Professor Emeritus Eric Newhall ’67 recounts the fallout from his decision to oppose the Vietnam War in a memoir more than 50 years in the making
“Some people can publish books while they are teaching undergraduates,” says Professor of English Emeritus Eric Newhall ’67, “and I wasn’t one of those people.” But he had a story in him dating back to 1970, when he was released from prison after spending nine and a half months behind bars as a draft resister.
In Always Resisting: Choosing Prison Over Vietnam and Awakening to American Racism (McFarland), Newhall unpacks the events that led to his imprisonment for refusing to answer the call of mandatory military service when he received a draft notice in 1968, on the grounds that the United States was fighting a war that was, in his view, morally untenable. “I’m not a pacifist; a war against fascism is one that I would fight,” he explains.
By the spring of his senior year at Occidental, with U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ramping up, “I had been thinking, ‘What am I going to do if I’m drafted?’,” Newhall recalls. “I’m somebody who looks ahead and makes plans. I read a whole lot about it, and this war did not make sense to me.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—who spoke at Occidental on April 12, 1967, with Newhall in attendance—“gave the best single short statement about why one should oppose the Vietnam War” only eight days earlier at Manhattan’s Riverside Church. King’s speech was published in newspapers all over the country, Newhall recalls: “Everything I’d been thinking about King crystallized—he made the argument [against the war] better than I could at age 21. From that point on, I pretty much knew that if I were drafted, I was going to refuse.”
On August 26, 1968, Newhall reported to the Portland (Ore.) Induction Center. Out of a group of about 400 men, he was one of four “troublemakers” who refused to accept induction into the U.S. Armed Forces that day.
Nearly seven months later, he was formally arraigned at federal court in downtown Portland and was sentenced to two years in prison a week after that. “Aside from my clothes, I remember boiling my life down to one cardboard box,” he says. “Then I went to Lompoc,” a federal correctional institution in Santa Barbara County.
The defining event of his stint in prison came four and a half months into his time at Lompoc, when a long-fomenting strike shut down the prison for eight days. “That may seem small from this vantage point,” Newhall says, “but at the time it seemed like a big thing. It got some public attention and 18 of us wound up in ‘the Hole’—instigating a riot was the charge.”
Among a prison population of around 1,200, there were 32 draft resistors, and the group as a whole “was absolutely racially divided,” Newhall says. “When I arrived at Lompoc, there were fights every day. The threat of violence was hanging in the air. Yet in four months, we went from that atmosphere to a strike that engaged everybody where before there was hostility and distrust.”
Describing life in “the Hole,” Newhall writes: “The food was bad, the air was stale with the smell of sweat and excrement, and we were allowed only one hour per week out of our cells to shower and exercise, walking up and down the tier.” Even so, “I felt the same sense of inner peace in the Hole that I felt on the day I refused induction.”
After three and a half weeks in the Hole, Newhall was transferred from Lompoc to McNeil Island Corrections Center in Puget Sound, Wash., about 200 miles from his parents’ home in Portland. He served out the remainder of his sentence there and was released in late January 1970.
When he retrieved his belongings before leaving Lompoc, his journal was nowhere to be found. “A dishonest guard stole the history of my time in custody from me,” Newhall writes, “and I contributed to the travesty by signing my name on a form, endorsing a lie.” Ultimately, he says, losing his journal “might even be a good thing, because I think my book is written better than my journal was.”
The publication of Always Resisting closes a chapter for Newhall, who will be speaking to multiple alumni chapters in the coming months, culminating in a book signing and talk at Alumni Reunion Weekend in June.
“All things considered, I think about those nine and a half months as a period of growth that benefited the rest of my life,” Newhall says. “In addition to introducing me to these young men who came from backgrounds wildly different from mine, I had this intense experience of solidarity that drove me the entire 44 years I was teaching.”
Top photo: “I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time,” says Newhall, shown in 2019. “I have a peace of mind right now about having finished this and I can go on and do other things.”
