The New York City alternative high school City-as-School sends interns to WRL as part of WRL s very successful internship program. 1995 City-as-School intern Michael Maronna was asked to interview a WRL staffer to show the interaction between interns and staff; he chose to interview Karl Bissinger. The following is excerpted from that interview.

Karl: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914. That puts me in my 82nd year.

I went to high school in Cincinnati, where I studied Latin. I never went to college; I went to art school instead--in Cincinnati for a while, then to the Art Students League in New York City. I wanted to broaden my outlook on what culture was. I thought of myself as becoming an artist--or a critic. But when I had to make a living I became a photojournalist.

I always was a pacifist. I grew up quarreling with my father about hanging the flag on the house on the Fourth of July, which I knew instinctively was the wrong thing to do. I didn t know I was a pacifist; I didn t even know the word. I just knew I couldn t conceivably kill anyone, and I certainly didn t want to be killed.

It was after the First World War, and almost everyone was a pacifist, consciously or unconsciously. The war caused such revulsion--it was such a terrible war, a war which should never have been fought. Nobody wanted to go to war again. It was with great effort that the Roosevelt administration dragged us, kicking and screaming, into the Second World War--until Pearl Harbor ...

I came to New York and I joined the Communist Party when I was very young. And the contempt pacifists were held in shocked me. I found, though I couldn t be an anti-Communist, I ouldn t be a Communist. I was in conflict, because I did believe in everything the Communists believed in--except I began to realize the coming revolution would mean bloodshed, and I realized only the young would shed blood.

After I left the CP, I was politically paralyzed until I read in the paper that Dorothy Day and others had been arrested protesting air-raid drills. Eventually I went down to City Hall to one of the protests. There were thousands of people, and only space in the paddy wagons for 26. So the police went through the crowd taking people at random, and I was one of the lucky 26. We spent the weekend in jail and came out tired and dirty, and there were Judith Malina and Julian Beck and the Living Theatre, and they had flowers for us.

I began to work with the Living Theatre--that s where I met [longtime WRL volunteer] Vicki Rovere (she was 15)--and then went to the American Friends Service Committee for draft counseling training and became a draft counselor with a local group, the Greenwich Village Peace Center. We could not actually advise anybody, but we could lay out the options the draftee had. It was a time of enormous activity--there were nights at the Peace Center when young men were lined around the block. We would always assume that every fifth person was an FBI agent, so we had to watch our p s and q s. After going through the various options, we would stop. But as the war wore on, many people were deciding to desert and leave America. More and more soldiers would come to us, and although you could not advise them to desert, at least not when you thought you might be talking to an FBI agent, you could tell them where there was information that they could look up themselves about going to Canada. In some instances they had come on their furlough from Vietnam and were ordered back, but they had decided, "Hell, no, we re not going back." You would find yourself being quite indiscreet; out of common human decency you would find them somebody to help them. There were underground railroads, so to speak, getting people across the border into Canada, and then many of them went to Sweden, where they were welcomed with open arms. I learned a great deal about pacifism there; one of the things you have to do in draft counseling is help 17-year-olds articulate their conscientious objection.

During the early part of the war in Vietnam. The Peace Center was very close to the War Resisters League, and I got to know people who were working at the WRL and also doing draft counseling. We began "trading" various young men.

I ve been here close to 20 years. I came here after semi-retiring from photography, and I have been here ever since.

I didn t "decide." After the Vietnam war was over, the War Resisters League decided that instead of closing down--or "downsizing," as they say today--they would upsize and take on the amnesty issue.

Each president, as he came along, had the power to declare an amnesty for deserters--Gerald Ford s was the first amnesty, and after Ford came Carter--and each president had his time limit, so our job was to get the word out to any contacts we had in Sweden and Canada that the men--the deserters, the draft dodgers, honorable names in those days (to us, anyway)--could come home, and how they could come home without going to jail or losing their citizenship.

I was asked to head that amnesty program at the WRL. We tried to get in touch with as many people as we could--of course we had kept no records, because they could be seized. The program was enormously successful. To this day there are people in exile because they didn t want to come back, but as many people as wanted to get back, we re pretty confident that very few got lost or didn t get the word. I was very pleased to do that; I felt if there was any wrong created indislocating their lives, we were helping to make it up to those individuals, which is the way I like to work, one on one.

Many times--at demonstrations here in the city and in Washington. In 1978, 11 of us were arrested when we went to the front of the White House and put up banners saying, "No Nuclear Weapons--No Nuclear Power--U.S.A. or U.S.S.R." At the same time, 12 of our people--headed by Norma Becker, who was our chair at that time--went to Red Square in Moscow. They were also arrested but immediately let go by the Soviets. We were put into jail for the weekend in Washington. Our trial lasted over a week; we were found guilty, put on two years probation and fined. So you have the irony of the Soviets letting them go free--

I think the War Resisters League has always made a difference. It will be 75 years old in 1998, and it has always made a difference. It was started after World War I--by women who had watched what had happened to the conscientious objectors--to help COs who had been thrown into jail and brutalized. It s the most radical side of the peace movement.

The biggest opposition, of course, is nationalism and militarism, the arms race, the Pentagon. Arms make enormous sums of money; when they made the budget this last term, the Pentagon asked for a certain amount and Congress gave them millions more than they even asked for. Because the arms business is profit not only for America but for the world. It s probably the most profitable commodity made--and the most useless. When it s used it s terrible, but most of the time it doesn t serve any purpose except to frighten people around the world.

Personally, I m old enough so that I find it almost irrelevant whether there s hope for the future or not, because you must work as though there were hope, no matter what. Whether there is hope or not, even if you have no hope, you have to work for what you consider the good causes, the young people of the world, the dispossessed, the underdogs.

We need a method to reach young people. There s enormous inertia in the world right now. There is no Left in America to oppose the government, the government becomes more right-wing ... the Democrats and the Republicans, it s hard to find the differences between the two.

And one of those ends is to make enormous sums of money for a small number of people. As they try to scare the middle class, break up their unions and do away with their standard of living--which they seem to be doing a pretty good job of--I think that somehow or other we have to find a way to reach people that will not sound like the same old clich s.

Well, it s not a detail at all. It s true democracy. And--I m beginning to see a little of it--the emancipation of women. Somehow or other we should fight for a true democracy and learn how to use it, instead of delegating it to people who we think are going to vote the way we want them to but they never do. ... I would like to see a true democracy.

Thank you, Mike.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
July-August 1996: [Standing for Children ] [Work As Though You Had Hope] [West Papua: Manifest Destiny Redux] [WRL Peace Award]

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