The Tobacco Road Gang

Selective Service officials were at their wit's end last week. The problem that vexed them: how to deal with a group of draft-age Americans who have refused to fight, who now decline to work, and spend most of their waking hours finding new and more ostentatious ways of thumbing their noses at all authority.

Most of the young men in Selective Service's problem are conscientious objectors who were plucked from other camps as troublemakers and sent to Camp Germfask, Mich. Officials had hoped that at Germfask, an old CCC camp on the 95,000-acre Seney Wild Life Refuge in northern Michigan, the troublemakers might mend their ways. But there has been little reformation.

Some 30 of the conchies (half the camp population) worked hard at a campaign of studied defiance of camp officials. They were mostly college graduates who maintained that the work assigned to them-- building dikes and roads, felling trees-- was not of "national importance." Therefore, argued the men who had refused to fight, or help fighting men to fight, they were illegally detained under the National Service Act.

The Intellectual Way? Camp Director Norman V. Nelson, who described them as "intellectuals," said sadly that there was nothing he could do. Revolters gloried in their nom de guerre: the "Tobacco Road Gang." They feigned sickness, passively resisted all orders. Told to cut down a tree, a Tobacco Roader would ask, "How do I do it?" Told to take hold of the ax, he would ask, "What do I do next?" Told to swing the ax, he would swing, cut out a small chip, inquire. "Now what do I do?"

With money supplied by relatives they bought liquor, which they smuggled into their quarters. Frequently they went AWOL and roamed the nearby towns, making ardent and often successful love to local girls. Two towns had barred them. Citizens of another town had one waylaid and thrashed a group of them.

But the Tobacco Road Gang was not discouraged. They threatened camp officials with violence. To underline their defiance they overturned mess-hall tables loaded with food, invaded the storeroom and ripped open bags of flour, smashed eggs and jars of mess supplies and dumped beans, rice, coffee onto the floor. Once they broke into the camp store and destroyed food and soft drinks. Camp Manager Karl Walz reported: "They said they were seeking an outlet for their frustration."

Guardhouse Law. A few have been brought to trial for desertion, but most were "guardhouse lawyers" who knew the limits of the loosely drawn Selective Service Act and stayed carefully within it. C.O.s are not subject to military discipline; in the eyes of the law, they are civilians. The Government has no authority to use force, can prosecute C.O.s only through the Federal courts.

To see what he could do about the situation, Lieut. Colonel Simon P. Dunkle of Selective Service headquarters went to Germfask. He admitted there was little that could be done, without a new law. At week's end, while a few better-behaved C.O.s tried to do all the camp chores, the Tobacco Road Gang lolled on their bunks.

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