Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors. By Steven J. Taylor. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xviii, 484 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-81560915-5.)

Abstract

During World War II, twelve thousand draft-eligible men applied for and received conscientious objector exemptions from military service. Some of the objectors joined the Civilian Public Service (cps), where their work ranged from soil conservation to fire fighting to participation (as “human guinea pigs”) in medical tests and experiments. Three thousand filled service positions in public hospitals for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled. Although the men came from many religious denominations, the majority of conscientious objectors and members of the cps were connected to traditionally pacifist churches: Mennonite, Church of the Brethren, and Society of Friends (Quaker). Using archival records, interviews conducted by himself and others, and secondary sources, Steven J. Taylor has written a magisterial history of a group of young men who called the nation's attention to the horrors inflicted on patients at state mental institutions during the 1940s. Taylor begins with an overview of conscientious objection. During World War I, objectors were socially shunned and often imprisoned. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the pacifist churches, prompted by Franklin D. Roosevelt's signing of the 1940 peacetime draft legislation, were planning for conscientious objection. Working through Eleanor Roosevelt and selective service officials such as Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, the churches set up the cps as an alternative system of public work for the objectors, modeled after the depressionera Civilian Conservation Corps. Beginning in 1942, cps men fought forest fires, developed and maintained federal parks, and worked on flood control projects. By 1943, some of the men wanted to carry out more socially constructive work.