“No War:” Dissidents, Resisters, and Pacifist thru Grand Valley History

In early 2001, months before 9/11, two young men living in Grand Junction signed up to serve their county, and “get out of Grand Junction.” Eight years later Jeff Englehart and Garrett Rappenhagen came back to Grand Junction, as outspoken critics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and leaders within the national organization Iraq Vets Against the War (IVAW).

“I went to war because I was a coward. I was afraid of being punished.” said Rappenhagen in a 2005 article in “The Red Pill.” Before they were even formally out of the army Jeff and Garret were speaking out against the war they were fighting. Upon discharge the duo threw themselves into organizing Iraq war vets into a political force for peace. Theirs is just the most recent in a long line of local pacifist, socialists, war-resisters and critics that have opposed America’s march towards militarism and imperialism.

World war one, was a war that the socialists saw coming. A full two years before America entered the conflict the local socialist party passed a resolution declaring “Not a man, not a dollar for war.’ Let those who create the war do their own fighting.” Two years later a mass meeting called by the socialist of Mesa County, was disrupted by “patriot” reactionaries, and the Socialists’ paper, The New Critic, was suppressed by the Home Guard.

President Wilson’s administration passed the Sedition Act to silence the widespread dissent to the U.S involvement in World War One. One of Grand Junction’s earliest citizens, Carl Glesser, was prosecuted under the Act. Gleeser, was an anarchist labor organizer and watch repairman while he lived in Grand Junction from 1881-1889/90. During WWI, Gleeser was the publisher of German language newspaper in Kansas that published the anti-war and anti-draft articles and was imprisoned under the Sedition Act. Gleeser and his co-defendant appealed to the Supreme Court, in Frowerk, et al. V. United States of America.

Grand Junction’s Dalton Trumbo was just 12 years old in 1917, when America joined into ‘The Great War.’ It’s impossible to know if Trumbo was aware of the suppression of local anti-war voices, or not. But if any 12 year-old was following the papers it was Trumbo. He was delivering papers for the Daily Sentinel and publishing the odd poem in its pages at the time.

Trumbo would later go on to pen the anti-war classic “Johnny Got His Gun,” in 1938. The award winning novel follows Joe Bonham, a young solider from Trumbo’s fictionalized Grand Junction: ‘Shale City.’ Joe wakes up in a hospital bed only to realize that he is without limbs, eyes, ears, or mouth.

Released in 1939, “Johnny Got His Gun” was seized on by both the right-wing Nazi-sympathizing America First movement and the American communist, who were opposed to the American involvement in WWII during the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact era 1939-1941. A member of the Communist Party USA, “Johnny Got His Gun” was serialized in 1940 in the pages of the “Daily Worker.”

“Johnny Got His Gun” would influence local and national activists during the next big war.

In 1971, during the height of the Vietnam war, Trumbo adapted a screenplay, and debuted at a director for a film version of “Johnny Got His Gun.” which can be viewed here. The book stands to this day as a classic of anti-war literature.

Chuck Worley led local protests against two different underground nuclear tests in western Colorado in 1969 and 1972. He was a driving force in the early environmental movement locally and was a founding member of Western Colorado Congress, now Western Colorado Alliance for Community Action.

But back in World War Two, Worely was a Conscientious Objector, and he was almost lynched for it while working at a Civilian Public Service camp in Arkansas. The good war is surrounded by many myths, one of those is its popularity.

Worley came to see even his labor in the camps as tacit support for the war. He walked off from a work camp in California, and was sent to prison. Around 6000 other Conscience Objectors also refused to work in the camps. While imprison Chuck penned this poem:

Out of Bound

You who by the grace of law go free
walk by spongy springs
and load your lungs up with the smell of things
for me.

And when dawn
yawns
and silver noises dribble from her wings
gather up such nuggets as fall free.

You who are still in luck 
dig your itching fingers deep in muck
and wash your eyes with all that's fresh and green.

Summer finds me out of bounds this year...
but conscience clean.

“Out of Bounds: poems and letters from prison by a conscience objector to the Good War” 
by Chuck Worley

The Korean war is an often forgotten war. Yet, some 1.5 million Americans were drafted. At least one local man resisted. Chris Pappas. Pappas was delinquent with the local Draft Board starting in 1951 and failed to report for induction in July of 1952.

The War in Vietnam and the associated draft was as unpopular here in the Grand Valley as it was thru the rest of the nation. Draft resisters began popping up as early as 1961. By 1968 about a dozen local boys were wanted, in jail or out of the county to avoid serving in that illl fated and ill advised military action in Southeast Asia.

In 1968, Mary Burns, a local women and marine, refused to wear her uniform or follow orders in opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. She was court marshaled and quickly discharged, but her protest made national headlines. Her twin brother Timothy was at that time resisting the draft. Both by not reporting but also by leading Grand Junction’s first anti-war protest.

“Tim Burns was grabbed at one point by his long blonde hair and turned around and shoved forcibly off the bus station parking lot.”

Ted Ford, then KREX news director, July 1968

This first protest did not go well. Tuesday July 9^th 1968 at midnight. Timothy Burns with six other protesters with placards descended on the Grand Junction bus station. There 12 inductees and their friends and families waited for a bus that would take the young men eventual to war. According to a July 11^th Daily Sentinel, the demonstration was over in about 15 minutes as two men in the crowd Roger Pantuso and David Miracle “tore up demonstration placards and told the demonstration to leave.” Ted Ford, then KREX news director who witnessed the scene “The scuffle lasted only five or six minutes, and then it was all over. The leader of the demonstrators, Tim Burns, was grabbed at one point by his long blonde hair and turned around and shoved forcibly off the bus station parking lot.” The day the article about the anti-draft protest appeared in the Daily Sentinel, Andrew Burns, Tim and Mary’s brother, was arrested in Aspen for failure to report for induction.

Starting in 1969, regular protests, teach-ins, vigils, direct actions took place at the Mesa State Junior College campus. Protests centered around the Bell-Tower. Veterans going to school on the GI bill, spoke out about what they saw in Vietnam. Some protests saw upwards of 200 people in attendance.

A few long-time locals tell of a direct-action wherein, Tillman Bishop’s office was burglarized and the draft records for the local draft board #12 were stolen and burned.

The stand that Mary and Timothy Burns made during the Vietnam war would go on to inspire their dad, Larry Burns, to be an out spoken activist and organizer for nuclear disarmament and peace in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1986, The Great Peace March (following the example of the Coxeyites of 1894) planned to walk across the country to Washington D.C for peace and nuclear disarmament, Larry Burns was in his 60’s but planned to make the long walk. He was also organizing with local peace group Citizens’ Action for Peace to support and house the Great Peace March activist as they marched thru the Grand Valley in May of 1986.

Citizens’ Action for Peace was formed in 1983, and tackled such issues as nuclear disarmament, South African aparthide, US backed covert-wars in Central America, overtures of peace to the people of the Soviet Union, as well as support for the Great Peace March.

“Today is a good day to stand up!”

Jan Emmons

Citizens’ Action for Peace was still active during the Gulf War in 1991. The group held weekly vigils at the Federal Building in the lead up to the conflict. An anti-war protest took place January 1, 1991, with about one hundred people in downtown Grand Junction. Jan Emmons, a 17-year-old organizer told the Daily Sentinel, “Today is a good day to stand up!”

Citizens Action for Peace folded into Grand Valley Peace and Justice (GVPJ) around the time of the first Gulf War.

Bev Goodrich, of GVPJ, called the first protest of the Iraq war some 12 years later. For the next six years a half dozen different citizens groups would actively organize to oppose, resist, and protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

GVPJ exists to this day working on many local and international issues.

War resisters on the western slope have long taken unpopular stands against the seemingly inexorable tides towards war. They have stood up to ridicule, physical attacks, imprisonment, life as a refugee, censorship and open hostility, to stand on their conscience. The local opposition to the next war will stand on the shoulders of a long-line of local dissidents who have fought for peace.