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From Hawk to Dove

By Paul Wisovaty (Reviewer)

Patriotism, Peace and Vietnam: A Memoir
By Peggy Hanna
(Left to Write, 2003)

As old as I am, I'm still real naive about some things. For example, whenever I meet a minister or a priest (in Douglas County, I don't run into a lot of rabbis), I just assume they're against killing people. I think I read something about that when I was a kid in Sunday school. My guess is that Peggy Hanna grew up thinking the same thing, until she got it shoved back in her face during her days as a Vietnam antiwar activist. Among her many tales of struggle and disappointment (and some notable triumphs), the ones that most bothered me personally were the ones that disproved my above-noted assumption. As will be apparent later, she didn't enjoy that revelation a whole lot either.

Peggy started out, as Phil Donahue writes in a note on her book, as "a Catholic Vietnam hawk who came to admire the peacemakers at a time when the vast majority of Americans, including the faithful of her own church, had little patience for the peace movement." Most readers of her and my ages will recall those times. Those of the more honest among us will admit that they didn't wake up one morning in 1964, read about the Tonkin Gulf resolution, and say to themselves, "This war is wrong!"

Not at all. If you were born in the 1940s, America just didn't do wrong stuff. "America" and "wrong" didn't belong in the same chapter, let alone the same sentence. And we weren't just talking about invading foreign countries. Women really did belong in the home, changing diapers and cooking up seven-course meals for the breadwinner. (If you paid any attention to "Leave it to Beaver," you know that all of those chores could be comfortably performed in high heels.) Negroes had some good ideas, but they just needed to be more patient. Our mainstream churches were as incapable of mistakes as our government, and probably more so. After all, they had some clout backing them up. If you're younger than me and Peggy, I forgive you for not understanding anything I just said. No, it doesn't make any sense. But it was real.

But back to Peggy. As I suspect she will agree, she was a true "1950s" woman in the early 1960s. Her first son was born on July 17, 1962, and when her husband dropped her off at the hospital about an hour before she was to give birth, she was stopped dead in her tracks by a sign on the front door that read "Women in Shorts or Slacks Not Allowed." Her immediate reaction was that she would have to return home to get into a dress before she could be admitted. I'm serious! This is what they did to us—more specifically, to women and minorities—growing up in the 1950s. My God, no wonder we all went along with Vietnam. Authority was everything.

As with most of us, Peggy's transition to starting to think about all this stuff did not take place overnight. (I note, however, that her book has fifteen chapters, and Chapter Two is entitled "Hawk to Dove." Once she started to wake up, she woke up pretty quickly.) She and Jim, her husband, moved to rural Ohio in 1966, and she immediately noticed that some things there didn't set especially well with her innate sense of morality. Some of the folks she initially encountered could appropriately be described as racist, pro-war hicks. (In fairness, I confess that in 1966 I was a racist, pro-war hick. I am at least no longer racist or pro-war.) However, she did find some solace in nearby Springfield, a "conservative, declining industrial community" with a population of about 80,000. Peggy became involved with a group called Springfield People for Peace, which was what the name suggests: an island of folks who were appalled by what we were doing in Vietnam.

Of course, once you start waking up to what's going on in the real world—as opposed to what they taught us in high school—things open up on a lot of fronts. Pretty quickly, Vietnam became just one issue area for her. There were also civil rights, women's rights, and—an especially difficult problem for anyone brought up in our mainstream churches—questions about the rightful role of the faith community in addressing all of those issues. Peggy's book addresses her challenges in all of those areas, and none of them was easy for her. You can take the progressive out of the 1950s, but you can't take the 1950s out of the progressive.

Most of "Patriotism, Peace and Vietnam" chronicles the author's efforts, and the efforts of Springfield People for Peace, in trying to bring the local Buckeye population to an understanding that Vietnam was wrong. I gather that they were not especially successful. Peggy was among a 171-member delegation that attended the Paris Peace Talks in 1971 and returned home to talk to local schools, churches and assorted civic groups about their experience. They were often treated like traitors, even in their own churches, and that's what hurt them the most. As it should have. She and I have never understood, and she and I will never understand, why so many of us in this country equate patriotism with going along with everything the government tells us to do, and why anything else is called treason.

Actually, the church experience was probably not what hurt her the most. What hurt the most may have been knowing that so many Vietnam vets did not understand that Springfield People for Peace was not the enemy. It would ease a lot of their pain if they did.