Draft-card burning
Draft-card burning was a symbol of protest performed by thousands of young men in the United States and Australia in the 1960s and early 1970s as part of the anti-war movement.
The first well-publicized protest was in December 1963, with a 22-year-old conscientious objector, Gene Keyes, setting fire to his card on Christmas Day in Champaign, Illinois.
[1] In May 1964, a larger demonstration, with about 50 people in Union Square, New York, was organized by the War Resisters League chaired by David McReynolds.
The act of draft-card burning was defended as a symbolic form of free speech, a constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court decided against the draft-card burners; it determined that the federal law was justified and unrelated to the freedom of speech.
In Australia, following the 1966 troop increases directed by Prime Minister Harold Holt, conscription notices were burned at mass demonstrations against Australian involvement in Vietnam.
[7] It appeared in magazines, newspapers, and television, signaling a political divide between those who backed the US government and its military goals and those against US involvement in Vietnam.
[9] Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a platform based partly on putting an end to the draft, to undercut protesters making use of the symbolic act.
[10] Strom Thurmond moved the bill through the Senate, calling draft-card burning "contumacious conduct" which "represents a potential threat to the exercise of the power to raise and support armies.
"[7] At the time, many observers (including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit) believed that Congress had intentionally targeted anti-war draft-card burners.
In April 1965, Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies sent a battalion of Army regulars to Vietnam, beginning an overseas involvement that lasted for seven years and provoked deeply divisive debate back home.
[13] Marxist writer and draft-card burner Andy Blunden said in July that, "by following America into Vietnam, Holt's Australia is playing the role of Mussolini's Italy.
[17] On October 15, 1965, David J. Miller burned his draft card at a rally near the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall Street in Manhattan.
Tom Cornell, Marc Paul Edelman, and Roy Lisker had burned their draft cards at a public rally organized by the Committee for Non-Violent Action in Union Square, New York City, on November 6, 1965.
[26] On the morning of March 31, 1966, David Paul O'Brien and three companions burned their draft cards on the steps of the South Boston Courthouse in front of a crowd that included several FBI agents.
He argued that the amendment served no valid purpose because the Selective Service Act already required draft registrants to carry their card on their persons at all times; thus, any form of destruction was already a violation.
"[10] On January 24, 1968, the Supreme Court determined that the 1965 amendment was constitutional as enacted and as applied and that it did not distinguish between public or private destruction or mutilation of the draft card.
He pointed out that the draft-card-burning question was not decided in relation to the similar one surrounding the act of flag burning, an issue the court had avoided for years.
[32] In 1990 O'Brien was analyzed again by critics following the case United States v. Eichman which determined that flag burning was a form of free speech and some made comparisons to the earlier 1984 case Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence which determined that sleeping at a protest rally location in a downtown park was valid as a symbolic expression intended to bring attention to the plight of people experiencing homelessness.
[30] However, the harmful conduct of burning a draft card did not have the normal test applied: it was not determined to be a case of "clear and present danger".
[33] On Armed Forces Day in the United States (Saturday, May 16, 1964), in New York, 12 students at a rally burned their draft cards.
[27] In August 1965, Life carried a photograph of a man demonstrating in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall Street in Manhattan, July 30, 1965.
[35] On April 15, 1967, at Sheep Meadow, Central Park, New York City, some 60 young men, including a few students from Cornell University, came together to burn their draft cards in a Maxwell House coffee can.
[27] In May 1967 in response to the Sheep Meadow demonstration, 56-year-old anarchist intellectual Paul Goodman published a piece in The New York Review of Books sympathetic to both public and private draft-card burning.
One from Ann D. Gordon, a doctoral student of American history, said that private, individual acts of card burning were useless in stopping the war.
Joseph Scerra, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, spoke against what he saw as too much news coverage: "All of our young people are not burning up their draft cards.
"[48] In October 1967 at a rally in support of the government, a news photograph was snapped of a man kissing his draft card, his girlfriend smiling at his side.
In 1967 off-Broadway and 1968 on Broadway and in London's West End, the musical Hair featured a climactic scene in Act I of a group of men in a hippie "tribe" burning their draft cards while the main character Claude struggles with the decision to join them.
[50] Later, when the musical was staged in Yugoslavia, the draft-card burning scene was removed, as the local protesting youth viewed their army positively as a vehicle to fight off a possible invasion by the Soviet Union.
[51] President Johnson spoke strongly against the draft-card protesters, saying in October 1967 that he wanted the "antidraft movement" investigated for Communist influences.
