The Cantonsville Nine’s Father Daniel Berrigan Passes At 94-A Belated Tribute  

 

By Frank Jackman

 

The Oakland Seven, The New York Twenty-One, The Chicago Nine (later Eight), The Harrisburg Six, The Fort Dix Twelve, The Fort Sam Houston Eleven, Free Huey, Free Angela, and of course the case I want to highlight this day after hearing on the radio a while back the passing of Father Daniel Berrigan at 94, the Cantonsville Nine, a town name down in Maryland and a cause, draft resistance, which he will be forever associated with. And forever honored for as a participant in that antiwar, anti-draft action.  

Of course bringing up that litany of political defense cases that ran through the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s only brings home once again what an extraordinary time that was, a time like a few others in our checkered history to try men’s and women’s souls. A John Brown moment in the face of the relentless onslaught against people that we had no cost to attempt to obliterate (or as the saying want at the time by some major military figure “bomb them back to the Stone Age”). In those days the distance between being catch up in the government’s dragnet and placed behind walls and staying on the streets to fight another day was sometimes just a matter of luck, of happenstance. What everybody knew though, everybody who was worth their salt was that whatever you did, or didn’t do, in those days would shape your life forever. How were you to talk your children, somebody’s children, tell your grandchildren, or somebody’s grandchildren that you kept your head down, that you kept your eyes on the ground while all hell was breaking out around you? The political rock group Steppenwolf maybe put it best:

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

 

Looking back on the times now there were actually relatively few of the older generation, of our parents’ generation, those like the Berrigans, William Sloan Coffin, Noam Chomsky, and a few others, those forged by the dregs of the 1930s Great Depression, slogged through World War II and made their peace with an unjust society during the heyday of the Cold War who stepped up to the plate, took a stand and we were mainly left on our own to make every mistake in the political book. Although when you think about the monsters we were up against those mistakes were innocent child’s play against the carnage they, the government and their hangers-on, were wreaking on foreign lands, and America cities alike. We had and HAVE nothing to regret, nothing to apologize for in that bare-knuckles tragically uneven fight against that dark night in America

Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phil, and others who would become Catholic “liberation theorists” later condemned in Rome did step up to the plate, did commit acts of resistance to evil. Did a very practical thing. Took out a draft board in Cantonsville, Maryland, destroyed or tries to destroy draft records, the life-blood of the draft system as a symbolic gesture of opposition to the slaughter of American boys (only boys then) in their slaughter of Vietnamese boys and girls. (Remember once again the old call the fights, they don’t do the actual fighting the young do.) And stayed around to get arrested, went to trial.    

Originally I had thought that a short homage to the late Father Berrigan would do the trick placing him as one of the older generation who took the risks that we, the young, were forced into. The more I thought about it though the more my own struggles with a hard-nosed Irish Catholic upbringing and the fight to break from the more onerous tenets of that church were reflected off the efforts of that man-whatever difference we might have then, or later.

In those days when I was having my own struggles against the military, when I was trying to resist going to Vietnam after having been inducted into the Army it was good to know I had allies raising hell against the system. Good knowing that guys, good Irish Catholic brethren, Society of Jesus guys, the soldiers of the Church, guys who would give the lessons to be learned about life at Sunday school or at Boy Scout retreats were breaking ranks who under ordinary circumstances would have counseled  non-resistance to civil authority were coming over to the people’s side meant a lot to me whatever I would come to later think about the value of such actions in the great scheme of things. Like I said the actions and actors in the Cantonsville Nine case will always have an honored place in the pantheon of the anti-war struggles. They did not keep their heads down. Daniel Berrigan too.