Air-Raid Drills

Ammon Hennacy led the organized opposition to government mandated air raid drills in the 1950s and 60s. This essay, which recounts one protest and trial in June 1955, is excerpted from The Book of Ammon (Fortkamp/Rose Hill, 1994) and is reproduced with permission from the publisher.

In the spring of 1955 I saw in the paper that there would be an air-raid drill on June 15, and everyone was supposed to take part or suffer a penalty of up to a year in jail and $500 fine, this being a state law. I told Dorothy and said we must get ready to disobey this foolish law. I contacted Ralph DeGia of the War Resisters League and he got in touch with others, the FOR, AFSC, and W.I.L., and so accordingly when the time came we had a whole group in City Hall Park ready to disobey when the whistles blew. The television men were there and asked Dorothy to explain why we were acting as we did, but she asked me to speak because my voice would be louder so I told them that if a bomb dropped there would be no police left to arrest us and that the whole thing was a farce. Robert Fisher, a young man uptown who was working as a social worker in lieu of going into the Army, heard me on television and took a taxi and came down and went to jail with us. He is a Unitarian. Just before the whistles blew we gathered at the War Resisters Office at 5 Beekman Street. where Bayard Rustin advised all of us not to refuse shelter unless we were ready to take the consequences of perhaps a year in jail and $500 fine. There were some who handed out leaflets until the last minute and then took shelter. Dorothy and I had signed a leaflet that was well printed by Dave Dellinger, and we distributed it. It began "In the name of Jesus, who is God, who is Love, we will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide...We will not be drilled into fear...We do not have faith in God if we depend upon the Atom Bomb," ending up with our pacifist-anarchist idea of refusal in every way to support war and governments.

We were ordered to take shelter and refused to do so. We were packed into vans, and when we were waiting to be booked at Elizabeth Street station, we noticed an elderly man with a badge on his cap who we thought might be an attendant. I gave him one of our leaflets, and it was not until later when our indictment was read in court that we discovered that he was Rocco Parellli, a bootblack, who had been sitting in the park knowing nothing about the air-raid drill, who happened to be the first one arrested. Our indictment thus read: "Rocco Parelli, and twenty-eight others, willfully refused to take shelter." It was entirely fitting that this common man, not a scholar, intellectual, or radical, would symbolically head the list, representative of the workers of the world we were trying to awaken. There were ten of us from the CW: Dorothy and I; Carol Perry, a tax refuser from San Francisco; Patricia Rusk; Mary Ann McCoy; Eileen Fantinio and Helen Russell, of the group that works with Puerto Rican children in Harlem; Mary Roberts, an artist; Stanley Borowski, who has helped selling CWs and picketing; and Michael Kovalak, who with others had picketed the Chancery Office at the time of the graveyard strike in 1949. A.J. Muste, Ralph DeGia, and Bayard Rustin were old-time War Resisters. Jackson MacLow, our atheist anarchist friend; Bob Berk, a young radical I had known in Tucson; and Dale Brotherington, a Quaker who had corresponded with me from Florida were arrested. Andy Osgood, a War Resister who had visited me in Phoenix, and Hugh Corbin, a War Resister who had picketed with us in Washington, were arrested, too. Also Edith Horwitz, whose husband had been a CO, and Jim Peck, and old-time CO, were. I had not met Henry Babcock, an elderly Quaker, or Henry Maiden, a Quaker with whom I celled. Kent Larrabee, head of the New York City Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Orie Pell of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom were arrested, but the Queen of us all was Judith Beck, the actress who was supposed to be playing Phaedra in The Living Theatre that night but who went to jail with us. Dick Kern had promised us at the War Resister's office not to "go limp" but to put on his show by himself elsewhere, but true to form he became enthusiastic and so the papers had a picture of him being carried by the police into the van. And Joan Hamilton had walked into the group and did not seem to be able to make up her mind whether she wanted to go through with it or not since she was pregnant, and she was later released.

By chance we fellows had sandwiches, but the women did not have anything to eat all day. Around 11:00 P.M. we appeared before Judge Louis Kaplain. As our names were read off, it seemed the Irish did not wish to admit that an Irishman by the name of Hennacy could possibly be among these radicals, so he persisted in pronouncing my name as "Hennacky." Some of the girls laughed lightly at this, and the judge pounded his gavel and wanted to know what was the matter. Judith answered pertly that she had had nothing to eat and was giddy. The judge asked her to step up and she did quickly, not demurely. He told her to stand back and shouted angrily, asking her name, where she had been born, and who paid her rent. She answered without the customary "your honor" with which dignitaries inflated their egos. This enraged him all the more, and he wanted to know if she had ever been in a mental institution. "No, have you?" was her classic answer, which will reverberate through these musty halls until the time when courts and prisons cease to exist. The audience laughed and the judge shouted, "Take her for observation to Bellevue psychiatric ward." Judith screamed dramatically and her husband who was in the audience in the courtroom, a Yale graduate, stood up and shouted, "You can't do this." The place was in an uproar. The judge ordered the courtroom cleared by the riot squad and we were all put back in our cells. Later he had us brought in and read off a written statement saying, "Theoretically three million people have been killed in this air raid and you are the murderers." He placed our bail at the unheard-of sum of $1,500 each...

Fritz Eichenberg, who had been in court, provided us with a sketch for the front page of the July-August CW. The case dragged on and on until finally on December 22, we were all found guilty and sentence suspended.