Michael J. Baxter co-founded and lived and worked at Andre House in Phoenix (1984-88) and the Peter Claver Catholic Worker in South Bend (2003-09). He directed the Catholic Peace Fellowship from 2001-2012.
He currently teaches Religious Studies and Catholic Studies at Regis University in Denver and is completing a collection of his essays on Catholic social thought in the United States, called Against the Americanist Grain (Cascade Press).
Ben Salmon
The Ben Salmon story begins in an ordinary way: born on October 15, 1888, the third of four siblings, to Irish-Canadian immigrants; raised in a Catholic household, a practicing member of a Catholic parish, attended Catholic grade school and high school, worked several jobs, got involved in union activity, increasingly committed to Leftist politics. . . . But it was when the United States went to war against Germany and the Central Powers in April 1917 that Salmon’s life took an extraordinarily radical turn.
On June 5, 1917, the day when young men were required by law to register for the draft, Salmon sent a letter to President Wilson stating that he had registered for the draft that day but would not be complying further with the Selective Service. The following Christmas he received a draft notice. The next day he hand delivered a letter to his local draft board declaring his refusal and explaining why: “War is incompatible with my conception of Christianity. I positively refuse to aid organized murder, either directly or indirectly. I must serve God first, and, in serving Him it [is] impossible to be other than loyal to my country—the world. Ultimately, individuals and nations must awaken and rally to Christ’s Standard or perish. Meantime, I must stand firm and trust in God. . . . I am in the Army of Peace, and in this army I intend to live and die.”
So began a three-year ordeal in which Salmon paid the cost of serving in the Army of Peace. In early January, he was arrested and released on $2500 bond, pending trial. In March, his attorneys argued his case on religious freedom grounds, but they lost because the Supreme Court had ruled that the draft was constitutional. On May 20, 1918 Salmon was arrested by Denver police and turned over to military authorities, who held him overnight at Fort Logan, Colorado. From there he was transferred to Camp Funston, Kansas (May 22); then to Camp Pawnee, Kansas (June 12); then to Camp Dodge, Iowa (July 2), where he was court-martialed and received the death sentence, later reduced to twenty-five years hard labor. On October 9, 1918, he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to be held with other “absolutists,” Anabaptist and Leftist pacifists for the most part. His stay there lasted some twenty months. In June 1920, he was transferred to Fort Douglas, Utah, where he began a hunger strike in protest of his mistreatment. He nearly died, was force fed, and then was put on a train in early August to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. There he remained in custody until he was discharged dishonorably and released on November 26, 1920, more than two years after the war itself had ended. Perhaps the most trying part of this ordeal was that Salmon had a wife and child back in Denver, where he planned to return. But the locals still held him in such contempt that he was warned not to return and settled instead in Chicago, where his wife and son later joined him. They had three more children, but health problems arose related to his years of imprisonment. He died on February 15, 1932.
What is significant about the Ben Salmon story is that it so clearly and compellingly challenges the usual story that American Catholics tell themselves, a story of God and country, church and nation, joining together in a kind of political-religious marriage, working hand-in-hand to bring about justice, freedom, and democracy to all other nations of the world. This Americanist story, as we can call it, was the story American Catholics told themselves during World War I. It saturated the consciousness of America Catholics during the Great War, thanks to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and the clergy and laity who, at his behest, founded the National Catholic War Council in 1917. The purpose of the War Council was to mobilze Catholics in support of the war effort. By all accounts it worked well on the national level, on the diocesan level, and on the parish level—including Holy Family parish in Denver, Ben Salmon’s parish. After circulating a pamphlet opposing the war in the fall of 1917, he was expelled from his parish’s chapter of the Knights of Columbus. It was the first of many rebuffs from his felllow Catholics. The most egregious mistreatment came when he was near death during his hunger strike. The priest summoned to attend him refused to administer the sacraments on the specious grounds that he was committing suicide and thus violating church teaching. And then there was the general neglect of his case by church officials. Msgr. John A Ryan lobbied for his release, but only after the ACLU had taken up his legal defense and his case had gained national atenttion in the press.
None of this is urprising, given the nationalistic fervor of American Catholics during the Great War. Within that nationalistic context, that Americanist narrative, Ben Salmon was a sign of contradiction, enacting a counter-narrative within which one strives to follow the teaching and example of Christ no matter what the cost. The challenge is to adhere to divine law over the false claims of a militaristic state that goes to war for the sake of profit.
Saint Telemachus, Peacemaker
by Ade Bethune
If you think this is stating Samon’s position in overly intellectual terms, think again. In the final months of his incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., Salmon typed out a 130,00-word, 229-page statement setting forth the reasons for his conscientious objection to war. Its leading emphases anticipate the central themes that emerge within Catholic pacifism over the course of the twentieth century: the profit motive operative in nations going to war, the specious character of the notion of “just war,” the narrow allegiances fosterd by nation-states, the teaching of the apostle Paul that we cannot do evil that good may come about (Romans 3:8), the teaching of Jesus on peace and forgiveness (Matthew 5-7), the grounding of a conscientious objection to war in abiding trust in Divine Providence. The document is a testimony to someone who had deep convictions and the wherewithal to set forth his reasons clearly and compellingly in humanitarian, moral, and religious terms. After being held by military authorities for three years, Salmon finally had the opportunity to articulate the faith and reasoning that undergirded his refusal of conscription, citing an impressive array of arguments and authorities, ranging from the Catholic Encyclopedia to the The Nation, but most of all, from sacred scripture, especially the New Testament, which brings us the teaching and example of Christ.
The Ben Salmon story might have faded from memory were it not for Dorothy Day telling it in The Catholic Worker in 1937, as a way to bolster the Catholic Worker’s pacifist stand, and then again in 1942 as the nation was going to war. She found in Salmon one of those exceptional figures, like herself, for whom traditional Catholicism and political radicalism posed no inherent contradiction but fit remarkably well together. Day’s portrayal of Salmon caught the attention of Gordon Zahn, a conscientious objector during World War II who thought he was alone in his CO stand until encountering the Catholic Worker movement. After the war, Zahn went on to study sociology and eventually wrote German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars(1962) and then In Solitary Witness(Templegate, 1964), the story of Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian farmer who refused to serve in the Army and was executed in Berlin on August 9, 1943. Toward the end of his long career as a scholar and peace activist, Zahn told a graduate student about the Ben Salmon story he had discovered a half century before and urged him to look into it. The fruit of Zahn’s suggestion was Torrin Finney’s Unsung Hero of the Great War(Paulist, 1989). The book sparked interest in Salmon’s story on the part of Catholic pacifists and scholars. Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest, poet, and peace activist, composed a meditation about Salmon’s witness. Robert Ellsberg included an entry on Salmon in his book All Saints, William McNichols, the Catholic priest and artist, painted (or “wrote”) an icon of Salmon, based on a photo taken at Fort Leavenworth. The Catholic Peace Fellowship published a feature article on Salmon in its Spring 2007 issue of The Sign of Peace. Now, more than a century after the Great War, Catholic peace activists in Denver and around the country are urging the Denver Archdiocese to initiate his cause for canonization. At the very least, these activists maintain, the Catholic Church should name Ben Salmon alongside Dorothy Day as a “Servant of God.”
But even if such efforts don’t catch the attention of our ecclesiastical authorities, it would be incumbent on us to broadcast the Ben Salmon story far and wide, for it urges us, in our time and place, amid our own wars and rumors of wars, to join the ranks of the Army of Peace.
To endorse the petition to initiate the Cause for Beatification of Ben Salmon, go to http://www.bensalmon.org/sainthood.html, scroll down to the yellow background area and there click “Sainthood.” For people who don’t use the Internet, you may leave your name, city of residence and parish affiliation as voice mail at: Phone: 724-523-0291.
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XXXIX, No 3, July-Sept. 2019
