The young woman dressed as a Sixties flower child and holding an anti-fascism sign at the No Kings demonstration in Catonsville on Saturday had never heard of the Baltimore County community’s historic association with protest. So, being old enough to remember when radical priests made the cover of Time, I filled her in.
Catonsville is where, in May 1968 — a year in which nearly 17,000 Americans died from combat in Vietnam — a group of nine anti-war activists broke into the local draft board on Frederick Road. They gathered hundreds of Selective Service records and burned them in the parking lot.
Among the Catonsville Nine were the Catholic priests who made the cover of Time (later memorialized as “the cover of Newsweek” in a Simon & Garfunkel song): Philip and Daniel Berrigan, brothers whose willingness to go to jail inspired many other anti-draft and anti-war actions in the 1960s and 1970s, eventually — eventually — leading to U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.
At the time, many Americans saw Vietnam War protestors as a bunch of ungrateful, hateful, pot-smoking, draft-dodging hippies though, in time, opposition to the war cut across a wide swath of the citizenry.
In the early 1980s, soon after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened to the public in Washington, I was having coffee with a colleague at The Baltimore Evening Sun — reporter Carl Schoettler, an Army veteran who had covered the Berrigans — and I’ve never forgotten what he said: “Someday there ought to be a memorial to the Vietnam War protesters.”
Carl would be pleased to know that, in 2018, the Maryland Historical Trust placed a marker near the site of the Catonsville Nine action.
If not for the Berrigans and many others who committed acts of civil disobedience or marched in protests, the war would have gone on longer and the death toll — 58,200 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, as well as thousands of Laotians and Cambodians — would have continued to rise.
The American involvement in the war lasted 11 years, and it was in the late Sixties and early Seventies when protests became common and large.
The war was polarizing, along generational lines and along the fault line between military families and draft resisters who wanted no business with military service in the Vietnam era.
“America, Love It or Leave It” was a theme of the anti-anti-war supporters of President Richard Nixon, a Republican, and there was a very loud echo of that in what we heard from MAGA Republicans about the second No Kings day of protest.
It was so retro.
Republican leaders spoke of the event as an attack against the country. House Speaker Mike Johnson called them “hate America” rallies, an insult to every citizen concerned about where the nation is headed under the Trump administration.
Hundreds of such citizens — some of them holding American flags, some of them singing “God Bless America” — stood along Baltimore National Pike and framed the intersection of Rolling Road. They were there to exercise their First Amendment rights to assemble and protest. They did so for two hours.
Numerous drivers of cars and trucks honked their horns as they went by. It was a great event, a real tonic to be among Americans who oppose the actions of the Trump administration and wanted to say so in public among the likeminded.
Each person I spoke with — young, middle-aged or older — was conversant in (or held a sign related to) some aspect of the administration’s policies, the Republicans’ silent complicity, and the Supreme Court’s deference to Donald Trump.
I heard people (and saw signs) objecting to the cutoff of foreign humanitarian aid to some of the poorest, hungriest people in the world; the deployment of masked ICE agents to strong-arm, detain and deport immigrants, most of whom have committed no serious crimes; the cutting of subsidies to Americans who cannot afford health insurance without them; the gleeful slashing of the federal workforce; the denigration of science; the rejection of efforts to address climate change and to further develop alternate sources of energy.
People have been paying attention.
Sheila Ruth, the delegate who represents District 44B in the Maryland General Assembly, addressed the No Kings protesters and brought up another point in American history, also during Nixon’s time, that tested the strength of democracy.
“In Watergate,” she said, recalling the 1972-1974 scandal that forced Nixon’s resignation, “it wasn’t that the Republicans immediately leaped up and said, ‘We’re going to hold the president accountable.’ It was when public opinion really pushed against him that the Republicans started to support impeachment, which led to his resignation. …
“We’re out here with millions of people across the country to say no kings, no tyrants, no secret police. And when we restore our democracy — and we will restore our democracy — we must not return to the status quo. We must rebuild. We must use the opportunity to rebuild a more just society.”
There’s nothing about such sentiments that “hate America.” In fact, if you listen closely, you hear in the clatter of protest what the late Steve Sachs, who prosecuted the Catonsville Nine and later served as Maryland Attorney General, once called “the music of democracy.” It’s a song of desire for a better country.
Dan Rodricks’ column appears weekly in Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com or via danrodricks.com
