Steven J. Taylor . Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors . Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press . 2009 . Pp. xv, 484. $45.00.

Abstract

Americans usually remember World War II as the good war, a conflict with strictly delineated lines of right and wrong where all citizens participated in the effort to defeat the forces of totalitarianism. And yet, approximately 12,000 Americans refused to join in this conflict on account of their religious or personal pacifist beliefs, instead becoming conscientious objectors (COs) and joining the Civilian Public Service (CPS), a cooperative venture of the federal government's Selective Service System and a consortium of historic peace churches. Of those individuals, 3,000 spent the war years working in institutions, hospitals, and training schools that housed individuals identified as mentally ill or feeble-minded. Although initially established as asylums to provide care and comfort, by 1940 most of these facilities had devolved into custodial warehouses that barely met the basic needs of the thousands of patients who lived there. The work of conscientious objectors at these facilities provided “attempts to do something about the conditions at those institutions” (p. 387). Steven J. Taylor's book traces the experiences of those COs who worked in such institutions, their attempts at systemic reform, and the failure of those reform efforts to make a lasting difference in the institutional system. He concludes, however, that this failure “is not the point of their story. The point is that they tried to make a difference” (p. 395).