Collecting area: Draft resistance

Carol Jankhow, COMD member, at a Stop the Draft rally, ca. 1979

Formed in 1979 in the wake of a congressional vote on reinstating the draft, the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD) was formed by San Diego-based anti-war activists Bill Roe, Hoppy Chandler, Norm Lewis, Fritz Sands, and Rick Jahnkow. Originally a chapter of the national Committee Against Registration and the Draft (CARD), the group formed as a grassroots effort to defeat draft registration legislation, organize opposition to future drafts, and expand the network of anti-draft/militarism work. Early successes included organizing around legislation proposed by President Jimmy Carter to begin draft registration in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, leafleting high schools over military recruiting, and supporting draft resisters, including Ben Sasway, a college student from North San Diego County who was among the first indicted for violating the Selective Service Act since the Vietnam War.
   
In addition to fighting prosecutions of draft resisters, S.D. CARD focused its efforts on counter recruitment campaigns in and around local high schools. In 1983-84, S.D. CARD began to broaden its focus beyond draft work to include the anti-nuclear movement, U.S. military involvement in Central America and the Caribbean, immigration, the militarism of the U.S./Mexico border, discrimination in the military, military impacts on the environment, and other militarism-related issues to become a more inter-sectional organization. This prompted the group to change their name to the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft and to joining other coalitions such as the San Diego Military Toxics Campaign, a coalition of groups educating the public on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers docked in San Diego, and the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). Today the group continues to fight state, local, and federal legislation related to the draft, including legislation in the 2020s that would expand draft registration to include women. COMD has also called for Congress to eliminate the Selective Service System and discontinue draft registration entirely.
  
This small collection consists of a run of COMD’s newsletter, Draft NOtices from 1979 to 2021 as well as clippings, photographs, circular letters, fliers, legal documents, press releases, correspondence, minutes, and pamphlets primarily from the 1979-1987 period. The material documents COMD’s campaigns, including the Ben Sasway campaign, as well as administrative material illustrating the inner workings of the group. There are also many newspaper clippings that document the national debate around the draft as well as COMD’s activities during this time.

Tom Gardner, 1966

Born in New Orleans in 1946, Tom Gardner began his involvement in social and political causes as a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1964. He joined the burgeoning civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and eventually dropped out of school to become a full time activist. During this time, he was the chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization based in the south which opposed the Vietnam War, fought for civil rights for black Americans, and supported the rights of women and workers. He returned to UVA in 1969 and completed his bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1971.

Following UVA, Gardner worked as a staff member at the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) as an organizer. Concurrently, he joined the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and became a board member. SCEF was active in numerous causes in the south, dedicated in particular to civil rights and electoral reform.

Beginning in the 1970s, Gardner began work on prison issues, working with a number of politically and unfairly convicted prisoners, and advocating for an end to the death penalty. Gardner, and the groups he worked with, challenged the institutional racism of a southern justice system that had existed since the days of Jim Crow. The most prominent of these cases was that of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris, who was originally sentenced to five life terms for 4 small robberies and an alleged rape in 1970 and eventually given the death penalty under Alabama’s capital offenses law due to an inadequate defense by his court appointed lawyers.

Concurrent to his work as an activist, Gardner has worked as a journalist and photographer, writing articles for a number of commercial publications as well as some independent work. While working for the Montgomery Advertiser, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and others, he covered local, college, and political news. Gardner has also used journalism to bolster his activism, writing for left-wing publications such as Workers World and The Great Speckled Bird. He used his talents in photography by taking photos of protests and events he attended for use in articles by him and others.

Gardner returned to school several times after originally graduating from UVA in 1971. He received a masters degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia in 1982, a masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1985, and later a Ph.D. in Communication from UMASS Amherst in 2005. Throughout his PhD program and since its completion, Gardner has been a professor of Communication at Westfield State University, using his experience from a life full of activism to continue educating a new generation of students and activists.

This Gardner collection illustrates much of Gardner’s activism and journalism work throughout his life. It contains correspondence, articles, press releases, meeting minutes, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, publications, notes, and newspapers. The collection documents the full scope of Gardner’s life; from his time as a student activist at the University of Virginia to his more recent achievements as a professor at Westfield State University.

The collection also contains a large amount of material written by Gardner himself, as well as publications, newspapers, and articles that either relate to causes he was directly involved in or the political issues of the day.

Ruth Mansberg was a writer, editor, poet, mother, and ardent peace activist. She worked with several civic, social, service, and political organizations dedicated to social change including a Pound Ridge, NY Nuclear Freeze chapter, the League of Women Voters, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She lived with her husband Hyman Mansberg and children Laura and Daniel in Pound Ridge, NY until moving to Chapel Hill, NC in 1991. After sidelining a writing career due to family obligations, she returned to writing upon her children entering adulthood. She enrolled in a continuing education writing course at the University of Connecticut, Stamford, where, thanks to a teacher there named Mel Goldberg, she picked up freelance work with two trade journals, Dental Management and Optometric Management. In 1971 she pitched a story to Dental Management on Bernard Bender, a 52 year old Los Angeles dentist who was convicted of helping young men avoid the draft by applying braces to their teeth. He was convicted in February of 1972 and sentenced to 15 years in Federal prison, but was later released in late 1973. Mansberg worked for a number of newspapers and trade publications and co-authored two books. She died in November of 2000 in Chapel Hill

This small collection consists of Mansberg’s correspondence and research materials related to her article, “The Strange Case of Dr. Bender”, which was published in the June 1972 issue of Dental Management. This includes correspondence between Mansberg, Dr. Bender and his wife Bea discussing the article and other things. In addition, there is correspondence with Mel Goldberg, the editor of Dental Management and others, whom she wrote for information about the case. There is also a reporter’s transcript of the trial and the testimony of dentist Spiro J. Chacanos.

David Seager’s 1995 PhD history thesis, “Repression in Academia: New Left and Antiwar College Teachers and Political Dissent in the Vietnam War era, 1964-1975” is one of the few in-depth studies of academic repression during the Vietnam era. Besides Ellen Schrecker, who has written extensively on academic freedom and repression in higher education, there has been a dearth of material written about the personal and career consequences faced by American college and university teachers who spoke out against the Vietnam War. For his thesis, Seager did extensive primary and secondary source research and directly interviewed 35 instructors and corresponded with 38 additional ones throughout 1993 and 1994.
               
The project was fully self-funded by Seager who had very little financial support. Early in the research project, his advisor passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack. He worked with a competent replacement, but they were not involved with the original concept and Seager was, in a sense, orphaned. Seager planned to expand the thesis with additional post-graduate work, but he was instead caught in a desperate financial bind with no help from a true mentor, a growing pile of job rejections, and a need for income, so the project ended with the thesis.