The Burglary Read Online Free PDF

side across the miles, and I hope that sometime, sometime in this mad world, in this mad time, it will be possible for us to sit down face to face … and find that our hopes and our sweat, and the hopes and sweat and death and tears and blood of our brothers and sisters throughout the world, have brought to birth that for which we began. Shalom to you.
    Those ideas meshed completely with Davidon’s as he searched for new, stronger ways to protest and hoped violence would be stemmed in both the government and on the fringes of the peace movement.
    WHEN DAVIDON FIRST MET people in the Catholic group, he was impressed by their commitment to nonviolent resistance. He was startled, though, when he discovered that recently they had used a new method: burglary. Their goal with this approach was to slow down the operation of the draft system by breaking into draft boards at night while they were closed and stealing as many Selective Service records as possible. Unlike the symbolic acts they had carried out earlier, including Catonsville, in this new phase of the Catholic resistance they hoped to flee, never be arrested, and continue to steal more records in order to make the conscription of young men more difficult.
    At first, Davidon thought the group was what he was looking for: people engaged in aggressive nonviolence. But burglary? That was not something he ever wanted to do. It was not what his and their heroes, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, had done. Nor was it what either Daniel or Philip Berrigan had done. The brothers had engaged in public resistance and then waited to be arrested. But as Davidon examined what the Catholicgroup had accomplished, he had to admit that they had used burglary very effectively. More than five hundred people in this loosely structured movement, located primarily in the Northeast and upper Midwest, had burglarized dozens of draft boards and removed thousands of Selective Service records. Despite FBI investigations, very few of them had been arrested.
    As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace, as they had done at a draft board raid in Philadelphia a few months earlier, and no one in the group was able to pick the lock. The break-in technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter: “Please don’t lock this door tonight.” Sure enough, when the burglars arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.
    Sometimes they destroyed the files they stole. Other times they sent them to the young men whose records they had stolen. Each file was sent with an anonymous letter that explained to the young man that his file had been removed from official files by antiwar activists, and they hoped he would take advantage of this disruption of the system to think carefully about the war and whether he wanted to serve in the military. Each recipient was given contact information for the draft counseling offices closest to his home. Davidon appreciated the irony years later that his last duty in the Navy during World War II was typing separation papers for people leaving military service, and now during the Vietnam War he typed letters trying to discourage people from entering the military.
    As Davidon thought about whether he should be willing to raid draft boards with