Theology Today - Vol 29, No. 2 - July 1972 - TABLETALK - On Saying "NO" To Death: Harrisburg 1972

172 - On Saying "NO" To Death: Harrisburg 1972

On Saying "NO" To Death: Harrisburg 1972
By J. Norman Thorson

THE counter-trial activities of the Harrisburg Defense Committee began in early February. From that time through Easter Sunday a seemingly endless progression of faces and activities passed through Harrisburg. These included Cynthia Wedel of the National Council of Churches, J. Metz Rollins of the National Conference of Black Churchmen, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Malcolm Boyd, Alger Hiss, Joan Baez, Arthur Kinoy, Tom Hayden, and all the Harrisburg Seven defendants except Phillip Berrigan. Other "heavies" filled the list during Holy Week: Anthony Towne, William Stringfellow, Ralph Abernathy, Daniel Ellsberg, Fania Jordan (Angela Davis' sister), Daniel Berrigan, Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Harvey Cox, and Rosemary Reuther.

From the time of his arrival at Dauphin County Prison, Phil Berrigan became the focus for a weekly vigil/liturgy each Sunday evening at the prison, sponsored by the local chapter of Clergy and Laymen Concerned. Workships, panel discussions, demonstrations, guerrilla theater, and concerts prevailed for two months as United States prosecutor William Lynch carried out his own form of guerrilla theater before judge Herman.

The height of the activity was during the Holy Week Pilgrimage. Workshops were held daily, with panel discussions each evening. Demonstrations and liturgies and symbolic actions and vigils took place at the Federal Building, Lewisburg prison, and military installations and industries.

The trial of the Harrisburg Seven falls into the same category as other "political trials" of recent years. The various Black Panther trials, the Catonsville Nine, the Chicago Eight Conspiracy, to mention only a few, have the common element that Thomas F. O'Meara identified in the January, 1972, issue of THEOLOGY TODAY: "The defendants see themselves . . . as being accusers. The accusers become the accused." In a time when the totalitarian powers of the

J. Norman Thorson, educated at Augustana College (Illinois) and the Lutheran School of Theology, is a minister in the Lutheran Church in America. He has served pastorates in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and is currently Executive Director of the Hamilton Area Mission, an inner-city project in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

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government are increasing at a frightening rate, the political trials of resisters represent at best a fragile attempt, on the part of those who are struggling to live humanly, to put on trial the growing exercise of illegitimate authority in this country. Indeed, the definition of totalitarianism suggested by William Stringfellow fits neatly what the justice Department attempted to do in the Harrisburg Seven trial: the merger of authority and law, where those who exercise authority become the law or the equivalent of the law in whatever they say or do. In this process, both persons and institutions regard their own exercise of authority as equivalent to law.

There are, however, distinctions which should be brought into focus. Prior to the Catonsville period, dissent took a conventional form of largely symbolic and verbal actions. For the most part, these were ignored by several administrations. The burning of draft records at Catonsville, however, involved a criminal offense, and therefore the government bad to take note of it. Then, with the Rochester draft board action, we were treated to government participation in the protest itself, in the sense that the government had information about the action and permitted it to occur. In the Harrisburg trial, the government became an open aggressive force, or, more accurately, the persecutor. Finally, with the Camden, N.J., draft board raid, the government became the moving force behind the act of protest. The obvious point is that the primary source of civil disobedience in our time comes not from protesting citizens but from the IRS, the White House, and the justice Department.

The latter two agencies were discussed in Harrisburg by Walter Kinoy, chief defense lawyer in the Detroit White Panther case, in which three defendants were accused of blowing up a CIA office. The significance of the Detroit case is the government's contention that the Attorney General should have authority to conduct wire-tapping without prior court approval. Kinoy spoke in Harrisburg just after his presentation before the Supreme Court in the wire-tapping hearings. He related the following account of those hearings to us:

Mr. Mardian, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of internal security, offered the government's arguments to the Court and attempted to justify the extraordinary claim of power which the Court was asked to legitimize. According to Kinoy, Mardian argued that the President of the United States should be able, through the sole judgment of his one representative, the Attorney General, to set aside provisions of the Constitution of the United States. Unchallenged, unjudged, unquestioned by anyone, the Attorney General could decide that the opinions, associations, ideas,

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and activities of any American citizen might at some time tend to subvert the existing structure of the government. If the Attorney General made that determination, no one had the right, according to Mardian, to challenge this; no citizen, not even the Supreme Court. If the Attorney General made that determination, then the specific provisions of the Bill of Rights must be set aside. According to Kinoy, Mardian went on to give the reason for such a position: it is necessary because the future and safety of the state is dependent on it.

At this point in the hearings, Kinoy said he reflected on the familiarity of these words. They were identical, he said, to those used by a very eloquent lawyer before a court on this continent, except that be wasn't Nixon's lawyer but the lawyer for George III. The case involved the Writs of Assistance, and out of these arguments, John Adams said, came the Revolution: "Then and there the child independence was born." That fight was against the power of an executive to decide when an individual's ideas, opinions, thoughts, or belongings could be ransacked. The royal government insisted that it needed such power because the life and death of the state depended on it. Those were arguments which were rejected not in the court room, but by the guns of the American Revolution.

Kinoy's reflections were seemingly shared by one of the Supreme Court justices, for suddenly justice Thurgood Marshall interrupted Mardian: "Just a minute, Mr. Mardian! Where does the Constitution fit into all of this?" According to Kinoy, Mardian became flustered; he wasn't totally the master in that court room. There were other forces and powers at play which sought to protect and sustain that which is human in the face of the ubiquitous power of death. Mardian couldn't just hand justice Marshall a subpoena, or pull him into some grand jury, or grant him immunity for his testimony. None of the tools of his trade worked at that moment. According to Kinoy, Mardian's response to Marshalls question was: "I'll get to that at some point." Marshall, however, wouldn't let him go. Several moments later Mardian was back to his insistence on the "dire necessity" of having non-judicial wire tapping available; the government would collapse if such power is not made available to the President and the Attorney General. Marshall broke in again: 'Where do you discuss the Fourth Amendment?"

III

The crucial question here runs not only through the Detroit case and the Harrisburg Seven case but also through every political trial of recent years, and it is cause for real anger and fear. The question is not merely the issue of electronic surveillance. On the contrary, the government is fighting for the biggest possible stakes.

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Mardian was asking the court to put the stamp of legitimacy and legality on the proposition that the executive branch of the government has the power to suspend provisions of the Constitution any time it deems necessary. If the activities, ideas, associations, or opinions of any citizen or organization of citizens can ultimately be a threat of any kind to the existing structure of the government, then the Constitution can be suspended by the executive's own decision.

That is why the wire-tapping case goes far beyond the question of wire-tapping alone. Wire-tapping has been described as a search and seizure-a search of one's conversation. If the justice Department wins its claim that it has the power to conduct wire-taps without prior approval by a judge, this would mean that the Attorney General could, in his sole opinion, determine that the activities of a given organization may someday tend to subvert the existing structures of government. No proof of actual violations of the law would be needed, only the suspicion that certain individuals or groups represent a threat. Mass raids could be carried out, and jury trials could be dispensed with, as fragile a device as they often are in protecting men against the state. In short, we would witness a vast extension of arbitrary, and unchecked, governmental power.

The tragedy of the "movement" in this case, as in so many other instances, is its apparent inability to see the commonality of issues, the relationship between Angela Davis, wire-tapping, Harrisburg, etc. There should have been a protest of national proportions around the wire-tap hearings. Or in other terms, the tenacity demanded to recognize and consistently act upon the deep issues of human freedom and illegal use of authority has not gripped the movement people.

With Kinoy's words and observations in mind, the presentation of William Stringfellow on Wednesday of Holy Week offered a sense of perspective, both politically and theologically, which was lacking during the previous two months of counter-trial activities.

Stringfellow used as his context conversations which he had shared as a student during the days immediately following World War II in Europe. He had been sent there partly under the aegis of the World Council of Churches. During this time he came into contact with the survivors of the anti-Nazi resistance. In recalling those 25-year-old conversations, he discerned two themes emerging from the anti-Nazi resistance which are contemporary with the American situation today.

The first of these themes concerned resistance as the only human way to live when faced with the power of death which was

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Nazism. Stringfellow discussed the particularly forlorn days during the Nazi occupation and before D-Day. To him, this was the period which is most instructive to us today, when the movements of the 1960's have dissipated into quietism, cynicism, and despair. For all practical purposes, the mass movements of the last decade have frittered away into searching for the nostalgia of the good old days of radical action and its momentary rewards. What has slipped away, or perhaps was never there with the masses, is the realization that resistance is mainly the concern of small groups of persons; that sustaining resistance is rooted, among other things, in an abiding concern for justice; that resistance cannot be measured in terms of effect; that in this time of totalitarian governmental power, to resist is to be alive and grateful for the gift of life.

The Nazi resistance, said Stringfellow, was similar to resistance in America today; it was composed of efforts which, when regarded cumulatively or individually, were "far too few, far too small, far too weak, too temporary, far too symbolic, haphazard, and trivial to be efficacious against the oppressive, monolithic, pervasive presence which Nazism was both psychically and physically in the defeated and seized nations." The resisters carried out their actions in an atmosphere where hope, as it is normally understood, was annihilated. The risks for such actions were monstrously out of proportion to the acts committed: arrest, torture, and death were the rewards-realities which caused most to despair. What reason could be given for such attitudes of hope?

Resistance wasn't rooted in a desire for martyrdom; most were quite ordinary people. Nor was faith the answer; many weren't Christians. The answer, declared Stringfellow, lay in the realization that resistance was the only means of defying the power of death represented in Nazism, the only way to retain sanity and conscience. It was the only way to live humanly. "To exist under Nazism," Stringfellow said, "in conformity, silence, fear, acquiescence, obeisance, collaboration; to covet so-called security and safety under conditions prescribed by the regime caused moral insanity, meant suicide, was fatally dehumanizing, and constituted a form of death." One was faced essentially with the choice of how to die.

The second recollection Stringfellow shared concerned the importance which many in the resistance movement attached to Bible study. Such action became a means of communication and nurture, a primary, practical, and invaluable tactic of resistance. In the midst of death, the biblical style of life embued the resisters with the reality of its relevance and resilience.

Studying the Bible provided the impetus for the free, humanizing, and ecumenical style of life that characterized the Confessing Movement in Germany. It provided the situation in which the new

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life, to which we are ceaselessly called by God, became real, the impetus through which one's humanity was discovered.

A final observation by Stringfellow, based on the need for Bible study in the resistance, and resistance to the power death as the only human way to live, concerned the realization that the politics of death in America is not unique to our own situation. It is merely a specific example of the condition of all nations and principalities, he said. "In its historicity, death as social purpose is not only the moral reality of the present American regime and society and culture, but it is our inheritance as a nation. The massacre at My Lai, or the infanticide at Kent or Jackson State are comprehended as implementations of the death ethic, as evidenced in American genocide against the Indians, or the present usurpation of the Constitutional system by incumbent authority-the Justice Department. Jeopardizing the rights and protection of every citizen against the State is beheld as a further indication of the original impairment of the Constitution: the institutionalizing of chattel slavery�. The plunder of the American environment � is known to have its sanction in the American death idolatry which bestows precedence upon property over human life. So the fascination in this nation with the moral power of death has always been with us and has not just lately materialized."

Stringfellow was reminding us that we live in time, or in biblical terms, in the period called The Fall. America is a principality held in the throes of death, where death rather than life provides us with meaning. Is there no hope then, is there no American dream other than one nightmare succeeding another? No! But out of that "no" emerges a hope which transcends our bondage to death. This is a hope, said Stringfellow, which is 'Wrought in realism about this nation, a hope which confronts the fallenness of the American principality, a hope which confesses the nation's death idolatry, a hope emancipated from the moral naivete about any supposed unique destiny for the nation, a hope freed from vainglorious delusions that America is a holy nation. The courage to say 'no' in this sense is in itself a radically humanizing experience. It is the no which verifies awakening conscience; not an idiosyncratic exercise, but an expression of commonality with the whole of human life, and a vocation responsible to all other human beings in the face of the ubiquity and versatility of the power of death at work in the principalities and powers of this world. . . . This no is the no of resistance; � from this no issues the only hope worthy of human beings, because no to death incarnate in the nation or in any other appearance means yes to the gift of life."

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What is strongly indicated in the reflections of both Kinoy and Stringfellow is the clear realization that resistance efforts in our present circumstances have been too puny and weak and disconnected to effect massive, radical change. The other part of the story is that one has to continue to struggle for those changes no matter what the cost. One has to do daily battle to live as a human being. The means we use to convey that reality are comparatively insignificant.

If one is to risk distilling the multifarious events that took place during the Harrisburg counter-trial, the central thrust was summoned up in the attempt to plant a tree on the grounds of the New Cumberland Army Depot on Good Friday. Symbolically, each participant became a tree of life in his actions of resistance, saying "no" to the power of death that hypnotizes: us. That is what the trial was about.

The various movements of the 60's are dead if we view them as mass actions. But the spirit of radicalism and resistance is alive. Many are struggling to live humanly and realize the tenacity and perseverance required in that there is great hope. It is John Adams' "child called independence" struggling to breathe again. Resistance is the only means of resuscitation.