“Welcome to the Resistance!”
We pushed through the rear doors of the auditorium and marched straight into the business meeting of the Missouri District of the Lutheran-Church-Missouri Synod, down the center aisle toward the stage, twenty-three pairs of hands clapping, our voices raised, singing:
“…Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain’t gonna study war no more…”
It was Wednesday, June 17, 1970: my eighteenth birthday. I wanted the several hundred church leaders there to know that I would not register for the draft that day even though it was required by law when men turned eighteen. I was resisting the draft after more than a year of organizing war protests in high school, wrestling with my conscience, and arguing with my parents. I wanted them to support me by taking a public stand against the draft and the war in Vietnam, a war that had just been drastically escalated and expanded the month before with the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
My friends and I — all members of Lutheran youth groups, either Black Youth Unlimited, the Walther League or the St. Louis Hunger Team — had attended the Missouri District’s meetings all week to engage our church’s leaders in polite discussions of hunger, racism, and the war. Today was different. Today we were done with talking. We wanted action. We stopped the meeting and took the stage to make our point.
I never thought they would let us on the stage, let alone leave the microphone on at the podium. So, I had not planned anything to say — just marching, clapping and singing. But now, as we walked up the short flight of stairs to the stage and stopped singing, President Scherer sat down on an empty chair to the side of the stage, glaring at me but leaving the podium wide open. I moved toward it while the others stood in a line across the front of the stage. All eyes were on me now as silence filled the auditorium.
Feeling a bit woozy, I tapped the microphone, then grabbed the smooth sides of the podium for support and began to speak, my voice cracking with emotion.
“My name is Paul Kuehnert and I am a member of Concordia Maplewood. I turned 18 today and, so, am required to report to my draft board and register. I am here to tell you that I’m not going to do that, not today. Not tomorrow. Not any day. I will not — no, no — I cannot register for the draft. This is because my conscience tells me I must not.
“I must, instead, break the law because the law exists only to support the war in Vietnam. And that war, the war in Vietnam, is wrong, morally wrong. It is not a just war. The endless bombing. The invasion of Cambodia just last month. The burning of villages and murder of villagers. The deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers, ours and theirs, and all for what? Nothing, nothing justifies this death and destruction.
“I learned coming up in this church, from a very young age, that I must examine my heart and my conscience and then, follow my conscience, in all matters, great and small. This is the biggest thing, the biggest decision I have ever had to make and I have made it as you, my church, taught me.
“I ask for a response from each of you as members of my spiritual community. Together we must bring our powers of love to bear on these times of war, human misery, and injustice. I know you all may not agree with my stance. But I hope you can agree that I must follow my conscience in these difficult, trying times.
“Please join me, join us, in doing what you can to stop the war and stop the draft. We cannot have business as usual as long as this war rages on. PEACE NOW!”
I paused and looked across the auditorium. The room of men glared at me from their seats, most with their lips sealed tight in a sea of stiff grimaces. Some were shaking their heads ‘no’ and whispering to their neighbors.
I figured we had pushed the situation about as far as we could. I stepped away from the podium and lifted my arms up in a gesture President Nixon had expropriated from the peace movement, forming peace signs with both my hands, pumping them up and down in rhythm with the chant our group had taken up: PEACE NOW! STOP THE DRAFT! PEACE NOW! I led our group off the stage and back down the center aisle, rushing out the rear doors into the sunshine where we all collapsed into each other’s arms in a series of group hugs.
As we laughed and talked in the sunshine outside the auditorium, I worked my way from person to person thanking them for joining me on stage and being a part of my draft resistance action. I went to my friend, Dennis Cummins, and his wife, Jane, last. Dennis was an early draft resister, having burned his draft card and then refused induction into the Army a couple of years earlier. I found myself physically shaking as I hugged them as the pent up anxiety washed out of me. They held me tight. Dennis whispered into my ear: “Welcome to the resistance, brother!”
Denny and I were part of an estimated 210,000 men who resisted the draft during the Vietnam War. And between 200,000 and 500,000 women and men refused to pay some portion or all of their federal taxes in protest during this period, again risking fines and imprisonment. Millions more joined vigils, protest marches, teach-ins, sit-ins, worked for peace candidates, circulated petitions — -in every community across the country. It is widely recognized that this massive movement did serve as a significant restraint on both the Johnson and Nixon administrations, forced changes in, and then the elimination of, the draft, and ultimately moved Congress to significantly cut funding to the War, hastening its eventual end.
And now, fifty years later — living once again through times of great division, moral outrage, and protest actions taken by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans — I recall those moments I lived through on the stage in front of the ‘powers that be’ of my church with a mixture of pride and wonder. I am proud that I took a bold, personal stand against an unjust war. And I marvel at my youthful willingness to risk my future based on faith that my act would make a difference.
When my friends and I pushed through those doors and disrupted ‘business as usual’ of our church, we knew that Richard Nixon was a huge threat to peace and justice in the world. But we also knew that Nixon was not the biggest threat.
The biggest threat was our own sense of powerlessness.
Together, though, we mustered the courage to act and we welcomed each other into the resistance. A resistance not to the American dream, but to the American nightmare. A resistance that has changed over the last 50 years, growing, shrinking and growing once again. Never giving up. Given shape in various ways and words, including, especially now, those of Langston Hughes:
“… Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain —
All, all the stretch of these great green states —
And make America again!”
from “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes
