HOW “A NICE GIRL LIKE ME” CAME TO LEVITATE THE PENTAGON

I was cold, huddled amid a mass of others sitting on a concrete ramp leading down toward an entrance to the Pentagon. We had marched, climbed over a falling-down piece of fence, and there we were...six hundred disparate souls come together to say no to the Vietnam War and the draft.  We wanted to raise that symbol of the war off its foundation and say yes to what we believed America stood for.

I was twenty-four years old that October in 1967. A child of refugees who fled Austria after Hitler’s Anschluss, I now often wonder if my parents would gain entry into this country under the current administration’s immigration policies.

In Vienna during World War I, my mother’s family was poverty-stricken and through a program of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), she and her sister were sent to Holland to be housed and fed for a time. When my parents came to America, she, a Catholic and my father, a non-practicing Jew, decided to affiliate with a Quaker meeting. I grew up there, absorbing the teaching that there is a light common to all people and we strive to honor that light which is common to all of us by standing against war and discrimination.

We had music! My father studied and sang opera in Vienna though he later decided on a career in aerospace engineering. We sang. We made music together. There was Beethoven’s Fidelio and Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s Magic Flute, odes to finding and giving voice to freedom. My brother brought home Joan Baez, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers. Music and words were increasingly woven into my expression of belief.  My own “personal troubadour” was Phil Ochs. He once came to a teach-in and even though there were only 5 people in attendance, he sang his heart out.

      ‘I can’t add my name to the fight when I’m gone...

       I can’t try to right what is wrong when I’m gone...

       I guess I won’t be singing on this song when I’m gone...

       So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.’

I still hear your voice, Phil.

As I recall, the night before we levitated the Pentagon, a group of us went to hear Judy Collins. And she sang me to the next day.

I was on the cusp of the Baby Boomer generation, born a year or two before its official start.  So I was in some ways traditional, anticipating college, grad school, marriage, family, job...and in others part of the huge social and personal changes sweeping our country.

In high school I joined members of our Meeting who went to Ft. Detrick to protest against research into biological and chemical warfare. I walked along US 1 with two Indian pacifists who were teaching non-violence along their journey.

In college I joined civil rights and peace activities and along with my passion for the revolutionary writer/artist William Blake, I thrilled to hearing IF Stone and Carl Oglesby. From them I began to understand the connection between individuals and the institutions we people...and what is required of an involved citizenry in times of crisis.

One college professor (of Shakespeare, alas) failed one of my papers because it was late after I attended a peace rally. He told me I would never amount to anything with my attitude and behavior. I told him I wanted both schooling and social action. It shocked him when I won a graduate fellowship and honorable mention in another, despite his rants. It was to further study William Blake and archetypal patterns in literature that I entered grad school in Toronto (William Blake and DH Lawrence: The Politics of Art)... and drove a young draft resister who was refused conscientious objector status across the border.

After grad school I was engaged by the Canadian and American Friends Service Committees to work on peace education and with high school students on social issues. A group of young people wanted to talk with draft board clerks, the women who staffed the Selective Service System offices where young men registered for the draft.  The students thought we could convince these clerks that sending young men to die via an inequitable draft in an undeclared war was wrong.  It wasn’t that simple. Those women showed they believed just as deeply in what they did as we in what we were saying and doing. How to bridge that divide?

We organized a peace caravan that traveled to various cities meeting with civic and religious groups to speak and engage in conversation about the war and the draft. At one meeting in a crowded church basement a man stood up after I’d spoken and said:  “If I had a daughter like you I’d be so ashamed and I’d want her dead.”  Shock. Some fear.  Anger.  I wanted to scream at him all the swear words I knew.  But something in me led me to ask him the question that led us to a conversation, if not resolution: Why?

I went on to a career in nonprofit social action (Women Strike for Peace, Clergy and Laity Concerned, the ACLU, Save the Children to name a few). I was arrested with a group of interfaith clergy for praying for peace in the Capitol rotunda. I visited American POW’s in North Vietnam and brought them letters from family and to one a pair of glasses as he’s broken his.  And subsequently I went on to hold a senior position in a global communications and advertising firm where I focused on helping companies communicate successfully with their stakeholders. Carrying on, I am now an executive and career/life coach working with corporate leaders and individual people in their 20’s to their 80’s to achieve their “next.”

Levitating the Pentagon was my first act of civil disobedience. We sat on that ramp and the police came with huge hoses and sprayed us with icy water as we heard the paddy wagons approach. I got pneumonia.

That levitation and the events of October ’67 were a milestone for disparate individuals and organizations which came together for common cause.  Labor, religious, women’s rights, student, civil liberties and other organizations convened (not always easily and cohesively) because the war had to end... and because we all knew we had to help make that happen together.

As I string together these pieces of my younger life and subsequent living, levitating the Pentagon is one of my proudest stories. In committing to lift that symbol of the war off its foundations, I know that for me and for the many movements that converged, it was we who we who were lifted and, I pray, are rising still.

Trudi Schutz

October 2017

Trudi Schutz was National Coordinator of the March Against Death in Washington, DC November. 13-15, 1969, in which more than 38,000 Americans walked single file in state by state delegations, starting with Alabama, from Arlington Memorial Cemetary to the Capitol, carrying the names and calling out the names at the White House of American soldiers from their state who had been killed and the names of Vietnamese villages destroyed in the war.