax the income of people who had more income than they needed to survive and how that tended to become eroded, and then during, I think it was during World War Two, they began to withhold income tax from regular paychecks in order to get money to fight the World War Two and then how U.S. steel had gotten to a point where it paid virtually no income tax and the unfairness of that and graphs that we did to compare, you know, what what the worker would pay out of his income versus U.S. steel. That kind of thing was what we were doing in the writers workshop. But we also brought to the writers workshop and interviewed and recorded stories by people like Kate Hyneman who is, I think, the first person in Rank and File Now Kate, well, during the two years that I was disabled and couldn't work, I went through the papers of John Anderson, and it was a stack of stuff, I mean, close to a foot high of things that he had written about his experience, and condensed it, you know, to something more like book-length. Similarly with Kate Hyneman, I went through all of the things that she wrote on-on greeting cards or Easter cards, or whatever paper she could get describing her experience when she was in jail for 10 months pending deportation, which didn't actually happen, but she didn't know it wasn't going to. And I went through the papers of George Sullivan, who was a steel hauler, over the road steel hauler. And I felt that I had three really good books to offer to Beacon Press, and the Beacon Press editor said nobody's going to want to know a book-length about Kate Hyneman, they don't know who she is, or John Anderson, or George Sullivan. What you do is you take these book-length manuscripts and condense it down to maybe 20 pages a piece, something like that, but get a whole lot of people and make up a book that-that has, you know, these different, these different stories in it, all in one book. So, that's what we did for Rank and File. But now that-that was, we did interview Kate and we interviewed a lot of the people, but the initial work that I did that became incorporated into Rank and File was Kate Hyneman's writings when she was in jail, John Anderson's writings and George Sullivan's writings, which I could do being in bed.

And you called the book personal histories. How did you come across-where-where did that term come from rather than biography or memoir or oral history or-?

Probably an echo of the personal accounts of war objectors, which was stuff that wasn't of any historical value for the most part, in the conventional sense of history. I mean, yeah, court records might have been kept for a while, but nobody would read those, transcripts of trials, nobody is going to go through and put any great value on dear draft board letters, or, you know, I mean-or personal things, like, you know, a journal that a guy kept while he was in prison and-and this was retrieving stuff that otherwise would have been below the radar, nobody would have noticed. Similarly, Kate's would have been below the radar, nobody would have noticed.

You've talked about your continuing interest in your book with Homeland, and-and actually, let me ask you other quick follow-up on that, when you wrote that book, who-who were you-who was the intended audience for that? And what were you hoping to kind of-who were kind of hoping to reach out?

Well, it was-it occurred right at the end of the first Gulf War. We had been leading some draft counselor, a draft council-not draft but military counseling because the draft was no longer in effect then but a lot of the regulations and stuff like that, you know, the-the criteria for conscientious objection had not changed. So, that we had prepared to do some military counseling and we had a whole series of workshop locations, times, so forth, audience. And when the war ended, we figured, well we don't need to do this anymore. But, by that time we had become aware that a number of the people in our group were Palestinian or Lebanese or there was a woman from Egypt, I mean, people from the Middle East who were wanting or for whom we felt, this is a whole world we didn't know existed. You know, we really want to learn about the poetry, we really want to learn about the history of these-of-of what's going on in the Middle East. So, then the next sess-sessions, series of sessions had to do with different aspects of Palestinian or Arab culture. And we at that-that particular year Easter, Passover and Ramadan all came the same-within a few days of each other. So, it was arranged that we would have a potluck occasion at the Arab-American community center in Youngstown, and anybody who wanted to could speak but not a political speak-speech just described their own experience. So we had people who had-whose families had fled from Palestine to Lebanon, and lived in refugee camps there and the-the children had come to this country and were studying at YSU, had a couple of them. We had Jules Lobel, whose family had-some members of his family had lived in what became Israel since the 18th century and Jules had gone to Israel and the West Bank and had done a lot of human rights interviewing but also visited members of his family who ranged in political views from extreme right to-to left. So he spoke about his experience and we had a man who described when he was seven years old, his mother would tell him to take bread to the people who were sleeping under the trees, refugees from what had been occupied in 1948 when-when Israel became recognized as a-as a state and who, when he was a young-well when he was a teenager was an ardent Muslim and would-would try to get people to go to Islamic religious services and so forth. But who had come to this country expecting, you know, to find gold lying in the streets ready to shovel it up and who got a job in a bakery in Youngstown for 35 cents an hour and somebody told him, well, a way to make money in the United States is you buy a bunch of junk, you go down south, you find out when the sharecroppers are going to get paid for the year and you show up at 4:00 in the morning at their house and sell them a piece of junk, and he did it and he had the feeling, there's something wrong here. In the-in Palestine, I was one of the oppressed, here I'm being one of the oppressors. He went back to Youngstown and ultimately he became a store owner of-a grocery store manager. And he taught a black man how to setup and manage a grocery store in in his neighborhood. Now, the black man didn't do a very good job of it and it failed, but this Palestinian man, who was the-the father of our co-editor of Homeland, really tried to -o compensate for what he felt had been his oppression of black people by trying to share a lot of money as well as skill to teach a black man to set up a grocery store in his neighborhood. So, you know, well, I guess that at the end of that evening, people said, you know, we really should record these stories. We should make a book of these stories. Well, that summer, the man who I'm describing, his son Sam Bahor, had a practice of going each summer with the teenage children of Palestinians living in the United States, so that they could go over and meet their grandmothers and their cousins and-and get a feel for the-for the country from which they came and he invited us to go along with them, which is a very interesting experience. For example, when we went to visit Gaza the teenagers would go out and mingle with the Palestinian teenagers on the street and come back and tell us what the kids were saying. You know, we wouldn't have had any access to teenagers in Gaza, you know, why would they talk to a couple of, you know, elderly white attorneys from the United States, but these kids would come back and-and it was great and they also-they visited their families and we got some information that way, but Sam would would take us to visit particular people and then after the editor told us to go back, we did and-and-and did explore different members of the same families, visited a lot of refugee camps. And, really were able to-to think about, well, who do we know who might be able to tell us about the experience in such and such a town that was absolutely demolished by the Israelis, you know, and we would find such a person go and talk with them and because of Sam they would trust us.

Why-for-as I understand it you were seeking out someone who's had this particular personal experience, and I'm interested in why that is kind of at-like why has personal experience been at the core of a lot of your work, whether it's the testimony work-why start with personal experience?

You want to know how it work. That is documents don't tell you why people do things. They might tell you that they do things. In Homeland, I would-would do a footnote and confirm, yes, the international committee for the Red Cross or the US State Department, in preparing its country report says, yes, there was a hunger strike at this prison on this date and these were their demands. But why were they making those demands, but what was the dynamic? You know? Why would a person take the risks that he's taking? And the-the kind of support that he did or didn't have in that and, you know, what he ran into, but you can't look at the State Department country report and figure out why do people do that? And I hadn't thought of it in this way, but you need to-if you're trying to get to the dynamics of history, you know, what-and to this day, you know, why did people vote for Trump? Well, is it the sense of, I'm afraid that when my kids grow up they're not going to be jobs for them, or, you know, the kinds of things that-that motivate people. Why-why are they doing that? Well, how do you know if you don't ask them? I mean I can sit here and imagine, but it might be something quite different. If I don't ask them, how do I know?

And I know you're going to want to respond to this, but you'll get your opportunity. I know that when you produced Rank and File, there was a criticism that you kind of overly romanticized these voices, let them speak for themselves and didn't engage in your interpretive responsibility. How-how would you respond to that-that or how have you or how would you now respond to-?

Well, that's an interesting question. We read Frank Bartokey's he's book on the farm workers, and it starts off where he worked for a couple of years as a farm worker and he used to ride in a certain car with a certain, you know, a couple of others. So, he went and asked them. And he had the feeling that their answers to his questions were totally inadequate. They just, you know, they-it was maybe one kind of capsule point of view, and it didn't serve his purpose of how to describe what happened. But he has a number of oral histories, or he did, I think, a number of oral histories in connection with what he did but not from just one point of view, so I think he explains on the one hand what he could get from the point of view of Cesar Chavez, but also from the point of view of one of the organizers working under him, who eventually was forced out because of differences between them. Well, those differences existed and I think that if you have something where you can show that there isn't just one point of view on this, and this is the best that we can come up with to demonstrate what may have been going on even though there may be other things that aren't being said, I think, to my mind, you try to get as close as you can to some sort of sense of-ofat least what was going on, what the divisions were, what the dynamics were. I was thinking when I was listening this morning, or in one of our conversations, that an attorney lines up all the witnesses that say what-what his side of the story is. But as a lawyer, you also better be aware of what the lineup is going to be on the other side. And if they come back with that, how are you going to rebut that? That is, we-we went to a continuing legal education seminar once where the judge said, you have to show the whole picture so that if down and that corner, there is a blemish you better keep that in your picture, but you better show that the picture is a lot bigger than that blemish because, you know, the other side's going to make its case on the basis of that blemish. You-your picture has to be able to include that. I think to some extent in Rank and File, and I think this may have been true particularly with regard to, what's his name, guy that worked in the railroad yard, Kennedy-Wayne Kennedy. There are footnotes in there as to, particularly in the later additions, as to what happened with his case. I think that it's important to me that you don't mince fact, that is, if you can find a factual basis in some independent source, it's important to do that. Now, when we were working on the Lucasville stuff, we interviewed a lot of different prisoners. And you would find some of them who would give a pretty consistent picture. That is, their picture would be coherent, but you'd find some things where if-what this guy said and what this guy said are diametrically-diametrically opposed, there's no way that both of them can be true. Then you would also find a whole bunch of guys maybe taking one position and that outlier. Okay, is that outlier the one to believe or the one to figure, unless you can find some independent corroborating evidence, you better not believe him because he has his own agenda and, you know, and-and there were such people. I mean, right, I felt, you know, I cannot trust that man, unless I can corroborate it by some objective, independent source. But finding objective independent sources is very important to me. I really want to be sure that we're not just taking off. I think that memory becomes corrupted over time. It's affected by what people hear from other people whom they respect or other people who are trying to influence them. People just may not perceive accurately. I mean, there's studies done that young people are not as able to identify an older person, you know, among older people as they are among people of their own age, or their own race or their own, you know, cultural, whatever it is. If you have to make a leap like that, people aren't very good at-at-at leaping to some other generation, or whatever it is. I mean memory is very important for what conclusions people draw from it. And that-but that may not accurately reflect what actually happened in the sense that, if you could have been keeping track of it, you could have shown that this occurred here and not here.

Could you tell me about-could you describe what how the idea of two experts, where that kind of evolved and have that's alsoshaped your approach to your work?

Yes, yes. In the course of doing draft counselor training, we trained some law students. It was a problem because the law students didn't have this sense of it being a joint process. It was as if they were being taught, well as lawyers you give legal advice, you tell a person do this, don't do this, whatever. And, I had the feeling that in draft counseling, there were two experts in the room. I might be the expert on what the law required, I might be the expert on what form to fill out and you better think through this question before you try to answer it or something like that, but the counselee was the expert on his own life, his family, his aspirations, what was and was not thinkable for him, what he felt he needed to confront. And-and it was two hands, and that was very helpful to me when I did become a lawyer and the Union steward would come in and we would figure the thing out together, you know? Well, the book says this, what do you think it is? If it should be here, how are we going to find that? What are the-what-what do we need to know to find if it really is where the book says it ought to be. You know, we case it out together and I just feel that very, very strongly that-that the client ha- has expertise that I need. And that certainly has been true of the prisoner Burke. When we put together, the complaint concerning the conditions of confinement and the lack of due process in putting people into the Ohio State Penitentiary. for one thing, the law requires that they use the grievance procedure or the appeal procedure, whatever procedures are available to them. And many prisoners sent me their papers. I tried to identify, well, which are the issues that are like class-wide issues or could affect anybody, not just this personal grievance at this guy has, what are-are typical of what people are going through? Okay, who is the person who most clearly. In his paperwork has set this out and, you know, describe what the problem is and the administration's point of view is there, and-and you have it. So, in doing the-in picking the plaintiffs, I picked the ones that I thought most had-had grieved or appealed on issues that were typical of the class. And, well stated, they didn't just sort of go off onto this is unconstitutional and blah blah, blah. We need to know what the situation was. What was done or not done about it and, you know, how-what the issue is. And then Jules Lobel and I wrote the complaint, and we gave the specifics, you know, so-and-so had a heart attack and it was five days before they gave him an EKG. Well, that's not right for the medical. So-and-so had an infected tooth. He tried for two weeks to get somebody to come from medical and they didn't, so he pulled a thread out of his blanket, tight around the tooth and pulled the tooth out and then it was another week before he got, you know, things like that that happened. We could show that it happened. So that when the judge read the complaint, I think he figured where there's that much smoke, there must be a fire and the-I mean, it-its using this material from them. I couldn't've cook that up. They gave it to me. I used it. I use their material to prove that case.

Could you-just a follow-up on that, could you tell us a little more about that case?

Hard to keep it at a little bit more. I think the thing that meant the most to me occurred before we filed a complaint. In the course of the first few years it was open there were three suicides. After the second suicide, well, before the second suicide, guys were writing to me and saying this guy's suicidal, you better contact the prison and tell them to watch out because he means business. So, I contacted the prison, and the prison had put him into-onto suicide watch, returned him to his cell, the guards were saying, why don't you do it, when are you going to do it, you know, so he did it. The warden's assistant then called me. And according to policy, when there's a suicide you're supposed to try to find out what you can do to prevent another suicide. So he asked us, you know, what-what could they do so that the prisoners there would feel that life was more worth living, and we talked with him for about an hour and we hung up the phone. I said to Staughton, they shouldn't be asking us, they should be asking the prisoners. So I typed up a form, if somebody asked you, what could OSP do to make your life feel more worthwhile, what would you say? Lines for the rest of the page, covering letter. First of all, if you don't want to say anything, you don't have to. Secondly, if you don't want to sign your name or give your number, you don't have to. But whatever you say, make it something that I can send into the prison. That is something that's not confidential that you're just telling me, something I can send into the prison. Okay, I sent out a hundred of these to different people from the prison who had written to us in the two years that the place had been open. Got 110 responses, not everybody to whom I sent it responded. And I took those responses and I categorize them: things about the library, things about recreation, things about, you know, and some of them were real horror stories, and I type this stuff up and sent it to the prison, to the central office of the prison system and to several human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, which picked up on it. They contacted me and they said there should be some sort of a legislative committee that investigates you know, that supervises the prisons. Well we happen to know the state legislator from Youngstown who was on that committee. So the lady from Human Rights Watch, the lawyer there, said if you can find someone on that committee who is willing to go in and do a prison inspection, I will tell him what to ask for, what to look for, so forth. And that's what happened. And as a result of that, the executive director of the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee went along on that trip, and he wrote up a report. And he said, Ohio never needed a supermax prison. What Ohio needed was a Maximum Security Prison in the northern part of the state. Guess what we have? 0SP is three-quarters maximum security and only one-quarter supermax. I mean that-that was one of the ultimate results of that case. But I have used some of that material, some of the horrible things that people reported about the effect of living in something that's like a tomb, to send to the legislative committee and the subcommittee in the US Congress that-that had hearings on-on supermax confinement. And I have some of it in our forthcoming book. But that sense of-of what it feels like, and it was interesting we were talking at lunch today about equal status contact. I might get a letter from an Aryan Brotherhood concerning a black man in the next cell, saying I can't stand that guy but what they are doing to him shouldn't happen to anybody, you know, stick up for each other, it's equal status. And, I mean, I often found that letters from Aryan brothers were on behalf of what they observed happening to other people that they felt, it just wasn't fair, it shouldn't happen to anybody. And they look out for the rights of other people. If-if two people get in a fight and you can't tell who was responsible for it, they should get the same discipline. Not, you know, you let one out after three months, I mean out of segregation out-three-and all his privileges and so forth, after three months and another one gets nine months. Well, that's not fair, you know? And I would bring these things up to the prison authorities and I'd say, you know, you may not feel that it's intended, I mean, that it's intentional race discrimination, but you've got a problem if it's perceived to be race discrimination, you better do something about it and they would. There's another thing I would like to touch on in this connection. I have a feeling that often when-when lawyers write briefs, they're abusive towards the other side, they'll say that-that the other side is disingenuous or, you know, they use derogatory descriptions of the people on the other side. I would never do that. I would object to that if any lawyer on our side wrote something of that kind, and I would change it. I had the feeling we base our case on the facts and not on casting aspersions on the other side and always speak respectfully to whoever it is lawyer, warden, officer, whatever, you know to treat them decently. Years later, one of the lieutenant said to me, you know, you've always treated me respectfully. What is it? You know, where are you coming from? You know. Or he'd say to us, if anybody who works in a place-that works in this place, doesn't tell you it gets to you, they're kidding themselves. Now why would a lieutenant choose us to say that? I mean, to my mind I think the person who has written about non-violence, who has meant the most to me, is Barbara Deming. Now, I don't-I'm-she's done things I would never do myself in terms of being far more of an activist, far more of an advocate for extreme action. But she has this conce-this is a different concept of two hands, not the two hands of the counselor and the counselee, but the two hands, one of which is reaching out to the adversary at the same time that the other hand is saying, no you're not going past-past here, you need-and it-it's a question of what is the motivation or the-the point of view, the-the danger perceived by the other person? If you can disarm them personally, then you can talk about the problem and seek a solution. What is it that they feel they have to have? Security. What is it we feel that-that we have to have? Peop-treat people with respect. If you treat people with respect, they're not nearly as likely to fight you. I mean it, you know, and I think eventually the prison administrators had the-came to the correct conclusion. We're not interested in fighting them, we're interested in creating a situation that's going to be easier for everybody. What is that? And-and work towards that because if you have a contented population you're not going to have the kind of security problems that you do if it's an adversarial relationship.

Here's a big one for you.

Can I just-we have three minutes on this card and then it'll bump over to the other. and we're still not sure if we lose a minute in the middle when it's transferring.

For three minutes, (*Catherine: So*) that's a big one but I'm-let's see if I can come up with a small one (*Catherine: okay*) that doesn't matter if we run over.

Okay.

Hmmm, small one.

Very few small ones.

Well let me see what I noted down when you were asking Staughton this morning. I did touch on mind-bending. Oh, I think with accompanying prisoners they have to take the consequences of whatever they ultimately decide to do, so I can give them information, I can tell them I think that's a dead end, I can tell them you-you may be able to get a lot more if you take this route rather than that route, but ultimately you are going to decide you're in the situation and I'm not. You may be aware of variables that I don't even know. And in any case you're going to have to live with the consequences of what you decide to do. And I just think that that's something that, I mean, I'm not going to tell them, I may urge them. That is, we got a letter a few days ago from a guy who was saying, you know, I'd like to just be able to lead a serene life but they're accusing me of things that I haven't done and at a certain point, you know, they come in on me. I'm ready to, in a sense, use-use negative means against them in the same way that they're using negative means against me. I think he's probably capable of committing violence that could get him in a lot more trouble. So, I was, you know, wanting to say to him I know you have the intelligence and the perception to understand what, I mean, he does have perspective on-on it, he recognizes that there's fear on both sides, maintain your honesty and your dignity. And use your intelligence. So that you won't put yourself into a situation, which is going to have more dire consequences. You know, to try to build on what I know are positive qualities that this man has and-and to emphasize that-that he may be able to-to be himself, and not-not grovel, but not do something that he's going to regret down the road. And there may be consequences, but the consequences may be a lot less severe than if he explodes and let them-lets them have it.

Another small question- (*Catherine: We're-we're in the new, we're just popped over to the new-) oh, we're in the new one. Alright, well, while I ask-while I'm on the small question (*Catherine: new card, okay, okay*) So, with Rank and File, just moving back to the-closer to the other side of this work, did you, to some extent, have a similar sense that that you were writing to young working class people and-and they were the ones that had to live with the consequences and so they were the ones that have to make sense of this as well and you weren't going to do it for them? Is that-

I don't think I had that perspective back then, no, I think was more that these-some of these people were very courageous, and also that they were grappling with issues that are just going to come up over and over and over and over again, generation by generation. And that in seeking for answers that they might be able to find something in the past that would be meaningful to them. Now, Staughton might be a better person to, to answer to that. But that's my sense that-that we're all trying to find solutions. You are, we are, they are. And what can we learn from what's-what's been done?

So with that in mind, I want you to imagine that on the other side of this are a room full of-of oral historians of different generations. Some young living in today's environment, with all of its violence and inequality and-and also goodness to the extent that that exists, what kinds of messages would you tell them in terms of the value of what the work they could do, the directions they could take their work, even thinking about the directions you might want to take your work, where do we go from here

Well, I certainly felt about We Won't Go that there was an urgency for that material to become available. It was for a purpose. The purpose was, people need to know what's been done. How are they going to make informed decisions if they don't have anything to work with? As to where we go. I think what interests me most at the time is that a couple of-beginning a couple of years ago, I realized that on the forefront of work being done by people who are advising veterans who are suffering from mental disorders, the concept of moral injury. Where people who have been in the military may have seen or done or failed to prevent things that so deeply offended their sense of right and wrong that it's-it's thrown their whole life out of kilter. I think the same thing happens among some prisoners, but there isn't the literature out there, that hasn't been studied in the same way, but the person who has murdered someone and can't breathe life back into that person and has the feeling of-of-of shame, of guilt, of having failed as a person. Of, you know, and-and going with that possibly withdrawal or, in the case of veterans, taking extreme risks. Like Brian Wilson lying down on the railroad tracks. Or George Skates feeling my life isn't worth anything, I might as well go out on the yard and bring in the food because if they shoot me it doesn't matter anyway, but if I can bring the food in that will help other people, you know, the-the these kinds of things effect prisoners very much, just as they do veterans and you get some of this extreme behavior in response to these abnormal situations that-that are just disorienting in a very basic way to a person's life.

Do you feel similar to Staughton as he talked about earlier that there's just to some extent this foundational moral injury that we face as a society? In terms of the crimes against humanity that we've engaged in societally and-

Well, I think what I felt and it's reflected in-in our book is that in the same way that an individual might feel that what he did was wrong, society, in many countries, there has been consensus that's expressed through international law. The problem is that a lot of decision makers, whether political or military, don't abide by those human rights standards. But, you know, at a certain point it was determined that you shouldn't use poison gases in-in warfare, that you shouldn't kill prisoners of war. If they can't fight you, you don't kill them, you don't kill civilians, you don't do collective punishment where, when the son does something you demolish the house of the whole family. You know, Grandpa may have had nothing to do with it, but you-you're abolishing his house along with the house where the kid might have lived. A lot of these precepts have been developed, not just in United States law but are internationally recognized norms of-of proper behavior, and they're war crimes if you commit them so that there's on the society level a reflection of the same kind of thing that people feel on an individual level. What was I doing bombing that house there were probably just women and children in there? We didn't need to do that. Or, I thought I was going to hit the target where such-and-such a suspect has been seen, and I've been watching him for five weeks. Well, he's a good daddy. You know, seeing how he-he was with relation to the children. And then when he actually triggers the-the Drone, three seconds before the drone hits he sees a child come around the corner. So he figures, you know, so then he makes an inquiry about it and they say no it was a dog. He questions, a dog on two legs? I think that, you know, society does set up some of these norms and the problem is how to get people to-to abide by them and not say, oh well, we have this or that excuse for-for not doing so.

Great. Well this-I-I know mindful of time, that it might be time for you to take your break.

You know, what I want to do for my break is rather than take a nap, to write track changes to Dana Hanson on the lamar brief-